Revival

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 co

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 fa

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 fu

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 Je