The Resurrectionist

  The Resurrectionist

  Wrath James White

  LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY

  A Living Nightmare

  It was still dark when Sarah woke up in her bed with the taste of blood on her tongue. Josh was snoring quietly beside her. The sheets smelled fresh, like they had just been washed. Sarah screamed.

  She kept screaming even when Josh woke up and wrapped his strong arms around her. Even when he began to rock her back and forth and stroke her hair.

  “It’s okay, Sarah. It was just a bad dream. Everything’s okay.”

  Sarah checked Josh’s neck and chest. Then she checked her own. There were no wounds, no blood. She dropped her head onto Josh’s shoulder and began to weep.

  “That sick bastard. You don’t know what he did to me. He killed us. You were dead. We both were. The new neighbor…that guy…Dale…he murdered us!”

  “It was just a dream.”

  “No! It wasn’t a dream!”

  To Mom

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  A Living Nightmare

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  Praise

  Other Books By

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dale walked slowly down the hall, yawning and rubbing his eyes as he tiptoed to his parents’ bedroom where the screaming was increasing in intensity, growing ever more shrill and agonized. He shivered despite his flannel pajamas and held his comic book clenched tight in his fist like a security blanket, rolling it up and squeezing it until the pages creased and wrinkled and the cover tore. He hadn’t slept yet. He’d been lying in bed reading The Man of Steel, trying not to fall asleep until the fighting was over.

  Just as he had every night, he’d lain awake listening to the wet smack of knuckles striking flesh, the roar of his father’s angry voice and his mother’s own shrill, defiant retort, not backing down until the blows began to fall without relent. Then, when his mother had been beaten into silence, that horrible sound would come. That squishy, rhythmic smack of flesh against flesh mingled with grunts and groans and his mother’s muffled sobs. A part of him had always worried that someday his father would go too far and he would wind up an orphan. A part of him figured it was inevitable.

  When Dale heard that new sound, wetter, more violent, less rhythmic, cries and screams that turned into a gurgling wheeze, he knew that his mother was dead before he ever walked into the bedroom.

  His mother was swimming in a river of blood. It poured off the bed as Dale’s father continued to stab her. He was still inside of her, raping her as he did every night, eyes glittering, high on crystal meth. The steak knife in his hand rose and fell over and over again, stabbing in rhythm with his own thrusts. Dale’s mother had stopped screaming. Still, she continued to struggle beneath him, trying to escape. But even her struggles had lost their urgency. Her arms and legs pinwheeled in slow motion, her fingernails clawing the bloody sheets as Dale’s father fucked her from behind and stabbed her in the back again and again, wrenching the knife free from her shoulder and flinging blood onto the white walls up to the ceiling before clenching the knife in both fists and bringing the blade down again with all his strength.

  When her movements finally ceased, his father rolled her over onto her bloodied back. Her head wobbled loosely on her neck, which had been hacked and cut so that her vertebrae were visible through the back of her neck. Dale thought that this meant the assault was over and his mother would finally have some peace, but his father reinserted his erect penis into his mother’s blood-slickened vagina and continued stabbing her in her breasts, throat, and face until she was nearly unrecognizable.

  His father didn’t say a word as he viciously unmade Dale’s mother. He grunted occasionally with the effort and exertion as he simultaneously fucked and stabbed her. His father finally ejaculated, his body hitching and jerking. His eyes rolled back in ecstasy. A grin ripped across his bloodied face. He looked over at his son and smiled wider. For a moment, Dale thought his Dad was going to hold up his hand for a high-five. His father was still breathing hard and smiling when he looked back down at the ruin he’d made of his wife. Blood and sweat ran down his father’s face and Dale watched as his dad wiped the sweat from his eyes with his forearm, replacing the perspiration with blood, looking pleased with himself, as if he had just painted a work of art or played some complicated piece of music. His father looked at the knife in his hand and the blood that covered his fist and arms, then looked back down at Dale’s mother and began to cut on her again.

  Dale watched the entire thing without saying a word. He knew that this was much worse than the beatings. He knew that his mother was dead and that she would never be coming back, but he just could not connect with it all somehow. He felt as if he were watching a movie and not the sadistic murder of the woman who had given birth to him, who had been feeding him macaroni and cheese just hours ago, before tucking him into bed.

  He walked into the living room and picked up the phone. He could hear tearing and ripping sounds coming from his parents’ bedroom. He gritted his teeth, wincing each time he heard the sound of skin ripping away from muscle. Dale finally began to sob as he dialed 911.

  “Police emergency line. What is your emergency?”

  “My…my daddy just killed my mommy and…and he…he’s cutting her up.”

  He closed his eyes and tried his best to block out the sounds coming from the bedroom. He didn’t want to go in there again, didn’t want to see his mother butchered, reduced to meat. What he’d already seen and what he was imagining in his head was bad enough. Dale didn’t want to know what his father had been doing with that knife for the last twenty minutes. He waited on the couch with his hands clamped over his ears until the police arrived.

  “Police! Open the door!”

  Dale opened the door for the police and was whisked outside and into the arms of a female officer who placed him in the front seat of a squad car. The policewoman told him her name. Linda? Lydia? Lila? He had forgotten it immediately after hearing it. He was too busy thinking about his mom.

  Everything was happening so fast. His mind was having a hard time catching up. Somehow, he’d gone from eating mac and cheese, watching Afro Samurai on TV, and kissing his mom and dad good night to sitting in a cop car while policemen stormed the house to arrest his dad, who’d just murdered his mother. Dale’s mind was having a hard time making the adjustments. He could not connect with this reality.

  He watched the other officers enter the house, heard the shouts and screams and then the gunshots. He began
to cry again, screaming for his mommy when he saw the officers stagger out of the house, ashen-faced, some regurgitating on the front lawn, others just staring off into space. A couple of cops held each other and wept. It was seeing those cops crying for his dead mother that broke him, brought home the reality of his mother’s brutal murder.

  “Mommyyyyyy! Mooooommyyyy!”

  “Stay right here.”

  The female officer climbed out of the police cruiser and walked across the lawn into the house. It was less than a minute before she came running back with her eyes wide and terrified. Dale watched as she leaned against the trunk of the car and vomited into the street while crying hysterically.

  “Oh my God! Oh my God! He tore her apart! How could he do that to his own wife? How could he do that to the mother of his child? He cut off all of her skin!”

  Dale quietly left the police cruiser. He walked back across the lawn and into the house while the other officers stood by their vehicles comforting each other, calling for the coroner’s van and the crime-scene unit, doing whatever they could to avoid going back into the house.

  The bedroom was splattered red. The carpet was saturated with his mother’s blood. It squished between Dale’s toes as he crept barefoot toward the bed. What he saw splayed out on the sheets defied all sanity. His father had torn his mother’s body apart. Her nightgown was pushed up around her neck and the skin had been flayed from her torso and piled up on the floor. She had been stabbed multiple times in the face, neck, and chest, puncturing both eyes, her cheeks and forehead, bisecting her mouth and nose. Her ears had been removed and she’d been scalped. Her throat had been cut so deeply that she’d been nearly decapitated. Dale’s father had begun skinning her legs when the police had apparently burst in and shot him. His body was crumpled up on the side of the bed.

  Dale crawled up onto the bed, slogging through his mother’s blood, his chest hitching with emotion, and placed his lips to his mother’s lips, trying to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He blew into her lungs, then inhaled deeply and blew again. He was about to give her another breath when he felt her blow back into his mouth. She was breathing.

  Her breaths came slowly at first and then began to speed up, coming faster and faster as if she was hyperventilating. As Dale watched, her flesh began to knit back together. A fury of movement exploded beneath the thin sheet of skin that remained on her body. It looked as if her muscles had been filled with tiny insects that were all moving at once, warring within her flesh.

  Severed veins, arteries, tendons, and sinews crawled like vines over exposed bone, slithering like a nest of worms within the lacerated meat, reattaching muscle to skeleton. Skin cells regenerated, reproducing at an astonishing rate as the skin grew back to cover her skeletal muscular system where the skin had been shorn away.

  Her breaths came in quick, short bursts as her body remade itself, chest rising and falling rapidly. Long minutes went by before her breathing began to slow, relaxing into its normal rhythm. Slowly, her eyes opened and she sat up.

  Dale’s mother looked around at all the blood and skin and bits of flesh, then down at her husband’s body. She screamed and immediately the room filled with police officers with guns drawn, shouting at her and ordering her to lie down on the floor.

  “Get down! Get the fuck on the floor! Put your hands where I can see them!”

  One of the police officers tackled Dale’s mother and soon three cops were pinning her down and wrestling her arms behind her back. Once they had her in handcuffs they lifted her back to her feet.

  “Now, who the fuck are you? How did you get in here?”

  Blood obscured her features in a mask of red.

  “I live here. What are you doing in my house?”

  “Where’s the body? What did you do with the body?”

  “What body? I don’t know what you’re talking about! What happened to my husband?”

  She was in a panic. Dale clung to her legs, hugging her tight.

  “There was a woman’s body lying in this bed with her head almost cut off and half her skin removed. You’ve got her blood all over you. Now what did you do with the body?”

  Police officers surrounded Dale’s mother, staring at her in horror and disgust. His mother’s nightgown had been cut to ribbons. Her breasts and the triangular patch of brown hair between her thighs were visible through the rents in the fabric. Blood covered nearly every inch of her body.

  “Who let her in here? Who was supposed to be watching this kid?”

  “It’s my mommy. She’s okay. I made her better.”

  The officer who’d tackled her pointed at her shredded gown.

  “Isn’t that the same nightgown the dead woman was wearing? What the fuck is going on here?”

  Two of the officers who’d handcuffed Dale’s mother were now standing beside her, backing slowly away, looking at her as if she were a ghost. The fear in their eyes was like a light growing brighter until it radiated from them and filled the entire room.

  The policewoman walked over to Dale and his mother. His mother was holding him tight, smearing blood onto his pajamas.

  “What happened to my husband?”

  “We had to shoot him. He was killing someone. We thought it was you. Do you know where the girl went? The woman whose body was here in this bed?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “There wasn’t anybody else in here. It was just my mommy. My dad hurt her real bad and then I gave her mouth-to-mouth like they do on TV and she was all better!”

  The police officers all looked at one another, not knowing what to make of it. The officer who’d shot Dale’s father, a fat Italian cop in his forties, was shifting nervously from one foot to the other, wringing his hands. He looked around at his colleagues for support.

  “I’m Lisa…L-Lisa McCarthy. This is my house. What are you all doing here?”

  “How are we going to explain why we shot this woman’s husband without a body?”

  Another officer with gold bars on the sleeve of his uniform looked down at the body on the floor.

  “Well, he had a knife. And with all that blood it looked like he’d killed her.”

  The policewoman who’d taken Dale out to the police car was standing in the room, looking around at all the blood and then at the blood-soaked woman with the torn nightgown.

  “No! This wasn’t some kind of hallucination! We all saw what he’d done to her. He almost cut her head off! Her skin was removed. Look! It’s still there. Her skin is still there! There has to be a body.”

  The officers dashed frantically around the house, trying to find the missing corpse. The policewoman continued to stare at Dale’s mom, noting the blood matted in her hair, already coagulating, the slashes in her nightgown. The policewoman began to visibly shake. She looked from the bloodied woman to Dale and back.

  Dale’s eyes connected with the policewoman’s and the officer clamped a hand over her mouth as she stared back at him.

  “Oh my God. It can’t be,” she whispered.

  The policewoman sniffled a couple of times, wiped the vomit from her lips with the back of her hand, then wiped the tears from her eyes and straightened her uniform. Dale watched as she nodded to the other officers, gave them a weak smile, and then knelt down, taking Dale’s hand. The policewoman looked up at Dale’s mom and then over at the other officers.

  “Can I take your son outside so the officers can ask you a few questions?”

  “Uh, sure, but I don’t know what happened. I just woke up on this bed in all this blood. And…and then I saw Mikey dead.”

  “He killed you, Mom. You were dead and then I brought you back.”

  The policewoman looked at Dale for a long moment. Dale could feel her trembling as she held his hand. Her hand flew up to her mouth again and tears welled up in her eyes. Dale knew right then that she believed him.

  “Let’s get you out of here.”

  The policewoman took Dale outside, casting on
e last glance over her shoulder at the blood-soaked woman, the woman she’d seen just minutes ago with stab wounds in her face and half the skin stripped from her body.

  Outside, Dale and the policewoman sat in the back of the police cruiser. The sky had gone from black to gray as the sun began to rise somewhere beyond the big houses and trees. Dale stared out the window of the police cruiser, watching the sunrise. When he turned back toward the officer, she was smiling.

  “You…you healed her, didn’t you?”

  Dale nodded.

  “How?”

  “Like they do in the movies. Mouth-to-mouth resussisation.”

  “You mean ‘resuscitation’?”

  “Yeah, I breathed into her and she healed all up.”

  “But she was dead. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah, just like on TV. She was dead and I saved her.”

  “But-but how did her wounds heal?”

  Dale shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t know.”

  “And you’re sure that’s your mom in there? It’s not some other woman that got in the house somehow?”

  “No, that’s my mom.”

  “And the woman who was on the bed when we got here, the woman who was all cut up, that was your mom too?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The policewoman smiled and wiped tears from her eyes.

  “It’s a miracle,” she said.

  Tears began to flow freely down her face and she began to laugh.

  “It’s a miracle!” she said louder.

  Dale smiled back at her, confused but happy.

  Moments later CSU arrived. They began collecting evidence, evidence that would confirm exactly what Dale had told the policewoman, evidence that they would all reject. A week later, when the lab came back with the DNA results, the blood on the bed and carpet and the skin recovered from the scene were all confirmed as coming from Dale’s mom. The results were dismissed as some sort of lab error and the case was promptly closed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dale picked up the kitten from the crate. His hand gripped its head tightly as he slowly turned it like he were unscrewing a jar, twisting its neck. He could hear the bones crunching and sinews and ligaments ripping and popping as the kitten kicked and gurgled and scratched. Its tongue flopped out of its mouth and its eyes rolled sideways and came to a stop. Dale smiled as he watched its chest cease its rise and fall. He stared at the kitten for a moment, then breathed into its mouth. Once. Twice. He pulled his mouth away and smiled as the kitten began to breathe again and its heartbeat returned, unnaturally fast at first, then gradually slowing. The fur around the kitten’s neck undulated and Dale could hear snapping and popping sounds as muscles, bones, and sinew rearranged themselves beneath the feline’s skin.