Necromance in the Air - Chapter I - (Fiction)

Deadend job

Chapter I - Deadend Job

If you’re new to Necromance in the Air it’s easiest to navigate the rest of the story so far using the contents page here -

Photo by Jose Losada on Unsplash

“Hot coffee, heating, witty repartee — what more could you possibly want, Felix?”

There is a smell of expensive aftershave in the air. It diffuses across the office space, colliding with the body odour coming from the opposite side of the room, where Felix sits.

“Purpose? Some kind of validation for my existence? Maybe just being told, ‘good job, Felix,’?” He snapped before flicking the wooden stirring stick from his coffee into the bin on the other side of the office.

“Good job, Felix. That’s the third evening in a row that your little coffee stirrer has ended up in the bin.”

Leaning against the office door, with his shirt sleeves rolled up and a look that screamed, ‘I’m better than you, but don’t worry — you can’t compete. I’m freakin’ awesome,’ was Errol.

“You know that’s not what I meant by validation.”

“Felix, look at all those faces out there. You’re in charge of all of them. You’re the man, the boss, and it’s not like it’s a hard job.”

Felix gazed out through the mirrored glass window across the office floor. There were over a hundred cramped cubicles filled with chattering heads trying to sell, con, or trap as many unsuspecting ‘customers’ as possible.

“Doesn’t it just seem a bit of a waste?” Felix said.

“Don’t go wandering down that path, Felix. You’re doing fine. Sure, there’s some moral grey area that we’re hovering in, but is it really all that bad?”

“We’re conning people.”

“No, no, we’re not. Those guys are, you’re just managing their day-to-day activities, or their nightly activities, in your case.”

“I’m not sure ‘they’re just following orders’ is a defence for me. It’s usually the other way around.”

“Aha, but you didn’t give the orders. You’re more like a physio for a football team — You’re not calling the shots, just keeping the players running.”

“A physio?”

“Exactly.”

“Errol. My job is to make sure a room of undead heads remain animated. I’m the shittiest necromancer.”

“To be fair, Felix. You’re just here to maintain the reanimation. Could you actually reanimate someone yourself? I’m not sure you’re qualified to call yourself a necromancer. The shittest stooge? Oh, henchman, you can be a henchman, or is it henchperson?”

“Of course I could reanimate someone, you smug—” Felix pushed off from his desk, riding in the office chair. The wheels caught on his robes and he slid off it onto the floor in a heap.

Errol let out a bark of laughter, then turned on his heel. “Nice seeing you, Felix. Stop overthinking things. You’re doing a great job. See you in the morning.”

Felix clambered to his feet, huffing and puffing. “It’s not validation if your voice is dripping with sarcasm, Errol. Errol? Oh fine, just walk away.”

He grabbed his coffee cup off the desk, tutted at the ring it left behind, then took a swig. Remaining standing, he opened up the daily logs, checked the productivity on the customer relationship manager, then opened up Necro-link. The bespoke in-house software that monitored thaumaturgic readings across the cell centre floor.

Felix muttered as he clicked through the settings, then rolled his eyes when he noticed the build up of error logs from the day shift. It was always worse when someone decided to try a new international con. The problem was where the agents had come from. If you want to run a scam in Italy, you need to go and dig up a few dozen Italian speakers. Trying to get British heads to speak another language was…well, it was just as hard as it was when they’d been alive.

“Must’ve had this conversation a dozen times at the weekly team meeting. The British do not cope well with other languages. Would it kill us to get a few foreign heads in here?” Of course, Felix knew it was expensive. Foreign enchantments were trickier. Only idiots think Latin is the solution to everything.

The phone on his desk started ringing, and he scowled at it. Someone on the floor was having an issue. He lifted to his ear at the same moment he dropped back into his chair.

“Support desk, Felix speaking.”

“Evening Felix. I was hoping it was you. We were wondering if we’d be able to get a little down time tonight.”

“Madeline. We’ve spoken about you organising the…agents before.”

“No, no, no. This isn’t a union or anything. We were just hoping to watch a little telly at some point.”

“Madeline. The last time I put the telly on, three agents started screaming about alien invasions.”

“It was Star Trek. The olds died before it was made.”

“Right, and what happened?”

“You had to mothball them.”

“Yeah, three new heads.”

“I could do a survey about—”

“You can’t do a survey Madeline. You’ve got no hands to write a list and everything is done by whispering. How about this? I’ll put the radio on for feeding time?”

“Can barely hear it over everyone chewing.”

“And you can come for a chat in my office.”

“It’s playing favourites, Felix. You know they’ll talk.”

“So?”

“Oh alright then. Oh, Geoff’s jaw fell off over night. We tried to tell whoever was on, but they didn’t answer the phone.”

“Bastards,” he said, hanging up the phone.

Above the monitor was taped a handwritten map of the office space. It was drawn in various different coloured pens with annotations scribbled over it, most of them in Felix’s own spidery scrawl. The plan was drawn on 4 pieces of printer paper that had been taped together and was what Felix disingenuously called a ‘working document’. This actually meant it was inaccurate and indecipherable to anyone other than Felix and the few others he shared this office space with.

“Where are you Geoff? Come on, row four, column C, there you are. Oh, well that’s just bloody typical, isn’t it?” He muttered to himself before standing and opening the metal cabinet by the office door. From it, he withdrew a clipboard and an ancient amulet. The amulet glowed with the faint purple colour of inter dimensional possession, it also had several badges and hair clips on the company issue lanyard it was attached to, though they didn’t contain any magical power, well, other than the power of ‘personalisation’ which was largely frowned upon by the higher ups.

He gave the Darth Vader keychain attached to it a little tap on the head and muttered, “we know the power of the dark side, Darth,” before slipping it over his head. Finally, he picked up a large open jar of what could easily be mistaken for vaseline mixed with glitter. On the side of the jar was a piece of masking tape with ‘all-purpose magic goop,’ written on it. Beneath the masking tape, in a worryingly reddish brown ink, was a complex series of runes which seemed to move if you stared at them for too long.

Fully prepped, Felix made to leave, then stopped himself at the last moment. “Gloves, Felix. Don’t forget the gloves.” He grabbed a pair of disposable medical gloves from a cardboard box and spent several minutes trying to get them on without dropping the goop he still held in one hand.

Touching the goop without gloves wasn’t just dangerous, it was practically suicidal. Not that the job was dangerous, it was just that accidentally coming into direct contact with the goop could lead to some serious side-effects, not least finding your hand possessed by an unintended third party. It wasn’t always permanent, but it might take several days before someone from tech support would get around to fixing the issue and in that time a rogue hand possessed by the wrong demonic entity could very well have taken control of a local political party and shifted the balance of power in local government causing a sudden change in lobbying to privatise previously functioning public services for the benefit of nefarious third parties.

He took a deep breath and began humming the Charge of the Light Brigade. It wasn’t necessary to hum anything at all, but there was something about walking between rows of resurrected heads talking to unsuspecting members of the public that demanded a little dramatic effect. Also, no matter how many times he had done it before, it was shitting scary.

Row four, column C. That put Geoff, and his slack jaw, on the other side of the call centre floor. He looked up and let out a curse. The strip lights in that corner of the room were flickering. It went without saying that the flickering was ominous. Everything was bloody ominous when you working in necromantic circles. Things that should be the opposite of ominous became imbued with a kind of crushing layer of dread and evil, buttered toast would appear to have the burnt in images of screaming souls in them, the last egg in a box would somehow become threatening and demonic runes would appear in its surface preventing anyone from cracking it open for fear of unleashing a tentacled hell-beast from the seventh dimension of Hell. It was just the type of thing you grew used to.

He stepped over tangled wires and throbbing organic tendrils that joined the terminals and heads, keeping a watchful eye on any loose pulsating veins, and disconnected Cat-4 cables. An ongoing war was being waged between IT and Necrotech over who was responsible for cable management. So far it was Felix and the on-floor management, who seemed to be the only victims. In every war, there were casualties. The cable management skirmishes had claimed Deborah as its most recent victim. She had worked mornings. Now parts of her were gurgling in row six by the water cooler. It had been horrific…but Felix couldn’t argue that the lag on video calls had got a lot better since she’d been subsumed into the system. Deborah had always been one for clean living, wouldn’t shut up about whatever fad she was into, but it makes sense that a corpse in better health is a more efficient demonic conduit.

“Excuse me, Debs,” he muttered as he stepped over something that might have been part of her intestines, or might have been an ethernet cable. Not for the first time, Felix wondered why there hadn’t been more research done into wireless internet usage. Apparently thaumaturgic waves caused interference, but surely, in his limited understanding of these things, they could try different frequencies or something?

As he reached row four, the conversations he passed filtered through, despite his attempts to hum away the horror.

“Hello, we’re just calling about a package we’re supposed to be delivering. Yes, unfortunately there’s been a customs charge. Hm, it’s quite hard to read, looks like it might have been written by a child in orange crayon, oh, granddaughter, is it? Yes, well, it’s probably some kind of surprise they packaged up, you know what kids are like.”

“Yes, Mr Timpson, the charges appear to be of a, um, sensitive nature. I mean, we can send the bill, but the envelope, well it doesn’t leave much to the imagination and sometimes customers complain, especially if they, um, might have subscriptions their other half is unaware of…oh, the card charge is very discreet, says it’s insurance, nobody bats an eye at that…”

They were unscrupulous bastards, but then they were also the heads of dead people. There wasn’t even any way to know if they were in their own heads. Felix wasn’t involved in acquisitions, but the general rule seemed to be, get a head, perform the rites, and then stick them through the customer service training for three days. Then you had a ready-made call centre scam artist, with the bonus of them being undead…which means their employment costs were…well, you can’t employ dead people, the government hates it.

Geoff was staring at the screen, glassy eyed, while making clicking noises. The entirety of the bottom of his face had fallen off, taking his tongue with it.

“For Christ’s sake, Geoff. They didn’t even take you offline. Bloody lazy.”

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Note

This is the first Chapter, several more to come. If you’re a subscriber and you don’t want to open ‘EVERY SINGLE BLOODY EMAIL’ you get from me, then I’ve put some things in the headings to help.

‘Fiction’- it contains a story/chapter/some fiction writing.

‘Update’- it doesn’t.

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Just a reminder I have books and stuff… You know…

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