PodCastle

* Author : J. P. Sullivan
* Narrator : Wilson Fowlie
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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Previously published in the August 2017 issue of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.


Rated PG-13 for waking the dead and disturbing their dreams.
The Resurrectionist
by J.P. Sullivan
“Yes, I can bring your wife back from the dead,” I told the farmer, who had reasonable doubts about my abilities. “Just realize that it might not be what she wants.”
“She wants to see her children again,” he said. He’d told me his name, but I’d forgotten it.  Honestly, it’s better that way. He had a smith’s build, muscle on muscle, more beard than chin. I could tell at a glance he’d never had a crooked thought in his life. People like that are awfully hard to negotiate with. Thankfully, I have flat rates.
“She signed the consent form?” The local chapel smelled like soot and incense. They hadn’t cremated her. That triples the fee and gives me a dreadful headache besides.
“I know I’m asking for a miracle,” the farmer said. “You can really do it for ten crowns sovereign?”
It’s not a miracle, I might have said. It’s a clever utilization of certain natural laws, an inversion of a subtle current and a trick played on God. Miracles assume His blessing, this process having none of it. But you start throwing around a word like ‘resurrection,’ and people get all kinds of ideas. “Did you bring the form, or not?”
He produced it. And there it was, in hill-country chicken scratch, her name on the appropriate lines. There’s a correct way of doing everything. Why should reanimation be any different?
I said the words, laid the hooks and lines and rock salt circles. Not all of that’s important, but the ceremony is part of the service. Like a funeral, it’s for the living.
The church was empty of clergy. They couldn’t have run off too long ago; one of the fires was still lit. Every rider on the hill looked like a foreign raid, with the war on. For all I knew, they hid from me.
“I don’t like this,” said the farmer.
“Don’t worry,” I said, hands at the dead woman’s brow. “I don’t like it either.”
Then I was in the elsewhere.
White light rippled across the surface of calm water. Grass rustled in warm and silent wind. Overhead was a sky more blue than the one God painted, lit by suns numbered seventeen. My stiff clearly died with a guiltless conscience.
“All right,” I said. I was smoking a pipe. I’ve never done that in the flesh; smells bloody awful, if you ask me. But this me knew how to do it, knew just how long to hold it in and just how deep to breathe. It smelled like an old man’s fireplace. I noticed I had an old man’s hands. For a moment I looked into the water. My face had lines and furrows and a hard-earned tan. My eyes were green like hers were green. People see in me what they want to see, and the situation here wasn’t hard to read.
So I said, “It’s time to go back, Michelina.”
“I just got here,” she said, relaxed as can be. “The angels haven’t come for me yet.”
“Time moves differently here,” I said. “It’s been nearly three days.” Which was cutting it razor thin. If a keeper showed up — well, best not to fret over it. I only needed a few minutes to work my technique. Getting in is easy.