Resurrection House (5 page)

The old man stands by his window and stares out on the close of day. As dusk takes the sleepy neighborhood, twilight shadows line the dead-end street, and the silhouette of leaf-barren branches lends the concrete the appearance of shattered glass. The dusty scent of autumn rides the air through window screens and into the old man's quiet house. It is a scent he knows well and he breathes it deeply into his tired lungs. He has spent his afternoon preparing for visitors. The half-open, inner front door beckons. A bowl of colorfully wrapped chocolates gleams on the low table in the foyer. Dying sunlight streams through the murky glass of the storm door. Twice during the day, the doorbell rang, but the old man, unready, ignored it. Now he seats himself in his worn, familiar chair and waits.

Outside goblin children overrun the darkening block, their wildest energies released in a sugar ecstasy of anonymity and candy-hoarding. Their visages vary wildly—ghost, pirate, princess, witch, pumpkin, hobo, super-hero—but their voices sing the same song. Excitement. Anticipation. The thrill of rare freedom. They flash from house to house, making their way up one side of the road and down the other before moving on to the next block and the next one after, and hopefully home before supper. The bright colors of their outfits flash, and from behind their masks, their high laughter crackles through the clear fall air.

But the old man sees their true faces; he sees them for what they truly are.

Not always did he know their secret. Not in the all long years stretched out behind him when the business of living and making a living provided suitable distractions from the ugliness. Not even in the few peaceful years he shared with Belle after they retired.

Without thinking he drops his forearm across the arm of his recliner so that his hand lies palm up on the arm of Belle's chair beside it, ready for the warm grasp that greeted it so many times before, but which does not come tonight and will never come again.

Now the old man makes no mistake. Now he knows their true nature.

This year he is ready.

It took time to learn the truth, but time he had after Belle went away. More time than he ever cared to spend on his own. And little by little he began to crack their facade, to notice the little oddities in their routines, their comings and goings at strange hours, the way a neighborhood cat disappeared, and the effort they spent to keep their houses so neat and perfectly groomed in order to deflect suspicion. He spent hours watching and noting, observing their rituals and the faint, strange lights that sometimes burned in the windows of the children's rooms at night. One time he watched a group of children squirm their way beneath the chain link fence that ran along the train tracks at the end of the road. God knows what hidden lairs they kept in the tangled weeds beyond the barrier. And one afternoon, a child fell from his bicycle to the hard pavement after bumping into the curb, and as he sat in the street crying and unaware of the old man's desperate gaze, he let the face he showed the world falter and the old man saw the horror that lurked beneath.

Two children run across the edge of his front lawn in their mad door-to-door dash to collect goodies. One wears a wizard's cloak and tall speckled hat; the other the delicate fringes and tight leotards of a dancer. He watches them eagerly, but they ignore his weed-cracked front walk and move on to the next house.
They have been warned by their parents,
he thinks,
to stay away from the old man who has seen their secret faces.

Perhaps,
he hopes,
they fear me?

Across the street paper decorations clutter the front window of his neighbor's home. A jaunty white skeleton. A creeping green witch. Foam tombstones dot the front lawn. At the house next door electric-orange, jack-o-lantern lights trace the edge of the porch roof and false cob-webbing clings at the corners.

The old man closes his eyes and sees his other neighbors' homes along the road, all similarly attired in this garish manner with icons of mischief and images of the wild spirits rumored to roam free on nights such as this. Every year they accrue these baubles and ornaments and slowly transform the block to suit
their
tastes. Do they think he doesn't know what the signs and symbols mean? Do they think he doesn't see them, their decorations and parties, their fancy candies and disguised children, mocking him and everything his life has meant? Everything Belle's life meant?

They taunt him for what he knows. Their secrets aren’t safe with him. Let them parade their depravity in public once a year, costumed from the unknowing world in the guise of a child's holiday. Let them raise their terrible monsters in plain sight. Let others walk in ignorance. I will no longer be misled, he reassures himself.

Two boys and a little girl pause before the path to his front door. He observes and waits, listening to their whispers.

"Ronny, if you go there, I'm telling Mom," says the girl.

"So?" answers Ronny. "Mom didn't say not to go here. It's just Mr. Louis's house, and you're just scared cause of what happened with Mrs. Louis last year!"

How brazen,
the old man thinks and then,
Belle, I should have been here that day.

"Yeah, Kimmie. Don't be such a baby," says the older boy. "Besides, Ronny's too scared to go on his own, aren't you?"

"Shut up, Billy! I am not," says Ronny. "I'll prove it, too."

With that the young boy's footsteps move toward his house. He slows as he approaches the door. Something inside tells him he should not be here, but he can’t turn back now. The old man rises and steps into the foyer, a welcoming grin on his face, warm satisfaction welling in his chest as he recognizes Ronny, the boy who found Belle in this very same foyer.
Perhaps this is what my beloved saw,
he thinks.
Her last vision the sight of an “innocent” child, her last impression a lie.

Ronny climbs the steps, holds forth his orange bag of treats and delivers his line: "Trick or treat."

The old man grabs a handful of candy from the dish and pushes the door open. "Oh, it'll definitely be a treat," he says. "Enjoy!"

The miniature chocolate bars spill from his hands, plunking heavily among the other sweets gathered in Ronny's sack.

"Thank you," the boy says.

As the boy returns to the sidewalk, the old man calls. "Make sure you share those with the others. They may be shy…but I know they want some candy, too."

He lingers in the doorway as the trio moves off toward the next house. Ronny hops and bounces, rubbing in his victory before his sister and the older boy, even as he pulls the chocolates from his bag and splits them up among their ready grasps. Together they stop by the next-door driveway as the old man's neighbor, Mrs. Reynolds, backs her car out into the street.

Ronny pulls the wrapper from a piece of chocolate.

Kimmie scolds him, reminding him they'd promised their mother not to eat anything she hadn't checked for them. Ronny razzes her and holds the candy out of reach above her head, teasing her.

Unable to resist such an easy target, Billy moves in from behind and slaps the candy from Ronny's hand, yelling, "He shoots! He scores!"

The candy lands under the wheel of Mrs. Reynolds' moving car. The heavy black tire squashes it flat, ejecting its creamy filling from the wrapper. Then air pops like a gunshot and hisses a long sigh. The car sags to one side as its tire deflates. Mrs. Reynolds puts it in park and climbs out, moving around to examine the wheel, joining the three children already circled around and pointing at the dull metal gleam protruding from the rubber: the edge of a fresh razor blade.

Ronny turns and stares at the old man in the doorway. The little boy's face is pale and tears pour from his eyes. And then the old man realizes his error. He knew them not at all; he underestimated their power. A clutching tightness seizes his chest, and his pulse throbs louder in his head as its beats slow and then weaken. He falls to the foyer floor, landing in blackness.

An hour later the police officer closes the ambulance door and watches it drive off without lights or sirens. Ronny stands with his mother, clinging to her, his face buried in her side. "Funny," the police officer says. "Mr. Louis dying just like his wife did and Ronny the first to find both bodies.” His voice comes laced with suspicion not quite strong enough to make him speak his mind. “Guess it’s better this way, though, considering what that old man was up to.”

“Yes,” Ronny’s mother replies. “They never did really fit in on a block with so many young families.”

Ronny peers out from behind his mother’s shirt, glimpses the officer and then smothers his face again.
If I didn’t know better,
thinks the cop,
I’d swear that kid was smiling.

Jennifer Truth drove along the street she had not been down in many long years and felt like she was nine years old again. And like that last day she had been here she felt a premonition of silent screams about to explode from behind the locked doors and shuttered windows of the simple houses. It set her gut on edge. She hated coming back, but even long-faded promises still meant something to her.

She parked curbside outside the house of her childhood friend. The address stenciled on the curb looked exactly as she remembered it, only fainter. A familiar, winding crack ran up the center of the front walk. Creeping mildew speckled the bricks and shingles of the house, and the doors and windows were shut tight under a layer of grime, dim in the shadow of the roof overhang.

Nothing much had changed here.

Leaving the cool interior of her black SUV, Jennifer approached the front door. She wore blue jeans and a black leather jacket in defiance of the blistering July heat and sleek sunglasses against the harsh glare. Her jet black hair stirred in the dry breeze.

The house was ordinary, one of hundreds like it lining the streets, all split-level ranches constructed from the same template during the housing boom of the 1950s, most well-maintained and probably looking much as they had when they were first built. Jennifer despised their uniformity and the tepid façade of normalcy it created. So many of the houses hid awful things, family secrets and violent acts, diseases and raging abuse, suicides, and worse. Things children should never have to think about.

Each house was another lock on an asylum door, waiting to be opened, reminding Jennifer of why her family had left here for good.

She rang the bell and waited.

A seagull cried in the distance. With the Atlantic Ocean only a few miles south, they were commonplace.

The inner door swung wide, and Chloe stepped into the half-light of the foyer. “Jennifer?” she said, as she pushed the storm door open.

“Hi, Chloe. It’s been a long time.”

“Oh my God, you look wonderful,” said Chloe.

She dragged Jennifer into the house and hugged her. Jennifer returned the embrace. Time stripped away, reeling back more than a decade in an instant, and the awkward moment melted into a burning present that they had believed long passed from existence. When they parted, tears filled Chloe’s eyes, and it was as if she had never stopped crying since the last moment Jennifer had seen her. She wore the same lost expression Jennifer had glimpsed through the back window of her parent’s car as they drove away after the funeral and left Chloe behind with her father.

The years gone by had not healed her, not fully at least, and Jennifer, who still nursed wounds of her own, wondered if anyone could ever recover completely from that kind of grief.

“Come in, come in,” Chloe said.

She led Jennifer into the kitchen, offered her a tissue from the box on the counter, and then used one to wipe her eyes. She took glasses from the cupboard and filled them with fresh iced tea from the refrigerator.

“Drink this. It’s a scorcher today, and Dad won’t let me open the windows or use the air conditioner. He’s so weak he hardly ever feels warm. He’s in bed right now under three blankets and a comforter.”

Jennifer accepted the glass. “I’m really sorry about your father. I felt awful when I got your message. How long has he been sick?”

“He was diagnosed a few years ago, but the last six months it’s gotten worse very fast. I suppose that’s a blessing of sorts.”

Chloe diverted her gaze out the window above the kitchen sink. Worry had thinned her. A cotton sundress draped shapeless and flat from her body; her short-cut bob of blond hair made her neck look frail.

Jennifer peered over Chloe’s shoulder at the uncluttered backyard where they used to play. A row of shrubs and a wooden fence demarcated the property line. Beyond it stretched the vast, vacant parking lot of the high school next door. Faraway by the rear entrance, three gleaming cars cooked in the sun. A scattered colony of gulls dotted the pavement and perched along the overhead utility cables. Some stood solitary watch atop the high lampposts. A few danced on the air currents, wings extended and stationary, weaving serpentine spirals before fluttering to graceful landings.

Chloe whirled around, her eyes braced with resolve. “Jennifer, I’m so, so sorry that I never called you when I heard about your mother or when Max died. I wanted to, but I was afraid. It had been so long, you know? And I didn’t know how you felt about me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jennifer said. “I was poor company then, anyway, but I’m glad you called me now. I promised if you ever needed me all you had to do was ask. I want to help you if I can.”

“Thank you. I don’t have many friends these days. None at all, really, unless you count the mailman and the pharmacist at CVS,” said Chloe. “Caring for Dad has pretty much left me stranded. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do when he’s gone.”

“You’ve done your best, I’m sure. It’ll be hard without him, but you’ll be all right.”

“I hope so. I have some plans. I put college on hold, but I want to go back and finish. And I think I’ll sell this place eventually and get one of my own,” said Chloe. “Nothing so exciting as what you do. I’ve tried to keep up. Checked some of your books out of the library when I heard you started writing. Read about you in the paper. You’re a little famous.”

“Being in the news when your mother disappears and when your fiancée smashes his car to pieces on the parkway doesn’t count as fame.”

“I meant your book reviews and the stories about how you help people with all that spiritualist, psychic stuff,” said Chloe. “Do you really believe that weird shit? You never said a thing about it when we were kids.”

“I didn’t believe it then. Didn’t even believe it when I started writing about it, either,” said Jennifer. “It was just an easy gig and the pay was decent. But things change.”

Jennifer and Chloe talked away an hour. Words and small laughters passed between smiles and frowns as they shared all the things they had missed in each other’s life. They found it easy to talk like this again, like they had only said goodbye yesterday and never ceased sharing little secrets; it recalled what had bonded them in childhood, summoned and resurrected it, breathed new life into an old and forgotten thing. It dispelled their nervousness.

Chloe, grinning wide, stood and raised the hem of her dress. “Remember that night we climbed the tree on the dead end for hide-n-seek?”

She pointed to a chalky scar that marred her hip and ran down the outside of her thigh. Others surrounded it, specks and almonds of tough flesh grown pale and smooth with time. Chloe had always been covered in bruises and scars as a child.

“Ouch,” said Jennifer. “How could I forget? You bled all over me while I dragged your crying ass home.”

“It hurt! The branch dug in an inch deep.”

Jennifer rose and shucked her coat. She wore a sleeveless blue T-shirt underneath, one that revealed the spider-webbing of indigo tattoos on her arms and shoulders and her belly where her shirt rose up.

“Guess I ought to show you these,” she whispered.

“Wow. You went all out.”

“They cover my entire body, except for my hands and face,” Jennifer told her. “The night Max died, they just appeared. I woke up the next morning and there they were. I never felt a thing.”

Chloe traced the intricate patterns that decorated Jennifer’s skin. There was hardly a bare patch of flesh, and every design was unique. No pictures or words. Not tribal or harsh and symbolic. They were labyrinthine and mesmerizing, and they seemed to move gently beneath Chloe’s gaze, to sway and shift infinitesimally like the hour hands of a clock or flower petals unfurling at dawn.

Chloe broke her stare, blinked, and looked again.  Jennifer’s tattoos were motionless and flat.

“You’re joking, right?”

Jennifer shook her head. “That’s when I started to believe in all that ‘weird shit’ I write about. The tattoos are just part of it. A lot of bad things happened that night, Chloe. I’ll tell you about it sometime, but I still don’t understand it all, so I’m not sure how much sense it will make.”

“So, this occult stuff, there’s something to it, then? Like black magic and witches and ghosts?”

“It’s less than it sounds,” Jennifer said. “Really, it’s about people. That’s all. People calling on powers they can’t control, people doing bad things for terrible reasons. Every monster that ever existed was a man or a woman once.”

“You’re getting a little heavy for me,” Chloe said. She stepped to the sink to wash the iced tea glasses, and then changed the subject. “What do the tattoos mean?”

Jennifer picked up a dishcloth and dried the glasses as Chloe handed them to her. “They’re something that was secret once and forgotten. My body is like a book in which lost knowledge has finally been rewritten. I can sort of read it sometimes. It’s like staring at one of those three-dimensional eye puzzles. An image just becomes clear. Not a picture, but just shapes and symbols that I understand intuitively. A kind of code, I guess. But I can’t control when it happens.”

Chloe stepped back from the sink, from Jennifer. “I have to be honest. I don’t believe any of this stuff, okay? And the way you talk about it creeps me out. I mean, it’s absolutely terrific to see you again, it really is, but you sound kind of crazy. Do you know that?”

Jennifer smiled. “It’s okay, Chloe. I’ve heard it all before. Believe what you want to. It doesn’t change the truth.”

“But the thing is, see, maybe you really can help my Dad. I never thought he believed in this stuff, either, but these last few months he’s been obsessed with it. He used to be so strong. Now he’s frightened all the time. I think his mind is degenerating.”

“Fear is normal for a dying man,” said Jennifer.

“Dying doesn’t frighten him,” Chloe said. “You know, it was partly his idea for me to call you. He wanted you here today. He’s read all of your books, too, and he remembers you. He thinks you can save him.”

“Save him from what?”

“From the thing waiting for him to die,” Chloe told her. “A ghost he thinks is waiting to gather up his soul and carry it away to Hell.”

* * * * *

The machines showed more signs of life than Chloe’s father did. They beeped and whirred, whooshed and pumped, and worked hard at keeping Frank Barnes alive. Soon they would fail; he would die, but the machines would carry on until someone came to dismiss them, to disconnect their cables and wires, to unplug them from the electrical outlets. Jennifer shuddered at the notion of Mr. Barnes’ useless lungs expanding and contracting through mechanical means, of medicine dripping like the grains of an hourglass into veins through which blood no longer flowed.

Hot air infused with the scent of stale sweat and rotten breath made the room almost unbearable. Sickly light crept in around the edges of yellowed window shades drawn tight.

“Dad?” said Chloe. “Jennifer Truth is here. You remember her, right? My best friend when I was a kid?”

Mr. Barnes rolled under thick bed covers and pushed himself upright against his pillows. Disease had wasted him to a scarecrow effigy that Jennifer barely recognized. His once-strong jaw quivered, and his rich, hazel eyes were rheumy and clouded with cataracts. Remnants of steel wool hair cropped up behind his ears like scrub growth. He looked like a man of ninety rather than one in his mid-fifties.

“I know you,” he said, his voice low but strong.

“Hi, Mr. Barnes,” said Jennifer. “It’s good to see you. I’m so sorry about your illness.”

The dying man began to speak but then gagged and surrendered to a coughing fit that lasted for agonizing seconds. “Pull up that chair and sit with me,” he managed to say between wheezes. “Thank you, Chloe. You can leave us be. I know how you feel about this kind of thing.”

Chloe hesitated then said, “Well, I have to pick up your prescription refill, anyway. I’ll be back soon.”

Feeling light-headed Jennifer sat in the bedside chair. She rubbed her eyes. A chill flush washed through her. She had eaten nothing today and the steamy, oppressive atmosphere sapped her energy.

“Hot?” said Mr. Barnes.

“More than a little.”

“You’ll live. Can’t open the windows or they’ll smell how close I am to breathing my last. Figure my only chance is if they don’t know it when I die.”

“Like the proverb,” Jennifer said. “May you be in Heaven an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead.”

Mr. Barnes chuckled. “Wouldn’t that be all right.”

“So, who are you hiding from?”

“The gulls. The little bastards are everywhere, those hateful, overgrown pigeons with their dead, gray eyes. Scavengers. Carrion pickers.”

Mr. Barnes twitched three times and then sputtered into a fresh outburst of coughing that rattled his bed-frame and threatened to jiggle the tubes and wires loose from his body.

“The ocean’s close by,” Jennifer said. “There’ve always been gulls around here.”

“You don’t think they can do it?” Mr. Barnes said after his spasms ended. “You don’t think those dirty things can snatch my soul out of the ether and drag it away to Hell or worse?”

Jennifer plucked a folded newspaper section from the nightstand, fanned herself, and wondered if Chloe wasn’t right about her father’s mental state.