The Resurrectionist

LIMBO COMICS: FROM ISSUE # 9: “The Castle on the Cliff”

. . The freaks rode in steerage out of the interior plains, packed in the darkness and stench of the elephant trailer. At night, they slept in open fields, under a moon that looked too big and clear to be real. And if they had heard the collision with the Resurrectionist, none of them spoke of it.

Though there was traveling money, they chose to scavenge their food from the wilds in order to avoid seeing others. They shared a need to be alone for a time, as family. To bind into one another in preparation for whatever lay ahead. And as they moved toward the western shores, they found even more untamed territories in which to hide. Much of Gehenna, it seemed, lay unconquered. The troupe spied the occasional sign of civilization, towns and villages that had sprouted around railstops. But from a distance, these settlements appeared more outposts than anything else, precarious — and maybe temporary — havens for the restless and the pursued.

Again they kept to the back roads and the wooded pathways. The chicken boy told Bruno when and where to turn, made all the forkin-the-road decisions. His seizures were getting more severe if less frequent. And when he returned from Limbo, he rarely had much to say about what he had learned. He studied the sun and the stars, gave directions to the strongman, and withdrew more deeply into himself. Kitty was both hurt and worried. She watched as Chick scribbled ferociously in his diary. She tried to ignore his nighttime wanderings away from camp and into the dense forests where the troupe hid.

The chicken boy’s confession finally came on the night that Aziz first smelled the salt of the ocean. They had pulled into a grove of enormous trees and were moving through the usual camp-making routines when the human torso tossed his head back, pulled in air through his nose, and announced, “I think we’ve reached the shores.”

All of the other freaks froze in place and began to imitate Aziz. And after a moment they started to nod and then murmur their agreement. In the wake of the murmuring came the celebratory sounds of a homecoming — though, of course, none had ever been to the western shores before. Their joy and hope were born of a sense of destination achieved. The fact that this destination was an unknown landscape didn’t matter very much at first.

Durga, Jeta, and Antoinette danced together in a small circle. Vasco and Marcel did their own little jig. Nadja and Milena embraced and hooted. Aziz hopped around on his knuckles like a frog. Only Chick maintained the gravity of the road, opening his beak in an effort to taste the salt that hung in the air. As if needing to confirm something.

Seeing the look on the chicken boy’s face, Bruno tamped down the revelry and called the troupe to a meeting. When they were all settled on the ground, the strongman put his remaining hand on his hip and spoke.

“It seems,” he said, “that we’re very close now. The ocean is less than a day away. And, believe me, I’m as anxious as all of you to get off the road and rest for a while. But I think, right now, that the one who brought us here should say a few words.”

He lowered himself to the ground with only marginally less grace than he’d once possessed.

Chick looked hesitant as he stood before the clan. He toed the earth as he thought about how best to begin. He scratched absentmindedly at his feathers and avoided eye contact.

Eventually, he said, “We’ve come a long way.”

The words triggered a whoop of affirmation from Fatos. Chick ignored the mule and pressed on.

“I want to thank all of you for having faith in me. You took a great chance. A great leap. I’ve never claimed to understand what happens when I go into Limbo. I just know that I hear and see things. And that those things feel true and real to me. So I want to thank you for trusting in something that none of us understand. Your faith is what makes it so hard to tell you this last bit.”

He paused and let the mood of the group change, felt the joy and excitement start to turn to anxiousness and suspicion.

“I know that we’ve all been looking for the same thing. We’ve been looking for a place where we can be our true selves, together. We’ve been looking for a haven. A place of refuge and sanctuary.”

Jeta nodded her agreement. Milena began to scowl and lean forward.

“But the fact is, I can’t promise you that place. It might be at the end of our road. And then again, it might not.”

Kitty reached over, took Nadja’s claw. Vasco and Marcel brought hands together nervously and cracked knuckles.

“All my life, I’ve been searching for my father. I think it’s my father who led me through the Limbo. I think it’s my dad who brought us to where we are tonight. And now, I think, he needs our help. And I think, if we help him, that he’ll help us in return.”

The chicken boy went quiet for a second and studied his comrades’ faces. The freaks looked back at Chick, unsure of what to say or do. Except for Bruno, who decided to push the boy.

“Tell us,” the strongman said, “exactly what you have to tell us.”

Chick looked at Bruno and nodded.

“Tomorrow,” Chick said, “we’ll arrive at the western shore. And at the castle of Dr. Fliess.”

At the mention of the name, Jeta burst into tears. At the sight of the tears, Antoinette became hysterical. Durga pulled both of them into her breast and looked to Milena for help. But the hermaphrodite only smiled at the fat lady and remained placid and unmoving.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Bruno said, standing and walking up to Chick in order to tower over him. “We spend this entire time running from Fliess. And now you tell us we were actually running to him.”

“I didn’t know,” Chick said, weakly. “Not until the last few days. Not for sure.”

“You said your father would be waiting,” Bruno said, confused.

Chick nodded. “Fliess has my father. And we have to free him.”

“You want us to go to the castle?” Vasco asked, incredulous.

“And demand that Fliess hand over your poppa?” asked Marcel, outraged.

“No,” said Chick, backing up as more of them rose from the ground and came toward him. “Of course not. I have a way in. There are tunnels. A series of caves that lead into the castle. I know exactly where to find my father. And I know, if we can free him, he can help us.”

That there was anger and outrage, disappointment and fear, did not surprise Chick. His own reaction to the knowledge of what lay in wait at the end of their road was profound sadness. The clan had relied on him to bring them to refuge. And instead, he had delivered them into their greatest terror and deposited them at the feet of their enemy. So he understood the bitterness that lay at the bottom of the troupe’s surprise. And beyond this, he felt his own particular brand of grief surge back into every feather of his body, the anguish that had simmered, for years, from the beginning, just on the edge of his consciousness. And he realized that whether or not his freaks abandoned him in the end, he would go to Fliess’s castle. And he would be saved or damned. But he would find whatever last truths were available to him. Because to live forever with a grief that deforms the heart is unacceptable — an abomination that must not be tolerated.

In the end, it was Milena who settled things and decided how the story would end.

“We’re here,” s/he shouted, drowning out the timorous carping of the others. “We’ve followed him this far. Now, we can call it a day and split up. Take our chances wandering around, looking for a show that will have us. Or we can trust in the chicken boy. We can play this out to the end. We can go to the castle and find his daddy and see what the man can do for us.”

It was as simple as that. As if all that had been needed was for a hermaphrodite to state, succinctly, the facts of the matter, and the options those facts generated. Milena’s tone was enough to indicate which option s/he had embraced. And once s/he declared her allegiance, the others began to fall in line. Their outrage and terror petered out rapidly and dissipated into little more than an undercurrent of grumbling. And suddenly, almost instantly, they were whole again.

Durga and Nadja got busy pulling together the night’s supper. And though the clan ate in silence, even the pinhead understood that all of them would remain a family to the end. There would be no splintering of the freaks. Come salvation or oblivion, they would face the future together.

And so, over a dessert of fresh berries and nuts, Bruno consulted with Chick, and the decision was made to set out just before midnight. They broke camp, buried their fire, left the truck to rust in the woods and followed the chicken boy on a path that, though it did not deter the freaks, did nothing to calm or reassure them. Within minutes of setting out on their last trek, they were overcome with a stench that made the slaughterhouses of Maisel seem like cologne shops by comparison. The ground beneath their feet turned into a hard, cracked clay of some sort. They tramped with hands and claws covering mouths and noses, taking short, careful steps that left them prematurely tired and uneasy.

They moved into and out of a fetid, swampy patch, slogging through warm murky water or pulling their feet step by step from the sucking mud. They passed through an infestation of fat, buzzing insects whose bites left welts the size of kroners over any exposed areas of flesh or fur. The freaks cried and groaned and cursed and threatened to turn back. But finally they emerged just meters away from a cascade of enormous boulders that coalesced into a cliff wall, atop which sat what could only be the castle of Dr. Fliess.

It loomed, as if it had been waiting for them since the day of its unlikely construction, all black iron and terrible rivets, countless stories of dark metal and tiny bug-eye windows. At its top was a single turret of tall glass panes, like a lighthouse, revealing a single, dim light within. From the top of the turret, a black metal spire thrust up into the sky like a lightning rod. And from the spire flew an enormous red flag, visible in the moonlight, its undulations in the wind incapable of obscuring the Gothic black F imprinted on its face.

Antoinette brought a hand up to cover her eyes, as if the mere sight of the castle and its awful banner would turn them all to stone. Jeta began to edge backward into the marshland from which they’d just emerged and Milena had to hold the skeleton’s hand to keep her from fleeing.

“That’s where we have to go,” Chick said, pointing to the turret. “That’s where he’s keeping my father.”

He looked to Bruno, but the strongman only nodded his head, gesturing to the mountain of rocks before them. So Chick led the way to the bottom of the cliff, moving to a smooth purple boulder that sat flush against the granite wall. He inspected it quickly, put his palm against its cool surface, then turned to Bruno and said, “This is the one.”

The others stepped back and made room for the strongman, who wasted no time putting his good shoulder to the shale and heaving all of his mass into the stone. It took time and effort to move the rock and at one point, Fatos attempted to offer assistance. But Chick warned him away with a look. They let Bruno grunt and heave, sweat breaking over his face, veins bulging across the dome of his skull. And gradually, the stone was rolled aside and an opening was revealed behind it, carved into the face of the cliff wall.

Chick smiled at the strongman, who was hunched down over his knees, blinking at his feet and breathing heavily. “It will be dark inside,” the chicken boy said. “Let’s stay close together.” And with that he entered the black hole of the cave.

The others followed, single file, Durga just managing to squeeze through. The air inside was close and stale. The tunnel opened out almost at once, but as it did, the sound of their steps on the stone walkway beneath their feet echoed loudly. Bruno brought up the rear of their parade. The freaks had no torches, not even a kitchen match among them, so they proceeded by touch and sound. They could all feel the curve of the path they walked and its upward slant. They were spiraling, Bruno knew, up a slowly inclining ramp, toward the top of the castle.

Everyone lost his or her sense of time after a while. Random and unsettling noises came and went — growling of stomach, clearing of throat, and what might have been the skittering of vermin across the flagstones beneath their feet. At some point they heard a muted weeping or laughing, but when Milena attempted to shush Jeta, the skeleton denied the sound had come from her.

And before Milena could argue, Chick crashed, beak first, into something and the clan collided, one into the next, fronts into backs. The chicken boy brought up a hand and touched a smooth wood panel that angled down at him sharply from the ceiling of the cave. It was a hatch of some sort and it was freezing. He pulled his hand away at once and called for Bruno. The strongman had to get on his belly and crawl between Durga’s legs, then squeeze past all the others until he arrived at the front of the line, where Chick indicated the door.

Bruno ran his hand over it, searching for a latch or a knob, but the chicken boy already knew the effort was futile.

“You’ll have to break it down,” Chick whispered, just as the realization dawned on his friend.

The strongman had an even harder time with the hatch than he’d had with the boulder at the base of the mountain. He had to work against gravity, to thrust his body upward into the impasse. With all his strength, he rammed his good shoulder into the hatch, as hard as he could, a dozen times before growing frustrated and angry. He pounded on the door with his fist. Slapped at it and punched it and then, in the instant when pique turned into fury, he bashed it with his head.

The bolt snapped and the trap flew upward and suddenly the freaks were illuminated by a dim yellow light that shone from above.

Bruno was bleeding from his brow but he ignored the gash, silently got down on his knees, and hunched his torso over. Chick understood that the strongman was offering himself as a stepstool and began to direct the troupe, one at a time, to climb up the patriarch’s back and pull themselves into the turret. A single grunt issued from the Behemoth when Durga trod his spine. But Fatos and the twins pitched in to haul the fat lady to the top of the castle.

When Bruno used his remaining arm to pull himself up through the hatchway, he thought Chick was about to slide into Limbo. The boy was shivering and his eyes were locked in that unblinking daze. But, in fact, there was no seizure under way. Instead, the chicken boy was transfixed by the gaunt man, suspended from the dome ceiling of the turret by chains shackled to his wrists.

The man was dressed in simple black pants and a white peasant shirt. He was shoeless and his feet were dirty with dried blood. His skull drooped and rolled on his neck as if he were balanced on the edge of consciousness. His feet dangled just above Bruno’s head. His arms looked as if, in the next second, they might tear away from the body at the shoulders.

But Milena was already removing the lantern from a small table that sat behind the hanging man, shoving the table forward and motioning for Bruno to climb on top of it. Bruno wasn’t sure the table could support his weight, but he mounted it anyway, then proceeded to take hold of the chains that bound the prisoner.

The freaks stared while Bruno ripped the chains from the ceiling. The hanging man dropped to the ground at the chicken boy’s feet. Chick went down on one knee, lifted the man’s head in his hands. The man’s eyes fluttered, then closed, as his mouth opened and the tongue inside batted around for a moment until he swallowed and found his voice and managed to say, “I knew you would come.”

Without any difficulty, the man came up on his knees and embraced the chicken boy. Over Chick’s shoulder, he surveyed the whole clan and, in a louder voice, said, “I knew you would all come.”

And then things happened so quickly that Antoinette would not suspect the truth until hours later, when she heard the first shovels of sand being tossed atop her casket.

The hanging man transformed his embrace into something closer to a choke hold and called for his creatures, a horde of grotesque homunculi — half-naked gargoyles with red eyes and diminutive but overly muscular bodies — which emerged through the trapdoor and swarmed into the turret.

And in that instant, Chick knew that the Limbo had turned on him. And that the man they had just rescued could not be anyone but their dreaded enemy and pursuer, the demon at the heart of all of their nightmares, the mad Dr. Fliess.

Within seconds, Fliess’s creatures had filled the turret, thronged over and captured all of the freaks. Bruno threw and kicked and stomped a dozen or more of the monstrosities before Fliess called the strongman’s attention to the scalpel held at the chicken boy’s neck.

Bruno and Fliess stared at each other until the doctor said, “Surely even a strongman knows when to surrender.”

Antoinette was hysterical beneath a swarm of Fliess’s monsters, who had her pinned on the floor. One of them bent back the cone of her head, as if making ready to snap the neck. Seeing this, Bruno gave up the fight and the creatures battened onto his legs and arm. The deformed angel on the pinhead’s back moved its hands to cover her mouth and silence her.

“Very good,” Fliess said, lifting himself and Chick to standing and walking to the far side of the room to get a better look at the entire troupe.

“You are more hideous,” he said, “than even I could have imagined.” He hugged Chick more tightly, brought his mouth to the chicken boy’s ear and added, “And I have a vivid imagination.”

Behind the doctor, out the turret’s window, Milena could see a vast ocean that rolled beyond the far side of the castle. For only a moment, s/he wondered about her chances of crashing through the glass and diving to the water far below. But at the end of that moment, s/he knew the idea was simply life’s last kick in the ass. A final instance of false hope.

“It’s true,” the doctor said to the freaks, “that I will never understand fear in the manner, or to the degree, that you understand fear. And yet, it breaks my heart and it angers me that you’ve allowed fear to damn you.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Chick said, staring at the strongman.

The doctor shrugged awkwardly while maintaining his hold on the boy.

“Despite all appearances,” he said, “you’re human. And like all of us, you fear the unknown.”

“You don’t know anything about us,” Bruno said, in a voice that should have held rage but, instead, contained only the sound of terminal failure.

“That’s incorrect, Mr. Seboldt,” Fliess said. “Try to remember that nothing is as it seems. That’s the original good advice.”

Then the freaks were marched out of the turret’s proper exit and down a long series of stairs and dark landings that led, eventually, out of the front gate and down a steep and narrow stone stairwell cut into the cliff. They were brought out into a small circle of beach, a horseshoe cove of hard, brown sand. There were no hysterics when they saw the graves that had been dug during the low tide or the simple pine boxes that rested next to their tombs.

Instead, Jeta and Antoinette wept and the others tried, with varying degrees of success, to assume a stoic posture. Without any delay, the gargoyles brought the freaks, in groups of two or three, to their respective coffins. No one fought and no one tried to flee. As if they’d all come, at the same instant, to some unspoken understanding or exhaustion. As if all of their spirits were like a circuit of circus lights and each one had gone out in the line.

The box for Durga was, of course, enormous. As was the one for Marcel and Vasco. Chick found himself wondering how the homunculi would manage to lower the crates into the ground. Then, ashamed at the thought, he found himself enraged. But when he spotted Kitty’s tiny coffin, his emotions simply imploded. He collapsed against the mad Dr. Fliess in a convulsion of self-loathing and despair, crushed under the realization that he had delivered the people he loved most deeply, most truly, into oblivion. Into the hopeless and ceaseless Limbo.

With one hand, Fliess stroked the chicken boy’s feathered cheek. With the other, the doctor adjusted the blade of his scalpel against Chick’s neck and made the boy lift his head.

“I want you,” the doctor said, “to witness this.”

And so, Chick watched through tear-splintered eyes as Bruno, the strongest man in the world, climbed, of his own free will, into his casket, and lay down, without a word of objection. One by one, the other freaks followed his lead.

The freaks had fought or run all the way across Gehenna. And now, here they were, models of acceptance and docility. More than anything else, in that moment, Chick wanted one final seizure, one last chance to fade out and quake and ask the reason for this gentle capitulation.

But the seizure would not come. There was no bile in his throat. No chill telegraphing up his spine. And so he tore his eyes off his clan as they lay down one by one. And turned his head upward to Dr. Fliess and asked, “Why?”

The doctor looked down at the chicken boy hesitantly, with a gaze that even a pinhead would call loving.

“Because,” said the doctor, “I am a man of both science and compassion.”