#benily

It was beautiful, and suitably atmospheric for her current activity.

After all, necromancy was not an art easily practiced in the afternoon summer heat or even in the chill of true night. Bodies tended to get more than little gross when around too much heat, and too stiff to do anything at all if it got too cold. So the cool air of the morning was just perfect.

She surveyed the clearing, and looked down at the book lying open in her lap. The meadow in the picture looked substantially larger - the trees had been slowly taking back their territory for years, now. The piles of stones scattered throughout the nearby woods and in the remnants of the meadow, however, were unmistakable.

The book had no title, and whatever image had been on the outer cover had long since rotted away. Emily had found it in the basement of the King Falls library when she’d first arrived, charred and fragile but still holding together. It was old, that she was certain. The dialect of English was almost incomprehensible, but with enough time and the internet she’d figured it out.

“Ben?” she called back into the forest. “Are you coming?”

Her boyfriend steps out of the woods to stand at her side, glancing back and forth uneasily. “Em, you know how close we are to the trail up to Hell’s Doorstep, right?”

She smiled at him, and patted the grass next to her. “Trust me, I know exactly where we are. I want to show you something.”

Ben looked reassured by her grin, and smiled a little in return. “Actually, if you stand up for a sec, I have a blanket we could sit on?”

“Aw, thanks!” Emily stood up and let Ben spread the blanket in the spot where she’d been sitting before. “Alright,” she continued once they were both settled, leaning against the tree behind them and into each other. “So, a little bird told me someone was a theatre kid in high school-”

“Would this bird happen to be a radio host?”

“-Maybe. Anyway, you still like to sing, right?”

See, the thing about necromancy rituals was that they were very specific. They didn’t create life in the traditional way, but it still worked a hell of a lot better with two people than one. And little details like duets rather than solos would make all the difference when reanimating humans, especially.  

Yeah, the first time Emily snuck into the morgue really hadn’t gone well for anyone involved. She still needed to send an anonymous apology card and massive cookie basket to the orderly on duty there that night…

She snapped back to the present just in time to hear Ben finish his sentence. “Yeah, I’d like to think I’ve still got some of that magic.” He was smiling a little wider, that slightly lop-sided cocky grin he got when he knew he was good at something and liked showing it off. Emily couldn’t help but lean over and kiss the side of his mouth.

“You’ve got your chance to prove it right here,” she said. “I want to hear you sing something, okay? The lyrics are in this book, and I can get you started on the melody.”

Emily flipped through the book until she found the page she wanted, pointing out the faded but legible writing. “I had a thought, dear, however scary about that night, the bugs and the dirt.”

Ben mostly just listened to her until she hit the chorus and he joined in. “I will not ask you where you came from, I would not ask it, neither should you.”  His voice was soft, smoothing out the places where Emily fell a little flat or missed a note.

She couldn’t resist taking a moment to turn her head to the side and rest her forehead against Ben’s. “How come I had to hear about this talent through Sammy?” she murmured, only half-joking in her complaint. He just shrugged, still smirking at her, and started in on the second verse. He’d well picked up on the melody by now, the two of them winding around the song’s curves and nuances like they’d been practicing it for years.

Emily really didn’t know how she knew the melody to the song; it wasn’t like the probably decades old tome had contained a handy CD-ROM to play the instrumental version for a tutorial. She just knew it.

Which was probably a bad sign, but research - even research that held the possibility of starting a zombie invasion - was one of her favorite parts about this job here in King Falls. The libraries back home had never had anything half as interesting.