Necromancy

Venturing not much further from the story at hand, I settled myself in for my night ahead repairing and restoring texts to their former glory. As the stranger had paid quite handsomely an advance, I was told to prioritize his book. To put it mildly the book was quite the horrible sight. Shredded to all manner of hells, it appeared far older than any other bound book I had the pleasure of setting my eyes upon. 

The pages were an ill colored tan, and positively ancient. They held a texture more akin to that of leather, but still held their blistering dark ink without even a glimmer of fading from their surface. Curiosity set the better of my mind as I turned through the pages. Examining with gluttonous interest every facet of the grand stories within. They were all manner of fantastic and yet now as I record my own story I cannot remember the specific details of what I beheld. But I do recall having difficulty deciding whether or not this were a personal recollection of past years of life, a generational tome recording family histories, or a work of utter fiction. 

The stories were positively unhinged, talks of covenants with old gods, and magic that could not possibly be real. Tales of risen dead and wild lands of otherworldly unlife. There were passages and mysteries abound in this so old a tome, so curious was my inquisitive mind that I could not help but scan them so intently with my voracious gaze. I did not feel it related to my pain until but the last hour. I, beguiled by the mystic unknown this book conjured, I dared read half passages aloud, one such one I did not garner to fully grace my tongue until the piercing headache shattered my focus. 

So intense has the pain become that I feel I am unable to truly see clearly or focus on any sort of task more than a few moments until it becomes too unbearable. Somehow, I had managed to complete the restoration of the odd binding, but never was I permitted to see the customer in question except for a brief moment when I spotted him through the shapes viewport from my workspace. Almost did I bring myself to rush to meet him. My mind was a flutter with questions as it was that agonizing white hot spear of pain that pierced its way from one end of skull to the next. But the odd nature of his appearance did give me pause. I could not describe his appearance beyond odd. Dark flowing cloaks and leathers, black as pitch and shielding him from the elements. Some sort of odd beaked trappings covering his face. 

I had stood there for only a second witnessing his presence, when in a flash, as suddenly as he had appeared-- he was gone. His exit punctuated with the loud raucous bell above our door, and the accompanying slam that could not be helped by our weather worn entrance. I had barely been able to set myself aside from the miserable pain long enough to look up from my projects, let alone pursue with all of my anxious questions in mind. Over the course of the evening that miserable feeling had only begun to escalate as well, by time of the strangers return for his property it had gone from hot metal piercing the soft flesh of my temple, to the dull throbbing ache of some horrible things wriggling themselves about in my poor miserable brain. 

It is difficult a feeling to put to words, it is almost impossible to describe in a way that the average man could quite understand. Like all host of slithering creatures, like worms, burrowing around the synapses of my mind like the muddied earth they swam through on a daily basis. The rest of the night was a blur, moving from one point of existence to the next as if swathed in some ephemeral trance. The memories of which were entirely transient an existence, as temporary and fleeting as one might expect while pain is so readily the focus. I remember visiting the church on the way home, in hopes that Father Erickson may have some sage words of advice, or something medicinal he would be willing to impart to deal with this new affliction of mine. 

Whatever advice I received offered no respite, only frustration, I remember that much. Whatever medicinal herbs I was given have long been used en masse in an attempt and hope that if I overloaded myself with their potency, it would push out this miserable pain. Yet, by some stretch it felt the opposite was true. 

By the breaking of the morning sun, I had slept so little—Time passed in a blink, but I remembered nothing—Could think of so little else but the miserable pain that only developed. When the light had cursed my eyes, every grey lobe of my brain felt like it had some sentience of its own. Wriggling, writhing, demanding escape from the confines of my skull’s prison it had been trapped in. Truly by now my sympathies would be with my neighbors were it not my suffering that inspired those anguished screams of agonizing existence. 

As I could muster little strength for any else but clenching my skull in bed, and retching with pain, I had missed what should have been the start of my workday. My employer promptly showed his way to my door and let himself in when he’d heard my screaming. I was accosted with all manner of questions. None of which I remember, nor do I recall if I’d even properly responded to them. What I do recall is him dragging me with great indignance to the hospital. With all hopes that some help from someone other than those ascribed by the church would be any more helpful. 

I sat waiting patiently for hours while it felt like my entire skull was unraveling at baser levels. That if I were to look in the mirror I would have been, through some strange alchemical process, reduced to the various scientific ingredients that compose the human body. The sweat of my brow had become so profuse, I had lived in silent fear those moments that I may drown. When finally, the doctor saw me, my relief was far from immediate. He examined me for what felt like hours. So long had he stared into every orifice of my miserable head that I feared he would simply produce his fleams and decide to perform a bloodletting. 

To my great fortune I am blessed that no such torture befell me in that way, in continued suffering’s place, I am given medicine and a word of advice. I am told to take them every hour or so, and to return in a few days to see if I am feeling any better. While my employer tells me that we will pause our current restoration commissions until I am in a more suitable state. Upon first taking the drug, I already wrote it off as another banal attempt at tricking my psyche. Placebo to make, what is surely in the minds of a doctor, my mental condition assuage and for me to return to normal. Though, I must admit, upon the second day of taking it, things did begin to improve. 

Though, I am entirely uncertain as to whether it is the medicines doing, time slowly aiding in my recovery, or the unfortunate truth of me becoming used to the agony.  

With great displeasure on that second night, when my defenses were lowered by renewed faith in the scientific method, I was plagued by nightmares. All manner of unspeakable horrors wandering through what is the usual monotony of my average night’s rest. Familiar landscapes are twisted and strung along at unsavory angles that make so little sense to the eye. It is an odd and harrowing vision that plagued me, every entrance to every home upon the cobbled streets of my neighborhood seem to open at once. White ethereal light cascades from within, not the holy light of the divine or holy as we know it—Something far from it. It is less the comforting of creation and more the accursed opposite, entropy given form as chaotic light to touch my mind in such unsavory a way. To promise salvation and in its place only give perdition. 

From the doors, all unevenly rowed along the length of the street that wound and curled upon itself into infinity beyond what my eye could perceive, came writhing horrific masses of flesh that I can only scantly describe. They are a work of horror, the sort my paranoid mind could only imagine as the beings writhing about in my rattled skull caressing and manipulating the lobes of my addled brain to their whims content. They move on their long foreboding tendrils, each horrific limb made of some terrible conglomerate of sentient worms folding mass in on itself as they crawled from the light of entropy. As they encircle me in their infinite colonies my only solace and reprieve is the morning call of the sun’s brilliant rays shining into my eyes to signal it is time I awoke. 

My only proper sleep in the couple of days since my journey of misery began, and it is cursed by the confounding image of these creatures. 

But I am free. Not from my misery but from the visions of horror and nightmares that had assailed my already fragile sanity. When I awaken relief for my mental state is palpable but worse yet my body feels sluggish. Every movement is labored, the simple act of lifting my thin sickly arm is like trudging through the full pressure of the ocean’s depths. Along the course of the night, perhaps I had done little actual resting—Rather fighting tooth and nail with every fiber of my mental being. 

I am but a prisoner in this slug’s vessel of a body. Merely sitting up feels as though it has taken me hours of daylight, and that is before I have even thrown the covers from my body. Of little surprise is how I quickly give the fight up, letting myself collapse back against the comforting cotton sheets. Staring with sunken miserable eyes up to the ceiling of my bedroom. Further there is no movement from me the rest of the day. I let myself succumb to the want to be unconscious. My mind was still a throb with nothing but horrible pain, my body wanting nothing more than to shut itself down. 

Sleep, I had feared, even through these visions of aberrant torment, was my only escape from the waking life that caused me more suffering than that which could be given by the throws of my imagination. My only solace through these new days of fighting my body through gelatinous waste was that when I slumbered, no matter how darkly the void may touch my mind, I would be at rest. 

The more I gave in, the less combative my dreams became. At least in ways I could scantly remember. So too do the headaches leave the less I fight. Taking that as a sign, I give in fully to the want of my brain, for my body to just rest. Surely, I thought, if my body wanted nothing more than to be at rest and continuing this agonizing fight to stay active had done nothing more than exacerbate my condition, then perhaps this was the best course of action. 

Sending word with the last mustered strength of my body to my employer, I let him know that I needed a full week’s sabbatical. Not bothering to wait for the letter in response, I adjourned back to bed. Knowing my misery would once more be as at rest as my mind. But as my weary mind drifted off there was not even a single vision of horrible creature or twisted landscape. Simply... Nothing. 

It would be incorrect to say I envisioned myself drifting through the empty blackness of the void, for that would be giving myself a sense of self in this nothing. There was simply no thought, no memory. I was at rest, and then I was not. No stirring, no moving. Though I could feel myself withering, though the hunger had begun to consume me when I woke again, I could not bring myself to leave the bed. All I’d had energy enough for was to sail adrift to my ardent slumber once again, only to once more be greeted by the absent entropy that had consumed me the night previous. 

This final morning when I found myself awake, the final disconnect had yet to have fully occurred to me. I stared absently at the ceiling for moments too long to be considered normal before it had occurred to me that I had not blinked for the duration of my hour set there beneath the welcoming warmth of my homely sheets. Trying to force such an action led to just as troubling a realization. 

We come to now. 

I have spent to this point, my entire week’s time of rest in this bed. Four of them had been of proper rest, but the last meandering three have been as a prisoner locked in my flesh. Without fail the sluggish pace of my body has elevated into a full blown rigor mortis. I am cold, stiff. More still I have lost full agency of my waking body. Attempts to bend the tips of my fingers have resulted in little to no movement. Not even a twitch mustered in salvation for me to crawl from this bed. But the passage of time has become the more grueling aspect. After the second day I had hoped if I merely tried to will myself to sleep I would either awaken or finally be consumed by the relief of death. 

Not even Morpheus can pull me away from this living nightmare, just as readily as Thanatos cannot bring me to any sort of afterlife. My soul is so terribly locked away in my ever rotting corpse. My only senses to be active are my eyes perceiving the world around me, my ears to hear the horse drawn carriages clacking their hooves and iron clad wheels across the cobbled street, and the increasingly acrid stench of my body consuming itself slowly. 

As the days progressed, and I remain there forced to stare lifelessly at the ceiling above, I can practically hear my own flesh start to slough itself in rotting chunks from my body. The stench was as horrendous as the sight of me must have been. It took merely a few more days of this Hell before I had fully lost track of time in totality. What must have been an eternity of suffering there stagnant in my body’s own filth eventually came to an end so to speak when my dearest friend came to check on me finally. After what had been far longer than the week’s sabbatical I had assured. 

His disbelief was heart wrenching, the guttural sounds of his sobs of anguish were all the more vile when I could not tear myself from this prison to comfort him. To assure him I was alive! So desperately I wanted to jump from myself to give him the sort of escape from his pain, as he had clearly desired. Yet in spite of what the mind had wanted, I felt entirely disconnected. All I could truly muster the strength to do was bring the memories of that horrendous scripture back to the forefront of my mind. Symbols and glyphs I haven’t even the words to describe. Ancient tongues and stories long forgotten by the world no longer touched by the void. 

Was this what happened when all things died, or was this because of that terrible book? 

Oh, how I wish that the mortician would have done me the service of closing my eyes as he treated my corpse. More haunting than the sounds of my brother in life’s cries of overwhelming grief was the sound of my own body being poked and prodded like some terrible thing of experimentation and intrigue, robbed of all autonomy. Through it all I could do nothing, not even move my eyes as I was at the mercy of this man and his instruments. Drained of all my fluids and prepared for the casket. I had expected a funeral, but none came.  

Just the box.  

Dark as it was. 

So much harder to count the hours of suffering when there was not even the touch of the sun’s light to give you any sort of experience of time. All I can relate to myself is that I was there longer than a day, and perhaps shorter than a century before I felt the clawing of hardened steel against dirt above me. Which too, seemed to drag on for an eternity. 

I am not entirely sure what I had expected of such a liberator of corpses as the one who tore open the wooden box, but I had hardly expected the odd lanky creature that had greeted me. An odd sort of innocence took his voice, but it was betrayed by his thin skeletal frame, and the beaked mask of doctors of old that adorned his face. In spite of his garish appearance, he spoke in polite well-mannered English. The sort of brogue of a man living in The Vosges speaking English as fluently as a native. As surprising as that was, what was more of an oddity how he had no care for my body’s stability. Doing little more than cutting my skull from my neck and lifting my head. 

But... Wait... 

This was him! 

This was the odd owner of the book. Though I had never met with him directly I recognized him from the vague description of his appearance given to me by my employer. Three or four full heads taller than the average man, thin as a rail—As if he could slip through the gaps in a door, and odd out of time attire that seemed no less as genuine as his money. 

This man, who now held my decapitated head betwixt his fingers, was the one who had come to rebind that infernal book. Had this been his goal all along? To take me as some sort of distasteful trophy of conquest over the flesh he had so thoroughly blasphemed? 

“Oh fear not dearest, Theodore—Todd I shall thusly name you—Free are you now of the prison of life’s embrace!” If, truly, I had been his intended target then why did he refer to me by a name other than my own? “Fear not, dear fellow! Worry no longer! For I am ever the friend to your begrudged sort, the kind that have been betrayed by life. Nermal Fitzroy, do well to remember the name, as we are to be friends now until the sun shines no longer.” 

A jester, almost, as he danced among the dirt. Giddy to have taken my head for himself. With the gentlest tap of what appeared to be a cane against my rotting nose I could feel some sort of life fill itself into my desecrated skull. 

“Are you ready for an adventure, my boy?” 

No! I wanted to shout! Begone from my final resting place you damnable devil! But instead, what came from my withered jaw was nothing more than a wild scream.