The Resurrectionist

21

He had to get down on his belly and crawl on his forearms to make it under the archway. His hips rubbed stone as he edged inward. The burrow was a bit longer than the length of his body. When he cleared it he got on his knees and reached his hands up in the darkness until he touched rock. There wasn’t enough room to stand, but now he could get off his stomach and crawl on hands and knees. The air inside was cool and dank and smelled like charcoal. And the light from outside didn’t make it in very far.

He began to crawl in an ever-widening circle, patting the earth and waving a hand to the side. He felt ridiculous, but he guessed that he was looking for some sort of contraband. A bag of dope or money or maybe even guns.

It took him a while to realize the initial chamber opened into a larger one, that the burrow was actually a series of caves, a honeycombed maze of linked vaults and passages. He struck a match and let it burn down to his finger and thumb. It didn’t throw a lot of light but he’d never have seen the graffiti without it.

It was in the second chamber, at eye level if you were on your knees. And when he got closer he could see that it wasn’t really graffiti. There were no obscene or obscure phrases, no insults or limericks or drawings of Kilroy or human anatomy. The writing was painted on the granite in Day-Glo lime but the numbers and letters were small and precise. The writer had etched them with a stick or a brush. This was not the work of some drunken teens with a spray can, but slow, close, methodical transcription.

Sweeney knelt in front of the first line, instinctively touched a random letter because the paint looked wet. It wasn’t, at least not the lines he found in that second chamber. But he knew immediately what the lines meant. And he thought, incorrectly it turned out, that they’d been painted specifically for his discovery.

He found writing on the wall of every chamber he visited after that. But by the fourth room he could no longer translate it. The writing had gotten too small and the lines ran too long and became nonsensical with tangential notations above and below the main text. By then he’d burned through his last match. And lost his sense of where he’d entered the cave.

He didn’t panic immediately.

The panic came when he called out for help and received an answer in the form of a laugh from somewhere close by. It was male and highpitched and sloppy and it echoed. Sweeney couldn’t pinpoint the laugh’s origin but that didn’t stop him from trying to run from it. He hit a wall almost at once, bounced off unhurt, but went down on his ass.

That was when the first beer can hit him. And when the laugh sounded again, it was in the same chamber. Sweeney scrambled backward, got his back against the stone, and said, “Who’s there?”

More laughter, then the sound and the smell of someone urinating.

Someone belched, sniffled, said, “Buzz send you in for me?”

When Sweeney didn’t answer, the voice said, “It’s been a fuckin’ week already?”

A flashlight beam snapped on, found Sweeney, and focused on his face. Sweeney put out a hand and shielded his eyes.

“You want a beer?” and a can landed in Sweeney’s lap. “Warm as piss but what the hell.”

Sweeney heard the cluck and hiss of a can being opened, then a moment of quiet and a second belch.

The beam of light came off Sweeney’s face and swung up onto the wall next to his head. It ran down the line of letters and numbers painted there.

“You know what that means?”

“Some of it,” Sweeney said.

“Buzz said you’d know. So you’re Danny’s old man, huh?”

The light moved again, jumped across the ceiling, and went into spasm. It darted back and forth over their heads until it blurred, then it vanished for a second, leaving an afterimage before Sweeney’s eyes. When it snapped back on, it was positioned beneath the speaker’s chin, lighting up the face Halloween style. The cheeks of the face were inflated, the eyes too large.

When he was done, he laughed for a while, his head lolled over one shoulder. An unseen hand turned on a Boy Scout lantern and illuminated most of the chamber. Sweeney looked out on a filthy Abomination. He wore the colors, but that was the only thing that marked him as part of the tribe.

He was small, scrawnier than Piglet, and wasted-looking, with spindly limbs and a tiny skull that sprouted stringy blond hair. Sweeney couldn’t hang an age on him, but sensed he might be younger than the rest of the crew.

“I thought,” he said, “I had a couple more days.”

“Did they put you in here?” Sweeney asked.

“Put me? Is that what Buzz told you? Fuckin’ Buzz.”

“Do you know the way out of here?” Sweeney asked.

“’Course I know the way out of here. Why you in such a hurry? You don’t like it in here?”

“I’ve got to get back to my boy,” Sweeney said.

The man began to pat himself down and came up with a pack of cigarettes. He offered the pack across his knees toward Sweeney, who shook his head to decline.

“You mind if I smoke?” the man said. “It helps me think. Came in here with a fuckin’ carton and this is all that’s left.” He searched himself again, found a Zippo this time, and lit up.

He took a long drag, pointed the butt toward Sweeney and said, “You don’t need to be worrying about Danny. Danny’s going to be okay.”

“Everyone seems to know about my son,” Sweeney said, “and his problems.”

The man made a face, kind of pulled his head back on his neck and tucked his chin down toward his chest.

“That embarrass you?” he said.

Sweeney hesitated and then said, “Does what embarrass me?”

“Your son,” the man said. He took another drag, expelled some smoke, and added, “And his problems.”

“My son doesn’t embarrass me,” Sweeney said.

“That’s good. That’s good to hear. And I hope I wasn’t out of line with the question. I apologize if I was. Takes me a while to get readjusted, you know? Get used to talkin’ to people again.”

Something occurred to him and he got up on his knees, a little unsteadily, and shuffled over to Sweeney. He put his hand out to shake and said, “I’m the Sheep, by the way.”

Sweeney took the hand. It was crusted with dirt and dried paint.

“I’m Sweeney,” he said.

“I know,” the Sheep said and sat down next to Sweeney, shoulder to shoulder. “I know you are. Buzz said you’d be comin’ for me. And Buzz doesn’t lie. You say what you will about Buzz. He does not lie to anyone.”

“You’ve been in here long?” Sweeney asked.

“Not sure,” the Sheep said. “You lose the sense of time. I’d offer you a bite but I ran out last night. I hope to hell Nadia’s got something going back at Gehenna.”

“You know Nadia?”

That laugh again.

“Well shit yeah,” the Sheep said. “And I’m guessing you do too by now. Buzz said you and Nadia’d be made for each other. Buzz knows people. He really does. That’s the thing about being a great leader. You have to see into people. Not that many can do it. Buzz knows how to push people’s buttons. He knows how to bring people together. Or push them apart.”

“You have any idea,” Sweeney asked, “why he sent me in here for you?”

“Believe me,” the Sheep said, “he’s got his reasons.”

“What are you doing in here?” Sweeney asked, and tried to lean away from the man, who smelled more than a little like his name.

“This is where I come,” said the Sheep, “when I need to block everything else out. I don’t know how other people do it. When I need to focus, I need to focus, you know? I mean, I’ve got to just seal myself away. I gotta crawl under the rock. Any distractions and my whole train of thought just goes to shit.”

Sweeney pointed to the writing on the wall opposite them.

“You’re their chemist?”

“I’m kind of a freelancer,” the Sheep said. “But I’ve been with these guys a while. They took me in. They really did. Most clients just treat you like the hired help, you know? But not Buzz. He gave me his colors. Set me up with Nadia. They’re good people.”

“You make crank for them?”

The Sheep blew out a long trail of smoke and laughed. He pointed at the wall with his cigarette.

“That look like any kind of crank you ever seen?”

Sweeney stared at the wall through the smoke for a while, then said, “So what is it?”

The Sheep got up on his knees, stubbed the butt into the ground, and crawled to the wall. He made a fist and knocked his knuckles across the line of symbols.

“It’s my goddamned masterpiece is what it is,” he said. “It’s my life’s work.”

“Your notations,” Sweeney said, “are a little unusual.”

“Yeah, well, I use my own shorthand. You think I’m the only one livin’ in these caves?”

The Sheep knee-walked to his little camp and started to tie up his bedroll and stash his tins in his pack.

“What happens now?” Sweeney asked.

“What happens now is you follow me out of here and we go back to Gehenna.”

“And what happens when we get to the factory?”

“Well, first, I’d like to freshen up a little,” the Sheep said.

“I mean,” said Sweeney, “what happens to me?”

The Sheep attached his roll to his pack and slipped it over his shoulders.

“That,” he said, “is for Buzz to say. I can’t speak for Buzz. I wouldn’t even try. But I really hope we get a chance to work together.”

He picked up the lantern, turned and started out of the chamber. It took a second for Sweeney to realize that the Sheep was heading deeper into the caves. He got up and followed.

“What do you mean,” Sweeney said to his back, “work together?”

The Sheep began to move more quickly, passing into and out of chambers, holding the lantern at arm’s length. Sweeney saw writing on every wall they passed. Some of the chambers came alive in Day-Glo as they entered, every inch of rock adorned with letters and numbers, some depicting basic chemical compounds and others simply nonsensical.

“I mean,” the Sheep said finally, a little out of breath, “that I’ve been needing an assistant for a while now. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Nadia tries. But she just doesn’t have the training. But you, being a chemist and all. .”

“I’m not a chemist,” Sweeney said and the Sheep stopped and turned and held the lantern out to look at Sweeney’s face.

“What do you mean,” he said, “you’re not a chemist?”

“I’m a pharmacist,” he said. “Did Buzz tell you I was a chemist?”

The Sheep sniffed, let his head drop toward a shoulder. He stood thinking for a minute, then said, “You’ll be okay,” and began his march again.

And Sweeney followed, unable to think of anything else to do. They wound left and right, through the interlocking chambers, sometimes crouching, sometimes down fully on hands and knees. The Sheep kept an even pace. Sweeney thought he heard sounds, all of them distant and brief. Water running. A shouted name. A crack of thunder. The Sheep gave no indication that he heard anything.

He lost track of time in the cave. He began to think they were revisiting corridors and chambers they’d been through before. He began to think that the Sheep was crazy and that Buzz knew it. That they might walk through this granite maze until both of them dropped. That whatever exits once existed had been blocked and mortared closed by a pack of Abominations. He began to think that maybe this was what it was like for Danny: cold entombment. A maze that emptied, always, back into the same pathways. A web of dark and useless roads that circled into one another until time and space and meaning were all degraded into a blind, exhausting loop.

And then he was following the Sheep down an incline and around a bend. And the walls were widening considerably. And light began to emanate from someplace up ahead. The Sheep turned off his lantern and waited for Sweeney to come level.

“Admit it,” the Sheep said. “You had your doubts.”

Sweeney didn’t know how to answer that. The Sheep took him by the arm and led him to a spacious mouth that emptied onto sand and rock and scrub. They stepped out into the air and Sweeney looked up at the sun and guessed that about an hour had gone by.

“Makes you appreciate the open,” the Sheep said, “doesn’t it?”

Sweeney nodded.

“What’s that song?” the Sheep said. “You know that song? Been through the desert of night. .”

Sweeney shrugged.

“. . Now it’s time for the wine and the friends.”

“Never heard it,” Sweeney said.

The Sheep smiled and handed off the lantern. “It’s a good one. But what I’m saying is, everything gets better from here on in.”

He walked about twenty yards and Sweeney thought he was looking for a place to take a piss. Instead, he pulled a bike from beneath a pile of bramble and walked it back to the mouth of the cave. The machine looked too big for its rider but the Sheep had no problem kicking it over.

He goosed the engine and motioned for Sweeney to climb on.