Thirteen Candles: The Hungry Dead
Smoke snakes up into the sky from the deceased candle. Mr Meadows sucks his thumb and forefinger; by the end of the night he was sure to have blisters on his finger tips.
‘It’s amazing what we will do, to get what we want, what we need.’ At this Ricky squinted, his stomach turned; nothing good ever came of it when Meadows talked like this. ‘Imagine having a hunger so foul, so vile that it makes your life hell on earth. Can you imagine if that hunger was all that sustains you?’
‘What do you mean, Meadows? You don’t sound like you’re talking about needing a fix or pervy sex.’ Meadows leans back, letting the night fall over his face like a veil.
‘What do you know about necrophagia, Ricky?’
‘Necrophagia, weren’t they a death metal band from Ohio?’
‘No! Necrophagia, from “nekros” meaning “corpse” and “phagos” meaning “to eat…”’
Some of the reagents and ingredients for these rituals are a little gruesome: eye of newt, hanged man’s hand, human placenta. But the most difficult, and dangerous, to find is human carrion. Mumia, or mummified flesh, has long been used by alchemists and sorcerers. It is dead but once living, corruptible and immortal and can be used in numerous rites. But what if a ritual demands… fresher meat?
Murder is not always an option. In very few instances, it is you can make someone disappear completely. So, when possible, yes, we can’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but never should we risk ourselves in the endeavour. So we must remember the lost of the resurrectionist.
Life beyond death is the most noble of goals, even if it is only to serve. These days we are not squeamish about organ donation or autopsy, but there was a time when the medical colleges we as reviled for their dissection of the dead as they were revered for their treatment of the living. The doctors relied upon the resurrecionists, grave robbers who would smuggle corpses throughout the country, and it is to their methods the modern necromancer must look.
I would never disturb a grave in Liverpool, or the Wirral, or anywhere in the Northwest, it is far too close to home, so I was forced to look further a field. The potters field I used shall be a secret revealed only on my deathbed, it is too rich a vein, too discrete a place to reveal as yet. And there are other hazards as well.
Suffice to say it took me most of an evening to drive there, but that was an advantage in and of itself. Call me a traditionalist, but I don’t think you can go grave robbing in broad daylight, it just doesn’t feel right. By the time I had parked in the gravely little lay-by, the moon was high and shrouded with cloud. I took out my spade and clambered over the dry stone wall that the early villagers had used to demarcate the land of the living from the land in which their dead lie.
I had been fruitlessly digging through alternating layers of sand and clay for sometime when I heard them whooping and hissing and bounding through the fields. Once that place had been a barrow-village, filled with the crude tombs and crypts of an ancient folk, but now it was just a field of tumuli. Far from the cry of progress, the surrounding villagers and farm clans continued to bury their dead in this unhallowed field. When I head the calls and cries coming over the fields, I hid in one of these ancient sepulchres.
Lean and wasted, with the paunch of starvation, they clambered over the broken rocks and violated earth. Long, rasping tongues lolled from panting, fanged maws. Splintered talons grasped at dirt and sod and bone for purchase. Patches of long, lank hair, petrified white in the moonlight, spilled over their faces like blood from a head wound. Ghouls: the Eaters of the Dead, the Tribes of the Skull. They had been in these lands longer than men as we know them and half a dozen were poaching my graveyard.
Their eyes were white with cataracts, but their blunt, sunken noses sniffed the air, aware of my presence yet unsure of my location. I carefully slipped from my hiding place and moved over to a fallen menhir, from my pocket I took a stub of chalk and inscribed the sigil of the corpse from the Book of the Black Pullet. At the slightest scratching, scraping, their heads whipped around to face me.
For once, reason and instinct were in complete harmony, I took flight into the fields, relying on the washed out starlight to hide me from the eyes of the dead. I was soon lost to these hateful, starving creatures, beyond their sight and scent. With utmost caution, I circled around behind them, mindful of the ravenous, fetid things that had interrupted my harvest. While they scrabbled in the earth for broken bones and partially mummified flesh, I inscribed a second rune: the Old Man of the Pyramid’s glyph for chains.
Again their ravaged faces whipped to my location. They lumbered over the stones and bones I had excavated, searching out the source of their distraction. This time I crept away slowly, making as little noise as possible. I left them to their mining, sure that they would turn up no more than I had. With as much accuracy as possible, I looped around to a point ninety degrees between the two runes. I picked up a flat stone and marked the next rune of the warding: it was a stylized icon of the sun, representing purifying light.
This time, only one ghoul, evidently the most curious of its breed, came to investigate my handiwork, brushing the greasy, rain-slick hair from its eyes in an almost human manner. Once, it may have been a man but death had rendered it gruesome and sexless. I was well away by the time it had loped over to where I had carved that small disc and its rays. There was one final quarter to the circle to complete and it would require the utmost caution. I went out as far as I could, so that the battery lamp I had brought was nothing but a tiny low star on the horizon. I drew the final rune, a simple closed circle, upon the stone I had picked up and made my way to the final point, the keystone of the warding.
Upon reaching this point, I placed the stone down on the ground and began to murmur the incantation to close the abjuration. The spell was in the Dragon’s Tongue, the infernal language of necromancers and nephilim, it meant nothing more to the ghouls than it did to the average person, but hey came to investigate nonetheless. I could feel the spell close around my soul and finally it wrenched the power to seal itself out of me. There was a perceptible thickening of the air and all of the ghouls turned to stare directly at me.
This time, I did not run.
They approached, meaning to tear me asunder and drink the marrow from my bones. But they could sense the change in the environment, the power that had bound them. They hissed and spat and threw what they could at me. After a close encounter with my own shovel, I retreated to a safer distance. The six living corpses paced and fret and let out long, keening wails as if they could move me to pity. I checked my watch. There was an hour and a half until dawn. I had arrived late and spent quite awhile digging before I was disturbed, it wasn’t long therefore until dawn. I spent this time, meditating and gathering back the energy I had spent in the warding. Remember the price of the Black Art, Ricky, it must always be paid.
As the first light of daybreak stretched over the horizon, the ghouls became frenzied, digging at the earth with their filthy jagged claws. I bet they wish they had kept my shovel now. The ghoul is a creature of the Outer Dark, a shadow-soul in a once mortal shell. Formed from a degenerate cannibal foresworn to the Devourer-of-Names, they are warped in death and raised again as a ghoul. Like all creatures of the Outer Dark, sunlight is anathema unto them. When the sun rose, they burned as if beneath a great lens, their skin blackened and gave off a vile and powerful stench. Their eyes boiled in their skulls, bursting and running down their faces. Their hair can claws turned to ash and their fat, their precious fat, rendered on the exposed stone of the barrows.
As I gathered up the tallow, I was surprised how little lard there had been on the corpses. But, still, there was enough for thirteen candles…
