The small dilapidated shop on Moor Street swayed, waltzing with the wind like an unwilling weather vane. It belonged to an enterprising Barroco Abuta. He relished the idea that it nestled near fashionable storefronts, which hired pretty serving girls. After all, Moor Street was, beside parliament, the heart of the great city of Loranisburg. Instead of the luxuries that high society cannot be without, Barroco, as a Sariassian witch doctor, sold strange medicines for modest sums.
His little shop was infamous. The ill from all over visited when other treatments failed. Girls from all the neighboring taverns, guilds, and boutiques occasionally came to vent about their lecherous bosses, match wits, or flirt. Officers of the law often complained about his store's sorry state, but over medicinal wine with its proprietor, offered to rebuild it themselves. To this, Barroco always said: My brothers, your lives are hard enough. If I troubled you with this task, I would just be taking advantage of fine men, and I will not have that on my conscience.
Of course, there was a reason for his refusal. His uncle had built the little shop as a speakeasy, running out of materials halfway. Frustrated, the uncle gave up his dream of filling the mouths of hooligans with ale. And so, the little shop was Barroco's. The men who did not drink his uncle's beer would eventually eat his uncle's dirt.
That uncle of Barroco's was a gravedigger.
The uncle left before dawn to investigate an incident by the gravesite. Today was a rare day when Barroco was lonely. With the unrelenting torrent driving his usual work away, he found himself fantasizing about the tall grassy plains of Sariassia. He thought fondly of his surrogate siblings. He missed the Paradise Island castle, where he spent most of his formative years, helping his adoptive parents rear those little goblins. But that was years ago, and who knew what those children ever thought of him.
Barroco gently hymned a battle march. It was in a tune he could not find and in a language no longer spoken. He matched the rhythm of the wrathful rain but found it a poor companion. Alas, he began to understand the mood of the rained-on peonies that filled the plaza at the end of Moor Street, but then he scowled in dismay as he realized that flowers probably liked the somber rain. At least the marble statues faired much worse.
He wondered if his admiration, the lovely nurse Florence, or his friend, the amiable officer Cletus, would come to visit in this foul weather. He redid his inventory and became annoyed at its sloppiness. To dispel this affliction, he began punching a lime-shaded cocoon the size of a melon. Long ago, he suspended it on a miniature oak tree that grew in the store when he accidentally poured a potent rejuvenation potion through the floorboards. The leafy bastard sprang through the cellar below. Then it punctured the first floor where it now towered towards the rafters. His uncle was determined to exact vengeance on that miserable firewood, but Barroco, ever the sentimental fool, felt an indescribable pride in its birth.
The story of the cocoon was somehow stranger. In short, it was an inheritance from Barroco's late adoptive father. However, Barroco rarely spoke of it or what it was for unless to jest that he would someday make medicine from it. For now, it was Barroco's silken punching bag.
Despite spending the latter part of his childhood in a respectable household, Barroco still refused to let go of some of his more boorish attributes. As such, Barroco was a person of peculiar contrasts. His neat way of dress pressed home the disorganization of his shop. Jars filled with concoctions of every imaginable hue crowded the small space and barely left a footpath from the entrance to the counter. The counter, of course, was a converted bar. Shelved behind where the drinks used to be, exotic herbs and animal appendages, seahorse tails, bramblebeak talons, and megalodon incisors, among the peculiarities of other peculiar creatures, proudly arranged themselves like the trophies of a wealthy hunter.
"Barroco?" yelled a voice outside that fought the storm for supremacy.
"Coming, uncle!" replied the startled Barroco.
Barroco quickly unleashed the front doors and became drenched by the rainwater from a curious wind. He waited awhile, but there was no one.
"The basement, you half-baked buffoon! Your front doors are open!"
"Right, sir." Barroco wondered what endeavor could require the basement. The only things down there were his bed, jars of fermenting potions, and foreign medicinal wine barrels. Surprisingly, among that arsenal of ungodly smells, his bed was somehow the worst. Nonetheless, Barroco waded through the mud to the back alley, where his uncle and two high-ranking sergeants of the royal police carried an anemic, barely conscious figure covered in dirt.
"Salutations, dear friend! We were wondering if you could, uh...., save this man's life. There is not much left of this fellow." greeted an always smiling officer Cletus.
So it was the bed, after all. "I'll do whatever I can, but I won't promise much. Belenatum's glowing buttocks, what happened to this bloke?" Barroco inquired. Pale as powder and consisting as a twig, the man must not have had a sandwich since the civil war.
Descending the stairs, Cletus spoke again after laying the man down. "Some citizens came by the precinct this morning to complain. The night before, people heard screaming by the Sorrowend Cemetery. So Sergeant Darius and I dragged your poor uncle into investigating. When we got there, the man's voice must have given out, but your uncle with his sharp ears dug up the correct mass grave and found the poor bloke."
The older officer, the unfamiliar sergeant Darius, took over from the zealous Cletus. He spoke with the slow country drawl of one who lived a hard life. "Amazingly, the man was still conscious. We darn thought he was just some drunken vagrant who accidentally wandered into the future, so we took him back for questioning but got no answers. The man's a blank slate: no name, family, job, address, where he's been, the works. Anyways, Sergeant Cletus here darn convinced me the man was telling the truth. Then the poor bastard just collapsed right there in the precinct."
"We called the garrison medic and some local doctors, but they said the man's got a day left at best," stated Cletus.
"And that's where I come in" Barroco scratched his chin. Despite his youthfulness and philandering, coupled with his exotic darker skin, he was still highly regarded in Loranisburg. In his own opinion, he had rightfully earned the misnomer The Necromancer of Moor Street. Barroco never refused the tenets of his vocation. Perhaps he was courageous at heart, but maybe he was too cowardly to give up. First, he needed information. He hastily ran to his closet and dug up various scientific instruments that he borrowed from the lovely nurse Florence. Tools he intends never to return, so she could keep bugging him for them.
"…Is he alive?" asked the stoic uncle.
"Cletus, Officer Darius, may I ask you to step outside for a moment? This next part may be unpleasant." eager to reduce the room of contaminations, Barroco responded, pressing the stethoscope to the patient's chest.
"Sure thing, my dear friend, but I've seen my fair share of unpleasant…. I have a mirror at home, you know?" chuckled Cletus as he ascended the stairs into the midday darkness beneath the storm. The other officer, Darius, lingered. He looked as if he would openly complain, as calculating eyes curiously focused themselves on the fate of the mysterious stick of a man. Was it duty or fear that lingered in that gaze?
"Alright, I'll wait right outside," Darius said,
"In the rain, sir?"
"Aye, I got no problem with that. You let me know the moment anything happens, alright?" Darius gingerly closed the door behind him.
When the old officer left, Barroco's uncle suddenly broke the renewed silence. "That officer Darius is a strange fellow."
"How so?"
"He transferred to this precinct just last night. When we got to the gravesite, none of us could hear anything, yet Darius insisted that something was amiss. So I played a hunch and luckily dug up the right one." The uncle spoke in a quiet tone that he developed from years of not trusting many people.
"Uncle, are you sure you dug up the correct one?"
"I'm certain."
"This man has no heartbeat," Barroco whispered, strapping the emaciated fellow to his bed with solid leather belts. He was dead, or he was undead. Now Barroco regretted his title like latent rabies from a gift horse.
"He shouldn't. I sold it to the Sungrace hospital before I buried him."
Suddenly, the patient moaned, and Barroco jumped a few feet in the air like a startled cat.
"How..... What?????? What is this, the work of sorcerers?" Barroco's whispers became increasingly agitated.
"There hasn't been a real sorcerer in over five centuries…., and they were never able to bring back the dead."
Barroco remembered the paintings of those terrible sanguineous rituals that enraptured all the bohemian painters. He had wanted to hang one in his store, but his uncle warned that that might estrange his clientele.
Barroco paced around the room nervously, unsure of his next step. Should he begin treatment or call an exorcist? Why was his uncle so calm? That was a stupid question; his uncle is always quiet. Should he pester the officers for answers? Cletus wears his heart on both the unwashed sleeves of his once colorful uniform, so Barroco doubts he knows nothing more. Darius seems untrusting at best and untrustworthy at worst. The roughed countryman had a foreboding exterior about him, clearly hardened from a hard life. He was the kind who hid a querulous temper and drank often. A furtive darting hung in his narrow yet colorfully hazel eyes, while a great beard, fighting against time to stay its former brown, obscured his face. Barroco noticed that Darius's scarred right arm was missing a hand. Fresh rashes and bruises covered much of the rest of Darius's exposed features as if he was hit by a carriage and flung for quite a distance. Was he dashed into a wall as well? Why Darius seemed so animated puzzled Barroco intensely, but the greater mystery today writhed on his bed.
Barroco examined his patient now with great care. While pale and near lifeless, his patient lacked the many distinctive features of a dead man. He was not stiff. There were no signs of rigor mortis or decomposition. Blood hasn't even been collected in his extremities since there was no blood in his system. He only seemed to breathe out of habit instead of necessity. His garments were warm, unwashed, and dull. After his brief burial, they were rotting slightly as well. On the other hand, his gloves ghoulishly wrought with a patchwork of gaudy patterns, each distinctive and combative. While the fermentation and brewing of concoctions in the basement briefly masked it, both the smells of death and life fought fiercely around him.
"I'm sorry….. Pa, Ma, please forgive a worthless son…." The unconscious man muttered deliriously. Clinging to the deathly border and between wasted breaths, "Isabelle….. I cannot.... ever…."
"...come..."
"... home..."