CHAPTER 26 ALIVE! ALIVE! ALIVE!
ALIVE! ALIVE! ALIVE!
I’m sitting with my dad on the couch, watching The Addams Family , eating takeout, and discussing the sloppy delivery of our latest guest.
“Guests need to be delivered in a timely manner,” my dad says, a slight tone of annoyance in his voice. “It’s important for the preservation, for the families.”
Our latest guest had come in a poor state of decomposition and my dad had, surprisingly, gone off on the delivery driver, the hospital, and anyone else he thought shouldered some of the blame.
I’m proud of him for sticking up for himself and for our guests.
I think it’s a new way of being for him but something he’ll have to do more of now that my mom’s not here.
An ache invades my chest and I try to breathe through it.
This is how it’s been for three months. Just trying to breathe, trying to move forward.
It’s been hard. Harder than when Noah died—the first time—and with every passing day, I hold my dad less accountable for what he did when he brought my mom back.
This pain feels like too much sometimes.
A pecking sound draws my attention. My dad’s beloved ravens are here for their nightly meal.
“My babies,” my dad says as he pulls himself off the couch.
He opens the hatch next to the back door and scatters a handful of seeds as two ravens peck at it.
I wouldn’t say my dad is less haunted now, but maybe he’s haunted in a way that is more bearable.
He doesn’t seem like he’s going to break under the weight of our mourning.
A commercial interrupts our movie and the local duo of reporters tells us that on the six o’clock report they’ll be discussing a tribute to Vincent Hollowell, who only a few months prior had seemed fine, but who had dropped dead seemingly out of nowhere.
My dad eyes me knowingly. Hollowell had clearly been a reanimate of Grandpa Redwood’s making.
“What if they knew he wasn’t alive to begin with?” my dad asks. “That would be breaking news.”
“Alive,” one of the ravens repeats in a voice that sounds almost identical to the tone and pitch of my dad. “Alive!”
I don’t think I’ll ever get used to how human they sound.
“Anyway,” Dad says. “Despite the ineptitude of the hospital and the delivery, I prepped our guest. She’s ready for you whenever you’re up to it.”
I’ve taken over the mortuary cosmetology for all our guests until we can hire on some help, but right now I’m happy it’s just me and my dad.
“Dad,” I say. “I need to ask you something.”
My dad closes the bird hatch and rejoins me on the couch. “Go for it.”
The impossible nature of everything that happened will stick with me forever. I know that. But there was something that stuck in my head, not because it was horrific or traumatizing, but because it was odd.
“When we were there at the castle,” I say.
“The monster kept saying things to me that didn’t make sense.
” I pull my legs up and tuck them in close to me.
“He said I was special. He said he couldn’t wait to see what I would become.
The way he was looking at me when I reanimated that poor woman . . . ?what was all that about?”
My dad is lost in his own thoughts for several moments before he answers. “We all have this gift that when coupled with the book gave us the power to bring back the dead. I don’t know if ‘special’ is the word I’d use to describe it but you are indeed special.”
“Dad, I love you,” I say. “I really do and I love that you think that way about me but I guarantee that is not what the monster meant.”
My dad shrugs but I can tell he’s holding back.
“It’s something else,” I say. “Like they knew something you didn’t.”
“I don’t see how,” my dad says. “My family has passed this knowledge down through the generations.”
“You mean the things Dippel knew?” I ask.
“Yes. It all started with him.”
“And we know that Dippel authored the book because he had the power to reanimate people, right?” I ask.
My dad nods.
“He was the first,” I say, more to myself than to my dad as an avalanche of thoughts tumble through my head. “How much of the Frankenstein story is true and how much is made up?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Dad says.
I think for a moment. “In the story, Doctor Frankenstein had a theory that he could create life and he used electricity to spark that in a monster he created from a bunch of dead bodies. But the monster himself said that that wasn’t true.
He said Frankenstein—Dippel— was the spark.
It almost sounds like the power reanimators have existed before the book.
Almost like Dippel was trying to work out something he already knew existed. ”
“But the names were all in the index,” my dad says, his voice low and serious. “Every reanimate was listed there. They have to be. That’s part of the ritual, recording the name in blood.”
“When Dippel made the monster, he wrote down the process and started keeping track of the reanimates,” I say. “He wrote down the process, the words, the rituals.” I huff and sink back into the couch. “There is something missing.”
“Like what?” my dad asks.
“Did you get a chance to write that woman’s name down? The one on the platform?”
He thinks for a moment. “I didn’t. I was in the process when she sat up. The book was open, I was saying the words, performing the ritual.”
“Can I ask you a question?” I say softly as the thought takes shape in my mind.
My dad says nothing but I take this to mean yes, I can ask, but tread lightly.
I ask him the only question that makes sense to me in this moment. “Have you ever tried to reanimate someone without using the book?”
He hesitates, swallowing hard and then leveling his gaze with mine. “I have.”
I sit straight up. “What?”
“My father tried to force me to do it when I was very young,” he says. “It’s one of the many reasons we were estranged.”
“He thought you could do it without the book,” I say.
“I could make bodies move, make them shift around on the prep table in the mortuary he worked in,” my dad says.
“That had never happened to him. He thought it meant something, but it never went any further than that. So you see, there must have been some power in the book and if I’m being honest, I’m glad it’s gone.
” He stares off for a moment, then shakes his head.
“Meka, I don’t think there is anything else to discover.
I don’t think we have to worry about any of that anymore. We can let it all go now.”
He pats my knee, then stands up and walks to the hall.
“Meka,” he says over his shoulder.
“Yeah, Dad?”
“The book is destroyed,” he says. “It’s not possible to reanimate someone anymore, not as far as I know anyway, but if it were . . . they couldn’t be destroyed. The book being gone makes that impossible. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Dad, I—”
“Just tell me you understand,” my dad says firmly, using a tone my mom would have used to let me know she was serious.
“I understand,” I say. “You’re right. I’m gonna go get started on our new guest. Love you.”
“Love you too,” my dad says.
My dad goes upstairs and I slip off to the basement and wheel our new guest, one Miss Shelby Ryan, who’d fallen from a mountain bike and landed on her neck the wrong way, from the freezer to prep room number one.
Her skin is badly discolored and she is definitely going to have to go into a turtleneck or a high-collar shirt because the bone in her neck is sticking out at an odd angle.
I use the lift to transfer her to the table and slip on my apron, still thinking about what the monster had said to me and what it means.
My theory about Dippel using the book as a means of recording still stands but if I’m right, it means there was no book at that very first reanimation.
It was just Dippel and the dead body made of other dead bodies.
Was there some magic connected to the book?
My dad was right. There had to be, otherwise destroying it wouldn’t have ended all the reanimates, but that still doesn’t feel right.
The book was a means of controlling the reanimates, and the reanimator.
Even Grandpa Redwood thought it was possible a reanimation could be done without the book.
I take up a seat on a stool at the head of the table and begin setting down a base for Miss Ryan’s makeup.
I think of how my mom would have proceeded and it makes me feel like she’s still here, keeping watch.
I can almost hear her voice in my ear telling me that we have a reputation to uphold and we gotta live up to it.
I touch Miss Ryan’s cheek. Pain, like a knife slicing my fingertips, rockets through my hand.
But this feeling is familiar now and I don’t jerk my hand back.
I don’t stand and stumble away from our guest. I sit very, very still.
I know this feeling but it’s not possible.
My hand aches and there’s a buzzing in the back of my head.
Scrambling to the door, I almost scream for my dad but something stops me.
All those years ago I’d stood at the foot of a prep table as my dad performed those archaic rituals—rituals he’d been taught were the only real way to perform a reanimation.
Dippel wrote down what he knew but Dippel didn’t need the book before he created it.
Those who had come after him did . . . ?but what about me?
My dad hadn’t had time to put that dead woman’s name in the book before she sat up, before I touched her.
Hadn’t this been building up? With my dad even admitting that our funeral home saw more than its fair share of moving corpses, many of them in my presence?
I’d seen it happen in the back seat of the hearse.
The book had been near but not open and I wasn’t reading from it.
Everything suddenly falls into place. I had done something in the hearse that night.
I’d reanimated a man without using the book and I’d done the same thing that terrible day in the castle in Roscoe.
I am a reanimator.
And much like my forefather, I don’t need the book because I am the spark. This is what the monster meant. That I would become like his very own maker, raising the dead without a book or a ritual of any kind.
I approach the foot end of the prep table, where Miss Ryan’s bare feet are sticking out from under the white sheet.
Her pink toenail polish is still intact.
I breathe deep and put my ungloved hands around her naked ankles.
A spark, painful and electric, shoots through my hands and into Miss Ryan.
Her body jerks and her eyelids flutter. I stare at her for what feels like a long time as the current flows out of me.
Something deep in my gut tells me if I hold on much longer, she will open her mouth and speak to me, she’ll look around and wonder how she got here.
She will ask to be freed from the curse of reanimation and I won’t be able to help because the book is gone and there can be no unmaking.
I let go of her ankles and she falls back onto the table.
My heart is knocking in my chest, but as I stare at my aching hands, I cannot help but feel something unspeakable, something that has been needling at my insides for as long as I can remember but it didn’t have a name.
Now, I know what it is . . . ?power. And it’s not just some vague thing that me and my dad have spoken about in whispers. It is real and it is in me.
I am the spark.
I let Miss Ryan rest in peace. For whatever reason, she’s here on this table and she’s not asking for more time. I don’t know if that’s what she would have wanted . . . ?but I know someone who did want more time. Someone who asks me for more time every time I close my eyes.
In the dead of a summer evening, I stand in the confines of the Cliff family tomb alone. Noah’s name, dates of birth and death, are etched into the facing stone. I stare at it for a long time.
“You are probably asking what I’m doing here,” I say aloud.
“I don’t know. This is the first place I wanted to be when—when I put it all together.
” I take a deep breath and lean my forehead against the facing stone.
“This is what my dad felt like when he thought he lost my mom. I know it.” I press my hand over my heart.
“It hurts.” I sigh. “We let her go and we let you go. It was the right choice.”
Wasn’t it?
It has to be, because the alternative is a selfish act, an unthinkable undertaking. And still . . .
“I wish you were still here,” I whisper into the dark. “I wish you were still alive.”
I press my hand to Noah’s name. A little ripple of energy tickles the inside of my palm.
Outside, ravens circle overhead. I can hear their song and their voices cawing, Alive! Alive! Alive!