The Resurrectionist

25

It was like cream at first. White on white and thick. And there was a richness, a hard sweetness. And cold moving toward freezing. That was where Sweeney first felt himself in the new moment. The sensation of his testicles rising with the cold, withdrawing — that’s what made it real, that sense of his body, that awareness. That’s what made it something more than a dream. Gave it a solidity that made it true.

He was still inside the factory. And Buzz and the Abominations were spread out around him, still in dream. That was his first sound, their collective respiration. He opened his eyes and blinked, surveyed the room and saw that Nadia was gone. He looked down to see that his pants had been pulled up and rebelted. There was a piercing sensation, like a bee sting, in the small of his back near the base of his spine. He rubbed it and only aggravated the pain.

He got to his knees and then, with some effort, to his feet. He made his way out of the cafeteria, through the kitchen, and out the loading bay onto the concrete apron. In the moonlight, he could make out the ruins behind the Harmony but everything was out of focus. He took his hand from his back, pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed down into the circles beneath his eyes. When he looked again, his vision had cleared. In fact, everything now appeared hyperfocused, more real than real. And somewhere out among the debris of the back lot, he began to hear a noise.

At first it was difficult to locate the source. The sound echoed and distorted on its way across the yards of brick and stone. Without thinking, Sweeney jumped down off the loading dock and began to walk toward the abandoned hearse, where the Abominations had played King of the Hill. Halfway to the hearse, he understood that the noise was a human voice, a child’s cry of grief and fear. And then Sweeney was running.

When he got to the hearse, he ran from door to door, pulling at each handle. But they were all locked. He began to circle the vehicle, pounding on the smoked glass of the windows. And the more he pounded, the louder the crying grew. The sound was making him frantic. He drummed his fists against the windows but nothing happened. He jumped up onto the hood and began to kick away at the windshield with his heels, but he could not shatter the glass.

Sweeney began to sweat and his breathing became labored. But at last, near the point of exhaustion, he moved around the rear of the hearse, got on his knees, and reached down for a brick. Bringing it up above his head, he let gravity carry the red block down against the hearse’s rear window, which cracked neatly down its center. Sweeney stood and dropped the brick, used his elbow to shatter the window, reached inside the hearse, and unlatched and swung open the gate.

Bending at the waist, he peered inside. And saw that the crying child was his son. And that his son’s body was covered in feathers. In all other respects, the boy looked normal, healthy. He was simply shrouded in a layer of down.

At the sight of his father, Danny stopped crying and yelled, “Daddy.”

Sweeney inserted his arms and extracted Danny from the hearse. Then the father fell back on his heels and cradled the child against his chest. And both of them breathed and shivered and held onto each other.

“I didn’t know where you were,” Danny said, starting to cry again. “I didn’t know where you went.”

“It’s okay, Danny,” Sweeney said, hugging his son more tightly, cupping the boy’s head and easing it down to the shoulder. “I’m right here. Everything’s okay.”

“I couldn’t find Mom,” Danny said, his need to suck air fighting his need to speak.

“We’ll find Mom. It’s okay, Danny. It’s all right.”

“I got so cold, Daddy.”

“I’ll keep you warm,” Sweeney said. “I’m here now.”

“Can we go find Mom,” Danny asked, “and then go home?”

“That’s a good idea,” Sweeney said, shifting the boy in his arms and struggling up to his feet. And when he looked around, he realized that the landscape had changed.

The ruins of the old factories now stretched as far as he could see. There were no bordering streets. No tenements or mills or city lights visible in the distance. Beneath his feet, what had been brick and rock and rubble was now something else — something like baked clay, hardpan, a gray and white expanse shot through with cracks. It was flat and it extended to the horizon. There was something intensely primordial about the landscape and it triggered sudden terror in Sweeney.

Sensing his father’s panic, Danny said, “It’ll be okay, Dad.”

Sweeney wanted to ask Where are we? but was afraid of the answer. Instead, he said, “I don’t know which way to go.”

“Can I ride on your back?” Danny asked.

Sweeney hoisted him and, once secure, Danny extended his downy arm and pointed away from the Harmony factory. And they began to walk.

They covered what must have been miles, but Sweeney’s feet and back carried his burden without complaint, though his eyes watered from the oppressiveness of the air. There was a chemical smell that got worse as they progressed, something like sulfur and cabbage. Danny either didn’t notice it or didn’t mind it.

They didn’t talk much. Once Danny asked if Mom would be mad that they were late and Sweeney said, “How do you know we’ll be late?”

“We’re already late,” Danny said.

After that they came to the first Joshua tree. It was growing up out of one of the larger cracks in the hardpan. Neither father nor son commented on it and soon they were spotting more of them and the new trees were bigger, fuller, their spearlike branches all pointing in the direction Sweeney was heading.

“Can you eat the flowers?” Danny asked and Sweeney said he didn’t know. As they passed one of the branches, Danny reached out, pulled free a white blossom. Seconds later, a few petals floated down onto Sweeney’s chest and leg.

And sometime after that they were in the thick of the trees. Their progress slowed considerably. The sky turned purple and the moon appeared low and to their right. Sweeney tried to hurry but the thicket of tree limbs made the going near impossible. There was no clear path. And the smell had grown putrid, a clogged leech field in high summer. He brought a hand up to shield his nose and mouth and from beneath the hand he said, “How can you stand it?”

“It’s not so bad from up here,” Danny said.

Sweeney felt his son’s feathers against the back of his neck and head. He wanted to put Danny down for a while, but he knew it was crucial that they continued moving. And so he tried to ignore the fatigue and tramp on. But as the hardpan began to soften, go marshy, his legs began to ache and he had to ask Danny if he could walk for a while.

The boy agreed and his father lowered him to the ground. Soon after, the trees began to thin again and when they left the last one behind them, they were fully in the swamps. Now the smell was different. Just as strong and just as unpleasant, but more alive, derived less from decay and more from something fertile and ripe.

They held hands and took smaller steps. Their feet sank into inches of heavy, fetid water. Sweeney felt it seep through shoe and sock and touch his skin. His flesh prickled and he ground his teeth. But the swamp water didn’t seem to have any effect on Danny. When it rose to the boy’s knees, Sweeney hoisted him up on shoulders once again. And that’s when the insects arrived. Fat, slow winter flies. They ignored his swatting hands, tried to land on him, their buzzing set to a ridiculous volume.

Sweeney breathed through his nose and shook his head. Within yards, the pests had swarmed into an infestation and he tried to run. But with each attempt to lift his leg and push out of the water, he planted a foot deeper into the bottom muck. Danny pressed his eyes into his father’s head and wrapped his arms more tightly around Dad’s neck. The flies began to mass on Sweeney’s face. He shook his head wildly but they refused to dislodge. And that was when he tripped over the first body.

He went down on his knees, yet somehow Danny managed to stay on his back. The putrid water sprayed up, soaked his shirt and face, which loosed some of the flies. He wiped the rest away with the back of his arm and opened his eyes to look into the face of Ernie Blake. Though Sweeney had never met the man, he was certain this was Ernie, Nora’s husband.

Blake was lying just beneath the skin of the water, floating in the murky pool. He was dressed in workman’s coveralls that had gone filthy in the swamp and sported a coating of slimy algae. Though he was fully submerged, his eyes were open and they tracked Sweeney’s movement as he tried to jump away from the body.

“It’s okay,” he heard Danny say behind him. “It’s only Mr. Blake.”

Sweeney didn’t know what to do, if he should attempt to lift the man out of the water. He felt his knees sinking into the mud and as he tried to think, Ernie Blake opened his mouth and dozens of tiny black fish swam out.

Danny began to laugh and Sweeney was horrified. He pushed himself up to standing, tried once again to run and tripped, this time over the floating body of Lawrence Belmonte, the footless hunter from Maine. Belmonte’s eyes were closed but his mouth was open and he was running his tongue over his teeth. The tiny black fish were swimming into one of the stumps at the bottom of the man’s left leg and out of the stump at the bottom of his right.

Sweeney tried to calm his breathing and failed. He stood up slowly and, though the swamp was dim, lit only by a sliver moon, he could see dozens of figures floating just beneath the water. And he knew they were all patients from the Peck Clinic — Honey Lieb and Tara Russell and Ginny Oliphant and all the others.

“Can they breathe under water?” Sweeney asked Danny.

But Danny just said, “I’m cold, Dad. Are we almost home yet?”

Sweeney’s answer was to begin walking again. When they cleared the swamp, they could finally see home. Only it wasn’t the house in Cleveland exactly. And it wasn’t quite the Peck Clinic. And it wasn’t entirely the Limbo fortress of the evil Dr. Fliess. It was, instead, some horrible and unlikely amalgam of all three structures. And it was looming above them from the edge of a cliff, a haunted Gothic castle, with handicap ramps and awnings, neon red crosses and enormous wooden shutters.

And looking up at it, Sweeney understood that it was the last place he wanted to be. That he’d rather spend the rest of his life in the swamps than in any room of this stone palace.

Danny sensed his father’s hesitation.

“You have to, Daddy,” he said. “You’ve got to bring me home.”

Sweeney shook his head, felt the brush of the feathers.

“That’s not your home, Danny,” he said.

“It’s my home now,” Danny said. “I’m late, Dad. And Mom’s worried.”

“Mom doesn’t have to be worried,” Sweeney said. “You’re with me.”

“She’s worried about you too, Dad. She’s worried about both of us.”

“But all those rocks,” Sweeney said. “I don’t know how to get up there.”

“I know a way,” Danny said. “I’ll show you.”

Sweeney stood for a minute looking up at the structure, then turned to look back toward the swamp. He started to say something about going back to the factory but was bitten on the hand by a green-headed fly. The sting and the after-burn were severe. He brought the hand to his mouth and sucked on it.

Danny said, “There’ll be millions of them in a little while.”

And so Sweeney started for the boulders without argument and began to climb. The stones were as big as cars, some of them larger, and they were slick with moss. Danny locked his arms around his father’s neck and asked questions as Sweeney tried to find his footholds and pull them upward.

“Do you think someone could lift one of these?” he asked. “How much do they weigh? What’s underneath the rocks?”

Sweeney replied in a monotone, “I don’t know.”

He slipped once, went down hard on his knee. The higher they rose, the steeper the rocks became. Had he been climbing alone, he would have had more options, but with Danny on his back he couldn’t make use of the crevices between stones. At one point while he was trying to get a purchase somewhere on the sheer face of a wall that stretched to twice his height, Danny asked, “What’s that say, Dad?”

“Danny,” Sweeney yelled, “I’m trying to climb here.”

His head was aching and his knee was throbbing and the boy was choking off some of his air. But when he heard the crying and felt the trembling against his back, he stopped attempting to pull them up and leaned his head back against Danny’s face.

“I’m sorry, son,” he said. “Dad’s really sorry. But this is very hard.”

“I just wanted,” Danny said through hitching breath, each word standing on its own, “to know what it meant.”

Sweeney looked up and backward now, to an outcropping of rock that formed a lip off the top of the cliff. Somehow, someone had spray-painted Freaks Die on the underside of the ledge.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Sweeney said and instantly regretted it.

“It says something,” Danny said.

“It’s in another language,” Sweeney said and turned back to the cliff wall and began to climb.

The rest of the way up they moved in silence. When they got to the top and Sweeney pulled them to level ground, they found freshly laid sod, a yard of meticulously clipped turf, too green to look natural. There was a brick walkway running through the center of the yard and it led to the oversized doors of the castle.

Sweeney sat on the grass, catching his breath and studying the doors. Danny sat next to him, imitating his father’s pose and demeanor.

“They’re not locked,” Danny said.

Sweeney looked from the doors down to his son. The feathers seemed less strange now. But the mouth appeared even more beaklike, harder and more protruding.

“Have you been here before, Danny?”

The boy looked down in his lap and nodded.

“What am I going to find inside, son?”

Danny looked up and said, “Everything’s going to be all right, Dad.” But the voice and the tone and the body language gave it away as a lie.

“If I go inside,” Sweeney asked, “will I wake up again?”

Now Danny looked genuinely confused.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“I’m asking you,” Sweeney said, “if the dream will end.”

Danny shook his head and said, “This isn’t a dream, Dad.” Then he stood up suddenly, extended his hand to his father, and said, “I’ll show you.”

They walked up the path to the doors, which parted as they approached. Candles mounted in holders high on the walls lit the interior foyer. Father and son stepped inside and Sweeney took a moment to let his eyes adjust.

It was partly the Peck Clinic. It was partly the St. Joseph in Cleveland. And there were touches of the old house back home — an endtable that had been in their bedroom, the framed print that Kerry had bought on a trip to San Francisco. But mostly the castle was Dr. Fliess’s Gothic laboratory, straight from the pages of Limbo.

In a corner of the foyer was an ornate, oversized grandfather clock, the same piece Sweeney had seen in the Peck residence. As soon as he looked at its face, the clock began to chime. And as soon as it chimed, as if it were a signal of some kind, Danny broke away from his father and sprinted up the center staircase to the second floor.

Sweeney yelled after the boy and started to run, but stopped when he heard his name called. He stood still, listened and heard it again, and followed the call into a parlor to the right of the stairs. The room was high Victorian, enormous but crowded with dark and heavy furnishings. Two wing chairs were positioned before a fireplace where a pile of logs was blazing. Someone was sitting in the nearest chair. He heard a crisp page being turned, smelled the cigarette smoke, and walked across the room to sit in the empty chair.

Nora Blake didn’t look up but she held out the hand that braced her cigarette to indicate she’d be with him in a minute. He looked up at the painting hanging above the mantel — a depiction of the Limbo freaks done in the same somber style of the Peck ancestral portraits. Danny was the centerpiece of the work. The rest of the troupe was fanned behind him.

Nora closed the book, sighed, and heaved it into the fire. Embers flew and she shook her head, plugged the cigarette into her mouth, and sucked until her cheeks caved in.

Sweeney looked at the book as the flames consumed its title—The Diary of a Young Chicken Boy.

He said, “You didn’t like it.”

“I’m done with fiction,” Nora said.

“Was it a pirate book?” Sweeney asked.

Nora shook her head, knocked some ashes onto the carpet.

“A love story,” she said and he knew it was a lie. “Really frivolous. I just don’t have the time or the patience anymore.”

She blew out a stream of smoke, came forward, slapped his bad knee, and said, “So you finally made it. What the hell took you so long?”

“You were expecting me?”

“I was hoping,” Nora said.

“To tell you the truth,” Sweeney said. “I didn’t have much say in the matter.”

Nora gave him a sour look and made a dismissive sound, blew some air through pursed lips.

“Of course you did,” she said. “Everyone has a choice. That’s all you’ve got. Choices up the wazoo.”

Sweeney didn’t want to argue with her. “What is this place?” he asked.

“Didn’t Danny tell you?” she said. “It’s home.”

“This isn’t my home,” he said. “I’ve never lived in a place like this.”

“Sweeney, honey,” Nora said, “your memory isn’t what it used to be.”

“I don’t think I can stay here, Nora.”

“You think too much, mister. I’d say that’s your number one problem. You overthink everything. My Ernie had the same tendency, by the way.”

“I’ve got bigger problems than that, Nora.”

She closed her eyes, shook her head.

“I knew you’d say that, Sweeney. I really did. I’m sorry but you’re as predictable as one of my romances.” She leaned forward again and knocked her paperback deeper into the flames. In a lower voice, she added, “It drove Kerry nuts you know.”

“You didn’t know Kerry,” he said and immediately regretted it. He realized that she was baiting him but couldn’t stop himself from giving her what she wanted.

“Let me tell you something about Kerry,” Nora said, angry now. “Kerry deserved better. Kerry deserved to be forgiven.”

“I did forgive her,” yelling now, “I swear to you I did.”

Nora wouldn’t look at him. She was staring at the fire. She said, “That’s right, swear to me.” And then she didn’t say anything else.

He waited a few minutes, watched the last of the paperback turn black and crumple into ash. Then he stood and said, “I have to find Danny.”

Nora rummaged in the chair cushion until she found her cigarettes. And Sweeney moved up to the second floor of the castle.

THE STAIRS WERE grand-hotel wide but much too steep. Sweeney had to concentrate to be sure of his footing. It was as if each ledge had been fashioned into different heights. There was no way to gain a rhythm and run to the landing.

When he reached the top, he stopped by the railing that formed a balcony over the foyer. He was dizzy and so winded that he wondered about the altitude. He looked down over the banister and was hit with a wave of vertigo. Turning around, he went down on his bad knee and let out a yell. It echoed a bit down the three corridors that stretched off the landing and ignited a distant burst of laughter.

The laughter seemed to come from the left, so he moved in that direction and suppressed the urge to call out for Danny. The corridor was tall but narrow, like the halls of the Clinic. The floor was marble, covered by a green runner. The walls were covered in wainscoting, but they were lined with mounted torches that threw shadows and left large pockets of darkness.

He found them in the billiard room. They were at the far end, beyond the tables, which were covered in animal skins — cow and leopard and zebra hides. He stood in the doorway for a while. Romeo, the janitor, saw him first but didn’t acknowledge it, turned his eyes back to his cards and hunched down over his drink. It looked like a sullen crew, locked into one of those dead games that refuses to end. Ernesto Luga slouched down in his chair, eyes half-closed. Though they had their backs to him, Sweeney knew the other players were Tannenbaum and Gögüs, the Clinic’s associate neurologists.

For the moment, he ignored them and moved to one of the billiard tables where Irene Moore was laid out like a corpse in its casket. Her skin had turned from white to a gray tinged with yellow. She was on her back, lit by a Tiffany lamp that hung from a chain of oversized metal links. Her skull was resting on two rubber bumpers. And she was naked.

“He’s gonna climb on top of her,” he heard Ernesto say. “I’ll bet all my chips he’s gonna slip her the chicken.”

The words were dull and muted, as if spoken underwater. Sweeney ran the back of his hand over Irene Moore’s cheek. The skin was icy but she opened her eyes at his touch and he jumped backward and collided with another table.

Then he felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find Tannenbaum next to him. The doctor was looking down on Irene Moore, shaking his head theatrically.

“Why don’t you sit in for me,” Tannenbaum said. “I’m busted. And there’s nothing you can do for this one.”

Sweeney shook his head in agreement, then leaned down and brought his mouth to Irene’s. Her lips were cold but smooth. He pulled some air in through his nose, pushed it out into the adjoining mouth. In response, he felt her tongue come to life and move against his own for a second, before continuing, pressing forward like a snake, until it touched the back of his throat and he began to choke. He jerked backward but she had her arms around his neck.

He swung his arm and broke her grip, fell to the floor, scrambled upright, and ran from the game room as the card players broke into hysterical laughter. He raced down corridors that merged into corridors. Took rights and lefts, vaulted more than one flight of stairs and didn’t manage to control the panic until he was entirely lost.

Eventually, he found himself at the top of the castle. The ceilings were lower here and the corridors shorter. He walked them, throwing open each door and poking his head inside each room to find a series of identical cells, stark chambers fixed under the eaves, each outfitted with only a coffinlike bed, a porcelain washbasin, and a matching pitcher. The cells looked out, through a chapel window of blue glass, onto an expanse of roaring ocean on one side of the hall, and the marshlands and swamps on the other.

Entering the last room, he knelt down before the window and drank from the pitcher. The water inside was warm and stale but he couldn’t get enough of it. He tipped the pitcher too quickly, spilling it down his chest. When he’d drained the last of the water, he dried his mouth with the hem of his shirt, unzipped his pants, and urinated into the basin.

On his way back out, he glanced at the bed and saw the book that was almost hidden beneath the pillow. He sat down and extracted it and found the final issue of Limbo. The issue that he and Danny had purchased on the day of the accident. The cover featured a jagged title balloon that screamed

“Freaks No More”

The End

of

Their Journey!

in scarlet lettering. The cover drawing depicted the troupe at the base of a towering cliff, looking up at the black iron castle of Dr. Fliess, the madman genius who had tracked them relentlessly.

Sweeney rolled the comic into a tube, tucked it in his back pocket and exited the cell. He moved to the last door at the end of the hall, put his hand on the knob and, in that instant, heard Danny’s laugh from inside. He turned the knob and pushed, found the door bolted and began to pound. And as he hammered his fist against the freezing slate of the door, Danny’s laughter turned to crying. And then to screaming.

Sweeney kicked at the door. Heaved his shoulder at the door. Began to yell for his son. His knuckles started to bleed. Something ruptured in his throat and his yell turned into a rasp. He got down on his back, stomped against the door with the bottoms of his feet. There was no give, no sense of progress.

He got to his knee and then stood, moved halfway down the corridor and ran at the door, threw his body into it, crashed and slumped, stunned. He sat up, blinked, brought a hand to his forehead and took it away bloody. He got back on his knees, put both hands on the doorknob and yelled, as loud as he could, for his boy.

Then he felt the knob turning in his hands and the door began to open and he was pulled into a dark room that he knew, at once, was cavernous. He felt the temperature change before his eyes could adjust. It was as warm as a sauna. He could hear waves crashing from an open window. He could hear the clink of metal against metal. But Danny’s screams had stopped.

The lights began to come up as someone on either side lifted him off the floor. He smelled perfume and coffee and salt air. He felt himself being lowered and relaxed into something plush. Felt something soft and damp against his wounded forehead. And then his vision was restored, though the light was cobalt blue and railroad lantern red. In the dimness, he could see Danny about ten feet away. The boy was lying on an operating table, his head on a thin pillow, his body covered up to the chin by a sheet that reflected the comic book colors of the room. The boy looked tired but his eyes were open and he was smiling at Sweeney.

Danny’s mouth opened and closed as if forming words, but no sound came from his lips. Sweeney tried to make out the words anyway.

“I knew you’d come,” he repeated to himself and started to slump a bit.

A hand pressed against his chest and pushed him back in his seat. He looked to his left to see Nadia Rey, dressed in her nurse’s whites, her hair pulled back and secured. He looked to his right and saw Alice Peck, in her three-quarter lab coat, with pearls around her throat and a stethoscope hanging from her neck.

Sweeney let his head loll back and touched glass. He sat up and surveyed the room and realized he was in the main turret at the top of the castle, a circular chamber, like the top of a lighthouse, with a peaked ceiling and narrow windows all around. He was on a section of the window seat that circled the room, which was, he now saw, a surgical theater. There were boxy metal carts everywhere, their tops covered in green sheets upon which rested all manner of bowls and basins, scalpels, scissors, chisels, retractors, bone saws, hypodermics, and roll after roll of cotton gauze.

A new kind of panic began to flood in and Sweeney attempted to get up, to go to Danny. But his legs couldn’t seem to bring him to standing and each time he tried, Nadia and Alice restrained him. They did so in a gentle and easy manner, with soft shushing and patting of arms and legs. But they kept him held in place.

Danny, watching his father struggle, gave another smile and mouthed what Sweeney took as, It’s okay, Dad.

And that was when Dr. Fliess appeared on the scene, as if out of nowhere. Suddenly he was standing on the far side of the operating table, his hands on the guardrail, lowering it. He was stationed halfway down the table, near Danny’s waist, wearing green surgical scrubs and latex gloves. To Sweeney, he looked as he’d been depicted in the various Limbo mediums — the comic books, trading cards, posters, TV cartoons, and films. He had the mad eyes that were somehow both bulging and beady. He had the terrible posture that made him seem humpbacked. He had the oversized ears that sprouted the wiry strands of white hair. But when he lowered the surgical mask, his face was that of Dr. Micah Peck.

He addressed Sweeney directly over his son.

“I’m honored to have an audience,” he said, “on a day that will live in medical history.”

Then he spoke to the two women in a sharp voice.

“Has the patient been prepped?” he snapped. “Where’s my assistant?”

Nadia and Alice leaned out from either side of Sweeney and looked at each other. But before they could answer, the room filled with the sound of heels on tile. And out of the darkness came Kerry, the lost wife and mother. She was dressed in scrubs, but unlike Dr. Peck’s, these were soiled. The front of her gown was saturated with blood. She ignored Danny and Peck and walked directly to Sweeney. She was carrying something in her arms.

When she reached her husband, she placed her burden in his lap. His legs and crotch began to burn and he made himself look down from Kerry’s face and saw a fetus, swathed in blood and afterbirth, squirming and making heavy, breathless sounds. Sweeney brought the fetus to his chest, saw that it wasn’t fully developed. Kerry took her husband’s face in her hands, wiped blood and tissue down his cheeks, and moved back to the surgical table to join Dr. Peck.

Peck was nodding, impatient to begin the procedure. Still staring at Sweeney, he reached down to a table, grabbed a sleek, black-on-black bone saw, and slapped it into Kerry’s hands in a theatrical gesture. As Kerry stepped to the head of the table, Sweeney tried to scream and run to her. But voice and legs both failed him, went numb and useless. And so he sat, embraced by Nadia and Alice, embracing the fetus, watching, unable even to close his eyes, as Kerry cut into Danny’s skull, made a small, round hole, and removed a covering of bone as if it were the top to a cookie jar.

What saved Sweeney was the fact that Danny remained fully conscious during the sawing and that he did not cry out. His eyes blinked and glazed, but there were no screams, no convulsion.

Kerry ran her fingers along the edge of the new cavity, and then, in a calm and clinical voice, she said, “We’re ready, Doctor,” and Peck took a long breath and once again addressed Sweeney.

“I know,” said Peck, his words clearly rehearsed, “that you question my methods. And that is appropriate. Many have doubted me before you. But I am here to lead, not to follow. And when the doubters have turned to ash in some forgotten boneyard, my work will live on.”

Without looking, he reached down and lifted a cup into view. It was clear plastic and oversized and decorated with line drawings of the Limbo freaks. The kind of thing given away as a promotion at a fast-food joint. It had a purple, crazy straw protruding high above its rim, twisting and looping to its end. For a moment, Peck lifted the cup above his head, like a chalice or a trophy, then he passed it to Kerry. When he spoke again, there was no sense of a prepared speech.

“Do you know why you’re here?” he asked Sweeney, staring.

“I’m here to help my son,” Sweeney said.

“Do you think you’re a good father?” Peck asked.

“I’ve tried my best,” Sweeney said.

“But your best wasn’t good enough,” Peck said. “Was it?”

Sweeney shook his head.

“Where do you think you went wrong?”

Sweeney tried to wet his lips but found his tongue void of fluid.

“I didn’t protect him,” he said, and Peck yelled, “Speak up.”

“I didn’t protect him,” Sweeney repeated. “I couldn’t keep him from harm.”

Peck nodded. Sweeney brought a hand up and covered his mouth.

“I had a son once,” Peck said. “I understand your troubles.”

Sweeney nodded, unaware that he had begun to weep.

“You want to be forgiven,” Peck said. “You want the boy to forgive you.”

Sweeney’s head was bobbing faster now, his throat on fire and his lungs forgetting any sense of rhythm.

“But to be forgiven,” Peck said, “you must forgive. That is an absolute.”

“I forgive you,” Sweeney yelled.

Peck bit down on his bottom lip, then said, “You have no reason to forgive me. I’ve done nothing to you or your boy.”

“You have to forgive Kerry,” Alice whispered.

“And Danny,” Nadia said.

Peck wasn’t pleased by their interruption.

“Do you know what grace is?” he asked, his voice too loud, and Sweeney nodded. “I’m giving you a gift today,” Peck said. “You didn’t ask for it and you’ll never be able to repay me.”

He looked to Kerry and gave a small nod. Kerry held the Limbo cup in her right hand and manipulated Danny’s head with her left, tilting it back until a thin, slow stream of murky pink liquid began to pour from the hole in the skull and fill the plastic tumbler.

“Today you’ll know what the child knows,” Peck said. “And you’ll feel what the child feels. You’ll know and feel these things without loss or distortion. Without the corruption of language. You’ll know the truth. And then you’ll have to decide if you want the truth to set you free.”

When the last of the fluid dripped from the boy’s skull, the tumbler was nearly full, and the liquid gave color to the skin of the freaks, whose bodies were outlined on the plastic. Kerry positioned Danny’s head back onto the surgical slab, crossed the room to Sweeney and extended the cup to him.

Sweeney stared up at her, unsure of what he should say or do. And in the absence of any plan, he lifted a tacky hand to his wife and they traded fetus for cup. Kerry smiled at him, brought the flesh in her hands to her chest, up high, near her neck. Sweeney wrapped both of his trembling hands around the cup, which was neither cool nor warm. He lifted it slightly, noticed what seemed to be tiny bubbles popping just above the rim. He brought his head down, fitting his mouth around the end of the straw as he closed his eyes and began to suck. The fluid wound its way through the looping track of the straw and flowed into the father’s mouth, over the tongue, down the throat and esophagus. It tasted like milk with a hint of molasses, and Sweeney drank until the straw made the slurping and sputtering that indicated the cup was empty.

He let the straw fall from his mouth, lowered the cup and opened his eyes to the phosphorescent display of a thousand Roman candles arcing across a deep blue sky. When the fireworks faded, he found himself staring at the back of his own head. And then the picture opened out, and his head was boxed in the rear window of the Honda. He was backing out of the driveway. He was headed down Oread Street on his way into work. He honked twice, his standard goodbye to his wife and his son.

He knew this moment, but not from this perspective. This was Danny’s viewpoint. This was the last time that Danny had seen him. This was the last glimpse of the father by the son. This, Sweeney knew, was what happened at home on the night of the accident.

While Sweeney was turning onto Williams, cranking up “Betcha by Golly Wow” and hoping that it would lull him out of a sour mood, Danny was watching the Honda disappear. Everything that Sweeney was about to witness, he realized, would be through the boy’s eyes. And what he saw was a dash back into the house, from a shaky and low-to-the-ground angle. Upon entering the kitchen, carpet changing into linoleum, the sprint transformed into a glide, as the Limbo slipper socks carried the boy almost across the length of the room, where Kerry was chopping produce for a salad.

Danny’s eyes came to rest on his mother and Sweeney saw Kerry smile.

“Did you say goodbye to Daddy?” she asked.

Danny nodded and the picture tilted forward and back.

“Can I have some Oreos?” the boy asked.

Kerry glanced at the wall clock.

“Dinner’s in a bit,” she said, but Danny was already at the low cabinet where they kept the cookies. “Just a few, okay?”

A nod, a tilt, and the boy pushed his fists into the bag that held the cookies and retrieved three, four, and one in his mouth made five. Kerry let it go and Danny departed the kitchen, climbed the stairs to the second floor, singing around the Oreo, “I Don’t Look Like a Hero,” the theme to the last Limbo movie.

When he got to his room, he stacked the cookies on the night table next to the bed, opened the drawer beneath the stack, and lifted out, gingerly, the issue of the comic that he and his dad had purchased earlier in the day. He hoisted himself up onto the bed. Kneeled and balanced and turned on the lamp. The bulb illuminated its Limbo shade. Threw shadows onto the far wall, across the Limbo poster and the Limbo wallpaper that stretched beyond the poster.

Danny sat back and then lay down. Not quite comfortable, he put the comic on the bed and stacked a second pillow atop the first. He grabbed two cookies off the top of the stack, put one on his stomach and took a bite of the second. Crumbs rained down on his chin. Now that he was ready, he lifted the little magazine, its cover overloaded with colors, the gloss glaring a little in the light.

He opened the issue, rolled the cover around to the back without creasing it, and began to read the first page of the final Limbo story.