Bone of My Bone
Someone is laughing.
The sound is so offensive, so wrong and horrible, that it snaps me back into sanity.
I look at the necromancer, and he looks at me, and I see it was not him who laughed, but me.
Horrified, I clap my hands over my mouth.
I taste grave dirt, and I gag, and then I am crying, or mayhap laughing again.
It’s hard to tell. I am not fully sane, not anymore, mayhap not ever again, for madness is truly a kind of place, and once you wander in too deep, you can’t find your way out again.
The necromancer does not laugh, does not grin, smirk, or gloat.
In fact, he looks both disappointed and disgusted, and that is worse.
“Now look at what you have made me do,” he sighs and kicks Ursula’s corpse with his foot, and for that alone he deserves to be skinned alive, then thrown into a pot of boiling oil.
“I told you I didn’t want to hurt you, but that I would if you forced me to. ”
“Don’t touch her, you bastard!” I growl. “Touch her again, and I’ll kill you.”
That dour expression flees the necromancer’s face.
He throws back his head and laughs, a high girlish sort of giggle that suits him poorly.
“Oh, Elsebeth,” he sighs, and with the hand he isn’t using to hold the skull, he wipes tears from his eyes.
“You are such an angry little thing, aren’t you?
A feral cat in human form. Poor Otto discovered that to his detriment, when all he did was try to warn you that you were wrong.
I fear that this whole situation could have been prevented, had you only listened. ”
He looks at the skull, sighs again, tenderly brushes some hair away from the forehead. “And if you hadn’t tricked them in the first place, you naughty thing. Filling people’s heads with the idea that you can grant wishes to trick them into taking you here!”
“You lie,” I hiss. I wish to fall upon him, or mayhap to crouch down to Ursula and touch her, but I must not let hot rage cloud my mind, so instead I keep standing, my hands balled into trembling fists.
“For all my many faults and sins, I am no liar, Elsebeth, and neither was Otto. This here is the skull of my wife. If you are quiet, I shall tell you everything in a way you can understand. Once upon a time,” the necromancer begins, and for a moment a finger of fear strokes my spine, for how does he know that I have many fairy stories in my head and that they help me make sense of the world?
But then he is a witch, and it must not be wondered at that he can do many dark things.
“Once upon a time, there lived a simple man who wanted nothing more from life than to serve God. This had been the most fervent wish of his heart ever since he could remember. He had no eyes for women, or riches, or any other worldly thing that so many others covet. All he wanted was to read his Bible and instruct those around him, that they may live in a manner pleasing to the Lord. For twenty years, the man lived in perfect contentment. Then, the man fell in love.”
The fear that flicked up and down my spine vanishes, for this is a boring story so far. I have heard half a dozen others like this, and those my grandmother told with far more skill. But what can I do but stay still and listen? It’s not as if I have anywhere else to be, not now, not anymore.
“She was no great beauty,” the necromancer goes on, “and her garb was simple, her hands and hair unadorned, yet she touched something within the man that had never been touched before. Though the man had prayed, and fasted, and flagellated himself, worn horsehair shirts, and placed sharp pebbles in his shoes in the hope that his thoughts would turn to God once more and drive her out, she would not be exorcised from his heart. He knew then that he was not merely lusting after her, for temptations may be strong, but they are also fleeting. He thought about it long and hard, and decided then that he should marry her, if she was willing. She was, and so they married, and the man rejoiced and praised the Lord for sending him this precious miracle of a woman.”
I look at my precious miracle of a woman, who lies so still and pale at his feet, that little frown still on her face.
I wish I could rub it from her forehead like one can rub out a mark in the sand, but I can’t, and my heart tears into pieces, and I wish I could rip it out so I need not feel this, not again.
For a moment, I go mad, and I hear see smell taste nothing, only feel a sickening pain in my chest, my eyes growing so heavy, I fear they might drop out of my skull if I bend over, and this scratching in my throat as if something wishes to be let out.
When I come to myself again, I have missed part of the necromancer’s tale, though he talks in such a long-winded way that it hinders me not in understanding what he wants me to know.
“But the bite was fatal, and she died in his arms. The man called on God and the angels and saints to please return his beloved, but no matter how he ranted and raved, his wife remained dead. Then, in a fit of madness and desperation, the man called out one final time, not for God or an angel or saint, but for anyone, anything, to please have pity on his sorry self and help him. This time, something answered, something dark, foul, and unclean.”
“So you conjured up a demon and sold yourself to Satan to get your wife back,” I snarl, for I do not want to hear him talk of death at length, not when my Ursula lies at his feet with her throat ruined by his hand.
The necromancer frowns at my interruption.
Methinks he has a love of hearing his own voice.
“I did. I signed my name in Satan’s book, and in exchange he lengthened my life long beyond what is common, and he gave me the power of necromancy.
Satan takes great pleasure in the perversion of holy miracles, and what miracle better to defile than that of resurrection?
So you see, I did not sell myself cheaply. ”
I wonder if he means for me to clap, as if it’s somehow admirable what he has done, when really, it’s sad. “So he made you a necromancer, and you brought your wife back from the dead, but you did it wrong, or she wouldn’t be just bones in the ground now.”
The necromancer’s face becomes tight, as does his grip on the skull, and won’t it be funny if he squeezes her so hard in anger that the brittle bone breaks, so that everything will have been for naught? “I didn’t do it wrong.”
“Then why are we here?”
“Because my wife did not appreciate being brought back to life by dark forces and fled from me, you rude little bitch!” the necromancer screams, spittle flying from his mouth like venom from a snake’s fangs.
I am quick to anger, yet when another rages, it makes me feel calm, and so I do and say nothing but stare at him.
Two spots of color burn on the necromancer’s sallow cheeks. The sun has set by now, darkness falls swiftly over the land, and the spots look not like blushes but like smears of grave dirt.
“Forgive me. I did not mean to lose my temper,” he says after a while, his voice restrained.
He wipes at his mouth with a handkerchief, clears his throat.
“What I meant to say before you interrupted me is that my beloved wife’s soul was pure and clean, and when she discovered what had happened and how I had restored her to life, she was appalled and disgusted.
I discovered that we had…different interpretations of what I had done and what that meant. ”
His face becomes tight again, as if he is in great pain.
He looks at the skull, strokes it with a fingertip.
“I felt I had been selfless. I had sacrificed my soul and the chance at eternal bliss in Heaven just so I could be with her again in this vale of tears, because I loved her more than anything in this world. She, however, felt that I had been rash and selfish. Our separation had been temporary, because, upon my death, I would have been reunited with her in Heaven, where we would live in joy for eternity. By selling my soul to Satan, I had instead ensured our separation was final, and in that way, I had taken away her chance at happiness, too.”
The necromancer raises the skull to his face, rests their foreheads together.
His quick, gulping breaths stir her coppery hair.
When he speaks, his voice is soft and pained.
“She no longer wanted to be with me, because necromancers are an abomination unto the Lord, and since she was God-fearing and God-loving, I was an abomination unto her, too.”
He lowers the skull, presses it against his chest over the place where his heart beats.
“I told her she was still my wife and had promised to love and obey me. She said we had taken our vows until death do us part, and that it had, and so she was no longer beholden to me. I argued death hadn’t parted us, because here she was, alive and well.
At this she laughed in a manner most cruel and mocking, and showed me her hands, which had begun to blacken at the fingertips. ”
“So you did do it wrong,” say I.
Through gritted teeth, the necromancer says, “I did not. The art of necromancy means the conjuring of the spirits of the dead. I had recalled her spirit to the land of the living, and what is more, I had bound it to her body. The problem is that I desired resurrection rather than necromancy.”
I find myself growing both bored and angry with this man.
I wish he’d speak plainly. All this babbling when my little love lies in the dirt all wet with her blood makes a mockery of my grief, and for that he deserves to be punished in the manner of traitors: pulled apart by horses, but not before his privates have been torn from his body with hot pliers.
But I’ve no horses, no pliers, only my tongue, and so I say, for I know it will madden him, “I suppose you shall tell me now what the difference is between necromancy and resurrection?”