Bob Wacszowski, Necromancer
being the story of a regular guy who learns how to animate and command the dead
a death-comedy novel by George Dalphin
George Dalphin has written one previous novel, Thirsty & Drowning.
This book is dedicated to Joe and Stephanie Foster, who provided my wife and me a delightful honeymoon on Amsterdam Island.
This is a work of fiction written between the years 2009 and 2011 of the Gregorian Calendar, at the Metropolitan and Bramhall in Portland, Maine, the United States of America, on Early-Anthropecene Earth, making use of a version of the English language in use at the time.
Smashwords edition.
All rights innate; art is theft, no?
Nevertheless, for ritual purposes, © 2011 Man-Like Machines.
This book is available in paperback at most online retailers.
ISBN 9781460998175
Bob Wacszowski, Necromancer is a Man-Like Machines project.
http://www.man-likemachines.com
This is the ultimate compendium comprising the totality of ancient esoteric knowledge on the topic of the honorable art of Necromancy. Herein can be found the means to raise and control the dead, prolong and control the living, and to wield the energies of evil in the world for the purposes of attack, defense and transformation.
- The Tome
INTRODUCTION
Muncie, Indiana
On Amsterdam Island, Bob Wacszowski is building a new world, both literally in the form of his planned skeleton-built and –run vacation resort, and figuratively as the reluctant figurehead of what has been called ‘the world’s newest, most confusing, and yet also most convincing religion’.
Your world is still recovering from those cold spring days when Bob turned your preconceptions inside out. No world culture has been unaffected by his emergence. All twenty-first century cosmology and theology is in reaction to what he has done. Even great swaths of what your species previously understood to be hard science have been put into question. There is no possibility that pre-Bob futurists could ever have foreseen the rise of such groups as Holy Iblis, the Death Miners, or Thanatism itself. But this is now your world: one where the Greek island of Skyropoula is cursed with cold, asynchronously-seasoned Antarctic water and weather so that Bob’s island home can have a pleasant climate; where symbol madness, brought on by obsessive attempts to find Bob’s magic invocations among the possible thinkable abstract thoughts, has crippled over one thousand people across the world already; where every living human shared the sensory experience of a certain minute and a half. The Age of Bob has begun.
Though it is relegated to the will of a single man, something that for lack of better terminology can only be called magic actually exists in your world again, and apparently always did. Your people have seen through the thin skin of your universe into the adjacent dimensions peopled by strange, extradimensional beings like myself, and you have television footage of them. But perhaps most significantly, you now live in a society that has at least some idea about what actually happens after your bodily death – most importantly that something, at least, does happen.
Everyone on Earth has a unique and spiritually harrowing story of one type or another from their own experience of those dark few days, whether you were huddled with your family waiting for some kind of confident voice to return to the terrified and hyperbolic television, taking advantage of the atmosphere of terminality by engaging in your dying wishes of sensuality and frivolity, getting mixed up with any of the myriad suicide cults that suddenly bubbled up out of a lack of context on what was actually happening, or whatever your unique corner of the Bob days looked like. But the one story nobody really has heard yet, outside of the gross conjecture of urban legends congealed around video snippets and mob memory, is the actual experience of those at the heart of the events – Bob himself and his girlfriend Anna.
For an event that has fundamentally changed every society on this planet, no two versions told have been the same. All within the nucleus of Bob’s crew have been entrenched with him on their island stronghold since their exile there, with no Internet or phone connection, only the Muncie portal through which quite literally to pass notes. From the perspective of the screen-watching world at large, Bob and his friends and throng of cadaverous minions marched through the Muncie vortex after the Treaty of Cleveland and have not been heard from since.
Few have any idea just what sort of person Bob really is, beyond his rambling, confused attempts at communication from the days in question. You all have heard the official information about who he seems to have been before he discovered Niock’s Tome – a mild-mannered, even-tempered, intermittently-employed college dropout with a small but tight friend group; an only child who got excellent grades until high school; boyfriend; Internet comment poster; organ and occasional blood donor – but the everyman that describes just doesn’t seem to jibe with the over-the-top corpse wrangler in the blood-spattered bathrobe everyone knows from shaky video on their monitors and TVs.
I, Xxivna, am what you will probably know as a demon, an emigrant from another dimension who traveled here to write this novel after inadvertently consuming what turned out to be the brain of a Mr. Fred James, an independent reporter from Bob’s hometown of Muncie, Indiana, who was briefly passing through my dimension on his way home from Amsterdam Island. His last thoughts indicate that he would have been the first to return from that place for some time.
Similar to Bob, Fred was in the right place at the right time during the days of the events I am about to relate, the latter half of which he participated in directly and the rest of which were related to him in a variety of versions by Bob, Tony, Anna and the rest of the Amsterdam Island crew, an average of which I have tried to compile to translate from my own memory of the taste of his brain into some kind of contiguous narrative the best I could. I have tried to invent a minimum of information, and insomuch may have left a few occlusions in the story. Notably, information that takes place in other dimensions cannot exist in this one, which is why I had to travel here to write this, feeling a duty after inadvertently eating an extra-dimensional tourist’s brain.
My story cannot be as impartial as Fred’s views were. He had not known Bob before these events, and in order specifically to retain impartiality Fred kept himself distinctly separated from Bob’s intimacy, or at least coolly unresponsive to gestures of inclusion, while on Amsterdam Island, difficult as that often was. They are a gregarious bunch. But after discerning the information I had eaten, I personally came to have a lot of respect for Bob, and I am certain that in the voice of my narrative that will inevitably resonate.
Bob’s discovery of what has become known as the Tome is the most important thing that has happened to the present iteration of homo sapiens in its known history (though apparently not necessarily in its unknown history). With every revelation about the actual hidden nature of your universe and souls, Bob reveals both your amazing, new, particularly difficult-to-predict future and the distant, previously darkened past, in which Atlantean necromancers like him struggled for the psychic favor of a near-omniscient slave-mutant named Ixikles, whose cobwebby matrix now responds to Bob’s commands alone.
Or, at least, so it was explained to Fred James. And Bob spent many late nights with him on the island, trying to articulate just how any of this made sense. For Fred, it never quite succeeded in doing so.
But it is, nevertheless, quite clearly real, and soon enough the Amsterdam Island resort should be open for visitors to see for themselves. Having had a while to recover from its initial shock at his debut, and having avoided much contact with demons like myself in the time since, the world has had a chance to become less afraid and more intrigued by Bob Wacszowski. His proposed skeleton-run resort island will undoubtedly attract its intended awe-struck tourism, at least for a while. Those with the courage and stomach will be able to make their own judgments.
In the meantime, hopefully a clear concept of the events from Bob’s perspective will help you all to be understanding and patient with this most important of your fellow men, upon whose personal equilibrium the balance of your world and potentially your souls now rests. It is with the hope of aiding such peace of mind, though a tourist’s lack of real investment in the result, that I give you the truest possible account of the rise of Bob Wacszowski.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 1
It was a gray spring day, the air cold after a warm spell that had melted away all but the last remnants of the winter’s snow, merely a cardboard cutout of the sun behind the clouds. Bob had just walked across muddy Hope Park and through the cigarette-speckled puddles of bumtown, past vagrants in slick, glistening windbreakers, to get to his girlfriend Anna’s apartment, but indoors now seemed no more welcoming.
“Bob Wacszowski, you asshole,” plain, pale, thin-boned Anna said with the door open only wide enough for him to see half of her. She glared down her apartment building’s front stoop at Bob. “What do you want?”
Bob winced, but shook it off. “Baby,” he started, “Anna, what’s wrong? What did I do? I’m sorry. I just...”
“You just,” Anna interrupted, “all you ever do is just!”
“I just...” he said again, shrugging, trying to make his most non-confrontational expression.
“You just,” she mimicked again. “You have no idea, do you? You just come here to shower and don’t give a second thought to how much of my body wash you might be using, or if your tiny little slivery beard hairs might be clogging my tub and even injuring me...”
“Oh shit, am I what’s clogging that?” he asked.
“Bob, one of your beard hairs impaled my big toe yesterday like a splinter! When are you going to get your own shower fixed?”
“It’s Tony’s name on the lease,” Bob shrugged, moving up a step to indicate his desire to get in out of the weather, but Anna closed the door an inch, signaling her willingness to retreat indoors, so he stepped back again. “Baby, I’m sorry. Can I just come in for a minute? I wasn’t going to use your shower. I just wanted to tell you something.”
“What’s in your backpack, then?” Anna asked, pointing at it. “If it’s shower stuff, then you’re a liar.”
Bob sighed and looked at his feet for a moment, because in fact it was a change of clothes in his backpack, but he quickly looked back up at Anna to avoid appearing guilty.
Bob said slowly and sweetly, “So, if you’re not going to let me in, can I at least tell you what I came here to tell you?” as he thought about what to make that be.
Anna stared hard at him for a while, then folded her arms and stepped out into the weather.
“First, show me what’s in your backpack,” she said with mock nonchalance.
Bob just stood there for a few moments in the rain, perfectly still, looking back at Anna. He let a droplet of water fall off the end of his nose as he considered what to do.
“I just want to make sure you didn’t just lie to me,” Anna reiterated. “I don’t deserve to be with a liar.”
“Oh, baby, don’t make it all epic like that; it’s not...”
“It is, Bob,” Anna shouted. “I’ve had enough of being lied to. Give me that backpack; I’m gonna see what’s inside it.” She reached for Bob’s shoulder strap.
“Anna, alright, see,” Bob said with frustration, pulling the bag unzipped so fast that the underwear and socks on the top inside bounced up out guiltily, “it’s my clothes. I lied to you. Are you happy?”
“Why would you lying to me make me happy? Is that what you think I want – to be dating a liar? To marry a liar?”
“Marry a liar? That comes out of left field...”
“That’s what this is about, Bob,” Anna said, stepping fully out into the rain and shutting the door behind herself. “It’s about ultimate conclusions, and yours is... I don’t know where you’re headed, but...”
Her long, black hair began to become speckled with the tiny droplets of rain that seemed to hang in the air, making her appear particularly beautiful to Bob, like a morning spider web in the grass, and it made it difficult for him to pay attention to what she was saying. Something about marriage, how she wasn’t going to live forever and deserved someone who took her seriously.
“I do take you seriously, Anna,” Bob pleaded, looking back into her eyes and trying to wish the moment away. All he wanted was to get into her warm bed and snuggle into her hair. He stepped toward her and she let him take her fingertips in his hand. Bob looked down at Anna’s fingertips and said, “I do want to marry you, I told you that. I just want to be more, you know, secure or whatever.”
“We’re never secure,” Anna said softly. “And I’ll certainly never feel secure if I can’t trust you to just be honest with me.”
Bob sighed in frustration, looking away for a moment at the crappy little two-swing playground half a block down the street.
“And Bob, don’t take your frustration out on me with your sighs and your gestures. I have enough of my own shit in here to not have to deal with your stuff, okay?”
“I’m sorry I sighed,” Bob sighed. “Look, Anna, I’m not trying to dump shit on you or hold you down or mislead you or anything like that. I just wanted to come over and snuggle in bed with you and then maybe take a shower afterwards...”
“Because your shower doesn’t work because you can’t convince Tony to talk to the crazy landlady to fix it.”
Bob shrugged a yeah.
“Bob,” Anna sighed, choking up a bit, “I need you to be capable. I need you to not be dependent on me. It’s not just the shower. It’s dinner last night. It’s gas when you’re broke.”
“We drive around in my car. You don’t have a license. At least I get us around.”
Bob glanced over at the small parking lot beside Anna’s building, where his little, tan VW Rabbit had been parked, nearly empty of gas, for almost two weeks now.
“Yeah, it’s your car and you should be able to pay for your own gas. You know? But no, you can’t afford to fill it up, so it stays over here doing nobody any good. And I’m not going to fill it up again for you. Sorry, Bob. I’m not asking for much. But you are a man-child.”
“I’m a what?”
“A fucking man-child, okay? It’s a term. You can’t take care of yourself, and I know that I deserve better than that. Okay? Bob, I’m thirty-three...”
“I’m thirty-one,” Bob interjected, “so?”
“Exactly! You ought to be an independent man. I don’t have time to waste with you anymore.” Anna sputtered out a single sob and then said, “Can you respect that decision? Can you let me be the girl with the boyfriend who cares enough about to her to fucking... I need you to want to be something! I need you to want to be something good. Can you fathom that? Or can you only just do things? Do you only know how to...” and then she started sobbing hard enough that the words had to stop.
“Oh,” Bob grimaced, holding out his arms toward her awkwardly, unsure whether he ought to try to touch her or not. “Anna, baby, I love you so much. I don’t want you to feel like you’re with someone who isn’t good enough for you. I...” Bob’s heart felt like shit. “I wasn’t expecting this, baby. You sideswipe a guy with this. Fuck. What do you ..? Fuck! Baby...”
“Bob, it’s over, okay?” Anna said at last. “I need...” She looked into his eyes, narrowed her own and began to weep again, slowly putting her palm to her mouth. Then she hurriedly stepped back inside the door to her apartment complex and shut it.
“Anna,” Bob pleaded, stepping up at last toward the door and grabbing the handle, shaking it to no avail. “What is this?” He stood there for several seconds, then said again, “What is this? Are you there?” He put his hands and ear against the door and listened to see if she was just on the other side, waiting. He heard nothing, but said anyway, “Anna, are you there? Can you hear me? Or did you just go upstairs?” Still he heard nothing, and finally stepped down away from the door, to the edge of Ferguson Avenue.
Bob zipped his backpack up and hoisted it back over his shoulder. Slowly, wondering what he could have done differently with Anna, he began walking back down the street toward bumtown, on the other side of which was his neighborhood in the university ghetto at the edge of Ball State.
A couple of eight-year-old boys he recognized from Anna’s neighborhood stood where a fence stopped at the street, by the edge of the two-swing playground. As Bob approached them, one of them called out, “Hey buddy, you got any cigarettes?”
“Does it look like I have or smoke cigarettes?” Bob called back, continuing to walk past.
The kid shrugged.
“Etiquette recommendation then, squirt,” Bob said, looking coolly forward as he passed the two kids. “Don’t ask for cigarettes from someone unless you see them smoking. I don’t smoke. And anyway you’re eight.”
“More like eighteen,” the kid retorted.
Bob didn’t turn his head, continuing his steady retreat past them, but replied sarcastically, “Forgive me. I guess I’m old enough that everyone under twenty-five just looks like a fetus to me.”
As he kept walking, his eyes set on the gathering of people down by the soup kitchen a few blocks ahead, Bob wondered just how angry Anna really was, but only had a few seconds to think about it before he heard the mysteriously fast footsteps racing up behind him. Two little hands followed by a surprising amount of inertia hit Bob in the lower back and threw him to the pavement hands first. He felt the dirt of the road scrape threads of skin off his palms when they met the ground. He instinctively curled up and attended to a tiny rock that was stuck in one hand, then spun around onto his back to address the fleeing young boy who was intermittently shooting laughing glances back over his shoulder at supine Bob.
Some people in line at the door to the soup kitchen pointed Bob out to each other, smiling.
Bob decided not to say anything to the little punks. He just got himself awkwardly to his feet without using his injured hands, picked his backpack up again and brushed some wet street dirt off it with his knuckles, the whole time glowering the evil eye back at the two laughing boys. Finally, after standing there for a minute staring at the boys, who simply stared back saying “What?” repeatedly, Bob turned back around and continued walking.
He trudged back past the morning drunks who had heckled him on the way over, and they heckled him again, but Bob did his best to ignore the taunts, considering instead what he could have done differently back there with Anna. He wondered if it could really be over this time, and the possibility made him very sad. Bob loved Anna, simultaneously due to and despite her weird, inscrutable qualities. She was the only girl he had ever felt really comfortable with.
To avoid the increasing drizzle, Bob did not take the shortcut across the abandoned lot where the old Walbog’s used to be, but rather veered a bit out of his way into a wooded area of the big complex of green areas and church buildings that comprised St. Mary’s. The branches of the trees, though still leafless, were enough to guard him somewhat from the soft rain.
Bob wondered if Tony would be up yet. He wondered what he should make for breakfast when he got home, and foresaw Tony asking him to make enough for both of them, wondered if he ought to if that happened. Bob was getting sick of making Tony breakfast.
Interrupting his thoughts, a squirrel up in a nearby tree shouted at Bob, and he looked up at it with a calm sigh. Bob enjoyed squirrels.
But just then, the earth gave out under Bob’s feet. His butt hit the ground behind him before he even knew what was happening, and then he bounced forward, falling into the chasm that had opened up in the ground beneath him. Bob hit the ground once again hands first, but this time he was able to catch himself and avoided getting hurt too badly, though he did scrape both hands again and tore a huge gash in one leg of his jeans that he wouldn’t notice until later.
Once the shock of the fall ebbed out of his brain, he found that he was surrounded by large blocks of earth and darkness. A shaft of light little wider than Bob himself shined from above into the chamber that he had fallen into. When he looked up, he saw the hole that he had fallen through, just big enough for his body to fall through.
“Whoa,” he said aloud, amazed that there was a small subterranean cavern here in the middle of Muncie, Indiana.
As his eyes adjusted, the light from his entry hole ended up lighting the chamber sufficiently to see, revealing it to be about twenty feet long by ten feet wide, and about seven feet high. Rubble covered much of the center of the room, where Bob had fallen. The wall about six feet in front of him appeared to be some kind of carved stone altar surrounded by a bunch of tiny, flickering candles.
Bob looked up at the hole above him and wondered if he would be able to climb out.
Then he looked back down at the stone altar ahead, suddenly realizing that its presence was extremely peculiar. He forgot about his stinging hands and that the dust in the air was causing him a mild coughing fit, and crawled forward on his hands and knees to the altar. As he got closer, he made out a huge, dark book sealed with some kind of reddish strap, sitting at an angle at the back of the altar, circled by tiny candles.
“What the fuck?” Bob gasped. His heart raced in the darkness. “How have these candles been burning?” he wondered aloud as he stood, picking clumps of damp earth off his jeans. The chamber’s ceiling was high enough for him to stand up straight, but close enough to make him hunch over a little for personal head space.
He stood still for a while, inspecting the altar, the book and the candles. The altar seemed to have been carved right out of the side of the huge stone that made up much of that wall. The other walls were mostly pebbles and tough earth. The altar was about three feet high and ornately carved with a crazy, pictorial script that Bob had never seen before. The candles, each contained in an ornate little iron cage, were barely lit, their flames mere pussywillows of yellow, but they were hot. Bob passed his hand over them to feel their warmth.
“Un-fucking-real,” he murmured, shaking his head.
Upon closer inspection, the book seemed to be made of thick, dark leather with a dusty red ribbon made of satiny material holding it sealed shut. The pages swelled with moisture, making the book appear obese. Bob chuckled at it.
He reached out and touched the satin ribbon to feel its texture.
The moment his fingers touched it, the ribbon glowed bright red and a dizzying low sound exploded out from it. All the candles reared up, their flames shining blood red. The ribbon rose from the book and swirled to a spinning circle in the air above it, and then in the center of the spinning ribbon a pinkish ghostly face appeared.
The face in the swirling ribbon stared at Bob with wide black eyes.
Bob blinked, hardly believing what he saw. He said slowly, “You’re a crazy ribbon guy.”
“I am Hormel, guardian of this ancient tome!” the face declared, widening its black eyes.
Bob laughed, “Hormel? Like Hormel dinners?”
“Like Hormel the Great,” Hormel retorted. “I was created to guard this book for all time.”
“Why’s that?” Bob asked. “Is it good? What’s it about?”
“It is a Great Tome of Atlantean Necromancy, the last existent, and your blood sacrifice has shown you to be a willing novice of its secrets. I will take you through the ritual of comprehension, and then the book will be yours, evil one.”
“Wait, sorry, what?” Bob asked, confused.
Hormel just stared at Bob, then asked quietly, “Do you want me to repeat myself?”
Bob nervously over-gestured with his hands, saying, “Yes, repeat yourself. I definitely misheard all of that.”
“I, Hormel, familiar to Niock, have been left to secure this tome of secret Atlantean necromantic knowledge until such a time as the Egyptian threat has utterly passed and the safety of...”
“Yeah yeah, whatever and such,” Bob interrupted, waving his hand in front of Hormel. “What blood sacrifice?”
“I sensed blood,” Hormel shrugged facially. “You didn’t blood-sacrifice?”
Bob shrugged back, cocking his head to the side to inspect the weird face. “Does it look like I have any idea what you’re talking about at all? You’re the one living in a book in a cave.”
“I live in a book in a room in deep space,” Hormel corrected. He looked around at their surroundings and coughed a ghostly cough, then looked up at the blue circle of sky above them and asked Bob, “What sphere is that? Is that Earth?”
“Actually everything but the blue is the Earth,” Bob retorted, feeling particularly clever. “That is... space. Sky. The air between here and nothing. Whatever makes it blue. I dunno.”
“I don’t understand. We aren’t in deep space?” Hormel asked.
“No,” Bob laughed. “No, you’re underground in Muncie.”
“Well, nevertheless,” Hormel said, “you got here and you made the blood sacrifice. You have shown yourself both capable and willing, to my standards.”
“So just me touching your book with my bloody hands has made it so that you’re now my familiar and... what, the book is mine?”
“The key,” Hormel replied, “it is the key that is yours. Material objects can have only fleeting possession. And I’m definitely not yours. I was freed by the great Niock in a previous age.”
“Righteous,” Bob nodded, still hardly believing his eyes but going along with it nevertheless. “So let’s see this key I won.”
“It’s an ability to understand,” Hormel explained. “It’s a decryption. It allows only you to comprehend the symbols herein.”
“Oh I see,” Bob replied. “Okay. Sweet. So do you have to give it to me, or did I, like, get it automatically by doing the blood sacrifice or whatever?”
The ribbon around Hormel began to pulsate that glowing red light again and Niock’s familiar rose up through the air to a position right in front of Bob’s face.
Bob automatically recoiled a bit from the ghostly face, saying, “Whoa, man, no personal space in deep space I guess?” But he gradually brought his face back to where it had been, glancing intermittently away out of awkwardness. “So what, now, are you giving me the key now?” he asked as Hormel continued to flash and stare blankly into Bob’s eyes.
“There,” Hormel said after a few moments, “you can now comprehend this Tome. Use it well, evil one.”
And then Hormel’s face vanished. The ribbon stopped glowing and snaked softly down through the air to the dirt floor.
Bob looked around, not feeling like he knew any new ancient Atlantean language. He frowned interrogatively at the huge book for a while, then slowly approached it and very carefully peeled the hard, leathery cover back from the pages.
The first page was an introduction, written in a bizarre, unfamiliar script, yet magically somehow apprehensible to Bob. He read: “This is the ultimate compendium comprising the totality of ancient esoteric knowledge on the topic of the abstruse art of Necromancy. Herein can be found the means to raise and control the dead, prolong and control the living, and to wield the energies of evil in the world for the purposes of attack, defense and transformation.”
Bob read the glyph that meant transformation and instantly felt like a new man. The whole world was a new type of place.
“Transformation,” he said to himself, looking up from the book into his own mind. He saw Anna there looking back at him, her thin arms folded, and in his imagination he could read her thoughts as she wished that he were a different man. “I am a different man,” he said to the Anna in his imagination.
A huge smile took over his face. So I’m to be a necromancer, Bob thought to himself. He kept trying to doubt the reality of this moment, but upon picking up the ribbon that had surrounded the face of Hormel and finding it hot to the touch, he had to laugh because he couldn’t deny that he had actually just seen all that happen.
A confidence in his own identity-as-Bob bloomed there in the dark cave. In a very literal way, for the first time in his life, Bob really believed in himself. And at that he shut the Tome. He heaved it up onto his shoulders and carried it under the skylight, heaved the huge book up out of the hole and then very slowly and shakily pulled himself up after it into the light of the world.
The clouds had parted around the sun, mottling the ground with pools of light within a network of tree limb shadows and giving the air a refreshing warmth. The squirrel that had chirped at him before now sat quietly on its branch, watching. Bob brushed dirty snow and mud off of himself and picked the big book up off the ground with a grunt.
“This is how I’m going to get back Anna,” he said to himself with an ecstatic, incredulous laugh, raising one eyebrow and imagining fantastic scenes of himself riding a big skeletal horse with armies of ghost warriors trailing behind him. “With the abstruse art of necromancy. Whatever the fuck that means.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 2
Bob burst through the front door of his house back-first, the big Tome held underneath his jacket as much as possible to guard it from the moisture in the morning air.
“Tony,” he shouted, “you up?”
He waddled over videogame cartridges and controllers and plopped the book onto Tony’s leather couch, where it bounced softly before coming to rest.
Tony peeked his head out of the bathroom door down the hall, shirtless and wet, a toothbrush in his mouth.
“What up, man,” he mumbled. “I thought you’d gone over to Anna’s.”
“I did,” Bob explained as he dropped his backpack beside the front door. “But dude, you’ve got to check out this book I found on the way back. Is the shower working?”
Tony shook his head no. “Sponge bath. Became necessary.” He eyed the Tome from the bathroom doorway. “You get that at the Wizard’s Keep?”
“No, I found it in an underground chamber.”
Tony furrowed his brow for a moment, then asked, “Is that a new bookstore?”
“No, man,” Bob explained, “I’m talking about a real underground chamber that I fell into, in the woods over by Anna’s. You know that little square of trees by bumtown? Part of St. Mary’s, I think.”
“The one where Spencer broke his arm in that tree?”
“Exactly,” Bob nodded. “Come here. Put some pants on and come check this out. For real, dude.”
“I don’t need any pants to look at a big, stupid book,” Tony joked as he ambled toward Bob and the book with his toothbrush still in his mouth and a towel around his waist. As he got closer to the book he became somewhat more impressed, and knelt down beside the couch to inspect it. “Did you seriously find this in an underground chamber? Is this, like, some kind of old Indian book or something? It’s crazy. Look at this thing. I may actually need some pants for this.”
“The Native Americans didn’t have books, as far as I know. Actually, it’s an ancient Atlantean tome of necromantic magic.”
Tony looked up at Bob incredulously.
Bob laughed excitedly, “I just had a ridiculous conversation with this ghost-faced demon guy who lived inside a ribbon, and who gave me alone the key to understand these... these symbols.” He proudly pressed down on the book with one finger.
Well aware that Tony was not quite believing him, Bob knelt down beside him and looked him in the eyes, trying to underline his seriousness.
“Now, dude, listen to me for a second, because this is gonna sound totally insane, but it’s true. I was walking back from Anna’s building and in that one little wooded area over by St. Mary’s I actually fell through the earth into some crazy underground chamber. There was this big-ass stone altar, and this book was on it.”
Tony just shook his head, hesitantly grinning.
“This is the day,” Bob laughed. “This is the day that we become something serious and real. Like, okay, anyway, sorry – I should continue. So, I touched the book, and that demon guy who called himself Hormel popped out of the book and claimed that he was some old Atlantean necromancer’s familiar, who had been left with the book to give the key to whoever came across it and, and I guess there was some need for blood sacrifice or something, but I seem to have avoided that prerequisite by just touching it with scraped up hands.”
“What are you talking about?” Tony asked with frustration.
“I’m trying to explain to you what just happened to me,” Bob shouted with matching frustration. He held his bloodied palms up to show Tony.
“You scraped your hands. You need some Neosporin, B.”
“Look, man, this could be the beginning of something really big. I mean, these crazy things actually just happened to me. I got the magical key to be able to read this book.” He flipped open the cover, revealing the weird script inside and shouted, “See, this stuff makes sense to me!”
“Great,” Tony sighed, “so what’s it about?”
“It’s about secret magical power,” Bob said, gripping Tony by the damp shoulders and shaking him. “Don’t you get it?”
“No,” Tony shouted, standing out of Bob’s grip, “don’t you get that I don’t? God! I’m not as smart as you, Bob. I’m not a reader, and I don’t play book-games.”
Tony walked over to the kitchen and began pouring himself a bowl of Lucky Charms.
“Tony, this really isn’t a game. I’m not LARPing right now or anything. Look, I’ll be as simple as I can.” Bob enunciated clearly, stepping over toward the kitchen and sitting down at one of the chairs around their little table. “That book pretty much basically has spells in it that will show me how to, like, raise the dead and stuff like that, for real. Or at least, so it claims. And at this point I’m more than a little bit believing it, because I just had a conversation with a ghostly face inside a spinning ribbon, and now I understand those symbols!”
Tony looked at Bob unimpressed. He poured milk on his cereal and then ambled back out into the living room, plopped himself down on the couch right next to the book and gave it the same unimpressed look he had just given Bob.
“Bullshit,” he said. “That’s made of foam or something.”
Bob knelt next to the book, looking up at Tony with a condescending expression like he was about to read to a baby, then began carefully flipping from page to page, revealing to Tony ever more old, thick, damp pages full of shimmering alien script and demonic diagrams.
“Whoa, what?” Tony coughed when he saw one particularly cool looking demon diagram that could easily have been artwork for one of his favorite hardcore albums. He spewed a few marshmallow bits out of his mouth and some milk down his chin, then carefully placed his bowl on a table beside the couch and wiped his chin. Tony turned bodily on the couch to hover over the book, a huge grin now commanding his face. “Where did you find this again?”
“In a magical underground chamber, dude, that I fell into randomly,” Bob said, trying to give his words the drama that he felt Tony seemed now to be understanding. “And the key, the mental key to understanding these, these words or whatever, this script, was given to me by this real-life ghost-faced guy, like a floating ghostly face.”
“What,” Tony scoffed.
Bob nodded. “Serious.”
Tony and Bob just stared at each other for a few moments.
The phone rang. Tony looked over at it, on the table next to his cereal bowl, and looked back at Bob when the caller ID came up.
“It’s Anna, man. Do you want it?”
“Yeah, hand it to me,” Bob said, and received the phone from Tony. “Hello?”
“Hey, is Bob back yet?” Anna asked nonchalantly.
“This is Bob, baby,” Bob said quietly, turning away from Tony. “How are you doing?”
“I just wanted to let you know that I meant what I said about needing you to grow up before we can keep pursuing a relationship with each other. I wanted to make sure you understood what I mean, that I’m not coming from nowhere with this.”
“I understand,” Bob said.
“I’m sorry I made you walk home in the rain,” she said sweetly, and Bob fell a little bit more in love with her.
“It was worth it, Anna,” Bob replied with a grin. “Honestly, something happened to me on the way back from your place that has completely changed my outlook. I feel like I know what you meant, and I feel like I might know what I want to do.”
“Are you thinking about bartending school again?”
“No, baby, nothing so small,” Bob replied with a chuckle.
“What’s that sinister laugh, there? This isn’t a joke, Bob. You need to be serious. It needs to be something you can really do, something in your range, you know? And you can build from there.”
“I know, I know.”
“Well, we’ll see, okay?” Anna said softly. “I have to work this afternoon, but maybe tomorrow morning you could come over, and you can use my shower…”
“Thank you, baby,” Bob interjected.
“See – would you just not interrupt me all the time?” Anna snapped, suddenly angry again. “You always have something to add in the middle of my sentences when I’m clearly at a comma, not a period, with my tone and manner, you know?”
“I do; I’m sorry,” Bob said quickly. “I want nothing more than to listen to you as long as you want to talk about whatever.”
“Don’t patronize me. Look, tomorrow we can talk. I need a day to not think about you.”
“Jeez,” Bob said.
“So sleep well tonight. Don’t think I won’t miss you in bed.”
“That’s nice of you to say,” Bob said.
“Does she know about this book?” Tony asked loudly from the couch. Bob put his hand over the phone and shook his head no.
“Hi Tony! Okay, so I’ll call you tomorrow,” Anna said.
“Okay, good day and good night and all that; I love you,” Bob said quickly, then hung up and turned to Tony. “I need to read this thing. Tony – you call Spencer and Travis and tell them that tonight, we are going to go raise some fucking dead.”
Tony laughed loudly and clapped once, then began looking around for the phone.
“Here it is,” Bob said, and handed him the cordless phone.
Bob took off his shoes, flipped the book back to its first page and began his attempt to read through Tony’s loud, invasively animated phone conversations with Spencer and Travis.
The little fenced-in graveyard down the road had no more than fifty or so gravestones. It was rather old, with no graves more recent than the Sixties and some from the nineteenth century. Tony said it was a family graveyard from when the area had been nothing but farmland, and that the family didn’t exist anymore. Bob chose it because it was separated from the street by a long driveway and surrounded by trees that kept most of the light out. And it was only a short walk from the house.
The air had gotten bitterly cold after the sun went down and a gibbous moon had risen after it. The dark grass was wet from the day’s precipitation. On arriving, Bob caught the shining eyes of a raccoon just before it dashed into the woods, startling Spencer with its rustling.
Spencer was now wringing his hands and scrunching up his whole face in anticipation of the evening’s macabre events. Travis just stood stoically smoking a cigarette, trying to seem above it all. Tony asked him, uncharacteristically (being hardly even a social smoker of anything but marijuana), “Hey man, can I get one of those?”
“Nah, this was my last one,” Travis replied, opening the pack with one finger and showing Tony its emptiness. “See; I’m not lying to you, either. Sorry, man. You wanna share this one?”
Tony shook his head and put his hands in his pockets, holding his arms tight against himself in the midnight chill.
Bob was knelt in front of a tombstone, against which he had propped the big Tome, from which he had been reading silently for some time.
“You almost ready, there, Bob?” Tony asked him.
“Yeah seriously,” Spencer hissed through clenched teeth. “This is the fucking creepiest event I have ever been invited to. And that fucking book has almost actually got me believing you already, so... I don’t even know if I want this to succeed or not. Pretty sure not, to be honest. Not to jinx you.”
“I gotta see it,” Travis exhaled. He pulled a big pair of aviator shades out of his pocket and put them on. “Do this thing already. What’s the holdup?”
“I’m just memorizing,” Bob murmured, trying not to lose his place.
As the book explained in a wordy introduction, its magic worked through inner-monologue vocalization, but the magic words, even though only occurring in the spell-caster’s mind, had to be precise. Bob had flipped ahead to this section on the animation of the dead, and so had no idea how similar the spells might be, and didn’t want to accidentally cast some other spell by misthinking.
Once he felt sufficiently confident that he had memorized the utterances, he moved the book to the side and stepped off the grave he had been crouching on.
“Alright now, guys,” Bob said to his friends, “you need to really give me serious quiet now for a couple of minutes. I have to recite some magic words in my mind, and they have to be precise...”
Tony snickered, but Spencer slapped his arm and he regained his serious face. Tony gestured a tiny apology and for Bob to continue.
“You ready to see me raise a fucking zombie or what?” Bob asked Tony directly.
Tony nodded. “Do it, dude.”
“Raise that bitch,” Travis muttered under his cigarette.
“Actually,” Bob corrected, reading from the gravestone in the moonlight, “this fellow will have been a man, a Mr. Arch Stanton. Now be quiet, and allow me to necromance.”
Bob folded his hands and held them up to his mouth, furrowing his brow and focusing hard on creating a quiet space in his mind where he could carefully pronounce the words.
With epic hope and optimism, he began thinking the magic words, eagerly picturing a future army of skeletons that he might one day raise.
Halfway through Bob’s inner pronunciation, Travis whispered, “Bob looks so serious,” and it caused Bob to pause. He struggled furiously not to mentally utter another thought-word until he had reachieved his place. He sighed slowly through his nose and regained a clear mind, found his place and finished the thought. As soon as he had finished and listened to a single moment of thought-silence, Bob opened his eyes, turned to Travis and shoved him hard on both shoulders.
“I’m sorry, dude. I forgot in that little second about total silence. Did I fuck you up?”
“Maybe, dickwipe,” Bob whined with concern, looking at the grave and not yet seeing a skeleton. “Do you see a goddamn skeleton here, standing next to us, willing to do our bidding?”
Then Tony shouted, “Oh fuck me!” and jumped back away from the grave behind him, colliding with Travis and knocking his cigarette out of his hand.
“Whoa, careful there, Clumsy,” Travis said impatiently, holding Tony up as he caught his balance.
“Dude, what is that? Is that Arch Stanton!?” Tony shrieked, pointing at the grave he had jumped away from, where a little white worm-sized something was wiggling back and forth, then stood up on its end and was suddenly joined by three more as Tony, Bob and Spencer all simultaneously realized that it was a grimy skeleton hand clawing its way out of the ground.
But it was coming out of the wrong grave. Bob looked around with a combination of concern and utter glee as he heard an insect-like scraping and soft, earthquakish rumbling coming from all directions.
Suddenly the whole graveyard was stirring; old skeletons ragged with patches of skin and still-clinging remnants of garments were beginning to slowly make their ways back up into the air of the world, the moonlight gleaming on the sections of white bone that showed from beneath clumps of earth and revenant flesh remnants. A faint red glow seemed to shine from each skeleton’s skull.
Travis, who somehow had not yet noticed or allowed himself to realize what was happening, bent down to pick up the cigarette he had dropped just as the skeleton fingers it had fallen near randomly caught it in their grip and pulled it under the earth. The next moment, the skeleton’s ghastly face, illuminated from within by two tiny red flames just behind the eye sockets, emerged from the ground and looked at Travis with a hellish, high-pitched hiss. Travis fainted instantly, falling onto his face and doing an inadvertent forward roll over his shoulder. Many more such hellish skeleton groans began to fill the tiny graveyard as more and more skeletons emerged from the dirt of their graves and began to gather around the four men.
Spencer screamed twice, high and hard, and then ran in the only direction in which no skeletons were yet standing, jumping over three that were still emerging and screaming once more each time. Once past those three skeletons, he was gone into the darkness of the trees within seconds.
“These skeletons are under your control, right Bob?” Tony asked, backing toward his friend.
Bob backed up against Tony’s back, but then took hold of the confidence his successful spell has seeded within him and stood up straight, moved away from Tony and said, “No, yes, right. I should have command over them. And I can give command over them to others, too. You want command over them, too, Tony?”
“Yes,” Tony nodded quickly. “I think that would make me feel better right now. This is awesome, right? Not terrible?”
“Right,” Bob assured him, “awesome. It’s excellent. It’s the fucking most excellent thing ever! Holy shit, Tony! We just raised like a hundred fucking skeletons!”
“You did.”
“Look around us! Who knew so many people were buried here – how did that work?”
“Yeah, seriously. What, was one of these a mass grave?” Tony asked and laughed awkwardly to himself.
“I just remembered that we might want to be quiet,” Bob whispered, realizing that he had just been shouting, and that they were not far enough from houses for that. “Umm...”
All around them, ragged skeletal figures clambered to their feet and gathered in a stoic mob around the two young men.
The brief terror over what others might think about what he’d just done was surprisingly easy for Bob to shrug away.
“Alright,” he said. “Bob Wacszowski, necromancer. Giving command of the skeletons to Tony.”
He closed his eyes and thought the magical syllables that he had read in the book for exactly this purpose, then thought about Tony as the recipient of the spell and opened his eyes.
“How’s that? Try to command them.”
“Everybody raise your hand,” Tony said to the legion of skeletons that was gathering around them.
The skeletons each raised one hand, most right, some left.
“Dude,” Tony said to Bob, “we got us some skeletons.”
“We sure do,” Bob affirmed with a smile. He closed his eyes again and thought the symbols to give control of the skeletons to Anna as well, thinking that she would find it sweet that he had thought of her.
“Hey Bob!” Tony shouted, grinning suddenly. “This means that Atlantis was real!” He shrugged. “Right?”
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 3
Tony gave the last skeleton through the door down to the basement of their house a kick in the back of the pelvic bone and laughed as he slammed the door behind it.
“Man,” he said with amazement, “a hundred and twenty-one skeletons. I can’t believe they all fit down there.”
“I feel like they must be just packed in there, like, bone-to-bone, grinding against each other,” Bob said with a slightly concerned smirk. “That is not a big basement. I gotta get you your twenty next week when I get my check, but man, you were right. They all fit.”
“I can pack anything into any space,” Tony bragged.
“There were a few children among ‘em,” Bob noted with a grimace.
“Kids die, dude,” Tony said unsympathetically, “get over it.”
“Yeah, I just feel like if anyone is going to get up in my shit about this stuff being evil or whatever, it’s those kid skeletons that are gonna be the easiest things to point to.”
“Whoa,” Tony said as if he hadn’t even thought about the world’s reaction to all of this until now. “Yeah. I am not gonna be able to tell my mom about this. Never. You can’t tell her, okay?”
“I won’t tell your mom you were involved,” Bob assured him.
“Are you gonna tell Anna about it?”
Bob laughed and said, “Yeah dude. This is – look, this is, like, something I can finally really do and feel good about. I mean... I gotta tell her. I’m excited; it’s a new me, a new potential!”
“Cool!” Tony laughed encouragingly, slapping Bob on the arm. “You think she’ll dig it, then? She’s all goth, right?”
“She just wears black, that’s all,” Bob said. “I don’t think she’ll like it at first. But I think, given time, she might be able to get into it. I guess we’ll see.”
“Yeah man, good luck with that. I’m sort of glad I don’t have a girlfriend right now, because I just feel like there’s no way I’d be able to get laid... in this situation... for a while... for some reason.”
Tony and Bob stared at each other for a moment, then Bob looked down and rubbed his chin and Tony realized that what he had just said might have been discouraging.
“You know – corpses and shit? That’s not sexy, right? But I’m sure you will. You can rock this. I’m not getting laid right now, anyway. You do sometimes. Right? So you will continue to, as normal, one’s gotta assume.”
Bob grimaced at Tony, whose face slowly stretched to match Bob’s until Tony shook it away and said, “Bob, when you make that face it makes me make that face.”
“I gotta call Anna,” Bob said, bounding toward the phone in the other room.
“Remember to tell her about the skeletons,” Tony called after him.
Anna answered the phone sleepily. “Bob?”
“Hey baby,” Bob said quietly and sweetly, “I’m sorry to have woken you. I know it’s a crazy time right now.”
“What time is it?”
“I think it’s about two-thirty. Baby, something amazing has happened. I gotta tell you about it.”
“Something amazing happened in the middle of the night? Are you high? Or is this about your bed being lumpy again? God, Bob, you need to fix your own problems!”
“No, baby, it started on the way back from your place. I, um…” Bob suddenly couldn’t figure out a good way to begin explaining without sounding ridiculous. “I can’t tell you about this without showing it to you. I found this book underground, and I’m gonna use it to start doing something with my life. It’s everything you wanted me to do!”
“What is it, a self-help book?”
“Exactly!” Bob laughed.
“That’s great, Bob. Show it to me tomorrow.”
“No, baby, it’s really like a life-shattering kind of thing that I need to come over and show you right now. Can I please come over?”
“This is about your bed, isn’t it?” Anna snapped grumpily. “There isn’t even any self-help book or anything like that, is there, Bob? This is just about you not wanting to sleep in your lumpy-ass bed and being, for whatever reason, completely incapable of getting a new mattress or fixing it or anything – isn’t it, Bob?”
With a burst of confidence, because it was essentially true, Bob said, “I got a new mattress, and it is extremely comfortable. I really do have something important to show you!”
Anna seemed taken aback for a moment; Bob could hear it in her breathing. Then she said, “Well I’m impressed. Where did you get this new mattress?”
To avoid telling the truth – that he had found his new mattress in an alley a few blocks away – Bob said, “You are evading my immediate issue. Can I come over and show you this thing or what?”
“Well you’re the one with the nice new mattress. How about I come over there and stay with you for a change? You can show me your new book in your new bed.”
“And we would shower where in the morning?” Bob asked, getting irritated.
“For Christ’s sake, Bob,” was all Anna could say to that.
“Look, I’m coming over,” Bob said, trying to sound authoritative. “You’ll see how real I’m being right now!”
Too excited to waste anymore time, Bob hung up, grabbed the Tome and ran out the door into the night.
With the big book held tightly to his chest in both arms, he hoofed across his streetlight-lit college ghetto neighborhood, cutting through the Saint Mary’s wooded area.
As he passed at some distance one of the churches in the complex, looking around himself nervously as he jogged, Bob caught sight of a man in robes standing near the doors of the distant church. He was surprised to see a priest out in the middle of the night. When Bob noticed him, he barely heard the priest shout, “You, my son, what is that you carry?” It made Bob’s heart race and his muscles run faster.
He was panting, sprinting, by the time he was crossing bumtown.
“What the hell is that?” Anna asked about the huge book in Bob’s arms as she held the front door of her apartment building open for him. “What was worth running the whole way here? Are you alright?”
“This is the book,” Bob explained with a gasp.
He carried the Tome up the narrow stairs to Anna’s apartment, shooing her cat, Admiral Zheng He, inside with his feet. Anna followed him in, locking the door behind herself and picking up the Admiral in her arms.
“It’s big,” she said, scratching the Admiral’s neck and eyeing the Tome in Bob’s arms.
Bob set the Tome down on the hardwood floor of Anna’s living room and then turned to Anna with a big, romantic grin. He took her face in his hands and kissed her on the lips. To his delight, she came out giggling.
“The Admiral Zheng He here is wiggling,” she explained.
“And you got all twitterpated from kissing me, you gotta admit,” Bob smiled.
The Admiral yowled softly and pushed off Anna’s chest to jump down to the floor. Anna squealed and held her right breast.
“You scratched me, you prick!” she scolded.
She looked up at Bob just as he came in for another kiss.
“I love you,” Bob said, holding Anna close and enjoying her scent. “I want you to know that I will never leave you if you keep on wanting to be with me. You were with me before I got big.”
“Got big? What is this, a book on penis enlargement?”
“Fuck off. You have no idea how much you shouldn’t really be making fun of me right now. You’ll see.”
“Alright, alright,” Anna conceded, laughing and patting Bob’s shoulder. “What’s the deal here, now?” She fell back over the arm of the couch and then scooted around to lie on her side with her head propped up on one hand. “Give me the spiel.”
Bob stood over the book for a moment, thinking how to begin, disarmed by how much it seemed like Anna was expecting some kind of self-help philosophy. He just looked down at her lovely eyes and frail, reclining figure and couldn’t help but smile. He could never really think in the presence of her loveliness. He decided just to tell it straight.
“This book has taught me how to raise the dead.”