Sunday, April 29, 2012

A Day in the Unlife


            There are some things you get used to when you live with a necromancer. The strange looks the neighbours give you—although if you’re the kind of person who lives with a necromancer, you probably got a lot of stares anyway—the way mundane animals won’t go near your roommate, the odd hours, the spare bedroom converted into a freezer. Going out to cemeteries in the middle of the night, of course, although that could be fun if you didn’t mind a lot of digging[1]. And the dead could be pretty interesting to talk to. Of course, if you were one of them, you could be a little biased on that point, but at least some of them understood what you were talking about.
            What you never got used to was finding your roommate in a cemetery covered in his own blood in the middle of the night. Especially when it was your fault, because you let him go out doing magic alone even though you know he gets carried away sometimes, and now you have to explain to the paramedics even though you have no idea what the hell is going on.
            For Saturday, it was not a good night. Granted, it was probably a worse night for Rosseau, but unconscious people don’t generally give their opinions, so it was hard to be sure.
            Saturday was sitting in a plastic chair that had been designed for people of average height and that forced his knees up somewhere around his shoulders, staring blankly at the waiting room wall. They had been through things like this before, of course, because necromancy had a lot of relics from the days when everything was ritual-based and there are some things you can’t modernize, but it was still difficult. Because you didn’t know. That was the thing. One day the text wouldn’t come (and god, there was nothing worse than getting the text “possibly bleeding to death pls help” when up until now you’ve been having a very nice relaxing evening and were thinking of maybe going to bed around now) or he’d get there too late or Rosseau would forget to mention where he was going (no he wouldn’t, he was too smart for that, wasn’t he?) and then…
            He pulled out the flask without even thinking about it, drinking from it in a reflex born of three years’ avoiding decomposition. It was disgusting, but it helped, sort of.
            A pen fell off the table next to him. The room was so quiet it actually echoed, because nobody talks in a hospital waiting room. He reached down automatically to pick it up—oh, yes, and there was the other problem.
            Because Rosseau hadn’t said what he was going to do, just that he had work and where he was going, the kind of blank statement that Saturday was used to when he wasn’t needed for heavy lifting or companionship. So, of course, Saturday had arrived and discovered a lot of blood and a seven-year-old girl who had died over a century ago and whose ghost Rosseau had tethered to the piece of dull rose-colored ribbon now tied around Saturday’s wrist. The name on the headstone was Angelina, but he didn’t know anything else about the ghost because he wasn’t a necromancer and she wouldn’t give him her voice[2], which he supposed was reasonable since she probably didn’t have the energy for a lot of people, but it was overall kind of frustrating.
            At least she wasn’t one of the dangerous ghosts, the ones that got really angry when you tried to talk to them. Ghosts can only move things with the mass of a pen or less, but there are plenty of dangerous things in that category.
            It was almost one in the morning. If he had gone to bed, he’d probably have scared himself awake by now anyway. This was not much of a comfort.
            “What happened to yours?”
            Saturday turned, startled. There was a woman in the seat next to him, short faded blonde hair, an unaccountably fancy black dress with some jagged rips in the hem, and with the ghastly grey pallor that generally marked the undead. Impossible to tell her age, but she looked younger than him. There was a long-dead lily tucked behind her ear, which made her look fresh from the grave. Maybe she was.
            “I’m sorry, what?” That was rude; he’d have to apologize at some point, when he was feeling better, if he happened to still be here by then.
            She nodded toward the closed door which prevented him from running off to harass the doctors for information, and which he regarded with a kind of anticipatory dread. “You have someone in there, right? You don’t hang around hospitals for fun? In which case I would assume it’s your necromancer. I’m here for mine.”
            Not exactly, since his necromancer would be the actual person who raised him from the dead, but he didn’t feel like explaining. “Yeah.”
            “Who’s that ghost? Somebody important?”
            “I don’t know, Miss…?”
            “Oh, I’m Maddie.” She was chewing gum, he realized; the snapping noise made him flinch. She leaned toward him, and he could smell the nasty pseudo-watermelon flavour as she spoke. “So. The ghost? How come you’re carrying her around if you don’t even know who she is?”
            “Well, my friend—that is, necromancer—I don’t know what he was doing, but I found this ghost with him. I guess he must have needed her for something, and I couldn’t really just leave her there.” He wasn’t really listening to what he was saying. To be honest, he wasn’t really listening to what she was saying either. Hard to focus on anything right now. He’d been waiting an awfully long time, hadn’t he? No way of telling. That clock was broken and he didn’t have a watch anymore (remember to get a waterproof one next time, you’ll probably have to jump in the bay at least once more), but really, why was he so worried? It couldn’t have been that long. He had no sense of time. Everything would be fine, of course.
            Everything would be fine. It couldn’t not be.
            Maddie was talking again, something about her necromancer and how he’d been “kinda chewed up” by someone’s dog for some reason, and how she wasn’t too worried because “stuff like this happens every other week, doesn’t it?” She didn’t need Saturday to actually respond as long as he looked attentive, probably. But then she poked him in the shoulder, surprisingly hard, and said, “Hey, how old are you, anyway?”
            Unaccountably rude, but he was so startled he answered. “Uh, twenty-five. Three years dead.” That was something you had to include, to avoid confusion. Of course, sometimes it made things more confusing, because sometimes people didn’t realize that you were dead until then.
            She stared at him admiringly. “Whoa! Three years? I’ve been dead six months. Do you have any, you know, advice or something?”
            “No.”
            His tone made her stop talking to him, finally. Rude. Very rude. Now he’d definitely have to apologize. Later, though, because even though he felt bad now, he wasn’t sure he could handle a long conversation, which it would surely be. Maybe he could find her somehow. Look up deaths six months ago of women named Madison or Madeline or whatever else might be abbreviated the same way, and find her in the phone book…
            Angelina was poking him with the pen she’d knocked down before. He looked over at her and was confronted with a lot of wild and unintelligible gesticulation, made harder to interpret because she was mostly transparent under the bright waiting-room lights. She lost concentration, busy trying to make herself understood, and the pen fell through her hand.
            Time dragged. He almost missed the nightmares. At least you could wake up from those. Maddie left at some point; he barely noticed.
            And then suddenly there were doctors, and lots of whispering, and someone talked to him and he got the meaning but not the words, and they gave him a phone number and told him he should probably go home. And he did, stumbling around in the dark apartment because he didn’t care to turn on the lights, checking Rosseau’s glowing clock (was it really only two?), finally just stretching out on the couch and not worrying anymore, except for the normal background worry that was pretty much standard by now. Forget the nightmares, because this one was over now.
            Everything was fine.


[1] Because necromancy is one of the more unsettling types of magic, most magicians with an aptitude for it get a necromancy license when they leave school; this allows them to legally dig up bodies, summon ghosts, etc, although it’s considered very rude to do so without consulting the family if you’re messing with the recently dead. A necromancer without a license will be arrested if caught digging up graves, even if they are able to prove they are a necromancer.
[2] Ghosts cannot be heard by non-necromancers unless they establish a link to the person, known as “giving one’s voice”. Most ghosts can only do this with about three people because they don’t have enough spare energy for any more; in the case of child ghosts, there may only be enough spare energy for one.

No comments:

Post a Comment