Amy of the Necromancers
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Chapter One: Mud
The night before my first day of junior year, I wake up with the Itch.
I slip down from my bunk bed, my bare feet soundless on the wooden rungs of the ladder. Sarah, my older sister by a year, snores softly in the bunk below mine. I watch her slack-jawed face for a moment before padding out of the dark room.
Moonlight illuminates the short corridor from our room to the living room. I pass the room that belongs to my oldest sister, Maddie, with its handmade sign on the front that proclaims, Do not enter! Magic is happening. I tiptoe through the living room and dining room and kitchen, a short trek, and pass my parents’ bedroom and the bedroom shared by Aunt Betty and Grandma. I grab a key off the island counter as I pass.
Crossing the laundry room, I squeeze between plants Maddie has been repotting, bags of soil, piles of laundry for ironing, and a broken chair, and slip out the side door into the backyard of our double-wide. My bare feet enjoy the sensation of fresh, cool soil in the warm night air as I walk between tomato vines, rows of mint and rosemary, sunflowers with their heads bowed, and the bed of root vegetables sticking out their tufts of green. My nightgown flutters against my skin in the warm breeze, and my short auburn hair, tangled from sleep, brushes my shoulders. In the moonlight, my miles and miles of freckles stand out even more starkly against my pale skin than they do in the sunlight.
The garden sprawls on an uphill slope from our house with the garden shed looming over it, white against the dark, mossy tree trunks beyond our property. I slide my key into the padlock and click it open. The door, white-painted wood like the walls, swings open. I slip inside, close the door so no one can see the light from the house, and pull the chain to light the bare bulb above my head.
It’s not as though I want to keep what I’m doing a secret—everyone in my family knows what happens when I get the Itch. But I don’t want to be interrupted, and I don’t want an audience. These moments are mine alone.
More potted plants, bags of soil and fertilizer, and empty pots clutter one side of the garden shed—the gardening things in our laundry room are the overflow from the shed. To the right is a chest full of tiny drawers, each with a hand-written label identifying the seeds nestled snug inside. The seeds come from a dozen varieties of roses, orchids, tulips, bougainvillea, daffodils, and carnations, none of which I would have been able to identify by sight; others, from every type of squash and pepper you could imagine along with tomatoes, eggplants, and berries. Garden tools hang from the wall, most of them cast-iron heirlooms with wooden handles passed down to Maddie from Grandma and maybe even from her Grandma.
In front of the door and below the light bulb stands a hand-made table so covered in work stains, weather stains, burn marks, and dents that the original color is almost indistinguishable. I approach the table and lay my hands palm-down on the surface, feeling the urge that drove me from my bed fill me like hunger, or a fever—no longer just an itch.
I take a bucket from below the worktable and set it on top. Then I empty a bag of soil into the bucket. I take a watering can and fill it from the faucet outside the garden shed, careful not to let too much light escape through the door as I go out and back in. Standing before the worktable again, I water the soil. I feel confident in my every move, driven and sure the way I almost never feel when I don’t have the Itch.
I don’t have to think. In fact, if I tried to think, it would disrupt my confidence and make me forget what I’m doing and how to do it—how much soil, how much water, how much time. The Itch doesn’t operate on logic and has nothing to do with my brain; the Itch is a knowledge nestled somewhere inside the coils of my gut or the folds of my muscles. Mama says that’s probably why it strikes most often at night, when my conscious mind has less of a hold on me.
I water the soil in the bucket until it becomes muddy sludge. Then I set down the watering can and slowly lower my hands into the bucket. I knead the dirt, combining water and soil until it’s an even, black mud that makes you want to curl your toes in it, or rub it on your skin to feel the silky residue it leaves behind. I let my hands rest in the mud for a moment, my eyes closed, breathing in the scent, like freshly tilled earth after a spring shower, and feeling the heavy, smooth texture, like cake batter. Gradually, other scents waft from the bucket into my nose: lemonade on a summer’s day, old carpet, motor oil, baby shampoo, wet dog. It must be a household pet, then; a well-loved one. The mud grows warmer, and shapes begin to form under my hands, like clay molding itself into the form it was meant to have.
I’ve brought back pets before. They usually want to go back to their houses, but of course, that’s a bad idea. The children might be happy if their beloved cat or dog or bunny came scratching at their door, but the parents would be terrified, would dig up the patch of dirt where they had buried Spot or Lady or Chase and find the corpse still there, rotting. And their pet would also be nuzzling the delighted children, wagging its tail, eating the kibble if the parents hadn’t gotten rid of it yet, disputing its territory with any new pet the family had found to replace it. Who knew what would come after that? Even if they are accepted back into the family, any pet I bring back can’t stay forever; they often fade away in the night when it’s time to go, leaving nothing but a pile of garden soil. If they were home, their families would feel their loss all over again.
No, I always keep the pets with me when I bring them back. I talk to them, and sometimes they understand me. I try to explain to them that they’re dead, and it’s time to move on. Sometimes it works. Other times, they just come to realize it on their own. Maybe the scents and tastes of the world feel wrong to them; maybe the sun doesn’t warm their fur the way it used to; maybe the howls of the neighborhood dogs in the night don’t call them to join in. Then they know, in the same way I know what to do when the Itch strikes, that they don’t belong here anymore.
I’ve never had a pet of my own, but I’ve fostered plenty of dead ones. It’s not so bad that they always have to leave. It feels right. I always see in their eyes the moment they understand, and I feel at peace along with them.
The shapes inside the bucket become more solid, more defined. I frown, my eyes still closed. It doesn’t feel like fur under my fingers, though it’s hard to tell through the mud. I feel out a limb, then another. A head; my fingers comb through silky hair. Maybe it’s one of those long-haired dogs, the kind you have to bathe and brush every day.
But then my fingertips trace over eyes and a nose, and my own eyes fly open. The head is emerging from the bucket. Fingers poke out, and hands stretch up toward me. I grab the creature under the arms and haul it out, setting it down feet-first on the worktable.
There’s no mistaking it: this time, I haven’t brought back a household pet.
I’ve brought back a child.
Chapter Two: Child
The child stands only a little taller than me, even on top of the table. They can’t be older than three. As always happens when I first bring something back from the dead, I can’t distinguish any features yet; the child’s face and clothes and limbs are muddy, but if I ran water over them, there would only be more mud underneath—at least for now. The child stands there, blinking mud-filled eyes at me. They don’t cry or laugh or try to run or reach for me. It always takes the animals I bring back a few hours at least to start developing their old personality, too.
I stare at the child and they stare back at me for what must be at least a minute. Well, I assume they’re staring at me, because their muddy eyeballs are pointed my way.
I’ve never brought back a human being before. Of course, I knew it might be possible, but I always assumed it would feel different, that it would take some different sort of procedure. The child rose out of the mud no differently than dogs or deer or birds.
My head pounds, the headache more intense than usual. That’s different, at least. I suppose bringing back a whole human being put more strain on me than I’m used to. Suddenly, I want nothing more than my bed. I usually leave the animals I bring back in the garden shed overnight, since they just stand around until the morning, anyway, but I can’t leave a child out here.
I take the child under the armpits again and set them down on the floor; then I take their hand, switch off the bulb, and lead them out of the garden shed, locking the door behind us. The child makes no protest, shows no signs of wanting to go anywhere but where I lead them. I take us in through the laundry room and into the kitchen. Then I stop and look back; the child has left a trail of muddy footprints. I sigh, but my family will understand, and my head hurts too much to bother with cleaning up.
I lay some old towels on the couch and lift the child onto them. They lie down without protest, like a doll that only becomes animate when I push a button. They blink muddy eyes up at me, still without pupils or irises or whites, though a hint of eyelashes are coming through the mud. I drape another old towel over the child’s body and tuck in the edges.
“Good night,” I say.
The child doesn’t answer.
I stare at them a moment longer. Where did this kid come from? What happened to them? Who are their parents? What am I supposed to do now?
My head pounds so hard my eyes water. I stumble into my room, climb into my bunk, and fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. I have lots of jumbled dreams that I only remember in flashes when I wake. I’m pretty sure there was a little girl in most of them, dark-haired with pigtails and a little yellow dress.
When I open my eyes, my head doesn’t hurt as much. Golden sunlight streams in through the curtains. I groan and stumble down the ladder; Sarah is already up, her bed made.
When I trudge into the living room, the child lies on her side like I left her, hands clasped together under her head. I started thinking of the child as her while I slept, though she still doesn’t have any distinguishing features. No, that’s not right; I crouch in front of her and peer closely at her face. The formless blob that was her hair is resolving into the pigtails I dreamed about, and I can see the shape of her nose and mouth more clearly now. It still doesn’t feel quite real to me that I actually raised her from the dead.
I stand up and go into the kitchen. Only Mama and Grandma sit at the island counter, sipping coffee. The clock on the microwave tells me I’ve missed the first two periods of my first day of junior year, and I’m well on my way to missing the third.
Grandma smiles. “Good morning, Amy.”
“Sarah couldn’t wake you up,” Mama tells me, “so we let you sleep. We figured last night took a lot out of you.”
I blow out a breath and plop into a chair beside Grandma. My head doesn’t hurt anymore, but it still hasn’t gone back to normal. I feel as though someone played around with my brain, shuffling thoughts and memories so I don’t quite know where to find everything; my skull feels tender when I run my hands through my hair. It’s a little like after I come back from an episode in my therapist’s office.
“It’s a little girl,” I say.
“Mm,” Grandma replies, sipping her coffee. She and Mama seem unconcerned. “Bound to happen sooner or later.”
They say I inherited Grandma’s auburn hair and freckles, though on her, both faded with age. She wears her tissue-white hair long, tied into a braid, and the sag of her skin doesn’t conceal the fine bones of her face, her high cheekbones, her bright blue eyes framed by thick lashes. She has a liveliness to her that makes her seem much younger, or maybe it’s that she seems much more alive than younger people do. It makes her take up more space than you’d think with her slight frame.
I inherited my build from Mama. Unlike Grandma, Mama and I are both stocky. Thick-boned, round-faced, with plenty of meat on our frames, as Mama says. Mama’s hair is dark and curly, like her daddy’s; we both have Grandma’s bright blue eyes, though.
“You knew I could bring back people?” I ask.
“We thought you might, one day,” Mama admits. “There’s oatmeal. You’ll have to make coffee.”
I take a deep breath and gather my wits before getting up to gather my breakfast. I wash last night’s mud off my hands in the kitchen sink; it browns the water as it flakes off and swirls into the drain.
“Do you know who she is?” Mama asks.
“Not yet.” I don’t look at her. I know who she’s talking about.
Sometimes I know a pet’s name right away, especially if it’s a dog who’s well-trained. You’d think a person, even a little one, would know their name better than a dog, but maybe it takes a person longer to come back all the way. It nags at me as I fix the coffee and warm my oatmeal in the microwave.
I’m not ready to ask until I sit back down with my breakfast. “Have you heard of…any little girls…dying lately?”
Mama shakes her head. She isn’t as upset as I’d expect about a little girl dying, isn’t as upset as I’m starting to get thinking about it. I’ve gotten used to pets and wild animals. This is different, though.
The more I think about the girl in my dream, laughing and swinging on the swings, blowing out her candles and playing in the sprinklers—I might be conjuring some of these things up in my imagination, I’m not sure—the more upset I get that this little girl didn’t get more of a life, didn’t get to grow up. But Mama and Grandma just sip their coffee thoughtfully.
My family doesn’t look at death the way other families do. None of them are scared of it. Most of them aren’t even sad at the thought, not even Aunt Betty, who cries at Christmas specials on TV. Not even Daddy, who doesn’t have any of the Art—nothing ever seems to upset Daddy, though, really.
“Haven’t heard anything,” Grandma says. “We looked at the obituaries in today’s paper. Nothing about a little girl. We have the papers from the last two weeks stacked in the laundry room. You should look through them just in case.”
“Shouldn’t you tell me to go to school?” I mutter through my oatmeal.
My eyes sting, but I don’t want to cry in front of Grandma and Mama. Not that they’d criticize me for crying about death; it’s just that I know they don’t feel the same way. It makes me feel like there’s something wrong with me.
“I’ll drive you over there if you want to go.” Mama pours herself and Grandma another cup of coffee from the pot I made and sits back down, unhurried. She’s still in her nightdress and slippers.
That’s another way our family isn’t like other families: they don’t think school is that important. If it were up to them, we wouldn’t go at all. But Mama never finished high school, neither did Grandma or Aunt Betty, and Daddy works all day, so they can’t homeschool us—not legally, anyway. Not that they’d teach us much if they did homeschool us. They think any knowledge worth knowing is what you seek out on your own.
I understand their point of view, but all my friends go to school, and my sisters, too—Maddie graduated high school a few years ago—so I’ve always gone. It’s going to be kind of embarrassing, being late to my first day of junior year. It almost makes me want to pretend to be sick and skip today altogether, but that would put me behind right from the start.
After breakfast, I get dressed and gather my school things. Mama, who’s thrown on a sundress and traded her slippers for sandals, joins me in the living room.
“You’ll take care of her, won’t you?” I ask, pausing at the couch to look down at the little girl.
Mama lays a hand on my shoulder. “Of course, Amy. Don’t we take care of everyone you bring back?”
“A dog or cat is different.”
The little girl’s cheek is growing visible through the mud, along with the collar of her dress. It’s the little yellow one I saw in my dreams.
“She’ll be okay, Amy,” Mama says as we slip out the front door and head down the overgrown gravel path to the driveway, where our beaten-down pickup truck resides. “Don’t worry about her. It’ll be nice having a little one around the house again. It’s been so long.”
Sure, it’s been a long time since I, the youngest one, was three. But Mama’s acting as though having a little dead girl in the house is the same as having a little live one. I drag my feet through the gravel.
“She might be scared,” I say. “If something bad happened to her…”
Mama laughs. “I know how to take care of children, Amy. Come on.”
