Assisting the Necromancer

ASSISTING THE NECROMANCER

by Marie Pabelonio

(Content warnings: grief, death of a loved one, mentions of war)

“Please don’t mind the singing bones.”

It was a good sign, thought Helena, both literally and figuratively. The words were painted in elegant script on a guidepost that pointed toward a lane embraced by sycamores and the chorus of a lively hymn. The necromancer had been very specific: Helena had to traverse the Bone Road from Widow’s Peak three times on a particular day, at a particular hour, in a counterclockwise loop. If she heard singing, she had come to the right place. If she found herself in the middle of a marsh surrounded by boggarts, she had gone too far, and would have to begin the journey again on a different day.

Such was the nature of the places necromancers chose to live, in the realms in-between, where the paths could be treacherous. 

There wasn’t much else Helena knew about necromancers. She had been a housekeeper all her life, and while she never worked for a witch or wizard, let alone a necromancer, she was still glad to be of service. You see, her last employer was a well-to-do family who announced, rather abruptly, that they were moving to the other side of the continent and could no longer afford to keep their staff. The war had been hard, they told her. Everybody had lost something vital, no matter what their upbringing. 

Needless to say, Helena applied for a new situation immediately. The clerk at her local employment office looked dubious. 

“Why not take your savings and get yourself a room by the sea?” 

Helena couldn’t think of anything so mortifying as that. She didn’t want to retire yet, you see, even though she had just turned five and sixty. Yet despite the stiffness in her joints and the fact that she now needed glasses to read the newspaper, Helena still possessed all the restless energy she’d had when she was in her twenties. What would she do with all those hours by the sea? 

She could imagine pacing restlessly back and forth along the strand, or perhaps the boardwalk, looking out into the deep blue waters and wondering if she should throw herself into them instead. No, she couldn’t bear to be so idle, so alone with her own thoughts. Unfortunately, the prospects of securing a new situation were dim. The war had happened and the world was changing. Helena feared she would be one of the many left behind.  

Then, at last, an inquiry.  

“Do you have any experience with magick?” the necromancer wrote. 

Helena replied that she did not. But while she knew nothing about charms or curses, she reiterated that she was steadfast, loyal, and hardworking. She could keep his weekly accounts so that his ledger was balanced. She could make a note of what he liked for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and prepare the menus for all three. She could supervise the shopping, the cooking, the mending, and the washing. Or do all four herself if he did not have a cook or a housemaid.

He told her he lived alone, would not require most of her skills, but very much preferred someone who knew no magick at all. Helena replied that, to her knowledge, she did not have an enchanted bone in her body.

“When can you start?” he asked. “Also, you may call me Bertrand.” 

•••

Bertrand Coffin (yes, Coffin) lived in a cottage at the end of the Bone Road. The cottage had a thatched roof, a stone well, and a small garden full of vegetables. Towering over it all was a weeping cherry tree, which still had pink blooms even though they were deep into summer. The whole scene would have made for a lovely painting in an earl’s gallery, had it not been for the skulls.

The skulls were placed on short wooden poles that surrounded the cottage like the most horrid fence you had ever seen. Despite their ghastliness, they were at least cleaned and polished. And their teeth were very neat and straight! The singing was not bad either. If Helena closed her eyes, she could pretend she was in a church. The verses were foreign to her. Even if she couldn’t comprehend the words, she could still understand their meaning somehow. “Welcome,” they seemed to say. “Rest easy. Lay your cares aside.” 

“I can cast a muffling spell if the singing bothers you,” said Bertrand (it was the singing that alerted him to the front door). “They may sound lovely now, but mind you, that all depends on the guest.” 

Helena hoped that meant the skulls thought well of her. 

Bertrand’s home was a little like himself: fussy and cluttered. Not at all what Helena expected of someone with the power to raise the dead. Later, he would correct her: “No one can raise the dead,” he explained. “Anyone who says they can is just playing parlour tricks with corpses, which is extremely unkind to the corpses in question.” 

He was much younger than she was, too. About half her age, if she were to guess. So it didn’t make sense that his flyaway hair was more grey than hers. His eyes were different colours as well: one brown and one a light amber, as if it had been drained of pigment. He was also very pale and thin, almost sickly. Which was quite curious, given that he lived in such pleasant conditions.  

“I spend a lot of time journeying into the underworld,” he said. “For most people, it’s a one-way trip. But for people like me, we can go back and forth as much as we like. That’s not without its price though…” 

•••

The cottage had two bedrooms. One on the main floor, which was overwhelmed with books. Even though every inch of the walls was covered in shelves, books had made their way onto the floor in higgledy-piggledy piles. “You can leave your things in the spare room down here,” said Bertrand. “My room is up in the loft.” He nodded toward a rickety set of stairs, which was also laden with books on every other step. “You can clean whatever you like, but please leave the things in my room as they are. I’ll never find them otherwise.” 

Helena said she would respect his privacy, but she understood her work was cut out for her. There was a sink full of dishes and a long wooden table meant for eating, but which instead teemed with scrolls that had strange symbols on them. Dried herbs hung from the rafters in colourful garlands and dripped their cuttings over every surface. 

“Where should I begin?” she asked, and felt the question was perhaps more profound than she intended. Where could an old woman like her begin, indeed? 

“Good question,” said Bertrand. “First, the fruit.” 

•••

The fruit from the underworld looked like no fruit Helena had ever eaten. It was something like a very white peach. When cut in half, she could see that its insides were red and wet like the chambers of a heart.

Outside, the skulls ceased their singing. Only the chirping of birds filled the woodland quiet. 

“You’ll need to eat the fruit if you’re to see the Visitors.” 

“Visitors?” 

“The dead,” said Bertrand. “They come here to leave remembrances for the living. It will be your job to make sure the exchange happens without trouble when I’m not around.” 

“Has there been trouble in the past?” 

“Yes. Mostly from people who know magick,” he said, winking. “It’s very tempting for those who know the Arts to try to glean secrets from those who’ve passed on. All that really does is upset everyone involved, and then I have to move the cottage somewhere else along the Bone Road.”  

“What makes you think I won’t try to glean a secret or two myself?” 

“I don’t,” he said. “Which is why you must eat this fruit.” 

So it was a test. 

She raised one half of the fruit to her lips. It was soft and smelled of… spices? Anise, maybe. Or ginger. How odd. Summoning her courage, she bit into the flesh. The fruit tasted like nothing, though the texture reminded her of the middle of an orange. When she swallowed, a memory rose up within her. As strong and as vivid as a moving picture show. 

She was a little girl again, wearing a red dress with white daisies on the hem. She was holding her father’s hand as they let loose a paper boat with a candle in it. It sailed across a dark pond alongside other paper boats. A whole fleet. Later that day, her father would kiss her farewell at the train station. She remembered the soft felt of his uniform. The smell of his aftershave. He was going to war, you see. Which war, you ask? There were so many. There was always a war, Helena thought. And there would always be fathers saying goodbye to their children. 

When Helena raised her head again, she was surprised at the tears in her eyes. 

“What did you remember?” asked Bertrand, handing her his kerchief. 

“I remembered the last time I was ever truly happy.”  

•••

Time passed strangely in the cottage, and the twilight hours always seemed to last the longest. Bertrand assured her this was perfectly normal. “It makes it easier for the dead to cross over here.”

Helena did what she could to keep busy. The memory of her father shook her, and she did what she could to clear it from her mind. She put away the book piles, organized the shelves by letters she could recognize, and took down all the curtains and the linens to be washed and dried on a line in the garden. Bertrand gave her free reign to do her work, coming down from his loft only for tea and dinner. She found that he rarely ever had breakfast or lunch and slept in well into the afternoons. At first, Helena worried about what they were going to eat if the cottage was so far away from any town or city she knew. Then Bertrand showed her the pantry and the ice box and how the food in each never seemed to run out. “A gift from one of my Visitors!” 

Then one day Bertrand  put on his hat and cloak and told her that he would be gone for a while. He didn’t know when he would return, but she told him she would make sure everything was in order while he was away. 

“Make sure you listen to the bones,” said Bertrand. “They’ll let you know whether to keep the door open or closed.”

“Stay safe,” she told him. 

When he turned his back, she could almost imagine the set of her father’s shoulders as he too journeyed to the land of the dead. 

•••

Helena’s first Visitor arrived after midnight. She was sitting by the fireplace, darning one of Bertrand’s socks (he had many mismatched pairs). The fire was crackling merrily, though it used no logs to do so. Bertrand told her to prod it with the poker once to get it to stop and start. When the clock struck twelve, the bones began to sing. This time, it sounded as though they were chanting a children’s rhyme. The highs and lows reminded her of skipping rope.

She made her way to the back door. “Back door for the dead and front door for the living! Don’t mix these up!” was the note Bertrand had left for her. 

When she opened the door, she braced herself for a ghost. A wraith, perhaps, rattling in chains. But that wasn’t right, she thought. The bones would have sung a different tune. When she opened the door, there was a boy on the stoop. No older than ten, maybe. He was a skinny thing, with bare feet and a school uniform that would have been fashionable twenty years ago. 

“May I help you?” 

The boy turned and spoke not a word. “The dead no longer speak, but they can say things in other ways,” Bertrand told her. “Take whatever they give you and don’t let them into the house.” The boy held out his hand to place a chess piece into her palm. A black rook. His fingers were frozen to the touch, colder than the insides of the ice box.

She thanked him and locked the door behind her. Carefully, she placed the rook into a dish shaped like a seashell in the entranceway. “The important thing is to keep their treasures safe. Sooner or later, someone will come to claim them and you’ll know who they belong to.”  

The next day, someone did. A young mother who followed the Bone Road several times before finding her way to Bertrand’s cottage. The bones began to sing an elegy, wave after wave of lamentations until their voices faded into the wind. When Helena gave her the rook, the mother staggered. As though she were dealt a very hard blow. 

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you.” 

•••

On and on it went like this. Another night, it was a ballerina who left a pair of worn shoes. The night after, a farmer who left his rake. The night after that, a doctor who left his wedding ring. Helena kept them all and waited for those who would claim them. She wondered at this exchange, at the meaning of it all. Perhaps the dead left these things behind so they could move on. Perhaps the living needed them so they could move on too. Helena was doing only what was expected of her and felt useless. What was she in the face of all this grief? If only she could wash it away from the world as easily as she could wash out stains. 

But perhaps it wasn’t her place to wash it away. Perhaps the best she could do was bear witness. To witness and open herself like a wound to the rawness of feeling. Sometimes, she would lie awake in bed thinking of her father, thinking of him as she had not done since she was little. A weight in her chest bore down on her, so heavy she felt she would be crushed. Is this what it meant to be alive? Is this the secret only the dead truly knew? To live and love bravely. To live and to love anyway, even though all that you have ever loved was already gone. 

How terrifying. 

How wonderful. 

Perhaps Bertrand’s cottage was simply a rest between the notes. An interval between the song of life and death.

The next night, there came a knock upon the door and the bones sang again. The song was soft and slow, a lullaby that evoked a placid dreaming. Dutifully, Helena answered the call and the bones fell silent. 

There was no one there. 

But at her feet, a paper boat, with the candle still burning.