Resurrection House

by James Chambers

  “What if the guys that did this are still down here?”

  “A lot of these old buildings have sub-basements and old rooms shut off by new construction. They probably went out another way, through a connecting building or something,” said Cam. “Look, we go in, make sure it’s clear, and do a quick search. If someone is hiding in there, we need to know.”

  “Then let’s get it over with.”

  The two cops returned to the lavatory, picking as clean a path as they could but the ubiquitous blood slicked the soles of their shoes, making every movement treacherous. They approached the twin holes with flashlights, and the extra illumination revealed a space three-feet deep beyond the ruined bathroom facade. Cam poked his head through and scanned to the left and right, his flashlight and gun sweeping the darkness. A narrow passage ran the short length of the bathroom walls. Pipes traversed the overhead space. A dense cushion of dust coated the wood planking.

  Hidalgo lifted one leg through the hole.

  “Wait!” said Cam. “Look.”

  He aimed his flashlight at the floor. “The dust hasn’t been stirred up except where the debris fell. No one’s been in here.”

  “Shit. Who the hell killed this guy? Spider-Man?”

  Cam’s flashlight lanced the darkness. “See the corner?”

  “What am I looking at?”

  “That dark spot on the floor.”

  “Yeah, okay. I see it.”

  “It’s a pipe opening.” Cam straightened and withdrew from the crawl space. “If the walls are false, maybe the floor is, too. Some of these old places are like that,” he said. “They’re built over structures that go back to the turn of the century, some even to the early 1800s, especially in this part of town. People remodeled them cheaply and closed off parts to save money or leave access for plumbing or whatever.”

  “So it’s empty space?”

  “Yeah, could be,” Cam said. “My father talked about this kind of thing all the time before his stroke. He worked down here his whole life. His hobby was history. It was all he did after he retired. He even volunteered in the archives at the Museum of the City of New York. Couldn’t get him to shut up about it, but I never thought he was actually saying anything useful.”

  “You sound like my little brother talking about my papa, man,” said Hidalgo.

  Cam surveyed the room and then pointed. “There, that corner where the linoleum curls up.”

  It was the bloodiest spot in the room. The two cops flanked it. Hidalgo trained his gun downward, and Cam slipped latex gloves out of his pocket and onto his hands. With one sharp motion he peeled the linoleum back as far as it would go, exposing four square feet of blood-soaked floor. The floorboards had been cut and left resting on the crossbeams. Darkness seeped through the cracks. Cam clutched the first plank and shifted it free. The others followed easily. He turned his light on a gaping space four feet deep that stretched beneath the entire area of the restrooms, perhaps the entire building.

  “Blood,” he said, spotting a glistening pool on the dirt.

  “Maybe it dripped down through the loose linoleum,” Hidalgo said.

  “Maybe, but that didn’t.”

  A crimson trail stretched out of the pool into the blackness.

  “Rats,” Hidalgo said. “Could be rats.”

  “Those would be some pretty damn big rats.”

  “Oh, yeah, man. One day I saw rats in this part of town pulling a garbage truck.”

  Cam ignored the wisecrack. “Someone could be hiding down there.”

  “Shit, like maybe some homeless guy or some junkie’s been living down there.”

  “Bennie, I’d feel a hell of a lot better if you went and got the shotgun from the cruiser.”

  “I don’t think I should leave you alone down here.”

  “Go fast,” Cam said. “See how the EMTs are doing. See if the detectives are here, yet. And bring the hand spotlight back with you, too.”

  Hidalgo ran, half-sliding on the wet floor. Cam crouched by the opening and listened to the plink-plunk of dripping fluid. He tried not to think about the bisected corpse sharing the room with him, but it crept unwelcome into this thoughts. Its dead eyes seemed to beg for answers.

  So, how did I get this fucked up? the dead man seemed to ask. All I wanted was to get high, get laid, and go home, and here I am, dead as a fucking stump.

  Take at least three guys to do that to you, Cam thought, Maybe two if they were strong, high, and savage.

  Maybe, maybe not, said the corpse. I could tell you exactly what happened, but I never will.

  Cam turned away from the corpse and thought of how much he wanted to be home with his wife. He knew Silje would be sitting up in bed, missing him and unable to sleep. She hated storms, and she had hated moving to the city when Cam’s father needed to be looked after. Being alone in the apartment made her nervous. Cam wished she had a friend to stay with her, but she hadn’t met many people here yet.

  Hidalgo slammed into the men’s room entrance, back far too soon, and struggled to raise the ruined door back in place. He paused to fire two shots into the hall and then dropped his gun to get a better handle on the cracked wood. Cam crossed the room in a heartbeat, responding only to the panic in his partner’s eyes, and lent his extra weight to jamming the door upright into the frame.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he said.

  “They wouldn’t let me out,” said Hidalgo. “They blocked the door when I went up there—all of them, Dubby, the three girls. Shit, even the paramedics! They just stood there watching me, not saying a damn thing, and when I pushed through, they started hitting me with bottles and shoving me. One of them stabbed me with a needle.” Hidalgo raised his left arm, displaying a bloody gash through his raincoat and uniform to the flesh beneath. “Their eyes were all blank like they’re too stoned to know who they are. And then, God help me, they started laughing, and one of them…one of them was singing.”

  Cam assessed the wound, small but deep and jagged, and there was no knowing what might have been in the hypodermic. A handkerchief wrapped three times around it and knotted tight stopped the bleeding. Cam placed Hidalgo’s hand on the cloth and squeezed.

  “Hold that there,” he said.

  “That’s not all,” said Hidalgo. “Our backup is here, but they can’t get in. I saw them outside, but the door is barricaded and one of the freaks has a gun. There were at least half a dozen cars out there. They already got sawhorses blocking the place off. Even a TV news crew setting up behind them. How fucking long have we been down here?”

  “Ten, fifteen minutes at most,” Cam said.

  “Not enough time for all that,” Hidalgo said.

  Both men jumped when a knock came at the door, a polite, almost gentle tap.

  “Who’s there?” Cam said.

  No one answered.

  Another hand fell against the wood, followed by a third, and soon multiple fists banged and scraped for passage, falling harder until they grew into a barrage of pounding. The door bucked as bodies crashed against it, and the weakened panels began to split. A knife blade sliced through the boards. A splinter of wood snapped off and spun through the air. Through the widening holes Cam saw dark shapes prowling and skittering outside like subway vermin. He spotted Maia in the dim light of the dirty bulbs, her dark eyes full of hate, her seared flesh glistening like sealskin.

  Cam yelled into his radio. Nothing but soft static came back. Hidalgo’s produced the same results. Maybe the storm raising interference, Cam thought, but whatever the cause, it meant the same thing: they were on their own with only one place to run.

  Cam went first, hesitating while he skimmed the area below with his flashlight, then he levered his feet over the edge and dropped. He crouched on the dirt surface, gun in hand, spinning in a circle to see what surrounded him. Nothing showed in the range of his light. The rough floor stretched into a void in all directions. Hidalgo descended after him, tugging the linoleum back into place as best he could
and re-positioning the floorboards overhead.

  Cam lanced his light in front of him. “I think the street is this way. Maybe there’s a sewer access or something we can use to get out.”

  Cam and Hidalgo crawled side by side with Cam testing the hard-packed ground as they went. The thin rays of illumination creeping through the floorboards vanished behind them. They were adrift in the dark with no fixed point to guide them and only the glow of their flashlights to show the way. Eventually the trail of smeared blood ended. They went on, coughing on the musty dirt pluming up with every motion they made. It wouldn’t take long for their attackers to break into the men’s room and uncover the floor, but neither cop heard anything other than their hands and knees scraping the gritty surface. Twice Cam stopped at what he thought was the sound of something moving past them, but he couldn’t be sure. Nothing felt real or solid except the hard-packed soil under the palms of his hands.

  “I ever tell you about the time I went to Key West?” Hidalgo said.

  “Yeah, you told me.”

  “Most beautiful place I’ve ever been. I love that long drive down there across all those little islands with the ocean on both sides of the highway. They got beaches down there right by the roadside. You pull off into these little parking lots, stretch out, and soak up the sun with the sea spread out in front of you. And that water is crystal, man. Not like this sludge we got up here. I mean crystal. And warm, too.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “The restaurants serve this stuff called conch. You know what that is? A mollusk, lives in a shell, like a mussel, only bigger. It’s like the national dish down there. They make conch fritters, conch chowder. This girl at the aquarium grabbed one out of a tank and hung it upside down until it came out. Looked like a big, wet slug, dangling from its shell, but they taste pretty good. Kind of tough to pull them out, though, like they’re really attached inside their own little world. They’re everywhere, too—.”

  A brick wall came into view. To the left it joined another wall in a vacant corner; to the right, it continued out of sight. The darkness felt all the closer for having revealed a measure of its boundaries.

  “Cam,” Hidalgo said. “You see this?”

  Cam peered into the white ring Hidalgo’s flashlight formed on the floor. Hidalgo had brushed away some of the loose earth to expose a smooth surface. He tucked the flashlight under his arm and cleared more dirt until the empty eyes of a yellow-tinged skull stared up at them from the ground. Hidalgo pushed more dirt away then pried it loose. His fingers twitched around the old bone as a shiver ran down his torso, and his body jerked as though a high-voltage jolt had coursed through him. Hidalgo dropped the skull and crab-walked away from it.

  “Bennie, you all right?”

  Hidalgo stammered like a rattling subway. “We need to be out of here, now, Cam. Now! This ain’t right! They were waiting for us. They wanted us. We’re gonna die down here. We’re gonna die! Can’t you hear it?”

  The sound became abruptly clear then, the unknown shape Cam had heard moving beyond their sight, a long, fat mass dragging itself across the floor, struggling as if trying to shake loose from within something. Ignoring the terror in Bennie’s face, Cam lifted the skull, meaning to take it with him. The moment his skin contacted it a shock throbbed through his fingertips and up his arm, and then Bennie and the subterranean dark vanished.

  Warm flesh pressed all around him.

  The odor of uncontrolled sweat and unbathed bodies blasted his nose.

  Voices rumbled, indistinct, humming.

  He opened his eyes and found himself standing amidst a mass of people wedged into a small windowless room until not another body could be squeezed inside the door. Dim illumination flickered from two gaslights on the far wall. Pale men and women stood side-by-side, their features and speech suggestive of the immigrant Irish of the nineteenth century. A few bore dark hair and sharp features that placed their origins in Eastern Europe, though Cam could not guess the exact region.

  He struggled in his small space.

  His lungs strained to draw breath against the crush of the crowd.

  Near the door two men with knives lunged at each other, snarling obscenities. Those around them cried out and searched for somewhere to flee, but in such close quarters the contest lasted only a moment before one combatant thrust his blade through the other’s throat. The murdered man died on his feet, propped upright by the mob as his lifeblood gushed from his neck and his eyes went blank. The killer rifled his victim’s pockets and raised two copper coins in triumph; the money had been all the dead man had in the world.

  The crowd cheered the trophy.

  “Congratulations, Handy! That bingo-boy’s been standing on me foot all day,” one man said, drawing a wave of laughter.

  Cam pushed toward the door, unwilling to stay a moment longer. Everything closed around him, and his head spun in the hot and choking air, but the others wouldn’t let him pass. They surged against him and refused to give way. They thrust their legs in his path and clawed at him. He felt a bowler hat he hadn’t even known he was wearing lifted from his head. His jacket went next, torn apart at the seams.

  The red-faced killer by the door watched him.

  “And where do ya think you’re going, covey?” he said in a harsh, gutter accent. “Out to fetch the crushers? Now, boyo, don’t ya know ya belong to us?”

  The crowd set upon him, shredding his remaining clothes, scraping at his skin, groping to pull him apart limb by limb.

  Their fists beat his skull.

  An unseen blade slashed his leg.

  He raised his arms defensively, but he was already falling…his vision darkening….

  Cam inhaled a sharp breath as if taking his first ever and glanced at the skull wobbling on the ground where Hidalgo had knocked it from his hands.

  “Dammit, Cam! What the hell did you do that for?” Hidalgo said. “What happened to you? What did you see?” Bennie’s tone suggested the weight of his sanity might ride on Cam’s response.

  “I don’t know what I saw,” said Cam.

  “Were there people? From a long time ago?”

  Cam nodded. They had shared the same horrible vision. The darkness had lifted and something had transported them to another place and time.

  “Who were they?” Hidalgo whispered.

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand this. But we need a way out of here. Now.”

  “No argument, there.”

  The two men resumed searching for an exit, but they went only a short distance before stumbling across a bundle of thick, transparent plastic gleaming in the light. It protruded from the ground, half-buried. Cam grabbed a fold of it and pulled it tight so they could see through it. A woman’s body was inside.

  “Dead at least a few days,” said Hidalgo.

  Casting his light around, Cam picked out another plastic-wrapped bundle nearby. Another woman, harder to identify for being dead longer, but dressed in clothing like that of the first corpse, which suggested both women might have been patrons of the Mission Bar. Beyond the pale of the flashlights, dark shapes signaled more corpses dumped in the occluding blackness.

  “Shit,” Hidalgo said. “We’re crawling around somebody’s private graveyard. You think they knew about this? Those girls upstairs or the bartender, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Marty was about to add another victim down here when somebody took him out. Maybe they’re all involved.” Cam thought for a moment, realizing how long they’d been underground, how far they’d crawled from their starting point. “Why haven’t they come down here after us? They should’ve been right behind us.”

  “Maybe they’re afraid of what’s down here,” said Hidalgo.

  A metallic glint caught their eyes and they crawled toward it. A wide, bronze ring lay covered in the dust.

  “It’s a trap door,” Hidalgo said.

  His light bobbed as he bent to open it. The square silhouette lifted and stood up like a stone mark
er, and for a moment Cam lost sight of his partner behind it.

  “Oh, no,” Hidalgo said. “Oh, fuck me, no, there are hundreds—”

  A harsh wind blasted by, buffeting Cam to the floor, pinning him. He fought against it, trying to close the short distance between him and Hidalgo, and then his partner’s light blinked out.

  “Bennie?” Cam called.

  Cam eased toward the open door, his light and his automatic in front of him. He inched forward and peered over the lip of the entry. The passage exposed a deeper chamber, where dozens of sparse, toothy grins leered up from a mound of discarded skulls and bones. Hundreds of them, some of them smashed and broken, others heartbreakingly small, laid piled one atop another on a steep ramp angling toward deeper recesses that promised an endless parade of the smiling dead.

  There was no sign of Hidalgo.

  Cam swiveled, searching for his partner. He put a hand down for support, felt an unexpected smoothness beneath his fingers, and then a fresh current raced through him. He felt himself falling sideways before the cellar went away.

  Screaming pierced his ears, the cries of a baby, hungry and wailing to be fed. The shrill sound was nearly unbearable. He tried to sleep through it, but couldn’t. He sat up and left the squalid room where he’d lain beside twenty other men and women, all dressed in soiled rags like his own.

  He entered the hallway and headed toward the front of the building and the small room with the window that looked out onto the street.

  He couldn’t say if it was day or night. Prone figures littered the hall floor. Some appeared to not be breathing.

  He passed an open doorway and peered inside where a diseased woman lay on her back on a cot, drawing a naked man down to her withering body. Two malnourished children sat in the corner. The woman waved irritably at them to turn away, then coughed, bringing a spot of blood to her lips.

  From further down the corridor drifted a stench so awful it forced Cam to clasp a hand over his mouth and nose as he passed. He struggled against the bile rising in his stomach. Voices rumbled on the other side of a door, and he couldn’t imagine how anyone could stay inside the room, trapped with the source of that horrific odor.