Jack O'Connell - The Resurrectionist

“Can you eat the flowers?” Danny asked and Sweeney said he didn’t know. As they passed one of the branches, Danny reached out, pulled free a white blossom. Seconds later, a few petals floated down onto Sweeney’s chest and leg.

And sometime after that they were in the thick of the trees. Their progress slowed considerably. The sky turned purple and the moon appeared low and to their right. Sweeney tried to hurry but the thicket of tree limbs made the going near impossible. There was no clear path. And the smell had grown putrid, a clogged leech field in high summer. He brought a hand up to shield his nose and mouth and from beneath the hand he said, “How can you stand it?”

“It’s not so bad from up here,” Danny said.

Sweeney felt his son’s feathers against the back of his neck and head. He wanted to put Danny down for a while, but he knew it was crucial that they continued moving. And so he tried to ignore the fatigue and tramp on. But as the hardpan began to soften, go marshy, his legs began to ache and he had to ask Danny if he could walk for a while.

The boy agreed and his father lowered him to the ground. Soon after, the trees began to thin again and when they left the last one behind them, they were fully in the swamps. Now the smell was different. Just as strong and just as unpleasant, but more alive, derived less from decay and more from something fertile and ripe.

They held hands and took smaller steps. Their feet sank into inches of heavy, fetid water. Sweeney felt it seep through shoe and sock and touch his skin. His flesh prickled and he ground his teeth. But the swamp water didn’t seem to have any effect on Danny. When it rose to the boy’s knees, Sweeney hoisted him up on shoulders once again. And that’s when the insects arrived. Fat, slow winter flies. They ignored his swatting hands, tried to land on him, their buzzing set to a ridiculous volume.

Sweeney breathed through his nose and shook his head. Within yards, the pests had swarmed into an infestation and he tried to run. But with each attempt to lift his leg and push out of the water, he planted a foot deeper into the bottom muck. Danny pressed his eyes into his father’s head and wrapped his arms more tightly around Dad’s neck. The flies began to mass on Sweeney’s face. He shook his head wildly but they refused to dislodge. And that was when he tripped over the first body.

He went down on his knees, yet somehow Danny managed to stay on his back. The putrid water sprayed up, soaked his shirt and face, which loosed some of the flies. He wiped the rest away with the back of his arm and opened his eyes to look into the face of Ernie Blake. Though Sweeney had never met the man, he was certain this was Ernie, Nora’s husband.

Blake was lying just beneath the skin of the water, floating in the murky pool. He was dressed in workman’s coveralls that had gone filthy in the swamp and sported a coating of slimy algae. Though he was fully submerged, his eyes were open and they tracked Sweeney’s movement as he tried to jump away from the body.

“It’s okay,” he heard Danny say behind him. “It’s only Mr. Blake.”

Sweeney didn’t know what to do, if he should attempt to lift the man out of the water. He felt his knees sinking into the mud and as he tried to think, Ernie Blake opened his mouth and dozens of tiny black fish swam out.

Danny began to laugh and Sweeney was horrified. He pushed himself up to standing, tried once again to run and tripped, this time over the floating body of Lawrence Belmonte, the footless hunter from Maine. Belmonte’s eyes were closed but his mouth was open and he was running his tongue over his teeth. The tiny black fish were swimming into one of the stumps at the bottom of the man’s left leg and out of the stump at the bottom of his right.

Sweeney tried to calm his breathing and failed. He stood up slowly and, though the swamp was dim, lit only by a sliver moon, he could see dozens of figures floating just beneath the water. And he knew they were all patients from the Peck Clinic — Honey Lieb and Tara Russell and Ginny Oliphant and all the others.

“Can they breathe under water?” Sweeney asked Danny.

But Danny just said, “I’m cold, Dad. Are we almost home yet?”

Sweeney’s answer was to begin walking again. When they cleared the swamp, they could finally see home. Only it wasn’t the house in Cleveland exactly. And it wasn’t quite the Peck Clinic. And it wasn’t entirely the Limbo fortress of the evil Dr. Fliess. It was, instead, some horrible and unlikely amalgam of all three structures. And it was looming above them from the edge of a cliff, a haunted Gothic castle, with handicap ramps and awnings, neon red crosses and enormous wooden shutters.

And looking up at it, Sweeney understood that it was the last place he wanted to be. That he’d rather spend the rest of his life in the swamps than in any room of this stone palace.

Danny sensed his father’s hesitation.

“You have to, Daddy,” he said. “You’ve got to bring me home.”

Sweeney shook his head, felt the brush of the feathers.

“That’s not your home, Danny,” he said.

“It’s my home now,” Danny said. “I’m late, Dad. And Mom’s worried.”

“Mom doesn’t have to be worried,” Sweeney said. “You’re with me.”

“She’s worried about you too, Dad. She’s worried about both of us.”

“But all those rocks,” Sweeney said. “I don’t know how to get up there.”

“I know a way,” Danny said. “I’ll show you.”

Sweeney stood for a minute looking up at the structure, then turned to look back toward the swamp. He started to say something about going back to the factory but was bitten on the hand by a green-headed fly. The sting and the after-burn were severe. He brought the hand to his mouth and sucked on it.

Danny said, “There’ll be millions of them in a little while.”

And so Sweeney started for the boulders without argument and began to climb. The stones were as big as cars, some of them larger, and they were slick with moss. Danny locked his arms around his father’s neck and asked questions as Sweeney tried to find his footholds and pull them upward.

“Do you think someone could lift one of these?” he asked. “How much do they weigh? What’s underneath the rocks?”

Sweeney replied in a monotone, “I don’t know.”

He slipped once, went down hard on his knee. The higher they rose, the steeper the rocks became. Had he been climbing alone, he would have had more options, but with Danny on his back he couldn’t make use of the crevices between stones. At one point while he was trying to get a purchase somewhere on the sheer face of a wall that stretched to twice his height, Danny asked, “What’s that say, Dad?”

“Danny,” Sweeney yelled, “I’m trying to climb here.”

His head was aching and his knee was throbbing and the boy was choking off some of his air. But when he heard the crying and felt the trembling against his back, he stopped attempting to pull them up and leaned his head back against Danny’s face.

“I’m sorry, son,” he said. “Dad’s really sorry. But this is very hard.”

“I just wanted,” Danny said through hitching breath, each word standing on its own, “to know what it meant.”

Sweeney looked up and backward now, to an outcropping of rock that formed a lip off the top of the cliff. Somehow, someone had spray-painted Freaks Die on the underside of the ledge.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Sweeney said and instantly regretted it.

“It says something,” Danny said.

“It’s in another language,” Sweeney said and turned back to the cliff wall and began to climb.

The rest of the way up they moved in silence. When they got to the top and Sweeney pulled them to level ground, they found freshly laid sod, a yard of meticulously clipped turf, too green to look natural. There was a brick walkway running through the center of the yard and it led to the oversized doors of the castle.