This Sickness Will Not End in Death

by Mavrik McMeekan

Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:

The government brought their bodies home today. We thought there would be more dignity. Maybe a parade. At least a trumpet. But when the wagon came, it came in silence.

Mama and I stood on the outskirts of town and, little by little, the creaking, rhythmic cadence of wooden wheels reached us. The bemused sighs of the ox drawing the cart. A nauseated feeling that had nested in my stomach for days slowly cooled, then solidified into ice as it passed. The driver, who looked very stiff in a wool Army uniform, did not wave, did not tip his hat, did not acknowledge us.

We followed it to the town hall, marching through the stink of their rotting bodies.

When the wagon faltered to a stop in front of Mayor Hughes, the driver gave a little nod, imperceptible beyond three feet, and crossed his arms. Hughes gestured toward the back of the wagon. Michael and David climbed inside, disappearing into the dusky blue shadows between its bow.

Mama clutched my hand so hard I thought it might shatter. I sank further into that icy feeling, though my heart pounded like a drumline.

They carried Elijah out first. His grey-green arms crimped up to his chest like a locust’s. They carried him to the back of town hall, down the cellar door.

The Mayor paced back and forth, his mouth a hard, white line. Who next? Isaac? Or Simeon?

When the duo returned, Hughes stopped them a moment. They nodded grim nods and climbed back into the wagon. They came out a moment later, Simeon’s ruined body in their arms. The steel in the Mayor’s face melted, only for a moment. He caught the sob before it escaped his lips.

Sweat bristled across my brow. Next would be Isaac.

Oh God, what have you done to him?

Mama and I stepped closer to the cart, legs jumpy and mechanical. Michael and David climbed into the wagon. They stayed in there a long time. A steady, mounting dread grew in my stomach.

Finally, Michael stuck his head out of the flap.

“Isaac’s not dead, Ben. He’s not dead!”

Mama’s grip went slack, and she sagged to a seat on the Saloon’s front porch. The blood ran from her face, imbuing her with the spectral color of some terrible spirit.

“What do you mean he’s not dead?” Hughes asked.

“He’s—he’s not dead. He’s moving!”

The Mayor took a tentative step toward the wagon, a step further into that stink of pestilence, and stopped.

“Well, bring him out,” he said, covering his mouth and nose with a handkerchief.

Michael nodded, and a moment later, they carried my brother from the back of the wagon. If he moved, the effort was too small for me to see. He looked just as dead as Elijah and Simeon. They carried him through the front doors.

The driver whipped the reins and wheeled out of town.

When he vanished over the horizon, Mama stood on unsteady legs and dragged me to the town hall steps.

“You hear that, honey?” she said. “They say he’s not dead. The Lord hasn’t taken him from us.”

Our heels clicked on the wooden steps, and we found the door unlocked. David rushed past us and ran up the street to Doc Caleb’s house. The room stank like of infection. Isaac’s body lay on a large cherrywood desk. Michael draped a thick blanket over him, drew it up to his chin, making him look like a boy afraid of the dark.

Hughes looked at us, locked eyes with Mama, and sighed.

“Mary, now, look, we don’t know—”

“The Lord’s saved him, Ben. Touched him like he did Lazarus.” I didn’t like the dreamy faraway look in her eyes.

He came forward, wrapped his hands around her shoulders.

“Mary, he’s hurt very badly. I don’t think—I just don’t want you to get your hopes up.

“He’ll be okay, Ben. I know it.”

The Mayor frowned, nodded, then let go of her. He let his hand trail down, ran it through my hair, and cupped my chin in his hand.

“I’m very sorry, Miriam.”

“Ain’t no reason to be sorry, Ben,” Mama said. “Ain’t no reason for any of us to be sorry. In near two thousand years, who got to witness one of God’s own miracles?”

She led me by the hand to where Isaac lay.

Up close, I could see the minute trembling in his lips. The strange words he tried to say but could only whisper. His brows trembled in miniature expressions of fear, then rage, then awe.

What are you seeing, wherever you are?

Doc Caleb arrived, Michael by his side, carrying a black leather medical bag. He dropped the bag in a chair and walked to Isaac, turning his head this way and that, pulling back his eyelids, thrusting his jaw open and examining the back of his throat.

Through the inspection, his expression shifted from grim determination to confusion.

He drew a stethoscope from his bag, unfastened the buttons on Isaac’s uniform, and pressed it to various spots on his mottled chest. A deep crease formed between his brows.

“What’s wrong, Doc Caleb?” I asked.

“Shush, child,” Mama said, drawing me into her skirts.

“What is it, Caleb?” the Mayor asked.

“Can’t find a heartbeat.”

A hideous rattle fell from Isaac’s lips. Everyone flinched.

“What was that?” Doc Caleb asked, leaning in over Isaac. He furrowed his brow, strained to hear. “I think he said, ‘water.’”

“Of course,” Mayor Hughes said. “Get him some water, Michael, will you?”

Michael ran out the door and returned with a bucket. Doc Caleb took it, dropped a rag inside, and patted it on Isaac’s lips.

“Good Lord, just give him a drink,” Mama said.

Doc Caleb held up a hand.

Isaac’s tongue peeked out like a serpent and slithered weakly against the water beaded on his lips.

“I don’t know how,” Doc Caleb said, “but he’s alive.”

We stood there a long time, watching Isaac lick the water from his lips like you might watch some grotesque circus show. It melted some of the icy feeling in me, replaced it with a sickening hope. Sickening because we recognized there was something wrong, something sacrilegious in it.

I knew better than to say it, but I wondered if we were watching one of God’s miracles or one of the devil’s.

“I think he’s saying something,” Mayor Hughes said.

Doc Caleb leaned in again. His eyes went wide.

“Isaac,” he said, “you don’t mean that.”

Isaac’s lips twitched in a way that reminded me of a smashed bug. I took a step closer and heard his husky, shadow voice.

“Kill… me… please… kill… me.”

I shuddered and retreated into Mama’s skirts. I hoped she hadn’t heard him.

Even if she hadn’t heard him the first time, she would hear it eventually. As Isaac drank, his voice gained strength. Still weak, it grew into a shallow double voice as though death itself spoke alongside him, strong enough to hear.

“Kill me. Kill me. Please kill me.”

Mama gasped, and Doc Caleb looked up at us.

“Let’s step outside, ladies,” he said, handing the rag to Michael.

The air outside no longer stank of death, and I breathed, full and deep, for the first time that day. Tears streamed down Mama’s cheeks, and Doc Caleb told her it was normal. Terrible, but normal, for a wounded soldier to beg for death. Nothing uncommon with that. Isaac looked like he was getting stronger, and he could do right by God when he got well enough to pray.

All through his speech, he kept looping near a word, though he never dared say it.

Unnatural.

And just beneath that, its older, more powerful form: Unholy.

“Now, it’s your right to be there, but if you break into hysterics, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

I’d always liked Doc Caleb, but for a moment, my body flushed with hatred.

He led us back inside, back into that stinking miasma, and gasped.

Isaac sat on the table, rotten chest visible through the unbuttoned flaps of his jacket. He had one arm loose around David’s shoulder.

“When did he sit up?” Doc Caleb asked, rushing to him.

“Just now,” Michael said.

“What—what year is it?” Isaac wheezed.

“It’s 1863, son.”

Isaac’s eyes went wide. “No. It’s been—thousands of years.”

The men exchanged uneasy glances.

“Isaac, you just left home six months ago,” Mayor Hughes said.

“No,” Isaac sobbed, burying his head in his hands. His shoulder shuddered and twitched in that same crushed bug way. When he lifted his head, I gasped in horror and disgust.

When he cried, no tears fell. Only maggots.

A low groan came from Mayor Hughes, and he ran from the room.

“I’m not—I’m not supposed to be here,” Isaac said.

“Now you stop that, Isaac,” Mama said. “The Lord’s given you a gift, and you’re spitting right in his face.”

Isaac recognized her for the first time. “Mama?”

Mama stepped forward, tears running down her cheeks. “That’s right, baby. It’s me. You’re home now.”

She wrapped her arms around him, shoulders hitching with sobs.

“You’re home now,” she said. “The Lord brought you home.”

“The Lord?” Isaac asked.

“Yes, baby, the Lord brought you home to me.”

“Mama, there is no Lord,” he said.

Everyone gasped.

“What did you say?” she whispered.

“There is no Lord.”

“No—you—you take that back now,” Mama said. “You’re not well, you hear? You’re talkin’ out of turn.”

“I’ve seen it, Mama,” Isaac said. “Seen somethin’ scripture can’t contain.”

“Stop it!”

Isaac shrugged, and his jacket sleeve rocked strangely. With a trembling hand, Mama reached out and slid off the ratty wool of his uniform. When the collar drew down past the ridge of his shoulder, the gray-green skin kept going, but nothing filled it. It was like the skin of a hollow doll—the arm had rotted clean through.

Mama gasped, one hand flying to cover her mouth.

“I won’t be here long,” Isaac said. He used his working hand to pull the rest of the jacket off, letting it fall to the floor. The arm within hit the ground with a wet slap.

Rot riddled his torso cesspool green. Ribs winked like grimy white snakes through his tattered skin.

“Miriam, c’mere,” he said.

I felt my legs carry me forward, and he placed a diseased hand on my shoulder. The stink singed my eyes.

“I don’t like this place,” he said. “But I’m mighty happy I got to see you and Mama again.”

“Is there really no Lord?” I asked.

“Don’t you listen to him, Miriam,” Michael said.

“No,” he said, patting my shoulder. “No, there isn’t.”

“There’s nothin’ after?”

“Oh, there’s something on the other side,” he said, lips spreading in an awful grin, “and when we die it opens its mouth. It goes on and on, bigger than you could imagine. A great and terrible darkness echoing out into eternity. And we drift on errant waves through the blackness. But we’re not alone, Miriam. There are things… things in the darkness.”

The crash of a revolver filled the world. Isaac’s skull opened like the petals of a blooming flower, and something spattered my face. My ears rang like they would never stop. A noxious miasma filled the room.

Isaac’s body shuddered and fell forward. Mama stood there, revolver in hand, looking hollow and beaten. When his body collapsed to the floor, she returned the revolver to Doc Caleb’s bag. She mouthed something to Doc, but I couldn’t hear it over the ringing.

I stared down at the body, yellowed brain and blackened blood pooling around my feet. It wasn’t fair. Wasn’t fair to bring him back only for it to end like this.

Doc Caleb scooped me up and placed me on the table. He and Mama took turns wiping the muck from my face with the rag, dropping it in the bucket, and wringing it out. The world came back into focus. The all-encompassing whine in my ears slowly faded away.

“Ain’t no point in wiping her clean, Doc,” Mama said, “Ain’t nothin’ but a second baptism gonna get any of us clean now.”

“Just wipe her down, Mary.”

When the bucket stank and the water gleamed reddish black, Doc Caleb picked it up.

“I’ll get a fresh pail.” He walked out of the room. Before the doors closed behind him, I saw the sunlight slanting, golden and holy, across his back. The sun was going down.

A faint, muffled sound reached us from below. Mama and I looked at each other. The sound came again. A scratching and a moan. As if something had stirred in the cellar.

The sun is setting. I wonder what things are in the darkness.