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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/AWEdmundson_0 on 2025-10-25 20:15:25+00:00.

We trekked up and down the side of the highway, the summer sun never letting up. Between the five of us, no one thought to bring any water. But we were young, and stubborn.

Deb spotted a dead armadillo, relatively intact. The rest of us decided it was too big to fit.

Arnold found the cat—squashed thin enough to be nearly invisible in the tall, prickly weeds. The body was only slightly thicker than a pancake.

“Good eye,” I said.

“What do you think, Ben?” Arnold wiped sweat off his shaved head.

I nodded, and led the march back to the old moldering mansion.

Last winter, every realtor in town agreed to finally abandon the property. Till then, they’d try about once a decade to unload it on an unsuspecting homeowner. Someone new to the county.

At the time, our town didn’t host many rich folks up for restoring a once-great palace. In fact, anyone in a Rolls Royce or Porshe passing by usually drove through as fast as possible. Which was dangerous, since the roads were winding and bent sharply. Accidents waiting to happen.

The mansion was a sinkhole for money and effort, and worse…cut off from the rest of town by the owl-haunted woods encircling it. A place where decay reigned and trees were just dead branches, spread out like skeleton hands.

So of course it made the perfect secret clubhouse for us kids. You only had to squeeze under the rusted barbed wire fencing that blocked off the acres of the property. That never bothered us. Tetanus shots were in the far back of our tiny minds.

Arnold handed the cat off to me so he could hold the wire up for Deb. She passed without having to crawl on her belly in the mud like Jamie did before, without complaint.

It was understood that Arnold was sweet on Deb (at least, to everyone except Arnold). That’s why she had been allowed to learn our big secret. That afternoon was to be her first time participating in the ceremony.

Tall front doors could just barely be found under the conquering ivy which had expanded across the house’s entire front. No one bothered using the gilded knocker—it was always unlocked. Anything inside worth stealing had been dragged out and auctioned before the grown-ups left the place to fend for itself among the wild elements.

Arnold held Deb’s hand, leading her inside. Outside it sweltered hot, but on crossing the threshold, a welcome coolness descended. Deb shivered in her sundress.

Like everything else, the furniture was ransacked. To rest, we sat on the floor. Splinters and rusty nails stuck out in all sorts of innocuous places, and had to be carefully avoided. Wallpaper peeled and fell to the ground like discarded orange rinds.

What that left were wide empty spaces for us to run around in, play, and hang out without parents busting in and ordering us to do chores. Though not without flaws, it was all ours. Due to rot and mold, some preferred wearing rags or bandanas over our mouths. But me? I breathed deeply.

Deb stuck out her tongue. In a corner, a spider was drinking a fly’s innards. Clay saw this too, and blanched. Jamie moved closer.

I ignored the miniature horror show. “Let’s do this, so I don’t have to carry this cat anymore.”

A couple marble steps of what had been a spiral staircase to a second, third, and fourth floor were intact. After that point, it dropped off into void. We’d never find out what lay up there. Perhaps the magic only worked because we never actually saw it happening.

I marched ahead to the kitchen. I’ll never forget what the dumbwaiter looked like. It was metal, rectangular, about a foot wide and a foot and a half high, with two ropes hanging under it. When you pulled the right one, the tray and anything on it went up. Tugging the left rope realigned some counterweights, lowering the device.

Sending things up always proved harder than bringing them back. Sometimes it took two, or even three of us to hoist it. Me, Arnold, Jamie, Clay, everyone except Deb had gotten to use it.

So now Deb had the distinguished honor of lifting the elevator solo. She proved mightier than her small frame might indicate, needing no help to take the dead cat to the top.

We heard a whirling of wheels and gears, and the jingling of chains. Despite its age, the box always followed smoothly along its tracks. The ride back down only required a single pull on Deb’s part. From inside the closed chamber, something yowled and clawed to get out.

Once we opened the door, it looked like the kitty had been reinflated. Released from that cramped space, it purred and licked itself clean. We fought over who’d get to keep it. After a few rounds of rock-paper-scissors, Jamie came out victorious.

Okay… so our last summer as grade-schoolers hadn’t gone quite how we expected. I hadn’t been first inside the mansion. That was Jamie.

I didn’t spot the dumbwaiter. That was Clay. But when I entered the kitchen, where a meal hadn’t been prepared in half a century, I was the one to start playing with the dumbwaiter.

Out of that mix of curiosity and boredom preceding any great scientific discovery, I tugged on the right rope. The chain at the top of the box looped around a wheel I couldn’t see. But I heard grinding.

The corrugated steel dumbwaiter looked empty at first. No requested plate of food for the masters upstairs. But there was one object, easy to miss. I saw a dead housefly. So small. Totally inconsequential from my perspective. And not at all hard to raise up.

I pulled as far as I could with my geeky boy strength, for the same prideful reason men at carnivals hit bells with a hammer. Muffled clattering let me know the box had gone as far as it could. I tugged the left rope lightly. Trying not to break my new toy.

The tray slid most of the way on its own. I heard the echo of buzzing inside when I slid open the outer door. Right there, crawling on the dumbwaiter’s wall, was a living fly.

Being June, flies were normally everywhere. In the dark cool mansion, however, the only living things except us children was mold. But maybe only the first floor lacked bugs. Flies could be swarming on the upper stories, and one happened to get inside. But then, where’d the dead fly go?

To test it, I got Arnold to find something bigger—a dead spider. Every corner of the mansion was draped with cobwebs, but no recent weavings.

Even so, good old Arnold came through. I miss him so much.

I heaved the spider up. When the lift came back down from its adventure between the walls, there was a living, moving spider. Lucky for the fly it had already buzzed off.

Jamie wanted to prod the arachnid with a stick “For science.” But none of us guys wanted to get close. She called us all “A bunch of big babies.”

Looking back, we should have seen the signs earlier that something was off about Jamie. It would have saved a lot of people a lot of pain.

Our experiments continued the next day and onward. We knew barely anything of theology. Whether this was a miracle, or something from the other place that smells like rotten eggs. Nor did we care—only that the process worked. Right before our eyes.

We started small. Earthworms that crawled out onto the sidewalks at dawn, only to be fried up before noon. Now, the slimy blind suicidal crawlers were free to wiggle in the soil in peace. Our ambitions only grew with time.

We competed to find bigger and bigger animals, though the dumbwaiter’s dimensions limited us. Every subject we brought was dead when we picked it up.

We swore to keep the truth between us. Heaven forbid some bullying creep like Tyler, or his cronies Andy and Hunter, discovered the magic lift. They’d probably shoot an animal just to see if they could bring it back while the meat was still fresh, then shoot it again.

But everyone liked Deb, even if not as much as Arnold. We trusted her to use our newfound power over life and death responsibly, and with kindness.

“We should invite someone else to join the Resurrection Club,” said Clay. “More eyes on the ground means more animals.”

“Ooh, let’s ask Margot,” Deb said in her eager, high-pitched voice. “She’s cool! And she wouldn’t be grossed out by our mission.”

“Yeah, but not Aaron,” said Jamie. “He’s too much of a weirdo for us.”

Turns out, we didn’t get the time to add any more members to our group. We can feel thankful for that, I guess.

Whenever our neighbors’ pets were sick and old, they had to be “Put to sleep.” Of course my friends and I knew that was code, just like there wasn’t really “A farm upstate.” So, we’d take the body (providing it hadn’t already been cremated), restored it, and presented it to the same child who had loved the animal. It seemed like their companion really had just been taking a nap. Now, they came awake to play another day.

The moms and dads never grew suspicious at our club’s charity. I guess each assumed their child’s playmate was an identical replacement that the other parent had gone out and bought.

Whether domestic or wild, we all felt sorry for those poor beasts we found run over. In those cases, we were smart. Making sure to wear gloves through the whole operation, avoiding being bitten or scratched when the roadkill returned to life.

Arnold tried not to feel upset by how ungrateful the raccoons and possums seemed to behave towards us, their saviors. Jamie said they were only acting on instinct.

Those wild things which didn’t flee immediately were carried back to nature in Clay’s red wagon. They could start their new existences far away from th…

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