The House
Husk loved being in the garden.
Once, the house’s back patio had opened onto a broad expanse of hill, the yard sloping away from the house and down into the loose forest. But for as long as Husk could remember, the edges had been hemmed in by tall, dense hedges on all sides. The children were free to frolic without fear of being seen.
Today, the bone-headed boy was through the doors outside almost before Gerard had left the house.
Husk’s favorite thing was a dead thing. He tried to find something dead every day, if the weather permitted. While Gerard might offer any number of corpses from the family crypts, there was something special about digging up your own. There were pieces of dead bugs, small fragments of bone to find. If he was lucky, he might find a whole person one day!
Far back as he could remember, Husk had been called a necromancer. Gerard often impressed upon him the terrible power of his inherited art, most unholy of magics. From his father, apparently.
Despite his caretaker’s best attempts, Husk wasn’t very interested in his potential. It had never fit him. He hadn’t raised any dead, or blurred the lines between life and death, besides where his head joined his neck.
He just liked to make friends that looked like him; a bit of both!
But it wasn’t just the potential of new friends drawing him down. Husk loved the way the dirt felt. The seemingly solid soil breaking beneath his nails.
Without eyes, ears, or a nose, Husk’s senses were weak approximations, powered by latent necromantic magic in his skull. That’s what Gerard thought. His sense of touch, however, was the genuine article. Touch was how Husk met the world.
The garden was covered in pairs of holes where Husk had plunged his arms up to the elbows in the dirt. He would stand there, content to spend several minutes sifting through all the different things he could feel underground.
Once satisfied, he would slowly pull them up, careful not to collapse the short tunnels he had made, before bounding away to the next dig site.
He adored feeling new things: a different type of grass with thicker blades; the varying fuzz on the backs of different bees; the cool, smooth stone of the house, where it turned to rough, choppy bricks at the bottom. The way things felt was the best!
Gerard hadn’t realized Husk sensed differently until the twins were five. Husk could remember the tests.
They’d been doing paints. The butler had noticed Husk mistaking the blue, the purple, and the black pots. Gerard had been nervous, terrified almost. But at the end of many examinations, Gerard was reassured the boy was in no danger. He was just different.
As far as his caretaker could tell, Husk’s sense of touch was exceptionally sensitive. His skull was mostly numb, but from the neck down he was so in tune that he felt even the lightest contact. Even a light pinch was enough to set him howling.
Husk had adapted quickly, once Gerard explained. Before, he might stub his toe and sob for an hour. Now, thanks to his time in the garden, he knew how to retract the hand that found thorns before it bled.
It was harder this way. Husk preferred to rush into things, favored leaping over looking. But that was then. He had been 5, a baby. Now he was basically an adult.
After plunging an even dozen pairs of holes in the dirt, Husk went down on hands and knees. Satisfied with the soil caked on his forearms, now it was time to find friends.
In the remaining grass, Husk passed what passed for eyes past the different pieces of detritus that littered the garden. He scurried like a squirrel, kicking up grass behind him as he went.
There were, as always, dead flowers in pieces and parts, fallen from atop the hedgerows. There were signs of bug activity–clippings of wings and the odd discarded limb. There was a new pile of droppings, possibly from a stray cat or raccoon. Sometimes it helped to not have a nose.
At the back-right corner of the garden, Husk stopped. There, poking through the blades of green, was a patch of dusty orange.
Carefully, quietly, Husk lifted himself onto his knees. He kept one violet eye on the new intruder.
He crept slowly towards it. It didn’t seem to be alive, but it was hard to tell. If it sprang up, Husk would leave it alone. He didn’t care about the living.
The boy drew closer and more color emerged. The orange patch grew, stippled in a way Husk couldn’t discern. Soon, a brown edge walked off the bottom edge of orange, and Husk saw a perfect, black circle–the orb of a beady eye.
Husk’s fingers parted the grass to reveal a small, dead bird.
From the second-floor window, Petal could see her brother’s bony head bobbing back and forth across the garden.
She didn’t share his love of the outdoors. It was sometimes enjoyable to watch him from the window, safe from the draining sun. But Petal knew why he rushed to the garden so quickly as of late. And that made it harder to enjoy.
Petal had always known she had magic. Hard to ignore, with a body like hers.
At least Husk’s head was the only odd part of him. If he were caught outside the house somehow, Normals might believe he was wearing a mask. Not Petal.
Nevermind the boundless shadow that she became outside of her suit, the suit itself only ever convinced Normals because they’re stupid, and only see what they want to believe. If they could really see her, they’d scream their little heads off. She knew because it had happened, once. Gerard had made her promise not to brood in the windows facing the street, after that. Not her fault some moony Normal mistook her for a damsel in distress.
Petal knew what she looked like. She didn’t look like a normal girl. She looked like the daughter of a scarecrow, inside her suit.
Gerard had tried his best, but he wasn’t a seamster. And it wasn’t as if being one would even help: from the patterns he’d brought back from the store, Petal could tell there was precious little information on the best ways to create a person suit.
So Petal had never thought she was normal.
She looked back into the house extending behind her. In the foyer beneath her, there was a grandfather clock; a dark and imposing block of wood in the corner furthest from the stairs. It cast a shadow even in the dim light that leaked through the front doors.
When she looked into the heart of the shadow, she thought she could feel it reaching for her.
She didn’t see anything, so instead Petal imagined the hand stretching out to her, bridging the distance between the deepest dark and where she stood at the balcony rail.
She brought her hand out, trying to hold it where she thought the hands would meet. She thought of hide and seek this morning. The freedom when she didn’t have to fit into a shape. The calm that washed over her in shadow.
Petal strained and flexed her gloved hand toward the darkness, holding it up until it felt like it was going to fall off.
Still, nothing reached out to her.
She dropped her arm, trying not to let out a huff. The house was quiet.
The floorboards creaked under her feet, echoing in the dark as she made her way up to her room.
Husk had broken into the greenhouse again.
On discovering The Bird, whom he was tentatively naming “Birdie,” the little monster had scurried to the greenhouse at once. Instead of heading for the door, he snuck around to the opposite wall; the one against the hedgerow. There, he found the secret loose panel that he had pulled away from its neighbors during his youth.
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Once in position, he pulled the glass panel away from its housing, leaving a window slightly above skull-height. Through an incredible feat of acrobatics, Husk vaulted himself over the window’s edge onto the table within—all while holding Birdie carefully in one grubby hand.
Now inside, Husk went to the most secret of his hiding places; the rusty biscuit tin, unearthed in the garden. When he had first found it, it had been full of spools and bobbins wrapped in disintegrating thread. Now, it was full of treasure.
Pulling away the lid, the Husk took stock of his collection. There were four bones (rabbit, bird, snake, and the jaw of a raccoon), an almost-complete exoskeleton of a cicada, a three-inch-long piece of snakeskin, and a single, pristine fox tooth.
Husk loved his treasure.
Skinny was first to arrive. He’d found it difficult to open up. Husk didn’t mind. He was happy to pass his fingers over each small, bubbly section of Skinny’s papery body. As he ran his fingertips over the flaky detritus, he found himself thinking about the moment, the day that the skin had stopped being a part of the vital body—Skinny’s body.
It was the first snakeskin he’d seen, and the first dead thing he’d ever touched. Husk had slipped his prize back into its hiding place and thought nothing of it. Until there was a similar experience with the carapace, Husk Jr.
During a science lesson, Gerard had told Husk that sometimes an empty body or a shell was called a husk. He had been waiting for a proper name to appear since he had found the shell on the patio step, as Shelly seemed girly and Buggy felt rude, and he leapt at the chance to create a junior.
Once he could steal a moment alone in the greenhouse, Husk had held his progeny over his head and declared his name with not a little ceremony. Gerard had told him all necromancers did rituals, even for small stuff.
Again, Husk was struck with an image. This time it was much more detailed.
His son was under pressure, being pushed on from all directions. The pressure kept building until it felt as though he were being pushed from the inside out. Then, Husk Jr felt the most shocking, tearing pain. It felt as if the world was splitting apart. And then it was over, and Husk Jr had been having a lie-down in the grass ever since.
Husk Sr, while a model father and actively blossoming necropath of some magnitude, was only 8 when this occurred. He could make neither heads nor tails of his overactive imagination. He hadn’t felt any of the pain he envisioned his son going through, but being so close to it had been not very nice.
Husk had chills for the first time in his life that day. He did not like it.
The feeling was exacerbated when he looked down to find Husk Jr standing up in the biscuit tin, balancing on end, his hollow antennae pointing impossibly skyward.
Husk Sr had stared at him for barely a moment before Jr tipped over and resumed his typical relation to gravity, rocking as he came to a rest.
Husk had gotten the lid on and kicked the tin under the table before the momentum faded. He didn’t go in the greenhouse for weeks after that.
It wasn’t until he found Rupert’s jawbone that Husk began to see.
Rupert the raccoon’s jawbone had risen from the soil after a particularly torrential rain during Husk’s eighth year. Not being the type to practice caution, the moment he’d seen it, Husk had rushed over and picked it up.
As his hand wrapped around the small bone, the world around him faltered and Rupert came rushing in.
Rupert had been a massive raccoon. The type that made you curious about the contents of the neighborhood's garbage cans. He had reveled in being a scourge while he’d been alive. When he was growing up, his turf was terrorized by a stray dog, Venus. Rupert learned from her example the way to intimidate scavengers into sharing, how to show yourself to humans in the way that would unnerve them most, to create a reputation among those who cooked meat and fish in their puny fields.
Rupert had bided his time, growing fat on banana peels and the occasional sugary treat stolen from the schoolyard.
Oh, but when the weekend of the loud noises above came and Venus vanished, raccoons were living large. With no larger mammals to rule the roost, Rupert seized power in his tiny hand. He grew so brazen as to walk in the streets. After all, who would question him?
That was until he was struck down by the enormous black demon that came on blurring feet and belching poison. Rupert had gone from road king to roadkill after a fortnight at the top.
When the demon stopped, its enormously wide arse blushing with the effort, Rupert thought he might still be saved. But the man-thing that stepped down from the demon and approached him only clicked his tongue and took Rupert’s body with him.
This person—Rupert was dead, and though he could no longer smell or hear or see, the spirit has a funny way of approximating what it has recently lost—didn’t smell right.
Rupert thought it was a man. The men-people often grew fur over their mouths, and that seemed to be all the fur this fellow had. And he was cold. When his hands had held him, Rupert felt them close around him like stone. He held out hope that he might be saved by this non-person.
When the demon came to the building on the hill, the non-person gathered Rupert’s remains and whisked them around the rear. There, a patch of yard was chopped out of the ground with a single stroke of an arm. Rupert was unceremoniously chucked inside, and a blanket of sod was slid over his limp body. There he moldered and decomposed, his skeleton eventually breaking apart and shifting around, until this very moment, and Husk was back in the garden.
Husk dropped the jaw. He stood there, staring at it in the dirt.
This went well beyond the imagination of a little boy, even to the little boy in question. Again he had felt something close to real when he saw those images. Though the collision with the demon didn’t hurt, it had been extremely unpleasant.
What was even more upsetting was that Husk recognized the demon. It was Gerard’s car. Had Gerard killed Rupert? Husk hadn’t been able to see well after Rupert died, but the mustache and the car together seemed irrefutable.
Husk sat motionless in the garden for a time after that. As the twins weren’t technically alive, time felt a bit different for them. It was easy for Husk to pass an afternoon outside, propped up on his haunches, watching the jawbone like a riled cat.
He only came back to himself when he heard Gerard’s car pulling up the drive.
Husk scrambled then. He was afraid of the bone piece, but even more than that, he wanted it. He couldn’t risk losing it. Besides, Husk was in no rush to reveal his new abilities to the older monster. But Gerard was very strict about not going into the greenhouse.
He and Petal had confided in one another that despite the excitement Gerard built up around their monstrous evolution, they both felt nervous. They were 7 when they’d that conversation, and Husk was 8 when he found Rupert. Now he was 10, the age Gerard had predicted they’d start to show signs. And 10 was halfway to 20, which was the same as being halfway to DEAD. Petal had reminded him that they were already kind of dead, but the panic remained.
Back in the garden, Husk, reluctant to touch the jawbone with his skin again, kicked it along the yard towards the greenhouse, relying on his velcro sneakers to protect him. Rather than try and take Rupert up through the secret panel, Husk elected to keep him safe under one of the stepping stones that lead to the greenhouse door.
Once he had —extremely carefully—kicked Rupert under a stone and set it back down on him, letting the weight push the bone into the soil, Husk had scurried back to the house.
He was questioned, of course. The children were expected to have tidied by the time Gerard got home in the evening.
(At the same time, the butler expected a certain degree of mischief from his charges, and Husk got away with only a minor interrogation.)
That night, under the cover of darkness, Husk had whispered to Petal the details of his vision of Rupert’s death. After listening, Petal asked him whether he planned to tell Gerard, and Husk was quiet for a while.
“Yes. Of course I do. Eventually. Just…”
After another moment, his sister shifted in the bunk below him. Husk slept on the top bunk because he was oldest.
“Just what?”
Husk held his hand up. He saw passably in the dark, and he watched the way his skin bent when he flexed his fingers.
“It’s not what I expected. I’ll tell, obviously. I just want to know what I’m telling. It didn’t feel… right.”
Husk swung his outstretched hand over the side of his bunk, dangling a pinky into space.
“Promise you won’t tell,” Petal’s pinky found his in the dark.
“I promise.”
And so, Husk had tried to practice in secret as best he could. He gathered more treasures in his tin, each of them singing the ballads of their demises in his mind. For all he tried though, he could not produce more of an effect on the remains than the same brief balance-at-attention that he had first seen in Husk Jr.
So far as Husk could tell, necromancy was the sort of magic that was meant to create nightmares: raising skeletons and zombies, or disintegrating Normals with barely a glance. He found his other bones and learned their stories, but that was all there ever was. The tooth hadn’t even moved. He hadn’t expected there to be so many feelings. Some days, after watching a memory, it was all Husk could do to keep from lying down in the grass himself.
But today was different. He had never found a whole body before. Birdy would be his very first zombie. It had to be perfect.
First, he cleared a small section of floor, kicking aside dried leaves and old snail shells. Then, he arranged his other children in a circle, creating a macabre clock face out of the remains. Finally, he gingerly placed Birdy down on her side in the center of the circle, using an old rag so as to avoid skin contact.
There was only a single break in her form: a small gap in her side, framing three slashes of white bone. Husk imagined that hole was the window through which he would spy the secrets of his magic, currently imprisoned in the bars of her ribs.
Once everything was in place, the grimy boy sat and drank the scene in. There was a hallowed feeling to this moment, and though Husk wasn’t sure how best to pay respect to it, he knew he would want to remember it. He tried to memorize the way the dim light of the overcast day filled the greenhouse around him. The tracks his tennis-shoed feet had left outside the bounds of his ritual circle. The various states of bloom on display through the plants Gerard kept on the counters and hanging from the ceiling.
Only when he was satisfied with his mental snapshot did he look back to Birdie, and reach out a hand to touch her.
When the vision came to him, he was ready for it. He breathed one gulp of fresh, bright air, and then he was gliding through open air.