Resurrection (31 page)

Mitch just nodded, couldn’t seem to find his voice.

He had never heard her talk so much. It was as if tragedy was the oil that freed her jaw. Here he thought old Mother Sepperly was just an old bag wrinkled and deflated by the years, but truth be told, that bag was filled with gas so hot it might burn you if you strayed too near. Yes, her face was old lady sallow and thin-skinned, her knuckles liver-spotted and she was more dry-wood than woman, but she was certainly alive. There was a vitality in those twinkling eyes you could not deny and a spirit haunting those bones that no oblong box could hope to contain. Those arthritic, knobby hands of hers had spanked naughty children to bed and pinched apple-pie crusts, they had harvested corn and slopped hogs, read tea leaves and whittled love charms. They were skeleton and skin worn smooth and thin as wax paper, but there was still a snap and a punch in them that ninety-six summers had not been able to steal away completely.

Standing there with his mouth open and Wanda Sepperly’s spicy tongue weaving a rich and heady spell over him, he could do nothing but compare her to some fine old wine stored in dust and cobweb and flaking time in a hidden cellar. A bottle that had now been uncorked and, damn, if it didn’t smell sweet and have enough kick left to put you on your ass.

“Well, Mitch Barron, are you going to speak or am I going to have to root around in yer head like my Finnish grandmother and expose all your dirty secrets as those of my bloodline always can?”

Mitch sighed, found his voice. “We just came to tell you that—”

“Yes, yes, yes, boy, I know, to lock my doors and bolt my shutters,” Wanda said as if it was all too apparent. “I saw it coming for weeks, did I tell you that? I felt it in my bones like the shivers and the rheumatism.
Something’s coming,
I said to myself many weeks gone.
Oh be sure of that, old woman, there’s a big black pot being
stirred and what crawls out
will not be that you’d want to meet this side of the grave.
I told myself these things, felt them, saw them, knew them. From that bad winter to that awful summer, oh, the signs were right and the planets aligned and the stars trembling in heaven. Oh yes, boy, oh yes, old Mother Sepperly was aware as I’m always aware. And when those storms started a-brewing, I knew as much. Back in farm country, yes, we would look for the signs and find them. It would have been no surprise to my kin if calves were stillborn and their placentas an electric blue. And if one placenta held a two-headed birth? Yes, yes, and yes! Such things always follow a pattern. The wind comes before the storm and the seed pops long before the harrow. Ain’t it the truth?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Tommy was looking at Mitch as if he was wondering what in the Christ he had gotten him into and where the exit might be located. But Mitch could only shrug. They’d come here to do a neighborly duty, more or less, to warn old Mother Sepperly of what was and what could be, but she seemed to know all that.

“You,” she said to Tommy, narrowing her eyes, “I can guess your name and all that sideshow bullshit, but I’d rather you confessed. Simpler that way.”

“Tommy Kastle,” he said.

“As I thought. Now reach in your front shirt pocket and share your tobacco with me. Go ahead, go ahead, and wipe those silly thoughts from your head, Mitch Barron. Smoking can’t hurt something as old as me. The cancer needs something healthy to chew and it would find nothing but jerky and gristle in this old frame. Ha! It’s more afraid of me that I am of it, hear?”

Tommy brought out a cigarette and Wanda snapped the filter off and lit it with a match. She took long, deep pulls off it, sending the smoke out through her nostrils. “Better,” she said. “Better. Now you boys have been playing at warning the neighbors of what might crawl out of the darkness this night? And what have they said?”

“They’re not answering their doors,” Tommy said.

Wanda smiled, showing them both her nubby yellow teeth. “Of course they’re not. They sense things and feel things, they know that a darkness is coming and maybe that it’s already arrived. Some have fled and others are hiding. For Halloween has come early and there will be a tricking and a treating tonight and certain revelers you dare not open the door to.” She sat there smoking, her eyes glazing over and when she spoke, the years clung to her like carrion birds to rotten meat. “When I was a girl, yes, in Haymarket, Bayfield County, it was. A tombstone winter was followed by a mad dog summer and that October, Matthew Donnegan went insane, did he not? He took an axe after his wife and three children. A cold and windy October it was. No more came the Donnegan’s into town to church nor market, they stayed out at that farm and it was in the icehouse back yonder that Sheriff Wick found them. Those children all lined up like mummies in a Mexican catacomb, frosty and blue and staring, their mother squatting beside them frozen stiff as a shank of beef. Matthew could not say why he did what he did, only that a grave whispering had come through the corn as it does and he had listened. You recall that year? You recall the wild tales and wilder rumors? Oh, it was bad, bad, bad!”

Tommy and Mitch just stood there, wondering if she had slipped away on them. And as they thought this, her eyes—which seemed to be closing as her mind drifted through the years like dandelion seeds in a good blow—snapped open.

“Ha! I ain’t senile, Mister Tommy! Far from it!”

And maybe Mitch had never been exactly adept at reading minds, but right then he could read Tommy’s just fine.
That old lady, Mitch, she just read my mind.
And Mitch wanted to tell him that, no, of course she hadn’t. It was just that old people are very sensitive, intuitive, but he didn’t say a thing because he knew right down in his bones that what Wanda Sepperly practiced so effortlessly was more than that. It wasn’t some carnival trick; it was the real thing.

Maybe to add substance to this, Wanda said, “You’re right on that, Mitch, goddamn yes, but you are.” She took a final drag off her cigarette and butted it. She looked from Mitch to Tommy. “Ah, you poor boys! You’ve seen
them,
haven’t you? You’ve seen those things that tonight will turn this town into a graveyard?”

There was no point in lying to Mother Sepperly and they both knew it. Lying to her was like lying to yourself, like looking into a mirror and proclaiming,
that’s not me in there! It’s someone else!
You knew better and so would she. So Mitch told her about their experiences at Sadler Brother’s Army/Navy, the dead woman in the culvert pipe, all the rest.

“Yes, as I thought, as I thought,” Wanda said.

Tommy stepped forward now, feeling they were indeed on the same page here. “What the hell are they? Zombies?”

That brought a laugh from Wanda that was dry and bitter-sounding. “Zombies? Heh, heh, now that’s a laugh riot indeed! But such words will serve to name them that cannot be named. A zombie is something conjured, I understand, a mindless thing lacking soul and will that chops cane in Guadeloupe and Haiti and such places. Also, a particularly ridiculous shambler of the cinema. But these things? No and yes. I would not name them. You believe they are folks that have come out of their graves to bring evil and make a certain mischief amongst the living, eh?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said. “I’m thinking.”

Wanda nodded. “Well, you are right and wrong. Yes, they have sheered the veil and come back, but there was no fancy conjuring done, not on purpose, I think. This was not meant to be, but an accident. Listen, Mr. Tommy, them things may have died as Joe Blow or Mary Jane Pissy Pie, but what they’ve returned as is something else indeed. The souls of Joe and Mary have gone traveling, but there are others in the void looking for occupancy. And these were not born as such. No, they are scavengers that have come to roost in the shells of the newly risen…like crows and buzzards attracted to bad meat, these things have been waiting a long time to be born.”

Mitch felt a heaviness in his limbs. He said, “They…they don’t like salt.”

“No, son, and they probably don’t fancy iron nor fire.”

“What should we do?” Tommy asked her.

“I’m not quite sure, son. But I can read the both of you and I know you plan to stand and fight. I will stand with you. But you had better be off to tell the others. They won’t listen, but you can try. And maybe later, you can come back and talk to me. Leave me one of those cigarettes and latch the door on your way out.”

“We can’t just—”

“Leave me here, Mitch? A frail old woman not in her right mind?” Wanda laughed at that, too. “Off with the both of you. When the time is right, I think, you will come back and I will be here.”

10

“Well, now that was a rush,” Tommy said when they were down the walk from Wanda Sepperly’s. “I ain’t got enough trouble with zombies, you bring me to meet the local witch. Greetings, boils and ghouls, hee, hee, hee!”

“Jesus Christ, Tommy, don’t be such an asshole.”

“Well, my mother always said to go with my strengths.”

“Wanda’s okay,” Mitch said. “Just a little…ah…eccentric.”

Tommy thought that was funny. “Eccentric? Holy shit, Mitch, that what you call eccentric? My cousin Lyle collected wooden dressmaker’s dummies and Victorian parasols. He was queer as they come, but a hell of a nice guy. My mother always said he was eccentric. I agree. But Mother Sepperley? Damn, that’s not eccentric, that’s
scary.”

“Ah, you liked her and you know it.”

“I did. She was strange, but she was my kind of strange.”

Mitch walked through the deepening puddles. “Trust me, Tommy, she’s spooky, but you haven’t met the real witch in this neighborhood, but you will.”

“Oh Christ.”

The Zirblanski house was next and nobody answered the door.

So on they went to the Blake house, but only after Mitch warned Tommy that he was about to meet the real witch of Kneale Street. Mitch explained that she had a lot of guns and she liked to use them.

“Just keep your head down,” he said.

“I’m not liking this,” Tommy said.

“I’d like to say she’s harmless, but I don’t think she is. Miriam Blake had her way, she’d shoot anyone that wasn’t white, Christian, and carrying a firearm.”

Now that Tommy had been prepared, they went right up on the porch and that was when the first shot rang out. Had Tommy been any closer to that doorbell, he would have lost his hand.

“Holy shit!” Tommy cried as he and Mitch hit the porch on their bellies.

Inside, there was screaming and shouting and the sound of something crashing. Then the door opened and Mitch saw Rhonda Zirblanski standing there. She was a tough little shit, he knew, but there were tears in her eyes.

“She told us to shoot whoever came through the door,” Rhonda said. “She gave us guns. Said anybody that came to the door was here to rape and rob and murder. She gave us guns, but we didn’t shoot, Mr. Barron! I swear, we didn’t shoot!”

Mitch rose slowly and when he did, tough or not, Rhonda fell right in his arms and he took hold of her, afraid for one frightening moment that she had been shot. But that wasn’t it; she was just overwrought.

When they got inside, they saw Rhonda’s twin, Rita, standing there, looking pissed-off, her eyes just black and simmering like burning pitch. “Hey, Mr. Barron,” she said.

Miriam Blake was on the floor in a blue jogging suit, covering her face with both hands. “Evil effing little bitches! See what they did to me? I take them in, little conniving harlots, and this is how they repay me! It’s their upbringing! Their upbringing! Goddamn parents, that’s what! Goddamn liberal sonsofbitches—”

“You better shut up,” Rita told her and from the tone of her voice, Mitch was thinking that was good advice.

When Miriam peeled her hands away from her face, her mouth was bloody and a blue welt was rising under her right eye.

Mitch sighed as Miriam kept complaining and Rhonda was talking about the guns and how Miriam was a crazy old hag and she knew she wasn’t supposed to say that, but crazy was just crazy, wasn’t it? And Mitch was in stark agreement with her. Tommy grabbed the 12-gauge off the floor that Miriam had tried to pepper them with and not too far away were a couple of little .32 autos. Tommy shoved them both in the pockets of his raincoat and stood there with the shotgun, looking confused.

When Rhonda was done talking, Mitch said, “She wanted you to shoot us?”

“That’s a lie!” Miriam snapped. “That’s an effing goddamn lie! You little bitch, you little—”

“Shut the hell up,” Tommy told her.

That did it. Miriam sat there, silenced, but hardly out of fight. She glared at Tommy and from that look, he was pretty glad she no longer had access to that Remington pump because she looked just mad enough to use it. Not that he was surprised after the welcome they’d received.

Rhonda started talking again, upset still but calming down an inch at a time. She started repeating verbatim the mad nonsense Miriam had filled her head with: shit about liberal Jews taking over the country and how they controlled the media and the government. How good old American Christian values were being stomped and stifled so that gays could marry and sluts could have abortions. That Hitler had had the right idea because those effing Jews had killed Christ and didn’t they honestly have the Holocaust coming? Well, didn’t they?