Davan James Magill's father had told him to bring it back better than he found it. DJ had taken the car only a few times, during none of which was it worse for it, simply not conspicuously better. He could gas it up and maybe hand wash it, though more as an act of brattiness than filial piety. Look, Father. I have reduced myself to the status of an automatic carwash. What a good child I am.
The tires thumped over something seconds after he took his eyes off the road to check a text. DJ pulled over when he processed what he had done in this distracted fiddling.
It was not a cat, which was less of a relief when the guilt found him that he weighed one animal's life over another. The squirrel, twitching its last ten feet away, would not have appreciated he measured its death as of less consequence than someone's dog or cat, some animal with a name who was beloved by a human.
He could not leave the squirrel to be further flattened until it was nothing but a matted pelt. Dying to a tire was indignity enough.
He would not touch it directly, no matter his compunctions. The closer his approach, the more revolting the remains became.
He rooted through the car's trunk for something that would serve the task better than his band t-shirt, with the added benefit he would not arrive home topless.
A microfiber shop towel. Well, he didn't want to wash the car anyway.
The body remained scalding, the coating of blood leaching heat. He would throw out the towel; there was no cleaning this.
He brought the corpse a little into the woods. He would not be away from the car long enough to worry about it. If anyone saw it, they might assume he was only taking a leak, though he would have waited for a gas station.
He looked only perfunctorily for the base of a tree that could serve as a resting place, finding a candidate between two thick exposed roots.
He nestled the bundle there. He should say a few words, but he had only just hit the squirrel, and it was dead before he could make its acquaintance, so he could not speak to the peerless animal's character. Instead, he recited a stanza from a poem he recalled from AP English.
All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal: and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
There's nothing mortal in them; their decay
Is the green life of change; to pass away
And come again in blooms revivified.
Its birth was heaven, eternal in its stay,
And with the sun and moon shall still abide
Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.
He called that good enough for the eulogy of something with a brain the size of a peanut.
It stirred beneath the cloth. He did not waste the sacrament of hope pretending for a second the squirrel was not dead. He had wiped a piece of its brain on the towel. If it were still alive, death had been too cruel to deny itself to the squirrel.
This unholy movement was not gas escaping. It had not had enough time for that sort of buildup.
DJ would regret looking, but he could not resist the curiosity. He poked the towel off with a stick.
It was not a squirrel now. There were part to it that had been. The tail split and migrated around its neck as an undulating slug of a cloak. The teeth were blades. It had fore and back paws but also a set of limbs between that may have come from its ribs and spine. Then, some parts could not have derived from its body: the golden glean of the bare skull like a helmet, the sparrow wings, the slit-pupil eyes above the onyx pebble ones close to the original.
It stared up a Davan James, each set of eyes blinking on its schedule.
It moved closer, more like a slither than a scamper, as though it no longer knew its body plan. He could not blame it there. DJ could not begin to reconcile its shape.
DJ ran backward, all fear and instinct, until he stumbled into a tree, knocking the air from his lungs and the rest of him on his ass.
He could not crabwalk away quickly enough. The squirrel--what had been a squirrel until it was something that was far from innocuous--was on him. No. Not quite. It stood feet away beside a cream-colored mushroom, its focus unbroken on him.
He waited for its attack, its vengeance for killing it and, possibly, causing it to become this--though he could not justify how he could have directly done this.
The former squirrel stood, resting its two right arms on the toadstool as though for balance. Considering him, it took a step closer. When it saw DJ's terror, it stepped back again. Something shaped this way should be malevolent. This was as close to a monster as DJ imagined he would ever witness, but it was also eleven inches now that its tail was not where it belonged.
Its deference did not go unnoticed.
"Hey?" DJ ventured.
The creature let out a tiny rasp, appearing surprised that this was the sound its throat made. There was a tonality, a modulation like words, but its voice wasn't substantial enough to carry it to DJ's ears. The creature paused in thought, then raised one of its arms from the mushroom and waved.
"Are you okay?"
The creature felt itself, the limps more flexible than DJ had guessed, reaching all crevices. It squeezed its quartet of eyes closed. Then it nodded.
"I'm sorry I hit you," DJ said, wanting to get that out of the way. "I didn't mean to."
The squirrel stepped closer, waiting for DJ's recoil. The boy resisted it, though he did not take his eyes from the daggers jutting from the creature's mouth. It appeared to acclimate to its shape and moved in a saunter now, its motions comfortable enough to seem unsettling.
It patted DJ's shin in what the boy took for forgiveness.
DJ took the initiative to sit up properly. The creature tentatively settled near him. If DJ wanted--and he did not--he could slap it ten feet away and make a break for the car.
"What are you?" DJ asked.
The creature bowed its head, asking permission to approach. DJ nodded.
It climbed the tree near DJ's head, which made the boy shiver. It leaned near his ear and rasped, "Squirrel."
It sounded like a name, the way it said the word, so DJ decided it was as good as any.
"Squirrel, are you... alive?"
Squirrel climbed down, resting closer to the boy's thigh this time.
It shook its head.
"Dead?"
It shook it again.
Great. A zombie, but its respectful, calm demeanor had won him over.
Nothing would be solved here, sitting in the woods with the undead, and DJ's anxiety grew the longer he left the car on the shoulder. He could only take this moment to moment. The lasting shock stunted his ability to construct a plan.
He did not doubt what he was going through or his sanity. He was of sound mind, simply incapable of figuring out what this roadkill had become and why. He could only conceive of lessening his burden by sharing it with someone who might better conceptualize what had happened. He did not know such a person but soothed he was not special enough to be unique. Someone had this experience before and likely would again. That was a solace, even one he granted might be unfounded. Someone had to be the first. Simply not him.
"Will you come with me?" he asked Squirrel.
Squirrel nodded in a way that implied he would follow DJ through the gates of Hell.
DJ considered putting Squirrel back in the towel to protect his seat, but blood soaked the former. He lowered his hand close to Squirrel, testing to see what the creature would do, which turned out to be only looking at him. He sensed it did this with the snake eyes more than the rodent ones.
He touched the thing's fur, hot but bloodless. It was not like petting, this assessment. His hand brushed close to Squirrel's teeth, causing the creature to pull away so DJ would not be scratched.
It didn't seem dangerous to the upholstery to allow Squirrel into the passenger's seat. DJ wondered if he should offer to carry the creature, but it did not struggle to bound from tree to tree until it beat him to the car.
It crawled in the seat, then perched on the edge. It looked so much like a morbid doll in the light that DJ laughed. Squirrel looked at him curiously, so the boy apologized until the creature returned to staring at the glove box.
DJ reached over to push Squirrel back and belt him in, then thought better. A seatbelt would cover most of its body and couldn't do much good for an undead rodent in the case of an accident.
When DJ pulled up outside his home, he felt a spasm of dread. How could he tell the creature's origin without implicating himself? Hitting the animal suggested divided attention--which was not inaccurate; his phone had buzzed. He could lie and say compassion at seeing this unfortunate animal convulsing by the side of the road possessed him, but it seemed incredible he would do this. It was not as unbelievable as the thing waiting patiently for release from the passenger's seat, but it was not something in his character. Would the creature back him up if he said this? What weight did its testimony have? He had invested in Squirrel enough trust, but he would not be the witness one wanted in one's corner.
He hurried Squirrel into his house. His parents would not be home for an hour at least, which relaxed him. He needed some time to think before he found the words to share the burden of this discovery with the adults he still believed, on some level, could solve any problem. Resurrection might be outside the purview of childrearing, but he didn't have better options.
"Do you want anything?" he asked the creature. "I'm sure we have mixed nuts."
Squirrel shook its head, scampering up a stool to stand on the counter beside DJ. He would have to scour that with bleach later. Who knew what germs Squirrel harbored?
In the light of the dining room, Squirrel seemed more ghastly than it had in the woods. There, freshly dead and restored, Squirrel was a horror that had no right to exist. On his mother's trivet from their trip to Howe Caverns, Squirrel became an abomination, an infection in the suburban blandness of the home.
DJ poured a little water into a dish, placing it before the creature. Squirrel squinted at it, tapped it with its foot, and then looked back at DJ.
"I thought you might be thirsty or want to clean up or-"
Squirrel waved its forelimbs over the water, clockwise and counterclockwise at once. The dish glowed like a black light. The creature chittered some chant. The water bubbled away. Squirrel appeared refreshed, stroking his cloak.
DJ picked up his phone to text his parents a warning of what they would encounter when they returned from work. He put the phone down. He had nothing to say that could prepare them sufficiently, and he didn't want to rush them.
Squirrel looked at DJ, waiting. Beyond this, the little demon did not have any interests. That, too, was unnerving, being its sole focus. DJ tried to imagine the creature larger and shuddered. The boy wouldn't have allowed a double-sized Squirrel near him. Big enough and he might have felt instinctually compelled to destroy it, which made him sorry. He had killed the animal once and did not relish the knowledge he might do it again for a reason so shallow as size. Squirrel had never been other than harmless in the near hour they had been acquainted. Yes, it looked like a marginal doodle that might have one sent to the guidance counselor, but the monster grew on him.
"Can you talk?"
It wrinkled its nose, chirping something that seemed like language. DJ could not parse the words, but he grasped the meaning.
DJ did not like the idea of monologuing. He didn't have answers for the gremlin, but he could not say the same in reverse. Squirrel seemed to understand its existence, which was nice for it. Whatever it was, it was not ignorant in the way a baby would be. How it gained this knowledge was only one mystery of the last hour and not in the top three.
DJ weighed whether it was safe to leave Squirrel alone in the kitchen while he researched. The creature blinked at him, passive and compliant. He did not want to let Squirrel know what he was doing in case it was offensive. It wasn't like Squirrel would mention, and DJ could not claim the creature had the same complement of emotions he did. Still, Squirrel might feel sad, anxious, and scared to be created into a hostile world so small and surely unwelcoming.
DJ directed Squirrel to his bedroom, where he had his laptop. Squirrel complied without objection or question, crawling over the walls.
There was nothing DJ could search that did not bring him to taxidermy, witchcraft, video games, or butchering. Like any teenager, he remained confident the fault was his not finding the correct search terms. He did not know what Squirrel was, so he could not search for something that would have made him feel less alone.
"Any help?" he asked. He repeated the question, realizing the creature could not readily reply verbally.
Squirrel was absent.
He called to the creature, then stopped. It would be futile.
Was it a blessing he would not have to deal with this? That he would never even have to explain?
No. DJ had accepted the burden of Squirrel's friendship. He thought he might be responsible beyond having squashed it under his parents' car. Losing Squirrel now was too onerous for DJ to bear.
He could not begin to imagine where something like Squirrel--if there were even something like it--would go. Partly, he did not want to imagine this. It led him to thoughts of where something like it would have come from, nowhere he was eager to visit.
He searched the house in haste, calling its name without evident effect.
For want of something more productive, DJ cleaned the countertop where Squirrel had stood. At least his one chore was done, even though it felt like eradicating a bit of proof.
He wished he had thought to take pictures, but maybe no one ever thought to do that in the moment. That was why all pictures of aliens or Bigfoot were smears. To record the experience was to end the doubt of it. That couldn't be something the world allowed, or this would not have been the first he had ever heard of a reanimated demonic rodent.
Or hadn't he? He knew to associate Squirrel with something infernal, eased into calling it demonic. He had never taken these stories seriously, but that might have been his folly. Squirrel might be the left hand of Satan. If so, Hell must look like a twisted Central Park, so nothing worth much worry in the scheme of things.
Squirrel was gone for half an hour when DJ heard the sound in the driveway, emerging to see the creature pulling the rusted Radio Flyer wagon kept in the garage for the past decade. Its middle limbs grasped the black handle. Squirrel made no sign of struggle, though this was an exponentially greater weight than the former animal.
DJ went to meet it, not wanting the neighbors to see any part of this, having found no answers beyond his escalating philosophizing about the nature of damnation and rodents.
He recoiled to see the contents, then the state of Squirrel, its fur matted black with gore.
"What did you do?" DJ demanded.
Squirrel motioned for DJ to kneel him, then squeaked, "Help."
This was an answer, not a request.
These had been a raccoon and cat, but days instead of minutes ago. The raccoon had the bloat of rotting, but the cat could have only been sleeping if not for the collapsed belly, a pale purple loop of intestine escaping. Around its neck was a collar and tag, the former only a shade lighter than the intestine. He could not bring himself to look at the latter. It was enough to know this was a creature someone had loved, who would never see it again and couldn't begin to imagine how it ended up here.
He would not insult Squirrel by asking if it had killed these animals. "How does this help anything?" he asked instead.
The imp waved his limbs not far from how it had when it absorbed the water. DJ held his breath, waiting for this movement to catalyze some change. Was this how Squirrel ate?
He leaned over, prepared for a twitch or the bodies to deflate. Nothing occurred, though DJ could grant the change might be more subtle.
Squirrel looked up at him, repeating the gesture, then pointing his teeth in a strangely indicative way.
"I don't know how to do that," DJ said. "I don't know if I did it with you or if you are just something that happens, something that took the opportunity of a dead squirrel."
Squirrel shook its head, waving again.
Hesitantly, DJ waved his hands over the wagon to appease this creature, wanting to expedite Squirrel getting back in the house and cleaned up. He might be able to somehow convey to his parents Squirrel's existence, but this would be far harder if Squirrel were covered in roadkill fluids.
Squirrel waved its limbs again, seeming more like it danced, then chittered.
DJ recited:
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Squirrel crawled over the wagon, settling on the edge closest to DJ. The undulations of the skin around its neck horrified DJ. What had once been a tail was now like a parasite, entirely divorced from Squirrel but feeding on it. The coating of coagulated and moldering blood from the animals only accentuated this illusion.
Nothing stirred, which appeared to confuse Squirrel more than it did DJ. He did not want anything to happen. Then Squirrel darted into the garage, emerging with a stained white towel. The physics of how Squirrel tossed it over the wagon was beyond DJ, but he had barely passed that course. Still, it likely relied on some force other than the adiabatic process.
Squirrel motioned again for DJ to attempt the conjuration. The boy could not think of another poem, not in a way that allowed him the force of conviction, so he repeated "Nothing Gold Could Stay."
He knew at once it had worked, but he was not eager to see it. The shapes under the towel stood, tossing the cloth to the side.
He didn't bother asking names. They--his minions?--were Raccoon and Cat, though the resemblance between what they had been while dead and what they became once revived was notional. Cat especially, with its six small breasts and snake tail, geometrically glowing skin and halo of human eyes, looked like an Alex Grey artwork. Raccoon's design was comparatively basic. Claws and teeth, eyes inches wide and red, muscled like a comic barbarian but fundamentally an upright quadruped that bordered on humanoid.
The new beings respectively slithered and hopped to stand before DJ.
Squirrel chirped something melodic and was covered by purple fire. When it receded, he was clean.
He looked to Squirrel, swaying side to side in what DJ took for satisfaction. It wouldn't do to inform it that more things DJ needed to explain had not helped anything. His guilt was no less, though he could not find any of it for Raccoon and Cat.
"Do you want to come in?" he asked.
They did not need to confer, following him.
He brought three folding chairs from the garage, setting them up in the living room, a triangle around the sofa. They did not need to be told, each climbing to one.
As DJ figured, he had as few as ten minutes, though it could be as many as twenty-five depending on traffic and how quickly his parents could get off work. His father walked a mile--"good for the circulation," he always said in that boisterous way dads did--but his mother drove the other car. He wasn't sure who would be the worst to see this horror triad.
"Can you all speak?" DJ asked. He guessed that Raccoon was large enough to be audible and seemed to have the masculine mandible for it. Only Squirrel raised one of his hands.
They did not confer, DJ noted. They knew about one another, though two had been born minutes before.
"Are you evil?" he asked. "Am I?"
Each of them made a gesture blasphemous to sanity but effectively conveyed that they did not know the answers.
"Oh shoot," he said, finding that he didn't want to curse in front of the abominations he had taken to thinking of as his. "The wagon is still in the driveway. My mom will be pissed if her car hits it, and it is so gross."
Cat slipped down its chair and through the side door before he could say another word. Before he could follow it out, he heard the hose on the side of the house turn on.
He supposed that was helpful, though he wouldn't need it to do that if Squirrel had not brought him more material for resurrection.
Material? That seemed like the right term, but it was not his phrasing.
Raccoon and Squirrel had followed DJ into the yard, where he was trying to usher Cat back into the house before the neighbors could see.
He heard someone walking up the driveway and greeted his father. No, there were too many steps, a set much heavier than his father's.
"Hide" was the only directive DJ had time to give as he walked to confront the people in the driveway.
The creatures did not obey, remaining close.
"May you burn in Hell," snarled a barely feminine voice.
An arrow flew past DJ's head, missing it by an inch. As he recoiled, he barely ducked a glow that might have been fire, except that he could feel no heat. Then again, beset by mortal attacks, he did not have time to contemplate what else this blast could have been.
DJ's reaction was screaming, almost crying, inarticulate though conveying that he was being attacked and needed help. Falling to the ground, he saw his assailants: a burly man with an ax on his back, holding a bow, a scar across one eye. Preceding him, a slight, pale woman with a whip in one hand, holding the other in a way DJ only recognized from his lily white classmates trying to throw gang signs.
"No, no, no, no," escaped DJ's mouth beyond conscious control. "Stop! Help!"
Squirrel did not hesitate, bounding off faded vinyl siding and a tree to reach the roof. It leaped. DJ thought Squirrel meant his plummet to be to the ground, that it would be a missile. At the last moment, its wings flapped open. It careened at the woman's face, slashing her more in his passing than had the demon taken a grater to it.
Her whiplash caught Squirrel before it landed, ichor flowing as she nearly sliced it in half. She snapped the whip back, the body in her hands faster than DJ could see.
DJ acted well before he got around to doing any thinking. He rushed the woman to snatch the near-bisected Squirrel, holding half in each hand and pushing the ends together as though he could knit them together and revive his minion. For all he knew, he could. We didn't think he could make little monsters out of roadkill yesterday, so he wasn't ready to doubt much.
He pulled off his shirt to make a shroud for his destroyed minion, struggling to remember a pastoral poem.
He could not quicken in the body whatever brought them back. Perhaps what he wanted was impossible, but that did not stop him from wanting it.
He still registered the people around him but could not find a reason to care.
"You're just a kid," said the woman with the whip. Her voice was not kind, but it was softer than when she told him to go to Hell.
He didn't answer beyond releasing Squirrel's body to the ground. The liquid on his hands was not blood as he understood it; it was black with a blue sheen, thinner, and smelled of perfumed artificiality. He wiped this on his discarded shirt, unself-conscious and too stunned to care about stains.
The people were conferring. Let them. If they were talking, they were not attacking him or his pets. DJ crouched to hold the remains of Squirrel. He mumbled some half-remembered Shakespeare over it without effect.
Cat and Raccoon stood by a tree, awaiting DJ's directive or a reason to act independently. He shooed them to go further away for their safety from these insane people, though they would not leave the sight of him.
The man walked up to him, keeping his distance not from respect but evident caution of DJ, which the teen felt was unwarranted.
"Who is your master?" he demanded of the boy.
"I don't know what that means."
His mouth drew in irritation. "Who taught you the necromantic arts? What patron gave you power over the Hellborn?"
"You have this whole script in your head. I have no frigging idea what you are talking about. That" -- He thought a word his mother would be scandalized to hear him use -- "woman just killed... It wasn't doing anything wrong. It was just a little guy. Just an innocent dude until she shot at me! He wouldn't have hurt you."
The woman removed her hand from her face, which flashed orange and was whole again. It seemed pedantic of her to contradict him, as she now seemed unharmed.
"Are you an idiot, child?" the woman asked, making the words sound more clinical than insulting.
"You killed it." DJ began to raise Squirrel at her but as quickly thought better of it.
"The Hellborn are not alive," said the man.
Cat hissed like the rainstick DJ's mom brought back from some peace festival years ago. The brute pulled the ax from his back.
"No!" DJ shouted. "They aren't going to do anything." He did not have the attachment to them that he was surprised he had to Squirrel, but he couldn't countenance seeing another thing die today--or die a second time.
"He is an idiot, Vonn," said the woman.
"Idiots cannot raise creatures from the depths."
"Ignorant, then," she said. "Perhaps possessed."
He crouched to study DJ. The boy put Squirrel's carcass to the side. He wanted to assume a more defensive posture, but they were both on the ground, and the whip woman towered over. If he clenched his fist, he couldn't trust that he would keep the hand.
"Hellmaster," snarled Vonn. "Reveal yourself."
DJ opened his hands, palms up, as though to show he had nothing up his sleeves before attempting a card trick.
"Evif," said Vonn, "he is not revealing himself. Make him."
Manacles of light shot from the driveway, which seemed unnecessary. DJ was already on the ground, and the ghostly chains were long enough for him to stand and put a few feet of distance between them. He opted to sit back, unclear what other option he had.
From the garage came a moan. The boy guessed this was the sound Raccoon made, a bovine lowing. He almost laughed at the silliness of that.
"Do we amuse you, boy?" demanded Evif.
"Not really."
DJ knew. If he had fought back, he would be dead now or at least in more pieces than he would prefer. Squirrel had come to his defense, a quixotic effort, and was slain for it. These people wanted an excuse, one they were uneasy that DJ would not provide them.
"Oh, satyagraha," DJ whispered, getting the concept more concretely than ever in AP World History.
A muzzle of the same substance as the manacles slammed shut his jaw. "Silence your devil tongue," demanded Evif.
"That wasn't devil tongue," said Vonn. "It's Sanskrit." He said something at DJ that the boy could not begin to parse.
DJ pointed at his mouth. Evif paused a moment, and then her fingers flitted. The muzzle was gone. "We did a unit on Gandhi," he explained. "I didn't know it was Sanskrit. I thought it was just... Indian."
"An idiot," said Evif.
"Or trying to play the part," said Vonn. "Make us think he is not a necromancer."
DJ could call Cat and Raccoon, but he couldn't see what good it would do him. He could feel their eyes on him, and they had eyes to spare. They were close but remained hidden because DJ had ordered it. He considered for a moment directing him to his aid--it wasn't as though he'd had time to bond with them--but they stood no chance.
He knew the word from the kids who played D&D in the lunch room, who DJ had always thought were cool. They did their own thing and were close friends, so no one bothered them.
He did not have the time to interrogate this before his mother's car pulled into the driveway. The car paused a second, then his mother lay on the horn and plowed into Evif. It wasn't enough to do real damage, but it knocked the woman onto the pavement.
The manacles vanished. DJ took the hint to run away, opting to go into the garage with his minions.
"For the love of God," said his mother, "you shoo! Get out of here. Of all the things, attacking a little boy. I have never seen such poor manners."
He could not call out for his defense, but he would stop his mother from getting an ax to the head. "Help," he said to Cat and Raccoon, who leaped to action before DJ could suggest what form that should take.
They were so fast that he lagged a second before running after, grabbing a rake on his way.
There, his mother stood, whole and unblemished, looking down at Evif, who held her shin. The woman's face was sour, and she had tears welling. Raccoon and Cat were on either side of the injured woman, lurching to and fro but doing nothing else.
His mother turned her attention to the minions, then DJ. "I'm gathering we need to have the conversation."
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.