The Adventures of Dead Dan: The Old Religion
by John Rossi
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Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 |
Dan Collins has lived for nearly a decade in a waking dream of denial but has at last accepted that he is Undead. He doesn’t really understand what he is or can do; he tries to blend in with the mortal world as best he can by attending faithfully to work, friends and, above all, family. And yet a question haunts him: might other supernatural beings be walking among the living? Might they be beneficent or malign? Would they even be human in any way? Dan is not sure he really wants to know.
part 3
Rory’s Tavern was one of those quaint little restaurants that speckled the major roadways throughout much of southern New Jersey. The place was longer than it was wide. The tables were just big enough to comfortably seat four. It gave the ambiance of a fireside inn, and Dan figured that was the intended effect.
Usually there was an older crowd in places like this. Most of the people here were middle-aged or older. A six-foot revenant who looked like he was nineteen and a twenty-something, doe-eyed witch might stand out a tad.
It was a relaxed environment. The food smelled good, which agitated him. In the last three months, he had discovered how much he missed eating. While he had deluded himself into thinking that he was still alive for all those years, he had always told himself that he would go get some pizza tomorrow, or some sushi, maybe one of his favorite hot sandwiches. To know he would never eat again was depressing. Sadly, he couldn’t even remember what his last meal had been before he died.
He spotted Drina easily. She looked up at him with a conspiratorial glance as she whispered something softly and lit two candles on her table. He looked on quizzically and then made his way over. She motioned for him to sit down, which he did.
“Is it safe to talk about this stuff in a place like this?” he said as he looked about.
“No one will pay attention to us,” she told him. “I’ve cast an anti-charm. Before you ask, it essentially makes people ignore anyone sitting at the table where the candles burn. So long as we don’t do anything crazy, like lifting forklifts, no one will listen to us and nobody but the staff will even remember we were here.”
He pondered that for a moment and said, “I can see a lot of useful applications for a trick like that.”
“Well,” she replied, “you have your supernatural strength, and we have our tricks.”
They stared at each other for a long moment. A witch and a revenant sitting at a table in quaint restaurant in southern New Jersey. The human beings around them carried on oblivious to the preternatural power that these two beings possessed.
Dan finally asked, “Mind if I begin?”
“Okay,” she told him, “that might be easiest.”
“You talked about a... ‘sixth sense’?”
“We are all different,” she replied. “Be it amongst the Tribes of Night or their breeds, crafts or houses there’s no two of us who are exactly alike, but there’s one thing true of every night child: we have an innate ability to sense each other. You are actually a huge pain in the neck.”
“Huh?!”
“My sixth sense manifests like a slight throbbing pain at the base of my skull. The more powerful the night child, the more powerful the sensation. That’s what I meant when I was talking about arthritis earlier. You are obviously pretty potent, so for the first few moments you come near, I felt I had arthritis.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be,” she told him. “It’s something we all have to get used to. You, too. It only lasts a few moments and then it fades away, unless...”
“Unless what?” he asked.
“Well... more on that later; let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Okay,” he agreed, “so this headache I have when you come around?”
“Your sixth sense,” she confirmed.
He found the notion that he could detect others like himself somewhat reassuring. Though he knew he had just scratched the surface. The most important question was the one he knew he had to ask next.
“You were surprised that I was ignorant of all this. You spoke about ‘The Tribe of the Dead,’ like I was supposed to know what that meant. I’m figuring the fact that I...” he stopped. He looked around afraid to say anything else because talking about his condition here in a restaurant in front of a bunch of strangers just seemed so reckless. He had seen her work magic once earlier with that strange glowing stone, but the whole thing still seemed so unbelievable to him, even if she had cast an “anti-charm.”
Drina looked at him with a wry grin as she observed his hesitation. She suddenly stood up and loudly proclaimed as she pointed at him, “Hey, is this guy hot or what?!”
Dan would have turned an angry red if his body still could. He looked around with wide-eyed shock at her audacity only to discover no one cared. No one looked over, no one reacted and no one acknowledged that they even existed.
She sat back down and told him, “You’ll get used to this. I know it's new to you, but, Dan, you really have to get a handle on this. Someone as powerful as you isn’t go to go unnoticed forever.”
“Who’s going to notice?” he asked with agitation. “This Tribe of the Dead?”
“Yes,” she insisted, “they will. Listen: your tribe is divided up into four breeds. I think they’re called breeds, but don’t quote me on that. The most common and the most revoltingly obnoxious are the ghouls. Flesh-eaters, Dan, though they can only eat what is dead and they like their meat rancid. It is not pretty to watch. None of them look human, the way you or the vampires do.”
“Then how do they not get caught?” he asked, shocked.
“Humans can see a ghoul only if the ghoul wants them to. Their presence is unnatural, so the human subconscious doesn’t want to admit they really exist. They're kind of like ugly ninjas with foul mouths and a really bad taste in cuisine. They work a lot with organized crime, eating bodies, and other things like that.”
“How does that work?” he asked with surprise that such inhuman creatures could work with people.
“Truth be told, I have no idea how they do it, I only know what my grandmother tells me. I don’t go looking for ghouls, and they rarely have contact with those outside their tribe. They don’t like vampires though, I know that.”
Realizing that as a witch her information on the Dead was limited, he decided to stick to the point. “Okay, ghouls and vampires, and revenants obviously, what’s the fourth breed?”
“The Spectral Dead. Ghosts, shades, poltergeists, that sort of thing.”
He was quiet for a long moment after that. She let him absorb it. She didn’t imagine hearing all this for the first time was easy.
“Okay, you called me a revenant, what does that mean?” he asked.
She took a long moment to contemplate his question before she replied. “You guys, you guys are the weird ones. See for the other three breeds there is the diversity I mentioned, no two ghouls or ghosts or vampires are exactly alike. Each one might have different powers unique to that individual. But they all have one thing in common: how they sustain themselves.
“Ghouls need meat, the more rotten the better. For ghosts, it's emotional energy. I don’t need to tell you what vampires drink. With you guys, it’s never the same. What’s more, Mama Cat told me that of all the Dead, you guys are the ones who are the most powerful at magic.”
“Mama Cat?” he asked.
“Sorry, my grandmother, her name is Caterine. The coven calls her Mama Cat. She’s kind of our leader.”
“I take it she wasn’t happy at the prospect of your coming over to talk?”
Drina looked agitated when she replied, “Its tradition that usually contact between tribes is handled by the head of the coven. In addition to the fact that she still wants to believe I’m sixteen rather than twenty-two. She never stops bitching about my makeup, and my whole goth look. She’s a little behind the times on certain things.”
“Gotcha; so is that a big deal, that revenants can practice magic?”
“Well, to us it is. Any night child can learn magic, but we are the best at it. The only exception is the Council of the Dead.” she added ominously.
“Is that bad?” he probed.
“You have to put it in perspective. Think of it this way. The Tribe of the Craft are the best at spells, sorcery and ritual castings. We learn it the fastest and have a natural knack for it. Then you have a creature that’s immortal and undead. It practices magic for what could be thousands of years. It trades knowledge and lore, learns all kinds of different crafts from its kind and from ours. Suddenly, five thousand years later, you have an undead crafter that can control the weather at will, incinerate its enemies by pointing a finger at them and cast spells that even our kind would be terrified to attempt. It’s a little disconcerting, to say the least.”
“How many of these things are out there?” he asked anxiously.
“No one knows,” she told then. “What every tribe knows is simply this: don’t piss off the Council of the Dead. Your elders — and they will consider themselves your elders whether you like it or not — are the most powerful of all the councils. Immortal beings who are driven by forces I don’t pretend to understand who spend millennia perfecting their skills and powers.
See, most all the members of the other tribes grow old, and we die. You just get stronger. You can lift forklifts now, in a thousand years, Big Boy, you’re probably gonna knock down buildings with one punch.”
A thousand years, he thought to himself in astonished awe. A chill of stupefied wonder made its way through his undead form. He had never thought about the facts that she had just driven home: he would never grow old, and he would never die. Even the Hollywood movies seemed to get that part right, and she was confirming it. He had just turned thirty, and he looked like he was barely twenty if he was lucky, and now he knew he always would. He could get away with it right now but in ten years much less twenty, he knew he would have problems.
She saw the look of grim realization darken his steel grey eyes. She kept quiet as the prospect of immortality began to sink in. She knew if she found out she was going to live forever she might be elated, so long as she could still breathe. She felt genuine sympathy for him in that moment.
“When you learned I was actually ignorant of all this, you said that was impossible. Is that because of these ancient revenants?” he asked.
“Sort of. Every tribe has some means to detect the birth of one of their own. For us, it’s really easy. Most magic runs in the family and, amidst the Stregheria, we can trace our family blood lines back for generations. It’s the same thing for the Druids in England and the Brujeria throughout Mexico and South America. The shifters, too, they know their blood lines—”
“Shifters?” he interjected.
“Yeah, the shape-shifters, the Proteans; they're called the Tribe of the Moon. You know: werewolves, werecats, all kinds of shape-shifters.”
“Werecats?” he asked dubiously.
“They are real; my grandmother knows one,” she insisted.
Having no interest in werecats, he pressed on. “So how does it work for me? How do the dead track their new members?”
“We don’t really know what kind of magic they use, but they always know. That’s really kind of an accepted fact amidst all the tribes of night. The Tribe of the Craft has always assumed that those ancient revenants we talked about have a powerful detection ritual that informs them of an undead rising from their grave. The fact that they not only missed you but haven’t contacted you in all the years you’ve been undead shocks me, but there might be an explanation.”
She hesitated before she continued. “I want to be honest with you, Dan, this is the real reason I approached you. When I gave you the sooth stone, it wasn’t supposed to respond the way it did.”
“Okay?” he posed.
“It’s a simple but potent talisman. I activate its magic by handing it to someone and asking them a question. It glows blue if they tell the truth, and radiates red if they don’t.”
“Then why did it glow silver?” he asked.
She stared at him with a burning intensity for a few moments before she replied. “There’s no certain answer. The ways of night don’t come with an instruction manual. In situations like this, we only have myth and legend to guide us. My ancient ancestors are said to have called it eri arser, ‘to push.’”
“Meaning what exactly?” he asked.
“To push magic. To effect mana in such a way so as not to require spells or counter-spells to defend against it, just sheer will. Some who had it were supposed to be able to... to kind of cancel out magic altogether. Others who had it could affect magic in some ways, make it more potent or diminish it, or so the legends say.”
“You think I do that: push?” he inquired.
“Maybe, I want to tell you something, and I hope you won’t get angry. I hope you realize that I’m trying to be honest with you.”
“I already don’t like the sound of this.”
She shot him a wary look of caution but continued on. “My grandmother is what we call a haruspex... a diviner. She’s clairvoyant and has a special aptitude for scrying spells, things like that.”
“And...” he pressed.
“And, despite the fact that she has been telling futures for years and watching people from afar through her crystal ball — and, yes, she has an actual crystal ball — she has never been able to watch you. To keep an eye on you, we’ve had to resort to more mundane means. Whatever power or ability you have to ‘push’ makes it damn near impossible for my grandmother to observe you clairvoyantly and, Dan, she’s had years of practice, decades. She has never had this problem with anyone else who wasn’t a powerful crafter.
“I think that’s why the sooth stone turned silver in your hand. I think you have an odd effect on magic. I think that might be why the Council of the Dead never found you. The spell or the ritual they use might not work on you. If you want, we can test that theory, right now.”
“You didn’t come into the warehouse today just to say hello, did you?”
“No, I didn’t,” she admitted. “Like I said, I want to be honest with you. I need help with something, and I can’t turn to anyone in my tribe.”
“What do you want?” he asked suspiciously.
“I need you to help me destroy something.” she stated.
“What?” he asked curiously.
“A focus, a kind of mystical object that I helped a friend create. A fossilized dire wolf skull.”
“All right, now I’m lost, you created the skull of an extinct animal?”
She sighed. “No, I helped a friend enchant it, and now I regret it, a lot.”
“Why did you enchant an ancient skull, and what exactly do you do with it?” he asked, perplexed.
Copyright © 2021 by John Rossi
