Resurrection House (4 page)

Dad had hung a red and gold “Happy Birthday” banner on the wall in the basement and tacked little clusters of balloons around it. We sat down there—me, Joey Reagan, Eddie Spirowski, and Billy Cooper—playing Atari until we got bored and started tossing a miniature Nerf football around. After that we played Twister for a while, but it turned into a wrestling match and Billy banged his head on the corner of a cabinet hard enough that we had to stop. It didn’t bleed, but he got a nice goose egg. He staggered through the rest of the party holding his head and falling into people like he was dying or passing out. Dad put out some soda and snacks and even Matty came down to play for a while. He couldn’t keep up, though, so we played keep away with the Nerf, laughing at him running back and forth between us like a trained circus monkey. That ended when Joey bounced the ball off Matty’s head and it knocked over a plate of cookies.

“Matty!” said Joey. “Look what you did.”

“I didn’t do it,” Matty said.

Billy groaned and fell on the floor, groping with one hand for a cookie. “Ohhh, I’m dying for a cookie,” he said. “But I can’t see it. The pain, oh, the pain!”

It cracked us all up.

Around four Mom turned off the lights and carried the birthday cake downstairs, a circle of candles flickering around the edges, the flames reflected like stars in the glistening chocolate icing. Everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” and then Mom served up slices. Dad dished out ice cream to go with it. Afterward I opened my presents and thanked everyone. It was getting late and time to go. Billy’s mother showed up first, and rolled her eyes when she saw the bump on his forehead. Then Mr. Reagan came and took Joey and Eddie away.

The rain poured down, and the wind picked up. A bad storm was settling in.

I helped Mom clean the basement and then took my presents up to my bedroom. I wished Wilt could have been there. I asked Mom if I could call him, but she told me he was ill and changed the subject. So, I played with my birthday toys and read comics until supper time. Matty imitated everything I did and followed me around. He even acted like me at dinner, eating green beans when I ate green beans, drinking his milk when I drank mine. I gave up trying to stop him and just ignored it.

Freezing rain crashed down and the wind whistled around the house. Our block turned dark with night, and in the meager glow of the few streetlights I saw water rushing in wide rivulets along the curb. The snow cover vanished, revealing black ground. Matty got frightened by the storm and refused to go up to bed alone, so even though I had another hour to stay up, Mom made me go with him. I could read if I didn’t make any noise, but I had to keep Matty company so he could sleep.

I guess I dozed off with the light on, because later I woke up still dressed and on top of my covers with a comic book stretched across my stomach. Something had jarred me awake, and I looked around, realizing that the odd shadows dancing across the ceiling came from my lamp, which had fallen to the floor where it now rocked back and forth. Damp air filled the room and rain spattered my legs. The window gaped open. The curtains flared in the snapping wind.

Someone laughed. I turned on my side, looking for Matty.

A hulking black shape hovered over him, chuckling as it bent and lifted my little brother from his bed, the sheets sliding lose like discarded wrapping paper.

Matty opened his eyes, too scared to make a sound. Tears welled onto his cheeks. He stared at me, pleading in silence for help.

With my brother in his arms, Mooncat Jack approached my bedside and gazed at me with hollow eyes that pinned me to my mattress. His mouth spread in a crooked smile, rotten teeth protruding from beneath wormish lips. A horrible moment passed while he lingered as though he was waiting for me to do or say something, but I could only lie there petrified. He held Matty, taunting me to grab him back, mocking my fear and helplessness. Then Mooncat Jack chuckled with a sound like water running down a drainpipe, and bounded over my bed, landing in the narrow opening of the window, poised there, perfectly balanced like a panther. He looked back, his head tilting and wobbling in short, weird arcs, and flapped one hand at me, waving. His body began to shrink until his entire figure wedged through the small space, and with Matty cradled in his arms, he winked and disappeared, leaving behind no more than the hollow echo of his laughter.

Strength surged back to me. I ran to the window, yelling for my parents. The rain pounded and the treetops churned. Wind stung my face with fat drops of water. Power lines danced savagely around the telephone pole. Across the center of the yard ran Mooncat Jack with my little brother trapped against his shoulder.

My mother screamed when she saw the room. My father swore.

Splotches of mud tracked across the carpet where Mooncat Jack had stood. The rain had soaked my bed. I turned, squared in the turmoil of the open window, and said, “Mooncat Jack took Matty, and he’s running toward the woods.”

I followed my parents as fast as I could as they fled downstairs. They didn’t bother with coats and my father hardly paused when he grabbed the flashlight by the side door. They raced into the yard, calling for Matty. The mud sucked at our feet and we stumbled through deep puddles, plunging headlong toward the stream. My father spied something and skidded to a halt. He had picked out footprints in the soft soil. He forged ahead, tracing them with his ray of light. The storm-gorged brook rose far up its banks, nearing the edge of our yard and beginning to pool around the legs of our picnic table.

Dad paused, swinging the flashlight left and right. Something splashed in the wild stream, and he honed in on it. Fifty yards downstream the weak circle of light picked out Matty, sputtering and splashing, struggling to keep his head above the rushing waters. Gripped like iron around the back collar of Matty’s pajama shirt was Mooncat Jack’s distended, grimy hand, tugging my kid brother through the torrent.

“Matty!” Dad screamed.

My mother shot after him, tears pouring from her eyes and vanishing instantly in the cascading downpour. My father’s flashlight glowed briefly underwater then extinguished.

I waited on the black edge, trembling and cold, my feet sinking into the mud, my pajamas sticking to me like a second skin. My teeth chattered and the rain slicked my hair against my skull. I cried but there was no one to hear me. I listened to splashing in the darkness and the voices of my parents gurgling as they choked and cried out for my brother. Then silence. No sound but the awful raging of the storm, no movement but the sky pouring out its blood like an uncontrolled hemorrhage. Raindrops pricked my eyes. Black clouds roiled overhead, charged every few minutes by the flashbulb glare of distant lightning.

“Dad!” I yelled, then “Matty!”

I couldn’t stop, then, and I cried out Matty’s name until my throat hurt, screamed for him to come back, demanded Mooncat Jack let him go. The soft ground gave way, and I toppled to a sitting position in the mud. My senses began to shut down, but I forced myself to remain alert. I tried to slither loose and climb back to my feet, but the wet earth held tight.

I stopped struggling when I heard footsteps squishing along the bank.Mooncat Jack had returned. This time I couldn’t run or scream, but found only quiet tears while I waited for him to take me away with my brother. But when he opened his coat and revealed Matty bundled inside, I saw he was warm and mostly dry and sleeping, unaware of the storm thrashing around us. Mooncat Jack sat on his heels and placed his hand on my forehead. A terrible cold filled me and set me trembling, and the rain seemed to fade as blackness overwhelmed my sight like a fog rolling in. Only Mooncat Jack remained. He grew, ballooning to the size of a giant, his body consuming the night, his face pressed close to mine with one awful, deep eye peering into me. I lost all sight of Matty, then, and of everything else. Mooncat Jack’s grubby flesh crowded out the world. The abyss of his mouth hung below me and I was sure I would be swallowed. I wanted Matty back. If I could pull him free, maybe Mooncat Jack would leave him and take me away in his place.

When it seemed Jack could become no larger, Mooncat Jack diminished, deflating in a heartbeat back to the size of a man. Feeble warmth returned to me as he removed his hand, and before I could clear the haze from my sight, he pressed Matty’s small, hot body into my lap. I clutched and hugged him and slid back from Jack as best I could. The Mooncat grinned, pleased with what he had found within me, and then he turned and danced away, his gangly frame spiraling and whirling, his feet moving to a foolish, irregular beat that only he could hear. He shrunk as he went, like someone racing rapidly into the distance, until his face became only a pale shimmer and then that, too, disappeared. The remnants of the strange darkness lifted and all at once the storm thundered back upon us, the rain hammering down, the wind screaming through our thin pajamas.

I heard my father’s voice and gazed toward the water as he emerged from the shadows, clambering up the bank.

Dad fell to his knees. He coughed and spit out water, his chest heaving until he caught his breath. When he saw Matty, he threw his arms around both of us and hugged us to him. He helped me to my feet and pressed Matty to his chest with arms like steel bands, and led us into the house. There he lay Matty on the sofa and ordered me to get some towels and blankets while he called 911. With the rain, it would take the police extra time to get to our house.

I took all the towels from the bathroom, wrapped a big one around me and covered Matty from head to toe, saving one for Dad as he settled next to us. When the ambulance came, they treated us all for hypothermia, and took Matty and me to the hospital. Dad stayed with the police to look for our mother who had not come back from the woods. They found her an hour later, trapped in a tangle of tree roots, most likely dragged there by the current, and unable to get free. She was in shock and suffering from exposure, and three days passed before they would let us see her in the hospital.

A week later I went back to school and learned the truth about Wilt. He hadn’t been sick the day of my party. He had gone out in the yard Friday before dinner and never come back. No one knew where he was. By Saturday the police decided he had been kidnapped. A second-grader who lived across the street told the police she saw a white van parked outside the Corman’s house, but Chris said that was his when he stopped by to grab some food between deliveries. I heard Mr. Corman tried to help, but I guess he made Mrs. Corman uncomfortable, because he didn’t stay around too much and soon after that he moved away to another state.

A month after my birthday, the police found Wilt’s body in the woods where it had been left after someone had beaten and choked him. I stayed home from school for a week after hearing about it, crying most of the time. As horrible as it sounds, some of those tears were shed in relief for knowing what had happened and for the fact that it hadn’t happened to Matty or me, when it seemed like it easily could have. My family went to Wilt’s funeral, and his Mom acted like she was moving through a dream that she hoped would end if she could only wake up.

Matty didn’t remember much about the night Mooncat Jack came to our house, which was probably for the best. Mom and Dad never liked to talk about it, and when anyone asked what happened they said Matty fell out the window while sleepwalking, landed in the soft, muddy ground and wandered down to the stream. But after that night Mom and Dad drove us to school both ways every day, and Dad changed all the locks in the house and put flashlights in every room. In the spring he put a six-foot fence across the yard, closing off the stream. Mom started giving me strict curfews and made me call anytime I would be late, and there was usually hell to pay when I forgot. And they argued less about Dad’s job and paying the bills and all the other things that used to get them angry at one another.

Both of them once told me that they had never before known fear like they felt when they were wrapped in the freezing water of the stream, blind and alone in the dark, and found all they could think of was not losing Matty or me and what we must have been feeling. Mom said she had a lot of time to think about that before she blacked out. She started to tell me about weird things she saw and heard before they rescued her, visions of a dark man with murky flesh and a bone-scraping laugh who visited her and whispered of terrible, sinister things. She sensed the iciness of his body, but when he stretched the flap of his coat around her, it felt warm, and if she didn’t know better, she told me, she’d think that he had helped keep her alive. The phone rang, then, and she answered it and never got back to talking about it again.

I think about Mooncat Jack a lot, though I doubt I’ll ever see him again. There are millions of towns out there for him to visit, hundreds of millions of children to choose from, all of them unwanted at least for a moment in somebody’s heart, which is long enough to draw the Mooncat down. But whatever he is, demon or ghost, monster or manifestation of the blackest parts of the human soul, I think he sees what he does as a service, one he’s happy to render. It’s why he laughs and smiles so often and why he approached me to introduce himself. But there’s something else to Mooncat Jack that Joey Reagan’s stories never mentioned, and it’s both terrible and beautiful. Sometimes, I think, Mooncat Jack takes kids to a better place. Maybe, for some like Wilt, he brings them to the twilight world of shadows I once imagined, where they become free and powerful and happy, and he leaves behind their broken bodies as punishment for those who neglected them. But for others, like Matty and me, I think he means to test us, and I think we passed. That night he led our family into the worst of our own horrors, and when it most counted, we threw away care for our own lives, plunged into the stormy dark to rescue my little brother and proved our love for one another. But had we failed, I have no doubt we never would have seen Matty alive again.