The underbrush was every variation of dead or dying you could imagine. The ground here looked parched, like it hadn’t seen a hint of moisture in decades. And that’s about how long it’d been since I was last here. I thought I saw a hand creep out, fingers tentative as they scratched at the ground, then, as if it sensed me, the hand sped back under the bushes.
A figure stood before the door. It was dressed in a tattered robe that looked like something I might have worn over the last few days. The ends of the robe swirled as if a wind had suddenly picked up, but I didn’t think that was the case. His face lay in shadow, but so did mine.
I shifted the fork onto my other shoulder, annoyed at how the groove along the wood dug into my skin. I started to work out the warlock version of a pillow spell then decided it would be easier to just bring a shoulder pad.
The dirt pathway gave way to crushed brambles and desiccated branches. These gave way to white chunks that crunched when I stepped on them. Then it was all ash as I made my way to the ancient wooden bridge leading to the front door.
The necropolis was old, older than just about anything this close to the cusp, and it certainly did have a history of manipulating the dead, but we weren’t really into the whole undead thing. That’s just plain gross.
I did know one necro that enjoyed getting his hands dirty, er, so to speak. His name was Doctor West and he was about as close to being dead himself as any man I knew. Some said he had been here since the place was built. Others claimed he had worked with corpses for so long that the dead had rubbed off on him.
I moved across the rampart and approached the front door. The figure still stood to the side of the entrance, eyes fixed on me. His robe was torn to strips along the bottom and the warlock was using some kind of spell to make the ends swirl, as if a breeze were constantly blowing under him.
“Chet?” I asked as I grew closer.
“Eh.”
Stupid robe. I lowered my hood.
“Phineas? An inquisitor? Fuck me six ways from Sunday. Look, man, I didn’t have anything to do with that vial of narcosis. That shit wasn’t even mine.”
Chet was at least fifty. He looked closer to eighteen and talked like he was still in the nineteen sixties. If there was a Tommy Chong of the necropolis, this was him. He shifted his feet side to side and the spell stopped blowing the ends of his robe.
“I’m in disguise,” I said and put my fingers to my lips.
“Ohhhhh.” He let the word hang in the air then gazed toward the cusp.
“Still hitting the juice?”
“Nah, man. The juice just hit me,” he said and wandered down the stairs.
“Where’re you going?”
“Just going to wander a little. If anyone comes along, I’ll hustle back and look scary.” Chet grinned.
The entry way was much as I remembered it. Hundreds of candles dripped wax on the floor, sending clouds of black smoke up to cover the ceiling with soot. It was arched low and might have provided a decent series of murder holes if this was indeed a fortification.
The gothic interior was all high ceilings and arched supports. Mostly stone, some of it had been replaced by concrete and rebar in the 80s, thanks to the ever shifting cusps effect on the millennia’s old architecture.
My time with Salazar had occupied a great deal of my early life, but when I showed a propensity for the dead (not that kind, perverts) he sent me to study with the best. They accepted me, after locking me in a room with half a dozen corpses.
Later that night they came with sledgehammers, preparing to kill whatever kind of zombies I might have created, because no one, and I mean NO ONE, wants those idiots around. It wasn’t hard to start a zombie outbreak, but it was a pain in the ass to put one down.
After they found out I had been creating the noise, accompanied by throwing a couple of severed arms at the door for realistic crunchy sound effects, they decided I was all right and let me study with them.
Weirdest. Initiation. Ever.
I left my hood down and moved through passages as quickly as I could. No point in hanging out and doing the whole “how are you brother. Any news from the dead?” routine.
I made straight for the morgue.
Don’t laugh. Even a house of the dead needs a morgue.
A few brothers took the time to move out of my way, keeping their own heads down and hoods up. Bring an inquisitor into a house and suddenly everyone had a secret identity.
I found the doctor’s office but he wasn’t in.
I went to wait in his laboratory.
A pair of bodies lay on a cold slab. A man and a woman with white sheets covering them to their necks. Experiments? Incoming or outgoing. They both looked to be in the prime of health and youth, except for being dead. She had a wound to her cheek that looked like an entry point. I didn’t want to see the back of her neck. I suspected that it, like my fashion sense, was gone.
The man didn’t show any signs of trauma. As I watched, I noticed something moving. Perhaps a rat under the cover looking for a morsel? But as I stared, it became obvious that the movement was some kind of rhythm, as if his fingers were tapping.
There were a couple of posters on the walls and at least one of them was of a blonde in a bikini circa 1970-holy-hell-that’s-old. The rest were diagrams of bodies and body parts. One pictured an opened skull with several words scribbled around it.
“I can’t read the writing anymore, but that drawing was used to note the entry points for Zaladas Tarl. Do you know the story?”
I turned and lowered my hood as Doc West came into the room. A light chill proceeded him, but I attributed it to the door and not his presence. Yeah, that was it. When I was taken to the necropolis in my youth, Doc West already looked like an old man at a retirement community who’d been dropped there and then forgotten for many decades.
He hadn’t changed one bit.
“Sure.” I said. “He thought he could know the dead if he joined them, so he drilled holes in his body and attached all kinds of weird devices. He used a battery of some sort to power his limbs with magic, but it didn’t work. About five minutes into his bloody experiment the battery discharged completely.”
“Yes. Yes. But why was the experiment of such importance?”
“Because he exploded, which probably made a hell of a mess.”
“That he did, but before the goo flew he spoke to us from beyond the gate. He existed in both places for several minutes. His words. Do you remember his words?”
West limped to the table with the boy laying on the cool metal surface.
“Wake up you, rapscallion,” he said in his gravelly voice, and yanked headphones out of the boy’s ears.
“Shit, it’s the fuzz,” I said, in answer to Doc’s question.
“No such thing,” Doc West said.
“No, what did he say?”
“He said ‘ow.’”
I burst into laughter.
He wandered to the dead girl and probed her scalp with age worn fingers. They were stiff, white, and I bet if he left them in a pool for an hour he wouldn’t have a single wrinkle that wasn’t already there. “A charlatan perhaps, but he is no authority figure.”
“Hey,” I said as I lowered the hood. “Maybe I joined up late in life.”
“The only thing you joined late in life was a YMCA, Phineas Cavanaugh.” West uttered a spell and the woman’s head jerked up. Her eyes peeled open and she gazed at the ceiling. He laid his spindly fingers over her face and kept her steady as her body shook. I breathed for her because the spell that West had cast had no such function.
West moved his hand until it perched, like a claw, over her face. She responded as he lifted his hand, then he pressed down and she dropped to the slab.
“What have we learned, Alexander?” West kept his voice low and didn’t look up at his apprentice.
“That chicks can fall for dark magic if they’re dead?” the kid said.
“Succinct, unlike you, and lacking detail, also, m
uch like you.”
“I get the basic stuff, Doc. When do I get to learn about skeletal armies, zombies, all the gnarly stuff they don’t teach in 101?”
“Was I this crazy?” I asked, but I didn’t think he heard me.
“Do you remember the time you thought to speak with spirits to inquire about your mother? It was a long time ago, but perhaps you could share a bit of knowledge concerning the folly of youth.” Doc said, eyes on me.
“Great, a history lesson,” the kid echoed my thoughts.
“Come on, Doc.” I crossed my arms.
“The inquisitor speaks.” Doc said. “As I was saying. Your apprentice boiled the sample. Then he baked it to a crisp, ground it up, and sprinkled it on a sandwich if I recall.”
“I used to beg the kitchen to spare some scraps of meat. Usually it was fatty, but I was always hungry back then. Didn’t have a sponsor or rich dad, so I had to make due with odd jobs,” I muttered the last part.
“Your memory seems to work well enough.”
“Remember that time you thought that Oldger Fellem was already dead and--”
“Shush, now.” West stopped me.
I gave up and flopped back in the chair.
“I thought that was a bad idea, to taste the dead like that,” the kid said.
“It’s a terrible idea. Terrible. It reminds us of centuries past when humans had no qualms about eating their brethren. A practice that is abominable. And yet our order requires its members to rely on just such a practice from time to time. And why do we require it?”
“Because it’s gnarly,” the kid said.
“He has a point,” I said. “Actually, we know now that there’s stuff like DNA. Back then it was the dark ages compared to today.”
“It was no dark age, I can assure you,” Doc said.
“It was dark to me,” I said.
“The spirit arrived and immediately attempted to take over Phineas’ body. He screamed and howled, but it was little use. The spirit was enraged and wanted a new host. I entered the room and spotted it hovering over Phineas as he cast spell after spell. Fire, water, ice, even lightening. Can you tell me what this effect had on the spirit?” Doc looked at the kid.
“Not a damn thing.”
“Right. Can you imagine what effect it had on my lab?”
“Dude.” The kid looked at me. “Is that why the back room is still scorched in some places?”
I sighed and shuffled my feet, looking anywhere but at these two.
“Precisely. I did capture the soul and set it free, but not before I let it scare my charge into pissing his pants,” West continued.
“What an asshat.” The kid laughed until his cheeks were red. Laugh it up, because someday you’ll be the one on the receiving end.
“What has brought the mighty Phineas Cavanaugh to our halls?” Doc looked me up and down. The skin above his head and on his neck hung slack, like it would be at home on a turkey. Translucent and veined, he was the second oldest man I had ever known. Which brought me to the reason for my visit.
“Not so mighty, my old friend. I’ve had my ass kicked several times over the past few days.”
“You look none the worse for wear.”
“I wish I could say the same for my mentor.” I produced the reason for my visit, palming the vial that contained the piece of blood stained cloth that had adorned Salazar’s body. It was a pitiful scrap, and a sad remnant of one of the greatest men I had ever known.
Doc West took the vial and held it to the light. He lowered his glasses down his long nose and stared at the chunk of cloth. He popped the vial open and removed the piece with a gentle touch, almost reverent, like he knew whom he held.
His apprentice stopped staring at his shoes long enough to wander over and check out the offering. He looked between us then shuffled back to his chair.
“Old people,” he mumbled. I thought about tossing him around the room.
West touched the scrap to his tongue and tasted it, then he put it back in the vial, sealed it, and handed it to me. He closed his eyes and his lips moved but I couldn’t make out the words. My own power in this part of the arts was limited, but it was still very strong in the mortal world. West, on the other hand, was a natural. While this bordered on blood magic, something strictly forbidden, it was the necromantic way. There would be no harm from this inflicted on anyone.
“Nothing.” His eyes popped open.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. Means he’s probably not dead.”
“He’s dead. I saw his corpse with his chest ripped open.”
“He’s still around. Trust me.”
“Doc. I saw him lying in a pool of blood. He had no heart and I don’t mean that as a knock. He literally had no heart in his chest cavity.”
“Maybe so but he’s still among us.”
I wanted to believe him but I had seen the proof with my own eyes. Salazar had been dead, and there was no coming back from the kind of wounds he had sustained. There was no magic in the world, or hospital in existence, that could have healed him.
“That’s disconcerting.” I said.
“Tell me the other reason you are here,” Doc said, like he was a psychic.
“How do you know there’s another reason?”
“Because you don’t look completely defeated. I know something else is bothering you.”
“Here,” I said and handed over the page that Salazar had left for me.
Doc slipped on a pair of reading glasses and studied the words. His eyes darted back and forth and then started at the top again.
“It doesn’t exist,” Doc said after a few seconds of silence.
“What!”
“No such thing. Infernal tomes, ancient magics. It’s all bullshit.”
“But he told me to come here and find the tome so I could tap into the other side of the cusp,” I protested.
“Listen, son. I’ve been around for a long time. Longer than either of those two and, trust me, there is no such thing as a tome of infernal knowledge.”
“Damn,” Alexander whispered.
“There is a book, a copy of a book, that may help. It’s a guide to the cusp by the very man I mentioned a moment ago. One of his experiments was to map the other side of the cusp. It’s said he went and came back, but no one knows more of our mysterious Zaladas Larl.”
“I always thought that was one of those wild tales. Like trying to power yourself with a magic storing battery. So is the book here?” I asked, excited for the first time since I’d arrived.
“Nope.”
Shit! I was now three for three and feeling like my visit to the necropolis had been a complete waste.
“But I think I know where you can get a copy. South of Heaven.”
“The casino?” I asked, indignant that he would even suggest such a place.
“Ask the bartender, Mike. He deals in the weird. Don’t ask for it by name. He’ll likely go in the back and bring you back a book of fairy tales and sell it to you for a couple grand. Ask for Larl’s Guide to the Cusp.”
I walked away and thought about banging my head into something hard. The kid that was apprenticed to Doc watched me do a circuit of the room.
“Just go and see if they have a copy. If they don’t, we can try another source.” Doc grinned from beneath his bushy white beard.
“I feel like this is some kind of joke,” I muttered.
“It’s no joke and the book does exist. Just go and check. It won’t take long.”
Fine.
“Anything you need while I’m there?”
“See if they have any dragon molars.”
I choked back a laugh. “Dragon molars.”
“You’re the one that came here for help. The least you can do is ask. Dragon molars make wonderful armor accelerants.”
I was glad to see that nothing much had changed in Doc’s office. We sat down and told tales for an hour or two. His desk was still stacked with papers and scrolls. Bottles of body part
s, mostly human, lined the shelves that ran along the wall. The smell was clean, like disinfectant.
I recounted my story to Doc about Balkir and his treachery. Doc looked suitably impressed by my recounting of the demonic battle, but also appeared as if he wanted to smack me for exchanging bodies.
He told me about some of his latest experiments to reanimate arms in an attempt to create the perfect yard cleaner. Armies of hands to drag leaves into a large pile. I told him that one of these had greeted me outside.
“I should go, Doc.”
“Going like an inquisitor? Got a badge?”
“They aren’t cops,” I said.
“True, but a uniform isn’t the only thing you’ll need to pull off your charade down here. Just a moment.” Doc West left the room. I gritted my teeth because I hated the word charade. It was too close to charlatan.
The kid hovered around the doorway while Doc and I talked. He produced a bag from his robe, extracted something that looked like jerky, and chewed on it while I waited. After a few moments of shifting from foot to foot, I found a seat and pulled it lose from a tangle of old clothes, worn robes, and at least one set of strips that looked more than a little bit like dried intestines. I shoved these to the side.
“No thanks,” I said and nodded at the baggie.
“I didn’t offer.”
“Oh, right.”
He looked at the bag and then back at me. He half offered it, but I didn’t want to sample whatever horror might be in there. For all I knew he was a subsumer and that was zombie flesh. He’s already mentioned raising skeletons which, and you can trust me on this one, sounds like an awesome trick. But no one wants to be around for that. It smells like – well, like death times a hundred. Not to mention all the dirt and detritus that gets stuck in the rib bones, only to fall out and litter the floor.
“So what do you do now?” the kid asked.
“Hunt down changers.”
“Whoa.”
At the Behest of the Dead Page 20