DEATH ON THE STREETS OF CHICAGO. 20% to @teamg-nigeria

"Because a lot of things are not spoken of does not mean they do not exist."
These were Dr Bells words to his ten year old son Craig who was as curious as a cat.
Craig grew up in the same house with a self made Morgue his father created in their home. It was the last door at the end of their corridor, not underneath the house, not the basement, not the garage but the corridor.

It was meant to house dead bodies while his father studied them and the spirituality that followed death.
As a child, he never understood why his father read too many books for people who were dead already or why he cared in the first place.

At age twelve, he heard of the word purgatory for the first time. Though he never understood what the place did but he was told purgatory signified a waiting room for the spirits of the dead. At a time, his uncle a medical examiner, who had similar interests like his father told him the only way to find out what a purgatory signified was by dyeing and Craig did not find it funny.

Day after day, his father began to spend more time in his morgue. On one of the nights he would have sworn he heard his father having a conversation but there was no one there that was alive aside from him.
The church visited every day, they begged him to stop his unhealthy researches that would push him out of God's light but his father was bent on unveiling the mystery over dead.

Years later, his father found others like him. Men who shared the same interest, men who delved into mystical readings, men who thought they could defeat death too.

Craig believed salt could keep off evil spirits, he believed holy water could exorcise a petty demon, he believed garlic had a stronger spiritual attribute than its known use, but he would never believe that a jinxed robe, bonded with strong spells and marked with the world's oldest spiritual carvings could hold the soul of a man until he saw it.

It was his father's first practical with an almost dyeing man. He wanted to defeat death and he did, but death as usual had something underneath its sleeves.

The things that happened after 17th October, 1815 was the beginning of an unpleasant life for Craig. What he saw and did thereafter are things no one would believe even if he said it out loud.

Two days after, people gathered in his home. The church came first consoling him of his lose; his father and uncle, and they offered to take him in.

But his life never remained the same. Not because he lost the only family he had or because he killed his father and uncle, but because he had become a dwelling place for the spirit of death and no spiritualist dared to return death to Hades.

Months later, his pictures were pasted on every wall and pole of chicago, shared to every passerby. He was wanted for multiple murders. Murders that confused every one because each time someone died, a dead body walked out of any morgue breathing like it returned from a vacation, irrespective of how long it laid dead.
No, it was not like Lazarus' resurrection, an order had been broken.

For craig, everywhere he went to, death followed. A tragedy that no one expected.

#Fiction