Expenses
Living forever isn’t worth it.
When I step into my Ossuary, where my crypt lay, I am reminded how I got here. Inside my musty crypt, the faint odor of rot still in the air, hangs my most recent acquisition: An old, faded portrait of a happy family. My family, moving to California, well over 150 years ago, to take advantage of the Gold Rush. I remember the affection I once had for them, but it is a memory of a feeling I long ago abandoned. I found it at an estate auction recently and purchased it, though I know not why.
There were few pleasures to be had while dead. I no longer desired food. It was not that I was not hungry, it was that it had been so long since I had been able to eat, that the pangs of hunger became a mere part of the background of my existence.
I no longer desired the touch of a woman. Even if I did, I could do nothing about it, my body had long ago rotted away into this skeletal husk.
Music had no meaning to dead ears.
The desire for companionship no longer held any meaning for me. I had abandoned my family long ago and they had been dead for over a century. I could resurrect the dead but the mindless beings I raised were no real companionship.
My powers were a pitiful mockery of the ones displayed by old stories, such as the ones in the Bible.
That was another thing. Faith. My family had faith. The only faith I had now was in the fact that one day I would be destroyed, and the Abyss would take me. It was my only fear, and it made my only goal putting it off as long as possible.
I sat down at my throne; what I called the work area I had built into a massive skull. It was constructed with the bones of the condemned. I began to write.
***
Reginald Hargrove. That’s what they called me once.
I was a tracker by trade, but I had hoped to find my own claim in California when word of the gold rush came to Arkansas. My son Robert, apprenticed with me as a tracker. He was remarkably skilled at it, probably better at it than I was. He was 16 when I packed him, my wife Elizabeth, and our daughter, Margaret, 9, who we called Molly into a wagon and traveled west from our home in Arkansas. We nearly lost Molly during the journey due to sickness. Robert stayed with her nightly, tending to her every need. When her fever finally broke, he was sleeping right beside her. Although they had a seven-year age difference, Robert doted on his little sister and the two grew much closer during the trip.
We finally made it to California and camped near Coloma, with thousands of others who had arrived with the same idea. We spent a month there with nothing to show for it, finally moving into an inn. Robert would hunt every day and bring back our supper for the next few nights, and he eventually became a tracker and apprentice bounty hunter with the local sheriff. I remember beaming with pride when the sheriff told me that my son was the best tracker he had ever seen. Elizabeth and Molly kept up with the cooking and cleaning as best they could, earning a bit of money from the innkeeper as well while I went out searching for a claim every day.
After coming up with nothing for almost three months, I was almost ready to give up. It was about that time I started hearing, well, them.
They were little suggestions at first, what I believed to be stray thoughts.
Go this way.
Say this instead.
I found, however, when I started following their direction, the voices came more often and were a bit more forceful. Eventually I heard one say, follow us and you will be more successful than any of these miners. We will show you wealth beyond your wildest imagination.
These words were the most I had ever heard from these voices, whatever they were. I should have known better. I should have visited the town pastor. Perhaps he could have set me on a better path and I would have never done what I did.
Late one night I awoke with the suddenness of being struck, though I felt no pain.
Get dressed.
Quietly, I got out of bed and put my clothes on. Elizabeth was a heavy sleeper, thankfully.
Take the shovel and a lantern.
I carefully took both items from where I had left them the night before.
Go outside.
I followed the voice’s direction until I came upon the town graveyard. Was I really following this right? I must be mad walking out here in the middle of the night. I brought my revolver with me, though I was a better shot with my hunting rifle, but that was locked up and I feared taking it out would cause too much noise. It was a cloudy night so I couldn’t, and the moon struggled to break through them and the stars were nowhere to be seen.
Go to the crypt.
I hesitated. The reason I brought the shovel was clear, but I couldn’t bring myself…
Do you want to take care of your family? The voice came as I contemplated my next act. Do you want wealth beyond your wildest dreams? Or do you want to go back to Arkansas, a failure?
Slowly I turned back around, walking toward the old crypt. The door was chained closed.
“Well, too bad, I have come all this way and it’s-“
Break the chain. No one will hear you.
I put down my lantern on a nearby gravestone, making sure the light shined on the chain.. I raised the shovel and struck the chain with the spade. I did it again and again, making sure it was on the stone of the entryway, finally breaking it. I pulled the chain away and opened the crypt. My nose was assaulted with the musky scent of mold and death. Someone had been entombed here recently, but not that recently.
With one hand holding the lantern to light my way and the other holding my nose, I continued on. The crypt was full of shelves, each one holding a mummified corpse.
Continue walking…now stop, turn.
Somehow, I knew it would be the oldest corpse.
Lift him up.
“I dare not desecrate the dead!” I argued.
Fool, you will master the dead!
“Master? But I thought you said I would be given wealth!”
You will be given more than you will know what to do with.
With that I lifted the rotting corpse. Several carrion insects scuttled away but underneath him, untouched by rot, was a book. Something old and ancient. I carefully picked it up.
Very good. Return home. Hide the book, let no one else see it!
I followed the order, finding a hidden panel in the inn’s wall to hide the text and the voices stopped. I began to study the book over the next few days. The language was strange. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. Of course, that is not saying much as I was no linguist. The more I looked at the strange text, written in fine, precise handwriting, I began to notice pieces coming together, forming words I could recognize. It was, as the mysterious voices had suggested, a book of the dead. Not just a book, of grimoire of sorts.
I almost threw the book into the fire when I discovered what it contained. A book of magic? Not just magic, but the foulest of magics! I was a good, Christian man, and had raised my family as such. I did not read the scriptures as often as I should have but I still made time for church every Sunday!
That had been the wise choice. The choice God was clearly leading me to. Instead, I put the book away and didn’t touch it again for almost a month. I thought by hiding the source of the evil instead of destroying it, I could resist the temptation.
Another foolish choice.
It was another month when our money started to dry up. I wasn’t sure what we would be able to do. That’s when the temptation started again.
Read the book.
We promised you riches.
Do you want your family to be destitute? Read the book!
Finally, I gave in, taking it out one Sunday, ironically, while my family went to church. I told me them I was too tired to go, and that they should go, and pray for our family’s future. I studied the book while they went to church and prayed. The spells were simple at first. Basic necromancy I suppose. Take a spider, boil, perform the ritual, and, to my surprise, the spell worked. The tiny creature was a slave to my commands.
Everyone in my family was now working, even little Molly, recently turned 10, was helping take care of some of the neighbor’s younger children. But instead of going to the mine, I studied.
Eventually I was confident enough attempt the spells on a human being. A few days prior, a young man, a few years younger than Robert, had been gored by a bull and was buried in the same graveyard that I had found the book. A sacrifice of purity was required for such advanced magic. I bought a spotless rabbit in town and slew it by the light of the full moon. The sacrifice was enough, and the poor lad rose that night.
I had learned enough to give the formerly deceased man instructions and he obeyed them: I had given him an extra sensory ability to detect rare minerals. Every night he would go out and search and, before morning light struck, he would return to his grave, and rebury himself. The next night I would raise him again. His abilities were limited, all he could do was see and move and detect, but I could read what he sensed in that rotted brain of his.
It took several nights of careful guidance before he found a deposit of gold that no one had claimed. The next morning, I struck out immediately and found the spell had worked: One of the largest deposits of gold that had been discovered so far. I staked the claim and began digging and throughout the night I had my servant dig. Unfortunately, the act of digging was too much for the risen corpse and I had not yet learned how to make my servants more durable, so he did not last much longer before his weak form gave out. Even so, it was no problem to mine there myself until a new fresh corpse became available.
The riches came in fast and within a week I had paid off our debts and moved us out of the inn, buying a property outside the city. My wife wondered why I wanted to purchase a home so far away from the inn, and I told her I wanted to live somewhere close to the claim so no one could steal it. That seemed to satisfy her, or maybe she was just so happy to leave the inn that she didn’t question it. The real reason is I didn’t want people seeing their dead friends and relatives bringing me the wealth they had gathered throughout the night into the city. While in the inn I had them leave what they found at the site itself but now I could have them bring it directly to my home before they went back to their daily slumber.
We even commissioned a portrait of our family, now happy and healthy and successful, which is the same one I now have hung in my crypt.
As I grew more skilled in magic, I was able to raise more servitors, and control them at once. I was able to stop working completely myself. I had ordered my servitors to build me a laboratory inside the claim and was able to hide it with the magics I had learned. This is where I spent most of my time now, and perhaps this was another another thing that doomed me, as I spent all my time reading the book, idle hands being the devil’s tools. I was now reading about advanced necromancy. Something about living forever attracted me. Given my dealings with such dark forces I began to doubt my place in heaven and started to greatly fear death. The more I read the book and mastered this forbidden art, the more I feared it. In my nightmares I could feel the pull of death.
The ritual for eternal life was complex, but I think, or rather, I thought I had the components down. However, I was confused about the passage: The sacrifice must be of the purity of the caster’s blood. The caster’s blood? My blood? My blood was far from pure, I thought. But that seemed what it was saying. I prepared the vessel, the object used in what would become my phylactery, with a bit of my blood and prepared the rest of the ritual.
At the height of the spell, I cut myself, pouring my own blood into the prepared chalice, drank it and poured the rest into the phylactery. The results were immediate.
I fell to my knees, retching, shaking violently, my hand going to my throat. Something was wrong. I looked at my hands, then my arms, dark veins ran up them and I felt a hard pounding in my head before I lost consciousness.
You fool!
I woke to find myself surrounded by ghastly beings. Horrible, skeletal monstrosities dripping with bits of rotting flesh.
These had been the voices, I recognized them now. What sort of horrors had I followed?
“Wh-what happened?” I rasped, horrible pain tormenting every segment of my body.
“You will be dead within a day,” said a skeletal humanoid with a crown and a cloak wrapped around its frame, its voice high and almost mocking.
“You have poisoned yourself,” another, a more eloquent, educated voice coming from a skeleton wearing a tattered suit said.
“You must sacrifice that which comes from your blood,” said another, this one much less humanoid, appearing to have great skeletal wings and six fingers on each hand on foot. It was naked except for a loincloth and its voice was even lower.
“I-I don’t understand!” I rasped, my throat burning with fire.
The fourth figure was covered in a dark robe, an eldritch tentacle sliding out of the robe’s bottom and a horrific single eye that that peered unblinking through the cloak’s hood. “The purity of your blood is not your own, fool. If you do not perform the proper ritual soon, the abyss will devour you.” I don’t know what language it was speaking or how I understood it, but it was clear what it meant.
“What?” I croaked. “No, I would never do such a thing! I-I’m a good man! I provide for my family!”
“You have desecrated the dead and blasphemed against your God,” the robed abomination said, it’s voice deep and rumbling. I felt the cave shake with its words, though it may have been my fever. “You could have been content with that you had, but you wanted more, and that has led you here. You have a choice: Wait, and Death will claim you, or take the final step, and rule Death itself.”
“I will not do it!” I screamed at them.
“Then stay here and die!” they all said at once and vanished before me. I could hear their hideous laughter echoing off the walls as they vanished.
Weeping into my hands the pain struck me again, agonizingly painful. No, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t. But it was either this or death.
***
I carried the heavy burlap sack over my shoulders as I walked back into my workshop late into the night. The agony was terrible but not debilitating as I put the struggling bag onto the sacrifice table.
I couldn’t believe I had done it. I couldn’t believe what I was about to do, that it had come to this.
I pulled the bag off of the sacrifice and looked into wet, terror-stricken eyes.
“I’m so sorry about this, Margaret,” I said. Her wrists tied together, and her mouth gagged she shook her head in terror.
I knew she wouldn’t understand, just like I knew she would never forgive me.
Once again, I prepared the ritual.
It didn’t take long; the pieces were already in place with Molly being the final part.
I held my ritual knife high, repeating the incantation.
I started to bring the knife down and…I almost didn’t do it, I almost convinced myself it was better to die than to perform such a dreadful act.
Pain tore through my body with such intensity than the rest was just instinct, I cut my daughter’s throat and collected her essence while she gurgled, her blood spitting up from behind her gag.
I drank the concoction, putting the rest into the prepared phylactery.
The spell was complete. I felt energy surging through me, the sickness being chased from my recovering body.
I fell to my knees and wept over my dead child, cursing myself for what I had done.
I stayed there in that cave for several hours. It was now morning; the orange yolk of the sun was struggling to rise over the mountains in the distance. Surely Molly would be missed soon. I hadn’t thought of that, as desperate as I was to survive the Death’s coming specter.
I put a stained sheet over my daughter’s body. The blood had congealed, no longer pouring out of her, but what was there caused a red mark on the sheet.
I went back to work. I wasn’t sure what I could do about the horror I had committed, but maybe the answer would be revealed to me if I studied the text more, which I kept deeper in the cave.
I read until about noon, finding no solution. Any spell to raise the dead was useless, she would become like my other servitors, a mindless husk, her body continuing to decay until nothing, but bones remained. Try as I might, I could find nothing that would return a soul that had left the body. My own soul would enter my phylactery upon the destruction of my mortal form, but it was obviously far too late for Molly.
It was about that time when one of my outer alarms went off. I ignored it, it was probably one of my servitors returning to the cave to work. After a few minutes I suddenly realized it was daytime. All my servitors were in their graves for the night.
Cautiously I got up, pulling out my revolver. As I turned the corner to the ritual room, I saw a figure had lifted up the sheet over Molly and was staring down at her. When I entered the room, the figure lowered the sheet and a familiar form stared at me, tears streaming down his face.
It was Robert. The best tracker in town. And he had tracked down his beloved sister.
He was holding his rifle and staring at me with a look of betrayal, sorrow, and pure hate.
“Pa…how could you?” he said in almost a whisper, though I could still hear it.
This was going too far. Now my son needed to die too? I started raised my pistol.
He was faster with his rifle, taking me right in the chest, throwing me back against the mine’s wall. Even he looked surprised that he had shot me, but it was no matter. I was now a master of death; my body would repair itself. The pain was excruciating, I could feel my organs bleeding, dying.
Wait, this wasn’t right.
My eyelids started to droop. The last thing I saw was my son cradling the body of his sister before my consciousness faded all together and my last thought was that it had all been for nothing, as the spell didn’t work.
I was wrong. The spell had worked.
I’m not sure how long my corpse lay in the mine but when my eyes opened again it was dark out. I could feel my leg moving involuntarily with a biting pain. I kicked my leg and the coyote chewing on it yelped and ran away. As I got to my feet and examined myself, I realized I was dead. My hurt was no longer beating. I could still breathe but every time I took a breath was like a dagger in my chest.
It took a long time to become the skeletal form I am now. And each step was unbelievably painful. I could feel the maggots as they burrowed their way out of my flesh. I could feel the army of ants as they devoured my eye. Somehow, I could still see despite losing my eyes, hear despite losing my ears, and think despite the rotting meat of my brain being devoured by vermin. I tried to kill the little beasts but every time I rested more of my body was gone.
I don’t know why my son left me in the mine, perhaps he couldn’t bear to tell his mother what his father had done. I did not desire revenge against my son. He did what any good son and brother would do: He destroyed the monster that had murdered his sister. A part of me was proud of him.
I moved much deeper into the mountains after my body’s death, knowing in my condition I could not be seen by anyone. My study into the book continued and soon I learned how to make more complex creations. They still had no mind of their own, but I could give them more complex tasks. I could even perform illusionary magic to cover myself and my servitors. I also learned the phylactery would not keep my body alive, like I had assumed, it would store my soul, allowing me to find a new body if my current, skeletal, form was destroyed.
A lich. That’s what I was called. A master of the dead, by the word simply meant corpse, as that was all that I was.
I am no longer in California. I am no longer even in the United States, living in a country now where it is far easier to hide an Ossuary such as mine. The local tribe worships me as a god of death, sacrificing to me and giving me more servitors. had bought the portrait in an attempt to remember the compassion and love I once had for my family. I do not feel it anymore, but I remember enjoying the feeling. But even now, after all this time, I feel nothing.
All I feel is the call to the Abyss. Those voices, those demons I now realize they were, had lied with the truth, as demons are want to do. I have great wealth. I have power over death. But I lost everything I ever wanted out of life. Even the tribesmen who worship me are more a necessity than something I enjoy.
The Abyss, hell, is far worse than I feared. No fiery puts, no demons with ironic tortures like in Dante’s work.
No, it’s worse than that. It’s nothingness. It’s oblivion. In the Abyss you are alone with the one being you hate the most: Yourself. No God. No Satan. No family. No friends. Just nothing. I can hear it. I can hear the emptiness. I can hear it scraping against my mind, its shadowy tendrils seeking me out, knowing that I have escaped its grasp.
It is the only thing that has kept me from my own destruction. One day, someone may put an end to me and the horrors I’ve unleashed on this world. If not, then I suppose I will exist until all life is burned away from Earth.
-Reginald Hargrove
***
After I finished writing I closed the book and stood. Returning to my crypt I examined the family portrait. On the left was Elizabeth, her warm smile, long brown hair, pretty pink dress. In the middle was Robert, handsome, strong, a smile on his face with an arm around his mother, a hand on his sister’s shoulder, wearing a work shirt and bowtie, his brown hair neatly combed. Molly, her blonde hair in pigtails, a big smile on her face, in a light blue dress. And finally, me, an arm around my son, the other hand on my daughter’s other shoulder, wearing my best suit and tie. I took down the portrait, broke the frame and burned the remains.