Resurrection House (6 page)

“All my life I’ve been holding her back, and now she sends this,” Mr. Barnes said, rising off his pillows and causing the color to drain rapidly from his face before he slumped back. “I remember when you were a child. Always so direct, so honest. You had eyes like a cop’s eyes. Never afraid of anything. I was glad when you left this foul little town, and now here you are, come back to help an old wretch on his deathbed. Why? Tell me, little girl, was I ever kind to you?”

Jennifer thought for a moment, and then said, “You were always kind to me, Mr. Barnes.”

“And would you say I was a good father to Chloe?”

Jennifer didn’t answer. She could only measure what she knew of Mr. Barnes against her own father whom she had adored as a child and who had always been there for her and still wove his life around hers.

“Shh,” Mr. Barnes said. “Do you hear that?”

A meticulous scratching came through the mechanical susurrus of soft clanks and repetitive beeps. Something fluttered like a paper bag snapping in a gale. Jennifer spied a shadow bobbing on the shade of the far window.

“Leave it be,” Mr. Barnes said as Jennifer rose and crossed the room. “Don’t let it see me. Please!”

Jennifer lifted the edge of the shade and peeked outside. A gull squatted on the window sill, white and mottled gray, its webbed feet shuffling as it bobbed and pecked with its long beak at a corner of the glass. It jerked upright, saw Jennifer, and then bounded into the air with a loud caw.

“Won’t be much longer now,” Mr. Barnes said.

“It’s gone. Don’t worry.”

Jennifer turned, glimpsed the opposite window on the far side of the room, and froze in place. Mr. Barnes caught the look on her face, swiveled his head to see, and then screamed in a thin, hoarse voice.

Jennifer shot around the bed and snapped the shade up. A figure glared in through the window with cold hatred, leering for several seconds before it exploded into a dozen black gulls fleeing in every direction. They flapped out over the yard, toward the neighboring parking lot where they alighted and vanished among the hundreds of birds now gathered like white clover spread across a wild meadow, eerily still, their eyes and beaks all pointed toward the Barnes house.

Jennifer had recognized the face of the thing crouching in the window: the high cheekbones and stringy hair, the thin lips drawn taut, the wide cloudy eyes like muddy pits.

Chloe’s mother.

Her face, mottled white and gray with decay and defined by a primal craving, was a sheer caricature of who she had once been. With no substance of her own, she borrowed her form from the seagulls.

Jennifer drew the shade and snugged it into the frame. A trickle of fear ran through her. The faint calls of the gulls carried through the window like laughter from a distant party. Mr. Barnes whispered something in response. Jennifer turned and watched the dying man scratch his leathery scalp with both hands as he clenched his eyes shut against oily tears.

“Mr. Barnes?” Jennifer said.

“Can’t she let me die in peace?”

“How long has this been going on?” Jennifer asked.

The old man dropped his hands to his sides and twisted to face Jennifer with anguished eyes. “Since the goddamned day Marion died,” he said. “She’s been with me ever since, looking over my shoulder, whispering in my dreams, hating me, draining the life from me. This illness inside me, this unstoppable fucking disease, is
her
doing,
her
will. She’s watching like a jackal for me to die, and when she’s had me, she’ll take Chloe next. I’m the only thing standing between them.”

Mr. Barnes no longer seemed a pathetic figure slipping into the delirium of his final moments, but a powerful spirit shattered and ruined by the weight of an unsustainable burden. Jennifer sat down and took his hand.

“Chloe doesn’t know?”

Mr. Barnes shook his head and choked back an involuntary sob. “Marion’s never been this bold, never let anyone else see her before. Only me.”

“But why would your wife do this? It’s okay. You can tell me.”

“I thought you already knew,” said Mr. Barnes. “You were there that day. The way you looked at me when the paramedics took Marion away, I was sure you knew. I never did understand why you kept it a secret.”

Jennifer squeezed the fragile fingers wrapped in the palm of her hand, and said, “Tell me.”

“Marion killed herself, but when I found her, she was still alive, still breathing. I sat down at the table with her and waited an hour for her to die before I called an ambulance.”

* * * * *

Jennifer found her memory of that day sharp and expansive.

She could almost taste that earthy air of the past.

She and Chloe raced around the grass with films of perspiration glistening on their brows.

A soft chill lingered on the wind, and Jennifer’s new wool sweater scratched her throat.

The girls had spent the afternoon in the yard, and while they romped, Chloe’s mother sat in the kitchen and swallowed one pill after another, chasing them with shots of gin, dying gently while she listened to the sounds of young girls playing.

The sun had dipped below the tree line and ushered in the dusk before Jennifer realized something was wrong. Mrs. Barnes always called them in before dark, and Jennifer should have already been sent on her way home for supper.

She watched the house.

Its dark windows gazed back at her, mournful in the deepening shadows, and then Mr. Barnes emerged from the back door, shaking, crying, and in moments Chloe’s life became something bleak and infinitely troublesome, although, truthfully, it had already been such a thing for many years.

Jennifer stayed to comfort Chloe. She watched the emergency medical technicians wheel Mrs. Barnes’ shrouded body from the house, and then she walked home late, and crept in the side door. Her mother started to scold her then stopped when she saw the confusion and grief in her daughter’s eyes.

Had there been something she had seen, something she heard that day that should have signaled what Mr. Barnes had done, she asked herself now.

“Came home early,” Mr. Barnes said. “Found Marion in the kitchen with her bottles lined up in front of her. She was slumped back in the chair, fading away, but she reached out for me one last time before she shut her eyes. I sat down and took a slug from the bottle, started crying, and made sure she was dead before I did anything about it. You and Chloe were singing and laughing out back.

“You were always so happy back then, kiddo. Chloe loved you for it. She felt good with you. It was bad for her when you weren’t around. Can’t blame your folks for keeping you away after what happened, but believe me, Chloe suffered without you. Marion had been hurting her for a long time before I realized it.”

The room lapsed into quiet, disturbed only by the electronic reports of the life support machines. Stillness seemed to shore up the entire house, and Jennifer wondered where Chloe had gone that she was away so long. How different might her life have been if her father had been a stronger man? How different if he had been any weaker?

She sifted her mind, wondering if there had been something odd that day, some out of place thing she had noticed and forgotten. She recalled the blank expressions of the neighbors, and Chloe’s whimpers, and the white flesh of Mrs. Barnes' bare arm propped at her side on the gurney as it rolled across the empty driveway, and then it came to her: she hadn’t heard Mr. Barnes’ car pull into the driveway. That day he parked in front of a neighbor’s house, as if he had known what awaited him at home. And in all the time since, Jennifer’s innocent face had haunted him alongside that of his dead wife, while he kept meaningless faith in a child’s nonexistent complicity.

“Marion started out smacking Chloe a few times, and we fought over it. She was afraid of what I might do about it, and she promised she would stop, but she didn’t. She just got better at hiding it, and she made Chloe believe it was all right, that all little girls suffered that way in secret. It escalated to cuts and stabs. Marion favored a pair of sewing scissors. Later she began with a lighter and sometimes a hot poker from the fireplace. I didn’t understand how sick Marion was until it was almost too late. She threatened to kill Chloe or herself.”

Jennifer had seen the scars on Chloe’s legs, the waxy-sheened welts and ridges of hard skin, the poorly-healed remnants of burns and lacerations. Chloe had always been covered in little bruises and wounds, patch-worked with Band-aids, but Jennifer had not understood what it meant. Bumps and scratches were part of childhood, like Chloe’s jagged memorial of falling out of the tree, like countless mars and scrapes Jennifer had suffered herself back then.

“Marion called me at work the day she died, ranting and blubbering about really committing suicide this time. I lost my temper and told her to go ahead and be done with. Then I was terrified for Chloe, so I raced home, and when I saw my daughter was all right, I decided that it was time for it to end. I couldn’t live with the fear anymore. In her heart Marion knew she was hurting all of us, but she couldn’t help it. She hated herself for it, hated me more for not being able to help her, and I was a fool who could do nothing but pretend everything would be all right.”

“You never told Chloe,” Jennifer said.

“She thinks I don’t know about the secrets she kept with her mother,” said Mr. Barnes. “Better that way.”

Shapes flitted in the windows. Something clattered against the glass, rattling the panes. Jennifer rose and snapped up the near window shade to reveal a swarm of gulls wriggling together like bees crawling over a honeycomb. Their fragile bodies twisted as they strained to beat their beaks against the glass. Jennifer crossed to the other window and uncovered a similar infestation.

A clarion burst from Mr. Barnes’ heart monitor jolted Jennifer’s attention back to the dying man. Blue lines lanced a black screen, leaping and spiking, as a series of racking coughs exploded from Mr. Barnes’ throat. The gulls released a fusillade of squeals, intertwined themselves into the rough delineation of a wicked, seething face that stretched its jaw wide and mouthed an empty laugh; and then an instant later the birds scattered apart, dipping and soaring, coursing over the treetops until they reached the hot, black plane of the parking lot. There were hundreds of gulls gathered now, if not thousands, gulls of all sizes, their wings white and silver or tipped with black feathers, their tiny eyes shining like marble chips in the sunlight.

Mr. Barnes groaned and his knobby fingers groped for an amber bottle on the nightstand. Jennifer grabbed it, shook out two pills, and fed them to him with water from his glass. The medicine kicked in quickly, and the coughing subsided. Mr. Barnes nestled into his pillows and fell into a shallow slumber. The alarm ceased and the room fell quiet. Outside a car engine droned, grew nearer, and then grumbled to silence.

Chloe was back.

* * * * *

Mr. Barnes awoke to Jennifer beside him and his daughter at the foot of his bed.

“Who is it?” Chloe said. “Jennifer won’t tell me.”

The frail man turned away.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Someone filled with hate and misery, that’s all.”

“Tell me! Who do you think is waiting for you? Is it Momma?”

Mr. Barnes avoided his daughter’s gaze. Chloe let the seconds tick by in the sepulchral atmosphere. “This is insane,” she said, and then retreated across the room.

“When I’m dead,” Mr. Barnes whispered to Jennifer, “you can tell her everything you think she should know.”

Jennifer nodded. “I’ve given this some thought, Mr. Barnes, and there are few possibilities to explain what’s happening. Old legends speak of birds acting as psychopomps, guides to usher the spirits of the newly dead to the underworld. Sometimes they work with spirits who were close to the dying. This could be a rare instance where they’ve actually manifested a physical presence rather than a symbolic one. There are some documented cases of it, though very few. It’s generally regarded as a metaphor, but if that’s all that’s going on, there’s nothing I can do. The gulls will help you find your way wherever you’re going.”

“To Heaven or Hell,” the old man said.

Jennifer shrugged. “The afterlife isn’t that simplistic.”

“What else might it be?”

“An individual will controlling the gulls to mislead your spirit from its rightful destination,” said Jennifer. “To limbo or to a trap or to the things in the next world that feed on souls, devour them, and erase them from existence. Only the guiding spirit can know what it’s trying to accomplish. But it might be something else.”

Mr. Barnes waited for Jennifer to continue. Instead she paused and watched Chloe, who was thoughtlessly rearranging picture frames and cologne bottles on the dresser.

“You could be doing this to yourself,” Jennifer said. “Some overwhelming guilt or resentment buried deep inside you might be driving your subconscious to leech off your vitality to manifest this bizarre situation as a way of punishment.”

Mr. Barnes gave himself over to a fresh spate of coughing. Jennifer waited until the fit passed into a steady gasping respiration and then helped him to a sip of water.

Chloe approached them, and said, “This was a mistake, bringing Jennifer here. It’s feeding your delusions, Dad. There’s nothing waiting to steal your soul. Nothing! You’re just terrified of dying. That’s all. There can’t be anything else. Do you understand? This nonsense is not real!”