A Hopeless Necromantic

A Hopeless Necromantic
By Billy Mau

I blame Stan.

Seriously.

The end of the world, the dead rising from their graves, the rivers of blood, the fountains of gore. All Stan. I am recording the events that in all likelihood will bring about the extinction of the human race so that when the space aliens land on this shell of a planet they can read this and know that Stan is a big, stupid douche bag.

Fuck Stan.

What did Stan do? He dropped eight bucks on a bullshit paperback copy of Necronomicon at Barnes&Noble. (Let Barnes&Noble’s role in all of this be duly noted. Thoughtless corporate dipshits.) Stan reads this thing and figures we can actually pull off the rituals. He gets into all the symbols and incantations, and he said we could actually bring a dead person to life.

I told him the book was a bunch of wannabe Lovecraft junk, but he was into it. I barely saw him for a week. When I did, he was wearing these weird clothes and he freaking stank. Bad. He called me up at the end of the week to come by and watch him do some crazy shit, so I went over to his place. I shouldn’t have, but I did.

I got to his place, and he’s got his dad’s old tool shed emptied out. The bastard had been sleeping in there all week. It was dirty and it reeked. He’d been sleeping in dirt and I’m pretty sure he had been shitting in a hole in the corner. (Sure, Stan is nineteen, but he lives at home. There has to be some kind of parental obligation.

Note to space aliens: Not only is Stan a douche bag, he was born of douche bag stock as well.) He directed my attention to a sheet on the floor.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Check it out.”

Stan pulled back the sheet to show me a dead armadillo. A big one at that.

“Found it a few block away,” he said. “Roadkill.”

There is nothing cool about having a dead armadillo. I told him as much.

“Maybe I should leave,” I said. And I would’ve if I wasn’t such a dumbass.

He grabbed my arm. “No, you can’t. You’ve got to see the show.”

“What show?”
Stan smiled. His teeth were yellow and brown and his breath reeked. Not taking a bath for a week is one thing, but you’ve got to at least bump into a Mentos or two by accident.

“I’m going to bring it back to life.”

He began circling the dead armadillo and chanting in some weird language. Two clockwise circles, two counter clockwise circles and one more clockwise circle. When he finished the last circle, he dropped to his knees next to the roadkill. He lowered his face just inches above the armadillo and lowered his chant to a whisper. I was starting to back out of the shed. The scene was a little too weird for me. I was frozen in my tracks when Stan started shouting in the strange language and slapping the ground.

The freaking armadillo started twitching.

Stan screamed and slapped the ground again.

The armadillo started flopping on the floor.

Stan jumped to his feet and screamed to the ceiling.

I shit you not, the armadillo got up and started running around.
Stan saw the armadillo and started laughing.

“Holy shit,” Stan said. “I worked. It freaking worked.”

The undead armadillo was darting around the shed, trying to find a way out. I jumped up on the workbench. Armadillos, live ones that is, are mean little bastards. This one was even worse. Apparently missing half it’s armor and being dragged from the embrace of death was enough to make this one super pissed. Stan was still doing his I-just-raised-the-dead touchdown dance when his roadkill zombie dashed under his homemade robe. That snapped him back to reality quick. He was on the workbench with me in no time.

“Shit, that thing almost bit me.”
“Dude, it’s your zombie minion,” I said. No sympathy from me.

“Those things carry leprosy. Open the door and let it out.”

“Let it out? Are you crazy? Kill it.”

Stan looked and the armadillo, who was frantically digging along the opposite wall.

“It’s already dead. I don’t think I can kill it?”

This was too much. I’d seen some weird stuff while hanging out with Stan, but none of it was so completely unnatural.

“What does the book say?” I said, pointing to the Barnes

Necronomicon. “There’s got to be a way to stop it.”

“I haven’t read that far. I didn’t think it would actually work.”

He jumped down from the bench and opened the door. The armadillo chased him out of the tool shed before bolting for the woods. I walked out to join Stan.

“And what do you plan to do when the forest becomes populated with zombie woodland creatures.”

“I doubt that will happen.”
He was quiet for a moment as we looked into the woods where the armadillo disappeared. He acted like he was about to say something a couple of times, but stopped. I was about to leave when he finally spoke.

“I’m going to need your help for the next one,” he said. It was barely more than a whisper.

“Why?”

“It takes two to raise a person.”

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Now is a good time to admit that I am not without blame in this situation, but I’m still not as bad a Stan. I’m like an accessory to the crime. I’m not even an accomplice. I’m barely even a party to the events.

Well, I guess accomplice might be a good term.

OK, OK. I’m a pretty big douche bag also, but I’m still blaming Stan. It was his idea. I’m just a loser that easily succumbs to peer pressure.

See, Stan and I have been psuedo-occultists ever since junior high. We used to watch movies like “Bride of Reanimator” and the “Puppet Master” movies and say to ourselves, “Now that’s the kind of shit we should be doing.”

We read Lovecraft and Crowely, Stan even got hold of a Satanic Bible. Not that we were Satanists or anything, we just had a weird hobby.

It took a solid three days of begging, but Stan finally talked me into playing along. After all, this was the stuff we fantasized about for years. Also, I didn’t really think it would work. For all I knew, that armadillo wasn’t really dead when Stan started screaming at it.

We didn’t have a person picked out when we started our preparations. It was kind of hard to plan that part out ahead because the ritual required a week of preparation. The preparation was called “cleansing” even though it was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done. In retrospect, not bathing, dressing in burlap and eating dogs for a week should have thrown up a big red flag. Unfortunately it didn’t because there was six hours of chanting every day that serves as a pretty effective brainwashing device.

Luckily, I was on a break from school. My appearance and behavior would be tough to explain, even in a scholarly liberal environment.

Stan found our subject on Day 5 of our cleansing. He had been keeping a close eye on funeral announcements in the newspaper in hopes of finding the right person. That person was Carly Westfield.

“Why Carly?” I asked over my breakfast of dog meat.

“Look at the picture,” Stan said, holding up the obituary page. “She’s hot. I don’t want some zombie dude.”

“But she committed suicide. I doubt she’ll be too happy about being brought back to--” Something clicked about what Stan had said. “What are you planning to do with her?”

“I used to have a bigtime crush on her in high school.”

“Stop it.”

“She had that cute goth thing going.”

“No, no, no.” I covered my ears.

“In theory I should have some control over her, so I figure she could be like a girlfriend.”

I groaned and banged my head against the table.

“What?” Stan said, putting down the newspaper, “I’ll share with you.”

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For the record, I never wanted any part of the “girlfriend” plan. I may be a lot of things, but I’m not a necrophiliac. (Stan and I had many arguments over the application of necrophilia to this case. He thought since she was reanimated that she wasn’t technically dead, therefore it wouldn’t be necrophilia. I thought he was a sick bastard who could get some undead strain of the clap. We agreed to disagree.)

Also for the record, digging up a corpse is seriously hard work.

Carly was surprisingly good-looking for a dead chick. She’d killed herself via slit wrists, so she was pretty much intact. The mortician had done a relatively Frankenstein-ish job of stitching up the wrists. I don’t even know why they bothered. Her arms were folded at her chests with the wrists down, so no one could see it to begin with. They could have used super glue or silly putty or whatever and no one would have been the wiser.

Except for Stan and me, that is.

As if digging the grave wasn’t enough work, we decided we should fill it back in as much as possible to keep suspicion to a minimum. Carly was still pretty stiff, so our plans of using a wheelchair to get her back to the van was shot. Stan had a dolly in the van, so we ended up taking her Hannibal Lecter-style to our ride back home. We barely got out of there by sunrise.

We wrapped Carly in burlap and stored her under the workbench in the tool shed until ritual time. She couldn’t be raised until exactly a week from the beginning of our cleansing, which was still nine hours away. I took advantage of that time to get some sleep in. Stan was too excited to sleep. He paced the shed for a while, then went out in search of another stray dog for our pre-ritual dinner. I was so tired that sharing the floor with a dead girl didn’t phase me in the slightest.

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The chants for the raising ritual were phonetically spelled out in the book, but no translation was given. In retrospect, that probably wasn’t a good sign, but the cleansing process removed a lot of my better reasoning. Let’s just say I won’t be signing anything anymore without reading every last word of it. That is assuming Stan’s army of corpses doesn’t destroy everything.

Despite studying those chants for a week, I was pretty sure I’d flub all the lines. We laid Carly out in the middle of the floor and started the chanting.

“Dast m’var oc battu.”

Our voices were in perfect unison. I didn’t even feel like I was controlling the words.

“Dast m’var oc renalk.”

We started our clockwise cirlcles. I could see the words in my head as I spoke them. They were being written in a book, but I couldn’t see the hand or the pen. The ink was appearing on the page. It wasn’t any alphabet I knew of, but I still could read the words.

“Pas fellit grak battu banal. Renalk battu oc hadi banal.”

Then counter-clockwise.

“Vadeer pannu m’var glast banal. Zenk chok fellit hadi banal.”

We dropped in perfect synchronization to Carly’s sides. Stan on the left and me on the right. We leaned forward until our lips were neatly touching her ears. We slammed our hands to the dirt in unison.

“Dast m’var oc battu. Dast m’var oc battu.”

Carly’s body twitched and her face cringed. We slammed our hands down again and screamed this time.

“Dast m’var oc renalk! Dast m’var oc renalk!”

She started shaking. We jumped to our feet. I was not in control of myself anymore.

“Dast m’var battu banal. Dast m’var renalk banal. Renalk battu ov hadi banal.”

Carly bolted upright and let loose scream that broke me out of my trance. She scrambled back to the corner. I’ve never seen anyone so scared. I looked to Stan. His yellow-tooth grin was seriously disturbing. He took a step towards her.

“Hello, Carly.”

That’s when it hit me: we woke up a dead person.
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Carly took to being Stan’s undead girlfriend a lot quicker than I would have thought. It was like she was drawn to him. That would make her the first female ever drawn to him, even before he turned into the dog-eating zombie humper he had become.

I will freely admit that my own experiences with the female species have been limited at best (apparently copping a feel of a crowd surfer at a GWAR concert does not constitute “second base”), but I know what high maintenance is.

Carly was high maintenance.

For example, if your standard living girlfriend asks you to go out and get dinner, she generally means Taco Bell or something. When Carly sent us out to get her something to eat, she wanted the guy that sleeps behind the Taco Bell. Naturally, I objected. I failed to see why we should have to do her dirty work for her. Carly said she didn’t want to go out because she didn’t want to be recognized. Fair enough. Also, Stan was pretty whipped.

Getting the Taco Bell guy back to the tool shed was remarkably easy. Stan had swiped some vodka from his parents to use as bait and it worked. We told the guy we’d get him another bottle and some food and he hopped in the car with us. Stan told him to go wait in the tool shed so the parents wouldn’t spot him. That made Taco Bell guy kind of suspicious.

“I didn’t see any other cars.”

Stan looked at me for help, but I had nothing to offer.

“Uh, they don’t have cars,” Stan said. “They’re big environmentalists. Yeah, they walk everywhere. Something about a carbon footprint.”

Stan’s excuse (and half a bottle of vodka) sloshed around Taco Bell guy’s brain for a couple of seconds. He nodded.

“Yeah,” the vagrant Bellgrande said. “I also walk everywhere I go. I love me the shit out of the environment.”

He zigzagged his way to the tool shed. Carly must not have been hiding, because he saw her as soon as he opened the door.

“Well hello,” he said as he stepped in, “must be my lucky night.”

The screaming started as soon as the door closed. It didn’t last long, but it was loud. There was also a fair amount of crashing going on in there. Stan and I stood in the backyard, watching the shed shake.

“Someone had to have heard that,” I said.

“Probably.”
“I’m going to be pissed if the cops come. We’ll be arrested for sure.”

“Don’t worry,” Stan said. “No one’s going to call the cops.”

The shaking and screaming had stopped, but the noises coming out of the shed were even more disturbing.

“She’s really eating that dude,” I said. I felt like I was on the edge of throwing up.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t see how you do it.”

“Do what?”

I finally turned away from the shed to face Stan.

“You’re having sex with her.”

Stan smiled and gave a slow nod of the head like he was some kind of ladies’ man. “Sure am.” He looked over to me. “You could hit it, too. Invitation’s still open. Carly’s cool with it.”

“No thank you. I’m not even getting close to her. She’s eating a person. You know she’s going to eat someone else, and yet you give her access to your penis. You’ve got a death wish.”

Stan laughed. “Carly can’t hurt me. I brought her back. She’s bound to me. Says so in the book.”

“Yeah, well what about me?”

The noises in the shed stopped. She must have finished her meal.

“I’m not a hundred percent sure,” Stan said. “You helped, but it was in a support role. I’m sure you’re safe around her.”

Carly’s voice called out from the shed.

“Do you guys like pirates?”

Stan and I were stumped. “What are you talking about, baby?” Stan replied.

“Come look.”

I didn’t want to look. I wanted no part of what was going on in there, but Stan grabbed my arm and pulled me along.

She’d torn Taco Bell guy inside-out. Blood and bits of flesh were everywhere. The blood was even dripping down from the ceiling. Carly was in the middle of the shed, naked with lengths of intestine tied around each thigh.

“Check it out,” she said. “I’ve got his guts for garters.”

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I am completely man enough to say that I stuck around with those two lovebirds out of pure fear. Carly clearly didn’t look at me the same way she looked at Stan. She looked at me the way a cat looks at a goldfish. She put up a good front. She was nice and pretended to like me when Stan was around, but if he left and came back he’d probably walk in on her with my tail sticking out of her mouth.

If being afraid that your best friend’s undead girlfriend is going to eat you makes you less of a man, then sign me up on the bitch list.

I helped Stan get her “food” and helped clean up after she was done. Carly helped with the cleaning some, but only because Stan went out and got her a French Maid outfit. Mostly it was on me, though. That said, you can imagine my joy when she said to Stan, “Let’s make another.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Stan said. “I mean, if you could get pregnant, you’d be pregnant by now.”

Apparently bonking dead chicks is rough on the brain cells.

“No sweetheart,” Carly said, “I mean raise one.” She pointed at his copy of the Necronomicon.

Great, I thought, another mouth to feed. I wasn’t going to stand for that.

“No way,” I said. “I’m not going through all of that again. Count me out.”

Carly shot me a look so evil that my testicle re-ascended back into my body (I’m still waiting for the right one to drop again.), then threw her arms around Stan.

“We don’t need him.”

Stan was caught in that predicament of whether to side with his best friend of his girlfriend.

“But it takes two people,” he said. “I need him.”

Carly licked his ear and let her hand slide down from his chest to the off switch for his brain.

“No you don’t,” she breathed into his ear. “You have me.”

I was losing him. The foul temptress was taking over. Stan put up one last push of defiance.

“Will it work with you? You’re already dead.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” she said, giving his off switch another try. Then she looked over her shoulder to me. “Can we get some privacy?”

They were shaking the walls of the shed before I was out of the yard.

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OK, so it worked. Stan and his dead girlfriend made another dead girlfriend. This new one, her name was Autumn, really didn’t like me. Stan had to physically hold her back the first time she saw me. I was dinner and very little else to her.

Needless to say, I stopped hanging out with Stan. Before I was scared to leave and then I was scared to stay. I kept myself barricaded up for the most part. There was no way Stan could keep an eye on both of his dead chicks and both would probably like to get me out of the way for good. I bought a can of mace and a stun gun. I didn’t know if either would work on a zombie, but it made me feel a little better on my way to class or the grocery store.

This kept up for a few weeks until I got a call from Stan.

“Dude, I need you to come over.”

“Like hell. I’m not going to let your harem of the dead rip my guts out.”

“It won’t happen,” Stan said. He sounded nervous. “They left. I don’t know where they went.”

Stan’s been my best friend since kindergarten. Aside from a few annoying habits (i.e. nose picking, public urination and necromancy) he was still a good guy and was like a brother to me. So I went…but I took my stun gun and mace.

The guy was a mess, which is understandable since his girl had walked out on him. Well, an emotional mess. Physically he was better than the recent norm. He’d showered and put on real clothes.

“They’ve been gone almost a week,” he said. He wasn’t far from tears.

“Why did you wait so long to call me?”

“Figured they’d come back. I don’t know why they left.”

Two zombies had been loose on the town for a week. Obviously they were behaving since there was no mass panic in the streets.

“They’re dangerous, Stan. People are going to die.”

“You think I don’t know that? I just want to find them and bring them back home. I miss them.”

I looked around, trying to come up with something. Maybe there was something in the book.

“What does the book say about controlling and stopping these things? Every manual has a troubleshooting section.”

“I never read that far,” Stan said. “I kind of lost interest after we made Carly.”

Brilliant, I thought. I started digging through the shelves in the tool shed. “Well, where is it? We got reading to do.”

“They took it with them.”

You know how in a movie when someone hears something unexpected and does that freeze thing with their mouth hanging open and you say to your friend, “This is the cheesiest shit ever,”? Yeah, I did that.

“I mean, I guess they took it,” Stan said. “I haven’t seen it since they left.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “We know from experience that a dead person can successfully pull off a resurrection.”

“Right.”

“And the instructions for said resurrections are contained in a paperback book.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you have successfully risen two people.”

“You know that I have.”

"And it takes two people to pull off a resurrection.”

“Again, you know that already.”

“And your bitch corpse of a girlfriend ran off with the book and her new little undead assistant.”

“Yeah but -- wait, you don’t think they’re…”

“It’s been almost a week. There will probably be four by then end of next week. That mean’s two groups of two, then three, then four.”

“How many do you think they’re going to make?”

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Twenty five. That’s how many they made. Add it up, that’s seven weeks and we couldn’t find them. Carly had a pretty sharp mind for a walking corpse. Her and her underlings kept on the move and were raising people they killed, but didn’t eat.

Stan was pretty much back to his normal self by the time we finally heard from Carly again. She popped up in Stan’s back yard one night and told us she had something for us to see. We went out to a spot in the woods outside of town and she showed us her gang. I nearly pissed my pants. They all looked right at me. Not Stan. Just me. And it wasn’t pleasant look.

“Everyone,” Carly said to the group, “this is Stan. He is why we are here. Through his power we live.”

They all looked at Stan. He did not get the same look I did. This was a look of admiration. I guess you could say there was a certain amount of admiration in the looks they gave me, but it was more like the way a fat kid admires a Sloppy Joe.

I leaned to Stan and tried not to be too loud. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Stan didn’t even look back to me. “I’m like a god.”

“To hell with this.” I took off running. My heart was pounding too hard to hear much, but I heard one thing that put a little extra fire on my ass. It was Carly giving a simple command to her rabble.

“Get him.”

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We tried to find another copy of the Necronomicon after Carly split, but there wasn’t much luck. The book was out of print and the bidding was a bit rough on Ebay. We tried the used book stores and the public library to no avail. There was only one place we didn’t try: the library at the college.

We didn’t check there because we’re idiots. I go there three of four times a week, but it never crossed my mind to look for it there. I finally did have that moment of clarity, but it happened with twenty-plus corpses on my trail.

I put a little distance between me and them once we got to town because the zombies were (for lack of a better word) easily distracted. It was chaos. There was a steady chorus of sirens and gunshots as I broke into the school library. All of the catalog computers were shut down, and I wasn’t about to hang out in front of the ground floor windows while one started up, so I ran up to the third floor. There was another catalog station there and I would be considerably less visible.

I got to the third floor and stopped. The windows at the top of the stairs faced back the way I had came. I counted at least seven fires. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I didn’t even think it would really work with Carly. It’s amazing how reanimating a dead girl to be you’re buddy’s girlfriend can so quickly turn into the Apocalypse.

Glass broke downstairs. That got me moving again. I booted up the catalog terminal and searched for the Necronomicon. Fuck me, they had it. It was on the fourth floor, the top floor of the building. I wrote down the Dewey decimal number and hit the stairs again.

But I wasn’t alone. Carly was downstairs.

“Strange time to catch up on your reading,” she said. It sounded like she was still on the first floor.

I went as quickly and quietly as I could to the fourth floor and made my was to section where the Necronomicon was.

“I know what you’re doing,” Carly said. She was on the stairs. “It won’t work. I read through the whole book. There’s nothing in there about stopping us. A very poor abridgement if you ask me.”

I found the book. It was hard cover, but the same version. I could tell it was the same version because it had the same useless table of contents. I found the ritual for resurrection and skipped through to the end.

“Do you know why there isn’t anything in there?” She was on the fourth floor with me. I had to get out of there.

“It’s because it would be very dumb of us to tell you how to kill us once you brought us back.”

I ducked between shelves and watched her stroll around the room. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen…so far. I had no idea what she was talking bout.

Maybe her brain was finally starting to rot.

“You knew Carly before didn’t you?”

She’d gone third person.

“There were little bits of memories of you floating around in her head. Nothing much, but you knew her. And yet you never said anything about how weird she was acting after you raised her.”

I wanted to respond, but bit held my tongue. I had chalked her behavior up to death trauma.

“My good friend Solomon wrote the book you’re probably holding your hands right now. You met him briefly after Stan raised him into the body of that animal. I told him not to put himself on the front of the list just in case something like that would happen. It’s almost funny. Not to him of course.”

She was weaving her way between the stacks, three rows away. I didn’t have long.

“It’s a shame that I’ll have to kill you. You’ve helped us so much. We’re all back now, and we may even have a new member in your friend Stan. He’s our kind of
people.”

Two rows away and right in the middle of the aisle. There wouldn’t be time for her to get to one end or the other.

“You, on the other hand, are not our kind of people.”

I was a little shocked at how easy it was to knock over the shelf. It slammed into the next on before the Carly thing could figure out what was happening. She was sandwiched between the shelves as that side of the room went down like dominoes.
She was pinned down good. There had to be some broken ribs, if not worse, but she was still alive…ish.

“Big mistake,” she said, spitting blood and goo. “I’m the only one that can call them off of you.”

“Oh, like you would,” I said.

“You’re right, I wouldn’t.”

I jumped up on the stack on top of her. A shelf dug in hard across her collar bones. There was a snapping sound.

“How does that feel?”

She struggled to spit out another gob. “Fuck you. You can’t kill me.”

I jumped again. The shelf cut in more. “Maybe not, but I can keep you from following me around.”

All she could do was gurgle. I jumped again. And again. And again.

Finally, the bitch’s head came off. I reached between the shelves and picked her up by the hair. The head was still alive. The eyes darted back and forth and the mouth worked soundlessly without airflow across her vocal chords.

“Not so tough now, are we?”

I set the bitch head on the book and ran back down to the main desk. Sure enough, there was a notebook in the lost and found. I snagged a couple of pens and went back upstairs. Carly’s head was still convulsing. I picked it up and carried everything up to the roof.

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I’m chucking the head off the roof as soon as I finish this. I’ve been reading sections of this out loud to it, my captive audience. I’ve asked it if my accounts are accurate enough, but severed heads -- even reanimated ones -- don’t offer up much constructive criticism.

I’ve seen a few of them getting closer to the library, so it’s time for me to do what I’ve got to do. Stan may have fucked everything up, but I’m going to try to make it right. If you’re an alien and you’re reading this, I failed and Stan is a major D-bag. If you’re not, you’ve just read the first part of The Chronicles of Ben: World’s Greatest Zombie Hunter. Stan is still a big D-bag in this scenario also.

Peace Out,
Ben