Back Cover Text:
The rain is falling and the dead are rising.
It began at an ultra-secret government laboratory.
Experiments in limb regeneration--an unspeakable union
of Medieval alchemy and cutting edge genetics result in
the very germ of horror itself: a gene trigger that will
reanimate dead tissue…any dead tissue.
Now it’s loose. It’s gone viral. It’s in the rain.
And the rain has not stopped falling for weeks.
As the country floods and corpses float in the streets, as
cities are submerged, the evil dead are rising.
And they are hungry.
EXHUMATION
1
This was Witcham in the teeth of the storm:
A bog of sucking black mud and rising waters. The rain had been falling for four
days nonstop and just after ten that night, it reached its peak. Truth be told, it did
not just fall, it hammered down from the heavens. It sprayed and lashed and turned
the roads to mud and filled cellars and pissed in through every available crack.
Bolstered by sixty-mile-an-hour winds, it ripped off roofs and punched in windows
and blew doors right off their hinges.
And by midnight, the cement wall hemming in the swollen Black River
completely collapsed, sending a wall of water rushing through the city. Particularly
River Town, a historic part of Witcham. And not just water, but filth and debris and
sewage from backed-up drains. Terrified as their houses crumbled around them,
people ran out into the streets and were driven under the rippling mud and lost for
good. Block by block, the lights blinked out one by one like somebody had drawn a
single, masking shade. And then there was just darkness and wind and destruction,
the rain pouring down.
The darkness, however, was not absolute.
It was spotty, a murky dreamlike half-light cut by elongated shadows. And had
you been able to withstand the onslaught out in the open, you would have seen that
wall of water strike Hillside Cemetery with incredible force. The hills it sat on did
not just gently erode away, they dissolved. They disintegrated, exhuming things best
left buried, creating a massive mudslide of bodies and headstones and rotting caskets
that washed down into River Town, engulfing the neighborhood in a deluge of
coffins and corpses. Tombstones speared through the walls of houses, caskets
erupted through living room windows, and hundreds of cadavers ended up in the
flooded streets, some standing upright in the mud and others caught in trees and
bushes and wedged in doorways as if they were preparing to knock.
This was not just a night of fierce storms and flooding. This was the night the
dead came out of their graves.
2
Later, Alan Sheeves wished dearly that he’d just gotten out like the others.
Meg was pregnant and the waters had been rising for days, but he had steadfastly
held to the idea that the rain would stop and the waters would simply recede as they
had done other years. But that didn’t happen. And maybe down in his guts, he knew
it wouldn’t. There had been no sleep for either of them that night. Just a tense
cuddling with Meg under the covers, the both of them holding on for dear life as the
storm battered the little house, making it shake and tremble on its foundation. The
rain sounded like pellets. Like thousands of pellets striking the house.
And then, on around midnight as darkness and rain licked at the windows, a
rumbling. A roaring wall of noise as the river burst its banks and rolled through the
neighborhood, washing houses away and uprooting trees and vomiting the charnel
waste of Hillside Cemetery into the streets.
Alan and Meg became aware of that when the picture window downstairs
shattered and wind and chill rain blew through the house.
“Alan…” Meg said. “Alan.”
“Probably a tree branch. I guess I better have a look. You stay here.”
But Meg refused. She threw on her robe, the thick terricloth one, and went down
the stairs with him. Eight months along, it was no easy bit for her going up and down
the stairs. Alan had even offered to set up a bed in the living room for her, but she’d
have none of it. But that was Meg. Eight months pregnant or not, she would not let it
slow her down or alter her lifestyle anymore than necessary.
The lights were out, but Alan had seen that coming. He had flashlights by the bed
and a couple gas camping lanterns all primed and ready to go. Flashlight in one hand
and lantern in the other, he moved down the narrow stairs, smelling the water and
the night and something else that just did not belong: a putrescent odor. Like
something had died and been washed into his house in the dead of night.
In the living room, water spraying into his face, he stepped around the fragments
of glass while Meg waited behind him.
“Be careful for godsake,” she said.
Setting aside the lantern, Alan put the flashlight beam on the thing that had
broken his window. Not a tree branch at all. But an oblong shape, a box dripping
water and covered in mildew and clots of earth. A coffin.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“What?” Meg said. “What is that?”
“It’s…it looks like a—”
“A casket,” she said for him, a note of panic just beneath her voice.
He swallowed. “Goddamn Hillside must have washed out of all things.”
He stepped forward, panning the light over the intruder to his happy little home.
The box was old, pitted and discolored. It must have been in the ground for decades.
Thank God it hadn’t burst open and spilled…well, spilled anything onto the carpet. It
was wedged through the window tightly, just wide enough to slip through the pane.
It was probably only a matter of shoving it back out.
You seriously want to touch that thing?
But he knew he didn’t have a choice.
There was no way in hell Meg would sleep with a goddamn casket stuck through
the side pane of the picture window. She was a good kid in every way, but she was
also a little on the superstitious side. Partly because of her Catholic upbringing and
partly because she liked to read books that scared the hell out of her.
“Let’s get out of here,” Meg said. “I don’t like this, Alan. I’m not too adult to admit
that this is freaking me out.”
Alan chuckled. “We can’t leave, Meg. Not right now. There’s nowhere to go to.”
“All the same…”
“All the same nothing. I’ll just push it back out.”
It was the only thing he could do. There was no other choice. Outside, beyond the
windows, a river of black water was flowing through his yard. The rose bushes were
gone along with the picnic table, the street invisible. Nothing out there but rushing
water and bobbing debris. Maybe alone he might have chanced it, but not with Meg.
Not with Meg.
Behind him, she lit the lantern.
“Don’t touch it, Alan. Please…just don’t touch it.”
“I have to.”
He went over to it and put his hands on it. Jesus, it was cold and slimy. The wood
was soft. It gave under his fingers and he didn’t like that. The idea that he might give
it a good push and his hands would go right through it, his fingers brushing up
against a polished skull or rotting grave clothes. Sucking in a sharp breath, he placed
his hands flat on the slimy wood and applied some pressure. The box did not move.
But the wooden panel at the end bulged inward an inch or so with a mournful,
unpleasant creaking.
Meg was breathing hard. “Alan, just leave it there. Do you hear me? Just leave it
there.”
He looked back at her. “Meg, it’s just a wooden box. That’s all it is.”
“I don’t like it.”
“C’mon, it’s harmless. If it was full of Tinker Toys it wouldn’t bother you, would
it?”
“No, Alan, it wouldn’t,” she said, her tone of disapproval growing. “But I’m pretty
sure there’s no fucking Tinker Toys in there.”
He just shook his head. The rain was still falling hard out there, but the wind had
lessened. That was a good thing. At least the house was no longer shaking. He
pressed his hands back against the box, feeling an almost atavistic repulsion against
touching it. He gave it a shove. Then another and another. It wasn’t moving.
“Now what?” Meg said.
“Now I push a little harder.” He smiled. “No harder than pushing out a baby.”
“Ha, ha.”
“I’ll get it.”
“Just leave it there,” she said again.
“If I leave it there, you’ll never get any sleep and you need your sleep.”
“Like I’m going to sleep anyway. In case you haven’t noticed, Alan, there’s a coffin
trying to get into my living room.”
Funny. Well, she might have been eight months down the road, but her mouth
still worked just fine.
Bracing his feet, he put his hands back on the end of the coffin and gave it
everything he had. The box moved maybe an inch or two before the panel bowed in
again and a trickle of black water came oozing out, running over the back of his
hands. He yanked them away like he’d been scalded, letting out a little cry. God, of
all things. Drainage from a coffin.
Meg giggled into her hand. “It’s just a wooden box, Alan. That’s all it is.”
He chose to ignore her amusement. Yes, it was just a wooden box hammered
together in a casket factory somewhere and a spider was just a spider, still you didn’t
want to go touching one if you could help it. And you sure as hell did not want to
grab a fat, juicy one in your palm and squeeze your fist shut until that spider’s soft
body pulped in your hand and brown juice ran between your fingers. And the coffin—
and the juice running from it—gave Alan about the same sense of aversion and
disgust.
But it had gone beyond that now.
At first, he was hesitant to touch it. Then merely revolted at its feel. But now he
was simple pissed-off. The storm wasn’t bad enough. The damage to his house and
yard were not enough, now he had a fucking coffin stuck in his window. And that
sonofabitch was going back outside whether it wanted to or not. He put his hands on
the box again and this time, he really put his back into it. His back and his upper
body strength, which was considerable after working in a lumberyard these past
twelve years. The panel almost completely collapsed, but before it did the box moved
five or six inches, enough so that most of its length was hanging out the shattered
window. Gravity did the rest. The casket balanced precariously there for a moment
or two, then fell out the window.
“Ha!” Alan said.
It hit the water with a great splash, stood straight up and down like a ship about
to go under, bobbed for a second or two, then righted itself, twisting in a lazy circle
as the current found it and carried it away. It joined that gently rushing river of filth
and bobbing things. And was gone from sight.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said. “Just needed some convincing was all. A
little push to show it who was in…”
Alan’s words dried up in his mouth.
For one crazy second in the glare thrown by the flashlight beam, he’d thought
somebody was standing out in the street. But that was crazy. Nobody could stand out
there. At least not for long.
“What is it?” Meg said.
“Ah, nothing.”
And it was nothing. Just a shadow or something swept in by the current. That’s
all. There was nothing out there now but that black, oily water and all manner of
flotsam caught in its pull.
“Look at your hands,” Meg said.
Alan did. They were muddy and dark. “Grab me a towel from the kitchen, will
ya?”
“You’re not going to wipe that crap on one of my towels.”
“Meg, please.”
Sighing, she turned from him and then stopped. Stopped dead as he stopped
himself. He could not have just heard what he’d thought he’d heard. Not on a night
like this. Not in a storm like this. It just couldn’t be. But then it came again: a slow,
insistent pounding at the front door. Thud, thud, thud.
“Alan…”
But he ignored his wife, things flowing through his brain, thoughts that told him
how there could not be anyone out there knocking. Not tonight. It just wasn’t earthly
possible. There were other thoughts, too. Thoughts that told him to take his wife by
the hand and run upstairs, pretend that he had not heard a thing.
But that was silly…wasn’t it?
The porch angled away to the side, so he could not see who was out there from
the living room window.
“Don’t answer it,” Meg whispered.
The pounding came again. An almost mechanical sound.
He walked over to the door, something seizing up inside him, his belly pulling up
like it wanted to fill his throat.
“Alan, please…”
But it was too late, because his hand was already gripping the knob and his other
was undoing the latch. Behind him, his wife made a weird, moaning sound. And
something in him, something like panic, wanted him to make it, too.
Without further ado, he opened the door to what waited out there.
3
Any given night in the summer or fall, had you been out walking down Angel
Street in Witcham’s River Town, you might have noticed a garishly painted edifice
squeezed dead center of a group of false-fronted buildings between 12th and 13th
Avenues. Though the block featured everything from pawnshops to fried chicken
counters, there was no mistaking that particular establishment with its bright scarlet
façade and gold scrolling along the roofline. And the sign which read: COSTELLO’S
MUSEUM OF MORBID MEMORABILIA in antique lettering.
From June through October, it was strung with red, yellow, and white bulbs and
calliope music played from speakers over the door. Its proprietor--a somewhat seedy
character named William Barney--was from a long line of carnival and circus
performers. Though he had not labored on the midway for thirty years or more,
Barney—as his father and grandfather—had amassed a sizeable collection of
souvenirs and momentos from those heady and raucous days of yore.
Step inside and the walls were plastered with old circus posters and railroad
show banners and sideshow accordion boards advertising everything from bearded
ladies to three-headed goats, half-girls and half-boys to fire-eaters and armless
wonders and alligator men. You could view the skeletons of giants like “Sky-High”
Lester Brown to those of dwarves like Wee Willie Wilkins in their respective, neon-lit
caskets or marvel over the death masks of Bobby the Frog-Boy and Slim Gerou, the
Caterpillar man. And if you were especially daring, you might want to investigate the
body cast of Laddy the Human Larva or see firsthand the implements of old-time
torture shows and view a photographic panorama of the lives of rubber men and
monkey girls and nail-eaters.
As can be inferred, Barney’s collection concentrated mostly on the more grim and
sensational aspects of carnival lore.
On dusty shelves and scattered over tabletops there was an exceptional collection
of natural and decidedly unnatural wonders. Everything from embalmed devil-
babies to stuffed mermaids, the tanned hides of man-eating snakes and giant rats,
shrunken heads and ossified hands.
There was another room in the back that drew most of the museum’s business.
And for an additional three dollars, you could go inside and view Barney’s collection
of bottled babies and pickled punks. In jars and glass vessels and tanks of
preservative were human and semi-human curiosities, things that died at birth,
things unborn, and things that could never have lived in the first place. They were
lined up on shelves and lit by red light bulbs to enhance atmosphere and lend an
uncanny, otherworldly illumination to things most definitely uncanny and
otherworldly—freak births and bucket babies, parasitic twins and monstrous fetuses
of every description. Drifting in their oceans of brine, here were things with too
many limbs or not enough, one-eyed and two-headed and six-fingered, squid-babies
and spider-babies, a menagerie of flesh twisted and mutated into the most abnormal
shapes.
Costello’s Museum was just down the road from Hillside Cemetery and of all the
buildings on that block, it took the worst beating. Its façade, which was little more
than reinforced plywood and joists, was obliterated by the rushing wall of water,
mud, and debris that had burst the banks of the Black River and pretty much sucked
up everything in its path. The water crashed through the museum, destroying
Barneys collection of oddities and spilling into the Parlor of Pickled Punks, and with
such force that nearly all the vessels and jars were shattered instantly. The backwash
sucked everything out into the streets, out into that river of foul water and falling
rain.
And for some time, up and down Angel Street, monstrous things that had not
been free of their liquid prisons for decades were exposed to what fell from the sky.
Things that had haunted the dreams of generations were set loose upon the world.
They bobbed and drifted and long-curled limbs unfurled…
1
This was Witcham in the teeth of the storm:
A bog of sucking black mud and rising waters. The rain had been falling for four
days nonstop and just after ten that night, it reached its peak. Truth be told, it did
not just fall, it hammered down from the heavens. It sprayed and lashed and turned
the roads to mud and filled cellars and pissed in through every available crack.
Bolstered by sixty-mile-an-hour winds, it ripped off roofs and punched in windows
and blew doors right off their hinges.
And by midnight, the cement wall hemming in the swollen Black River
completely collapsed, sending a wall of water rushing through the city. Particularly
River Town, a historic part of Witcham. And not just water, but filth and debris and
sewage from backed-up drains. Terrified as their houses crumbled around them,
people ran out into the streets and were driven under the rippling mud and lost for
good. Block by block, the lights blinked out one by one like somebody had drawn a
single, masking shade. And then there was just darkness and wind and destruction,
the rain pouring down.
The darkness, however, was not absolute.
It was spotty, a murky dreamlike half-light cut by elongated shadows. And had
you been able to withstand the onslaught out in the open, you would have seen that
wall of water strike Hillside Cemetery with incredible force. The hills it sat on did
not just gently erode away, they dissolved. They disintegrated, exhuming things best
left buried, creating a massive mudslide of bodies and headstones and rotting caskets
that washed down into River Town, engulfing the neighborhood in a deluge of
coffins and corpses. Tombstones speared through the walls of houses, caskets
erupted through living room windows, and hundreds of cadavers ended up in the
flooded streets, some standing upright in the mud and others caught in trees and
bushes and wedged in doorways as if they were preparing to knock.
This was not just a night of fierce storms and flooding. This was the night the
dead came out of their graves.
2
Later, Alan Sheeves wished dearly that he’d just gotten out like the others.
Meg was pregnant and the waters had been rising for days, but he had steadfastly
held to the idea that the rain would stop and the waters would simply recede as they
had done other years. But that didn’t happen. And maybe down in his guts, he knew
it wouldn’t. There had been no sleep for either of them that night. Just a tense
cuddling with Meg under the covers, the both of them holding on for dear life as the
storm battered the little house, making it shake and tremble on its foundation. The
rain sounded like pellets. Like thousands of pellets striking the house.
And then, on around midnight as darkness and rain licked at the windows, a
rumbling. A roaring wall of noise as the river burst its banks and rolled through the
neighborhood, washing houses away and uprooting trees and vomiting the charnel
waste of Hillside Cemetery into the streets.
Alan and Meg became aware of that when the picture window downstairs
shattered and wind and chill rain blew through the house.
“Alan…” Meg said. “Alan.”
“Probably a tree branch. I guess I better have a look. You stay here.”
But Meg refused. She threw on her robe, the thick terricloth one, and went down
the stairs with him. Eight months along, it was no easy bit for her going up and down
the stairs. Alan had even offered to set up a bed in the living room for her, but she’d
have none of it. But that was Meg. Eight months pregnant or not, she would not let it
slow her down or alter her lifestyle anymore than necessary.
The lights were out, but Alan had seen that coming. He had flashlights by the bed
and a couple gas camping lanterns all primed and ready to go. Flashlight in one hand
and lantern in the other, he moved down the narrow stairs, smelling the water and
the night and something else that just did not belong: a putrescent odor. Like
something had died and been washed into his house in the dead of night.
In the living room, water spraying into his face, he stepped around the fragments
of glass while Meg waited behind him.
“Be careful for godsake,” she said.
Setting aside the lantern, Alan put the flashlight beam on the thing that had
broken his window. Not a tree branch at all. But an oblong shape, a box dripping
water and covered in mildew and clots of earth. A coffin.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“What?” Meg said. “What is that?”
“It’s…it looks like a—”
“A casket,” she said for him, a note of panic just beneath her voice.
He swallowed. “Goddamn Hillside must have washed out of all things.”
He stepped forward, panning the light over the intruder to his happy little home.
The box was old, pitted and discolored. It must have been in the ground for decades.
Thank God it hadn’t burst open and spilled…well, spilled anything onto the carpet. It
was wedged through the window tightly, just wide enough to slip through the pane.
It was probably only a matter of shoving it back out.
You seriously want to touch that thing?
But he knew he didn’t have a choice.
There was no way in hell Meg would sleep with a goddamn casket stuck through
the side pane of the picture window. She was a good kid in every way, but she was
also a little on the superstitious side. Partly because of her Catholic upbringing and
partly because she liked to read books that scared the hell out of her.
“Let’s get out of here,” Meg said. “I don’t like this, Alan. I’m not too adult to admit
that this is freaking me out.”
Alan chuckled. “We can’t leave, Meg. Not right now. There’s nowhere to go to.”
“All the same…”
“All the same nothing. I’ll just push it back out.”
It was the only thing he could do. There was no other choice. Outside, beyond the
windows, a river of black water was flowing through his yard. The rose bushes were
gone along with the picnic table, the street invisible. Nothing out there but rushing
water and bobbing debris. Maybe alone he might have chanced it, but not with Meg.
Not with Meg.
Behind him, she lit the lantern.
“Don’t touch it, Alan. Please…just don’t touch it.”
“I have to.”
He went over to it and put his hands on it. Jesus, it was cold and slimy. The wood
was soft. It gave under his fingers and he didn’t like that. The idea that he might give
it a good push and his hands would go right through it, his fingers brushing up
against a polished skull or rotting grave clothes. Sucking in a sharp breath, he placed
his hands flat on the slimy wood and applied some pressure. The box did not move.
But the wooden panel at the end bulged inward an inch or so with a mournful,
unpleasant creaking.
Meg was breathing hard. “Alan, just leave it there. Do you hear me? Just leave it
there.”
He looked back at her. “Meg, it’s just a wooden box. That’s all it is.”
“I don’t like it.”
“C’mon, it’s harmless. If it was full of Tinker Toys it wouldn’t bother you, would
it?”
“No, Alan, it wouldn’t,” she said, her tone of disapproval growing. “But I’m pretty
sure there’s no fucking Tinker Toys in there.”
He just shook his head. The rain was still falling hard out there, but the wind had
lessened. That was a good thing. At least the house was no longer shaking. He
pressed his hands back against the box, feeling an almost atavistic repulsion against
touching it. He gave it a shove. Then another and another. It wasn’t moving.
“Now what?” Meg said.
“Now I push a little harder.” He smiled. “No harder than pushing out a baby.”
“Ha, ha.”
“I’ll get it.”
“Just leave it there,” she said again.
“If I leave it there, you’ll never get any sleep and you need your sleep.”
“Like I’m going to sleep anyway. In case you haven’t noticed, Alan, there’s a coffin
trying to get into my living room.”
Funny. Well, she might have been eight months down the road, but her mouth
still worked just fine.
Bracing his feet, he put his hands back on the end of the coffin and gave it
everything he had. The box moved maybe an inch or two before the panel bowed in
again and a trickle of black water came oozing out, running over the back of his
hands. He yanked them away like he’d been scalded, letting out a little cry. God, of
all things. Drainage from a coffin.
Meg giggled into her hand. “It’s just a wooden box, Alan. That’s all it is.”
He chose to ignore her amusement. Yes, it was just a wooden box hammered
together in a casket factory somewhere and a spider was just a spider, still you didn’t
want to go touching one if you could help it. And you sure as hell did not want to
grab a fat, juicy one in your palm and squeeze your fist shut until that spider’s soft
body pulped in your hand and brown juice ran between your fingers. And the coffin—
and the juice running from it—gave Alan about the same sense of aversion and
disgust.
But it had gone beyond that now.
At first, he was hesitant to touch it. Then merely revolted at its feel. But now he
was simple pissed-off. The storm wasn’t bad enough. The damage to his house and
yard were not enough, now he had a fucking coffin stuck in his window. And that
sonofabitch was going back outside whether it wanted to or not. He put his hands on
the box again and this time, he really put his back into it. His back and his upper
body strength, which was considerable after working in a lumberyard these past
twelve years. The panel almost completely collapsed, but before it did the box moved
five or six inches, enough so that most of its length was hanging out the shattered
window. Gravity did the rest. The casket balanced precariously there for a moment
or two, then fell out the window.
“Ha!” Alan said.
It hit the water with a great splash, stood straight up and down like a ship about
to go under, bobbed for a second or two, then righted itself, twisting in a lazy circle
as the current found it and carried it away. It joined that gently rushing river of filth
and bobbing things. And was gone from sight.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said. “Just needed some convincing was all. A
little push to show it who was in…”
Alan’s words dried up in his mouth.
For one crazy second in the glare thrown by the flashlight beam, he’d thought
somebody was standing out in the street. But that was crazy. Nobody could stand out
there. At least not for long.
“What is it?” Meg said.
“Ah, nothing.”
And it was nothing. Just a shadow or something swept in by the current. That’s
all. There was nothing out there now but that black, oily water and all manner of
flotsam caught in its pull.
“Look at your hands,” Meg said.
Alan did. They were muddy and dark. “Grab me a towel from the kitchen, will
ya?”
“You’re not going to wipe that crap on one of my towels.”
“Meg, please.”
Sighing, she turned from him and then stopped. Stopped dead as he stopped
himself. He could not have just heard what he’d thought he’d heard. Not on a night
like this. Not in a storm like this. It just couldn’t be. But then it came again: a slow,
insistent pounding at the front door. Thud, thud, thud.
“Alan…”
But he ignored his wife, things flowing through his brain, thoughts that told him
how there could not be anyone out there knocking. Not tonight. It just wasn’t earthly
possible. There were other thoughts, too. Thoughts that told him to take his wife by
the hand and run upstairs, pretend that he had not heard a thing.
But that was silly…wasn’t it?
The porch angled away to the side, so he could not see who was out there from
the living room window.
“Don’t answer it,” Meg whispered.
The pounding came again. An almost mechanical sound.
He walked over to the door, something seizing up inside him, his belly pulling up
like it wanted to fill his throat.
“Alan, please…”
But it was too late, because his hand was already gripping the knob and his other
was undoing the latch. Behind him, his wife made a weird, moaning sound. And
something in him, something like panic, wanted him to make it, too.
Without further ado, he opened the door to what waited out there.
3
Any given night in the summer or fall, had you been out walking down Angel
Street in Witcham’s River Town, you might have noticed a garishly painted edifice
squeezed dead center of a group of false-fronted buildings between 12th and 13th
Avenues. Though the block featured everything from pawnshops to fried chicken
counters, there was no mistaking that particular establishment with its bright scarlet
façade and gold scrolling along the roofline. And the sign which read: COSTELLO’S
MUSEUM OF MORBID MEMORABILIA in antique lettering.
From June through October, it was strung with red, yellow, and white bulbs and
calliope music played from speakers over the door. Its proprietor--a somewhat seedy
character named William Barney--was from a long line of carnival and circus
performers. Though he had not labored on the midway for thirty years or more,
Barney—as his father and grandfather—had amassed a sizeable collection of
souvenirs and momentos from those heady and raucous days of yore.
Step inside and the walls were plastered with old circus posters and railroad
show banners and sideshow accordion boards advertising everything from bearded
ladies to three-headed goats, half-girls and half-boys to fire-eaters and armless
wonders and alligator men. You could view the skeletons of giants like “Sky-High”
Lester Brown to those of dwarves like Wee Willie Wilkins in their respective, neon-lit
caskets or marvel over the death masks of Bobby the Frog-Boy and Slim Gerou, the
Caterpillar man. And if you were especially daring, you might want to investigate the
body cast of Laddy the Human Larva or see firsthand the implements of old-time
torture shows and view a photographic panorama of the lives of rubber men and
monkey girls and nail-eaters.
As can be inferred, Barney’s collection concentrated mostly on the more grim and
sensational aspects of carnival lore.
On dusty shelves and scattered over tabletops there was an exceptional collection
of natural and decidedly unnatural wonders. Everything from embalmed devil-
babies to stuffed mermaids, the tanned hides of man-eating snakes and giant rats,
shrunken heads and ossified hands.
There was another room in the back that drew most of the museum’s business.
And for an additional three dollars, you could go inside and view Barney’s collection
of bottled babies and pickled punks. In jars and glass vessels and tanks of
preservative were human and semi-human curiosities, things that died at birth,
things unborn, and things that could never have lived in the first place. They were
lined up on shelves and lit by red light bulbs to enhance atmosphere and lend an
uncanny, otherworldly illumination to things most definitely uncanny and
otherworldly—freak births and bucket babies, parasitic twins and monstrous fetuses
of every description. Drifting in their oceans of brine, here were things with too
many limbs or not enough, one-eyed and two-headed and six-fingered, squid-babies
and spider-babies, a menagerie of flesh twisted and mutated into the most abnormal
shapes.
Costello’s Museum was just down the road from Hillside Cemetery and of all the
buildings on that block, it took the worst beating. Its façade, which was little more
than reinforced plywood and joists, was obliterated by the rushing wall of water,
mud, and debris that had burst the banks of the Black River and pretty much sucked
up everything in its path. The water crashed through the museum, destroying
Barneys collection of oddities and spilling into the Parlor of Pickled Punks, and with
such force that nearly all the vessels and jars were shattered instantly. The backwash
sucked everything out into the streets, out into that river of foul water and falling
rain.
And for some time, up and down Angel Street, monstrous things that had not
been free of their liquid prisons for decades were exposed to what fell from the sky.
Things that had haunted the dreams of generations were set loose upon the world.
They bobbed and drifted and long-curled limbs unfurled…
Copyright 2009 By Tim Curran