Dead Ends

Margaret Locke had an appointment with a dead man.

Actually, she had several appointments. But now, she found herself alone in an alley with a strange man, and she found that her schedule had changed. She narrowed her eyes at him and shouted some rather rude words, but the man was unfazed. She reached into her pocket and prepared to take extreme measures.

He shuffled and swayed as he followed her. His mumbling was incoherent, and his eyes were cast downward. Part of Margaret was angry. If he was bold enough to follow her here, the least he could do was have the courage to look her in the eye. She quietly cursed herself for never having taken that magical self-defense course. No matter. Her pen would do. She tightened her grip around it and began to click the pattern.

Then the man stepped into a stray beam of light. Margaret’s breath caught in her chest.

Poor thing. He doesn’t know he’s dead.

Margaret had assumed he was drunk, his stumbling and slurring the result of a night well-spent. No wonder he hadn’t minded her shouting. Most men would have been scared off by that, while a few others may have at least jeered before advancing. She paused and let the distance between them close until she caught the familiar stench of the dead.

She held up her hand and extended her index finger. White light shone at the tip of her it and illuminated the alley. She looked at his face. It was gaunt but otherwise undamaged. He was certainly dead, but he didn’t seem to be aware of his condition. He pawed at the air and mumbled something at her. Did he think the same thing she had? That he’d had a night out and had a bit too much to drink? She shook her head, half disgusted and half sympathetic. He moaned again, his features straining to the familiar position of a crooked smile, perhaps a suggestive look. It wasn’t that effective, what with the rigor mortis and all. He called to her again. If he’d been alive and had a fresher tongue, her sympathy likely would have vanished. As her brother liked to say: no man was that dead.

Put the guy out of his misery.

Margaret gave him a once-over. He didn’t belong to anyone from the looks of it. No manacle, no brand, not even a nice colored ribbon to tell him apart from all the other undead running amok in this shithole. People really needed to learn to take care of their property. Necromancers weren’t cheap and were hardly ever worth it to begin with. Undead armies were fun in theory, but even fresh corpses were too fragile to stand a real chance against an organized militia. As laborers they were alright but only for the mundane tasks. They never had enough of a brain left to get past basic motor function.

This guy was fairly fresh. Definitely against regulations. Risen corpses were only legal for work if they’d been in the ground for at least a few months. Enough time for the soul to shuffle on to whatever awaited them beyond the veil and to guarantee that the husk they left behind was just that. It was the only way to keep the market ethical. The necromancers hemmed and hawed at this law. Apparently, the longer they were dead, the harder they were to raise. Then again, why get into the darker magics if you’re going to moan about the difficulties of it?

Perhaps she was being judgmental. Margaret had never bothered with magic. She preferred the order of law to the chaos of magic. She could do little more than open drawers and light candles when it came to the arcane arts. In times like this, she wished she’d at least taken a self-defense course. A simple hex would have done the trick. Instead, she had to rummage in her coat pockets until she found her pen. She clicked it three times before bringing her hand back out. In seconds, she was flanked by men in pale green uniforms, each brandishing a staff.

“Where’d you pick this stiff up from?” one of them said with a sniff.

“Not too sure. Didn’t notice him until I got to the alley. No ID on him, though, so best we get him back to Marshall. Then we can figure out where he belongs.”

“Think it was a grave robbery?”

“Guy this fresh? Doubt it. He looks like he napped on the slab and woke up here.”

Both of them raised their eyebrows. “You don’t think Morty went and did this, do ya?”

Margaret shook her head. “I doubt it, but we won’t know for sure until we get him looked at. He needs scanned to see what magic touched him last, see if there’s traces in the database to match him to.”

The pair nodded and moved forward with their staffs. The undead man slowed to a stop and watched. As the ends of each staff began to spark, the corpse moaned and shuffled backwards. His brain was still fresh, and he at least had the remaining sense to shy away from any form of pyrotechnics.

Margaret whistled at the Cadaver Catchers. “Hey, he’s still got some brain cells swimming around, so tone it down a bit. Last thing we need is for him to get agitated.”

The men grumbled but complied, resorting instead to the far more dignified approach of casting a rather large net from the end of a staff and ensnaring the poor sod. Margaret rolled her eyes but said nothing. The job was done, and that was all she needed. One of the Catchers held the staff with the net while the other used his to draw a sigil on the ground in yellow light.

“When you drop him to Marshall, tell him to give me a call, would you? I won’t be in until morning. I have a few stops to make tonight.”

The Catchers nodded in acknowledgement as the sigil was finished and began to glow brightly enough to illuminate the entire alley. Margaret took a few steps back; those teleportation rituals blew out hot air that dried out her eyes every time. In a flash, the Catchers and their cadaver were gone, and Margaret was alone once again.

She pulled a notebook from her pocket along with her pen. She was careful to click it only once.

-Drop in at Faxfeld Farms – check that changes have been made to ectoplasm inspections, consent forms

-Deliver records to Anders for case against haunting of Hillshire

-Mausoleum inspection at Brokenhelm

She frowned at the list. She was behind. At this rate, she wouldn’t even have time to go home and change between her appointments and seeing Marshall. It normally wasn’t the sort of thing that bothered her, but when it came to seeing her old coworkers, she began to fuss about appearances.

She didn’t have time to whine about it. She had to get a move on to make her first appointment. Reggie Faxfeld had a habit of chatting the night away, and he would be her first stop. She pocketed the notebook and continued to the end of the alley where a phone booth awaited her. Its blue paint had chipped away over years of use and abuse, and the panes that had once held glass were almost all bent. Margaret wrinkled her nose when she opened the door; the box reeked of piss.

That was the thing about working a night job. Didn’t matter the pay or prestige – you got the same treatment as all the other night lifers: poor lighting, slim choice of eateries, and unreliable transportation. Margaret pulled a small, blue coin from her pocket. A light mist billowed from it, and the metal was as cold as ice. She pushed it into the coin slot, picked up the phone, and punched in: 003.

Thank you. Your driver will be arriving in approximately: one hundred fifty-three seconds, a voice rasped. There was a dismissive click, prompting Margaret to hang up the phone. She gladly exited the phone booth and inhaled less piss-saturated air.

The seconds loitered about before shuffling on to allow for the next. By the time one hundred fifty-three seconds had passed, it had been ten minutes. Margaret sighed in relief when she heard the familiar rumble of the midnight chariot.

There was no horse at the head of the carriage. Well, no real horse, anyway. It was a horse’s ghost, then a donkey, then an ox, and so on until the cycle started from the top again. It was easy to trick a horse’s ghost into old habits by summoning him to the physical realm directly at the head of a carriage, but after a few minutes the horse would nearly always remember himself and wonder why it was bothering with work in the great hereafter. Once it disappeared, another draft animal was summoned in its place, went through the same moment of enlightenment, and made room for the next.

Upon the driver’s seat of the cart was a young woman. She was wearing a short-sleeved button-down shirt that left the tattoos on her arm exposed. The tattoos were not, however, for personal expression. They were sigils and incantations, all linked to her necromantic work. By inking them on her skin, she cut down the complications of her ritual significantly. So long as she kept uttering the necessary words, she could drive the cart and summon her specters at the same time.

The woman raised an eyebrow at Margaret as she whispered the incantation over and over.

“Faxfeld Farms, please,” Margaret said as she pulled the door of the carriage. A puff of icy air blew out as the horse departed. The woman’s tattoos pulsed with green light for several seconds until a ghostly mule appeared in the horse’s place.

The woman nodded. Margaret climbed inside and scarcely got the door shut before the carriage started down the road. She felt something tap against her side. She reached into her pocket again and pulled out a different notebook. It was slimmer than the first; it only had a few pages cover-to-cover. The telebook tapped against her palm again, prompting her to open it.

Words were writing themselves onto the page in the familiar penmanship of Marshall Corpick.

Boys said you found this one just wandering about? Where in the hells was that?

Margaret fished a pen out from her coat pocket and jotted down her reply:

In the city. Can you believe that? Not far from Bokkin’s.

Bokkin’s Brews was a popular pub near the center of the Blaze Borough of Candlewick. It was a neighborhood staple. Even on a weeknight it was busy, so the odds of an undead strolling through unnoticed were slim to none.

And yet, it had happened.

There was a pause on Marshall’s end.

You’re joking, he wrote.

Not at all. I could hardly believe it myself. Thought it was some drunk bloke following me home, she wrote. No reports from anyone on it?

None. But I don’t see how that could be. And no ID either, so he doesn’t belong to anyone.

Or he wasn’t marked because he wasn’t acquired legally. Deadmen aren’t allowed to be as fresh as him. Too much of a risk.

If you raised the dead before their soul got the chance to move on, you risked trapping their soul in a rotting body, which was no fun for anyone. The soul gets confused, and the body gets irritated that it’s under someone else’s management again. All in all, it made for a rather awkward situation at best and a downright deadly one at worst. Souls that were angry enough inspired the body to lash out, and the body seldom stopped its rampage unless someone started breaking pieces off.

What necromancer would risk having his license pulled like that? And for a single deadman?

Margaret’s pen hovered above the page. She wasn’t fond of necromancers. They tended to be as snobbish as wizards, as shifty as witches, and as creepy as the corpses they raised. But she couldn’t imagine any of the ones she knew being stupid or bold enough to start raising fresh corpses under the radar.

I don’t know, she wrote. But we’ll have to start making some house calls.

Marshall didn’t write a reply. She closed the book and tucked it away again. She glanced out the window and saw the cityscape slowly change towards stretches of fields dotted with trees. They’d be only a few minutes from Mr. Faxfeld’s now, and the normal routine of her night would fall back into place. Yet, the closer they got, the more the fresh deadman popped into her mind. He’d had no clue what was going on. She almost felt bad for calling the Catchers right away. Then again, she’d seen deadmen turn on people in an instant.

Hopefully, Marshall wouldn’t treat him like cattle. He probably knew better. But these sorts of jobs took their toll on people. They roughed them up and gave them calluses in places they never knew they could exist. Margaret had felt her own form in the past few years. Still, she knew death was a jarring transition for everyone, and she imagined that dying and undying so close together was bound to make anyone’s head spin.

At least all his parts were still attached to him, she thought.

That you saw, anyway, she reminded herself. She shuddered. Dying, undying, then seeing you had less of you than you had before was anyone’s nightmare.

The carriage slowed to a stop. The woman stomped her foot twice, shaking the carriage and signaling to Margaret that they had arrived. She slid out from the carriage and saw that now a one-eyed ox was pulling the carriage.

Margaret rummaged through her pocket until she found a few silver coins. She put them into the bucket next to the young woman’s feet. She nodded her thanks to Margaret and, still whispering, snapped the reins and began driving back towards the city.

Before Margaret now was a large, blue barn at the head of several acres of farmland. The lanterns inside the barn were all lit, emitting a dim green light rather than white light. Ghosts preferred light similar to their own, and they typically were within the green-blue hues. Unless they were wraiths. But no farmer in their right mind wanted a wraith on their property.

Margaret steeled herself and walked towards the open door.

“So, ya see, that’s why I had to switch the headstone material,” Faxfeld told Margaret. She was finishing her report as they approached the entrance of the barn. Her inspection, which should have taken her fifteen minutes, took an hour instead. Faxfeld had made the changes to ectoplasm inspections, ensuring they were alchemy-grade before shipping containers off to apothecaries, but he insisted Margaret come see the changes he had made to the graveyard as well.

Whenever specters were gathered for work, their bodies and therefore their graves had to be moved within a mile of the worksite. Mr. Faxfeld had thirty specters on his farm, which meant he needed a nice, roomy graveyard to keep them all happily working and producing ectoplasm. He had wanted Margaret to admire the enlarged plot sizes, fresh headstones, and the flower garden lining the fences. Then he had her speak to the ghosts to ensure that the changes were well-liked.

“My Dead Speech ain’t what it used to be,” he’d told her. “I prolly sound like a simpleton.”

She didn’t dare correct him that perhaps it wasn’t the language giving that impression. Ignorance, she had found, was bliss. And, in Mr. Faxfeld’s defense, all manner of ghosts were fairly judgmental of the living. Dying once tended to give ghosts the impression that they knew all there was to life.

The specters had liked the changes, though Mrs. Haring thought the flower arrangements could be better. Margaret didn’t translate this part. It earned her a stinkeye from Mrs. Haring, but Margaret couldn’t afford to breach the topic of flower gardening if she wanted to get out of there before sunrise.

She then had to speak to the specters and get them to fill out their annual consent forms. They were here of their own will, their working conditions met all the legal standards, they were not chained by unfinished business undisclosed by their employer, etc. She filled them out for them before having them seal it with a smudge of ectoplasm, proof of their participation. She thought it was a bit gross, no matter how often someone assured her that ectoplasm wasn’t a bodily fluid, strictly speaking. She sealed the forms in a plastic bag and was carrying them under her arm as she and Mr. Faxfeld walked out of the barn together.

“The new material is a nice touch. Granite, you said?” Margaret said absently.

“Yessum, lot better than the ol’ limestone. They were a bitch to keep clean,” Mr. Faxfeld said as he lit a cigarette. Then he remembered himself. “Beg your pardon.”

A smirk surfaced on Margaret’s face. The implication of Mr. Faxfeld’s apology was, in theory, more offensive than the cursing. Not that she minded either.

“Why are you apologizing? Do you think I fall under that category?”

Mr. Faxfeld’s weathered skin flushed for a moment before he caught Margaret’s smile. He scoffed and grinned at her. “Ya nearly had me there. Naw, my ma used to tell me to keep my mouth clean in front of ladies. Prolly an outdated thing now.”

Margaret softened a touch. “I think it’s nice,” she told him, and she meant it. People like Faxfeld showed their thought for others in those ways. It was the language they spoke best. Unfortunately, it was a language that was dying out.

Mr. Faxfeld bowed his head sheepishly. “It’s nothin’.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I’ve kept ya long enough. I’ll get my end of the forms signed an’ drop them at the office when I go into town.”

“Sounds good to me, Mr. Faxfeld.”

“Reggie’s alright. D’ya want me to call a carriage for ya?”

“That’d be great. I just need to get up to the mausoleum in Backbrook—”

She felt that tapping again against her side. She motioned for Mr. Faxfeld to wait a moment while she pulled her telebook out and checked it.

Need you back at the office ASAP, Marshall wrote.

Before Margaret could reach her pen, another sentence scrawled itself out:

Your deadman. He’s talking.