The Tale of Abraham Stockwell

Abraham Stockwell was not your average man. That is to say, your average man is not a practitioner of necromancy. The land of Tenebris was a place teeming with all manner of magical phenomena; vampires, ghosts, trolls, goblins, witches, wizards and suchlike. Although the denizens of Tenebris had a liberal attitude when it came to the supernatural there was, understandably, a point at which they drew the line - unfortunately for Abraham, his occupation was considered to be about fifty miles away on the other side of said line. People didn't appreciate it when they went to put fresh flowers on Granny's grave only to find her shambling about and attempting to devour her grandchildren...

Which is precisely why Abraham now had a disturbingly large crowd outside his door in the early hours of the morning. The rising sun bathed his room in a warm orange glow. A little too warm, he noted, opening his eyes fully and looking around. No, the sun hadn't come up yet: they had set fire to his house.
Abraham got up, casually sauntered over to the calendar and flicked through the previous dates. Apparently, this was now the sixty-third time he had been run out of town. He then opened up his map, which was dotted with little black crosses. He took a pencil from his bedside drawer and, with the care and precision of an artist, dutifully marked another area with a neat cross. Abraham frowned. From now on, he was going to have to be a bit more cautious; he was running out of towns. Outside his window, the mob was howling with bloodlust. His ears picked out the cries of a few particularly loud individuals:
‘Go get some more oil!’
‘Burn in hell, you monster!’
‘This is for Grandma Mildred!’
Abraham couldn't help but chuckle at that last one. People could be so sentimental over dead relatives. Well, partially dead, anyway; the Ritual of Reanimation had worked a treat!
He opened his wardrobe, dragged out a charred, blackened corpse and dumped it in the middle of the floor. After dozens of similar incidents with angry mobs, one quickly learned the importance of faking one's death.
Abraham gathered the rest of his belongings and turned to face his floor-to-ceiling mirror, which conveniently happened to be a one-way portal to a nearby lake. He stepped through it, and the burning room blurred and gave way to fresh, open air.
He climbed into his boat, having prepared it several weeks earlier, and set out across the lake. As the sun came up over the horizon, the lake sparkled in a symphony of yellow. A gentle breeze blew across the water, carrying with it the distant shouting of enraged townspeople. Abraham sighed.
Back to square one...

More to come ?

I especially like the image of the lake in the morning. Nice.

a reply to: SIEGE

I'm working on another few paragraphs

a reply to: Tenebris

Loved it, can't wait for the rest!

I guess I'll have to though, won't I?

A few days later, Abraham found a rather spacious cave at the base of a mountain. There was a shallow freshwater river just a few yards away in the forest clearing. At this time of the year, entire schools of salmon made their way upstream, fighting against the current in their journey home to the Tenebraean Sea. With this plentiful food supply, as well as the surrounding flora and fauna, Abraham decided he could live here quite comfortably for now. The only problem was a distinct lack of human corpses for his experiments; there was no civilisation to be found, and therefore no graveyard to supply him with test subjects.
Oh well, he thought to himself, I've been meaning to do a little bit of spirit summoning anyway.
That night, Abraham had been looking through his old research notes concerning conjuring spells when a passage caught his interest. It was a project he'd written down years ago, but never got round to actually doing - the Summoning of Ancestral Spirits. It was a relatively simple ritual that brought forth the spirit of one of your ancestors. Necromancy had been the Stockwells' family trade for hundreds of years, and so Abraham reasoned that perhaps he could rouse one of his long-dead relatives to impart some of the occult knowledge they had amassed in life. He began to tick off the list of ingredients: a single hair from his own head, the powdered fangs of a fledgling vampire, six ounces of ectoplasm, a cutting of hemlock and a sprinkling of bone dust. Yes, he had all those.
Abraham got out his chalk and marked out on the floor a standard Circle of Binding. Just to be on the safe side, he drew a few protective runes and a favourable star constellation around the side. Sometimes spirits didn't take too kindly to being disturbed, even it was family.
He mixed the ingredients together using a pestle and mortar and recited the appropriate ritual incantation:
‘By the power of my Art I compel thee, my honoured ancestors! May my voice carry thee beyond the veil of death, across the Realm of Abysmal Darkness and into this world once more!’ He threw the mixture into the circle. Nothing happened.
There was a long silence. It was the sort of silence whose only purpose was to precede whatever it was that was anticipated to happen straight after, that tiny little moment between cause and effect; if the Universe could be said to have any personality of its own, it seemingly couldn't resist a bit of drama.
There was a sound very much like an explosion in reverse, starting with the distant echo and getting increasingly louder. Then came the real explosion, a blinding flash of green light, and Abraham was flung across the cave and out into the forest clearing where he landed in a heap of tattered robes.
Temporarily deafened and blinded from the explosion of magic, Abraham had only one thought going through his reeling head.
That should not have happened...

Shut.the.#.up.you.matrix,#ing.muppets.

a reply to: Tenebris

It was the sort of silence whose only purpose was to precede whatever it was that was anticipated to happen straight after, that tiny little moment between cause and effect; if the Universe could be said to have any personality of its own, it seemingly couldn't resist a bit of drama.

That made me chuckle!
Perfect and I know that silence.