Necromancy for Band Geeks
By: Craig Allen Heath
Tags: High School, Geek, Horror, Fiction, Satire

The book of incantations held aloft in one hand, her jeweled athame dagger in the other, Angelica stood in the center of her living room within a protective circle of salt. She raised her eyes to the ceiling, pointed the blade to the floor and chanted the final words of the summoning invocation.

“Ba’hal arooth tich set f’tule al-gi-brah!”

A reddish, glowing circle, small and dim at first, appeared on the floor near the coffee table. Angelica worried she’d started a fire, but saw no signs of flame or smoke. A noise rose from the spot, like a windstorm growing closer, soon rattling the walls and threatening her ears with a high-pitched whine. As the spot grew in size the color shifted from red to orange, then yellow, and finally, blinding white.

Angelica shielded her eyes but couldn’t look away as a figure began to rise from the portal. Her breath stopped as a man took shape within. A man and not entirely a man. The body of a man, clothed in the rich silken doublet and hose of a Renaissance prince, but his head was that of a three-horned goat, his face the grimace of an ogre, his eyes burned red like coals beneath a flat brow and long, pointed ears. As the demon’s hideous form took shape, the light dimmed, and the roar subsided. When all was still, he stood and glared at Angelica with a malice she felt on her face like heat from a furnace.

“Who dares summon me to Earth, disturbing my work in the underworld? Who, I say!”

Angelica lowered her arms and her eyes and said, “It is I, oh lord of darkness, Angelica, who called you forth.”

“You?” mocked the ashen-colored apparition. His chuckle, like the rattling of dried bones, shivered Angelica’s spine. “You pitiful, weak, human woman? You dare invoke my name, the most feared and beloved of demons, Master Leonard?”

She raised her eyes and frowned. “Leonard?”

“Yes!” the demon boomed. “Leonard! Master Leonard, the grand-master of the nocturnal orgies of demons!”

“Wait a minute” she said, flipping pages in the book. “I thought I summoned Leraiel.”

“I have several names, mortal fool!” he growled, “Leonard is my favorite.”

Angelica hesitated, her curiosity piqued. “But… Leonard? Really?”

“Yes, really!” came the angry reply. “Why do you ask, insignificant wretch?”

“Well, it’s just…” she lowered her eyes to hide a grin. “I don’t know, I just thought, you’d prefer to be called something more… impressive.”

The fiend’s eyes widened with shock and flickered red and gold with anger. “Impressive? What’s not impressive about Leonard? I told you I am Master Leonard! I command thirty legions in hell! I am master of ceremonies for the unholiest of demonic orgies, a devourer of mortal flesh, high executioner of the living and the dead! Those who worship me gain power over the weak-willed, the ability to transform into ravenous beasts, and even to fly! That’s not impressive?”

“I guess it’s just me. See, I knew this guy in high school named Leonard, and well, I mean, we never really did anything, but we sort of…”

“Enough, woman!” The monster’s bellow shook the windows. “I am in the book, you know! The Dictionnaire Infernal, by none other than Jacques Auguste Simon Collin de Plancy! Demon number 40, right after Lechies and before Lucifer himself! I’m not some third-rate goblin you can dismiss and mock, just because you had a bad relationship with some pimply-faced band geek who happened to have my name!”

“How did you know we were in band?”

The brute narrowed his eyes and smirked. “Really? You’re going to ask me that? It’s written all over you. Once a band geek, always a band geek. One can always tell another.”

“You mean, you…? You were…”

“First chair trombone, yes.”

“Wow! What school?”

Again Leonard’s eyes flashed fiery indignation. “That impresses you? I’m a legendary, evil demon with powers beyond human imagination! But you’re all ‘wow’ at the thought I played trombone?”

“Well, with your name, it kinda makes sense.”

“Oh? Does it? What about you? ‘Angelica’? Your parents must have had stratospheric expectations of you.”

“My friends call me Angel.”

“God, that’s worse. I bet you played flute.”

“Hey, you’re pretty good at this.”

“Of course I am! I possess the mastery of arcane forces you could not fathom! I can bend time to my will! I can change the future and erase the past! I can certainly tell a flute player a mile off. You’re too small and thin for a larger instrument. And your fingers are long and delicate. If not clarinet, then flute. Add the fact that you are blonde, and it’s definitely flute.”

Angelica took note of the compliments but wondered at the blonde reference. She smiled. “Um, if you’re so powerful, do you know why I summoned you?”

“Yes. Why do you think I’m so grumpy?”

“What is it, then?”

“You still have to say it.”

“I do?”

“Yes, dammit!” Leonard screamed. Angelica smelled smoke. “You have to make the request formally!”

“Why”

“I don’t know! I don’t make the rules!”

“Okay, okay. I just figured, you being so all powerful…”

He scowled at her. “Snark does not become you.”

She pressed her lips together to fight her smile and cleared her throat. “Okay. Here goes. I want you to…”

“It begins…” he thundered, “Oh Great and Powerful Master of the Dark, Leonard!”

Angelica couldn’t stifle her laughter. It exploded from her lips before she could clamp her hand over her mouth. She coughed through her fingers, then bent over and joggled in silence.

Leonard folded his arms and stared at her, tapping his foot. “When you are quite ready” he sneered.

She turned away and breathed deeply. Her exhalations still rattled in her throat as tiny giggles. She turned back but couldn’t look Leonard in the eye. “Okay. Okay, um… okay. Here goes. Oh, great and power… powerful…” She snorted, recovered, and tried to continue. “Master of the Dark…”

It was too much. She doubled over with loud guffaws, then knelt on the floor and sat on one hip, holding her sides. A full minute passed, the grey-skinned hellion rolling his eyes and checking his fingernails.

“If you think you can contain your jocularity” he scoffed, “we can take the preamble as read. Could we speed things up a bit? I don’t have all eon.”

“Sure, sure.” Angelica cleared her throat and got to her feet. She took a deep breath, fought against one last urge to laugh and said, “Ready.”

Leonard side-eyed Angelica, waiting for another outburst. “Alright, then.” His next words came in the sing-song cadence of a high school girl reciting for a teacher she hates. “What purpose have you in summoning me from the depths of hell, puny, useless human?”

Angelica smiled, making Leonard frown and wag a sharp-nailed finger. She forced a serious look, cleared her throat again and mimicked his rhythm and tone. “I want you to be my date for the class reunion next month.”

Leonard face-palmed. The heat of his irritation sizzled away the sweat on his brow and gave off a light hiss and a wisp of steam that rose over his misshapen head. He sighed and regarded Angelica as if she were naive or stupid or both. “I knew before you asked” he sighed, “but hearing it is somehow worse.”

“Well? It’s what I want. It’s why I did all this.” She gestured at the salt on the floor, pointed to the book and the dagger and shrugged. “So? Did I do it right or not?”

“Yes, you did everything right” he said, not hiding his condescension.

“Okay” she said, “So? I did it right. Do I get what I asked for?”

“I get your soul for it, you know.”

“I know. It’s worth it, believe me.”

Leonard did not believe it possible, but he was surprised by her answer. “Really? Do you even know what that means?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I do. You get my soul. For all eternity. In hell.”

“And just what do you think that will be like?”

“I suppose it will hurt.”

Leonard stared a moment, slack-jawed. “Hurt?” He chuckled again, a bucket of cold bones thrown down an empty well. “You think it will hurt?”

“Yeah. It’ll hurt. All the time.”

“For all eternity!” he shrieked, his voice now chorused by a million tortured souls at his command. “But hurt it will not! It will be the agony of your flesh burned from your bones in the molten bowels of the Earth, then rematerialized and frozen in blizzards of ice! The shards blown by gale force winds will pierce and slice your body, leaving you bleeding from a million gashes! The wounds will attract a billion flies, who will feed on your blood, then lay their eggs in your open sores! You will endure the horror of the larvae growing inside you and consuming your flesh until you explode, a human host to a trillion biting wasps that eat your remains and excrete you as liquid goo! Then… then!” Leonard barked, his arms outstretched, his eyes blazing, “Then… you are made whole, and it all begins again!”

“I get it.” Angelica was unmoved by the fiend’s litany. “It’ll be bad.”

Leonard’s voice shook the foundations of the house. “Did I mention the ‘for all eternity’ part?”

“Yes!” she shouted back, reaching the end of her patience. “I get it! Fire and ice and blood and flies and goo! Over and over and over for all eternity! Never-ending torment and agony from now until the end of the world! I! Get! It!”

Leonard smiled. “Very well, then. You understand the terms. This will be the easiest soul I ever earned. Just be your date at the reunion, right?”

“With two conditions.”

The demon’s smile grew wary. “Ah, I should have known. What conditions?”

“Well, I’m sure you know that, being a band geek, I was teased mercilessly.”

“You probably deserved it.”

“No I did not! I listened to your spiel, now you shut up and listen to me!”

“Okay, okay” he smirked, “calm down, chill out, or whatever.”

“Yeah, sure. You can be all brimstone and hellfire, but when a woman gets angry, then it’s all ‘Hey, calm down, bitch. Don’t frown, it makes you look ugly!’ Damn! Men are the same even if they’re not human!” Angelica stood, her hands on her hips, her face set and her eyes boring into Leonard’s

He collected himself. “All right, fair’s fair. What conditions?”

“The people in my class are a bunch of entitled snobs. They were then, they’re worse now. I’ve kept up online. God! Douchebags, that’s what they are!”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“They’re successful, the bastards. A few created startups and sold them for millions or billions. But most of them are doing great, high paying jobs in the C-suite, or they married rich, living their beautiful lives with their beautiful spouses, raising beautiful kids and vacationing in the Bahamas. It’s disgusting!”

“And you want to show them up.”

“Big time.”

“So?”

“So. Can you ditch this whole ugly-as-a-blobfish get up? Can you make yourself a handsome, strong, successful human man?”

Leonard snickered, the cold bones slightly warmed over. “Easily. In fact, my specialty is appearing as a devastatingly handsome military officer, to lure beautiful young women into the forest.”

“Really? What happens in the forest?”

“I seduce them, impregnate them with cold semen, and they miscarry the babies.”

Angelica’s brow could not have furrowed any deeper. “Cold semen?”

“I said I don’t make the rules. Look it up.”

She waved her hands, still scowling. “Okay, but none of that. I’m not putting up with cold semen or miscarried babies.”

“Agreed.”

“But hey, could you be a Navy SEAL? They’re the hottest!”

“Easy.”

“An officer? A captain?”

“Commander. They lead SEAL teams. I’ve taken my men on dangerous secret operations. I‘ll hint at being the team that got bin Laden, but of course I can’t talk about it.”

Angelica’s happy laugh reached Leonard as a crystalline wind chime moved by a spring breeze. He liked the sensation.

“That’s great!” she gushed. “That’s effin’ fantastic!”

Leonard assumed a fatherly air. “If you are going to spend all eternity in hell, you’ll have to give up the fake curses like ‘effin’. It just won’t do.”

“What can I say? My mother was strict.”

“So am I.”

Leonard’s hint reached Angelica as a match struck in her belly setting dry kindling alight. She liked the sensation.

The hellion smiled. “And the other condition?”

“Yeah. Um. You won’t like it.”

“I don’t expect to.”

“They’re going to hold a talent contest.”

Leonard stared at her a beat, then burst into maniacal guffaws. The booming laughter echoed from the walls and rattled the dishes in the cupboards. Angelica squinted and held her hands over her ears. The slapping of his thighs sounded like rifle shots. Breathless, he wheezed a last chortle, and his deep inhale to recover was the roar of a tornado. A full minute passed before he could speak.

“Oh, dear Satan and all his devils protect me! You’re serious?”

She frowned at his teasing. “Yes, I’m serious!”

“And just what…” he giggled, “just what would we do?”

“Well, I was thinking… you can make us do anything, with magic, right?”

“Oh, yes. You want to do a magic act?”

“No.”

“I saw you in half? Then reveal you are really, physically sawed in half, your entrails spilling out in a great gush of blood? You smile and wave while they all run screaming from the hall?”

“No, no, no.” She smiled. “But it’s a great idea.”

He smiled in return. “Kind of a ‘Carrie’ vibe, no?”

Her laughter again reached him in a way both unfamiliar and welcome.

“I was thinking” she said, “of a magical dance number. Like if Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sold their souls to create a dance that would astound the world. You a dashing officer, resplendent in your dress uniform. Me, a Helen of Troy beauty in a fabulous, flowing gown that would make Oscar de la Renta cry. We’d float and spin and glide like glass figurines on ice. You would throw me in the air and I would float back into your arms like a leaf on the wind. A dance that could never be repeated, not by mortals, that would stand as the ultimate… the perfect…” Angelica hesitated and dropped her lashes a moment. When she looked up she met his eye. “The perfect ‘fuck you’ to those douchebags.”

Leonard’s grey cheeks blushed slightly. He smiled. “I like it. I like it a lot.” He tapped his chin with a fingernail as sharp as a scythe and made a ‘hmmm’ sound. “But I might have a better suggestion.”

“Yeah?”

“The whole reason these douchebags teased you was because you were a band geek.”

“Yes.” Her eyes darkened, remembering the torment.

“So, your ‘fuck you’ should come in the form of band geek revenge.”

She tilted her head and said, “Go on.”

“Duet for flute and trombone.”

Her surprise manifested as a ‘snuck’ in the back of her throat and a wry smile. “What?”

“You on flute. Me on trombone. We play a duet.”

“I… I don’t…”

“Not just any duet, mind you.” The malevolent spirit shook a finger and looked about the room, deep in thought.

“Flute”, she said, incredulous, “and… trombone?”

“Yes!” he said. “There are many pieces written for that duet. And for flute and cello? Hundreds! A ‘bone is a great brass substitute for cello.”

Angelica began to hear the combination in her head. “Yes.. Yes!”

“But this would be, like your dance, the ultimate duet. Never before has anyone heard such transcendent music from these two instruments, and never again will they. I, a dashing officer, resplendent in my dress uniform, playing the perfect undertones and harmonies. You, a Helen of Troy beauty in a fabulous, flowing gown that would make Oscar de la Renta cry, manifesting the melody from your flute as if the universe blew breath through the instrument. We would play such a piece as to make even the most musically ignorant stop, shut up, and listen in rapturous wonderment.”

“Yes.”

“We would make the angels weep!”

“Yes!” Angelica shook with delight at the thought of upstaging her classmates, of the shock-and-awe, of making angels weep.

“So” Leonard hissed. “You said, next month?”

“Uh-huh. The seventeenth.”

“We have time to practice.”

Angelica saw promise and threat in his smile. She returned both.

“Yes. We do.”

“Then it’s a deal?” He extended his hand, callused from millennia of whipping the damned, the sharp nails dirty with the blood and flesh of those he eviscerated with sweeps of his taloned claws.

Angelica hesitated, then slowly stepped out of her protective circle and went to him. She laid her delicate, flute-playing hand in his. He held it gently, but his skin was hot to the touch. “Deal” she said quietly, meeting his flickering eyes. “Don’t I have to sign something?”

Leonard allowed himself the slight thrill she sent through her soft fingers. His smile grew. “We can take care of the paperwork later. Tomorrow. I know I can trust you.”

“Okay. Tomorrow, then.”

He bowed slightly and said, “For once in my existence, a day will feel like forever.” He released her hand.

She dropped her hand and her eyes a moment. Then, “Oh! Do I have to do the summoning thing again? Each time?”

“No. You’ve opened the portal. As long as you don’t reverse the spell, and close it, I can come and go at will.”

“You mean, anytime? Without, you know, an invitation?”

“Yes.” His grin reached out and touched her in a way she could not name.

“Okay” she said quietly. “I guess that’s okay.”

“Then I will bid you au revoir.”

“Hey! Wait a minute!”

“Hmmm?”

“Could I call you… Leo?”

The ghastly apparition of evil frowned, considering. “Yes, I think that would be fine. Leo. Hmm. Never occurred to me. I may like it.”

“I like it” she said, “better than Leonard.”

He thought a moment, then said, “May I call you… Angie?”

“Angie?”

“It’s my favorite Stones song.”

“It’s a sad song.”

“Yes” the demon said, “very, very sad.”