The Resurrectionist (3 page)

Dale fell backward, still holding the cat. His eyes filled with tears and widened in shock.

“I-I wasn’t doing anything. I was just playing with it.”

“Playing with it? I watched you kill it with that knife!”

His mother pointed angrily at the small blood-covered knife still clutched in Dale’s hand.

“But I brought it right back to life! It doesn’t even know what happened to it.”

“How do you know that? How do you know it doesn’t remember? And even if it doesn’t, that still doesn’t make it okay. Do you think it was okay, what your daddy did to me? Because you brought me back? Do you think that made everything okay?”

“But you don’t even remember what happened and neither does the kitty. Look!”

Dale reached out for the kitten but this time it hissed and bit him on the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, then dashed across the garden and into the house.

“Ow!”

Dale seized his injured hand with his other hand and brought it to his mouth to suck away the blood.

“Oh, baby! Let me see that.”

Dale’s mother knelt down and took his injured hand in hers. There were two tiny puncture wounds where the kitten’s fangs had pierced his flesh.

“Dale, listen. You’re right. I don’t remember what happened to me and hopefully I never will, but that
still doesn’t make it right. What your father did to me was terrible and he’s going to rot in hell for it. I may not remember the pain now but from what those police officers told me they saw, it must have been horrible. Just because you can bring me back to life or bring that cat back doesn’t make it okay for us to suffer like that. Just because we can’t remember what happened doesn’t make it any less…evil. It’s still wrong.”

Dale stared at his mother. His face betrayed his utter lack of comprehension.

“It’s like those Christians that say that if there wasn’t a God they’d be out there robbing, raping, and murdering folks. If that’s true, and the only reason they aren’t out committing crimes is because they’re afraid to go to hell, then they aren’t really good people. Deep down they’re every bit as evil as the murderers and rapists…as evil as your father. There’s this quote and I forget who said it. I’m not really good with that sort of thing. But it says that morality is what you do when no one is looking. It’s what you do when you know you won’t get caught. Do you understand? Even if no one knows what you did when you killed that kitten, even if the kitten doesn’t even know, you’ll know and it’ll change you. It’s not about what you’re doing to the kitten. It’s about what you’re doing to yourself. Do you understand?”

Dale nodded and his mother gathered him into her arms and hugged him. But Dale hadn’t really understood his mother at all. The part of him that might have understood, might have empathized, had died on those many nights that he’d watched his mother get beaten and raped by his father. It had been buried the
night he watched him stab her to death, rape her, and skin her. Dale hugged his mother tight, still remembering what she had looked like bleeding on the bed until he’d resuscitated her. He didn’t understand. Not at all.

Dale heard his grandmother wake up in her bed screaming.

“Oh my God! He killed me! He killed me!”

He heard his mother’s slippered feet sinking into the old carpeting as she ran down the hall to his grandmother’s room. Her voice was calm and soothing, the same way she sounded when she spoke to him.

“It’s okay, Momma. You just had a bad dream.”

“It was Dale. He strangled me. He choked me to death. He killed me!”

“You’re not dead, Momma. Everything is okay. You’re okay.”

“No. No. No! He did it! I’m telling you he did it. He killed me and then he must have brought me back. Just like he did with that butterfly and that kitten you caught him torturing.”

“But why would he do that? If he wanted you dead, then why would he bring you back to life? I think you just had a bad dream.”

“It wasn’t a dream. He touched me too. He undressed me and he touched me.”

“Momma! Why would you say that?”

“He did it, I’m tellin’ you! H-he…he…urrrrlllgh.”

“Momma? Momma? Oh my God, Momma! Dale,
call the ambulance! Dale! Dale, call the ambulance! Your grandma is having a stroke.”

Dale threw back the covers and stepped out of his bed. He walked up the hallway and into his grandmother’s room. His mother sat on the edge of the bed cradling his grandmother in her arms while the woman turned blue and saliva foamed from between her lips and came frothing down her chin. She must have bitten her own lip or tongue because there was blood in her saliva. Her eyes had rolled up in her head so that only the whites were visible. As Dale stood there, her eyes rolled back down out of her skull and fixed on Dale. Her eyes widened and she began to tremble. Dale smiled. When he looked up at his mother she was staring right at him. There was a look on her face of terror and disgust. She had seen his smile. Dale walked over to the phone, picked it up, and dialed 911. He continued staring at his mother and grandmother as he spoke to the emergency operator and they continued staring at him.

Later that night at the hospital Dale’s grandmother passed away. Dale was asleep when she went. He woke up when his mother grabbed him and began slapping him. It took a moment for him to orient himself and remember where he was, in a hospital, with his dying grandmother. But why was his mother attacking him? Dale covered his head to protect himself from the blows.

“Mom? Stop! Why are you hittin’ me? I didn’t do nuthin’!”

“Bring her back! Bring her back!”

The nurses looked confused when they rushed into the room and pulled her off her son. Dale was breathing heavy. There were bruises on his face and arms
from where his mother had struck him. His mother was breathing hard too. She stared at him with something that looked very much like hate blazing in her eyes as the nurses held her back and she struggled in their grasp.

“Bring her back! Do it! Do it!”

“Mrs. McCarthy! There’s nothing he can do for her. The doctors did all they can. No one can help her now. She’s gone.”

“But he can. He can bring her back!” She looked directly into Dale’s eyes. Her eyes were so full of tears that he wasn’t sure that she could even see him through them. “Why won’t you bring her back? Why?”

Dale tried to think of something to say, something that would ease his mother’s mind and make him sound compassionate and wise. He couldn’t think of anything. The only thing he could think to say was the truth.

“I don’t want to bring her back. She didn’t like me.”

The two nurses turned to look at Dale. His mother’s mouth dropped open.

“You did this. Didn’t you? You did this to her. It wasn’t a dream. Was it? Get out of here! Get the fuck out of here! I don’t want you anywhere near her!”

A big, burly black orderly arrived with security.

“Maybe you should wait in the lobby, little man. Your mom is just a little upset. Everything will be all right.”

“Get out! Get out! Get out! You did this! I know you did this!”

Dale walked out of the hospital room with the orderly and the security guard. He hated to see his mother like this, but he was glad the old woman was dead. He began to whistle as he walked toward the lobby. He stopped himself, suddenly realizing how inappropriate
it must have appeared. He looked up at the orderly who was exchanging looks with the security guard. Their faces were completely shocked. It struck Dale as funny. He started to laugh, which made their expressions turn to bewilderment, which caused Dale to laugh even harder. They walked him into the lobby and then walked away shaking their heads. A teenage mother sat in the lobby, bouncing an infant on her lap.

“What’s so funny, kid?”

Dale wiped tears from his eyes and looked over at the girl. She was smiling at him, anticipating a really good joke.

“My grandmother just died.” He turned away from her and continued to laugh.

Dale sat in his room reading an old article in his dogeared
Encyclopedia of Crime
about a serial killer who had been captured in Philadelphia in the 1980s. His name was Gary Heidnick and he had been kidnapping women, keeping them chained up in his basement for months, raping and torturing them. A few of the women Heidnick kidnapped had been murdered and buried in his backyard or in a nearby wooded area. At least one of them had been dismembered, her flesh boiled into a stew and fed to his dogs and the other women. Dale found himself aroused by the tale. He believed the only way he’d ever get a girl would be to kidnap one.

The girls at his high school paid no attention to him except when they teased him and called him a loser or nerd. A bad case of acne made Dale’s face look like he were growing cranberries on it. Where his skin was not erupting with pimples it was sickly pale, and he was so skinny that the bones in his chest and shoulders stood out prominently through his skin whenever he dared to wear a tank top. It looked as if he hadn’t eaten in months. His chest was concave and his cheeks were sunken in. His eyes stared out from deep in their sockets, giving his face a cadaverous skeletal
look. He was the very antithesis of the athletes all the girls in his high school were chasing. He didn’t have their tanned muscular physiques. He looked about as healthy as death smoking a cigar in a nuclear waste dump.

Dale turned next to a story about Ed Kemper but soon lost interest in it. He wasn’t interested in reading about killers who murdered just for the sheer joy of killing. He knew that joy. That was the only joy he could ever remember knowing. Now that he was in the full swing of puberty and his hormones had begun to rage and riot, he was interested in other forms of satisfaction. He was more and more interested in the girls in his class and curious about what pleasures their young bodies might hold.

Dale could understand raping a woman and then murdering her to keep her silent. It had a sort of logic to it. He could even understand the idea of killing just for the pleasure of the act. But the idea of taking souvenirs home, pieces of their corpses, and masturbating with them, that made no sense at all. The only reason he could think of to rape a woman would be so you didn’t have to masturbate. Raping a woman and then killing her was one thing, but killing her and then raping her was just twisted. Dale thought about his father and what he’d seen him doing to his mother’s corpse. He had been getting just as much pleasure from skinning her as he had from fucking her.

Dale slammed the book shut when he felt an erection swelling in his shorts. He remembered how his father had stabbed his mother again and again and then slit her throat as he fucked her doggy-style. Dale was ashamed at how that memory made him feel. He
knew it was wrong but he couldn’t help the sensations that image aroused in his body. It was as if his own body was betraying him and his mother. Dale was terrified that he understood Kemper more than he’d realized. He thought about what his grandmother had said about God being crazy for giving the power of life to a person like him. He hated to admit it, but the old woman had been right. He wouldn’t do anything good with this power.

In the next room, Dale’s mother was taking a bath. Dale had heard her running the bathwater hours ago. She hadn’t left the bathroom since. He wondered if he ought to check on her. She had been in the bath far too long and he had heard a splashing and thumping sound coming from in there twenty or thirty minutes ago. He was afraid she might have fallen and hurt herself. It didn’t matter though. If she was dead, he would simply bring her back like he’d done before.

The hollow echo of solitary drops of water splashing down into a larger pool of water echoed down the hallway as Dale approached the bathroom he shared with his mother. He grasped the handle but the door was locked. It was one of those privacy locks that were about as useless as childproof caps on medicine bottles. Dale reached for the little metal pin that his mother kept above the doorway. All you had to do was slip it, or just about anything else that would fit into the little hole, in the center of the doorknob and the lock would disengage. It was more of a nuisance than a deterrent if someone really wanted to get in. The “key” wasn’t there.

“Mom?”

There was no answer.

“Mom?” Dale spoke in a louder voice. “Are you all right in there?”

Still no answer.

Dale banged his fist on the door.

“Mom! Mom!”

All he could hear was the drip of the tub faucet.

Dale sighed and turned away from the door. He took his time walking back to his room to get a hanger. There was no hurry. He had learned through trial and error that even if someone had been dead for several hours he could still bring them back, as long as they hadn’t begun to decompose. Once a corpse began to rot it was good and dead.

Once he had retrieved a wire hanger from his closet, Dale began straightening it as he walked back down the hall. He imagined he would find his mother drowned in the bathtub after slipping and hitting her head on the edge of the tub. Perhaps she had fallen out of the tub completely and cracked her neck. Whatever it was, he could fix it.

Dale slid the straightened hanger into the hole in the doorknob and disengaged the lock. The door popped open and Dale slipped inside. He wasn’t prepared for what he found. Dale’s mother lay in the tub just as he had expected, only she hadn’t slipped and hit her head or broken her neck or drowned or had a stroke or a heart attack. She had slit her wrists. The bathwater was tinted red like fruit juice. She had made a mess of her wrists. She cut across them first; then she’d taken the blade and cut all the way up her forearms. Ghastly red crosses scarred her arms.

Her eyes were closed and she looked as if she’d simply fallen asleep. Her breasts were pale and flabby and
had flopped to either side of her chest. Her legs were splayed immodestly but the amount of blood in the tub prevented Dale from seeing anything. Dale felt that uncomfortable stirring in his shorts again as he stared at his mother’s nude dead form. This time he didn’t shy away from it. There was no one around. No one to see what he was doing. Why not have some fun? he thought. He had never seen a real woman naked before, and even though it was his own mother, she
was
naked, and at least she wasn’t just a picture in a magazine or on TV.