Revival

XIII

There was a large east-facing window in Mary Fay’s death chamber, but the storm was almost fully upon us now, and all I saw through it was a tarnished silver curtain of rain. The room was a nest of shadows in spite of the table lamp. My left shoulder brushed the bureau Jacobs had mentioned, but I never thought of the revolver in the top drawer. All my attention was taken up by the still figure lying in the hospital bed. I had a clear view, because the various monitors had been turned off and the IV pole had been pushed into the corner.

She was beautiful. Death had erased any marks incised by the disease that had infested her brain, and her upturned face—alabaster skin set off by luxuriant masses of dark chestnut hair—was as perfect as any cameo. Her eyes were shut. Thick lashes lay against her cheeks. Her lips were slightly parted. A sheet was pulled up to her shoulders. Her clasped hands lay on it, above the swell of her bosom. A snatch of poetry, something from twelfth-grade English, came to mind and chimed there: Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face… How statue-like I see thee…

Jenny Knowlton stood beside the now useless ventilator, wringing her hands.

Lightning flashed. In its momentary glare I saw the iron pole on Skytop, standing as it had for God knew how many years, challenging each storm to do its worst.

Jacobs was holding out the box. “Help me, Jamie. We must be swift. Take it and open it. I’ll do the rest.”

“Don’t,” Jenny said from her corner. “For the love of God, let her rest in peace.”

Jacobs might not have heard her over the drumming rain and screaming wind. I did, but chose to ignore her. This is how we bring about our own damnation, you know—by ignoring the voice that begs us to stop. To stop while there’s still time.

I opened the box. There were no rods inside, and no control box. What had taken their place was a metallic headband, as thin as the strap on a young girl’s dress shoe. Jacobs took it out carefully—reverently—and gently pulled it. I saw it stretch. And when the next stroke of lightning came, once more preceded by that faint clicking sound, I saw green radiance dance across it, making it look like something other than dead metal. A snake, maybe.

Jacobs said, “Miss Knowlton, lift her head for me.”

She shook her head so hard her hair flew.

He sighed. “Jamie. You do it.”

I moved to the bed like a man in a dream. I thought of Patricia Farmingdale pouring salt in her eyes. Of Emil Klein eating dirt. Of Hugh Yates watching as the faithful in Pastor Danny’s revival tent were replaced by huge ants. I thought, Every cure has its price.

There was another click, followed by another flash of lightning. Thunder roared, shaking the house. The bedside lamp went out. For a moment the room was plunged into shadows, and then a generator clattered to life.

“Quickly!” Jacobs’s voice was pained. I saw burns across both of his palms. But he hadn’t dropped the headband. It was his last conductor, his conduit to potestas magnum universum, and I believed then (and now) that not even death by electrocution would have made him drop it. “Quickly, before lightning strikes the pole!”

I lifted Mary Fay’s head. Her chestnut hair fell away from that perfect (and perfectly still) face in a dark flood that pooled on the pillow. Charlie was beside me, bending down and breathing in harsh, excited gasps. His exhalations stank of age and infirmity. It occurred to me that he could have waited a few months and investigated what lay on the other side of the door personally. But that, of course, wasn’t what he wanted. At the heart of every established religion is one sacred mystery that supports belief and induces fidelity, even to the point of martyrdom. Did he want to know what lay beyond death’s door? Yes. But what he wanted more—I believe this with all my heart—was to violate that mystery. To drag it into the light and hold it up, screaming Here it is! What all your crusades and murder in the name of God were for! Here it is, and how do you like it?

“Her hair… lift her hair.” He turned accusingly to the woman cowering in the corner. “Damn you, I said to cut it!”

Jenny made no reply.

I lifted Mary Fay’s hair. It was as soft and heavy as a bolt of silk, and I knew why Jenny hadn’t cut it. She couldn’t bear to.

Jacobs slipped the thin band of metal over her forehead, so it lay tight against the hollows of her temples.

“All right,” he said, straightening up.

I laid the dead woman’s head gently back on the pillow, and as I looked at those dark lashes brushing against her cheeks, a comforting thought came to me: It wouldn’t work. Cures were one thing; reviving a woman who had been dead for fifteen minutes—no, closer to half an hour now—was another. It simply wasn’t possible. And if a stroke of lightning packing millions of volts did do something—if it caused her to twitch her fingers or turn her head—it would be no more meaningful than the jerk of a dead frog’s leg when electricity from a dry cell is applied. What could he hope to accomplish? Even if her brain had been perfectly healthy, it would now be decaying in her skull. Brain death is irrevocable; even I knew that.

I stepped back. “Now what, Charlie?”

“We wait,” he said. “It won’t be long.”

When the bedside lamp went out a second time, thirty seconds or so later, it didn’t come back on, and I could no longer hear the roar of the gennie below the roar of the wind. Now that he had slipped the metal band around Mary Fay’s head, Jacobs seemed to have lost interest in her. He was staring out the window, hands clasped behind his back like a ship’s captain on the bridge. The iron pole wasn’t visible through the teeming rain—not even as a shadow—but we’d see it when the lightning struck it. If the lightning struck it. So far, it hadn’t. Perhaps there was a God, I thought, and He’d taken sides against Charles Jacobs.

“Where’s the control box?” I asked him. “Where’s the connection to that pole out there?”

He looked at me as if I were an imbecile. “There’s no way to control the power that lies beyond the lightning. It would fry even a titanium box to a cinder. As for the connection… it’s you, Jamie. Haven’t you guessed even yet why you’re here? Did you think I brought you to cook my meals?”

Once he’d said it, I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen it before. Why it had taken me so long. The secret electricity had never really left me, or any of the people Pastor Danny had cured. Sometimes it slept, like the disease that had hidden so long in Mary Fay’s brain. Sometimes it awoke and made you eat dirt, or pour salt in your eyes, or hang yourself with your pants. That small doorway needed two keys to unlock it. Mary Fay was one.

I was the other.

“Charlie, you have to stop this.”

“Stop? Are you insane?”

No, I thought, that would be you. I’ve come to my senses.

I just hoped it wasn’t too late.

“There’s something waiting on the other side. Astrid called it Mother. I don’t think you want to see her, and I know I don’t.”

I bent to strip off the metal circlet that lay across Mary Fay’s brow. He grabbed me in a bearhug and pulled me away. His arms were scrawny, and I should have been able to break his grip, but I couldn’t, at least not at first. He held me with all the strength of his obsession.

As we struggled in that gloomy, shadow-haunted room, the wind suddenly dropped. The rain slackened. Through the window I could see the pole again, and small rivers of water running down the wrinkles in the bulging forehead of granite that was Skytop.

Thank God, I thought. The storm is passing by.

I stopped fighting him just as I was on the verge of breaking free, and so lost my chance to end that day’s abomination before it could begin. The storm wasn’t over; it had only been drawing in a breath before commencing its main assault. The wind rushed back, this time at hurricane velocity, and in the split-second interval before the lightning came, I felt what I had on the day I’d come here with Astrid: the stiffening of all the hair on my body, and the sense that the air in the room had turned to oil. Not a click this time but a SNAP, as loud as a small-caliber gunshot. Jenny screamed in terror.

A jagged branch of fire shot from the clouds and struck the iron pole on Skytop, turning it blue. My head was filled with a vast choir of shrieking voices and I understood it was everyone Charles Jacobs had ever cured, plus everyone he’d ever snapped with his Portraits in Lightning camera. Not just the ones who’d suffered aftereffects; all of them, in their thousands. If that shrieking had gone on for even ten seconds, it would have driven me insane. But as the electric fire coating the pole faded, leaving it to glow a dull cherry-red like a branding iron fresh from the fire, those agonized voices also faded away.

Thunder rolled and rain swooshed down in a rush, accompanied by a rattle of hail.

“Oh my God!” Jenny screamed. “Oh my God, look at it!”

The circlet around Mary Fay’s head was glowing a brilliant, pulsing green. I saw it with more than my eyes; it was deep in my brain, as well, because I was the connection. I was the conduit. The glow began to fade, and then a fresh bolt of lightning struck the pole. The choir shrieked again. This time the band passed from green into a coruscating white, too dazzling to look at. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears. In the darkness the afterimage of the circlet remained, now an ethereal blue.

The interior screams faded. I opened my eyes and saw the glow embedded in the circlet was fading, as well. Jacobs was staring at the corpse of Mary Fay with wide, fascinated eyes. Drool dripped from the frozen side of his mouth.

The hail gave a final furious rattle, then quit. The rain began to slacken. I saw lightning fork into the trees beyond Skytop, but the storm was already moving east.

Jenny abruptly bolted from the room, leaving the door open. I heard her crash into something as she crossed the living room, and the bang when the door to the outside—the one I’d had to struggle to close—flew open and hit the wall. She was gone.

Jacobs took no notice. He bent over the dead woman, who lay with her eyes shut and her sooty lashes brushing her cheeks. The circlet was only dead metal now. In the shadowy room, it didn’t even gleam. If it had burned her forehead, the mark was beneath the band. I didn’t think it had; I would have smelled charred flesh.

“Wake up,” Jacobs said. When there was no response, he shouted it. “Wake up!” He shook her arm—gently at first, then harder. “Wake up! Wake up, damn you, wake up!”

Her head wagged from side to side as he shook her, as if in negation.

“WAKE UP, YOU BITCH, WAKE UP!”

He was going to pull her out of bed and onto the floor if he didn’t stop, and I couldn’t have borne that further desecration. I grabbed his right shoulder and hauled him away. We staggered backward in an awkward dance and crashed into the bureau.

He turned on me, his face wild with fury and frustration. “Let me go! Let me go! I saved your miserable useless life and I demand you—”

Then something happened.

From the bed came a low humming sound. I relaxed my grip on Jacobs. The corpse lay as it had lain, only now with its hands splayed out at its sides, thanks to Charlie’s shaking.

It was just the wind, I thought. I’m sure I could have convinced myself of it, given time, but before I could even get started, it came again: a faint humming from the woman on the bed.

“She’s returning,” Charlie said. His eyes were huge, bulging from their sockets like the eyes of a toad squeezed by a cruel child. “She’s reviving. She’s alive.”

“No,” I said.

If he heard, he paid no mind. All of his attention was fixed on the woman in the bed, the pale oval of her face deep in the swimming shadows that infested the room. He lurched toward her like Ahab on the deck of the Pequod, dragging his bad leg. His tongue lapped at his mouth on the side that wasn’t frozen. He was gasping for breath.

“Mary,” he said. “Mary Fay.”

The humming sound came again, low and tuneless. Her eyes remained shut, but I realized with a cold chill of horror that I could see them moving beneath the lids, as if in death, she dreamed.

“Do you hear me?” His voice, dry with an almost prurient eagerness. “If you hear me, give me a sign.”

The humming continued. Jacobs put the palm of his hand on her left breast, then turned to me. Incredibly, he was grinning. In the gloom he looked like a death’s head.

“No heartbeat,” he said. “Yet she lives. She lives!”

No, I thought. She waits. But the wait is almost over.

Jacobs turned back to her and lowered his half-frozen face until it was only inches from her dead one—a Romeo with his Juliet. “Mary! Mary Fay! Come back to us! Come back and tell us where you’ve been!”

It’s hard for me to think of what happened next, let alone write it down, but I must, if only as a warning for anyone else who contemplates some similar experiment in damnation, and may read these words, and turn back because of them.

She opened her eyes.

Mary Fay opened her eyes, but they were no longer human eyes. Lightning had smashed the lock on a door that was never supposed to be opened, and Mother came through.

They were blue eyes at first. Bright blue. There was nothing in them. They were utterly blank. They stared at the ceiling through Jacobs’s avid face, and through the ceiling, and through the cloudy sky beyond. Then they came back. They registered him, and some understanding—some comprehension—came into them. She made that humming sound again, but I hadn’t seen her draw a single breath. What need? She was a dead thing… except for those inhuman staring eyes.

“Where have you been, Mary Fay?” His voice trembled. Saliva continued to drip from the bad side of his mouth, leaving damp spots on the sheet. “Where have you been, what did you see there? What waits beyond death? What’s on the other side? Tell me!”

Her head began to pulse, as if the dead brain within had grown too big for its casing. Her eyes began to darken, first to lavender, then to purple, then to indigo. Her lips drew back in a smile that widened and became a grin. It grew until I could see all of her teeth. One of her hands trundled across the counterpane, spiderlike, and seized Jacobs’s wrist. He gasped at her cold grip and flailed for balance with his free hand. I took it, and thus the three of us—two living, one dead—were joined. Her head pulsed on the pillow. Growing. Bloating. She was no longer beautiful; she was no longer even human.

The room didn’t fade; it was still there, but I saw it was an illusion. The cottage was an illusion, and Skytop, and the resort. The whole living world was an illusion. What I’d thought of as reality was nothing but a scrim, as flimsy as an old nylon stocking.

The true world was behind it.

Basalt blocks rose to a black sky punched with howling stars. I think those blocks were all that remained of a vast ruined city. It stood in a barren landscape. Barren, yes, but not empty. A wide and seemingly endless column of naked human beings trudged through it, heads down, feet stumbling. This nightmare parade stretched all the way to the distant horizon. Driving the humans were antlike creatures, most black, some the dark red of venous blood. When humans fell, the ant-things would lunge at them, biting and butting, until they gained their feet again. I saw young men and old women. I saw teenagers with babies in their arms. I saw children trying to help each other along. And on every face was the same expression of blank horror.

They marched beneath the howling stars, they fell, they were punished and chivvied to their feet with gaping but bloodless bite wounds on their arms and legs and abdomens. Bloodless because these were the dead. The foolish mirage of earthly life had been torn away and instead of the heaven preachers of all persuasions promised, what awaited them was a dead city of cyclopean stone blocks below a sky that was itself a scrim. The howling stars weren’t stars at all. They were holes, and the howls emerging from them came from the true potestas magnum universum. Beyond the sky were entities. They were alive, and all-powerful, and totally insane.

The aftereffects are trailing fragments of an unknown existence beyond our lives, Charlie had said, and that existence lay close in this sterile place, a prismatic world of insane truth that would drive a man or woman mad if it were so much as glimpsed. The ant-things served those great entities, just as the marching, naked dead served the ant-things.

Perhaps the city wasn’t a city at all but a kind of anthill where all the dead of earth were first enslaved and then eaten. And once that happened, did they finally die for good? Perhaps not. I didn’t want to remember the couplet Bree had quoted in her email, but was helpless not to: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die.

Somewhere in that marching horde were Patsy Jacobs and Tag-Along-Morrie. Somewhere in it was Claire—who deserved heaven and had gotten this instead: a sterile world below hollow stars, a charnel kingdom where guardian ant-things sometimes crawled and sometimes stood upright, their faces hideously suggestive of the human. This horror was the afterlife, and it was waiting not just for the evil ones among us but for us all.

My mind began to totter. It was a relief, and I almost let go. One idea saved my sanity, and I still cling to it: the possibility that this nightmare landscape was itself a mirage.

“No!” I shouted.

The marching dead turned toward my voice. The ant-things did likewise, their mandibles gnashing, their loathsome eyes (loathsome but intelligent) glaring. Overhead, the sky began to tear open with a titanic ripping sound. An enormous black leg covered with tufts of spiny fur pushed through it. The leg ended in a vast claw made of human faces. Its owner wanted one thing and one thing only: to silence the voice of negation.

It was Mother.

“No!” I shouted again. “No, no, no, no!”

It was our connection to the revived dead woman that was causing this vision; even in the extremity of my horror, I knew it. Jacobs’s hand clutched mine like a manacle. If it had been the right hand—the good hand—I could never have freed myself in time. But it was the weakened left. I pulled with all my might as that obscene leg stretched toward me and that claw of screaming faces groped, meaning to yank me upward into the unknowable universe of horror that awaited beyond that black paper sky. Now, through the rip in the firmament, I could see insane light and colors never meant to be looked upon by mortal creatures. The colors were alive. I could feel them crawling over me.

I gave one final yank, freeing myself from Charlie’s grip, and went tumbling backward. The empty plain, the vast broken city, the groping claw—they all disappeared. I was in the bedroom of the cottage again, sprawled on the floor. My old fifth business stood beside the bed. Mary Fay—or whatever dark creature Jacobs’s secret electricity had summoned into her corpse and dead brain—gripped his hand. Her head had become a pulsing jellyfish with a human face crudely scrawled upon it. Her eyes were a lusterless black. Her grin… you would say no one can actually grin ear to ear, it’s just a saying, but the dead woman who was no longer dead was doing exactly that. The lower half of her face had become a black pit that trembled and throbbed.

Jacobs stared at her with bulging eyes. His face had gone a cheesy yellow-white. “Patricia? Patsy? Where are you? Where’s Morrie?”

The thing spoke for the first and last time.

“Gone to serve the Great Ones, in the Null. No death, no light, no rest.”

“No.” His chest hitched and he screamed it. “No!”

He tried to pull back. She—it—held him fast.

Now from the dead woman’s gaping mouth came a black leg with a flexing claw at the end of it. The claw was alive; it was a face. One I recognized. It was Tag-Along-Morrie, and he was screaming. I heard a tenebrous rustling sound as the leg passed between her lips; in my nightmares I still hear it. It reached, it stretched, it touched the sheet and scrabbled there like skinless fingers, leaving scorch-marks that gave off thin tendrils of smoke. The black eyes of the thing that had been Mary Fay were bulging and spreading. They merged over the bridge of the nose and became a single enormous orb that stared with blank avidity.

Charlie’s head snapped back and he began to make a gargling sound. He stood on his toes, seeming to make one final, galvanic effort to free himself from the grasping hand of the thing that was trying to come through from that insane netherworld I now know is so close to our own. Then he collapsed to his knees and fell forward with his forehead against the bed. He looked like he was praying.

The thing let go of him and turned its unspeakable attention to me. It threw back the sheet and struggled to rise, that black insect’s leg still extruding from its gaping maw of a mouth. Now Patsy’s face had joined Morrie’s. They were melted together, writhing.

I got up by pressing my back against the wall and pushing with my legs. Mary Fay’s bloated, pulsing face was darkening, as if she were strangling on the thing inside her. That one smooth black eye stared, and reflected in it I fancied I could see the cyclopean city, and the endless column of the marching dead.

I don’t remember yanking open the top drawer of the bureau; I only know that all at once the gun was in my hand. I believe if it had been an automatic with the safety on, I would have just stood there, pulling at the frozen trigger, until the thing arose, shambled across the room, and seized me. That claw would have pulled me into its gaping mouth and into that other world, where I would face some unspeakable punishment for daring to say one word: No.

But it wasn’t an automatic. It was a revolver. I fired five times, and four of the bullets went into the thing trying to rise from Mary Fay’s deathbed. I have reason to know exactly how many shots I fired. I heard the roar of the gun, saw repeated muzzle-flashes in the gloom, felt it jump in my hand, but all of that seemed to be happening to someone else. The thing flailed and fell back. The melted faces screamed with mouths that had merged. I remember thinking, You can’t kill Mother with bullets, Jamie. No, not her.

But it was no longer moving. The obscenity that had come out of its mouth lay limp, trailing on the pillow. The faces of Jacobs’s wife and son were fading. I covered my eyes and screamed, over and over again. I screamed until I was hoarse. When I lowered my hands, the claw was gone. Mother was gone, too.

If she was ever there in the first place, I hear you say, and I don’t blame you; I wouldn’t have believed it myself, if I hadn’t been there. But I was. They were—the dead ones. And she was.

Now, however, it was only Mary Fay, a woman whose serenity in death had been destroyed by four bullets fired into her corpse. She lay askew with her hair fanned out around her head and her mouth hanging open. I could see two bullet holes in her nightgown and two more below them, in the sheet that was now puddled around her hips. I could also see the scorch-marks left by that terrible claw, although there was no other sign of it now.

Jacobs began very slowly to slide to his left. I reached out, but the movement felt slow and dreamy. I didn’t even come close to grabbing him. He thumped to the floor on his side, knees still bent. His eyes were wide open but already glazing. An unutterable expression of horror was stamped on his features.

Charlie, you look like a man who just got a bad electrical shock, I thought, and began to laugh. Oh, how I did laugh. I bent over, grasping my knees to keep from falling. It was almost noiseless, that laughter—the screaming had blown my voice out—but it was genuine. Because it was funny; you see that, don’t you? Bad electrical shock! A shocking development! Hilarious!

But all the time I was laughing—convulsed with it, sick with it—I kept my eyes on Mary Fay, waiting for the hair-tufted black leg to slither out of her mouth again, giving birth to those screaming faces.

At last I staggered out of the death chamber, and through the living room. A few broken branches lay on the carpet, blown through the door Jenny Knowlton had left open. They crunched like bones under my feet and I wanted to scream again, but I was too tired. Oh, I was so tired.

The stacked stormclouds were moving away to the east, throwing down random forks of lightning as they went; soon the streets of Brunswick and Freeport would be flooded, the storm drains temporarily clogged with chips of hail, but between those dark clouds and the place where I stood, a rainbow bent its many-colored arc over the entire breadth of Androscoggin County. Hadn’t there been rainbows on the day Astrid and I had come here?

God gave Noah the rainbow sign, we used to sing during our Thursday-night MYF meetings, while Patsy Jacobs swayed on the piano bench and her ponytail swung from side to side. A rainbow was supposed to be a good sign, it meant the storm was over, but looking at this one filled me with fresh horror and revulsion, because it reminded me of Hugh Yates. Hugh and his prismatics. Hugh who had also seen the ant-things.

The world began to darken. I realized I was on the verge of fainting, and that was good. Perhaps when I woke up, my mind would have blotted all this out. That would be even better. Even madness would be better… as long as there was no Mother in it.

Death would be best of all. Robert Rivard had known it; Cathy Morse had, too. I remembered the revolver then. Surely there was a bullet left in it for me, but it seemed like no solution. Perhaps it would have, if I hadn’t heard what Mother said to Jacobs: No death, no light, no rest.

Only the Great Ones, she had said.

In the Null.

My knees unhinged and I went down, leaning against the side of the doorway, and that was where I blacked out.