Resurrection House

by James Chambers

  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 peo
ple. 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.

  “All my life I’ve been holding her back, and now she sends this,” Mr. Barnes said, rising off his pillows and causing the color to drain rapidly from his face before he slumped back. “I remember when you were a child. Always so direct, so honest. You had eyes like a cop’s eyes. Never afraid of anything. I was glad when you left this foul little town, and now here you are, come back to help an old wretch on his deathbed. Why? Tell me, little girl, was I ever kind to you?”

  Jennifer thought for a moment, and then said, “You were always kind to me, Mr. Barnes.”

  “And would you say I was a good father to Chloe?”

  Jennifer didn’t answer. She could only measure what she knew of Mr. Barnes against her own father whom she had adored as a child and who had always been there for her and still wove his life around hers.

  “Shh,” Mr. Barnes said. “Do you hear that?”

  A meticulous scratching came through the mechanical susurrus of soft clanks and repetitive beeps. Something fluttered like a paper bag snapping in a gale. Jennifer spied a shadow bobbing on the shade of the far window.

  “Leave it be,” Mr. Barnes said as Jennifer rose and crossed the room. “Don’t let it see me. Please!”

  Jennifer lifted the edge of the shade and peeked outside. A gull squatted on the window sill, white and mottled gray, its webbed feet shuffling as it bobbed and pecked with its long beak at a corner of the glass. It jerked upright, saw Jennifer, and then bounded into the air with a loud caw.

  “Won’t be much longer now,” Mr. Barnes said.

  “It’s gone. Don’t worry.”

  Jennifer turned, glimpsed the opposite window on the far side of the room, and froze in place. Mr. Barnes caught the look on her face, swiveled his head to see, and then screamed in a thin, hoarse voice.

  Jennifer shot around the bed and snapped the shade up. A figure glared in through the window with cold hatred, leering for several seconds before it exploded into a dozen black gulls fleeing in every direction. They flapped out over the yard, toward the neighboring parking lot where they alighted and vanished among the hundreds of birds now gathered like white clover spread across a wild meadow, eerily still, their eyes and beaks all pointed toward the Barnes house.

  Jennifer had recognized the face of the thing crouching in the window: the high cheekbones and stringy hair, the thin lips drawn taut, the wide cloudy eyes like muddy pits.

  Chloe’s mother.

  Her face, mottled white and gray with decay and defined by a primal craving, was a sheer caricature of who she had once been. With no substance of her own, she borrowed her form from the seagulls.

  Jennifer drew the shade and snugged it into the frame. A trickle of fear ran through her. The faint calls of the gulls carried through the window like laughter from a distant party. Mr. Barnes whispered something in response. Jennifer turned and watched the dying man scratch his leathery scalp with both hands as he clenched
his eyes shut against oily tears.

  “Mr. Barnes?” Jennifer said.

  “Can’t she let me die in peace?”

  “How long has this been going on?” Jennifer asked.

  The old man dropped his hands to his sides and twisted to face Jennifer with anguished eyes. “Since the goddamned day Marion died,” he said. “She’s been with me ever since, looking over my shoulder, whispering in my dreams, hating me, draining the life from me. This illness inside me, this unstoppable fucking disease, is her doing, her will. She’s watching like a jackal for me to die, and when she’s had me, she’ll take Chloe next. I’m the only thing standing between them.”

  Mr. Barnes no longer seemed a pathetic figure slipping into the delirium of his final moments, but a powerful spirit shattered and ruined by the weight of an unsustainable burden. Jennifer sat down and took his hand.

  “Chloe doesn’t know?”

  Mr. Barnes shook his head and choked back an involuntary sob. “Marion’s never been this bold, never let anyone else see her before. Only me.”

  “But why would your wife do this? It’s okay. You can tell me.”

  “I thought you already knew,” said Mr. Barnes. “You were there that day. The way you looked at me when the paramedics took Marion away, I was sure you knew. I never did understand why you kept it a secret.”

  Jennifer squeezed the fragile fingers wrapped in the palm of her hand, and said, “Tell me.”

  “Marion killed herself, but when I found her, she was still alive, still breathing. I sat down at the table with her and waited an hour for her to die before I called an ambulance.”

  * * * * *

  Jennifer found her memory of that day sharp and expansive.

  She could almost taste that earthy air of the past.

  She and Chloe raced around the grass with films of perspiration glistening on their brows.

  A soft chill lingered on the wind, and Jennifer’s new wool sweater scratched her throat.

  The girls had spent the afternoon in the yard, and while they romped, Chloe’s mother sat in the kitchen and swallowed one pill after another, chasing them with shots of gin, dying gently while she listened to the sounds of young girls playing.