I'm in a creative writing class that is making me cry. Everyone is so depressing in there. So I wrote this to make someone smile at least. But,
seriously, what do people think? I can't trust my class to get their heads out of their butts long enough to tell me something helpful, so I'm
submitting for discussion and abuse here.
I woke up to a zombie drooling on my face, which, on the whole, is not a good way to start the day.
Normally, I'm not a morning person, but the undead have the same affect on me as an alarm clock that activates a cattle prod does. I go from zero to sixty faster than a Mercedes. Before I really knew what I was really doing, I had rolled off the bed and grabbed my sixteen inch meat cleaver from the rack on the wall.
The zombie drooled at me. He was one of the less fleshy versions I'd seen lately; meaning he was mostly bone with some thick chunks of skin and a few organs moving things around. He was also covered thickly in ichor, which has the consistency of warm Jello and a spring green color (which, if you ask Crayola, is sort of a really light yellow-green) which was dripping on my carpet and bedspread.
Once again: not the way to start my day.
I shouted a battle cry and lunged at the zombie. He just sort of groaned and fell over. I chopped his head off, partly to shut him up, mostly because he got ichor on my carpet. The stuff stains worse than red wine.
I thought about just taking a shower and seeing what my housemate was up to afterwards, but I decided against it. Things had probably gotten out of control again.
So I picked up the zombie head by the stump of the spine and marched downstairs to give dear 'ole Robert Mezzalini a helping hand and a piece of my mind, not necessarily in that order.
Robert, or Robby, as he prefers to be called, is, in a nutshell, the cheeriest, most optimistic necromancer I've ever met. He looks like every emo-child's idol: black hair worn over his right eye in a smooth 'n' straight style; pasty skin; narrow, cleft chin; and a build like a whippet. He wears more eyeliner than Britney Spears, has a bigger collection of fingernail polish than me, and owns enough Gothic jewelry to open his own store. He's uncomfortable in any clothing that wouldn't frighten a small child. He even owns an old Victorian house with all of the morbid gingerbread trimming you could ask for. This is the same house I help pay the bills for and, consequently, live in. To explain why is a story in itself-one I don't really have time to tell.
I was halfway down the stairs when I saw, posed in the door to the basement, Robby with a baseball bat with a nail through it, looking like he was playing Wack-A-Mole with his latest creations.
"Robby," I yelled over the groans coming from the basement. "What happened?"
"Sorry, Susan," he shouted back without turning to look at me. "Did I wake you?"
"No, your zombie did."
"I thought one had gotten by me," he brought the baseball bat down on another groaning head. "Are you hurt?"
I gave a snort of contempt loud enough for him to hear. "Hardly. You need any help?"
"Nope," he shouted, kicking a zombie down the stairs, "I think I've got it under control this time."
"Right. I'm going to go shower, then."
"Okay," the bat crushed another skull, "Enjoy it."
Now don't get me wrong, whoever you are. Robby and I live in a normal world with normal people who don't believe in magic and don't have to kill undead first thing on a Saturday morning. We could be the people living in the apartment above you or the house beside yours, the ones who always seem to be up at all hours making weird noises, or the people down the street who throw Rocky Horror themed parties but make sure all of their neighbors get Christmas cookies. We're not, obviously, or I'd be telling you this story in person, but we're like that. We're harmless. Strange, but harmless.
And we used to be even more normal. Robby wasn't a necromancer when I moved in with him and I didn't have to sleep with a butcher's knife within arm's reach. But Robby works the night shift at this little store in the historic shopping district called Raven's Revenge. It advertises itself as a purveyor of rare books and novelties, but really, it's mostly full of antique and occult junk. The rarest thing I've found in there is a monkey skull, but then again, I don't go in there very often.
Or that used to be the case, until about a month ago. That was when Robby came into my room when he got home one morning, before I left, with this book called How to Be a Necromancer in Ten Easy Steps. He'd found it at work while he'd been unpacking boxes. I thought it was a joke.
I came home to find out he'd resurrected my goldfish.
Not that I wasn't grateful, I'd been missing the little guy horribly, but my housemate had just performed a necromantic rite in our kitchen. And I had a rotting, undead fish-albeit a cute one-but, still, how's a girl supposed to deal with that?
I did the best thing I could think of to do at the time; I made Robby clean up the mess he'd made in the kitchen, then I went and screamed into my pillow for the next half hour in sheer terror.
There's a lot more to the story than that, but that was the beginning. The morality of the situation, the zombies, and another book, Help! My Roommate's a Necromancer, all came later. Basically what it boiled down to was this: Robby's my friend as well as my housemate. I couldn't let him get killed all alone. And I certainly couldn't let him have all the fun.
I came downstairs after my shower. Robby was done with the zombies, had a mop out and was cleaning up the slime on the floor. He was covered in ichor himself; still wearing a lab coat, rubber gloves, galoshes, and had his hair was held out of his eyes with a sliver clip-you know, normal mad scientist working gear. He also looked unusually grim, which doesn't happen to Robby unless the end of the world is coming.
"What's the problem?" I asked.
He seemed reluctant to tell me. That meant it was really, really, really bad. "Those weren't my zombies," he said at last.
I wasn't quite sure what to say this. I finally settled on, "Then whose zombies were they?"
"Can we sit down and talk about this?" Robby asked.
I looked him over. Then he looked himself over.
"Okay, maybe not while I'm this gross. But…"
"Look," I interrupted. "Go shower. Those undead were pretty pathetic anyway. We'll be fine for the next hour or so."
An hour later we were sitting in the kitchen eating a late breakfast and watching Figment, the undead fish, swim around in his bowl. By the time Robby finished his waffles, he looked a bit more like his old, cheery self.
"So I think I might have summoned up a new kind of monster," he said, like he'd just won the school spelling bee.
"What kind of monster?" I asked suspiciously, expecting something like the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters.
"An ethereal one," he said as if that explained everything.
"So…a spiritual one?" I asked. He nodded. "We've moved on to spirits then? No more zombies?"
"Not quite…"
I listened very patiently to his explanation and waded through mass technical details before I got the gist of what had happened. But the time he'd finished, his cheery demeanor had drooped somewhat. I guess he realized the gravity of the situation.
"Let me get this right," I said. "You attempted to summon your first spirit from the Netherworld, or wherever, and, when it said you needed to sacrifice a spirit in return, you got one from a pet store hamster. However, instead of getting an equally small ethereal creature, you got a creature that summons up zombies-really, really pathetic zombies. How?"
Robby shrugged, "I don't know. All I can figure is that I ran across some misaligned arcane astrometrics from one of my old zombie projects that I hadn't dispelled properly. But thinking about it in the shower just now, I think that the spell might have been crossed with an incomplete grid for distance and a modifier for phonographic…"
"Robby," I said sharply, "layman's terms, please."
He thought about that. "I think the spirit may gravitate to a location when someone plays…a certain song. But in its wake, it will summon up every undead thing in a," he did some mental math, "radius of about a mile and a half from that song."
"Is this song popular?"
More hesitation, "Not as much as it used to be, but, yes, it's still kinda popular."
I made an attempt to find the positives in the situation. "But the undead will be really pathetic, right? I mean, the one in my room this morning practically killed himself."
There was a lot more hesitation this time. "I don't know. I guess you could call the ones from this morning re-dead."
"Redead? Like the creepy, molesting things from Ocarina of Time?"
"No, no," he said quickly, "they were just undead that were already undead. They were brought back again."
"You mean brought back as zombies for a second time? I thought that wasn't possible."
"Wwweeeelllll…" Robby said, long and drawn out, as if stalling was going to make things any better. "I couldn't do something like that. There have only been two or three necromancers in history that have that kind of power. But this thing…" he spread his hands and shrugged again.
"So thing spirit thing can summon up really strong zombies then?"
"Oh, yeah. We're talking 28 Days Later kind of zombies. Ones that are strong, fast, smart, and really, really hungry."
"Jesus Christ and Saints preserve us," I muttered, putting my head down on the table. "Can we stop this thing?"
"Actually, yeah," Robby said, "The zombies are strong, but they take a lot of the power from the spirit. The spirit is just like a sentient version of the power a necromancer uses to make zombies in the first place. It'll be easy to catch the spirit. We just have to get by all the zombies it summons."
I glared at him. I usually do the fighting end of this. That meant the undead were all mine. "Oh goody," I growled.
"Don't worry," he said cheerfully, "You won't have to kill anything. Or probably not, anyway. I have a plan for a really great distraction. All you have to do is a little dancing."
"Robby," I said, still glaring, "what song did you choose?"
"A…a…logical one…" he said shrinking into his chair, "for a necromancer…"
"Robby," I repeated louder this time, "what song?"
"I just want to say, Robby, this was in poor taste." We were standing outside of the graveyard down the street, a CD player with the detachable speakers a facing each other, a glass bottle between them, in the middle of the design he was just finishing chalking on the pavement. It was almost three am. "Very poor taste."
"You've been saying that all day," he said. "I thought it was the logical musical decision. It was either that or one of the songs from Rocky Horror."
I thought about the dance numbers in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. "I'll hold my peace," I said.
"I thought you might," he replied smugly, putting the last flourish in the design. "There! Provided the bottle doesn't fall over or break, we should be good."
"Turn down the bass then," I told him. "I'm not doing this more than once."
"Right, bass down, volume up." He grabbed the remote. "Now when the undead start walking, you start dancing. They should be attracted to the music just like the spirit because that's what made them. They'll dance because the physical extension of music is…"
"Dance. And they're physical extensions of the spirit, which will gravitate to the spot between the speakers and then you do your little rite and cork the bottle. Yeah, I know," is said, shivering in my tights and red nylon jacket we'd picked up from the thrift store at the last minute. I was going to get him for this. Somehow I was going to get him for this. "Let's get this over with."
Robby hit the play button. At first, there was nothing. Then, a door creak and some footsteps across a wood floor came from the CD.
"Are you sure this is the right song?" I asked.
"Positive."
"All right," I said moving toward the center of the street so I had plenty of room. "Don't forget your words to your rite."
"Don't forget your dance steps."
"I won't." I don't think I could have. I'd been practicing since this morning.
The familiar three four, pop/disco beat started. I tapped my heel in time to the music. "How will we know when it gets here?"
"You'll know," Robby said confidently. A wolf howled on the CD.
Then I heard an undead groan and the scraping of packed earth being moved out of the way. Zombies crowned the hill that the graveyard was built on. For a moment, I thought they were regular people, they moved so smoothly, so quickly, but the stench of rotting meat wafted down toward me. Definitely dead things up there.
"It's close to midnight.." Michael Jackson sang over the CD player.
The air got colder. Much colder. A nearby zombie pulled itself out of the grave.
"And something evil's lurking in the dark."
No matter how many times I see that, it still makes my flesh crawl.
"Under the moonlight,"
I practiced my moonwalk a little and hoped this stupid plan of Robby's worked. I had my knife in a sheath strapped to my thigh, but I didn't think I could fight them all.
"You see a sight that almost stops your heart."
One of the zombies growled as his feet moonwalked out of their own volition.
"You try to scream but terror takes the sound before you make it."
I tried an experimental hip pop, just to see what would happen.
"You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes."
Several zombie hips flicked right of their own accord, making a few of them stagger.
"You're paralyzed."
I did two right shoulder pops and then turned to the side bouncing on the balls of my feet, shaking my hips and my knees. A few zombies had reached the street by this time and were trying to go further, but were getting caught up in the dance.
I kept it up with two sliding steps forwards and then two to the side. All of the ones on the street were tangled up in this spell by the end of those steps.
There were still a few on the hill or crawling out of their graves. It seemed wise to keep going.
Knee pop to the right with the hand at the chest and then turn the head to the side-easy.
"I've got it!" I heard Robby cry. Then he started muttering in a low voice words I didn't even try to understand.
I skipped the next couple steps on accident and stumbled a little. All of the zombies stumbled too and some of them took a step toward Robby. "Not happening," I thought and launched into the most famous part of the dance: the slide-lunge with the head moving back and forth. I jumped into the clap above the head and repeated that step in the opposite direction.
"'Cause this is thriller, thriller night,
"and no one's going to save you from the beast about to strike.
"You know it's thriller, thriller night.
"You're fighting for your life in side a killer thriller tonight."
I was just finishing up the second round of monster hands when I heard Robby say, "Gotcha!" a moment later adding, "I got it Susan! It's bottled."
"Great!" I shouted, sticking in another side step and hip pop for good measure. "Now why haven't the zombies gone away?"
I heard some panicked flipping of pages. Then, "Give 'em a minute," Robby said.
I was really going to get him for this.
I did the shuffling turn and the bent knee stomps toward the graveyard. But instead of stopping when I did, the zombies just kept walking. Some of them danced to their graves and sunk under the torn up grass and others just kept on going over the hill, back wherever they'd come from.
"That was easy," I said, wiping my hands off on my jacket. I was shaking a little. Stage fright, I guess.
"I knew you could dance, but I didn't know you were that good." Robby said to me.
"Thanks," I replied, "I guess I owe my parents a thank you letter for making me take dance classes all those years."
"I guess so," Robby held up the corked bottle, which was now full of smoke. "Then again, maybe you shouldn't tell them about this little guy."
I took the bottle from him and looked at it. It didn't look all that scary, just sort of like cigarette smoke. "What do we do with it?"
A voice drifted out through the glass. It was soft and dry, like very old paper. It sounded nothing like Vincent Price:
" Darkness falls across the land.
"The midnight hour is close at hand.
"Creatures crawl in search of blood,
"to terrorize your neighborhood.
"And whosoever shall be found,
"without the soul for getting down,
"must stand and face the hounds of hell
"and rot inside a corpse's shell."
"Nobody asked you," I told the smoke. "Come on, Robby. Let's go home."
And though I never mentioned it to Robby, and I swear he never said a word to me, I thought I heard that same voice whisper.
"For no mere mortal can resist,
"The evil of the Thriller."
And give a very evil, quiet laugh.
