The Resurrectionists

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  The men traced a long, candlelit corridor that terminated at the entrance to the hospital’s surgical auditorium. Hereford entered first, holding the door for his protégé.

  Encircling the operating table were four figures hidden beneath thick leather coats and beaked masks. He set his medical bag upon a nearby table and undid the clasps. He withdrew two metal cages and stationed them in close proximity atop the table. Then he removed a voltaic pile and ran the wires about the cages, punching their ends into the muscle of the heart within each cage. He squeezed a sponge wet with salty brine over each heart. The fluid would provide the dry meat with the necessary conductivity for the flow of electricity. The hearts leapt to life, their chambers beating as if alive once more, and the sound of the animated muscles filled the operating room with a staccato noise.

  Satisfied, he moved to the second table and readied himself for the ceremony to come. Hicks stood beside him, already in the process of drawing his ankle-length oilcloth cloak over himself. The woman had been arranged atop the operating table, and four plague doctors stood around her, their staffs in hand.

  Hereford’s flesh goose pimpled beneath the cold air, and he dressed quickly. The beak mask slid easily over his head and face, as if welcoming him, and he pushed aside the pretenses of his profession to better embrace the reality of his self. He breathed deeply, inhaling the lavender stuffed into the striking beak of his mask. Contentment washed over him as he pulled on thick gloves and took his staff to assume his place beside the woman. Hicks stood next to him, practically jittering with excitement.

  Bayley spoke first, intoning the ancient prayer of a dead people, in a tongue long since vanished. His words carried power absolute, their syllables heavy with importance, weighted with ancient meaning. The air turned suddenly hot. A newfound strength emboldened Hereford and, he knew, the others.

  The prostitute began to moan as consciousness slowly seeped into her. Her head turned from one shoulder to the other, eyes fluttering weakly. As her head moved, Hereford caught sight of the frozen blood matting the hair behind her ear, where the resurrectionists had clubbed her into unconsciousness. Her limp hands shifted, and her panic clearly rose as she realized she could not raise her arms. Eyelids snapped open, and her mouth sounded an urgent but silent alarm, her scream lodged firmly in her throat. She attempted to kick her legs, but that effort, too, was useless. She was strapped tightly to the table. Bayley jammed a bite block into her mouth before buckling the leather straps at the back of her skull. Her scream growing thickly audible behind the wooden gag, she struggled all the more fervently, eyes wide with hysterical fright at the figures before her, until she began to choke. The six plague doctors lowered the razored appendages at the heads of their staffs, slicing away the whore’s modest garments until she lay fully revealed.

  Hereford’s breath hitched in his throat, his heart racing at the sight of the woman’s ample breasts, freed of their support and slumping to either side of her chest. Tears ran down her face. He followed the plane of her belly to the thick mat of dark-brown curls between her thighs. As his eyes roamed her, he noted the many slices to her skin left by the plague staffs. Each gash wept freely. She had clamped shut her eyes, unable to dam the tears pouring readily down her cheeks.

  Suffering was the key, Bayley had said many months ago. And this woman’s suffering was as sure as it was beautiful. She had to be aware of what came next, keenly focused on her pain and tormented by the understanding that her body was no longer her own. She was little more than a plaything, owned now by the beaked doctors gathered around her to do with her as they wished.

  Bayley examined her eyes then spoke in that harsh, guttural dead tongue. The words were tinged with anger, as if the mere phonetics were built entirely from hate. The odd language roused the whore, drawing her attention to Bayley. The words had power, dangerous and dreadful power, and they triggered something instinctual and primitive within the woman. Frenzied, she attempted to rise despite the restraints pinning her cranium to the table. Her arms and legs struggled against the thick leather cuffs. Beads of sweat exploded along her hairline to run down her face, mingling with the current of tears blazing down her empurpled cheeks.

  Light from the surrounding lanterns danced along the back of Hereford’s razor. He stepped closer, holding the blade over the harlot’s eyes, which widened in fear. He drew the flat of the blade across her collarbone then down her sternum. Her flesh turned bumpy, the fine hairs along her breasts standing on end. He dragged the flat edge across the rise of one breast, circling the areola. Her dark, ruddy nipple stiffened at the cool contact, and Hereford felt his own arousal growing. With his free hand, he pinched her nipple between thumb and forefinger, pulling it and stretching the elasticity of the breast to its peak. He slashed at her breast, a lightning quick strike to slice off the hardened pink nub in a sudden flair of violent theatrics. She screamed around the bite block, her cuffed hands slapping uselessly at the operating table. Tears and sweat washed down her pained, blanched-white face. A thick scarlet wash flooded across the pale mound of her ruined breast. Beneath his mask, Hereford licked his lips with longing.

  Garbled pleading came from around the bite block, indecipherable and pointless. Her begging reached a crescendo as he amputated the other nipple, her head rising and slamming against the table repeatedly. Her breathing came in ragged gasps through her nose, reminding Hereford of wind rustling dead leaves and barren branches.

  All the while, as he cut and goaded loose her screams, the plague doctors chanted their ancient hymn. Electric notes thickened the air as an unnatural heat rose to meet the last gasp of February cold. From the corner of his eye and through the darkened lens, Hereford saw a ripple in the air. He had seen similar apparitions before and knew that if he dared to look at it directly, it would disappear. The only way to see it was indirectly, at an angle, and through tinted glass.

  The thinnie caught the woman’s attention as well, and when she attempted to meet it head on, her pained expression took on a confused state. She had witnessed the impossible and knew not what to do with the information. Her pain briefly forgotten, she looked toward the beaked doctors with incredulity.

  It was time to remind her, then. Hereford walked along the table’s edge slowly, dragging the blade down her body as he went. One long, shallow, unbroken line split apart the skin of her flank. The razor bumped along the bony protrusions of her ribs then bit into her belly, cutting down the length of her and glancing across the curve of a hip bone. It continued down her shapely thigh and over her knee, to her shin and the top of her foot.

  At the opposite end of the table, Bayley continued to read from his grimoire, while Post, Hicks, Ellery, and the sixth plague doctor, physician Douglas Quick, disassembled the woman’s upper extremities. Hereford glanced up from his work to see Post gripping a mutilated breast in one hand, carving away at the fatty tissue with the other.

  The woman’s pain was incomparable, the bite block deadened her screams. She sought to thrash her head from side to side, but such movement was impossible. He had no doubt that if she were able, she would have slammed her skull against the table until she blacked out or caved her head in, in an attempt to escape the unyielding torment inflicted upon her.

  The wet noise of tearing meat was very nearly drowned by the woman’s muffled screams. Metal struck metal, then with the crack of bone, Ellery forced apart the whore’s sternum. Meat tore free, and the woman turned silent, finally succumbing to death. Her eyes slammed shut, and a final shuddering breath shook her chest.

  Ellery removed the heart and held it overhead, as if presenting an idol, then ceremoniously presented it to Hicks. He carried the heart to the nearby table and arranged it in its new cage, stabbing the wires into the appropriate spots along the ventricles and atria. He squeezed a sponge full of salty brine over the organ. In discordant rhythm, the trio of hearts began to beat in accordance to the voltaic charge. The crackle of electricity and the palpitations of flexing, strumming
muscles danced in the air.

  It’s working, Hereford thought.

  In his peripheral vision, his mouth slack with wonder, Hereford watched through the lenses of the plague mask as more thinnies opened in the air around him. Small slits split the air with a peculiar, silvery shine, then widened. As they grew, he saw the darkest of voids, an opening to an elsewhere that the candlelight could not reach. Bayley’s voice thundered as he read from Al Azif, then Hereford saw movement deep within the holes, just hidden in the pitch blackness of the beyond, slithering in awareness.

  No sooner did that thought occur to Hereford than the first heart lost its rhythm and slowed. The others followed, one by one, as the electric currents burned away the brine that propelled them. The thinnies closed. Bayley tore loose his mask, a look of dejection painted across his features. All that remained in the operating theater were the remains of their awful, carnal depravity and the pungent reek of violent death.

  Bayley’s jowls trembled as he looked around the theater, his eyes finally settling on the slaughter at the room’s center. “Clean this up,” he said, waving at the messy disaster before him. “And dispose of… all of this.”

  Chapter Five

  Salem Hawley kept watch over his friend’s grave for three days. Each night, much like the body interned several feet below, grew colder and colder. Hawley, meanwhile, grew only more desperate and angry.

  After their encounter with the body snatchers, Salem had hoisted Jeremiah over his shoulder, returned home with the man, and called for a local Negro physician to tend to him. Jeremiah’s face had been shattered, his skull fractured in half a dozen places, and his teeth had been knocked out. He had been breathing, though—shallowly, at least. By the second day, his breathing had grown erratic, and a wet rattle clanged around inside his chest. Occasionally, he would cough, exhaling a red mist into the air above his lips. He slept and slept and would not wake.

  Salem had been luckier, as his own injuries paled in comparison to Jeremiah’s. His sides were a mess of bruises, the muscles of his back strained. Every breath he took renewed the deep ache in his tight chest, although, blessedly, no ribs had been fractured or broken. He hobbled around his small apartment like an old man, hunched over in pain. The worst injury, though, had been to his pride. Salem had taken far worse beatings from his former owner and the slave drivers the man employed, and he had the scars to prove it. His body would heal, he knew, but it was another thing altogether to recover from the mental recriminations that plagued him. Sitting beside Jeremiah, waiting and hoping for the man to awaken and rise, he was left only with his thoughts. If only he’d moved faster… If only Jeremiah hadn’t been so brash, so impulsive in his anger…

  Salem kept to the man’s bedside until the last, shallow breath rattled Jeremiah’s chest. After Jeremiah was laid to rest in the Negro cemetery, Salem remained with him, adamant that his friend’s eternal rest would not be disturbed by those repugnant bands of roving grave robbers.

  The cold nights did his injured body little good, and he would wake in the morning, freezing and stiff. To keep warm, he lined his clothes with old newspapers as well as more recent editions of the Daily Advertiser. Insulating him from the cold was a far nobler purpose for Childs’s newspaper, which had taken to printing insults toward him of late.

  He had sat beside Jeremiah’s deathbed when the response to his Humanio letter caught his attention. The words of the entitled, self-important snob stuck both in his mind and his craw even days after the fact.

  Great offence, it seems, has been given to some very tender and well-meaning souls by gentlemen of the medical department, for taking out of the common burying ground of this city bodies that had been interred there; one in particular, whose philanthropy is truly laudable, has obtained a place for his moving lamentations in your useful paper. Whence is skill in surgery to be derived? Kind and generous Humanio, your head is too empty, and your heart too full!

  That page of the Advertiser very nearly dripped condescension and derision, so soaked was it in malice. The author had signed off as “Junior, Broad Way” but gave no other means of identification. Hawley gave due consideration to tracking the man down, but such an effort would only incite further provocation and cause more grief.

  With his left side resting against cold earth, Hawley wondered what the point of the war had been. For too long, the Negroes had been waiting for men to grant them the accords God had given freely. He spat, knowing all too well how God’s words were twisted by the White devils. They believed the color of their skin granted them special privilege over others and that the darker one’s skin was, the fewer human qualities they possessed. Negroes in particular were considered a subhuman species, and the attacks committed upon their bodies were nary seen as crimes at all. Hawley had lived in New York, right here in Manhattan, all his life. He’d fought, bled, and very nearly died for this country, the only nation he had ever known. Yet the idea of him even being equal was laughable. These Godly men did not even believe he, Jeremiah, or anyone of their ilk was as human as a Hessian who made himself a neighbor among the families he had been paid to slaughter.

  Hawley had fought for his freedom, only to find his choices of where he could live and the jobs he could practice were limited. Even the sanctity of his burial was in doubt.

  The Common Council did nothing with their complaints. If the bodies left to rot in the earth of the Negro cemetery and the potter’s fields were to be left in peace, it fell upon the families to guard them and friends to offer safekeeping.

  Perhaps that was the real lesson of the war, Hawley thought. One cannot wait to be given the freedoms God has guaranteed. One must take them. Seize them. And if they were denied, he must fight, and maybe kill, to claim them.

  In that moment, Hawley realized two things with measured clarity. First, his war had perhaps not ended after all, and second, although he felt defeated, he was not finished fighting. And on the heels of that realization was a third revelation, an understanding that the Whites would not help stop the robberies of the Black graves until it began to impact them. They, too, would have to understand the personal sort of affront that particular brand of violation brought with it.

  A plan began to take root.

  He kissed the tips of his fingers and pressed them into the dirt as he said goodbye to his friend.

  John Hicks, Jr. left his home on Broadway shortly past midnight to join up with his small band of grave diggers. Each teenager carried a wooden shovel over his shoulder. The moon was bright and the sky clear, making lanterns unnecessary. The stars provided more than enough light as the band of boys made their way toward Gold Street.

  Passing a pig rummaging through the muck, Hicks reared back with his shovel and struck the animal along the spine at its hindquarters. The swine let out an angry scream as it ran away, Hicks’s laughter chasing after it in the darkness. He had been in a foul mood the last few days, still reeling from the failed séance at the hospital, but striking the filthy beast had certainly felt good. His spirits were buoyed briefly, so much so that he looked forward to hitting something else.

  Approaching the house of Scipio Gray, he thought he knew just what his target should be. He bounded up the steps of the Negro’s porch and pounded on the man’s front door.

  “What are you doing?” one of his diggers whispered urgently.

  Hicks smiled at the note of panic in the lad’s voice and redoubled his efforts against the door.

  “I’m coming,” a baritone voice shouted from within the home. A moment later, the door opened.

  As Gray opened his mouth to speak, Hicks punched him squarely in those fat Negro lips. Gray stumbled back, both hands going to his mouth, and Hicks shoved his way through the door, forcing the older man farther back.

  “Get out of my house,” Gray said, iron in his timbre.

  The trio of diggers came in behind Hicks, and Scipio Gray darted his eyes from one to the next.

  “Get to work,” Hicks ordered them. Their foo
tsteps clattered down the wooden porch as they retreated outside and filed into the field adjoining Gray’s property.

  With the Common Council refusing to act, Negroes who could afford it had taken to using Gray’s private burial yard. Gray was custodian over the number of bodies buried there, and until that evening, those bodies had remained safe—far safer, at least, than those interred to the potter’s field and the Negroes Burial Grounds.

  Scipio took a step toward Hicks, intent on stopping him. Hicks was swifter, though, and he brought the shovel around, jabbing the wooden blade into the black man’s belly. An electric thrill ran through the youth, and when Gray doubled over, Hicks launched himself forward, tackling the old man to the ground. Sitting astride Gray’s chest, Hicks coiled his small fists and beat the man upon the face.

  “I’m going to pop those fat nigger lips of yours like leeches,” Hicks said. Beneath his knuckles, he felt teeth loosen and then a flood of hot, sticky warmth as skin burst.

  Winded, Hicks pulled himself away and recovered his shovel. He thought about the nigger whose skull he had busted apart a short time ago, recalling how satisfying that was. Perhaps he was due an encore. He felt invigorated, strong, his whole body singing with energy. Beating a nigger was far more satisfying than smacking a swine on its rump. Of that much, he was certain.

  He raised the shovel then brought the flat of its blade back down on Gray’s belly. Air shot out of the man’s lungs in a hearty gust, his pained moans filling the quiet home.

  “Now, I got me some work to do,” Hicks said. “You stay in here—you hear me? You as much as step one foot outside that door, I’ll fucking kill you and burn your fucking house down.”

  Gray was in too much pain to respond. He merely nodded and waved his hand at Hicks, understanding lurking beneath the standing pool of water glistening in his eyes.