by Anne Caywood
Every night was the same.
A girl with hair and skin different from my own filled my mind, the phantom pain of hands on her arms and legs trickling into my own existence. The voices around the girl were garbled, and I could hardly make out what they were saying.
The ropes tied around her body constricted my lungs and the smoke around her filled the gaps in my lungs where oxygen fell short, the world falling into a haze around me.
It was always this, or I’d see the boy filled with jealousy and rage, his hands tying the ropes around the girl’s skin.
I’d wake up from this dream, and I could almost see fresh burns on the skin of my calves.
—
What I like most about my job is that I never know the intentions of my clients. When a sobbing woman wrapped in a scarf and bonnet approached my desk, I naturally assumed she was a widow. The mysterious man clad in black with a devious gleam in his eye must have been a debtor looking to collect payment. The small, innocent child was missing a parent.
However, it could be that the sobbing woman was a con artist, the mysterious man was a criminal on the run, the small child part of a dangerous gang. I was never the wiser.
“Doesn’t it scare you?” Gloria, my secretary, would sometimes ask, when a particular client was blatantly devoid of good intentions and raked their eyes over my face as if they wanted to throw me to the afterlife like a rabbit to the hounds. Gloria was always quiet, and always agreeable with my clients. I don’t think it’s because she’s scared of them. I think it’s because she’s scared of me.
“No,” I told her. “No one is foolish enough to deceive someone who regularly blurs the line between life and death.”
Until Victor, that is.
He came in when it was storming outside, thunder running rampant and rain a temporary relief from the blistering London summer heat. I was working late, the body of a teenage girl was brought in around 6 o’clock. I had sent Gloria home. Florence Miller, 17, died of suffocation. Her eyes were shut and her hair was matted and tangled as it lay resting against the metal surface, brown strands falling off the side of the table.
Already at 17, there were indications of stress marks along her forehead and sides of her eyes, and I had a slight suspicion Florence hadn’t lived the life girls her age should. Not unlike myself, in that way.
As I finished the autopsy, the doors creaked open and stray raindrops landed at the threshold of the wooden door.
“Sorry, we’re closed,” I said, pulling my rubber gloves off and pushing Florence into her cyronic bed, and closing the door as if she was an inmate facing solitary confinement.
“I’ll be but a minute,” said a man, watching me curiously from the glass door leading into the morgue. He was slim and well-dressed, black hair combed back and slick from the rain outside. He wore gloves and a coat, walked with a cane, and the only inches of skin I could see were that of his neck and face. Pale, a shade away from looking sickly. “Intriguing name, the mortuary. Is Baker a family name?”
“Yes,” I said, turning fully to face him. “I inherited the morgue from my father.”
“Curious thing, to pass down in an inheritance.”
“Well, my family was never run of the mill. How can I help you?”
He stepped further into the room, and I rose up to meet him, angling my gaze up slightly to look him in the eye. “My name is Victor Lawrence, of the Wesleyan Church down the way. Have you heard of it?”
“I have.” I hadn’t. I didn’t make a habit of concerning myself with Godly people.
Victor’s eyes raked over the doors with bodies behind them, along the wooden desk Gloria typically sat at, and then over me. There was an emotion I couldn’t describe in his eyes as he seemed to hyperfocus on every detail about me, from my dark hair to dark attire, but it was a look that gave me goosebumps to see from a man.
“I’m going to be blunt, Miss Baker. There are rumors that your… business does not run as it appears.”
“I’ve heard them,” I said, guarded. It wasn’t always those struggling with loss that came to my doors.
“Tell me, is there any merit to these rumors?”
“Depends on why you’re here.”
He drew in a breath, gaze sinister and aura malicious. “It is un-Godly to raise people from the dead.”
“How so? If Jesus did it, why shouldn’t I?”
“You would compare yourself to the son of God?”
“He was a man just like you, wasn’t he?”
Victor was silent for a moment. I wasn’t sure what to make of him. The unpredictability of my customers often delighted me, but with Victor, every instinct screamed in me to run, as if he were a bloodthirsty lion and I were a mere rabbit. “I suppose you’re right, Miss—”
“Call me Christine.”
Victor’s lips quirked up into a strained smile. “Christine. However, I must implore that this method of inquiry you’ve pursued is dangerous and, frankly, witch-like.”
My brow raised. My hands clasped in front of my body, and I resisted the urge to take a step back. I wasn’t letting this man think he was getting to me. I’m in control. “I thought the church stopped burning witches centuries ago.”
“Indeed. However, it doesn’t make them less…” Victor pondered for a moment. “Sinful.”
I stiffened. However this was going to end, I knew it wasn’t going to be pretty. Victor was a Godly man, and nothing was more dangerous than a man so committed to his religion that he blurs the lines between good and evil, whether consciously or otherwise.
Victor’s dark eyes bored into me, and a chill went down my spine. “What can I do for you, Mr. Lawrence? No one comes here to lecture me unless they have other intentions.”
“Patience, Christine,” Victor said and glanced at the chair I reserved for clients. “Mind if I sit? My leg becomes rather provoked by the rain.”
“Please,” I said, and Victor slowly lowered himself into the office chair I reserved for guests, resting his cane against the arm of the chair. Hesitantly, I sat down across from him.
“Who was the first person you brought from the dead?”
The answer was on the tip of my tongue. Gloria had asked the same question when she started and learned the true nature of what I do, and I declined to answer, deciding that some things were better left unsaid. “Why? I thought my practices were un-Godly.”
“They are,” Victor said. “But man wouldn’t ever fall to temptation if sin wasn’t so seductive. And I am very intrigued by you, Christine.”
I narrowed my eyes, skeptical. “What makes you think I’m going to play this game of yours, Mr. Lawrence?”
“Just Victor, please,” he said, fingertips dancing over the top of his cane. “And it’s no game. I’m simply an inquiring mind. A simple, curious man.”
I sighed. Victor undoubtedly set me on edge, but I had to admit, something about him set me… at ease. There was a hint of familiarity to it. “Victor. If you must know, it was myself.” Victor’s brow raised, but he didn’t seem surprised. I took his silence as his prompting for me to continue. “I was murdered. My soul tore from my body, and I simply reattached it. Like a seamstress, if you will.”
“Intriguing,” he said, a tone I couldn’t detect underlying his voice. “Who were you murdered by?”
“That’s not relevant.”
“It is to me.”
“And why is that?” I asked, leaning back in my chair. “So you can crucify me in the name of God? Call me a witch? Strap me to a pyre?”
A ghost of an amused smile twitched on Victor’s lips. “Is it so hard to believe I am a curious mind?”
“I am not a fool. No man is ever only curious. You’re always looking for some semblance of power.”
Victor hummed, nodding his head thoughtfully, almost condescendingly. It felt like he was mocking me. “And this soul-stitching it is that you do… is this what you do for all of your clients?”
“Yes.”
“And are there no consequences?”
“I never said that,” I said, crossing my legs. “If a body is dead, it’s dead. If a soul is at rest, it’s at rest. Reattaching a resting soul to a dead body will cause nothing but prolonged suffering.”
“Why do it at all, then?” Victor tilted his head, but the question almost sounded rhetorical coming from him.
“Wouldn’t you, if you had the power? To give someone prolonged time with their loved one?”
“No. We’ll all meet in Heaven one day, after all.”
I turned away. “If you say so.”
“And the body decay didn’t happen to yourself?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“The body I attached myself to was never dead.”
Victor pondered this for a moment, his eyes traveling up the wooden walls and to the ceiling. Then, they fell back onto me. “Tell me, Christine. Do you believe in God?”
I quirked up a brow. “Surely, if there were a God, he would have deposited my soul in Hell long ago. Defeats the purpose if an ordinary woman can revive herself, doesn’t it?”
Victor almost smiled, then. “I suppose you’re not wrong. But He works in mysterious ways, doesn’t He?” He stood up, cane clacking against the floor as he walked closer to the freezers. He gazed up at them as if staring down Goliath, and his faith in God would allow them to collapse. “There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there, Christine?”
“Hardly,” I said, standing up and leaning against the chair I had been sitting at. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up, and I felt a heightened level of anxiety in my chest. “I’m not obligated to share information with you. If anything, you’re the one who’s been keeping secrets. Why did you seek me out?”
Victor responded without turning around to look at me. “I wanted to know if you would tell the truth. And maybe find some answers for myself.”
“What answers?” I said, every hair on the back of my neck standing straight up.
“The answer to where you’ve been hiding all this time, Elizabeth.”
I stiffened. The phantoms of spiders crawled along my back, flames licked at my legs, bruises in the shape of fingerprints marred my skin. Distantly, I heard screaming. “Where did you hear that name?”
“Oh, come now,” he said, facing me now. There was a glint in his eyes that was all too familiar, a gait in his step that was eerie. I couldn’t place it before. But I fear I could now. “I would never forget the name of my little sister.”
My body reacted before my mind did. My hands reached for the scalpel on the table next to me, pointing it at Victor — no, John — as if it were a musket. He laughed, and the noise was familiar and foreign all at once. “What will you do, Elizabeth? Break my other leg?”
“What are you doing here, John?” I asked, hands trembling as I white-knuckled the scalpel. My body had broken out into a cold sweat, and my head was spinning, my heart pounding as adrenaline pumped through my veins. “You should be dead.”
He laughed as if I had just said the funniest thing in the world. “You’re one to talk.”
“How?” I said, tears climbing to my eyes and threatening to pour.
“I guess we’re both sinners, sister. Cursed with the same ailment.” John paced around the morgue, looking over at the freezers again. As if he longed to be in one. Or put me in one. “After you died, I wasn’t far behind. I guess karma doesn’t smile on murderers.
“However, I wasn’t done so soon. I placed my soul within another boy — a young one, respectable and quiet. I’m not quite sure what became of his soul, but I don’t sit around and question the morality of my actions.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” I said, scalpel shaking in my hands. “Your limp — why does it linger?”
John glanced down at his leg as if he were just realizing it was there. A physical ailment was a minor inconvenience when your heart was so full of malice. “I suppose that there is a byproduct that comes with immortality.” He looked back at me, a smile that was almost sad flicking across his face. “Don’t tell me you don’t have one, Elizabeth. I know you do.”
I inhaled, looking John up and down. I hadn’t seen him in centuries, but I hadn’t forgotten the games he liked to play. “What are you trying to prove?” I asked, grip never loosening on the scalpel.
“That humans, no matter how close they come to being gods, will always be flawed.”
I hesitated for a moment. The last time I was vulnerable with him, it cost me my life. However, it wasn’t as though he could kill us both and pray that we would stay dead. No God listened to our prayers, anymore. I lowered my arms, gathering up my skirt in one hand and lifting, exposing my ankles and shins.
John’s face remained impassive as his gaze lingered over my imperfect skin. He knew the burns there were his fault, yet his face was casually neutral. John was a man capable of many things. Regret wasn’t one of them. “It’s where the fire first lit,” I said, even though he’d seen. “When I was tied to a pyre and set aflame. Because of you.”
“Intriguing,” John said, after a few beats of silence. He stepped closer, and I resisted the urge to step back. I held my chin up high, daring, courageous, maybe even stupid. But I was not the naive girl John had once set the torch to. “And this body; whose is it?”
I took a deep breath. “Her name was Christine Baker. She was engaged. Daughter of a mortician. Eerily fitting for someone like me.”
“And what happened to the fiance?”
I gestured to the cyronic vaults, one of them holding an Edward Walker. John hummed, thoughtfully. “People like us can’t love without catastrophic results,” I said, letting my hand drop to my side.
John took another step closer. “You are not as foolish as you once were, Elizabeth.”
I huffed. “And you are every bit as diabolical and despicable as you once were, John.”
John laughed, and the sound echoed around the walls like creatures in the shadows. “I suppose you’re right.”
Against my better judgment, the question that had lingered in the back of my head for centuries came pouring out as a cascading tsunami. “Why? Why did you do it?”
John didn’t need to ask me to specify what it was I meant by that. “Sister, what you don’t understand is that you and I had a very different relationship with Father. God called upon me to purge the demon from our family, and only then would Father’s anger cease. If I hadn’t given you away, it would’ve been me and you burning at the stake.”
“So what am I supposed to think? That your actions were understandable? Noble?” My voice dropped. “Godly?”
“What choice did I have?” John hissed, his teeth gleaming white in the unlit room. “If God calls upon me, I will listen. I am His servant.”
“You’re delusional.”
“Call it what you will. My mind is clear.”
“So did you never care about me?” I said, tears rising to my eyes despite it all. “All those years, were they for nothing?”
“Why would I have ever cared for you, sister?” John said, looking down at me as if I were a bug to be squashed. “You were a witch. You are a witch. You’re the demon that tainted Father’s Godly heart. You’re a blight on this world, and your soul belongs in Hell.”
“Right,” I said, grip growing tighter on the scalpel. “You know what I’ve learned, John? Being alive this long?”
His brow raised. “What’s that?”
I bit my lip to stop it from trembling, blinking away the tears from my eyes. This man didn’t deserve my sorrow. “Cowards often disguise themselves as villains.”
He lurched forward, then, and before I could react his hands closed around my neck. I gasped, hand scrabbling at his, kicking my feet out towards his abdomen. He pushed me against a wall, a fire lit in his eyes, and I could feel the heat crawling up my legs, melting my flesh as I was forced to feel every single sensation. My lungs fought desperately for air, and all I could breathe was smoke and the heat of John’s rage.
John leaned in my ear, and said, “I’ll find you, and I’ll kill you as many times as it takes. You’re a flaw in God’s plans, and you were never meant to be on this Earth.”
Struggling one last desperate kick at his abdomen, I brought my hand with the scalpel up and scratched him across the face. John yelped, releasing me and staggering backward. I fell into a heap on the ground, gasping and coughing.
“You stupid bi-”
Hearing him get close, I reacted. The scalpel slit his throat quicker than he could put his hands on me, and he grabbed at his neck, stunned, as if he couldn’t quite believe I’d had the guts. His blood splattered on my face, liquid hot and coppery stains dripping down my blouse, my skirts, and onto the floor.
John crumpled to the ground, gasping for air, his blood pooling beneath him and drenching his coat with wine red. I kneeled next to him, my heart tearing itself to shreds as I fought off the urge to help my brother. He let out a gag and opened his mouth as if he were trying to speak. Spit his final words of contempt.
I smiled, then, my tears mixed with the blood on my face. “I know you’ll be back. Until we meet again, brother.”
The rain outside came to a pause as John’s soul tore into the sky, and Victor’s body lay to die.
Anne Caywood (she/her) hails from Upstate New York and studies Creative Writing at Arizona State University. “The Necromancer” is her first published work.