Monster Mash 2018 Entry - The Summoner

My entry to the Monster Mash 2018 Blog Hop.  

 The Summoner

Jack remembered how she’d said it repeatedly in an attempt to placate him. It’d always worked. ‘I love you.’ He wished he’d recorded it and kept it for himself. But it was too late now. 

Only the basement was left, where he’d kept her, with the trappings of each step of the planned transformation. She’d resisted at first, as most of the women he abducted off the streets did, but with persistence she’d relinquished and performed better than any other. 

Each night and at each stage she’d become more wordless. In the end it was only those three words that she’d been able to say. It had been part of the process. 

And now it was time to speak another incantation, because now it was time to complete the conversion. He’d undertaken each step as the book had said: he’d waited the required three years, returning to the place of burial on significant dates and performing the ritual. Now it was time for the final rite. 

He arrived early in the graveyard. He wanted to make sure he didn’t miss the strike of midnight. He found the tree he’d buried her under easily in the dark, he’d been so many times. He set out all the objects and the cloth and prepared the candles. Then he sat cross-legged for a moment, eyes closed, clearing his mind, summoning his energy. 

When he opened them, one minute was left before the first clock strike. He could see the tower from this side of the municipal graveyard. It was why he’d picked the spot. Others might’ve used their own gardens for privacy, but Jack found it easier to find privacy in public. People were less suspicious when you were out in the open, especially at night in a graveyard on Halloween. 

This thought caused him to glance round. Was he alone? He had to make sure; he didn’t want anything to go wrong. This had to be performed correctly or it could have disastrous consequences – not just for him, but for the townsfolk too. 

But he could see and hear no movement besides the breeze rippling the leaves in the tree above him, and rustling the tops of the grass, bushes and shrubs. He turned back to his buried treasure, hoping to hear those words again.

With the first strike of the clock he began to recite the words. He knew them off by heart. With each clock strike, the energy built. By the fifth the ground had started to lift, and by the tenth she was free of the ground and rising to meet him. When the twelfth struck it was as though someone had brought her out of hypnosis and she blinked, speaking the words he’d been longing to hear: ‘I love you’, but in chorus with a hundred other voices. 

He turned to find she wasn’t the only one risen: all around the graveyard other bodies had risen too.

But they hadn’t been prepared like she had: their limbs were in various states of decay, remnants of clothing hanging from their bones, putrefied and shambling. And more importantly they hadn’t received the intermittent invocations and anointments he’d brought over the last three years. What had risen couldn’t be tamed; it possessed demons Jack couldn’t control. He’d opened the entire graveyard to the dark realm unprotected. What had he done?

He scurried to pick up his ritual tools, his love stepping forward ready to be taken, but there was no time for that now; the fantasy of midnight love-making in a graveyard gone. 

The bodies were moving toward their summoner. He needed to get out of here. He grabbed his lover’s hand intending to take her to the safety of his car, but there were so many of them, their silent shuffling portending a fate he’d only imagined for his enemies. 

Jack was not a physically strong man, it’s one of the reasons he’d turned to the dark arts. He might be able to best a petite female and bundle her into his boot, but to fight a horde of undead infused with demonic power, not a chance. 

He tried to skirt them but they came from every direction, grasping onto his catatonic lover and dragging her down. He watched them take her, still trying to break free, but before he knew it his life force was being drained, his body abused, his life blood taken. His only consolation knowing that humanity would shortly be meeting the same end.