Circus of the Damned

“Lawrence, break the circle, please!”

He said something, too low for me to hear. I leaned as close as the blood would let me get and said, “What?”

“Larry, name’s Larry.”

I smiled, it was too ridiculous. He was worried about me calling him Lawrence instead of Larry with a rogue zombie climbing out of the dirt. Maybe he’d snapped under the pressure. Naw.

“Open the circle, Larry,” I said.

He crawled forward, nearly falling face first into the flowers. He scraped his hand across the line of blood. The magic snapped. The circle of power was gone, just like that. Now it was just me.

“Where’s your knife?”

He tried to look back over his shoulder but couldn’t manage it. I saw the blade gleam in the moonlight on the other side of the grave.

“Just rest,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

He collapsed into a little ball, hugging his arms around himself, as if he was cold. I let him go, for now. The first order of business had to be the zombie.

The knife was lying beside the gutted chicken he’d used to call the zombie. I grabbed the knife and faced the zombie over the grave. Andrew Doughal was leaning against his own tombstone, trying to orient himself.

It’s hard on a person, being dead; it takes a few minutes to wake up the dead brain cells. The mind doesn’t quite believe that it should work. But it will, eventually.

I pushed back the sleeve of my leather jacket and took a deep breath. It was the only way, but I didn’t have to like it. I drew the blade across my wrist. A thin, dark line appeared. The skin split and blood trickled out, nearly black in the moonlight. The pain was sharp, stinging. Small wounds always felt worse than big ones… at first.

The wound was small and wouldn’t leave a scar. Short of slitting my wrist, or someone else’s, I couldn’t remake the blood circle. It was too late in the ceremony to get another chicken and start over. I had to salvage this ceremony, or the zombie would be free with no boss. Zombies without bosses tended to eat people.

The zombie was still sitting on its tombstone. It stared at nothing with empty eyes. If Larry had been strong enough, Andrew Doughal might have been able to talk, to reason on his own. Now he was just a corpse waiting for orders, or a stray thought.

I climbed onto the mound of gladioluses, chrysanthemums, carnations. The perfume of flowers mixed with the stale smell of the corpse. I stood knee-deep in dying flowers and waved my bleeding wrist in front of the zombie’s face.

The pale eyes followed my hand, flat and dead as day-old fish. Andrew Doughal was not home, but something was, something that smelled blood and knew its worth.

I know that zombies don’t have souls. In fact, I can only raise the dead after three days. It takes that long for the soul to leave. Incidentally, the same amount of time it takes for vampires to rise. Fancy that.

But if it isn’t the soul reanimating the corpse, then what is it? Magic, my magic, or Larry’s. Maybe. But there was something in the corpse. If the soul was gone, something filled the void. In an animation that worked, magic filled it. Now? Now I didn’t know. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know. What did it matter as long as I pulled the fat out of the fire? Yeah. Maybe if I kept repeating that, I’d even believe it.

I offered the corpse my bleeding wrist. The thing hesitated for a second. If it refused, I was out of options.

The zombie stared at me. I dropped the knife and squeezed the skin around the wound. Blood welled out, thick and viscous. The zombie snatched at my hand. Its pale hands were cold and strong. Its head bowed over the wound, mouth sucking. It fed at my wrist, jaws working convulsively, swallowing as hard and as fast as it could. I was going to have the world’s worst hickey. But at least it hurt.

I tried to draw my hand away, but the zombie just sucked harder. It didn’t want to let go. Great.

“Larry, can you stand?” I asked softly. We were still trying to pretend that nothing had gone wrong. The zombie had accepted blood. I controlled it now, if I could get it to let go.

Larry looked up at me in slow motion. “Sure,” he said. He got to his feet using the burial mound for support. When he was standing, he asked, “What now?”

Good question. “Help me get it loose.” I tried to pull my wrist free, but the thing hung on for dear life.

Larry wrapped his arms around the corpse and pulled. It didn’t help.

“Try the head,” I said.

He tried pulling back on the corpse’s hair, but zombies don’t feel pain. Larry pried a finger along the corpse’s mouth, breaking the suction with a little pop. Larry looked like he was going to be sick. Poor him; it was my arm.

He wiped his finger on his dress slacks, as if he had touched something slimy. I wasn’t sympathetic.

The knife wound was already red. It would be a hell of a bruise tomorrow.

The zombie stood on top of its grave, staring at me. There was life in the eyes; someone was home. The trick was, was it the right someone?

“Are you Andrew Doughal?” I asked.

He licked his lips and said, “I am.” It was a rough voice. A voice for ordering people about. I wasn’t impressed. It was my blood that gave him the voice. The dead really are mute, really do forget who and what they are, until they taste fresh blood. Homer was right; makes you wonder what else was true in the Iliad.

I put pressure on the knife wound with my other hand and stepped back, off the grave. “He’ll answer your questions now,” I said. “But keep them simple. He’s been mostly dead all day.”

The lawyers didn’t smile. I guess I didn’t blame them. I waved them forward. They hung back. Squeamish lawyers? Surely not.

Mrs. Doughal poked her lawyer in the arm. “Get on with it. This is costing a fortune.”

I started to say we don’t charge by the minute, but for all I knew Bert had arranged for the longer the corpse was up, the more expensive it was. That actually was a good idea. Andrew Doughal was fine tonight. He answered questions in his cultured, articulate voice. If you ignored the way his skin glistened in the moonlight, he looked alive. But give it a few days, or weeks. He’d rot; they all rotted. If Bert had figured out a way to make clients put the dead back in their graves before pieces started to fall off, so much the better.

There were few things as sad as the family bringing dear old mom back to the cemetery with expensive perfume covering up the smell of decay. The worst was the client who had bathed her husband before bringing him back. She had to bring most of his flesh in a plastic garbage sack. The meat had just slid off the bone in the warm water.

Larry moved back, stumbling over a flowerpot. I caught him, and he fell against me, still unsteady.

He smiled. “Thanks… for everything.” He stared at me, our faces inches apart. A trickle of sweat oozed down his face in the cold October night.

“You got a coat?”

“In my car.”

“Get it and put it on. You’ll catch your death sweating in this cold.”

His smile flashed into a grin. “Anything you say, boss.”‘ His eyes were bigger than they should have been, a lot of white showing. “You pulled me back from the edge. I won’t forget.”

“Gratitude is great, kid, but go get your coat. You can’t work if you’re home sick with the flu.”

Larry nodded and started slowly towards the cars. He was still unsteady, but he was moving. The flow of blood had almost stopped on my wrist. I wondered if I had a Band-Aid in my car big enough to cover it. I shrugged and started to follow Larry towards the cars. The lawyers’ deep, courtroom voices filled the October dark. Words echoing against the trees. Who the hell were they trying to impress? The corpse didn’t care.