Resurrection (67 page)

It was getting on four a.m. when she heard a knocking at the front door.

She came awake from a shallow sleep in which her mother’s voice warned her of things she could not remember when her eyes flickered open.

The knocking came again. It was frantic.

Wanda tried to wet her lips, but they were as dry as the rest of her anatomy. Nothing in her now but sticks and twigs and desert sand. The knocking came again. There had been fear at first, but not now. She didn’t think those out in the streets could stand at her door with what she burned in her incense pots. The stink was heady and maybe a trifle unpleasant and they could not bear it.

She got to her feet, her old bones creaking, and went to the door with the aid of her cane. Funny how she had not needed it all day long. How the knowledge that her mind and her craft and her special talents being needed had revitalized her, made her feel as hot-blooded and flush as a woman of thirty or forty. But now that had drained away. She hobbled to the door, trying to feel in her mind what might be out there, what had come to call.

And though she was weak and worn, her mind was still an intuitive thing and it could sense no sinister intent out on the porch, nothing that walked that should not.

Sighing, she undid the deadbolt and lock, pulled the door open.

A teenage boy stood there, dripping wet, an overfed tomcat in his arms. “My mom and dad are gone,” he said, falling through the door. “And I can’t find Chrissy.”

Rhonda and Rita wrestled Deke onto the sofa, while he mumbled on about things they could not understand. He was drenched and so was his kitty. Wanda toweled the cat off and it began to purr almost immediately.

“Friendly old mouser, ain’t you?” she said, setting him down.

Over at the door, she stared out into the night. Yes,
they
were out there and she could feel them. Feel the ancient evil they emanated. For maybe some thought they were just the reanimated dead, but she knew better. She could see the true nature of the malignance that filled them.

Yes, they were out there.

And now she saw them.

The boy, this Deke Ericksen, had brought some with him that had no doubt been following him. One of them was a young girl standing next to an oak in the front yard. She was just a gray, withered form, but Wanda could see her face, pale as marble and the depthless eyes staring out of it.

And out in the streets, another rose from the water, a woman who might have been the girl’s mother. She rose up, water running off of her, seeming to be at once flesh and blood and then something that melted into shadow. Her eyes were huge and black and intense.

Wanda slammed the door shut before one of those shadows drifted in.

20

What Chuck Bittner remembered most was running.

After he’d escaped the witch’s gingerbread cottage

a.k.a. Mrs. Crowley’s apartment of crawling goodies

he took to the streets in a daze. He didn’t remember much of it save splashing through the water, the falling rain, hiding from shadows that stalked the night…but little else. Some demonic clown had chased them all and then that kid, Nigel, had brought them to see the witch. Yes, that’s exactly what had happened, he knew, just as he knew he’d never, ever get anybody to believe him. Regardless, you couldn’t come out of something like that without being a bit confused, a bit rattled, and maybe more than a little crazy.

Chuck figured that’s why he didn’t remember much of his journey across the city to his own neighborhood in Elmwood Hills. When he arrived there, stunned and fatigued and he didn’t know all what, he was surprised. Surprised because he could not recall setting out in any particular direction with any set plan in mind. But some how, some way, he had arrived home. Something had guided him.

And after what he found when he got home, he just had to wonder.

The first thing he saw was that there were lights on in his house. Sure, the big Cape Cod on the corner with the high, hand-crafted iron fence around it. His old man’s Lincoln Navigator in the driveway. Not electric lights, of course, because those were history now. Wavering, yellow-orange lights like the kind thrown by candles. He should have felt welcomed by this, by the idea that someone was home waiting up for him.

But he did not feel welcomed.

In fact, he felt almost threatened.

His old man worked long hours and Chuck just couldn’t imagine him waiting up. Even with the fact that his son was missing in a school bus somewhere. Not that dad was selfish or insensitive really, but as he always said himself, he worked long hours.

So who had lit the candles?

Chuck stepped through the gate, the rain just coursing down now, running down his face and down the back of his shirt in rivers. He caught a glimpse of someone watching him from the oval window on the stairs. But as soon as he looked, they darted away.

It wasn’t his old man.

Dad was short and round. Dad wore so much gold jewelry around his neck it would have flashed in the candlelight. So it wasn’t dad. Then who? The figure had been tall and thin, almost like mom…but it couldn’t have been mom. Mom had divorced dad years ago. Besides, last month, last month…

Last month she died. She died and that’s that. You never saw her anymore, you didn’t even know what she was doing these days. Was she with one man after another like dad said? Or had it been worse? When she slit her wrists had it been because of her drinking and drugging or something more?

Something like loneliness?

Chuck wasn’t going there. There was pain there and bad feelings and he could not face them. After she’d died, he’d spent a lot of nights going over it all. It was true that he had not really seen her in three years. But she always sent cards and sometimes she called. But Chuck had not acknowledged those cards or returned those calls. He knew why, of course. It was because his old man had encouraged him to blot out the memory of his mother. And he had done so. His mother had left. He lived with his father. That made him feel bitter at her and made him want to do just about anything to please dad.

Well, he never left, did he? He didn’t abandon me. He took care of me.

As dad always said, “It’s just you and me, kid. Your mother wasn’t much to begin with and now she’s gone. It’s just us. You know you can count on me, right? That you can always count on me?”

Right away. He could smell something cooking. Something like bacon frying. It had that same unmistakable odor…almost. But not a good smell like bacon in the morning, but something else. Something that smelled like salted meat on top and something almost rancid beneath.

He walked slowly towards the kitchen, certain now what he was going to see. But driven. Pushed in that direction. Needing to see the very worst thing that this night could offer up to him. Something much more personal than that clown or the old witch. Something he could not walk away from unchanged.

The cooking smell was stronger.

It was gagging even.

At the archway leading into the kitchen, he stopped. Stopped, took a breath, found his voice and pulled it up where it might be heard. “Mom?” he said.

There was a wet, smacking sound like an old lady moistening her lips. Then a voice, very dry and cracked: “Come in, dear.”

It was Chuck’s legs that almost mechanically brought him through the archway. Because the rest of him was tensed and crawling and needing badly to run. But his legs brought him in there and he got to see. See what, somehow, through wind and storm and driving rain, he’d been drawn back home to see.

There were perhaps a dozen candles glowing, throwing wavering shadows against the wall like something from a spookshow. And that was appropriate because mom was standing before the stove. The gas stove. The electric ignition was out, but mom was resourceful: she’d used a kitchen match. Mom had always been resourceful that way. Even after six weeks in the grave.

“Are you hungry, baby?” she asked.

Chuck wanted to fall to the tile floor. He wanted to fly apart or drag himself under the table like a sick dog. Mom just stood there, smiling at him as she cooked things in a frying pan. She was entirely naked, a moldering thing with deflated breasts hung with green moss. Her left eye was missing and her right was huge and glistening black, a grayish mucus running from it. The flesh had been eaten away from her ribs as if by animals and her skin was white and lumpy with strange sucker-like growths that looked oddly like barnacles.

“How’s my baby boy?” she said. “Did my baby boy miss his mommy?”

Chuck was repelled, certainly, but more than that he was wounded on a much deeper level. Something inside him, something he imagined to be like boiling red blood, was bubbling to the surface. Coming from a room inside him he’d kept locked and bolted for years. It was the place he’d kept the memories of his mother. The way she’d been before she left and his hopeless childhood fantasies of what things would be like when she came home again. But she never did come home, so Chuck had thrown everything into that room: all the emotional flotsam and jetsam that had collected in his soul over the years, all the love and hate, joy and heartbreak, remembrance and disillusion and pain, dear God all that biting, cutting awful pain, and here it comes, here it all comes


Chuck began to whimper as all those repressed emotions broke through the levy and flooded him, running wet from his eyes and filling his belly with heat and making something in his chest constrict.

“Tears, Chuck? Are those tears and sobs for your poor neglected mother?” she said. “No, no, no, we can’t have that. Mommy can’t have her big boy crying like a little girl. You let mommy make it better. You let mommy make you something yummy to eat.”

And as Chuck stood there, floored with too many conflicting emotions, mom flipped dark, burning things in the pan with her spatula. A sickening odor wafted from them, almost overpowering her own stink which was that of mildewed, rotting things. As she worked that spatula, he could see where the pathologist had sutured her wrists back up in the morgue. The flesh of her fingers hung in loops like cobwebs. Her knuckles had burst through the skin and he could see red gristle beneath. She hummed some melancholy dirge under her breath and Chuck was certain that she’d hummed him to sleep with it when he was a baby.

He took one step backward.

“Where are you going, baby? Don’t you like mommy’s cooking?”

As she said this, a flap of something fell from her cheek and landed in the pan, sizzling away in the hot oil. And that was what she was cooking up. That’s what she was offering to her son: herself. Didn’t mothers always give their children their own flesh and blood? She had brought him to being within her own body and now she was giving him another helping of that. She wanted to fill him with herself and that’s why the flesh from her ribcage was missing: she’d filleted herself for her only child.

She stood there, humming and flipping the meat, an absolute horror. He could recognize that figure as his mother…but just barely. Most of the hair was gone from her scalp, save a few locks at the back of her skull. And these were not the lustrous red he remembered, but a dry tangle of pale orange hairs like dried reeds or straw. Her lips had shriveled away from her blackened gums and her teeth seemed narrow, rodent-like, just gray with filth caked between them as if she’d chewed her way up out of the grave. The entire left side of her face was enormously swollen, just a great sac of pus and quivering larva.

“Why don’t you talk to mommy, Chuck?” she said, a couple of graveworms dropping from her mouth and frying up in the pan.

“Your dead,” he said and was surprised at how calm his voice was. “You…you shouldn’t be here. You’re dead.”

Mom fixed him with that single black, juicy eye. “That’s what your father said, Chuck. That’s exactly what he said. Right before his heart gave out and he hit the floor. Don’t worry, baby, I didn’t let your father die alone and unloved. I laid on top of him. He didn’t like it much. Especially when I told him how all his partners are robbing him blind and how his mother tried to abort him and

”

“Stop it!” Chuck said, more emotions rioting in him, filling his head with explosions like fireworks. Grief and pain and guilt and anger and horror, oh yes, lots of that.

Mom laughed and it was an awful, screeching sound like grinding metal. “Hungry, Chuck? Hungry? She reached into the pan and her fingers sizzled in the oil, black smoke coming off them. She snatched a piece of meat and placed it between her teeth. She did not chew as a human chewed, but like an animal, a dog or even a shark maybe, snapping her teeth down on it and pulling it whole into her mouth and down her throat. “Yummy. Now, Chuck, it’s time we spoke the truth about your father.”

Chuck was breathing very hard, part of him certain that none of this was even happening, that perhaps he was still in Mrs. Crowley’s apartment. “Your dead,” he said. “Go…go back to your grave.”