Revival House (15 page)

We both smile.

I know exactly what this is. An entrance to the tunnel system right in my very own basement.

We spend a day hammering and picking away at the old Savannah brick, and we’re in.

“Give me the flashlight,” I say, feeling for it in the dark behind me. I grab it from Avery and light up the corridor. Disappointment flares in my mind as another wall blocks our path dead ahead.

“Oh, fudge,” Avery says when we get close. “We can’t work in this tiny space. There goes that idea.”

My eyes strain in the gloom. The stone wall looks darker to the left. We creep toward it. It’s another tunnel.

Leading to another Dead House!

“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s father’s brother,” Avery says. I can hear the smile in his voice. It’s the same smile that decorates my face. The room is a little bigger than the Dead House on Four’s tour, and it is equipped with the same slab in the middle, sink at the side, but no skylight.

“This is still going to take some serious work,” I say, looking up at the ceiling. “We need light, power to run machinery, ventilated air.”

So, we get to work and we’re up and running in two days’ time.

Damn, I love that nosy little beagle.

~

“We need a marketing plan,” Avery says, hooking up tubing to embalming pumps. “Something big, of course, but, you know, covert. This is going to be huge, but we can’t divulge any secrets just yet, right?”

I sigh. I am surprised that I find this venture distasteful, since it could mean a huge scientific breakthrough and also resuscitate my dying business.

Avery talks about putting stickers in phone booths, like he’d read in some book once, but how many phone booths are there any more? And why would people be looking for reanimation services in them anyway? There is talk about putting an ad in the
Savannah Morning Times
, but how would we word that? ‘Did your loved one suffer a life-threatening head injury and has only hours to live? Did he or she fall victim to fatal cardiac arrest?’ Better yet: ‘May we bash your head in, giving you a life-threatening head wound or even just induce cardiac arrest, then kill you for a couple of hours and bring you back to life? All in the name of science, of course. We here at Exley & Sons can help you bring you or that loved one back from the very brink of death, snatch you or them right out of the Grim Reaper’s skeletal claws...’ That might play on Craigslist, but I doubt it would keep law enforcement from investigating such a service.

Chapter 28 – Caleb

“You need to stay away from him,” he yelled at Scarlet. “I mean it.”

“Shove it up your ass, Four. He’s harmless. He’s not the one I’m seeing anyway.”

They don’t know I’m on the backstairs, listening to their hushed kitchen conversation. I can just imagine Four’s bloated red face, veins standing out in his neck; Scarlet’s vacant sneer.

“He’s dangerous. Don’t you see it? The fighting, the bruises, the weird shit he says. The other day, he told me he’d cut my throat so I wouldn’t have to worry about being late for work. Something’s wrong, Scarlet. Bad fucking wrong.”

“Well, from what I can tell, he seems okay to me.”

She’s lying, of course. Ever since Sterling offed himself, I suppose I have been acting kind of fucked up. She told me I used to be so sweet to her— a bumbling, shy, only slightly strange dude with a silly crush on her. She thinks I’ve changed. She’s wrong. Of course I’m in love with her. But I also want to completely destroy her. She chose Avery, probably thinking he’d take her back to California with him someday. Instead of facing more rejection, I spend more time alone, brooding, plotting, planning. Strange cuts open on my face and arms, I get into more fights than ever, the headaches come every day. Right now, Scarlet tells Four that she thought she heard me say something about killing her, out at Oatland Island, but she’s okay with that.

“I think he quit taking his meds,” he says. Scarlet and Four both know about my problems. The basics, anyway, the stuff about my parents. They don’t know that I broadcast and receive telepathic messages. They don’t know I crave violence. They don’t know I am going to bring someone back from the dead.

“Fuck you,” Scarlet says, defending my dubious honor.

Stupid bitch.

Heart of my heart.

“Those psych meds are just a conspiracy,” she says. “Doctors and drug companies make cash, like, hand over fist while they pacify a generation of people who only think they’re fucked up because of the idealistic images of ‘normalcy’ they’re fed through the TV. Drugs like that turn people into sheep. Can you blame him for not wanting to be a fucking sheep?”

Four flicks his cigarette into the sink. I hear the hollow ding on the stainless steel, the hiss of the glowing cherry rocketing into a drop of water. “You’re fucked, too. Forget Avery. You and Caleb make a great couple. You deserve each other, fucking freaks.” I hear heavy footsteps followed by the opening and slamming of the kitchen door. He’s gone.

I’m sorry for your loss.

Chapter 29 – Scarlet

“Hello?” I slip down the hall between two creepy parlor room things. Little bronze plaques beside their doorframes announce their names: ‘Peace’ and ‘Serenity.’ Gross. I don’t look in, just in case there are, like, dead people in there or something.

I know he’s in here somewhere. No sign on the parlor level. I mount the front staircase and shout his name. Nothing. I stand there listening for a minute. No creaking footsteps, no one upstairs. I trot down the steps to the embalming room. Empty. My ‘hello’ echoes off the tile. I turn toward the lab and walk through the doorway. The glass fronted shelves have been shoved into a corner. In their place, a gaping hole penetrates the brick wall.

“Hello,” louder now into the dark mouth.

I approach the hole, stepping over the piles of broken brick on the floor.

“Hello?”

A muffled voice comes from somewhere down the hole. I step through the rough arch into the dark and damp tunnel, like the subterranean passageways on the ghost tours. A dim light pierces the darkness, coming from around a distant corner. I trip on something and look down. In the gloom I can see a thick rope of extension cords and this, like, big silver air duct tube running from the mouth of the tunnel toward the light source.

The voice.

His voice.

Soothing someone.

A whining dog.

An antiseptic smell fills the space, almost obliterating the underlying musty sewer smell.

I advance, tiptoeing, toward the light, turning the corner.

Oh, my God. One of the dogs strapped on the table with tubes stuck in it, its eyes taped shut, legs stretched, paws bound.

Him. In a stained apron, rubber gloves on his hands. Medical equipment, one bright light swinging above the dog, other dogs in a line of wire cages. He murmurs to the dog as he shoves some, like, tube down its throat.

That’s when I start screaming.

Chapter 30 – Caleb

His heart slows as the last of the cold saline enters his body, displacing the warm life-sustaining plasma and platelets. I disconnect the line feeding the clear liquid into his circulatory system when the outgoing line fades from a dark purple to pink to clear. I lay my hand on the beagle’s chest and feel cold stillness. All respiration has ceased, there is no movement beneath his taped eyelids.

The dog is dead.

For now.

“Phase one complete, commander,” Avery says with a grin.

My eyes fall on the dead beagle. Something in my throat burns all the way down to my chest. Tears gather in the corners of my eyes.

I’m sorry for your loss.

But, it’s only suspended animation
, I tell myself.

Since there’s nothing to do down in the new Dead House – ‘Revival House,’ Avery calls it, we play Uno for a couple of hours, ignoring the whining of the other dogs who watch us from their kennels. I can’t bear to look at the animals’ uncomprehending liquid eyes, their furry little faces, their wagging tails. The thought that they trust us not to harm them makes me want to vomit. They are the only beings in the world that never inspire any type of violence in my volatile mind. I’d love to keep these dogs as pets, to care for them, to play with them, to love them; I’d never had a pet of my own.

But Avery says what we’re doing is far more important.

We can learn to do what, up until now, only God himself has been able to do: restore life to those who are on the very brink of Death, and even just beyond.

The beagle’s blood is kept body-temperature in an insulated metal jar for a number of hours. Avery inserts an arterial hook into the dog’s neck, pushing it through a shaved patch of pink flesh and feeding it in a couple of inches. He twists a valve and the blood flows back into the dog’s body, forcing the saline out the other tube into an orange five-gallon Home Depot bucket. I lean over the dog’s face, like some kind of idiot, looking for any sign of movement, any sign of life.

“Okay, watch yourself,” Avery says. He’s got the paddles of a defibrillator clasped in each of his hands. I scurry to the other side of the lab table. Avery glances at me, then trains his eyes on the dog’s face, and says: “Clear.” He touches the paddles to the dog’s chest. Its body jerks, straining the loops of webbing that hold down its limbs. It falls back on the table. Lifeless. The heart monitor shows a flat line.

Disappointed, I look at Avery’s face. He looks hopeful, eager. I am less so. In fact, I’m heart-broken. That poor little doggy.

A blip registers on the heart monitor.

Then another.

Slowly, the individual blips weave themselves into a discernable pattern. The dog’s eyeballs roll beneath their lids and Avery peels away the tape. The beagle’s eyes are open, tracking from Avery to me and back again. Its tail taps on the table, its tongue forces its way out of its mouth around the breathing tube. I can’t help but laugh.

“And I said, ‘Let there be life.’”

And, I’ll be damned, there is.

As awed as I am by this act, I know there’s something not right about doing this. Huh. I always thought this was what I wanted more than anything: the ability to restore life. My stomach flips as I watch the beagle struggling to get the breathing tube out of its mouth with its bloodied pink tongue. He must have bitten it when Avery shocked him. I pull out the tube and I swear the dog smiles at me.

Avery smirks and I know he is the Devil. No man should have this power.

We wrap the beagle in a blanket and lay him gently on the dog bed we’d placed in his kennel before the experiment. Just as we coax the lab out of his kennel, I think I hear someone shout my name. I stand still for a few seconds, but I don’t hear it again. I go back to helping Avery strap the retriever down on the table. Just as he pushes the plunger on the syringe to deliver a sedative into the animal’s bloodstream, I hear it again.

I’m sure of it this time. I freeze, my heart pounding in my ears, fight-or-flight, hide or run, answer or not.

“Hello?”

Female voice.

I look at Avery.

He doesn’t seem to notice. He goes about his business, readying tubes and hanging bags of saline that have been cooled in the mini refrigerator.

Footsteps echo somewhere down the tunnel, growing closer, louder.

“Hello?”

Much closer.

Avery shoves the arterial hook in the dog’s neck, taping the fat needle down with white cloth tape, and the death process begins.

That’s when the screaming starts.

Scarlet’s pear-shaped figure appears in the mouth of the tunnel. Her mouth forms a perfect O as a high-pitched wail streams out forever. Her eyes pass over the unconscious and bleeding Labrador retriever on the table, the myriad pieces of surgical and medical equipment, the power generator, the line of four dog kennels, my blank face. Her scream dies in her throat.

The secret is out.

She knows that I am a monster.

She turns and slips on the damp pavers, regains her footing by slamming her arms into the slick wall, her giant purse swinging, and runs into the darkness.

I look at Avery. He raises his broad shoulders and neat eyebrows in a simultaneous shrug, drawing up one corner of his mouth.

“Shou— should I—,” I stammer.

Avery says he doesn’t care what I do. “Go after her if you want. All she’s going to do is fuck everything up. She will not understand. God is not a woman.” He laughs. “I told you she’d find that tunnel sooner or later.” He smirks.

I pull off my latex gloves and take off through the tunnel. My lab is empty, there’s no sign of Scarlet in the kitchen, the hallway, or the front parlors.