Necromancer, by Cassandra Mortimer

The taxi was smoldering.  The fake leather burned and stuck to Derrick’s skin as he fidgeted in his seat and clicked his belt into place.   His mother smacked the side of his leg and sent him a glare.  He stopped moving.  Hands sweating, he clutched his pillow more tightly, knuckles popping and grinding.  His ten-year-old frame vibrated with tension as he watched his neighborhood fly behind the car and new streets and signs began streaking by with violent speed.  His eardrums thumped when sirens glared past.

The new place wasn’t a house like his mother said it would be.  It was a fifth-floor walk up in a gray apartment building on the bad side of some town he didn’t know the name of.  When he stepped out of the taxi he looked up at the windows, all the same size, all the same shape, mirroring each other like dead clones, hanging there.  His mother yelled for him to start carrying up his things and he grabbed a box.

The first night there he couldn’t sleep.  His bed hadn’t been moved in yet and so he lay on his dead grandmother’s blanket on the floor of his unfinished room.  It was a pale blue, with light flowered stitches.  He rubbed his cheek against the fibers.

His window overlooked a small yard and he found himself dragged there again and again during the night.  Derrick moved quietly, his bare feet making slight squeaking sounds as he trudged back and forth from his blanket to the window and back again.  It was sweltering outside, but his room felt like a meat freezer.   He decided to wrap the blanket around himself, still smelling his dead grandmother’s perfume, and stood at the window, surveying his land.  For a moment he pretended that this dark wasteland was his, and that he could build and destroy what he pleased. He watched trees grow and wither like weeds and created a small cabin right there, behind that patch of mud.  The dark grass turned bright and that shadow…

That shadow turned into a man.  A man with black and red skin, whose body was bent, whose eyes were moon-white.  The look on his face was resentful and full of rage and Derrick was reminded for a second of his father, years ago, when the stink of hate was pouring from his mouth, the alcohol bottle swinging like a bat.  The shadow looked right up at him, and with a strong walk despite his crooked features, came towards the window.  Derrick reminded himself it was pretend, he was imagining, and concentrated on making the Shadow-man turn into another twisted tree in his collection.  It wouldn’t work.

He kept walking towards the building, his white eyes focused intently on the boy.  Derrick screamed.  He screamed until his mother came into the room.

“What’re you screaming about? I am trying to sleep!”

“The man! The man!”  was all he was able to get out as he pointed again and again at the window, now choked with the fog from his breath.

She pushed him aside and used her arm to wipe at the window, peering out.  Her scowl deepened and Derrick noticed her arm tighten.

“There’s nothing there.  Go back to bed.  Right now. Don’t you be screaming anymore, you understand me?  I can’t deal with your shit.  You have to think about me here.  Okay? Can you do that?  Can you think about someone besides yourself?  Do you know what I had to do to get us into this place?”  He was about to shake his head no, feeling smaller and shorter and more powerless every word she spit.  But she slapped him before he could answer.

“No, of course you don’t know!”

Derrick felt his eyes burning and drowning, his eyesight under water.  He caught his voice in net upon net of sobs and could do nothing except dig his fingers more firmly into the blanket he still seized.

“Go to bed!” She yelled and he scrambled onto the section of floor that he had decided was his bed.  He buried himself in the blanket and cocooned himself as tightly as he could.  He heard his mother slam the door behind her and his heart stuttered.  He didn’t like it when the door was closed.  He liked it open.  Always.  He almost stood and opened it but he pictured his mother coming back in to find him up and the sting on his cheek pulsed in warning.  He spent the rest of the night with his eyes trained at the window for any sign of black and red skin or white eyes and kept his back to the closed door, pretending it was open and pretending he could get free.

The next morning his mother told him that she hadn’t signed him up for his new school yet and would do so the next time she went to the library to use their computers.  She told him not to leave the house and then went to go get a bus.  She never said where to.  Once Derrick had asked but she told him it was none of his fucking business and he never asked again.

As soon as she was gone he snuck out of the house, walking on the points of his toes, afraid to make noise as if she was still there.  He closed the door behind him, walked down the five flights of stairs and left the building.  He gazed longingly at the bus stop.  Just a little money, that’s all it would take.  He would hand over bills like dark merchandise and speed away.  But no, he turned his head away from his only escape route and headed around the building to the back yard.  He mapped it out in his mind, the small plot burned and permanent in his skull.  There was where the trees had been, there was where the cabin was, and that was where the man had stood.  But none of it was there.

He walked with slow and careful steps the perimeter of the yard, taking in all the details he could; sure he would find some secret, some clue.  When he stood in the shade he whispered to himself that he could feel a chill in the air.  That there must be some evil minion or demon of sorts floating invisible nearby.  But he didn’t.  It was warm.  The branches above his head floated in the breeze on a peaceful wave.  The sun created outlines of the leaves on his dirty shoes.  He looked at the building in front of him, imagining that this must have been where the Shadow-man stood last night.  He counted up five gloomy, cloned windows, searching for his.

The man was standing in the window.

His red and black skin, torn at the edges and fraying like cotton, glittered in the dark of his room.  Derrick felt his heart pound and skip, stuttering in his small chest, his entire body numb.  He was sprinting before he knew what he was doing.

He ran up the flights of stairs and tore open the door to the apartment.  He tripped on the raised edge between the kitchen and the hallway but caught himself on the side of a cracking wall.  He ran into his room and prayed that the man did and did not exist.

He was still there.  He faced Derrick with a calm appreciation, his body straighter this time and some dark ring visible in his white eyes.  He wore no clothes but his body was a marred mess of clotting and bunched flesh. Burned. Derrick couldn’t scream, and so he backed away slowly. He had tried to scream, a couple times, but air would not be forced out his lungs.  They gripped onto the air in a desperate plea for reality.  He stumbled out of the room and the Shadow-man’s eyes followed him like a tracker eyes a deer.

He backed into the hallway, moving faster and faster until he hit the legs of the couch that his mom had bought off the side of a road.  He climbed onto it backwards, mind blank with terror, his legs hiding under his body, his arms around his head.  He kept his eyes peeked above his forearms, pupils pointed and small, directed at the hallway. There was no movement, no shadow, no sound from the room.  The couch felt hot and cold at the same time, the ticking of the kitchen clock made a sick snapping beat as he waited.  He didn’t know what he waited for.  Death maybe.  To be proven wrong.  All he could think of was the dark ring in those eyes.

Minutes passed.  Fifteen, twenty, twenty-five.  At thirty he felt curiosity wriggle around in his body, a grotesque question working its way back and forth between his eyes.  He stood in one fluid motion, adrenaline still singing through his blood, goose bumps making his body feel light.  He walked the same path to his room, only this time with a quiet and determined passion.  The man was there, in front of the window.  He hadn’t moved a bit.  Derrick stood there.  Locked in a standstill, neither twitched nor breathed.  The Shadow-man held out a hand and Derrick felt a tug forward.  His breathing sped up and his heart quivered.  The man lowered his hand.

Feeling calmer, and not knowing why, Derrick took a step forward.  The Shadow-man blinked his inhuman eyes.  Derrick took another step.  The man did not move.

Derrick held out his fingers, shaking so severely they seemed to move his whole body.  His breath felt hot in the room, like frost had begun to coat his clothes and hair.  One more step.

He touched the man.  His fingers met oily, broken skin, bloody strips of flesh forever falling and dripping off the bones.  The man still didn’t move.  Derrick felt a giddy sense of manic energy course through him, bubbling and rising.  He laughed nervously, then laughed harder.  He continued to stroke the man’s arm, fascinated and disgusted and ecstatic.  He laughed at his mother, at himself, at this man, at this place.  He realized the man was standing on his dead grandmother’s blanket and he wondered whether he should ask the man to move.

The Shadow-man followed Derrick’s eyes and stared blankly at his own feet. He took a shuffling step to the side, off of the fabric.

“Thank you,” Derrick said.

The Shadow-man moved his head to the side, a tilt of his burnt and peeling neck.

The sound of pounding footsteps and keys jingling broke the moment and Derrick ran to the door.  His mother was standing in the doorway.  Her face was red and she held paper bags.

“What was this door doing open?” She yelled.

Derrick wrung his hands together, fingernails scraping the insides of his palms.  “I- I was just out, well I wasn’t out, I was here-”

His mother slammed the door behind her and dropped the bags on the floor.  He was sad that they had no entryway table like they did at their last house.  She used to put bags on that table.

Then she charged towards him.

“What were you thinking? I told you not to go outside, I told you!”  She grabbed his arm and swung him around, bending him over and yanking down his loose jeans.  She smacked his butt, her rings turned inward, over and over.  He cried out and tried to explain.

“It was only for a minute!” He screamed.

“Don’t you raise your voice to me!” She hit him again.  He felt his own body twitch and jerk against her arm and he peed himself.  He couldn’t hold it, her knee was pressing into his stomach.  He felt the warmth trickle down into his pants and his mother hissed and dropped him on the floor.

“What the fuck are you doing? You go and clean yourself up and don’t leave your room you hear me? You understand me?”

He cried an unintelligible yes and ran into the bathroom, not understanding anything.

When he went to his bedroom the Shadow-man was gone.  He wrapped his dead grandmother’s blanket around him and curled onto the floor.  He watched the light in the hallway change colors as his mother watched TV.  She went to the bathroom an hour later and slammed his door shut when she walked by.  He closed his eyes and told himself over and over that it would open, that it would just open up, all by itself, and it would stay open.  It would never close, it would get stuck open, the hinges wouldn’t work. Open, open, open.

He heard the floor creak.  He opened his eyes and the Shadow-man was there, half-bent over, like he was checking on the boy for a fever.  He stood up like an old man and reached out a red and black hand to the doorknob.  He opened it, never making a single squeak or whisper.  He looked back and forth between the door and the boy like he was looking for appreciation.

Derrick sat up and looked at this man, his friend.

“I want to talk to you Shadow-man.”

The same tilt happened to the man’s head.

The man stayed standing and so Derrick stood as well.  His bum throbbed sharply and he grimaced.  The man tilted his head even more to the side.  Derrick thought it might fall off.  He put a hand to his butt and rubbed gently, feeling the rage build inside him.

He played the scene tonight over in his head and looked into the eyes of the Shadow-man.

Kill her, he thought.  Kill her, strangle her, watch her die, watch her go away, make her go away.  He thought harder and harder, sure that the Shadow-man would see his thoughts, make them happen.  Kill her, kill her, kill her.

The man turned towards the open door and stepped outside.  Derrick followed him out, keeping close. The living room flashed blue and green as the television switched channels.  The volume was too loud. Derrick hated her more.

She looked up to see him in the hallway.

“What are you doing out of bed? Didn’t I fucking tell you not to-”

The Shadow-man grabbed her neck and she clutched at hands that she couldn’t feel or see.  She stared at Derrick, her eyes bulging and wide.  Her face got redder and redder.  She choked out words but Derrick didn’t bother trying to understand them.  He rubbed a hand along his backside again as she flailed and jerked against the man.  The man’s eyes were even darker now, changing almost as fast as his mother was dying.  They went from milk-white to a dark slime color.  Derrick thought he looked better that way.

His mother was crying now.  Thick, fat tears dropping out of her eyes as she pleaded with her son for reasons she didn’t even know.  He felt a pity for her, like a cat feels pity for the mouse he played with too long.  Kill her now, make her dead, kill her! He thought.

The man squeezed harder and he heard a crack.  It sounded like when he popped his finger-joints first thing in the morning to wake them up.  His mother fell limp on the couch.  The man stood and turned toward the boy.  Derrick breathed in and breathed out.  He stopped clutching at his fingers and instead tilted his head so far to the side that his vertebrae rubbed and popped against each other.  His eyes sparkled like dark stars and he felt solid and grounded for the first time in his life.  He looked at the Shadow-man and the man tilted his head as well.  Their own salute.  Derrick opened the door, went down the stairs, and walked away.

The man followed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cassandra Mortimer is currently working towards a BFA in Fiction at Emerson College, where she does nothing but read and write and life is better that way.  She has been published in a few collegiate literary magazines such as The Writer’s Block Anthology and The Emerson Review but looks forward to branching out.  She lives in Boston, MA with a bunch of writers who gnaw on each other’s works, and she loves it.