Resurrection (17 page)

“Smells like they got the rot in here,” Tommy said. “Got it bad, too.”

Blobs of water led from the doorway into the living room. Mitch could now make out distinct muddy prints in the blue shag carpeting. The smell was stronger in here. Tommy went over to a recliner. Its cushions, both bottom and back, were stained dark. He pressed the butt of the Savage into the ass cushion and water oozed out. A magazine—
Newport News—
was laying at the foot of the chair. The pages were mangled, streaked with dirty fingerprints like somebody with shit all over their hands had been leafing through it.

“C’mon,” Mitch said.

He led them through a dining room and into the kitchen. On the wall over the dinette table, somebody had scrawled a message in something like mud:

NOBODY’S HOME

The letters were more of a looping childish scrawl than anything and whatever material was used had dripped like horror movie print.

“That supposed to be a joke?” Tommy said.

Mitch didn’t answer, because as he came around the table he saw the refrigerator. It was a pearl white Amana and the door was standing wide open. The shelves in there had been pretty much cleared, eggs shattered on the floor, mixing in with the contents of a milk carton, a shattered orange juice bottle, mustard, mayonnaise, a glop of pasta. There were dirty handprints all over the door and smears on the shelves inside.

Somebody had been looking for something.

And then Mitch saw what it was. Where the kitchen opened back into the hallway, there was a ceramic plate and strands of shredded butcher paper that were pink with blood. Bits of hamburger were stuck to them. Somebody had torn it open, eating it raw and—judging from the trail of bloody hamburger fragments—had been walking away as they did so, clots of raw meat dropping from their mouth as they went.

“Not much on housekeeping, these Bell’s,” Tommy said, trying to be funny and failing.

A series of black, watery prints led away into the hallway. Mitch peeked into a bathroom and saw nothing. And right about then, Tommy let out a little surprised shriek.

“What?” Mitch said. “What the hell is it?”

Tommy’s mouth was moving but nothing was coming out. He had his Savage up and he was looking wildly from a mirror hung on the hallway wall to the stairs leading to the second floor. “Saw…saw a girl standing there,” he managed, his breath coming very fast and shallow-sounding. “Saw her in the mirror…girl just standing there in a dirty dress or something, hair stuck to her face. She was looking at me.”

There was no one there now.

Mitch, something tensing in his belly, looked into the mirror. It reflected the stairs, part of the living room. He went over to the stairs. There was a pool of water soaking into the carpet like somebody dripping wet
had
been standing there. More of those filthy prints went up the stairs.

“I’ve had enough of this spooky shit,” Tommy said, breezing right past him. “Somebody’s playing games and I got a new game they never heard of.”

He mounted the steps and Mitch was at his side. They were both frightened now, afraid of things they could not see and maybe more frightened of those things that
could
see them. They moved up the stairs slowly. At the top they could see part of a plaster wall and a painting of flowers in a brass pot, but nothing else. They could hear each other’s labored breathing and the rain striking the house.

Then above, the sound of a door creaking open followed by footsteps that were wet and mucky like someone was walking around up there with sponges strapped to their feet.

But they kept going, knowing in their hearts that if either of them had been alone they would probably have run right out the front door. More of those stinking, wet prints were in the hallway above as if their owner had been tramping through the black silt of river bottoms.

There was a long muddy streak along the wall like an oily rag had been dragged along it. But it hadn’t been a rag, Mitch knew, but a hand.

The dirty prints ended at a closed door. There were others shut or half-opened, but whoever was up there was behind this one. There were black stains all over its panels.

Mitch tried it, brushing muck from the knob.

It was locked. From the inside.

He looked over at Tommy and they understood each other. Tommy brought up the four-ten and Mitch made ready. At some unspoken, but understood moment, he brought up his size eleven boot and kicked out with everything he had, giving it the old Kwai Chang Caine treatment. It was just a cheap hollow door and the lock gave instantly, the door slamming right open. And then both Mitch and Tommy charged in there, becoming comically wedged in the doorframe as they tried to vault through shoulder to shoulder like Moe and Curly. Mitch pulled back because Tommy had the gun, a manic voice in his head saying,
spread out, you knucklehead.

The room was probably the master bedroom. It was quite large with an oak four-poster bed and powder gray carpeting. There were muddy prints all over it, of course. As they stepped across it, standing water seeped up from the fibers. The embroidered coverlet on the bed was black with a foul, slimy stain like somebody especially grubby had laid there. And the stink was almost overpowering…pipes clogged with hair and grease and rotting scraps, heaps of decaying leaves…and maybe a worse undersmell of the noxious thing that had been laying in such filth.

None of this interested Mitch and Tommy, though.

There was a doorway leading to a bathroom and that’s where this person had to be. The closet stood open—more dirty smudges on the clothes in there as if polluted fingers had been sorting through them—and they could see everything in there. No room for the girl to hide.

But there had been. The tiled floor was stained with crud and silt. There were black, muddy prints all over the mirror. The tub had been filled and there was a gray scum on the water…but nothing hiding beneath. A small square of window, about large enough for a little kid to squeeze through was standing open, the curtains billowing, a wet mist blowing in. The sill was absolutely black.

“She must’ve went out that window,” Tommy said like he couldn’t believe it.

Mitch started over to it, some slightly neurotic voice in his head crying out,
what in the hell happened here? Some dead and waterlogged thing came into this house, sat in a recliner and paged through a magazine? Laid on a bed and drew a bath, rummaged through the clothes in the closet?
It was madness. What the hell could it possibly be about? But maybe the dead clung tightly to the daily rituals of life and this thing, this girl, had just been going through the motions.

You can’t know that!

Yet, he felt this was as close to an answer as his brain could furnish him with. There were patterns, insane ones perhaps, that were still in play in dead brains. He wanted to think that this girl had been some living waif, but his heart and maybe his soul would not accept this.

Tommy prodded it with the barrel of his shotgun and it moved, it unfurled like a sleeping caterpillar and dropped to floor, squirming. Mitch made a disgusted sound and kicked it behind the toilet. He looked out the window at the falling rain. Felt it in his face and it was good to feel connected to something
real.
This thing, this girl had certainly not been alive…she was filthy and rotting, spilling some festering black juice like the ink of a squid. And she had been so soft and pulpy, she had been falling apart.

He stuck his head out the window, certain he would feel two spongy hands wind around his throat. There was nowhere to jump
.
Just a straight drop to the wet grass below. Nobody was down there. Nobody at all. Mitch craned his head and looked up…well, there you go. There were greasy, ebony stains going right up the vinyl siding to the roof overhang like some mucky human spider had climbed right up its face. Rain blew into his eyes and he wiped it free.

They both made for the stairs, moving at a good clip now. Mitch felt an almost physical wave of horror settle into him with a sickening weight. He almost expected every door in that silent, brooding house to slam open—particularly the cellar door—and things to begin creeping out. Faceless things and dripping things, crawling and slinking things. Yellow-eyed monstrosities that waited in webby, damp cellar corners to disembowel unwary children. A host of tenebrous and macabre horrors that had crawled from some crack in the floor of Hell.

19

Their house was empty, so like Craig Ohlen who lay seething in damp rot not so far away, the Zirblanski twins—Rita and Rhonda, aged eleven—decided that neither snow, rain, nor the gloom of night would stop them from kicking each other’s asses.

Rita started it.

When Rhonda stared forlornly around the wet yard, wondering where their parents were off to now, Rita stomped her in the ass and she went skidding in the water, landing face first. She popped right back up, leaves sticking to her face and launched herself at her sister like a lineman bursting into the pocket for the quarterback. She hit Rita full
-
bore and they both went down, rolling through the sodden grass.

“Bitch! Ugly, stupid, shit-eating bitch!” she screamed in her sister’s face when she had her pinned down. “What did you do that for? What did you do that for?”

But Rita wasn’t saying, so Rhonda grabbed a handful of wet leaves and mashed them in her face, kept rubbing them in while her sister writhed beneath her, swearing and hissing, globs of leaves working their way into her mouth. Something that Rhonda thought was funny as hell. So funny she broke up into laughter. Rita didn’t think it was so funny, though, and she fought and finally managed to work her sister off
-
balance. And when Rhonda went to regain her mount, Rita lashed out and slapped her across the face. It was sharp as a pistol
-
shot and Rhonda’s head jerked to the side with the impact.

Then Rita threw her aside and clamored to her feet.

“
Witch!” Rhonda cried out.
“You stinking witch!”

As Rita tried to make a break for it, Rhonda grabbed one arm of her purple raincoat, yanking it back savagely. But Rita, well accustomed to the tactics of battle, spun around and when Rhonda gave her coat another yank, it came right off, depositing Rhonda on her ass in the soggy grass.

“You’re stinking rotten dead!” Rhonda told her, getting to her feet.

“Bring it, bitch,” Rita told her, standing her ground now.

They launched themselves at each other, actually colliding in midair with a moist smacking sound and going to the ground again, swearing and scratching and kicking.

All in all, it was just another day in the life of the Zirblanski twins who verbally abused each other on a daily basis and generally got into one or two good fistfights a week. They were both small girls, eleven
-
years old and still nowhere near five feet, finely-boned, and oddly feminine despite their reputations and demeanors. But nature had been good to them, giving them both their mother’s high cheekbones, full lips, and angular bodies. There was something positively feline about them, hinting at the ravishing beauties they would someday become. Their eyes, which would one day be called fiery and sensual, were now just burning and starkly confrontational. Maybe in the future they would be comely creatures like their mother, but for the present with their assorted battle
-
scars—scabbed knees, bruises, and scratches—they were the toughest kids at Thomas West Elementary.

And if you didn’t believe that, all you had to do was cross them…or meet those eyes with your own on the wrong day and dare not look away.

So they were into it hot and heavy, rolling and thrashing, drawing blood and somewhere during the process a shrill voice called out:
“Girls! Girls! You stop this right now! Do you hear me? You stop this effin nonsense right now!”