Resurrection House

by James Chambers

  There were exceptions, people who protested the summary dismissal and mockery of the phenomenon, but their voices were often squelched, their opinions dismissed with the same casual humor that greets reports of flying saucers, Bigfoot, crop circles, and the Loch Ness monster. A regional news anchor lost his job after refusing to report the case as a fraud. The town mayor was one of the few local voices in favor of preserving the house, and the town residents, for their first-hand experience, seemed far less convinced that it was all a put-on. Most others protesting the scam theory came from fringe groups involved with alien visitations, transgressional theologies, UFOs, and other extreme and minority perspectives.

  Thus the door hung wide for one of the richest men in the world to step in and take on the full expense of properly securing the house and property, seeing to its upkeep and security, compensating the neighbors for their inconvenience, and launching a full investigation into the matter.

  What a collective sigh of relief was breathed.

  However, thirty years later and three months after Moriarty’s announcement of his intention to conclude his study and put Resurrection House on the market, the public yet awaits the results of his research. It is inconceivable that, with three decades to investigate and the enigmatic Moriarty’s resources to draw upon, no progress was made. What is the old man hiding?

  * * * * *

  George Gail lit a cigarette then deftly managed to wield it with the same hand with which he held his coffee mug and morning paper as he clapped his free arm around Peter Carroll’s back and ushered him out the door. The backyard was larger than average for houses in this neighborhood. Peter was unprepared for the number of corpses milling about, perhaps fifty or sixty, all of whom turned and looked at him. Some of them only had empty eye sockets, but he could feel their stares. They looked frail and hungry in the glare of the late-morning sun. Sparrows flitted among them, plucking worms and grubs from the crevasses of their polluted flesh.

  “So’s not much to it, really,” said George. “Twelve-foot, chain-link fence running on three sides of the property, more to keep ‘em out than in, you understand. And Mr. Moriarty, he sunk vertical concrete slabs seven feet down below all the property lines. Still, we get a new face now and then, though I can’t say for sure exactly where they come from. Got my theories, you bet, but that ain’t what you pay me for, is it?”

  George twisted Peter sideways and pointed across the yard. “Up there we got the platform and one of two monitor stations for the cameras. Fifteen feet high. Always a man on watch in there. The other monitors are in the cellar safe room. I’ll show you that later. The guard on the platform is always armed, though we’ve only had call to draw our weapons maybe a dozen times since I’ve been on the job. Most of those were to scare away vandals.”

  Gail dragged Peter off the porch and walked him toward the driveway. Every few steps he paused to point out a nook or corner of the house where a small black camera peered down at them.

  “We got cameras on every angle of the building and grounds, and twice as many covering the grounds off-property. Those are the ones that matter. Law says we’re responsible basically for two things. One, no one live gets hurt by anyone ‘dead,’ which isn’t much trouble as long as we keep the live ones off the property and you make sure to enforce the rules. And, two, we ain’t allowed to accept dead bodies on the property. That boils down to doing everything we can to discourage corpse dumping. If they get by us, though, well, ain’t much we can do about that. They come back to life, they’re welcome to stay. Law says they ain’t dead if they’re moving. But we’re not permitted to store ‘em otherwise, even if they’ve been properly embalmed. But, now, I ain’t telling you anything you don’t already know, am I, Mr. Carroll?”

  George and Peter rounded the front of the house and closed full circle toward the backyard. Peter eyed the sturdy framework of the security platform. It could’ve passed for an overgrown patio deck, but for the concrete, steel, and glass. Gail dug his fingers into Peter’s shoulder, spewed smoke, and gazed up at the structure against the glare of the sun reflected in its windows.

  “I’ll tell ya, Mr. Carroll, eight years I got on this job, and I still can’t understand why they want in here. I mean, hell, I’m getting paid to be here or you wouldn’t see me within five miles of this place. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. Not at all. Oh, some I get it—the ones who want to sneak in with the bodies of their loved ones and bring ‘em back. But it’s the live ones that baffle me, the ones that sit vigils all night outside the front gate. Like they just enjoy being around death, you know? Like they got some sick urge to fulfill or some unhealthy questions they’re looking for the answer to. This whole neighborhood is full of them, you know, folks who moved here just to be near this house.”

  Peter blushed and looked away.

  “Oh, not that I mean you, sir. No, you’re the owner, and this place is one of a kind. And that I get, too. Owning a place like this? It’s kind of special. And who knows? Maybe you’ll figure out how to turn a buck or two off it. Now, let me show where all the alarm boxes are. Officially the dead don’t come back to life, but I guess somebody high up is smart enough to hedge their bets. So, we got direct lines to the fire department, the police department, the hospital, and, my personal favorite, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Soon as they put one in for Lazio’s Pizzeria, we’ll be all set.”

  Gail unleashed a raspy chuckle, slapped Peter on the back, and steered him toward the house. They passed an outside entrance to the cellar, covered over by a pair of cyclone doors painted dark blue and set in a sloped concrete frame.

  Have to look around down there, Peter thought.

  * * * * *

  Obituary

  Rudolf Mann,

  Physicist and Founder of

  The Society of the Second Death,

  Dies at 80

  Rudolf Mann, whose scientific contributions include Kinetic Delinquency: A Treatise on the Transfer of Energy, but who is better known for founding the cultic Society of the Second Death in 1953, died Friday in Hamburg. The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage. He is survived by his granddaughter Dotti Gruenlotter.

  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 journal
s 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 g
overnance 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?”