Two is found here: https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/12ss8gn/necromancer_tales_everyone_makes_mistakes_part_2/
Quite a bit of people have been asking for more stories of cases that have dropped on my desk. I’m guessing they want the more interesting ones, expecting that every case has me having to seal some dark spirit, or help someone move on. Honestly, I’m rather glad that’s not the case. It’s a very boring job at times. I review past cases of missing persons, the paranormal, and the unexplained, seeing if there’s anything at all that I can use my abilities to sort out. Honestly speaking, I probably review some two hundred cases a year, and of them only four or five rise to the occasion where there’s something I can do about it. That’s leaving out the phone calls sending me off on special duty. Those are special, and you’ve read one of them pretty recently.
It’s the mundane, routine ones that always get me. Well, not “get” me, but rather they aren’t always mundane. Things start normally, and by the end of the night I’m wandering around a cemetery at night with a shovel, trying to find just the right grave to dig into and cut the head off of some undead creature that keeps eating the local cat population. Before you ask, yes, that has actually happened, and no this isn’t that story.
My last case was one such ‘mundane’ case. It started out simply enough, me at my desk flipping through old case logs, relaxing to some nice smooth jazz and listening to the rain drumming on the window. I was rifling through police reports about a missing persons case in upstate Virginia, when I looked up to find Sam perched on the edge of my desk and watching me with those dark eyes of hers. Sam always unnerved me, she was quiet. I mean damn near silent as the grave, which made sense. Remember how I said I work with vampires? Sam is one of those. Damn beautiful lady, but you don’t want to ever see her angry side. Trust me on that. It didn’t help matters that she liked me. We’ve known each other… okay, let’s just say quite a while and leave it at that.
Sam held a file in her hands and extended it to me with that sly smile of hers. “You need to look at this one.” She said, and I had to fight the urge to gulp. She rarely ever asked me to look over a case, and when she did, they were always quite interesting. I took that folder from her, smiling pleasantly even as she watched me flip through it. Simple, mundane case really. Bunch of homeless people going missing in New Orleans. Not really something we’d even take, and as I looked up to say as much, she gave me a level look “Read the next two pages” she noted and I complied. That’s where things turned interesting. This wasn’t a one time thing. It had happened before. In fact it’d happened off and on since sometime around the first world war. The people vanishing were always the same. People who wouldn’t be missed. I looked up at her and nodded. She had my attention. “One of your friends?” I asked and she gave a melodic laugh before shaking her head slowly and going serious. “No, I mean, I know why you’d think that… but it gets even weirder. Read that last page.” Flipping through, I found a last report. A statement from a friend of one of those people missing, who swore that the last time he’d seen his ‘friend’, they’d been talking to this man wearing a suit that looked like he’d been taken right out of one of those old black and white detective movies.
Okay, that isn’t normal. The local police had just written his testimony off as being the ravings of a drunk, or a madman, but that started to ring some bells. “When am I leaving?” I finally asked her, as Sam slid a ticket over to me. “Tonight” she said, and then kissed my forehead, telling me to ‘be careful’. Her lips were ice cold and sent a shiver through my spine, but I accepted the gesture. Sure, she probably has devious plans for me some time in the future, but she does at least seem to care.
Red eye flights are never fun, and this let me poke through the information Sam had rummaged up for me. She was from the area herself, being turned during the US Civil War, and until maybe fifty years ago, she’d stayed around there. So she was a wealth of information. I flipped through the books and folders, reading through on the previous incidents, poring over witness reports, and reading the fine script of Sam’s own notes on the subject. She believed, and I came to agree with her on this, that this was tied to Charity hospital. The vanishings had happened in an area roughly directly adjacent to the hospital itself. There were more than were tied to the case, with people reporting hundreds of people just never being heard from again. It had the hall marks of a vampire, and yet there were some problems. The vampires of New Orleans… they love their city, and that city has pretty much embraced them. (no pun intended). So they may feed on the people there, but they never go so far as to outright kill them. Just some tourist gets a bit too drunk, and wakes up with a raging headache the next day, and a strange love bite on their neck.
Once I landed, I headed over to a cafe to get a quick bite to eat, and to link up with the night watchman for the place. Talk with him some, maybe get some insider info before I headed inside.
I didn’t need to really wait long before he walked through the doors and sat at my table. He was a perfect stereotype of the fat, old security guard, and spoke with a creole accent that was hard to follow. We shared pleasantries, he asked how our mutual ‘friend’ was getting along, before he started to speak about the hospital. He gave me quite a lengthy rundown on it, which I already knew most of, including how it was abandoned after Katrina hit. Then, after a sip from his coffee, and shooting a glance around the cafe, he leaned close and started talking in hushed whispers. Talking about ‘bad’ things that had happened there in the past, in particular one “Doctor Adrieux”. He went into great detail about this doctor, and the strange methods he had, the… unnatural methods, to put it simply. We talked until night had just started to fall, and as I headed over to the hospital I found my thoughts wandering to what I had been told. Adrieux had, by all accounts, gone insane after his daughter had died from the influenza epidemic of 1918. He started performing unneeded surgeries on people, trying to ‘cure’ them, only to result in their deaths or disfigurement. He ended up arrested in 1920, after he was implicated in the murder of a well respected socialite. During his interrogation, he kept saying that everything was for his “Anna”, and that he wouldn’t stop until he could find a cure for her.
When the police raided his home, they’d found what they described as ‘occult’ books and writings. Adrieux managed to get released on bond before his trial, though he never lived to see it happen. At least, that’s what everyone believed. A couple days after he was released, his home burned down, and from what police found, he was in it at the time.
The evidence was all there. A vengeful spirit, trying to finish the ‘work’ it had started in life. Trying to save the daughter that was now dead. I could sympathize with the pain, sure, but I can’t condone it. To put it simply, I was going to need to put Adrieux down. That was the only way these vanishings would stop.
I hate hospitals. Abandoned ones doubly so. I dunno what it is about them, but they just bother me. I’m not afraid of them, like I said before, I doubt I can actually be afraid, but they just seem to rub me the wrong way. Charity was no different. It stands like a skeleton over the skyline of the city. A sore reminder of past failings. The interior has largely been picked clean, looted of anything valuable, and covered with trash, broken glass, and spray paint tags. It smelled of stale urine, dried blood, and rot. Almost reminded me of home…in an odd way.
I picked my way through the corridors, delving down into the basement, and then further into the subbasement of the building. I don’t know exactly what I was searching for, or what I even hoped to find. Hell, I don’t even know why I went down there in the first place. It just…well it felt right. As right as anything could feel in such a wrong place.
As I turned a corner, I found myself looking down a long hallway with several doors on either side. Big, heavy, metal doors. They were all locked, save for one at the far end of the hall. That door sat open enough to let candle light flicker through it. I approached this slowly, and peered through the crack.
Like I said, I don’t know what I was expecting to find down there, but it sure as hell wasn’t a little girl’s room. Covered in pink, with a hospital bed at one end. A young girl of fourteen or so reading a book by candlelight with a doll sitting beside her. I admit it I gasped a bit, and this caused the girl to look up suddenly. She dropped the book, grabbed the doll and retreated to the far end of the room. She was terrified of me, or so it seemed. The girl had skin nearly as white as the doll, and she looked oh so frail. She hid from me, and practically begged me to not hurt her. I stepped inside and just asked her gently why she was here. That’s when she dropped the bomb.
Her father, she claimed, had said she was sick and needed to stay in the hospital. He was doing everything he could to help her get well… but nothing seemed to work. I muttered a curse at myself for not figuring it out sooner, while also cursing Sam. She had to have known what was going on, and the more I thought about it, the more angry I became. It must have shown on my face, because the girl shied away from me. It was everything I could do to calm myself, and talk to the girl. Asking where her father was now. I needed to have a talk with him. Talk… yeah, that wasn’t what I had planned. She directed me down the hall, saying her father was making her dinner in the kitchen there. I nodded at this and then as I started to leave, I thought of something. “Do you happen to know if there’s anything your father keeps safe? Say something small that he pays close attention to?” The girl nodded at this and pointed over at the little dressing table. There sat a small blue glass bottle. “It was mummy’s” She told me, and I moved to pick it up. The girl watched me curiously, and I promised to be careful with it, as I went looking for Adrieux.
To put it simply.. I was angry. So, let me explain something to you here. There’s two ways to become a vampire. One is the traditional way of being bitten and then tasting the blood of the vampire that did it. While another is a necromatic method. It’s a damn involved spell, and requires the necromancer to do some particularly dark and evil things to pull off. I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say, it’s one of those things that if I’m telling you it’s evil, a necromancer myself, then yeah, it’s really dark. Adrieux, that bastard, had done that to his daughter. What’s more, he hadn’t just stopped there. He’d extended his life. Sure, that’s something all necromancers do to some degree… but this bastard, he was using that to experiment on his daughter, and I’m not sorry to say that I wasn’t about to let that happen.
The ‘kitchen’ area looked like a charnal house, with Adrieux standing in front of a body… a still breathing body hanging from a hook in the ceiling. He was dutifully draining the blood into a series of bottles and vials, and god damn it, he seemed to be enjoying himself. He must have heard me enter, hell he likely knew I was talking to his daughter earlier. He never looked back, just told me in a patronizing tone to wait my turn, as he’d get to me next. I cleared my throat and held up the bottle. “This yours?” I asked. Adrieux rounded on me, eyes wide as he saw the bottle in my hands. I made certain he could see me as I uncorked the bottle and dumped the contents of it into a sink. The blood within mixing with the water, and then vanishing into the drain.
Adrieux screamed bloody murder, reaching out for me, grasping at me even as he started to change. To age. In minutes he was seventy, then in a few more, ninety, and before long he’d just aged away into dust, which in turn became a fine powder and then nothing. I still needed to deal with Anna, of course, but at least that was one problem out of my hair. Looking back to the hall and sighed. This was not going to be easy to do. That kid, she was innocent. Didn’t choose to become what she was… but I really didn’t have many options.
The flight back home, and the drive to the offices were surprisingly quiet. As if the universe was giving me a break. I think some celestial power recognized what I’d been through, and in doing so thought maybe they’d give me a day off. That or a reprieve from what I had to tell Sam. She wasn’t going to be happy with the choices I made that night. That’s for damn sure.
Sam was waiting in my office, and I was right. She wasn’t happy. She yelled at me, she berated me, but, she came to accept it. I mean, she’d always told me she wanted kids, but couldn’t have them. Vampire can’t of course. Well, now she had Anna. The girl had lived one hell of a sheltered life in that basement, and like it or not, Sam was going to have to step up and be the mother figure. She did get one over on me though. Anna started calling me ‘daddy’ last week. So there’s that.
There is something of an epilogue to the story though. The killings haven’t stopped. Not completely. In fact, they only really stopped for about a month. I’m starting to believe that there was more to the story than meets the eye, and Sam is giving me odd glances every now and then. I have a bad feeling that I’m going back down there in the near future.