Without Marcie, Hunter barely ate. He felt aimless. He felt restless. Then the anxiety started. Most of his time was spent awake in bed, locked in a stalemate between the pros and cons of leaving his college dorm room. His friendships, new and shallow, dried up as they drifted elsewhere. Eventually, after too many failed midterms and unattended lectures, he just stopped trying.
And a little while after that was when a neighbor from a ways down the hallway who he’d spoken to about zero times, knocked on his door. They came with several restaurant to-go bags full of incense, mixes of herbs and salt, and an offer.
Then the neighbor showed him how to summon a spirit. Her spirit. Among the innumerable questions that Hunter had about everything, the identity of the spirit they called forth was not one of them. It had to be Marcie. It could only be Marcie.
After the first seance, classes were far beyond an afterthought. He taught himself to perform the seance with the neighbor’s help. He still had no idea what their deal was but at that point it wasn’t all that important.
During one summoning, Hunter had asked if Marcie wanted to come back to life. To which she answered a resounding yes. He later had to formulate an explanation to an R.A. why the whole floor shook and all his drawers had been flung onto the carpet. A rough tumble out of bed was an adequate enough excuse to get a slap on the wrist.
Finding out that the occult was real—that demons, ghosts, and grimoires existed—should have been world shattering. It should have broken Hunter. But he’d already been broken once. He finally had something that could piece it all back together. He’d always had small cycles of hyperfixations. But this was truly the first time he had to agree with his sisters. He was obsessed.
An offhand google search turned into months of research. He taught himself a dead language just to learn as much as he could from every niche website, dusty library book, and historical academic paper. It was about all that college was good for at that point. The world of the supernatural was vast. Too vast for Hunter to fully explore in one semester. And he only needed to scratch the surface to find what he needed. Hunter had one goal. It took two semesters worth of incomplete credits, but he finally found the key to everything. The book.
“Yes.” Hunter looked at Dad across the dining table and smiled. It was always better to meet his eyes. Otherwise, he’d waste his breath commanding Hunter to look at him. Hunter didn’t want to waste any time. Mom, Beth, and Candace were still silent. For Beth, a bad grade was common, presumed even. For Hunter, dutiful, obedient Hunter, it was earth shattering.
He continued explaining in a direct tone to match Dad’s. “I was on academic probation two semesters ago. I was attempting to fix it but with Marcie’s passing, it was challenging. I’m sorry. I should have told you, but I was ashamed to admit I wasn’t doing well.”
There was a flash of something maybe someone else’s dad would have meant to convey sympathy or respect. For Hunter’s father, that immovability was the closest he’d ever get. “You understand even one semester costs a lot of money? I work every day and probably will until I die, so you have every opportunity available to you. That goes for all of you.”
The three children nodded.
“Hunter, I expect more of you. Berkeley is not a school where you allow yourself to slack off. You don’t get to flunk out after I’ve worked so hard to pay for your education. I want you to plan out how you’re going to regain those credits. Until you have that figured out, I’ll be handing you a list of tasks to do to repay those wasted semesters. Beth, you’re grounded.”
“What!” Beth screamed. “That’s not fair! Why does Hunter get off so easily!”
Dad squared his shoulders. Which is a bit redundant, the man was practically a rectangle. He just got up from his chair. Not a single glance was awarded to Beth for her protestation and certainly no response.
“I have to drive to work.” Then he gave Mom a look like ‘is this what you wanted?’, then he left. He hadn’t even taken a single bite of his pancakes. Granted, they were soaked through with hot sauce. With the conversation cut so abruptly, everyone sat there in resigned and deflated smallness. Except, of course, for Beth who was staring daggers at Dad and then transferred to Hunter as soon as Dad was no longer visible from the dining room.
“Can I bring this to my room to eat?” asked Hunter.
“Yeah,” Mom said with a sigh and a nod of the head like she was coming out of some sort of dream.
He had to get out of there. It had taken every fiber of Hunter’s being to keep from exploding along with everyone else at the table. He didn’t know how his father managed to stay so stoic all the time. It was exhausting.
Marcie was curled up under a mountain of blankets. The whole guesthouse was sweltering. Hot air blasted out of the vents with a consistent harsh woosh. Opening the door had made him flinch when all the air rushed out like opening the door to an oven.
Some horror movie he'd never seen flashed blood and guts across the screen. If it was anybody else, the gratuitous gore might have tipped Hunter off to the beginning of a concerning fixation on human flesh. And while in life, many did find Marcie's love for cinemas most gruesome to be concerning, Hunter found it endearing then. He still did.
He felt the sweat start to trickle down from his forehead. Breathing was even a little hard with how thick the air was. He held the plate out to her.
“Room service.”
Marcie took the plate ferociously and started wolfing down food, completely unperturbed by the furnace she’d created.
“You’re not cold?” she asked, with half a pancake shoved into her mouth.
“How could I be? I’m roasting here. What happened?”
Marcie took another huge forkful. “I got really hungry, then I got really cold” she said. Hunter heard the biting sarcasm behind her mouthful of eggs and bacon.
He had to stop himself from putting a palm to his face. Instead, he put his hand to Marcie’s forehead. In an instant, it felt like he’d placed the back of his hand against a block of ice. The feeling of her skin was so cold it was painful.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
“Well, that’s moderately concerning,” Hunter said, “I think there's something about this in the book, but I don't remember exactly what it says.”
It was, most likely, highly inadvisable to keep a centuries old demonic grimoire made of human skin in his socks and underwear drawer, but it was the only place he could think to hide it. Since the night of Marcie’s resurrection it wouldn't stop glowing. Since all his other clothes were hung in the closet, he kept it under piles of black briefs to cancel out the color. Maybe, in some cruel twist of fate, when Hunter died, the book would curse him by turning into a mummy made of those undergarments. Except they’d be desperately unwashed.
Post-it notes rimmed the exterior of the resurrection spell, with many of them overlapping one another. He flipped through until he found one that seemed relevant, “Resurrected body requires flesh to sustain form–”
Oh great, she actually was a zombie. Maybe he should have paid a bit more attention to the undead girlfriend aftercare. He’d worked so hard to get her back and he was already royally fucking it up.
“–Oh great! I am a zombie!” Marcie’s voice muffled as she threw herself under the covers.
“Wait, wait! It doesn’t say anything about human flesh or living flesh. So maybe a couple steaks will work?”
“And if that doesn’t work?”
Flipping through more Post-Its he found, “Uhh, the resurrected body will decompose if it is not sustained.”
Marcie tossed the covers back off. They locked eyes and Hunter knew they were both flooded with the same panic. He shut the book closed, threw it hastily back into the sock drawer, and grabbed his jacket and keys.
“You think like three pounds is about enough?” He asked, rushing to get his shoes on.
He could feel the stink eye emanating from Marcie’s direction. “You calling me fat?”
“Okay, four pounds.”
He ripped the door open ready to get to store as fast as humanly possible.
A voice called from beside him right outside the guesthouse.
“Who are you talking to?” Beth asked. It was clear as day, she still was annoyed from breakfast.
Quick thinking had Hunter grabbing his phone out of his pocket and shook it to say ‘Piss off, I’m on a call’. He was gonna have to get used to keeping an earbud in to match the charade, he thought.
“Hey!” Beth called after him.
But he was already in the car, getting in to start the engine.
There were two major supermarkets in Redwood Cove. Three, if you counted the Mexican market downtown. Four, if you counted the farmer’s market that popped up once a month. But the two that most everyone shopped at—you know the kind of stores where you could bump into someone you didn’t really want to talk to or have that first realization all six year olds have that their teacher does in fact exist outside of school—were Vinny’s and Harvest Fresh.
Harvest Fresh was the hoity-toity store that was stocked full of all the keto-friendly, gluten-free, cage-free, nut-free, non-GMO, grass-fed, vegan, organic bullshit an upper class asshat could ask for. It had its own juice bar, cafe, buffet, bakery and charcuterie counter. And Hunter wanted to avoid it and all costs.
So he drove the extra three miles to get to Vinny's, which was just a normal goddamn grocery store. Normal brands, normal brownish worn tile, and a sort of stale smell that permeated the whole store and mixed with the myriad of other smells from each aisle. A droning of bland pop music was playing out of invisible speakers.
By happenstance, there was a sale on pork shoulder. Human flesh was supposed to taste like pork, right? Maybe that would be more satisfying. Hunter grabbed a couple new york strips to be safe. He figured while he was here he might as well grab some snacks. Marcie’s favorites.
Going aisle to aisle he grabbed everything he remembered she used to fiend for during lunch breaks and midnight snack runs. Cheap peach iced tea, any cinnamon candy, and Snickers bars (but only the dark chocolate ones). He’d landed in the chip section for a family sized bag of Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos when a man came down the aisle.
There were a moderate amount of people in the store, another person coming down the aisle was no surprise. Though, this man did smell. His pants and jacket were covered in dirt and he had an unkept beard that seemed to be trying to escape his chin in wiry clumps. Lines on his face indicated he might’ve been in his upper 40s, maybe 50s. Maybe he was even younger and worn by hard times.
Homelessness in Redwood Cove wasn’t like the horror stories people told. It wasn’t like San Francisco or Oakland. The homeless here were just down on their luck or had difficult medical problems and never got the proper support. Redwood Cove was too rural and too small to have a super pervasive drug problem, so most of the homeless people were pretty much in their right mind. And pretty nice at that. So Hunter had no issue with the man.
The man got rather close, right up next to Hunter. He thought the man was about to ask him for change, but the man barely even looked his way. On his tip toes and stretching his back, he reached up for a bag of chips on the tallest shelf.
“Um, sir?” Hunter tried to get his attention, “Which bag did you want? I could grab it for you.”
The man grumbled something Hunter couldn't make out. He kept stretching his back, painfully it seemed, to reach for what he wanted.
"The Cool Ranch?” asked Hunter. He reached up to grab it off the shelf, just as the man decided it was time to jump for it. His body collided with Hunter’s and knocked his hand, sending a row of chip bags cascading to the ground.
Hunter had secured a bag of Cool Ranch, which the homeless man snatched angrily.
“Beware, satanist,” he grumbled under his beard and walked away, crunching a bag of spicy nacho under his foot.
Stunned and dumbfounded, Hunter stood amongst a sea of fallen bags. He must've been tired. They’d gotten home late last night and it had been a long morning, that was for sure. It was likely he just misheard. There was no way anyone knew. There couldn't be. Maybe he said Thank you, sorry bout this, only really mumbly. He put down his basket to start picking up the chips.
Clean up on aisle six. A voice came over the store’s speakers.
A lone employee quickly came pacing up the aisle pushing along a half full shopping cart. Hunter looked up before he could grab any of the Cool Ranch Dorito bags to find that the employee, quite contrary to the homeless man, was staring at him.
“Hunter?” asked Grant Jeong, the last person on planet earth Hunter wanted to see.