Lorraine waits until it’s almost too late. She selects the coffin—cherry wood, the color beautiful and rich and bright—and speaks to Father Jimenez about the service. She holds Judy through her quiet sobs almost every night, and on one of those nights she helps Judy pick out a dress. Judy has more than one dress suitable for funerals, which ought to tell Lorraine something, but she’s not listening—not to that nor anything else. She’s humming to herself every minute of the day and night, drowning out her own thoughts, not listening—
But she cannot close her ears forever. The night before Ed’s funeral, she puts on a dress, belt, shoes. She clips her hair up. She kisses her daught and her mother and takes the car keys, and she points the old Plymouth northeast. Whatever it is that’s been whispering in her ear for days, it’s telling her to go that way.
Once she’s on the road, it’s Ed’s voice she hears, as clear as life. Not like this, Lorraine.
She shakes her head, blinking away threatening tears. She can’t start bawling; she has a destination to get to.
A little later, You have to let me go.
“You didn’t,” Lorraine says out loud. “If you’d let me go, then you wouldn’t—you wouldn’t be—” She stops, too choked up to continue.
The Ed of her memory doesn’t have anything to say to that. Lorraine drives on.
She doesn’t have an address or even a name, only a kind of pressure in her chest that eases the farther she goes. When she sees a highway sign for Arkham, she thinks she must be getting close; when she rolls into the city limits, she knows it. She follows that tug across town to a cemetery and down its long dirt road, along a cast-iron fence. Statuary rises up in her headlights, stone weather-worn and shockingly pale, and then it shrinks away again behind her as she passes.
She comes at last to a looming old heap built of brick. There’s still a light on in one upstairs window, though it doesn’t matter. She’d have knocked either way. She’d knock until her knuckles bled.
She doesn’t need to, though. She’s only been knocking and calling for a minute or so when the door opens. It’s a young man in front of her, tall, with soft eyes and a good heart. Lorraine can tell.
“Can I help you?” he says. He’s got a sweater on, brown with splatters of darker brown on it, and those darker stains make Lorraine hesitate for a moment.
But only a moment. “Yes, thank you,” she says, and steps inside, though he didn’t exactly invite her.
“Uh—”
“I’m Lorraine Warren, from Bridgeport.” She pauses, but there’s no recognition in the young man’s eyes. Just as well, probably. “My husband died a week ago. I believe you can do something about that.”
He gapes at her for a moment before he finds a response. “I’m not—if you’re looking for a doctor, the hospital—”
He goes on in that vein for a bit. She waits patiently until he rambles himself to a stop. “My husband’s dead,” she repeats. “A hospital can’t help him.”
Wary now, he says, “I don’t know what you think I can do.”
Lorraine wouldn’t have needed clairvoyant gifts to know he’s lying. He’s not very good at it. “I think you do.”
His gaze slides away: restless, guilty. “I can’t. I can’t help you.”
She takes a step closer and gently grips his hand. Tears pool in her eyes, almost without her trying, and she’d be ashamed of the effort if she had any room left for shame. She hasn’t, though: shame, doubt, a sense of what’s right, they’ve all been crowded out by the overwhelming lack that Ed has left behind. She is like pure vacuum inside, she thinks. She is as empty as space. “Please,” she says.
The young man looks down at her fingers gripping his. He nods to himself and pulls away. “Wait here,” he says, and disappears down the hall.
Lorraine doesn’t move an inch. She listens to his fading footsteps, to the heavy, iron clang of a door somewhere beneath them. She looks at the furnishings of the living room, faded and worn, their wooden bones showing in places. The place smells of must and decay that has nothing to do with the husks lying quietly out in the cemetary.
“Who are you?”
This one is shorter and far warier, suspicious of her from the start. He stretches up to his full height—about the same as hers—and peers at her through wire-rim glasses.
Lorraine tells her short, sad story again.
The young man is unmoved. He glowers at the other one, and then he turns the glower back to her. “You shouldn’t have come. We can’t help you. Please leave now.”
“You can,” Lorraine says.
“You don’t want us to,” the tall one says.
“Dan,” groans the shorter one. “What are you doing?”
Dan, the tall one with the soft heart, meets Lorraine’s gaze. “It doesn’t really work yet. It’s not—it won’t help, all right? I know.”
Lorraine sees that he does know, or thinks he does. The grief is pouring off him. Another day, Lorraine would feel the miserable stickiness of it, clinging to everything it touched. Today she cannot feel even her own grief, much less his. “Then you know I have to try.”
It doesn’t matter how long he stands there deciding, because he does eventually, as she knew he would. She wouldn’t have been brought here otherwise. He turns to the other young man and says, “Herbert.”
Herbert rolls his eyes. “We’re not running a plumbing service, Dan. We don’t work on demand.”
“It’ll just be another body to practice on,” Dan says. He flashes Lorraine an apologetic glance. “We won’t even have to steal this one.”
“Dan—”
“Please,” Dan says.
That works. Lorraine sees the moment Herbert changes his mind. “Fine.”
Herbert almost balks when he realizes how long the drive is. He decides they’re riding with Lorraine. “You can pay our fares back,” he says, and watches her closely to see if she’ll complain. She doesn’t. He takes the passenger seat, which she doesn’t expect. Maybe it’s because he knew that Dan would be asleep by the time they reached the Arkham city limits.
After snores began drifting up from the back seat, Lorraine says, “That’s my husband’s seat.”
“What,” Herbert says flatly.
“After he began having heart trouble, I took over the driving. He’d sit right where you are.”
“Was that his cause of death?” Herbert asks, with more interest than he’s said anything since she’s met him. “Heart failure?”
“No.”
He waits. When she says nothing more, he asks, “Are you going to tell me what was, or am I to discover that surprise for myself?”
“A roof fell on him,” Lorraine says shortly.
“Well, that’s not good. The worse the body’s condition—”
“His body is fine,” Lorraine says. “There’s not—not even a scratch. It’s like nothing even touched him.”
She can feel Herbert’s eyes on her. She keeps hers on the road and prays—oh irony—she prays that he doesn’t press further. Surely he will soon, but please, not yet.
“How did you find us?” Herbert says instead.
She glances over, once, twice: takes in his sharp gaze and his certainty and his button-down and tie that he was apparently wearing in his basement at midnight. It’s flecked with dark stains, like Dan’s sweater. “Do you believe in spirits?” she asks.
Herbert scoffs. “No. I believe in reality.” There’s a trace of disappointment in his voice, perhaps. He expected something else from her; something scientific, no doubt. “You read about us in the papers.”
Lorraine wonders what these two young men did to get themselves in the papers. She supposes it was something similar to what she’s asked them to do for her. For Ed.
Ed’s locked inside the funeral parlor. It’s Lorraine who breaks in; if someone comes, she wants to be very clear on which of them is responsible. Dan and Herbert clearly have enough crimes of their own to worry about.
That pressure has returned in her chest, though she doesn’t need it this time. Earlier that week, without letting herself notice she was doing it, she took note of where the bodies were prepared for burial. She strides down the hall to the place where Ed lies waiting for her. Still, it’s a shock when she rounds the corner and sees him lying on a table.
“You didn’t say he’d been embalmed.” Herbert’s voice seems to echo against the walls, and Lorraine flinches.
“Is that important?” she asks.
“Maybe not,” Herbert says. “It might even be a nice test.”
Lorraine should be concerned about that. She should be angry; Ed is not a test subject. But he’s lying so still on the metal table, and when she folds her hand around his, his skin is so cold—as cold as she feels, inside and out.
Herbert drops a leather bag on the table by Ed’s head and digs around in it. Soon enough he emerges with—well, Lorraine isn’t sure what it is. A syringe, certainly, filled with a yellow-green fluid so bright it seems obscene. Nothing in this cold place ought to be so bright, and she is quite sure nothing of such a strange, artificial color should ever go into a human body.
“You’re right about the body,” Herbert says. “He hardly looks like a roof fell on him. Are you sure that’s what happened?” His voice says he is quite sure it isn’t.
Lorraine grips Ed more tightly. She opens her mouth, thinking she’ll tell him: yes, it was a roof. She and Ed were investigating a supposed haunting in an abandoned church. They were retired, yes, but it was close to home, and there’d been no prior reports of activity there, which piqued Ed’s curiosity. The truth was they’d both been a little bored, God help them.
So they’d gone to the church, a squat, unlovely little building, its stones showing signs of decay and long neglect. Its air was damp with a chill that seemed to settle into Lorraine’s bones as soon as she walked in the door.
And yet she encountered no unrestful spirits. None spoke to her; her gifts showed her nothing.
She turned at last to go, and her breath caught. No, not just caught; her ribs felt as if they were in a vise. She couldn’t have inhaled if her life depended on it, and for moment she thought it did, for there above the doorway, as black as night, as death, as sin, perched a demon.
“What do you want?” Lorraine said. Perhaps she said it out loud, perhaps not. It was difficult, after all, to speak with no breath.
And the demon answered her, not in words but in certain knowledge. It had lured her and Ed there to the church—which had been unconsecrated, though they hadn’t known it. It had hidden that fact from them. It had waited for them there. It had built its trap.
Lorraine’s heart beat far too quickly. She couldn’t see Ed even from the corner of her eye. “We are protected. There is nothing you can do to harm us, not even in death.”
And then the stones of the roof fell in.
She finds herself in the funeral home again. Herbert is watching her impatiently, waiting for an answer. Lorraine doesn’t have one he’ll accept. “I was there,” she says instead.
“If you say so,” Herbert says, obviously disbelieving.
Dan grips Lorraine’s arm, and she jumps a little. She forgot he was there. “Are you sure about this?” he asks. Across the table, Herbert heaves a sigh.
Lorraine thumbs across Ed’s knuckle. The skin feels strangely thick, almost rubbery. His eyes remain closed. That hollow place he left behind gapes within her. “I’m sure.”
It looks so simple in the end. Herbert lifts Ed’s head and injects the fluid into his neck. “The spinal column,” Dan says, though she didn’t ask. He’s hanging nervously at her elbow. She thinks he might be more anxious than she is. She thinks maybe that’s a bad sign.
Herbert lays Ed’s head back down. The syringe is empty, and Ed hasn’t moved.
“Be ready to grab him,” Herbert murmurs to Dan, but Ed keeps on lying very still.
“Maybe—” Dan begins, and then Ed twitches.
“There!” Herbert says.
It’s a brutal, ugly process, being brought back to life—like being born in the first place. Blood bubbles from Ed’s mouth. He chokes on it, spewing red spittle everywhere. Droplets fall on Lorraine’s skin. Ed struggles to sit up, and Lorraine tries to help, but her touch alarms him and he begins to flail, knocking his elbow into her.
“Oh,” she gasps, more in shock than pain, though that was hard enough to probably leave a bruise.
Herbert shoulders her out of the way. “Vitals?”
Dan rattles off numbers that Lorraine doesn’t bother to take in. “Ed?” she says. His hands have stilled, and she grips one. “Ed, darling?”
He turns towards her, but his eyes are clouded and unseeing. He moans. He moans with his own voice, the one that’s teased her and sung to her and whispered dirty promises in her ear all these years. “Ed,” Lorraine says. She thinks her heart might break with relief.
His next moan has shape to it. Two syllables, upturned at the end with fear and uncertainty, but still recognizable. That’s her name in his mouth. She’d know it anywhere.
“I’m here,” she says. She grips his hand, and this time he lets her. She begins to weep.
The two young men take Ed’s pulse and his temperature. Herbert shines a light in his eyes, which Ed shies away from. Otherwise he sits still with his face turned towards her, and every so often he moans. At last Herbert and Dan retreat to the far side of the room and whisper to each other.
Finally Dan comes over to her. “Is this—is it what you were hoping for?”
“Do you know we’ve been married over thirty years?” Lorraine says. “I don’t know how to live without him. I’ve seen a lot of death, so you’d think I’d be prepared, and I was going to, but…” She offers Dan a feeble smile. It’s all the explanation she has.
Dan watches her, like he expects her to finish that sentence. He’ll wait a long time.
“Are we ready?” Herbert asks. He has his instrument bag in hand.
“Coming,” Dan says.
Herbert looks Ed over and then turns that suspicious gaze on Lorraine. “I suppose you think God did this,” he says.
Hurriedly, Dan says to her, “What are you going to do now?”
Lorraine smiles at Ed, still moaning softly. “I’m going to take him home, of course.”
It takes Lorraine some effort to get Ed into the car. She straps him in with the seat belt and flips on the child safety locks, just in case. But at last they’re ready, and she turns out onto the street.
The pressure in her chest is gone. She knew it would be.
The demon told her something more, back in that abandoned church. She said that it couldn’t harm her or Ed, even in death, and the demon agreed. And then it asked, in something almost approximating words, But what harm would you do to save him?
[end]