Hunter held Marcie’s ashes tightly against his chest. The midnight ocean wind was barely a breeze, the metal urn colder still against his skin. Course sand caked onto Hunter’s shoes and he had to stop every ten paces to dig free the wheels of his beach wagon. Frankly, it was too heavy. He’d packed everything he could possibly need that night. Chalk for tracing, the generator which was the bulk of the weight, a headlamp, single use gloves, a bucket of goats blood, a paint brush, and the Necronomicon. It was in taking inventory of all these items that he realized he forgot to bring a goddamn broom. There was no turning back for it now. If death couldn't keep them apart, a little sand certainly didn't stand a chance.

Memories of Hunter’s childhood painted hazy pictures of the beachside carnival of Redwood Cove, California. Dart throwing games, ring toss, a Ferris wheel, a fun house, and plenty of other attractions he and Marcie could spend all day doing again and again. They were all gone now, except for the carousel at the end of the cove, which for whatever reason had been left behind when the rest of the boardwalk was deconstructed. The dock had been overtaken by rising tides, burying most of the hardwood under a foot of sand.

Cove Beach itself was cramped under a cliffside, far from the streetlights that lit the town past dusk. Hunter dreaded lugging the generator back up the hill to the parking lot with his scrawny stick arms. He feared for his spine, still addled by semesters of sleeping on the cheapest mattress imaginable in a college dorm room and shrimp-sitting in a desk made for people of average height and well-proportioned legs. His were long, too long, and aching terribly. The sand swallowed him up to the ankle as he anchored himself enough to pull the wagon. Though, that was nowhere near top of the list of ‘things Hunter was currently concerned with’.

Hunter approached the carousel, averting his eyes from the hole torn in the canopy as soon as he saw it. The carousel was tucked away in the farthest point on the beach, under the tallest looming cliff. Its cloth hadn’t done a single thing to break her fall, he imagined. Now it flapped in the wind, making sounds like the blow of a horse's nose. Hunter averted his mind away from these thoughts as soon as they passed and, without thinking, pressed the urn a little harder into his ribs.

Old wood, eaten by fungus, wildlife, and simply the passage of time, creaked under his footsteps. Horses of various colored porcelain were caked with sand. Paint finish was peeling off like scabs, revealing the gray metallic bars that held the spinning top together like toothpicks. Memories surfaced of when he used to shove other kids to the side just to sit on the special seahorse, but looking at it now, its face was uncanny. It had the smile of a demon and unblinking eyes that seemed to follow him as he started unpacking.

Hunter’s last few days were spent obsessing over the perfect angle, the perfect path to accommodate the exact lines and symbols. Not to mention the last six months using his very rudimentary, very Googled, Latin to translate pieces of the tome. Beth, as nosy and annoying sisters must do, started to pick up on Hunter’s frequent trips to the beach during the day. She’d called it his “weird obsession”. But, when did Hunter not have a weird obsession? Mom scolded her, saying if she had enough time to bother him, she had plenty of time for studying, which of course Beth would never end up doing.

He’d confirmed his design as he brushed dry sand off the carousel floor with his bare hands. The work of it gave him enough splinters to last a lifetime and he paused every minute or so to remove a new one.

The book of the dead seemed delicate, but the pages never tore. It was dark, dusty, and Hunter had a strong suspicion the binding might be made of human skin.

Bulging with Post-It notes, he flipped to where he’d bookmarked an incantation titled Anastasim. Little by little, he took chalk to the floor, erasing and redrawing any runes that had even the slightest deviation from the reference. He only had one chance to get the incantation right. And no horse pole or bench—the ones for parents that didn’t want to crush their groin riding with their child—was going to ruin that chance. Once done, he traced over the chalk perfectly in blood.

Sundown was hours ago. The town was in deep silence by now, slumbering, tucked away under woolen blankets while Hunter worked something unholy in the dead of night. Confident in his efforts, he wiped the sweat from his forehead.

With no hesitation, he reached his hand into the urn. Her urn. Sprinkles of ashes fell from his fingertips. Her fragments were miniscule and inhuman, but no less her. The ashes settled into place, outlining the sigils without being lost to the wind, however soft a breeze it was.

Hunter stepped off, plugged the carousel into the generator. The generator sputtered as it worked, much louder than Hunter was hoping for. The carousel buzzed into weary life. Shy lights blinked in and out like it was struggling to breathe. What working speakers were left, those not yet disemboweled of their wiring to make bird’s nests, crackled with circus music. Hunter flipped the switch to start the carousel spinning.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“This better work or else I’m gonna feel like such an asshole,” he whispered to himself and read the first section of the spell. “Lutum de pulvere, caro de luto, animam dilecti mei voco.”

The blood began to glow a crimson red. The carousel lurched forward and its metal supports creaked as if it was yawning awake. Hunter hopped on and began to finalize the spell, “lutum de pulvere, caro de luto, amorem meum in terram.”

The carousel spun faster. He read from the book again, “lutum de pulvere, caro de luto, amorem meum in terram.”

Faster it went. Hunter read the phrase over and over, prompting the carousel to whirl at rapid speeds it should have been entirely incapable of. The light of the sigils brightened in blinding red, illuminating the beach out to the ocean. Marcie’s ashes began to float in midair. As the horses spun, Hunter dizzied. He fell into the nearest horse but dug his grip into its pole to stabilize. Despite the disorienting lights and unbearable motion, he persisted.

“lutum de pulvere, caro de luto, amorem meum in terram.”

Then he saw her. A shadow, an outline in the corner of his blurred vision, riding the bobbing horse he clung to. As the great world spun around him, light and music and ash coalesced. All of it like a raging storm, its eye focusing on him and her shadow. The music rose in a crescendo until it was so oppressively loud that it registered in Hunter’s ears as pure noise. The rush of so many sensations disentangled Hunter from the inside, melting the world into amorphous shapes.

Then suddenly it stopped. Ambiguous color and shadow imploded. At once so pitch dark that the world disappeared in a void. In another instant, soft lights, flickering back on, brought Hunter back to his senses. And she was there.

Her hair, black as that endless void, flowed as she turned on her steed. Long obsidian streaks seemed to float like they were windswept, though they settled as the carousel did. Her dark amber skin had paled slightly, showing a faint roadmap of veins and arteries. There were other somewhat alarming developments. Small crustaceans crawled in and out of her sand-dusted hair. She was missing a single shoe, which revealed a foot without skin or muscle. Though, tendons, still attached, articulated her phalanges. Her left eye socket had been hollowed out. But, the one that remained was a warm hazel.

Thankfully and miraculously, she had materialized in a comfortable outfit. Black ripped jeans, a black crop top clinging to her emaciated body, and the same gray cotton jacket she always wore when she slept in Hunter’s lap. Under her top he could see a patch of skin missing, showing the lip of her ribcage. When she saw him staring, a red-ish color returned to her pale face, and she quickly zipped the oversized hoodie.

She was just as beautiful as the day he left.

“Marcella,” Hunter gasped, pure elation leaping from out his throat, only weakened by nausea.

“What's up, string bean,” she said, smiling from atop her plastic mustang.

The carousel returned to its natural lurching speed. The ash, chalk, blood, truly any evidence of the ritual was gone, as if it was taken by some unknown force as currency. Suspicion in the back of Hunter’s head fretted that the carnival ride was not going to survive the incantation. In fact, he wasn’t even sure he would have survived himself. However, the beams only creaked slightly as if its age and the anomalous motion it just went through had never worn it at all. As well, it seemed his body and soul were still intact, even if it was reeling from vertigo.

Basking in the enormity of what he’d accomplished, Hunter blinked, confirming that this was, in fact, reality. “Oh my God, it worked! I – wow – I can’t believe it worked,” Hunter said, kissing the Necronomicon, then immediately regretting it when his lips met the skin-like binding. “You’re real!”

“Very real, my little necromancer,” Marcie agreed, a grin creeping across her face as she seemed to settle into reality herself. She took in the view as the carousel turned. The ride itself, the beach, the ocean, Hunter. When she settled on the waves crashing onto the sand, she listened for a moment. Hunter tried to listen too, but he didn’t want to pull his focus from Marcie, for fear that if he looked away, she’d disappear.

Turned again, she peered through the hole in the top’s fabric and up towards the cliffside. Her apparent joy waned seeing the trajectory of her fall. The framing of her death.

“Wow, this place looks like shit,” she laughed, injecting a cheerfulness into her tone. “Like it was shit when I died, but somehow it’s gotten even shittier.”

Hunter couldn’t stop himself from smiling. Now that he had her back, he wanted to listen to her voice forever. He dropped the spellbook to the ground and took three wobbly steps towards her.

“I’m sorry I took so long,” he said. “And I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

She opened her arms to him, but Hunter felt his legs buckle. Exhaustion whisked all his remaining consciousness away. And then the world went black again.