"My dark arts are too heinous for the populace to abide," said Tolliver, and I couldn't help but glance at the chamber pot still in his hands. "If they see that I have raised him from the dead, they'll storm my home with torches and pitchforks."
"Pitchforks are very hard to come by in the heart of the city," said John.
"More to the point," said Mary, "nobody else knows that he's dead."
"Exactly," I said. "In fact it's very safe to say that everyone but you, and I suppose him, thinks that Mr. Crow is still very much alive. When they see him on the street they won't think twice."
"At least not for now," said John. "Eventually he'll start to decompose."
"Don't count on that," I began, but Tolliver proved my point before I could even finish making it.
"My thralls don't decompose, impudent whelp! He'll stay as fresh as the day as he was born! I can even make him age, so no one asks questions—why do you think I look like an old man, because I enjoy it? It's because I choose to!"
"I don't understand why this is working out so well," I said, "but I'm glad that it is. The funeral is at four; Spilsbury and Beard. Our lavatory is out of service, so please . . . plan ahead." I tipped my hat. "Thank you very much."
Tolliver harrumphed and closed his door, and we all but ran down the street, desperate for fresh air. "Great gods above and below," gasped John, "and all the fairies in all the mushrooms in England. No wonder Crow hates the man. It smelled like a . . . pork loin made from sweat, left in the sun for three days and then boiled in a decomposing whale."
"It smelled like the cesspit behind a dysentery hospital," said Mary, "across the street from a pub that fries week-old fish in vomit they collect from potholes."
"It smelled like . . . ." I shook my head. "There's no sense competing with two writers. Setting aside the smell, this is good: he will come, thinking he can raise Mr. Crow from the dead, Mr. Crow will, in fact, rise up from what appears to be the dead, they'll insult each other, wiggle their fingers a bit, Tolliver won't enthrall him because he's not really magic, Crow will attribute his lack of enthrallment to his own skill with similarly non-existent magic, our man wins, our man pays us, our work is done."
"You're assuming they're not actually magic," said John.
"That is exactly what I'm assuming," I said, turning toward the mortuary and walking briskly. "Out of all the assumptions I am making, that is the one in which I am most confident."
"Then how shall we choose to explain that?" asked Mary, and pointed at a man walking toward us from the far end of the street. He was dressed in the rags of what might once have been a workman's suit, but was now so full of tattered seams and moth-eaten holes it could barely be called a suit at all. He shuffled toward us slowly, dragging a lame leg and drooping one shoulder much lower than the other. His skin was ashen, his face poxed, and in his twisted hands he clutched what appeared to be a hunk of meat. We drew back, too shocked to run, and as he approached us I looked into his clouded, rheumy eyes and prayed he could not see us. John, of course, greeted him cheerfully.
"Good afternoon!"
"Uuuuuuuuuuh," said the man. He shambled past us without a nod, staggered up the stairs to Mr. Tolliver's door, and rang the bell. Tolliver shouted angrily, opened the door, and chastised the wretch.
"My lunch! Took you long enough." The gray man limped through the door with a groan, and Tolliver closed it behind him.
"That," said John, "explains a great deal about his intestinal health."
"It doesn't—" I started, "he's not—it's a—that's—"
"I agree," said Mary.
"I have rarely seen a man more dead than that one," said John, "and I work in a mortuary."
I raised my eyebrow. "Work is a very generous description of what you do in the mortuary."
"I'm more of a hobbyist than a professional," said Mary, "but I have to concur with John's assessment. The man looked very dead."
"What if he has the plague?" I offered. "Something that just makes him look dead. Maybe it's leprosy?"
"Would you hire a man with leprosy to fetch your lunch?" asked Mary.
"That depends," I said. "Am I me, in this scenario, or am I a delusional idiot? That might change my answer."
"We must lean on science," said John.
"Exactly," I said.
"So we resort to the wisdom of William of Ockham," John continued. "When choosing between multiple hypotheses we must look for the one with the fewer assumptions, so: which is more likely? That two men, despite a deep hatred for one another, would nevertheless fall into the same shared insanity, in perfect sync with each other, down to and including the times and details of a midnight attack that involved no coordination and left no evidence? Or, more simply, that they're actually magic?"
"Doesn't the second option rely rather heavily on the assumption that magic is real?"
"You have vampires in your basement," said John.
"Point taken," I said. "It is entirely possible that we are getting into more of a mess than we're prepared for."
"We could fight their supernatural forces with our own," suggested Mary. "Wizard versus necromancer versus vampire."
"Why not throw in a werewolf while we're at it?" I asked. "This isn't a pit fight between preferably-imaginary monsters, and
