The Templar Chronicles by Joseph Nassise

shotgun before following behind.
    They could hear voices, chanting in a strange tongue, the sound rising and falling with the wind like some insane chorus, causing the hair on their arms and the backs of their necks to stand at attention.
    Cautiously, they moved closer.
    *** ***
    Surprisingly, the spirit he was calling forth fought back with a power almost equal to his own.
    Logan could feel the spirit resisting his call to return to its former body, fighting his commands to cross the barrier and answer his summons. Frustrated, the necromancer increased his efforts.
    It quickly became a battle of wills, Logan’s arcane power pitted against the righteous nature and faith of the former Templar Knight, each side refusing to give in. Power spit and crackled inside each of the circles like hot grease on a grill, and the smell of burning ozone filled the air. The Council chanted, the Necromancer forced more of his power back down the link that connected him to the shade, and still the knight sought to avoid being called from his rest for so nefarious a purpose.
    As a result, the energy began to spill over, no longer affecting just the target grave but those in the immediate vicinity as well, seeping down into the earth to affect coffins on all sides. Where the bodies inside them were too decayed to support their return, the indistinct forms of apparitions began to appear, hovering over their gravestones or rising slowly out of the ground. Their lack of physical form fueled both their hunger for life and their anger at the living. When mixed with the Necromancer’s potent magick, they became not ghosts but spectres, vile creatures with a desire and craving to bring harm to the living.
    There were hundreds of them, and the cemetery grounds gave birth to more and more, swelling their ranks, as the Necromancer continued to pour more and more energy into the confrontation.
    The Council ignored the presence of the spectres, knowing they’d be safe locked within their protective circle.
    In counterpoint to the Council’s chanting, the ghosts took up an unearthly screeching of their own, warbling and weaving in syncopation.
    At that moment, Gibson and Jones appeared from out of the darkness and walked into full view of the necromancer, the Council, and the spectres.
    Nothing they had been taught could ever have prepared them for the sight.
    *** ***
    “Freeze!” Gibson cried out, as they stepped into view. The muzzle of his gun was locked on the tall figure off to his right, which seemed to be the source of the green light.
    “Mary, Mother of God” Jones whispered.
    Following his partner’s gaze, Gibson looked to his left.
    The dead stared back at him.
    A young man stood just a few feet away, one side of his head crushed like an aluminum can, his eyes bulging from the pressure. Nearby stood another man, the whiteness of his bones gleaming through his decomposing flesh. There were hundreds more of them; some nearly perfect, so that you wouldn’t have known they were dead if you’d passed them on the street, some so corrupt and decayed that they were barely recognizable as human.
    Some they knew.
    Around them hovered those phantoms that had returned from the other side only to find that their bodies could no longer contain them. These wraiths were less distinct, flashes of ghostly luminescence that flickered in and out of existence. Gibson could see that their faces were strangely distorted, as though they had been twisted and pulled in different directions at once. They stared out at him through dark, eyeless sockets, and from out of their mouths came a high pitched screaming.
    For a moment, no one moved.
    Then the dead came at them in a rush.
    Gibson and Jones opened fire.
    They might as well have been whistling “Dixie” for all the good it did them.
    Gibson’s shotgun knocked several of the revenants off their feet with its sheer power, but those behind simply charged forward over the bodies of their brethren without