Resurrection House (11 page)

Mann, whose philosophical beliefs took their roots in
fin de siecle
Millenialism and bastardized principles from established world religions, was a proponent of the concept that human beings might move materially into the next world. His unorthodox mix of science and rogue theology placed him firmly outside the academic and scientific mainstream. Yet, in 1953, Mann founded a society whose membership numbers more then 75,000 worldwide today.

Mann spent the better part of his youth journeying through Asia, before returning to his native Dresden at the end of World War II when he gathered a following of men and women devoted to his ideas. Though no formal records of military service exist for Mann, controversy has long surrounded his activities during the war. Historians have purported that Mann’s travels were connected to covert efforts of the Third Reich or that Mann was engaged by Great Britain as a double agent. His official biographer, Ute Meineke, claims Mann was neither and that his journey was one of spiritual and self-discovery.

Following the death of his wife in the 1960s Mann became a recluse. In his writings he often pointed to the influence of family legends concerning his great-grandfather, Avery Mann. The Mann patriarch committed suicide with half a dozen others in a cottage outside Dresden on New Year’s Eve 1900. Mann alternately characterized his progenitor as a brilliant spiritualist who foresaw the end of the world and just another victim of the odd apocalyptic mania that seizes upon the soft-minded at century’s end.

Mann leaves behind a body of work consisting of numerous scientific treatises and monographs, two novels that were banned for several years in numerous countries, and many volumes of privately published religious writings, including a disturbing creation myth that has inspired generations of subculture artists and musicians. At the time of his death, he was reportedly at work collating forty years of his journals for what he intended to be his final statement to the world.

* * * * *

Moriarty’s lawyer had dubbed the hulking, one-armed corpse that sat in the cellar like a king perched upon his throne the “Scowl.” Still and silent as a statue, only the dead man’s perpetual glower and the radiating intensity of his eyes indicated that he belonged among the living dead. His tattered clothes suggested nothing of his former life. No one among the security detail could recall his arrival at the house, though George Gail placed it at more than six months ago. But the Scowl seemed too little decayed to be so old.

The men who worked the basement security station tried to avoid him. His unblinking stare made them uncomfortable. Peter Carroll found it fascinating.

He came to think of the Scowl as the gravity of the 1379 Hopewood Boulevard, the mass around which the other corpses orbited, and perhaps the vessel that contained the key to the secrets of the house. During the second week of his residency, he began daily observations of the dead man, at first sitting beside the guard, observing the solitary figure, while also keeping an eye on the monitors. In this way he adjusted to the routines and cycles of the household. The dead moved in fixed orbits. Days or weeks long their circuits took them through the rooms and corridors of the house and its grounds like cells coursing through the veins and arteries of a circulatory system. Their inexorable motion made the stillness of the Scowl seem all the greater.

Then there were the “shades” to wonder about, dark figures that danced briefly across the monitor screens or hovered in patches of darkness on the fringes of perception. Glimpsed from the corner of his eye, they seemed to Peter like the figures of men, but viewed head on, they shifted into amorphous shadows like smears of soot on the screen. One moment they were present and the next gone. They only appeared on camera. The guards ignored them, but Peter suspected a connection existed between the shades and the mysterious comings and goings of the dead who vanished without a trace as often as fresh corpses appeared out of nowhere.

The “scraps” were harder to overlook. Scattered willy-nilly within and without the walls of the house were the lost limbs and loose bits of animated flesh or organs that decomposing residents sometimes trailed behind them. Or when a body became too damaged to go on, the others would tear it to shreds and spread the quivering remains around the property. The pieces never lasted long before withering into dry nubs of old skin and sinking away into the cracks of the house or holes in the earth that the dead dug by hand in the yard. Peter surmised that this disposal process marked the central preoccupation of the dead. He steeled himself to investigate when he could.

For now, though, it was the Scowl that obsessed him.

Carroll had done his research before placing his bid for the house, and he knew things were changing. The rate of decay among the dead had been slowing in steady increments over the past decade. The corpses were walking longer. Their numbers were growing. If Gail’s time line for the Scowl was accurate, then he was the best-preserved corpse yet to inhabit the house. Peter could not escape the sensation that something more than the rudimentary thought processes apparent in the other corpses was taking place inside the Scowl’s mind.

Before long Peter moved out of the guard station to sit eye-to-eye with the thing. Those first few sessions lasted minutes, but he found himself staying a little longer each day. The Scowl was unlike the other corpses. It possessed warmth to their cold, and weight, as though its physical presence, rather than decreasing in death, had become denser and more substantial. Its skin shone like veneer. Peter’s imagination filled to bursting with ideas about who the Scowl might be, where he had originated, and why he seemed so powerful.

When a month had passed, an hour-long staring duel with the Scowl had become well entrenched in Peter’s daily routine. He took to recording in a notebook the ruminations and ideas that often flashed through his mind during that time. Visiting the thing had become a form of meditation, and Peter wondered if some days he wasn’t subjecting himself to a subtle self-hypnosis facilitated by the unnatural steadiness of the corpse’s nacreous eyes. He found that the immutability of its cold stare bordered on reassuring as though it understood who Peter was and intended soon to deliver some telltale gesture or revelation.

But after weeks of observation Peter’s hope began to fade that any sign of the creature’s thoughts might reach its surface.
Maybe,
thought Peter,
this one is different in other ways.

One Thursday as Peter sighed, closed his notebook, and rose to leave, the Scowl grabbed him by the arm.

Peter barked in surprise. The thing’s touch was hideous. Biting cold penetrated Peter’s flesh, and an icy sweat broke out on his back. He dropped his notebook and pen to the floor.

The security guard rushed from his post. Peter waved him back.

The Scowl made no other move. He simply held Peter and stared at him. And then his stiffened mouth opened, shedding flakes of brittle skin as he said, “God…has not abandoned…you…why have you…abandoned him…?”

His voice floated like a whisper down an endless tunnel. Then the dead thing growled and a flat, rolling uproar billowed from deep within the Scowl’s torso. Peter recognized it as laughter. The dead man let go of Carroll’s arm and lapsed once more into quietude.

Rattled, Peter retrieved his notes and fled upstairs.

* * * * *

Excerpt from

Seven-Fold World
(1955)

By Rudolf Mann

And Ailo wept for the loss of Anlo his mate with whom he had created all the aspects of the Seven-Fold World and given seed to the multitude of beasts and spirits that populated it. For Anlo had forgotten the warning of the Great Thing that lived below the sea, the one thing to which Ailo and Anlo had not imparted existence, and she had traveled too near the Fiery Heart of the Earth. And thus Anlo was burned and did vanish while Ailo slept.

Upon awakening Ailo called out for his mate. But only silence like that of the great empty gulfs amidst the galaxies responded.

And Ailo searched for her, receiving word from the beasts of the mountain that Anlo had touched the Fiery Heart of the Earth and had thus been seared from the land.

Upon hearing this Ailo vowed to reclaim his mate from the depths of the underworld and restore her to life for their work stood unfinished. The world remained imperfect.

And though many months did pass and the seasons change, Ailo’s conviction burned without wavering. One day after weeks of wandering the utter darkness of the underworld and passing through the many tricks and traps of the slithering shades that inhabit the unlighted realms, he came upon a chamber whose blackness reeled back from the glow of red-hot metal. Its source was the pendant that once he had gazed upon so often where it hung from Anlo’s neck. This was where her body lay. The metal of the charm still bore the atomic heat of the Fiery Heart of the Earth. It glowed like a young sun perceived from a planet’s distance.

Upon seeing Anlo there, Ailo wept tears of joy. But as his eyes grew accustomed to the baneful light and took in the fullness of his mate’s decay, the sight of her shattered his elation. All sign of her former beauty had been vanquished by decay. Those parts of her meant to nurture and spawn life were spotted with rot and ruin. The wreck of Anlo’s flesh repulsed Ailo. He cried out in anguish.

And Anlo awakened and asked, “Why have you come seeking me, my love? Do you not know I am not yet finished dying? My life above is ended. Now I must face my second death before this world we have fabricated together might free me in body and soul. Return! Your place is no longer at my side for you have many sins yet to repent.”

Upon hearing Anlo’s voice changed so by the ravages of death, Ailo seized the fiery charm from his lover’s neck and fled back to the surface where he expressed to all the beasts and creatures of the earth his cosmic sorrow that not one death but two must claim them all before they might know peace. And so from the creatures who had drawn around him, he chose seven and declared them divine heralds. Into their hands he assigned governance over all those things of the underworld and delivered to them the freedom of passage through the unlighted channels of the night. Then he cast the burning charm among them and doomed all things to suffer its horrible power.

* * * * *

“So, how do you pay for all this, Mr. Carroll? You’re not a wealthy man.” Padraic Irwin O’Flynn pushed his teacup aside and prepared to jot notes on a yellow legal pad. A mini-cassette recorder whirred faintly on the table.

“Ah, well, first question and it’s already about money, Mr. O’Flynn? I consented to this interview to help your research, not your royalties. Please don’t forget that,” Peter said.

“It’s relevant to my research to know who’s backing your ownership and maintenance of Resurrection House. But a poor choice for my first question. Let’s start with something easier. How long have you lived at 1379 Hopewood Boulevard?”

“Six months,” said Peter. “And the house is supported by a fund established by Red Moriarty. I contribute every cent of my own earnings, minus expenses, but as you noted, I’m not a wealthy man. Red assured the support of the house independent of the resources of its owner.”

“Thank you, Mr. Carroll,” said O’Flynn.

He had begun work on his book three years ago, determined to dispel the cloud of half-truths and rumor that obscured what was really happening at Resurrection House. O’Flynn had no doubt that dead bodies did indeed return to life on the property, and he feared that it marked the advent of something monumental. The denial of the place’s significance by the world at large only bolstered his conviction. He intended to set down the most factual account of the house’s history that he could assemble, at best to expose the truth behind the phenomenon, at worst to awaken the interest of the self-obsessed public. Moriarty’s organization had routinely stonewalled his investigative efforts and requests for interviews. It had taken him four solid months of persuasion to arrange his meeting with the new owner. He could feel it was going to be worthwhile.

“Do you like it here? Does it feel like home?”

“I’m quite comfortable. It’s a charming house. Of course, I’m still adjusting to the others but we get along fine,” Carroll said.

“So, you, what…?” asked O’Flynn. “Get up in the morning, brush your teeth, come down to breakfast? All while the dead carry on around you?” “Pretty much. The others keep to themselves. They’re like ghosts, in a way, but ghosts with substance. Anyway, I’m well occupied. There’s plenty of work to tend to as the house’s caretaker. Administrative affairs, fielding requests for visitation, and other duties.”

“I’d imagine keeping contact with lawyers takes up a good deal of your time. Last I checked there were 734 pending legal actions connected to the house.”

“You’ve done your homework. But we’re up to an even 750 as of this morning. Not everyone wants to see the house continue to exist. Not everyone is happy that I own it. Most of them are crackpot cases that will never see the inside of a courtroom.”

Padraic took a leather-bound scrapbook from his briefcase and flipped through stiff pages of newspaper clippings. “It raised quite a stir when Moriarty chose to sell to you. Here’s one,” he said, stopping at a page. “The headline reads: ‘Moriarty Sells to Incompetent.’” And another, ‘The Headless Household: Visionless Amateur To Buy 1379.’ Do you feel there might be something to the criticism?”