The Last Necromancer

By Benjamin Allen

What would you do if you discovered you were the one standing between life in the universe as we know it, and a sea of hellish legions threatening to pour out of Tartarus? How much fun would you have if you could teleport to any universe on a whim, complete quests for money, and learn how to cast spells with your friends? What if you had to use everything you’d ever learned in your day-to-day life just to live to see tomorrow? My name is Elgar King and I’m the last of a prestigious race of psionic necromancers. I was just questing like my normal psionic friends when I accidentally released a demon called Ryptose the World Ender. Being the last necromancer in existence... it kinda falls on me to put the genie back in the bottle. But I’m just a thirteen-year-old kid with ADD and a few months of psionic experience under my belt. If I don’t succeed in sealing Ryptose to the Hell-Sword: you, me, our friends and family—that’s it, game over.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Benjamin Allen
• Release date: Oct 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463894347

Benjamin Allen

Benjamin Allen is a writer, podcaster, and French Horn restoration artist from North Texas. He has been writing for over fifteen years, and has trained and worked in some of the top musical instrument repair facilities in the southern United States. Ben lives with his wife in Fort Worth.

Book preview

The Last Necromancer

A Novel

Book One of the Hell-Sword Series

By Benjamin Allen

Smashwords Edition

First American Edition

ISBN: 9780463894347

Copyright © 2018 Benjamin Allen, EK Publishing Media. All Rights Reserved.

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This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of interested readers. This eBook may not be re-sold for profit, but may be loaned at the purchaser’s discretion. This eBook may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for non-commercial purposes provided the eBook remains in its complete original form and all due credit goes to the original author, Benjamin Allen. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Disclaimer

This novel does not promise a happy ending. Heroes and villains may frequently be misconstrued. Antagonists won’t antagonize. Protagonists will often run away screaming. Nothing in this book has occurred within this universe save for the pages between your fingers or the words being read into your ears.

This was not written with the intent to aggravate or participate in any assault upon your beliefs. This story has been written under the prospect that all ideas are true and equal, that all philosophies and views of life shared or held solely to an enlightened individual are so. You may find yourself uncomfortable with the ideas expressed, but rest assured that none of this has really happened. And if it did, you wouldn’t be able to remember it anyway.

References to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

Chapter One

House of Horrors

I was eleven years old when I defeated my first demon. My name is Elgar Centrifeous King. You might call this an account of my first year as a psionic, someone who can psychically manipulate the physical world using an ancient language that taps into the baseline programming within our reality, better known as magic. I consider this more of a written confession marking the first chapter in what will chronicle my inevitable downfall and the complete destruction of the Eternium.

Let’s back up. Magical expression typically begins between the ages of six and twelve, enhancing or declining with adolescence. In some children, this expression is limited—almost nonexistent—but with others, it’s impossible to hide. I was one of the latter. When I was ten, I remember watching cartoons on my back one afternoon, immersed in the show blaring from the screen. My mother stopped in the hallway nearby. She had a hamper of wet clothes that spilled to the floor as the flat-screen television that had been hovering over me crashed onto my arm the moment my eyes dropped focus. They had to buy a new television, but my arm was fine.

I met Brenda a year after the television incident. It was a gray Sunday afternoon in the suburbs of Arlington—the same city where Amber Hagerman was abducted and murdered twenty years earlier. My father drove semi-trucks for a living. Any weekend he was home, he and my mother shamelessly disappeared for hours, leaving me to play the PS4 or watch television. Being a natural explorer, I went out the back door, climbed the side fence, and went for a walk. I had my basketball with me because I thought one day I would attempt to master the sport. I had yet to learn that I have laughably poor coordination.

I’ve relived the scenario millions of times in my mind over the years. An old, gray pick-up truck entered the three-way intersection ahead and did an immediate U-turn at the sight of me, sparking my primal warning signs. The truck rolled closer and came to a stop five yards from my position. Leaving the engine idling, the driver opened the door and stepped out. He was balding with receding brown hair, and his mustache had sprouts of gray whiskers. We locked eyes, and I broke all social standards. I ran. I ran all the way home and jumped the fence to the safety of my backyard.

In the time that our eyes connected, I saw all that he had done and all that he intended to do. That’s how I met Brenda. She was only a vision at first, but the abductor’s gaze reflected his intention. He was proud of her. He wanted me too, but as long as he had Brenda, he would be okay. I saw that I could know her name just from the look in those murderous eyes, witnessed him standing in a dimly lit bathroom with yellow and white tiled porcelain that had grime between the tiles. He was wiping his hands with a red towel that had been white earlier. He had almost killed her that time. They say serial killers don’t feel anything, but he felt everything. It was like a drug to know that he had power over her.

His madness went on, but I pulled myself out and escaped. Until then, I had been innocent. After, I knew that human beings could develop an insatiable hunger for their desires. The worst thing I knew as I lay on the ground staring at the gray sky overhead was that Brenda, a nineteen-year-old missing law student from the University of North Texas, was still alive. I had wanted to tell my parents, but how would I explain that I didn’t just think but knew a girl was being held against her will and would likely be tormented to death within the next few days? How could I change her unfortunate fate on my own?

My answer came the next evening when one of the neighborhood boys and I were sitting on the play park of the elementary school. I saw the man prowling around the corner, watching us—tufts of his receding hair blowing in the wind. My friend had continued rambling about how much he loved his Xbox One as I watched the man return to his gray truck and start the engine. I memorized the last three digits of the license plate. I remembered the last three because they were B, S, and G—the same three letters that were on a DVD box set of the Battlestar Galactica reboot series from the mid 2000’s that my parents had on the shelf at home.

Maybe I should have called the police. I didn’t. After what I had seen, I was more afraid of what might happen if they did nothing. What if I saw him again later? Whatever was inside me would be able to know what he had done, and it would be because I was too scared to take action. I grabbed an old arrow quiver my dad had given me to hold my baseball bat and slung it over my shoulder as I hopped on my black Huffy bicycle to search for Brenda.

After forty-five minutes of riding through the neighborhood, I found a house with a gray truck parked in the driveway. The license plate matched. How many gray trucks with the license plate ending in BSG can there be in one little suburb? That energy inside me was honing in on her. I could feel her fear as if it were my own. I wanted to go back, but I couldn’t let him have her.

Brenda’s prison was an orange-red brick house that was slowly being consumed by the vines that crept over the walls from the garden below. I walked by the truck in the wide driveway in front of the garage that was the same color as the house but a different building. She wasn’t inside, but that’s where he kept his kidnapping tools. Brenda was in the heart of the house, and so was he. My fear mounted as I walked down the mossy sidewalk to the wooden front porch with the warped floorboards and chipped gray paint. I saw a screen door that was latched and locked because he never went in this way. I could sense his past movements.

I touched a brick jutting from the corner of the house and felt a memory ingrained there. Manny: Manny Finch was his name. A month ago, he cursed as his elbow busted into the brick. He was carrying his seventh victim out to the car, a young boy named Tyler Norowitz. He would have become a neurosurgeon if he hadn’t been ruthlessly picked up after exiting an external bathroom behind a Shell gas station on I-20 in east Texas. It had been too easy. The kid’s parents didn’t even see Manny drive away with their child gagging on a cloth of chloroform in the backseat as they were perusing the snacks in the rundown gas station lobby yards away.

There was a camera, but Manny knew where it was and hooked a left out of the parking lot into the neighborhood. It didn’t capture his Mercury Sable pulling in or out. The family’s maroon Honda Odyssey had a Colorado plate. They were heading for California—maybe stop by Carlsbad Caverns along the way, take a detour through the Grand Canyon and make some genuine family memories. That had been the plan. Manny had followed at a distance for about forty-five minutes before family memories transformed into a horrible tragedy. Tyler Norowitz was gone like the others, disappeared into Manny’s dark world.

I walked along the cement path between the garage and the house into the backyard. There was a pool that was covered with a plastic coverlet adjacent to the back entrance. I could tell it had been years since someone cleaned it from the algae that caked the pool’s rim. Everything Manny touched seemed to die.

The back door was open to a comfortable living room where I could hear The Price Is Right playing on the television. I climbed the cement steps and drew back the screen door just wide enough for me to slide inside. The rusty spring in the door gave a weak growl as I closed it quietly. It was summer, and the air in the house was humid and hot—like he had wanted to cut the electricity bill by keeping the AC off in addition to having little ventilation. The muggy air carried the metallic aroma of blood as I stepped into the hall corridor. I heard a cry from the other room as Manny yelled at Brenda.

I found a closet in the kitchen that was full of dirty magazines and stacks of garbage that made me sick to my stomach. The smell was horrendous. He hadn’t cleaned in years. Months ago, Manny had injured his knee on a construction jobsite and was living off compensation and government disability checks while his knee had made a full recovery. Now that he was better, he was free to stalk his prey like a wolf hunting sheep.

My plan was your standard Jack and the Beanstalk method. I would wait until the demon was asleep, rescue the golden goose from its chamber, and then we would flee without pursuit. Although, if I remember correctly, Jack had been pursued, and this wasn’t your average giant. He was a demon, and demons don’t tire. They just become angrier. I watched through the cracked pantry door as Manny emerged from a room in the hall to go watch television.

After the sun disappeared from the grimy windows in the kitchen, he cooked himself a pot of Ramen noodles, chugged several beers, and collapsed on the couch with Brenda sobbing in the next room. She begged him to let her go, that she wouldn’t tell anyone if he would just release her. We both knew letting her go wasn’t part of the plan. His power-drive would escalate soon, and he would kill her. After that, it would be time to dispose of the body. Manny already had it planned out because Brenda was number eight. In his mind, it was like putting trash out on the curb.

I must have waited a full hour before I heard Manny snoring. Brenda went silent, hoping he wouldn’t wake up. I quietly pushed open the pantry door and rested the quiver and bat against the bar in the kitchen amidst the smelly open trash bags heaped throughout the room. I didn’t want the bat handle to knock against something as I navigated the disgusting mess that was Manny’s hallway. The house had hardwood floors, so I had to creep through the den toward Brenda, who was lying with her back to me in one of the rooms.

Bars covered the door and windows like a prison from an old western movie. She wore only a loose brown shirt and a pair of gym shorts. The air was hot, but she was still shivering. Bloody smears marked the floor and walls. The floor creaked under my step, and Brenda turned around to see me. Her bruised expression widened, and she started shaking her head. One of her eyes was bloodied, limiting her sight in that eye for the rest of her life.

She mouthed the words, No, no, no, no, no!

I put my hands on the bars of the door.

He’ll kill you too! she whispered.

I touched the lock of the cell door, and it sprang open. It felt like I had triggered the lock mechanism to open with my mind, but maybe it wasn’t locked to begin with.

I had just realized that the house was too quiet.

Who the— I heard Manny yell, but I was running down the hall before he could get the first part of his sentence out. Wearing only his black checkered boxers, he pounded down the hallway after me. I wasn’t sure where I was going or why I had decided that running further into the house would be better than running out. The back door was in the other direction, but like a rabbit being chased by a weasel, I charged deeper into the hole.

Bursting into Manny’s bedroom, I immediately tripped on a pile of children’s clothing by his dresser. I scrambled into a run around the bed as he entered the room behind me. I went to the window, but it was barred shut. Manny seethed with rage as he bounded after me. I dove under the queen-sized bed that sagged low in the middle, pushed two Rubbermaid boxes full of socks and underwear out of the way, and crawled toward freedom on the other side.

A hand clamped around my ankle. Got you, you little—

I fired my shoe directly into his mustached face, breaking his nose as he released me.

Ow— He slammed his balding head into the wooden beam of his bed before backing out.

I ran down the hall with Manny still charging behind me like an angry bull. I wondered if Brenda had escaped when I ducked under her as she swung a fire extinguisher around the corner into Manny’s temple. As noble as this might have seemed, this wasn’t a movie, and Manny was far too big to be taken down so easily. He shoved Brenda away with one hand, sending her sprawling through the heaps of trash he’d been too lazy to take out in the kitchen while redoubling his attention on me.

The house had become even more of a wreck than it was before as Manny knocked things over to get me. He grabbed my wrist and pulled. I kicked him as hard as I could directly where his knee had been injured not long ago. Grimacing, he seized me by the throat, a searing grip that sent burning pain through my windpipe. I went dizzy and began to lose consciousness as he squeezed tighter, glaring with black eyes into mine. I remember him shaking me back and forth as he choked the life from my body. His grasp faded, releasing me as a struggle continued before my lulling form.

My eyes refocused to see Brenda and Manny fighting. She had tried to strangle him with a belt but failed. Brenda wasn’t very big, so once Manny pinned her, she couldn’t move. I watched Manny start wrapping the belt around his fist. I grabbed my aluminum baseball bat that had fallen over in the quiver under a broken kitchen chair nearby and stumbled to my feet. Stars swam through my vision. Somehow, I’d sprained my ankle throughout the chaos, but I didn’t care. I staggered toward him and drew back the baseball bat.

Aiming for the base of Manny’s neck, I swung. The bat cracked him with a solid strike that sent shocks of pain through my forearms. Manny slumped to his side, his face turning beet red as his fingers and legs twitched. His neck was twisted weirdly. The aluminum bat slipped from my shaking fingers and pinged to the floor. Brenda shoved Manny off of her and got up.

The house was filled with a heavy silence as Manny’s horrified expression stared straight ahead. He had stopped moving. Blood dripped from his nose, ears, and mouth to the floor. I was still worried he might return to life and come for us again.

Hey, look at me. Brenda took my hand and made me look into her good green eye. Are you all right?

Yeah, I said even though my hands were shaking uncontrollably.

My name is Brenda, she said and then gave me a tight hug. Tears were welling from her eyes, but she wiped them away. We’re going to get out of here, but we need to call the police first.

We searched the house for a phone. The only one we found was Manny’s cell in his bedroom. The phone was locked, but we could still use the emergency feature on the lock screen to contact the police. Before I could hit the call button for 911, Brenda’s eyes widened.

Wait! she said. I followed her back into the kitchen with the phone in hand. She grabbed the baseball bat and rubbed the handle with her shirt before gripping it tightly in both hands. After, she tossed it next to Manny on the floor.

Listen to me, okay, she said as she dropped to one knee beside me. When we call the police, I want you to tell them that I’m the one who hit him. Can you do that for me?

I met Brenda’s eyes. But…why?

I don’t have time to explain, but it’ll be easier. When we talk to the police officers and your parents, tell them I’m the one who killed him, she said.

I did as Brenda asked and told the police that she was the one who dealt the killing blow to Manny. It would be a few years before I understood why she asked me to do this, not that it would have mattered in hindsight. It was self-defense, and I think most judges would have seen it that way. But Brenda assumed that because I was technically trespassing, it might get me into hot water. The police confiscated the baseball bat as a murder weapon and evidence. My parents had to fill out a ton of paperwork and get a lawyer. It was lame, but Brenda and I made the front page of the Fort Worth Star Telegram—like people still read newspapers these days.

Missing UNT Student Found Alive!

Brenda and I had our pictures taken on the Tarrant County Courthouse’s front steps, and there was some deal about a Netflix documentary special in the works. The news article told the full story of how I had heard Brenda screaming from outside and acted quickly. When asked why I didn’t call the police, I had told them that I didn’t think about it. That awarded a considerable amount of skepticism and frustration with officials, but they couldn’t see any nefarious motive in me being part of the equation.

Investigators found out later that my and Brenda’s story didn’t match up—that whole confusing part about how my baseball bat got into Brenda’s hands. We thought it was going to spiral into a big deal, but then the entire thing went away overnight. It sounds ridiculous now, but our lawyer got wind from one of the receptionists at the police station that the baseball bat disappeared from the evidence room. No one had checked it out, and video cameras were of no help. It was a rare anomaly where a key piece of evidence in an already complicated case went missing and eventually caused officials to drop the matter. Manny Finch would always be a suspect in question for future cold cases, but the police were done with Brenda and me.

Brenda was a good friend of mine for many years. Nothing could cease the unending memories she had of Manny and the torture she was subjected to in that house. I loved Brenda like an older sister. No one could know what she felt, but she and I were family for what we had been through.

She lived for another twelve years before she took her own life by jumping from a bridge in Switzerland. People think that’s a sad story, but it isn’t. There was not a more redeeming moment in Brenda’s life than when she felt the wind on her face as she fell, the dissipation of Manny’s last evil energy.

There was a moment of pain, and then…

Freedom….

Chapter Two

The Malark

There are entrances to places that don’t exist to regular members of society. Nature is the most common passage to the old countries that are becoming lost as time goes on. I’ve seen places where travel-weary wizards go to retire, mountain ranges where dragons still pass over when they’re not guarding ancient treasure, where there are no cars and buildings and tourists. Regular people look through them because they no longer know how to see, but it’s right in front of us.

I remained in loose contact with Brenda, but she moved to a different part of town several months after the incident. At thirteen years old, public school was impossible. I couldn’t see the dry-erase board, and my teachers had little patience with me because I was bored and had more fun trying to make the other kids laugh. English? Who cares? Algebra? Why would you try to compress a universe of beauty and art and holy majesty into some lines and equations?

Private school was a joke. They just wanted me to teach myself to speed-read from the Bible. I could already speed-read, so I memorized it to win their Bible Drill games later. I had my worst teacher that year, a crone named Peggy Notes who forced me to write definitions from the dictionary when staying focused in class was difficult. To be fair, I didn’t pay attention to her teaching, so I could understand her need for retribution to a certain extent. However, being forced to write that way caused irreversible damage to my developing handwriting. It wouldn’t be such a big deal except that having proper hand etiquette would be crucial in my later line of work. Touché, Mrs. Notes, touché.

I remember an afternoon when she scolded me for drawing faeries all over my homework after I had just waved my pencil at another student as if it were a magic wand to ward away a swarm of earwax flies.

Elgar, said Mrs. Notes. She had a long, hooked nose, a nasty sneer, and piercing green eyes. Her wild curly blond hair reminded me of Ramen noodles, which reminded me of Manny Finch, so neither of us liked one another for silly reasons. Can I ask that you don’t draw faeries on your homework anymore? she asked in a sarcastic tone.

There are just so many of them that I wanted to keep track.

There are no faeries. Don’t do it anymore. She shook her head.

There are so faeries. I’ve seen them, I muttered.

At that point, she dragged me by my arm out into the hall and glared at me with her wide Medusa green eyes. Elgar, don’t talk back to me. There are no faeries. I won’t say it again. Go back inside and don’t say another word for the rest of the day. Finish your definitions.

I never told my parents how cruel my eighth-grade teacher was at the private school. I just thought adults were jerks like that all the time. It’s odd how the people who leave the longest lasting impressions can be some of the worst people you’ll ever meet. Yet we rarely think of the people who came and went pleasantly.

I didn’t belong in regular school or private school, and that was about to become extraordinarily clear.

During the last week of school, we had a class field trip to the Greenbelt Corridor Park in Denton, Texas where we were supposed to walk a few miles and then walk back. Those sorts of trips are memorable as a kid, but half the class had already been there. I hadn’t, so I was fascinated by all the trees while still being in proximity to the metroplex.

I might be overly critical of Mrs. Notes from my memory. To be fair, she had been dealing with a cheating husband, her patience was tested daily by twenty-nine normal children, and then you add hyperactive me to the equation. She had tried to have me put on Ritalin, but my parents wouldn’t spring for it. I did have to get glasses though. They were thin-rimmed with cheesy brown leopard spots on the earpieces. They didn’t last long.

That morning, she was in a lousy mood. We were supposed to be staying with our buddy, but I had been paired with Jim Crook. Jim Crook had a gas and BO problem. I didn’t like being near him, but Mrs. Notes kept positioning me at his side to exert as much dominance and authority over me as possible while she still could. Crook and I were neutral. I didn’t want to say out loud that he smelled like BO so I’d float away from him as we walked.

Finally, Mrs. Notes isolated me behind the rest of the students and towered over me with her hands on her hips. "Elgar, we have not had one good day together this year. Do