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The Necromancer: magic or delusion?

Warnings: This story is dark and might be upsetting to some. Contains: physical assault, death of children, brief instances of gore, and one scene dealing with harm to animals.

By Sam Desir-SpinelliPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 25 min read
Top Story - January 2022
15
The Necromancer: magic or delusion?
Photo by Daniel van den Berg on Unsplash

Rodney Mackel sat on the sidewalk shielding his face from an evil wind.

To shelter his mind from the news and the memories he counted the holes in his clothes.

Like a child numbering his bug bites with boastful focus: one on the right knee, two and three on the left. Four, a tear on the hem near the ankle of his pants.... Five, a popped belt loop, six a hole in the pocket.

And that was just his pants.

Seven was the flapping toe of his right shoe, and eight the heel of his left. He hadn't even begun to count the holes in his T-shirt or jacket; both were ragged.

His mismatched gloves were okay for now though... The left was a coming a bit frayed below the thumb. But he had a backup in his pocket and later on he'd scout 5th Ave for more strays. He kept a keen eye for replacement gloves, he couldn't risk holes in those.

The crosswalk swarmed with busy people. He brushed his long, matted hair away from his face-- all the better to see them.

All strikingly different, one to the other-- but alike in one thing: they put forth an obvious effort to ignore him.

They fled past him and turned their faces to the biting wind just to give him a wider berth.

If only one they'd really look him in the eyes, they'd see his soul laid bare. They'd know he wasn't a bad man, or a freak... He was just a guy.

But nobody looked, they'd all gone back to their screaming declarations of subtle disdain.

He was functionally alone. Relegated to the corners, to the peripheries, where he could be easily forgotten.

A sudden wind tore into an overfull garbage can and flung litter out at the crowd. A torn news page was plastered against his cold, boney shin. He picked it up, glanced at the headline: "Roy Collins, age 8, still missing. Police suspect foul play."

Reported missing from a museum field trip four days ago... at first, the public had clung to an intoxicating hope that he might simply turn up hungry but unharmed.

But...

That hope had passed away.

Smiling images of Roy Collins still haunted the walls and lamp posts of the city, but now people only hoped for closure.

He flung the paper back to the breeze, into an updraft. Roy Collins' famous eyes soared over the heads of the bustling crowd-- but Rodney hadn't needed to be reminded of the boy.

He'd been trying to forget all along.

And failing despite himself.

The story unearthed a wretched sadness, long maintained in secrecy-- tugged at a thread which ran through the core of Rodney's psyche: grief over the long-suffering loss of his kid brother Roy Mackle.

It wasn't just their common first name. And it wasn't the way they looked, in fact they couldn't look more different: Mackel had blond hair whereas Collins had dark kinks, and their faces were different shapes and shades. The resemblance was in their similar expressions. They held the same goofy grin, and the same delighted eyes. The same messy, boyish mannerisms... As if they exuded the same aura. Whenever they showed Roy Collins on the news, Rodney might have sworn he was watching videos of his kid brother wearing someone else's mask.

He started to cry.

He actively watched the crowd in order to force the kid- both kids- out of his mind.

Buoyed on the swells of that endless current, there were families. Mothers and fathers who scanned the world with darting eyes and gripped tiny wrists in their tense fingers. They tugged their kids as hard as they could-- any direction would do as long as it was away from Rodney.

They were afraid, even of him.

And it was worse than the casual disregard he had grown used to.

He saw it quivering through the tight-wire steps of their walk.

He wrapped his thin arms around his knees and rocked on his heels, acutely aware of his own frailty-- a weak old man, nearly transparent. Why should they fear him?

How could they suspect him?

Rodney couldn't hurt anybody even if he'd wanted to, even a young boy like Collins.

He saw himself for what he was. A wisp. But they saw him as a dangerous unknown.

And was it really such a leap to tie one unknown to another? The tragedy of what might have happened to Roy Collins had honed people's anger and mistrust into a blind lance.

Their suspicions towards him were not justified.

Yet... he did feel guilty. After all, wasn't he?

He burned with defiance and indignation. Would any of them have done better? What right had they to judge him?

The power drained from his face and his righteous glower melted into a self-pitying frown.

Their humanity was tantalizing. He wanted to pry into their souls, to bask in the warmth of another person, but they were a wall built up around him.

And the wall spoke harshly, directly to his wearied soul: we regret the fact that you exist.

It was hard to be so abhorred. His isolation was dismal and crushing.

He began to cry, and the chilly wind made his nose run like water. He could almost feel the crowd gloating.

Biting back his tears, he thrust his gaze towards something all the less personal- the plain reality of hunger. Why cope with his emotions, when he could just pave them over with basic needs?

He placed a hand on his empty stomach, but that did nothing to fill it.

There were places he could try, for a meal and a warm place to bed down... but he'd been turned away before. They had a limited capacity. Even houses that provided for homeless mothers and children ran out of space, and those were comparatively well funded.

Rodney scanned the curb for dropped bills, coins, lost belongings, or scraps of food. Found money would win him a wholesome meal. Dropped valuables could too, but it would take the effort of trying to trade for cash.

He'd be happier to find other people's discarded leftovers. A half eaten bag of chips or pizza crusts or some other stale morsel for his gut to gnaw on. These meals had long ceased to be demeaning. Less enjoyable than anything fresh or warm, but they were fast and easy.

The cold air sucked his breath and bit his nose. He wiped his face-- the skin of his nostrils was raw and his lips were cracked.

His stomach groaned.

Only garbage.

Crumpled tissues, torn plastic bags, a wet shoe lace that looked like a dead snake-- nothing to eat.

His eyes wandered farther up the curb and landed on a fan of misshapen feathers, rising from the gutter. He stared for a moment before he understood what he was looking at: a dead pigeon, its wing splayed in a final salute.

He checked to make sure his gloves were on and folded his hands between his legs.

The pigeon-- a dead thing-- made him remember the first dead creature he had ever touched.... A mouse, caught in a spring trap, back in their old childhood home.

How old had he been? Three? Four?

Even so young, the sight of the poor critter had made him deeply unhappy. But he couldn't look away from the grotesquerie. Its neck was crushed to an acute degree by the steel bar and its dead-eyes bulged hideously.... The fur at its back end was matted with brown and red filth.

Repulsed beyond belief but ensnared by the morbidity of it all, he had scooped the tiny corpse in a wad of paper and whispered his apologies.

He'd felt so sorry for the little thing... Then he'd given it a gentle stroke across its twisted back-- and felt it twitch.

Shaking himself out of memory, he went back to counting. Distraction: one on the right knee, two and three on the left. Four, a tear on the hem near the ankle of his pants.... Five, a popped belt loop, six a hole in the pocket.

And that was just his pants. They looked like they'd been mauled by a rabid dog.

But no escape from fixation... Because a rabid dog would love to tear into that poor dead pigeon.

It's head was crumpled under one wing and the other was raised into the air. It could have been playing the school game "heads down thumbs up," if it weren't wedged in the gutter and collecting road-grit.

But he could fix that.

.... Same way he had fixed the mouse.

Seven in the toe of his right shoe, and eight the hole in the heel of his left.

He started counting the holes in his shirt.

When he had touched the mouse it had twitched, and then it had started to squirm.

Little Rodney had felt it's tiny claws panick across his tender, young fingers.

He had flung the trap and mouse entire away from himself, across the linoleum of their kitchen floor.

Then he had watched the little hind paws skittering across floor in drunken circles by the frantic lurching of its hind legs. The mouse had been vying for an impossible freedom.

He had wanted to help it, but he was too afraid.

He had let out a scream and ran to his mother, crying that he had touched a dead mouse and that it had come back to life!

She had shot him a mom-look that said she was mad about the first part and didn't believe the second, "Were you playing with a mouse trap? Why would you touch it-- dead animals are filthy especially mice! Wash up this instant."

He had began to protest, "Mom, I swear it came to life-"

"Nonsense!" Even fifty years later he could still hear the anger and incredulity in her voice. He could feel her iron-strong hands hauling him back towards the kitchen to wash his unclean fingers.

"Do NOT lie to me Rodney Mackle!"

It had hurt where she'd pinched him, but that's not why he'd started to cry. He'd started to cry because she had never believed him-- or at least never admitted it. Even after they entered the kitchen and saw the mouse still struggling, she'd said it must have only been stunned. That the trap hadn't worked. And playing with the animal like a damned fool, he had woken it into a frenzy.

But her face had told him something else. Her face had told him that she hadn't believed her eyes... That tiny mice could not possibly survive a spring trap to the neck.... She had turned to look at him. That look had been one of the hardest, most scrutinizing gazes he had ever endured, full of questions and judgments.

Then she'd stomped over to the front door, slipped on her husband's work boots, and raced back to stamp the mouse out of its misery.

He remembered the sound of the splat, and the sickening way all the insides had ended up on the outside.

And he had cried so hard, while she had scrubbed and scolded his hands.

Rodney sighed. He had never spoken to his mother about that incident. They both behaved as if it had never happened. But he knew the mouse hadn't been stunned. He had undone death- though he could never know how or why.

He started counting the rips in his jacket.

After the mouse, he had tried on other things-- but only when he was sure of secrecy. Even as a child he had seemed to intuit: such a rare magic could attract dangerous attention.

So he'd choose rainy days and cold days when nobody else was out. He'd go down to the beach and scoop up dead fish along the bleak shore-- they'd wriggle madly the second they were in his bare hands and flail happily through the air as he tossed them back to the water.

Once, around age ten, he had happened on a partially spoilt carcass of a barn owl on the roadside. The smell had been utterly revolting. He'd loathed to touch it for fear of the decay. But he had needed to test the limits of the unbidden power at his finger tips.

Pinching his nose against the rot with one hand, he had reluctantly prodded the animals damp, feathered breast with the other. Its moldering claws had began to kick, its hooked beak to clip the air. Sunken eyes had bulged aimlessly and its throat had produced a stuttered hissing sound.

--And-- as it had struggled to right itself, clumps of putrid flesh were sloughed away from its ruined body. It had flapped its piecemeal wings. Bits of rot were scattered to the asphalt. Rushing to fill the void, healthy tissue had begun to grow: tendons and sinews across unbroken bones. Clean, soft feathers had sprouted across at bird's shoulders and along its wingtips. In a matter of minutes the owl had been fully restored. Then it had turned its head, noticed him, and taken to the air.

He had felt like God.

In that moment he had begun to feel the full weight of fantasy. Human beings.... Could he bring husbands back to widows? Parents to orphans? Children to grieving families. He could erase a good deal of human suffering.

But that thrilled 'what if' simply wasn't strong enough to break his secret. It held fast, because of uncertainty which nourished a depth of fear. The miracle at his finger tips was too grand, too unnatural. It was terrifying, even to him. How would the world react?

He had been-- no, he still was afraid that he'd be viewed as a freak... a menace....

Better not to be seen at all.

There was one, grand, pivotal moment in which he might have overcome his fears for the sake of love... Roy, his little brother. After the accident...

He could have... made it right. Just one little touch, and he would not have lost his kid brother.

He had raised dead animals as a matter of secret play so many times, but when the real test arrived he had fled away.

They'd been climbing the big spruce out back and Roy had slipped.

He'd landed badly.

Rodney had watched it happen, and he had let his miracle hand falter.

Instead of touching his brother and revealing his own strange gift, he had screamed for help.

Since that point, he had made every conscious effort to avoid touching anything dead-- he never ate meat and he wore gloves year round just in case. To him, even the smallest corpses-- dead flies and the like-- had become untouchable.

A taxi honked at a pedestrian and his gloomy thoughts were scattered like dry autumn leaves... Or like feathered wings took to the air once again.

He looked away.

The dead pigeon was as it had to be. If he were to crawl over and reach out and touch the pigeon: it would twitch to life, it would shake the grime out of its mottled feathers and fly away. But Rodney would remain, to suffer the consequences.

On it's basest level that would be an insult to Roy's memory: using his gift to raise a pigeon when he hadn't been brave enough to raise his own brother-- whom he had loved.

On another level it would be a great risk. Everybody would see.

He roused himself, cast his gaze out among the hurrying folk and saw himself through their eyes: a husk of a man; an outcast bent and weary, huddled on the concrete below a towering high-rise that pierced an ambivalent sky.

He couldn't stay there. Suddenly he felt very hot, even in the face of the December cold.

He pushed himself to his feet, and hurried away with his head hung down, aiming his retreat for the shelter of the subway. He could never escape his poverty or his isolation, but the subway was at least an escape from the open vastness of an overwhelming world.

And it was a safe place to try and catch some sleep.

He entered the subterranean world through a flight of marble stairs. Once they must have been quite grand. Now there were tiles missing from the wall mosaics and the railings were heavy with an unclean patina. The floor was pressed with discarded chewing gum and other filth.

Litter in the corners, his practiced eyes quickly weighed the debris for items of worth.

Finding nothing, he quietly waited for someone with a stroller to come out through the turnstile bypass- then snuck in through the opened gate.

Nobody noticed or nobody cared.

He wandered deeper into the yellow-lit bowels of the city.

An express train passed without stopping, blasting him with an icy rush of stale air.

He ignored the painfully optimistic missing child posters on the tiled pillars.

He needed to put the whole thing out of his mind, so he started digging through a waste bin. After all, he still hadn't eaten.

A woman seated on the nearest bench sucked her teeth in disgust and shook her head.

Rodney tried not to care. Willed himself to throw out a mental 'fuck you', but hostility lost to shame.

He pulled away from the rubbish.

Nothing good in there anyway. Only a half eaten hot dog, which he dared not touch-- even with his gloves. He didn't want three different animals to resurrect themselves right there on the subway platform. .

When a red line finally rumbled into the station, and hissed to a stop. He flung himself through the pneumatic doors and sank into a seat towards the back of the very last car.

He stretched his legs until his hamstrings moaned and shuffled. He felt a pressing drowsiness creeping up his neck. As the train swayed along the tracks, consciousness slipped away from him--

But sleep was trouble. It peeled back the layers of his flailing mind and thrust him back to the tree. It was tall and imposing, as he remembered it. Only now it grew out of cracked asphalt-- its gnarled roots twisted across a sidewalk beaten with debris.

Roy Mackel was standing still under the branches. His body broken, his wild hair messy with blood- as he'd appeared after his fall. He was staring hard at Rodney. The apparition didn't speak- the look in his young, unsmiling face said it all.... His eyes hurled their silent accusations.

"I'm sorry."

The blood which matted his little brother's hair trickled down his forehead and cheeks, but his dead stare remained unchanged.

"I really am. I wish..."

Curled into a ball across a pair of subway seats, Rodney let out a pained moan. A few passengers saw tears rolling down the sleeping man's cheeks. Then they went back to their books and their phones.

He began to talk in his sleep.

His words came out in broken pieces, "I'm sorry I didn't bring you back. I'm sorry Roy, I'm sorry Roy, I'm sorry Roy."

When Rodney wiped the salt out of his eyes and looked up Roy Mackel was gone, and the missing boy Roy Collins was in his place.

And his stare was just as miserable to behold.

"Get up you lousy freak."

Hard hands jostled him. He opened his eyes, but his vision was blurry. The hair on his cheeks was wet with tears.

Rodney heard somebody clear their throat then he felt something warm and sticky land on his forehead. When the phlegm hit, he knew he was in danger.

He started to buck franticly. But the hands which had roused him clamped his meager flesh and bruised his bones.

"I said get up, you friggin' bum! Keep a hold of him Tom, get this friggin' psycho on his feet."

Those powerful hands lifted him clean into the air, his feet swung hopelessly and Rodney shrieked, "911, somebody call 911!"

"The cops are already on their way you freak! You're going away."

Residual tears still confused his vision, he tried to blink them away, and gain his surroundings.

Two men held him by the arms. The man who had been doing all the talking was short but stocky, and his face was knotted in a ball of wrath: "I wanna friggin' kill this guy. I swear I wanna make him suffer."

"Wha-"

"Shut up you scumbag!" The speaker raised his fist, and Rodney flinched away fearfully. "Of course you're a coward. A friggin' coward! You weren't afraid to hurt that poor little kid were you? But you're afraid of me!? You're a coward who's afraid of somebody his own size and has to go out and- and-"

The speaker let out a frustrated yell and slammed his fist into an empty seat.

There were other people on the train, watching. But none of them intervened. Some held their phones up to capture the moment.

"Why?" Rodney still had no idea how he had woken up to such aggression.

"We all heard you, guy." One of the bystanders. "Everybody heard you confessing in your sleep, about that little kid Roy Collins. 'sorry Roy, sorry Roy, sorry, Roy.' We got it on video. You're a disgusting piece of shit and you deserve whatever happens to you in prison."

The train came to a lurching stop.

It was too much for him to handle.

He shut his eyes and shrieked.

There was an impact on the bridge of his nose, pain bloomed between his eyes. He stuck out his tongue and tasted salt and copper.

"Chris! Jesus! What the fuck? Wait for the cops!"

He cracked his eyes and saw that one of the men who had been restraining him, was now pulling "Chris" away.

That one spat on the ground. "He deserves a whole lot worse!"

"Of course he does, but it's not worth it man."

Rodney brought his free hand to his nose- it still hurt. When he looked down he saw mucousy blood all over his fingers. He let out a pitiful cry and clamped his nose again.

When the cops came, they detained Rodney, and both his assailants. They took statements, they reviewed the security footage. When they asked Rodney why he was calling out the name of the missing boy, he explained his dream about his kid brother-- of the same name... and he finally came clean: about his failure to resurrect his little brother.

The cops checked his story and found that Roy Mackle had died in the early 80s.

They could have set Rodney up with some state services, but it was easier to just let him go and then crack a couple jokes about the crazy bum with survivor's guilt and delusions of grandeur....

Before he left the precinct he went to their bathroom, where he cupped his hands under the faucet and washed the clotted blood out of his misshapen nostrils and did what little he could to clean his grey whiskers.

Then he drank as much free water as he could and pushed his way out of the warmth and into the wasting cold of the city winter.

He felt the damp in his beard freeze up.

A scattering of snowflakes swirled lazily over his head. He saw an endless grey sky-- the threat of a looming storm. He pulled his ragged coat tighter.

He didn't want to get caught out in the storm, but he was too shaken to return so soon to shelter in the subway.

Further on, he saw a break in the sidewalk wide enough for a garbage truck-- the promise of a service road where he could duck out of the wind and maybe scrounge some food.

A full belly might help him muster some courage.

When he peeked down the alley way he smiled-- the ice in his moustache pinched his hairs-- there were dumpsters all along one side!

Rodney almost laughed.

There must have been a string of retailers or eateries on the other side of this block....

Trying not to get his hopes up, he pried open the first dumpster and tore a bag to peak inside.

The usual: slop and greasy paper.

He saw another bag towards the back that was much fluffier looking than the rest. He hoisted himself up to reach it, and tugged it forward...

When he peeked inside he let out a happy shout- it was positively full of hamburger rolls and unopened loaves of bread!

He'd seen this a couple times before, when restaurants messed up their orders and ended up with more than they could sell they'd simply throw it all away once it expired.

Rodney tugged the bag carefully out of the dumpster and laid it on the ground- which was now under a thin lacing of snow.

He grabbed a seeded bun and took a huge bite, then peered back into the dumpster to see what else he might win.

His eyes caught hold of something in the far back- a stretch of plaid fabric.

He did a double take, it must have been buried by the bag he'd just taken-- looked like a blanket!

Rodney climbed forward again, this time it was a hard reach. He got his finger tips around the soft fabric- it seemed brand new.

He gave it a tug with his free hand, but it wouldn't come free.

He pulled harder... Barely a budge.

So he took another bite of the bread, and stuffed the rest on his pocket, that he'd be able to use both hands.

He had to lean pretty far and hook one leg on the frame of the dumpster, but once he got his other hand around the piece of fabric he gave as hard a tug as he could manage.

He grunted and strained and up it came, four feet of weight wrapped in a warm plaid blanket.

He almost swooned, not from the effort, but from the shape beneath the fabric.

Tears welled in his eyes, but he had to see.

He pulled at the top of the wrapping, and saw dark hair. He moaned and bit his gloved knuckle, to stop from screaming.

Rodney took a cowering breath. He couldn't leave him there, the garbage was no place for a person.

His tears fell freely as he heaved forth all his strength. He pulled blanket and body all, up to the edge of the dumpster. He strained with every muscle fiber in his pathetic body, to pull the child out-- and they both tumbled hard to the snowy asphalt.

He peeled the blanket back and confirmed with icy clarity: the missing boy, Roy Collins.

Rodney sobbed bitterly. He leapt back against the dumpster and tried to breath.

His hands trembled. He found himself crawling back to the boy on sore, quaking knees. He reached out desperately.

He could NOT let Roy stay dead. He knew what he had to do.

He put his hand against Roy Collin's cheek...

Nothing happened.

"Idiot!" he cursed himself, and took off his gloves.

The air was ice and pain.

He flexed his boney fingers, and... Hesitated.

Rodney thought of his brother, whom he still missed- whom he still loved.

He had sworn to never raise another, after that damning failure.

"I'm sorry Roy." He reached forward, and placed his bare hand on Roy Collins' forehead.

A tremor ran through the boy's body, and his eyes flashed open. He looked around in confused terror- saw Rodney huddled over him and let out a scream.

He struggled and wiggled like a fish to get free of the blanket. Rodney was too stunned to help, he backed away, his hands burning in the snow.

"Wait...." He said it weakly.

Roy finally gained his feet and shook the blanket off-- he bounded away with all the grace of a bird on the wing.

Rodney struggled to his feet and ran after the boy--but by the time he made the sidewalk, Roy Collins was gone and the people hurrying by were all wrapped up in their own business.

He looked for little foot prints, but couldn't track them through the grey slush of the city streets.

So he shuffled back to retrieve his gloves and his bag of bread.

He decided not to take the blanket.

***

***

***

If you made it this far, thanks for reading my story! Now that it's over, don't you wonder what would happen if this dude were to swat a mosquito or walk bare foot through a pile of saw dust? Maybe nothing at all, if he was only delusional... But I kinda like to believe he was the real deal.

If you want to read more from me, check my profile. You'll find dark absurdism, some horror fiction, and eventually some dark satire.

Short Story
15

About the Creator

Sam Desir-Spinelli

I consider myself a "christian absurdist" and an anticapitalist-- also I'm part of a mixed race family.

I'll be writing: non fiction about what all that means.

I'll also be writing: fictional absurdism with a dose of horror.

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