Project Lazarus (27 page)

“Mom and Dad, remember when I told you someone’s coming for us.  Well, it’s about to happen and we need to go now,” Gilbert warned them, “Follow me,” he said, “I know exactly what to do.”

His parents watched in horror, as the boy fled from the room motioning them to follow.

The dead man was at the door.  He was pounding.  Pounding loudly. 

“What do we do?” Mrs. Chuttle asked, terrified her son could really handle this.

“Shhh,” Gilbert whispered, motioning them to huddle in the corner of the room.

Gilbert proceeded to enter some kind of trance again.  Ivan stared at his brother.  They certainly picked up some strange powers out in the woods. 

While Gilbert was in the trance, Ivan tried to contact him by mind but realized he couldn’t.

The pounding was fierce and growing louder, if that was possible.

“I think he’s trying to break the door down,” Mrs. Chuttle murmured.

Gilbert took his mother’s hand, “Do not worry mother.  He can’t come in.”

She felt a wave of relief, as she watched her son.

The pounding went on for hours.  While Gilbert’s parents were scared, he and Ivan remained relatively calm.

“It is our duty to fight them now,” Gilbert whispered.

Ivan nodded his head in agreement.

His brother remained in a trance, even when the man from hell silenced.

“He’s sneaking around to the back window,” Gilbert warned them, as he could hear his thoughts.

“Oh God,” Mr. Chuttle said, “He’ll break in the window,” He stared to get up, when Gilbert grasped his hand and took him back down to the floor.

“He can’t get it,” he repeated again.

The scratching at the window began.  More pounding on the siding.  The terror wouldn’t cease.

Gilbert remained in a trance, mesmerized by it all.  The power was new and intoxicating.  He could hear people in his mind but only certain people.  He couldn’t hear his parents.  When he wasn’t in a trance, he could easily hear Ivan and Ivan could hear him.  But mostly, to save their lives, he had been given an enormous gift.  He could hear the living dead.

It seemed from the garbled message of the man pounding outside he was indeed the living dead man from hell they had encountered in the woods.  Apparently, since Gilbert and Ivan were the only witnesses, the man thought he could take their souls.  They saw him, just as he had been raised from the dead.  That direct contact was a no no.  Now this living dead man from hell, thought he could steal their souls.  They weren’t supposed to see him.

Little did they know the dead man from hell didn’t come for their souls.  He needed something else form them.  Something very important they would soon learn about.  The dead man from hell needed their help.

Finally, the scratching, pounding and horror ceased.

While the parents had imagined the worse, being torn limb from limb like their neighbors, they were spared.

Gilbert possessed some unusual power that spared them.  He was able to save them from this man, from this living nightmare that had overtaken Cotter, Arkansas.

They stared at the two boys, as if they were strangers now.  One seemed to have the power of healing his brother, the other possessed powers to communicate with the dead.

“He’s gone now.  But he’ll be back,” Gilbert announced getting up from the floor.

“How can you be so sure?”  Mr. Chuttle questioned.

“I know Dad.”

“What happened out there in the woods?”  He asked the boys.

Ivan was the first to answer, “We don’t know Dad.  We really don’t know.”

“Yet, you seem to know so much,” Mr. Chuttle pondered.

The boys had made a pact never to tell what they had seen, a man just raised from the dead.  They didn’t tell the Commander.  They knew it might keep them safe.  But there were people out there wanting to kill them, people in the government and the military, who wanted to study them perhaps.  The living dead would haunt them and so would the prying eyes wanting to know about their new powers.

“We saw something in the woods Dad,” Gilbert announced suddenly.

Ivan looked surprised.  Would he now break the pact?

“What?  What did you see?” Mrs. Chuttle asked.

“If we tell you…then you’ll be in danger.  They’ll know.  We can’t tell you,” Gilbert answered.

Luckily, their parents believed them.  They knew their sons.  But the most surprising words came from Ivan.

“If we must take it to our graves, then that is what we intend to do.  Sorry Mom and Dad.”

He was now so wise for his age.  Both the boys had changed in a matter of months.  So much Mr. and Mrs. Chuttle thought they knew about life and the way things worked had changed as well.  There was no going back now.  For better or worse, their sons knew far more than they should.  They had the ability to keep them safe.

“Then take it to the grave boys,” Mr. Chuttle said approvingly.

“Yes, to the grave,” Mrs. Chuttle agreed.

The boys sighed in unison, the secret was out in the open but not completely.  The storm had only begun to brew.  They had to be ready.

“Dr. Woods have you gotten to case file 3126 today?”  Asked the man in the black suit.

Dr. Neville Woods, an older man in his sixties, was the only doctor allowed in the building.  He had an extensive scientific background in life after death studies.  He agreed to be brought in by the military when he heard the case. 

“No,” he answered tersely, “that one’s from hell and we can’t keep her in the chains.  We had to lock her back in the cell.”

Dr. Woods had all the right credentials, Harvard medical school, residency at Bellevue, the list went on.  But the government was mostly interested in his forty year study of life after death and death in general.  Theories, papers, studies, there was an extensive file on the man.  The government studied his theories for years.  He suggested Project Lazarus to them, not directly but in a thesis paper he did back at Harvard.

The summer of his Junior year in medical school, he traveled to the Congo, not the Amazon and his findings were remarkable.  He claimed there were lost tribes and the living members of the tribes appeared to be over two hundred years old by our normal standards.  Dr. Woods theorized, even though they had illnesses, they were still alive and it was his hypotheses that they were raised from the dead by elder members of the tribes.

Only a junior in medical school, his thesis was published in prestigious medical journals.  While it received most attention from critics, he became a fascination for the government.  Whatever he wrote, they read.  Until one day, they stopped reading and began acting.  Project Lazarus was born.

Dr. Woods never knew there was someone or an entire government willing to put their money and beliefs behind his theories.

“Hogwash.  He should be ashamed of himself,” a top government medical advisor said upon reading his outlandish papers, “He wants us to believe he saw men living well to age 700 and his theory is they were continually raised from the dead.”

“It claims so in the Bible,” another government man argued.

“Yes, I know the story of Lazarus.”

“No, I mean people lived well into the hundreds.  Do you think it might be possible?”

Even though he agreed it was a good hypotheses, the medical advisor refused the possibility.

“No.  Absolutely not.  No.”

The debate raged on for years.  Dr. Woods stopped writing about the coming back from the dead theories, after his intensive all night research nearly landed him in a mental hospital.  Some started calling him a loon.  But others wanted to find out the real story.  Seek the truth.  Men like Charlie Dempster who had both a personal stake and a scientific stake.

Charlie knew the doctor wasn’t mad, he was simply overworked and overtired, trying to prove the impossible.

He was dubbed “a modern day Christopher Columbus”.  Instead of proving the world wasn’t flat, he was blurring the lines between life and death and whatever was in-between.

Immediately when the disaster struck in Cotter, he was contacted and asked if he would like to study the living dead.

Dr. Woods didn’t refuse.  He was warned of the dangers.  That wasn’t a problem for him.

For a while, he had a very successful practice as a surgeon, notably bringing back more lives from death than any other physician known.  His work occupied him and he had no personal life.  With no one to worry about back home, no immediate family and no ties- his life was devoted to his work and he was prepared to pay the price for the rest of his life to find the answers.

His life was buried in books and trances, medicine men and the occult.  So much so, it made people gossip and whisper behind closed doors about the impeccable doctor.  The percentage rate of survival in Dr. Woods’ hands, especially when near or experiencing death was shockingly high.  His results were astounding, enough to make people wonder, how he brought back so many from the dead all by himself.

Dr. Woods always called it luck.  One nurse admitted she saw him chanting while using electric shock to revive a dead man brought in from a car collision.  She was questioned by the government promptly and then dismissed by the hospital.  After scores of anonymous threats, she moved to a small ranch town in Texas and gave up the medical profession.  Rumors of her strange departure made others aware they should look the other way and keep their mouths shut when it came to Dr. Woods.  When she turned up dead, a year later, after a freak car accident, Dr. Woods was the subject of quiet speculation.  Apparently, he knew something important and there were some very powerful people willing to do anything to keep that knowledge successfully under wraps.

The government wanted Dr. Woods to continue his studies and his work.  They didn’t want anyone interfering.

If he could raise the dead himself, it would be of great interest to the powerful men in this world.  The years went by and the powers that be waited and so did Dr. Woods, knowing one day his work would not go to waste.

“How about case 7784 Dr. Woods?”

“That will be fine,” Dr. Woods told the nurse, while he studied the chart, “this one wants to return to heaven.”

A refreshing change, he thought.  He had grown tired of the living dead from hell.  They were more like creatures from outer space than human beings.  In fact, the only thing human about them was the way they looked.  They were desolate, despairing, full of rage, violent and they tried his patience.  Dr. Woods got nowhere with the one’s from hell.

He approached the patient, a woman in her early thirties, she appeared like a movie star out of some glamour movie from the fifties.  Beautiful curves in a slightly fitted black dress, wavy bobbed black hair just like Elizabeth Taylor and retro-red lipstick.

He studied her eyes with his light tool.  He moved it back and forth but the woman’s eyes gazed either straight ahead or up towards heaven.

She said nothing.  Some of the others from heaven spoke and often.  They asked about things he couldn’t comprehend like God, angels, music and lights.  It wasn’t that Dr. Woods didn’t understand God, angels or lights, after all that was the quintessential near death experience.  He spent hours trying to find the missing link between the two.  His only answer was the obvious- death.

The living dead from heaven were often disoriented.  They all appeared to still be in some unending loop of awe.  It was as if they were seeing heaven for the first time over and over.  Their faces filled with glow, a smile crossed their shining eyes and lips, the expressions were always the same.  They were looking to something or someone. 

Dr. Woods dreamt day and night of what that feeling might be like.  He longed to experience such wonder.  For as beautiful as the earth that surrounded him appeared with mountains and trees and rivers and lakes, this world he couldn’t see entranced him as much as those who had already seen it.

It existed.  Both heaven and hell.  In his heart, every human being knows this truth, but foolishly we seem to feel we can bend the rules of space and time.  That we live on forever.  That there are no consequences or rewards.  Unfortunately, most feel the rewards are here amongst the restless on earth.  Dr. Woods knew better.  He saw the great rewards available to the faithful servants of God in their eyes.

Some were desperate to return to heaven.  Others were scared to the point they had to be sedated.

Aubrey Wiltser simply sat in the chair, motionless.

He turned away, walked half way across the room and then hurried toward her very quickly.

Nothing scared her.  Nothing startled her.  She sat motionless.

He came up close to the girl, “Aubrey.  Aubrey can you hear me?  My name is Dr. Woods.  Can you tell me something about yourself Aubrey?”

Usually, the patients either rambled on about heaven at this point, so he didn’t expect much from Aubrey.

His stunning surprise came when she answered distinctly and clearly.

“My name is Aubrey Wiltser.  I know all about you Dr. Woods.  You wonder what I’m staring at.  I’m staring at your entire life.  It’s passing before me.”

Dr. Wood’s heart beat faster.  He never expected anything like this.  She wasn’t simply talking.  She was talking about him.

“You are a man of medical science.  You want to know all about death, heaven and hell.  I can see you because you came very close to death once.”

He marveled at the talking girl.  What she said was true.  When he was young, he went chasing after his dog on a thin ice pond, fell in and nearly died.  It was then he experienced a near death instance.  He was told to go back, like so many others, it wasn’t his time. 

“Your dog, Dilly, he misses you and smiles seeing you now.”

This too made the doctor speechless, as he couldn’t reach the beagle and poor little Dilly drowned.

“It wasn’t your time Dr. Woods.  It wasn’t your time,” she repeated.

She went back into the speechless trance.  During that time, Dr. Woods pulled up a little stool and sat beside her.  She wouldn’t speak again for another three days.

Dr. Woods feverishly kept track of the girl, her pulse, heart rate, breathing, she was connected to several computer monitors.  He was obsessed.  He wanted to record everything. 

He ordered the nurse to bring in a video recorder and tape recorder, a double measure to tape their session, should Aubrey choose to speak again.

Every hour he attempted, “Aubrey?  Aubrey are you there?  I have some questions for you.  Questions that need to be answered.”

The girl was blank, still in the awe of whatever she was seeing.

Dr. Woods grew frustrated.  How could he lose her now?  He needed proof.  She could see his life.  Surely, she could tell him about death, heaven…God?

He stared at the girl.  She was the key.  He spoke to her.  She was someone from the other side.  It was both exhilarating and scary.  And again, purely frustrating.  Would she ever return?

“Dr. Woods,” Grace, his assistant that afternoon, approached him.

“What Grace?”

“It’s Case 5698.”

“What about it?” He asked.

“The others can’t keep him down,” she warned him.

“He’s from Hell this one?”

“No, limbo, we think.  We’re not entirely sure.  He might be entering hell.  Is that possible Dr. Woods?  I mean if he died and was in limbo then came back to life could he try to be entering hell while alive?” The words came out jumbled and confused to the point of embarrassment.

“I don’t know Grace.  I just don’t have the answers.  She does,” he pointed to Aubrey.

“Can I ask?  What did she tell you?”

He paused for a minute then thought it unfair to keep secret from the girl, “She knew all about my life.  My own near death experience when I was about seven.”

“Wow,” Grace said amazed, “that’s something.  Your work has not gone in vain.  Did she tell you about Heaven?”