Whichwood(63)

“Friends,” she said softly. “Thank you so much for coming.”





I think it will not surprise you to hear that these excitable corpses soon stormed the city. They stomped through the beautiful, historical center of Whichwood en masse, thousands upon thousands of them marching fearlessly across the cerulean streets of town with one goal:

To leave an impression.

Whichwood had ceased believing in its mordeshoors. Their lack of faith in this tradition had failed them and their town and, in the process, had turned them against an innocent young girl and her father, painting them both with scarlet letters of injustice. Laylee had been starving and hardly surviving for years; she was underpaid, desperately overworked, and treated like a pariah. No one respected her. Strangers dumped their dead on Laylee’s doorstep and disappeared, sometimes leaving a token of payment, sometimes leaving nothing at all. She wore ancient rags and slept in the bitter cold, too poor to afford even enough firewood, and still our young protagonist devoted herself to her job—and to the many dead she had loved.

Today, dear reader, they would stand up for her. (Quite, ahem, literally.)

The magic that embalmed the flesh of the dead had made them inhumanly strong—it was this same strength that enabled them to dig their way out of the ground—and it made them formidable opponents. The superstitious Whichwoodians were too terrified to stand against the walking corpses as they tore through town, ripping poles out of the ground and knocking carriages into the sea. The six ghosts were squealing with delight as they flew overhead—but of course the living could not see these spirits, so the terrified expressions of civilians were focused only on the walking wax figures. Laylee, followed closely by Maman and Baba, led the group of them, while Roksana (you remember Roksana, do you not?) walked alongside our mordeshoor, one inhuman hand laid protectively on her shoulder.

Laylee wondered in every moment where her friends might’ve gone—and whether they were still here—but there was never a chance to stop and find them. Laylee was now in charge of an army, you see, and they required quite a lot of guidance. Our mordeshoor was able to manage things in a general way, but there were so many thousands of corpses following her that it was hard to keep track of those among them that ripped landmarks, streetlamps, food carts, and passenger sleighs from the ground only to fling them into the distance. Laylee didn’t really want violence or mayhem—she wanted only her freedom. Was it possible, she wondered, to have the latter without the former?

Laylee didn’t know. After all, she’d never been in this position before. And though her parents stood right in front of her—ripe for the asking—she knew that these figures before her were only evaporated versions of the real thing. These were not people who were fighting for her; they were memories of people wearing milky flesh. And very soon, they had seized the city.

Laylee was ready to leave her mark.

At her direction, a couple thousand corpses had split from the group and made it their mission to collect the many magistrates and Town Elders from their homes and hiding places. Now they were dragging the screaming, writhing bodies of prominent figures into the center square, where the rest of the waxy horde had gathered. It was beyond insanity—it was anarchy.

It was then that Roksana leaned in to her mordeshoor and said, “What would you like us to do to them?”

And Laylee merely smiled.





Screams pierced the silence in steady contractions of pain.

The sun had scrambled behind a mountain and the moon peeked out only occasionally from behind a cloud. Birds had hidden in the trees; horses had galloped away—even the crickets knew better than to make a sound tonight. The corpses had been playing with the Town Elders like cats would toy with prey, and Laylee, who was still haunted by images of Baba being murdered before her eyes, would be lying if she said she wasn’t enjoying the show. She watched as the dead tossed her town’s important men and women into the sky only to catch them again and quickly fling them in the sea. Someone would then fetch their sopping bodies out of the water and sit them in the snow where icicles formed immediately across their skin and then, once they’d nearly frozen, another corpse would come along and punt the shaking figures into a tree, where they’d land with a hard thump, and eventually slide roughly down the tall trunk. They’d soon amassed a rather large heap of hurting bodies.

Somewhere in her heart, Laylee knew she shouldn’t be dragging things out like this, but she felt suddenly fueled by a righteous anger that demanded retribution against her townspeople. How deeply they’d hurt her. How deeply they’d cut into her heart. They’d spit in her face at every opportunity, hissing as she passed, dismissing her from schools and shops. She was loathed for invented reasons, mistreated for their own profit; she starved and no one cared—and the only parent she had left, they’d killed.

How could she ever forgive them?

At Laylee’s command, the entire city—nearly all eighty thousand people—had been dragged out of their homes and forced to bear witness to the activities of the evening. The corpses, who had no interest in anything but serving their mordeshoor, would never question her methods. They would never tell her to show mercy to the people who’d hurt her. And had Laylee no one else upon whom to rely, she might have lost herself to the madness. A sudden influx of power, violent anger, crushing heartbreak, and mass chaos—