Peter said nothing. His hand ceased twirling the spoon and dropped to the table, dragging the coffee cup onto its side. Hot coffee pooled out and dripped over the aluminum trim.
“Peter?” O’Flynn said.
The patter of coffee dripping onto Peter’s raincoat joined the rhythm of the rain. O’Flynn reached across the table and swept back Peter’s hood. He recoiled. Coagulating blood trickled in sticky streams from Peter’s nose. One of his eyes was bruised. The right side of his neck had been torn away. There were bite marks in his flesh. Peter’s chest was still. The blood leaking from his throat had dried to a trickle. The man who owned Resurrection House was dead.
O’Flynn turned away, looking out the window. The dead watched from outside. They filled the street. Dozens plodded through the puddles and downpour, marched along the darkened sidewalk like a troop of rusted automatons.
Bells jingled. Cold air rushed in.
The waitress screamed. One after another the corpses filed in, silent and voracious.
O’Flynn skittered sideways and fell to the floor. He groped at the table, grabbed a knife, brandished it, and cried out, “God help me!”
“God is dead, Padraic.”
O’Flynn looked up to see Peter Carroll pulling himself free of the booth.
“And God will help you.”
Splattering blood all around him, Carroll snatched O’Flynn by the shirt collar and lifted him, slamming his skull against the overhead light fixture. Cold flowed from the dead man’s fingers, but a nauseating heat radiated from the bracelet around his wrist, toasting Padraic’s skin like the noonday sun.
The waitress shrieked twice more then her voice was not heard again. One of the dead clambered into a seat at the counter and gnawed on the cracked end of her leg. Fresh sounds of fear gurgled from the kitchen staff in the next room.
The dead congregated in the diner, their eggshell stares intent on O’Flynn.
Peter righted him on his feet and straightened his clothes.
“The seventh herald has returned,” Peter said. “We are your gods, now. Worship us. Die for us.”
Padraic’s heart pounded. Blood crashed through his head, clouding out his thoughts. He averted his gaze and shook his head.
“No…,” he said.
Padraic lashed out, every muscle in his body quivering with fury. His blind thrusting arm knocked loose a bit of flesh from a corpse standing beside Peter. It barely noticed the blow. Carroll snarled in anger. He seized Padraic’s wrist and snapped it. The knife clattered to the floor. Pain exploded in Padraic’s arm as Carroll squeezed until bone crushed against bone. With his other hand Padraic reached for the cross around his neck and spoke the words of the Our Father.
The dead blanketed him. Their bodies blocked out the light.
* * * * *
Excerpt from the Afterword of the forthcoming book
A History of the Resurrection House:
The Odd Events at 1379 Hopewood Boulevard and What They Mean to You
by Padraic Irwin O’Flynn
My interview with Peter Carroll was meant to be the final piece in this puzzle of a book to which I have dedicated my life. In receiving it I had anticipated something akin to a sacrament, the last great enlightenment, the lifting of the shroud that I had always, blindly, associated with access to Resurrection House. For so long I convinced myself that with entry would come knowledge. Answers I sought, and answers I would have. How could I have known that all along I had been asking the wrong questions?
Is it too late, now, to turn the tide? I fear it may be, yet, I’m unwilling to forfeit the spark of hope that lingers in my heart. Few will listen and even fewer will act, though, and so I suppose it is inevitable that I will see that light extinguished before long. Mankind carries on like a wild herd of burrowing animals, their senses too clouded by the grime of their own lives to notice the expansive, indisuadable doom plunging down around us all.
The full set of clues to the mystery has eluded me for now, but when the complete picture is finally assembled, I have no doubt it will shatter the foundations of all our beliefs about the world.
In the time since my visit to Resurrection House, I have caught the first inklings of other such places in the world. In India and France, in Japan and Belize. Word carries now of secret places where the dead walk in South Africa and the Ukraine, Argentina, Great Britain, Somalia, New Zealand, and on and on. Are they but more lies and rumors? Or is there in every part of the world, a Resurrection House, where the dead carry on in imitation of those against whom they plot? The idea is incredible to the most credulous and to the skeptical, it smacks of inebriation.
But why not?
Peter Carroll once told me that the dead travel their own paths, the roads and trails unknown to living men where the secrets of their power dwell. Imagine the ranks of the unliving, mustered to action by a single-minded will, organized, granted power and energy from sources beyond the knowledge of science, and set in motion. Resurrection House is our future. Humanity walks the edge of a knife—the blade that parts humility and grace from arrogance and subjugation.
And thus what Resurrection House means to you depends on which you have worshiped.
For as the past, so the future.
The Feeding Things
Gazing at the firm, pale flesh beneath him, drinking in the serous light spreading within it like a napalm spill, Malcolm exulted and knew that this was the most beautiful thing he could ever hope to see. Even among all the wonders apparent to him now, none moved him like this. None other carried him to the verge of tears.
Heat rose from the woman, whose name he had already forgotten, and caressed his cool, dry flesh; he marveled that the searing waves didn’t scald him but instead felt like a sauna in winter. The woman wiggled and bucked, rammed her hips against his, and clamped her eyes shut as ecstasy consumed her. Malcolm had already come, but his powerful erection continued, as it always did, so that he could bring the woman to orgasm. It was always best for her when she came at the exact moment that his seed bore fruition. Malcolm liked to think that the euphoria she felt would equal her sacrifice.
The woman yelped, squealed, drove her fingernails into Malcolm’s back as a riptide of muscle contractions rolled through her. Sheer pleasure abducted her senses. She never felt the pyre bloom inside her. She never felt her organs, skin, and bones cinder and flake away to black, crackling remnants. She was lost in a deep spring of never-ending bliss as her body oxidized into ashen clumps.
Malcolm rolled to the side and watched the glimmering thing emerge from a scorched womb. The pulsing luminosity hovered, gathered its poly-limbed form, solidified, opened its rows of eyes, and blinked wetly, curiously, at the world it was so close to being part of now. It rose from the smoldering bed, hastened as it approached the window of the dead woman’s apartment, then escaped to the midnight sky.
Red with the flush of excitement Malcolm walked to the wide picture window and sought the thing’s trail, catching it flashing past a neighboring skyscraper. He smiled, thinking of all he had accomplished since the Dark Woman had instilled him with her gift.
There they swam, high above the city: his progeny intermingled with their countless siblings and cousins, arrayed against the firmament, a blind and thriving brood of phantasmal creatures growing stronger each day.
Malcolm watched their play, their first faltering movements, and savored his swelling pride.
* * * * *
“What do you see?” the woman asked.
Malcolm barely heard her over the combative beat of the industrial house mix booming out of the speakers. She was tall, thin but muscular, her complexion earthy and coated with glistening, jet black face-paint so that she resembled a black obsidian statue brought to life, like a thing out of ancient myth. A tassel of wavy black hair flowed to the lower edge of her shoulders. Malcolm wondered if she was coming on to him.
“In her, I mean.”
She gestured to the trim brunette swaying on the
dance floor. Malcolm had been nursing his drink by the bar and staring at her, admiring how her snug skirt rode her thighs.
“She’s beautiful,” he said.
“They’re all beautiful.”
It was true. Many of the women who came here were models, or aspiring actresses, or hard-driven career women seeking visceral release, women who took excellent care of themselves, took pride in their looks, their fit bodies, and their desirability. Malcolm always knew where to find them. He had so little in life—no money, no talent, no smarts—only his good looks and his natural charm. He used them to pick up women who would otherwise scorn a lowly photographer’s assistant like him, women he would’ve found unattainable in other settings. Here, at the cost of a few creative lies, he could be anyone he needed to be to get what he wanted.
“So, why her?”
Malcolm shrugged. “I like her looks.”
“But what’s there to be gained?”
Malcolm didn’t understand the question.
“Will it make any difference tomorrow if you go home with her or any other one out there on the dance floor? Will you be better off? A better person? Will you have accomplished anything?”
Malcolm suppressed a smirk.
“Not really. But that’s not the point.”
The stranger flagged down the bartender and ordered a fresh round of drinks. Malcolm accepted the cold beer bottle, and then followed the woman to one of the small tables in an alcove beneath the balcony, where the music grinded with less thunder. He watched the brunette from a different perspective. Her feline body stretched and turned like a music box dancer.
“You could have her,” said the woman. “Or any of the others here you set your sights on, I’d bet. This is an old game for you.”
“Hey, listen, thanks for the drink, but what’s it to you?”
“It’s an opportunity.”
“For what?”
“To give you purpose in what you do best so that you can help me in return.”
Malcolm scowled. “Who are you?”
“Just a faceless messenger,” she said, “speaking for the vast and awful choruses rising from the audient void. There are things much, much greater than you drawing near, and they’ll be ready to join us soon. A new world will blossom here. I’m offering you a part in it, handing you power and spectacle beyond anything you’ve ever dreamed.”
“You fucking weirdo.” Malcolm stood, abandoning his half-full beer. “Take that psycho, Goth makeup off your face and maybe you’ll get laid. You obviously need it. Either that or lay off the drugs. I’m not into this weird, religious shit.”
The stranger gripped Malcolm’s arm. Her lithe fingers dug in sharp and sent a hot jolt through his flesh.
“Don’t go,” she said. “I know how little you think you have to offer the world, how you leech off those who let you, that if it wasn’t for fucking a different sow every night of the week, your existence would be exhaustively pointless. They use you or you use them. What difference does it make? You’re nothing special, and you hate the world because of it. At least you’re honest about it. But you’re so damn lonely you’re half a step away from suicide. Go ahead. Tell me it isn’t true.”
Malcolm’s heart pounded in a rising tide of panic. The woman let go of his arm. He stepped backward, stumbled, and bumped against a column. He couldn’t imagine he was that obvious and pathetic that she could see into him so deeply at a glance.
“Leave me the fuck alone,” Malcolm said.
He wanted to turn away, but the Dark Woman’s saurian eyes mesmerized him. They turned black like candle flames extinguished in a sudden gale, and then her face stretched, broadened, and cracked open along the sinister crevasse of a smile widening to swallow whole. What Malcolm had taken for black face paint looked like chitinous, icy skin. Delicate, electric sparks danced in the woman’s hair and flickered through the crystal spheres and gold bands of her jewelry. Malcolm felt small, like a child being scolded.
The Dark Woman circled the table and cupped her hand around the back of Malcolm’s neck. A stinging sensation rippled up and down his spine; a wicked case of pins and needles enflamed his nerves and sent cold flashes through his torso.
“There will be legions,” the woman whispered. “And there will be those who must command them. Their numbers grow and they learn to crawl, but soon nothing will be sufficient to bind them. They are brothers and sisters born of the forgotten wastelands, the young of the black disruption, growing, ripening, yearning for their ultimate rebirth. So many waiting. So many yet to be conceived and born.”
Malcolm spasmed as the woman’s other hand clamped over his crotch. Every part of his body but his genitals went numb; the sensation between his legs obliterated all other feeling. He tried to yell, but his lips only trembled and his throat froze tight.
“My gift to you,” said the woman. “You’ll take from them no matter what as one like you must do, but from now on you’ll make their sacrifice a worthy one, make something both sacred and profane of your lust.”
She gave Malcolm a gentle nudge toward the crowded dance floor, and said, “Go and make Liliths of them all. Make them brute mothers to monsters until the day you find your true mate.”
Malcolm’s senses snapped back to awareness. Music tore through him, and he felt tossed on a crashing wave of vertigo. The darkened club became a swirling panoply of pinpoint lights and throbbing shadows alive with the buffeting of hyper-aroused bodies. The floor shifted underfoot. Malcolm rose, felt light and transparent then heavy and dark. His surroundings whorled together. He closed his agonized eyes, clamped his hands over his ears, shutting out all sound but the aural punches of the tenacious beat.
Floating.
Rising.
Rotating.
Turning inside out counterclockwise to the world.
He clung to the rhythm stampeding from the speakers, let it anchor him to reality, and groped his way back to solid ground. When he lowered his hands and opened his eyes, he gazed into the face of the dancing brunette he had admired. She grinned at him with a wanton face. Malcolm saw everything about her now: the invisible patterns of heat in her skin, the inner flashings of her synapses, the secrets of her body language.
Her light show excited him.
He looked around. It was the same for all the women in sight; their inner beings lay stripped bare for his cold observation, and in each of them he spied their desires like black maws of craving nestled so deep inside them that even they themselves did not fully recognize them.
Malcolm scanned the crowd for the slick, black features of the Dark Woman, but she was gone. Had she slipped something into his beer, passed something to him through his skin, something hallucinogenic? It wouldn’t be the first time he’d ingested a drug without knowing it. It was a trick he had used himself once or twice. But he knew of nothing that hit with such intensity.
Malcolm struggled to understand, but the brunette heaving and gyrating beside him commanded his attention. Pressure built inside him, making it impossible to think clearly. He wanted the brunette. With raw desire like he hadn’t felt in years, he pulled the woman to his chest, and crushed his lips against hers. His fingers tingled when he slid them up under her silk blouse and traced tiny circles on the small of her back. She kissed him, melted into him, and then let him draw her off the dance floor, toward the exit, absorbed by his urgency, which surprised him almost as much as it elated her.
* * * * *
The brunette had been his first after meeting the Dark Woman. When the inner conflagration devoured her, Malcolm had recoiled. He hadn’t understood.
Her flesh had hissed and popped, echoing the frightened screams in Malcolm’s mind, until the glowing thing emerged from her burnt remains. The sight of it inspired awe. How wondrous its instantaneous arrival. How fulfilling to witness its birth, nurtured, Malcolm intuited, on the life force of its mother. The seed was his, though, the new life a product of his desire, his need to fulfill the destiny the Dark
Woman had granted him. She hadn’t been a madwoman or a club freak, his hallucination not drug-induced, but the result of absorbing a shred of her power so that he could carry out her work. All this clicked on in his mind as if the knowledge had been buried there waiting to be activated.
This was the Dark Woman’s gift.
He felt duty-bound to share it most promiscuously.
It was easy when he saw all the hidden signs and signals that let helped him be any woman’s perfect man, any woman’s sinful and unexpected fantasy. He approached his lovers with total confidence. The Dark Woman had been no less than she claimed: a harbinger of something vast and bordering incomprehensible. Malcolm knew it was true because of all the things he saw now that no one else ever did.
Stone buildings dripping like sludge.
Towers of steel and glass running like chrism.
Sidewalk concrete flowing with an infinite swarm of tiny creatures for which Malcolm knew no name.
Throngs of people passing through doorways and subway entrances like a monstrous wash of cytoplasm spilling through the canals and orifices of the city.
The sky overhead alive and electric with the glowing things like those Malcolm sired. They seared the night. And every one of them had devoured its mother before rushing to the bloated wet-nurses that sustained them: sprawling leviathans that filled the empty heavens and stretched so far toward the horizon that Malcolm could not see their heads. He saw only turgid fields of mottled, inhuman skin between bunches of ravening lights clustered to suckle at throbbing teats, living constellations in a universe made of flesh.
The glimmering things changed each day, sprouted limbs and sensory organs, adopted forms that puzzled Malcolm and sometimes made him shudder. New births occurred frequently. Infants sailed out of the city canyons, rising to join the growing brood, giving Malcolm comfort in the fact that he was not alone in his work. He wondered how many others had accepted the Dark Woman’s sacred charge, how many hollow lives had she filled putting them to work toward the end of a world that had left them all empty and riven by anger and despair. Malcolm searched himself for some shred of sadness or sympathy for the kine he sacrificed to his power, but he found none. He was more than human now, his place in the new way secured, and he had much left to do. He hoped it would not be long before he found his “true mate.” He took joy in imagining what they would accomplish together.
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