True Love and Necromancy [Featured Story!]

Chapter XV

NINE YEARS LATER, Theo sat at the bench in his workroom, idly combing his graying beard with his fingers. He turned another page and made a soft, musing sound to himself. The sound rose weakly into the air, gave up, and faded, leaving the sorcerer with the eerie stillness of the cottage.

Across the room, several potted plants that had stretched their luxuriant planty appendages throughout the room in earlier days had dried up, shriveled, and died. Most of the pots were cobwebbed and empty of anything green. Dust and cobwebs wreathed the ceiling beams. As Theo pored over his book, a neighborly spider descended with expert employment of her spinnerets to perch on the edge of his desk. She flailed one long, slender foreleg in greeting, but went entirely unnoticed.

"Very good," Theo said to himself.

He rose to his feet and shuffled over the dirty floorboards toward the kitchen, where a large pot had been set to boil.

"I've not had much success as of yet, Elliott," the sorcerer said, "But this new tome holds promise indeed. If we can simply make this experiment work ... it's the boiling that concerns me."

Over the next few hours, Theo alternately poked, prodded, and stirred the contents of the large pot as it simmered away. The room was suffused with the most unsettling odor that issued from the pot Theo did not seem to notice. Perhaps his nose was too distracted by the smell of himself to notice. It looked, to be honest, as if no part of him or his clothes had seen hot water or soap in far too long.

"There we are, I think, Elliott," Theo said, with a note of cheer in his creaking voice.

He picked up a pair of tongs and began to carefully pick a series of small bones out of the boiling pot, one after another. He laid them carefully on a towel. Once all the bones had been lain out, he began to carefully arrange them using a pair of large tweezers. He referred frequently to a diagram in a book lain open near at hand.

"That will be the tibia," he muttered, poking a bone into place. "Scapula ... why so many vertebrae?" It took him a considerable amount of time to perfect the alignment of the skeleton.

At last, Theo stood straight, much to the displeasure of his spine, which cracked in irritation. Theo shuffled back into the workroom and came out a few moments later with armfuls of tools and materials.

He clumsily arranged the items: a circle of black candles, several crystals that glowed in an ominous manner, and an iron dagger.

"The one thing I have learned about necromancy," Theo said companionably to the skeleton of the cat, "is that it is not full of froo-froo nonsense."

He struck a long match and lit each one of the candles, carefully avoiding his unwashed, untrimmed beard. Then he picked up the knife and raised his arms.

"Spirits of the dark realms, make way!" Theo intoned. His voice was dry and tired-sounding, but nonetheless took on a certain power as he spoke. "Make way for the soul of the one who returns. Elliott, my feline friend ... er—companion ... you are a cat, after all ... Elliott! Return to me! I command thee! I command thy soul!"

Theo drew the blade of the iron dagger across the palm of his hand. It was not very sharp, so he had to do some uncomfortable sawing, but at last, he mangled his palm enough to produce a sluggish few drops of blood. He allowed the blood to drip over the white-gold bones.

Almost at once, the creepy little skull rose up on his skeletal neck. The cat pulled himself to a seated position, his tail curled primly around his skeletal haunches. He bent his bony jaws to his paw as if to lick it, then sniffed in displeasure and glared—if skulls are able to glare—at Theo.

"You brought me back from the dead by dripping your filthy human blood all over me and didn't leave me a tongue to wash with? Barbarian."

Theo seemed only mildly surprised to hear the cat skeleton speak. "You can talk? That's interesting."

"Finally," Elliott replied. He pointed with his paw at a grubby dish rag. "Clean your drippings up. It's disgusting."

The sorcerer obediently dabbed at Elliott's tiny vertebrae, all the way to the tip of his serpentine tail and the minuscule bones of his little tiny paws. Once the blood had been cleaned away from the fastidious reanimated cat, Theo went back to the stove and looked into the pot.

"I don't see why you couldn't have kept me as I was," Elliott complained.

"Well, you'd been dead for a while and you were quite off by the time I was able to make the spell. I've not quite mastered bringing something back to life full-on."

He gestured distractedly to the corner of the combined kitchen and living room. There, a cage hanging from the rafters contained two tiny skeletal birds, clacking their beaks eerily, and a large cage on the floor contained a reanimated opossum.

The opossum was still in possession of most of its flesh. Unfortunately.

Elliott's empty skull managed to convey an expression of deep distaste. "Point taken."

"I'm close to ready, I think," Theo said, staring into the murky contents of the pot. He did not seem to be seeing what was inside. His eyes were distant. "I'll have to practice several more times, of course, to ensure success. You were too far gone. But I think I have reached another level of knowledge. A deeper level of knowledge. I'll be ready soon. Very soon."

"Please save your occult ramblings for later and give the rest of me a decent burial," said the cat. "I'd help, but I still don't have opposable thumbs."