Spooky Story 2021
Once again, the library is having a Spooky Story Contest...for children. Oh, well. Here is my just-for-fun-I-guess-I'm-too-old-for-you entry.
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Once upon a time, there lived three siblings who were all young and ambitious necromancers. What’s a necromancer, you ask? Well, you know how most graveyards, mausoleums, government offices, closets, and basements are filled with shambling zombies, murderous skeletons, or various other abominations wrought from the discarded dead? All of those monsters were made by necromancers.
Anyway, the three little necromancers set out into the big, wide world to seek their fortunes and whatnot.
The first little necromancer raised an army of revenants and commanded them to build her a house made of bones. Not only bones, of course, because that would be both structurally unsound and would require an impractical number of bones. Nevertheless, the general motif and the materials used were predominantly osteological. Osteological? It means that the place was spooky.
The locals in the necromancer’s neighborhood did not approve of the necromancer or of her house. Partly it was that her house didn’t fit in with the guidelines of the local homeowners association, partly it was that her army of zombies was noisy and smelled bad and was an affront against nature and decency, but mostly it was that to raise her army and build her house the necromancer had scavenged a lot of her raw materials by desecrating the local cemeteries. Funerals are expensive and time-consuming, and nobody wants all of that effort and expense undone by someone digging up their relatives and turning them into wainscoting.
And so the locals formed an angry mob to tear down the house and dispose of the necromancer. The necromancer tried to point out that the building was made almost entirely of all-natural recycled materials, but the mob was far too angry to listen to this entirely reasonable argument for sustainable building practices, and so they set the house on fire and hacked apart the revenants with axes and chainsaws and such. The angry mob would certainly have done the same to the necromancer (either the setting on fire or hacking apart, they were not picky), but the little necromancer escaped and ran all the way to her brother’s house. Well, metaphorically ran - he lived several towns away. The little necromancers couldn’t live too close together or they’d be competing with each other for resources.
The second little necromancer had raised an army of revenants and commanded them to build him a house made of glitter and rainbows. He didn’t feel shackled by societal expectations of what sort of décor he or any necromancer should favor any more than he felt shackled by societal rules or natural laws against raising an army of the dead in the first place.
Now, it’s not easy to kill a rainbow, and even harder to preserve the corpse so you can harvest it for parts to build your necromantic lair, but the second little necromancer was very talented and industrious. He even made his own glitter, grinding up the bones of unicorns in his diabolical windmill. Yes of course that’s where real glitter comes from.
Sure enough, soon an angry mob formed outside the second little necromancer’s home as well. The mob felt threatened by the necromancer’s refusal to conform to gender stereotypes and his decision to use renewable energy in the form of his windmill rather than continue to feed money to the local energy conglomerates. I mean, they also shouted a lot about his zombies, but I think we all know what was really going on.
As the angry mob burned down the necromancer’s house and hacked apart his zombies with chainsaws and axes, he shouted at them that they were narrow-minded fools, and that they would rue the day. Then he and his sister fled before they were either caught by the mob or overcome by the toxic fumes from the burning glitter. Together they made their way to the home of their elder sister.
The third little necromancer had raised an army of revenants and then rented them out to factories and megastores and other large businesses, allowing those businesses to circumvent laws pertaining to fair compensation and employee rights, since the revenants weren’t actual living people. This was immensely profitable for the businesses, and also fairly lucrative for the necromancer, and she used the money to buy herself a modest, nondescript home out of the edge of town where she could work unnoticed and uninterrupted by angry mobs. At least, that had been the plan.
Alas, even though the necromancer scrupulously avoided social media and worked very hard to keep her personal information as secure as possible, the ceaseless surveillance of our dystopian nightmare world ultimately revealed her location to an angry mob of people driven out of their jobs by the necromancer’s zombies. Yes, I’ll grant you that the elder sister was clearly the most evil of her siblings, but I don’t know why the mob chose to direct their anger at the necromancer instead of the corporations. For some reason, angry mobs just really don’t seem to like necromancers.
Regardless, the necromancer’s corporate connections meant that all it took was a single phone call, and dozens of people with guns and riot armor and tear gas and helicopters showed up to disperse the angry mob, and the three little necromancers were safe to continue practicing their unspeakable arts and laughing in the face of death itself, and even now they continue to fill the world with monsters.
The lesson to be learned here is to always have your spare room ready for guests in case someone dear to you is suddenly menaced by an angry mob. That, and the reason the world is so full of monsters is because making them is so profitable.
Now ignore those noises coming from your closet and go to sleep.
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Once upon a time, there lived three siblings who were all young and ambitious necromancers. What’s a necromancer, you ask? Well, you know how most graveyards, mausoleums, government offices, closets, and basements are filled with shambling zombies, murderous skeletons, or various other abominations wrought from the discarded dead? All of those monsters were made by necromancers.
Anyway, the three little necromancers set out into the big, wide world to seek their fortunes and whatnot.
The first little necromancer raised an army of revenants and commanded them to build her a house made of bones. Not only bones, of course, because that would be both structurally unsound and would require an impractical number of bones. Nevertheless, the general motif and the materials used were predominantly osteological. Osteological? It means that the place was spooky.
The locals in the necromancer’s neighborhood did not approve of the necromancer or of her house. Partly it was that her house didn’t fit in with the guidelines of the local homeowners association, partly it was that her army of zombies was noisy and smelled bad and was an affront against nature and decency, but mostly it was that to raise her army and build her house the necromancer had scavenged a lot of her raw materials by desecrating the local cemeteries. Funerals are expensive and time-consuming, and nobody wants all of that effort and expense undone by someone digging up their relatives and turning them into wainscoting.
And so the locals formed an angry mob to tear down the house and dispose of the necromancer. The necromancer tried to point out that the building was made almost entirely of all-natural recycled materials, but the mob was far too angry to listen to this entirely reasonable argument for sustainable building practices, and so they set the house on fire and hacked apart the revenants with axes and chainsaws and such. The angry mob would certainly have done the same to the necromancer (either the setting on fire or hacking apart, they were not picky), but the little necromancer escaped and ran all the way to her brother’s house. Well, metaphorically ran - he lived several towns away. The little necromancers couldn’t live too close together or they’d be competing with each other for resources.
The second little necromancer had raised an army of revenants and commanded them to build him a house made of glitter and rainbows. He didn’t feel shackled by societal expectations of what sort of décor he or any necromancer should favor any more than he felt shackled by societal rules or natural laws against raising an army of the dead in the first place.
Now, it’s not easy to kill a rainbow, and even harder to preserve the corpse so you can harvest it for parts to build your necromantic lair, but the second little necromancer was very talented and industrious. He even made his own glitter, grinding up the bones of unicorns in his diabolical windmill. Yes of course that’s where real glitter comes from.
Sure enough, soon an angry mob formed outside the second little necromancer’s home as well. The mob felt threatened by the necromancer’s refusal to conform to gender stereotypes and his decision to use renewable energy in the form of his windmill rather than continue to feed money to the local energy conglomerates. I mean, they also shouted a lot about his zombies, but I think we all know what was really going on.
As the angry mob burned down the necromancer’s house and hacked apart his zombies with chainsaws and axes, he shouted at them that they were narrow-minded fools, and that they would rue the day. Then he and his sister fled before they were either caught by the mob or overcome by the toxic fumes from the burning glitter. Together they made their way to the home of their elder sister.
The third little necromancer had raised an army of revenants and then rented them out to factories and megastores and other large businesses, allowing those businesses to circumvent laws pertaining to fair compensation and employee rights, since the revenants weren’t actual living people. This was immensely profitable for the businesses, and also fairly lucrative for the necromancer, and she used the money to buy herself a modest, nondescript home out of the edge of town where she could work unnoticed and uninterrupted by angry mobs. At least, that had been the plan.
Alas, even though the necromancer scrupulously avoided social media and worked very hard to keep her personal information as secure as possible, the ceaseless surveillance of our dystopian nightmare world ultimately revealed her location to an angry mob of people driven out of their jobs by the necromancer’s zombies. Yes, I’ll grant you that the elder sister was clearly the most evil of her siblings, but I don’t know why the mob chose to direct their anger at the necromancer instead of the corporations. For some reason, angry mobs just really don’t seem to like necromancers.
Regardless, the necromancer’s corporate connections meant that all it took was a single phone call, and dozens of people with guns and riot armor and tear gas and helicopters showed up to disperse the angry mob, and the three little necromancers were safe to continue practicing their unspeakable arts and laughing in the face of death itself, and even now they continue to fill the world with monsters.
The lesson to be learned here is to always have your spare room ready for guests in case someone dear to you is suddenly menaced by an angry mob. That, and the reason the world is so full of monsters is because making them is so profitable.
Now ignore those noises coming from your closet and go to sleep.