“And ye wish that I raise up yer dead mama, eh? Call her from the damps of the grave and from beyond the pale?” Missy Crow spat again. “Do yerself a favor, Luke Strand. Forget such vile doings. Take her home and bury her proper, say a prayer to Jesus and the saints.”
“But I brought money,” he said. “Everything I could get.”
“Did ye now?” She put those eyes on him that were open sores and secret cancers. “Then say the words, Luke Strand, say them words that will damn yer immortal soul straight to hell. Say unto me what ye would have done.”
“I want you to raise my mama…from the dead,” he managed, his breath catching in his throat.
“Ye wish a resurrection?”
“I do.”
With no help from Missy Crow, Strand brought the shrouded body of Mama Lucille into that dank-smelling cabin. Through the warped plank door knotted in a tangled profusion of woodbine and trumpet creeper. A place of shadows and sheeted forms; tables crowded with alembics and retorts and dried animal scraps; corpse-fat candles guttering on shelves amongst bones and jars of fetal things floating in brine. It smelled of spices in there, of ashes and tanned hides, wormseed and devilpitch, rotting coffin linings and graveyard soil.
“Now, Luke Strand, ye kindly step outside while I cut and sew and snip, whilst I remove things and say words and sprinkle essential salts and warm this barren clay.”
It took about two hours.
Then the still sleeping form of Mama Lucille was placed back in her box, smelling of dampness and carbolic, preservatives and cold rain.
Missy Crow the straw-witch took the money, and whispered something into the shroud. Then to, Strand himself: “Take yer mama home and bury her, son. Two days of seasoning in the ground, she’ll ripen like slaw and then just maybe…just maybe…but if she moves, if she walks above again, no salt and no meat. Remember that, Luke Strand, and I bid you good-bye. And may the Lord have mercy upon yer heathen soul for the things ye have done and those ye will yet do.”
*
Two days later.
The cemetery.
What Strand did he did in silence, he did alone, he did with a madness tickling at the base of his brain and a spade in his hands. And in that sullen graveyard, there was the rustling of unknown shadows, somber light winking off leaning tombstones, spiders tickling the dark with silken threads. High above, that ancient moon slid through the sky like whispering casket silk as something far below ripened and readied itself.
It was a night of resurrection beneath that same glowering, bloated moon. A night of digging and clawing, of the moist skin of the earth cut by the surgical blade of a shovel as a hideous gestation reached its peak. As the swollen belly of the graveyard delivered a grim parody of life from the moldering oblong box of its womb and cold meat was given breath and colder clay given sterile animation.
Strand worked that shovel, tossing out clods of black earth and squaring off the grave meticulously as was his way. He could feel it below him, waiting in the thick and swelling blackness of his mother’s coffin: a dire breathing in those damp confines of decay, a life, a death, the undead and poisoned milk of the charnel yard filling that box and needing to spill out in noxious tangles.
When he struck wood, found that fine gumwood coffin with the iron bands, he brushed dirt from it, whispering something under his breath just as he was certain something inside was whispering to him.
Was that…was that the sound of ragged fingers scraping from within? A thudding and a shifting like a child announcing itself from its mother’s belly? No, not yet, not yet.
As Strand reached for the catches on the coffin lid, his hands pulled back and some dread voice in his mind demanded to know what he thought he was doing, in this place, down in this claustrophobic darkness.
And that stayed him for a moment or two, long enough for him to hear the chortle of frogs from the ravine and the sing-song shrilling of whippoorwills and the droning of night things. But then his fingers were at those catches, undoing them, curling along the seam of that lid as an earthworm coiled fatly beneath his hand.
It’s time, mama, he thought with a buzzing sibilance in his head. It’s time to wake and rise up and Then the lid was swung open and there was a rush of moist putrescence and fetid gas that made Strand gag. Mama Lucille was laying there in her silk burial gown, gray hands folded neatly at her bosom. Her face was pallid and drawn, the skin there thin and tight as if the skull beneath was trying to push its way through. Blackened lips pulled back from narrow teeth in a livid corpse-grin.
She was dead, she was not alive…yet, there was almost a repellent and lewd vitality to her that did not belong. There was a sentience, an awareness that was practically obscene. Like seeing a wooden window dummy smile and wink at you. Life did not belong in those remains, yet it was there.
This was when Strand truly realized he had made an awful mistake.
Then Mama Lucille’s eyes flickered open, luminous yellow sacrificial moons.
She grinned and those withered fingers reached up, skeletal twigs scratching at an October window.
Strand started screaming.
*
It was a week later when he stumbled into town, gibbering and mad, his eyes wide and reflective like wax pennies. He made it to Sheriff Bolan’s office and collapsed into a chair, his face grimy, leaves and sticks braided into his hair. When he tried to speak, all that would come out was a dry gibbering. And when he tried to make Bolan understand with just his hands, those fingers shook with violent quakes.
No, Bolan did not know what had happened to him, not then, but he knew it was bad. Luke Strand was thin and wasted, drooling and delusional. Whatever had taken hold of him it had done so with claws and teeth and appetite. Chewing up the man and shitting what was left out the other side. You could smell the fear and the insanity running from him in a sharp juice. He was like some demented ghost haunting the bones of his life.
“ Okay, Luke,” Bolan finally said. “We’ll do it my way then.”
Bolan was a big man, hard and wiry with sure hands and a cool head. And if there was one thing he believed in, it was whiskey. It was the only medicine he used and the greatest curative in God’s creation. No greasy, slick- talking Yankee snakeoil salesman could touch good Kentucky whiskey and that was the plain truth. So he got out his bottle and he started pouring it into Luke Strand along with hot black coffee that was so strong it could’ve made a blind man see or a seeing man blind.
After a time, incrementally, Strand relaxed. All those compressed springs and taut wires loosened slowly, slowly, and he began to speak. He was still out of his head. So far out that try as he might, he could not find the way back in again. But he was lucid. And that was something.
“ Eileen’s dead,” was the first thing he said. “She was murdered.”
Bolan sat down, nodded, rolled himself a cigarette and gave it some fire. “Did you do the killing, son?”
But Strand shook his head so violently it looked like it might fall right off. “No, sir! It weren’t me…it was, it was… my mama.”
Bolan pulled off his cigarette, his eyes narrowed to razor cuts. He knew that Strand was not pulling his leg; he could see the sincerity in his eyes and it didn’t sit well with him. There were certain things that could be and others that could not. “Your mama’s dead, Luke. I saw her put in the ground.”
Strand’s eyes were glassy and staring like those of a stuffed elk. “She was in the ground, sheriff, then I dug her back up and I took her…took her to Missy Crow…”
Bolan grimaced and a slight tremor passed through his hand. An understanding passed through his eyes, a recognition as if he knew this dark path all too well and where it led. He sat there silently, smoking, looking as if what he had chewed for lunch was chewing on him now. “I told you to leave that goddamned hag out of this.”
But, as Strand explained, he could not.
He told Bolan what it was like with Mama Lucille being gone, how it had all pulled out his guts, emptied him, the grief stuffing something else back in there that was poisoned and foul. He told Bolan how he had gone to the straw-witch and paid her and all the rest.
“ Then I dug her up and she was dead…but she was alive,” Strand said.
But not really alive, he admitted. She was animate, but not human anymore. After she had woken up down in that grave, he climbed out of there, his mind just gone to sauce. He ran home and hid in the farmhouse and Mama Lucille followed him.
