The Resurrectionist Read online

  The kitten purred as Dale scratched its tummy and behind its ears. It closed its eyes and rubbed against Dale’s legs contentedly. Dale chuckled and shook his head in disbelief.

  “Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.”

  He grabbed the kitten by the throat again and began to squeeze.

  Dale could hear his mother and grandmother talking in the kitchen. They were talking about him. They were always talking about him. They tried to whisper but it was so still and quiet that he could still hear every word drifting through the open window on the warm spring breeze.

  “I talked to the priest today…about Dale.”

  “Momma! I told you nobody is supposed to know about him. About what he can do.”

  “Oh, hush. I didn’t give away your secret. It was in a confessional. He can’t tell anybody. Besides, something ain’t right with that boy and you know it. The dog won’t even play with him. I find knives and clothes in his room with blood on them. And I have nightmares. I have these terrible nightmares about being stabbed and suffocated. I know it has something to do with Dale.”

  Dale’s grandmother was an old Southern woman who’d grown up on a farm. She wasn’t like those Southern belles you saw on TV sitting on the porch of some old colonial mansion sipping mint juleps. His grandmother had dropped out of school in sixth grade to work the farm. She was hard and coarse and always spoke her mind whether she was right or wrong and was more likely to be smoking a cigar than sipping tea.

  “Shhhh! Keep your voice down, Momma. He might hear you.”

  “Ya see? You’s afraid of him too.”

  Dale heard his grandmother pause and take a deep breath. He paused too, holding his breath, waiting to hear what she’d said to the priest about him.

  “I told him all about what happened to you and what Dale did. How he breathed life back into you. The things I’ve seen him do around the house. How I watched him kill a butterfly in the garden and then bring it back to life. Then I asked Father Stanley why God would put a power like that in the hands of somebody evil.”

  “Momma! Dale’s not evil.”

  “That boy has got the devil in him and you know it.”

  “He’s just a little boy.”

  “And God help us all when he becomes a man. God help us all.”

  His mother let out a long sigh and Dale could almost see her rolling her eyes.

  “What did Father Stanley say, Momma?”

  “Oh, he’s an old fool. He tried to tell me that God wouldn’t give power like that to someone unless it was to fulfill his purpose somehow. He told me Dale must have some good in him, that God must be working through him in some way. Made Dale out to be some kind of saint. He wanted me to bring him to the church and set him up like they used to do with the revival tents and all. So he could heal people in Jesus’s name.”

  “And what did you say?”

  Dale continued to listen. He was fairly certain that whatever the old battle-ax had said about him, it hadn’t been good.

  “I told him that God gives power to evil people all the time. Hell, some of the most powerful people in this world are mobsters, drug dealers, pimps and gun runners, dictators and warlords. I asked him if God had some sort of plan for Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini or Saddam Hussein or that idiot that got us into the war in Iraq. That shut him up right quick. He came back with that old bullshit about God working in mysterious ways. It seems like whenever you point out God doin’ something that just don’t make no damned sense they always hit you with that. Maybe God ain’t really all that mysterious. Maybe he just likes puttin’ us through hell.”

  “Momma, you don’t mean to talk that way.”

  “To hell if I don’t. You explain it then. You tell me why God would give that kind of power to a boy like that. That boy got the devil in him, I’m tellin’ you. He ain’t got no conscience, no sympathy. You know damn well he ain’t no good. He’s just like his father and look how he ended up.”

  Dale squeezed the kitten tighter. Its tongue lolled from its mouth and it made a dry hissing sound as its legs beat at the air. His mother, his grandmother, none of them understood him. He didn’t even understand himself. All he knew was that he was different and for some reason it felt good to kill things.

  The smile marring his face turned cruel and the look in his eyes became one that battered women often saw in the eyes of their abusers. It was the look his dad had worn the day he’d taken a knife to Dale’s mother. Dale grabbed the kitten’s head with two hands. It began scratching, hissing, and kicking its legs, its entire body twitching and convulsing as Dale shoved his thumbs into its eyes. Blood poured down the kitten’s furry face, soaking its whiskers, as Dale’s thumbs dug into the feline’s brain.

  The kitten twitched and shuddered, then went limp. Dale withdrew his bloody thumbs from the cat’s skull and wiped them off on his Levis. He stared down at the cat and tried to feel for a pulse in its throat. He wet the back of his hand with his tongue and held it up to the cat’s nose to see if he could feel it breathing. It wasn’t. Dale looked over his shoulder to make certain that no one was watching and then gathered the kitten into his hands. Its body was so tiny it barely filled his cupped palms. He held its face up to his lips and once again Dale exhaled into the cat’s lungs, watching as its chest expanded and then began to rise and fall rapidly.

  Its eyelids seethed with movement. A riot of activity was taking place in the empty sockets where its eyes had been. A wet crackling sound emitted from the cat’s bleeding face as it regenerated. When the kitten’s eyelids fluttered open, two flawless green orbs stared up at Dale. The newly resurrected kitten sat in Dale’s palms, licking its own blood off its whiskers and grooming itself. It showed no fear as Dale began to stroke its fur. Just as before, it rubbed itself against him, purring contentedly. It had no idea of the things Dale had done to it.

  Still holding the kitten, Dale removed a small penknife from his pocket. He stabbed the knife into the kitten’s throat as the kitten howled and hissed, crying out in agony and spearing its tiny needlelike claws into Dale’s hands. Its claws were still embedded in Dale’s hands when it began to shake and convulse, spraying blood from its mouth. This time Dale whooped with excitement and laughed out loud as the little gray-haired Himalayan choked on its own life fluid.

  He was still smiling when he placed his lips against the kitten’s mouth for the third time and breathed part of his own limitless life force back into the cat. The smile grew wider as the kitten’s legs began to kick again and the wound in its throat stitched itself closed and faded away. His smile fell to a hard, flat line when he looked up and saw his mother standing above him. He spotted her there only seconds before the back of her hand collided with his mouth.

  “What the hell are you doing? Do you think torturing a poor animal is funny?”

  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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  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.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  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.