Going Through a Bad Spell
Ratho Station, nine miles west of Edinburgh
As the sun rose over Ratho Station on Monday, the cloud of ash that wreathed Edinburgh in darkness was visible in the distance, black smoke from hundreds of small fires curling up to join it.
By 10 o’clock in the morning, an anxious and panicky crowd had crammed itself into the primary school gym, congregating in small groups, although they were unaffected otherwise a creeping belief in magick was spreading around the village, and the name Morrigan was seeping into their heads for the first time.
The blare of an air horn silenced them, drawing their attention to the stage where Jeffrey Lopez, professor of anthropology, waited to speak, the air horn dangling by his side, making people wonder what sort of person needs a belt clip to carry their very own attention getter.
The answer was that he was a small man with a big ego who combed what little hair he had left across the top of his head, almost covering his baldness.
“Ladies and gentleman, we need to fight fire with fire and protect ourselves with apotropaic magick,” which was a fancy way of saying use good luck charms. He was what’s known in academic circles as a smart-arse.
He stood for a moment as people looked around in puzzlement, wearing the same smug expression on his face he always had when nobody understood what he was talking about, which wasn’t a good trait for an educator to have.
“Put cutlery under your doormats,” he said, continuing once he felt he’d proven his cleverness (but since he didn’t understand the difference between knowledge and intelligence, he clearly wasn’t as bright as he thought he was) “the Christmas baubles you have in your lofts have their origin in Celtic mythology as witch balls,” he kept talking to leave no room for the obvious jokes, “hang those in your windows,” which led to suppressed sniggering, “you should also carve a pumpkin or swede into a face, hollow it out and put a lit candle in it then leave it on your doorstep, as practiced in the ancient ritual on Samhain eve, or Halloween, as it’s now known.”
“I saw a fairy at the bottom of my garden this morning, should I have talked to her?” A young woman in the middle of the crowd said, holding her hand halfway up shyly.
“Not under any circumstance!” he snapped, “You’re not Cinderella, and that wasn’t your fairy godmother. Fairies are fast, strong and would fly through you like a bullet without giving it a second thought.”
“I feel,… believe that there’s a goddess called Morrigan, should we pray to her?” an elderly man at the back said, raising his walking stick to attract attention.
The professor was of Mexican descent, with no Celtic blood, and although the evidence of his own eyes led him to believe in magick, Morrigan could never control his thoughts so he wanted to say no, but felt that there was a good chance that a crowd of Celts driven by superstition would burn him as a heretic, so he said, "Of course you should,” instead.
It was a chilling measure of Morrigan’s growing power and influence, that not a single person doubted him, and when the meeting broke up everybody left to do exactly what he told them.
Meanwhile, Mortimer Ghoul was six miles away, travelling down the M8 towards Ratho Station in his old Ford Capri.
He wasn’t paying attention to his driving and swerved from lane to lane as he worried that the tingling all over his body, he’d woken up with, was the start of a heart attack. Fortunately, traffic was light that close to Edinburgh, given the state of the city.
He and his car had a lot in common; they were both nearing fifty years old, had been traded in for newer models on several occasions and neither one was properly maintained.
Until the age of ten, when he got a magic set for his birthday, he was almost a normal child. The “almost” part coming from his habit of wearing a three-piece suit and bow tie to class and if there was ever a person destined to wear a top hat and cape for a living, it was certainly Mortimer Ghoul.
In his last year at school, the careers advisor, looking at his impressive exam results, had recommended that he go to university to study biology, so naturally, he called himself Mortimer the Magnificent and became a professional magician instead.
When he got to the birthday party he was performing at the parents told him they didn’t want to alarm the children, so he should keep things as normal as possible, which was a strange request for someone wearing a top hat and wizards’ cloak who made objects disappear into, and out of, thin air on a daily basis.
The audience of nine-year-olds sat cross-legged on the grass in the garden as he started his act. Halfway through the show he opened both ends of a wooden box, tapping the inside with his wand, to show it was empty, closed it again and, as he moved his wand theatrically above it, said, “Hocus-pocus.”
Which, unfortunately for all concerned, has its Latin roots in ‘hoc est corpus meum’ (meaning “this is my body”) and that, combined with the pentagrams on his cloak, that he’d googled, made up a long forgotten, particularly nasty spell.
The pentagrams glowed and ectoplasmic green as the sudden noise of clawing and scratching from the back of the garden drowned out the plastic party streamers bursting out of the box to complete the trick.
Clods of soil shot high into the air, exploding out of the manicured lawn. Earth showered down on screaming children as they ran towards the house, tripping over each other in blind panic.
A dozen skeletal goldfish lay flopping helplessly in the dirt as three gerbils, in various states of decay, clawed their way to the surface to chase after the crying children, moving with a stiff and awkward gait.
Mortimer stood frozen in terror as the cadaverous remains of a tomcat stalked him on rigour-mortis legs, worms wriggling under its skin as it hissed and bared its fangs.
The tingling in his bones startled him into action and he turned and fled, trying to hurdle the garden fence, he caught his foot on the top slat and crashed onto the pavement, landing on his side and banging his left knee and elbow on the way down.
He jumped up and hobbled back to his car, as he slammed the driver’s door shut, what the fairies called cold iron, cut the supernatural connection and the zombie pets dropped, inanimate once more, as the parents dragged their sobbing children to safety.
And just like that, Mortimer Ghoul realised that, after spending decades faking magick, he’d been the real thing all along.
It was hours later when he stood in Boghead cemetery, two miles away from his home in Bathgate. He was leaning on a garden spade as he took a swig out of a half-empty bottle of vodka. His stage clothes and the wand tucked into his belt were all covered in mud.
Even though he lived twenty miles west of Edinburgh, talk of magick was spreading amongst the locals, as Morrigan got ever stronger, her influence spreading outwards and onwards.
In a few days, maybe less, they would be destroying technology and burning those accused of being witches at the stake. After that Bathgate, along with all the other towns that surrounded the city, would fall as Edinburgh had.
He’d been struggling all day with the inescapable truth: he was a necromancer and what, in all practicality, that meant, His thoughts went back to his poor wife who’d died at twenty-seven, over two decades earlier, and how he still missed her terribly.
It was a mixture of alcohol and self-pity that led him to be standing in front of her grave, reading the inscription by moonlight.
“VANESSA GHOUL
BELOVED WIFE”
Vanessa had hanged herself, a fact that her family didn’t want people to remember, so they decided to cremate her, to burn up what they saw as their shame but Mortimer refused to allow it as he felt he needed a graveside to visit and lay flowers at.
Which, with no help from them and inadequate insurance, left him with a stonemason who charged by the letter with very little money to pay for it, and that was how the headstone came to have a lot less on it than originally planned.
Piles of earth were heaped up at the graveside and down in the hole the coffin had been burst open and emptied. He wheeled a large suitcase over to the car and loaded it into the backseat, then climbed in behind the wheel, took a long slug of vodka, shuddered, and headed for home.
He sucked on the bottle as he drove, swerving violently across the empty road. The police had all left for Edinburgh days before, so there was zero chance of being caught, and he was too drunk to think about the consequences of his crashing at over sixty miles an hour.
In his living room, a few minutes later, he unpacked his wife’s skeleton and laid it out on the floor. Lying it on its back and assembling it as best he could, although he was never any good at jigsaw puzzles. He felt bad about doing it that way, but he somehow knew that he had to get her remains away from hallowed ground for his spell to work.
When he was ready he stood solemnly over the skeleton and said, “Hocus-pocus? Hic!” uncertainly as he fell down, being unable to steady himself with a vodka bottle in one hand and waving a wand with the other.
The bones shook and rattled as they knitted together, little sparks of hellfire fusing the joints until it was whole again. As she stood up awkwardly, it became obvious that he’d made a mistake when laying her out. Despite what the children’s song said, in this case, it was the leg bone that connected to the neck bone.
“Mortimer, dearest, how lovely to see you again,” she said with a giggle.
“Nessa, is it really you? How are you able to talk? You don’t have any vocal cords!”
“Here I am, the earthly remains of your dead wife, walking and talking of my own volition and that’s all you have to say to me, sweetie?” she said, glancing down at her bony form, “Aw, look at me, I think I’m a bit below my ideal weight.”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure that I can work out how to grow your internal organs and flesh back,” he said, trying to stand up before deciding that gravity was not his friend at the moment, “or, quite frankly, I don’t hold out much hope for our sex life.”
“Wonderful, there’s been a marked decline in the chatting-up I’ve received since I died,” she purred, squatting to run a skeletal finger down his cheek affectionately as he propped himself up on his elbows.
“Your parents said you committed suicide,” he said, as he recoiled from her cold touch in horror, banging the back of his head on the floor, “but I know you wouldn’t kill yourself––w-w-would you?”
“Of course not, Sweetie, you refused to choke me during our lovemaking, so I had to improvise. Never try auto-erotic asphyxiation whilst standing naked on a wooden stool in high heels with a noose strung from the rafters around your neck, would be my advice to you.”
He could never have afforded to build a monument to her in reality, but over the years he’d certainly put her on a pedestal in his memory, forgetting the seedier aspects of her personality, but now it all came flooding back.
Grabbing him by the throat, her bony fingers digging into his flesh, she pulled him to his feet, ”You’ll love being dead, the barbed wire whips that exquisitely flay the skin off of your flesh and all the other deliciously agonising tortures. It’s all you could hope for and more.”
He had discovered early and extremely painfully in their marriage, that Vanessa was a sadomasochist, a fact she’d kept hidden from him until the wedding night when she’d chased him around the bed naked with a riding crop shouting, “Giddy-up!” and, apparently, Hell wasn’t sufficiently nuanced to cope with that, and who could blame it?
“How are you doing that?” He croaked painfully, as she lifted him off the ground with one hand “You don’t have any muscles.”
“So many questions, sweetie, you tell me, you’re the necromancer, after all,” she said throwing him across the room.
“I thought you loved me,” he gasped as he climbed unsteadily to his feet and stumbled toward the door.
“Of course I do, Honey,” she said, pulling him back by his cloak, spinning him around to face her and hugging him tightly, his lips pressing against her lipless mouth.
She squeezed so hard that his bones started to crack, “And now we can make love for all eternity, turning slowly as we roast on a spit over the fires of eternal damnation,” she said as one of his ribs shattered, piercing his lung as she crushed the life out of him.
She let go as blood bubbled out of his nose and mouth, and his death rattle gurgled in his throat. He collapsed to the floor and, kneeling at his side, she stroked his hair soothingly and hummed a lullaby as he died.
With his powers gone there was a series of clatters and clacks and Vanessa Ghoul was just a pile of mouldering bones once more.