THANKS IN LARGE PART TO A WHITE NOISE MACHINE AND THE SIZABLE AMOUNT OF WINE PATRICIA HAD IMBIBED BEFORE BED, Theodosius and Elliott were able to sneak into her kitchen, steal the lawn gnome, and sneak back out with no incident whatsoever.

It was once they were safely back outside, the lawn gnome safely tucked underneath Theo's arm, that things took a turn for the slightly less good.

"Hey!" A light turned on in the neighboring yard. A man was standing on the porch in his bath robe and slippers, a cigarette in one hand. He leaned forward, as if squinting to see them through the darkness. "Hey! Who are you, and what are you doing on Patsy's porch?"

"Run?" Elliott recommended. He sounded as if he were not too invested, one way or the other, but Theo took his advice immediately, bowling down the steps of the deck and darting off across Patricia's darkened back yard with a steady slap! slap! slap! of his dollar store flip-flops. Bihatra and Elliott came behind at a less frantic pace.

After running across several back yards and hopping a few fences, Theo stopped. He leaned over, gasping for breath, and waited for a good ten minutes for his companions to catch up. It was there, trying hard to keep his lungs where they belonged in his chest, that Theo realized he had no idea how to get from Point A, theft of gnome-shaped cremains, to Point B, resurrection of the dead.

"What now?" Elliott asked upon his undramatic arrival to the scene. He minced through the grass and, after a careful examination of the premises, he chose a seat on the stump of a tree and sat down primly as if he, a talking skeleton cat, had every right to exist.

"Well, we have the soul towel," Bihatra said, indicating the Discount Sooper's bag she had been toting around with a nod of her head. She did not sound winded at all from their late-night escape. "That was it, wasn't it, Theo?"

Theo drew a deep, steadying breath. It was with careful application of his willpower that he restrained himself from reminding Bihatra about the black candles, which were not necessary for the actual magic of necromancy but would lend an almost critical component to the necromantic ambiance. He knew she would never understand. She was the sort of creature who would have scoffed at his superfluous-but-wizardly walking stick.

It was Theo's learned opinion that necessary things were not always useful things, but this was a distinction he knew Bihatra would not care to unravel, and so—not without reservations, but in a heroic act of personal sacrifice—Theo decided to forgo the theatrics, just this once.

"Yes. That was it," he said, unable to keep a note of pained resignation from his voice.

Elliott glanced askance at Theo, and then at the house standing some distance away in the yard. Were its resident to come out onto the back stoop for a smoke or an inspection of the property, they would easily be discovered. "Might I suggest that we remove ourselves to a slightly more discreet locale?"

Rolling her eyes, Bihatra trudged off through the stranger's back yard, and Theo and Elliott followed.

***

The trio found an unlocked, cluttered tool shed a few more houses down. With an enormous effort, Theo cleared a space in the center of the tool shed, stacking cans of paint, power tools, lawn implements, and so on up along the walls of the shed.

Elliott and Bihatra, of course, supervised.

Wiping the sweat from his brow with the front of his baggy T-shirt, Theo at last placed the lawn gnome in the center of the cleared space, and the three of them arranged themselves around it in an awkward triangle.

"I am not confident that this is going to work," said Theo. Looking down at the unpainted, gnome-shaped chunk of cement and human cremains, he suddenly realized just how ridiculous the entire situation was, which puts him many paces behind you, Dear Reader, who have known since the opening pages of this story that the levels of absurdity in this novelette are dangerously high.

"STOP CALLING IT A NOVELETTE!" Theo shouted.

Elliott, terribly startled by the sudden noise, immediately fell apart.

There was a moment of general confusion. Then, Theo leapt into action to reassemble Elliott's skeleton, which was a difficult task in the darkness of the cluttered garden shed. Elliott's skull, which had fetched up against a coiled garden hose and made it look like he had morphed into some kind of fantastical serpentine nightmare beast, provided mostly insulting commentary throughout this tedious process.

Bihatra huffed in irritation, watching Theo search on hands and knees for a missing ulna. "I'm missing my shows for this crap."

"I don't especially care," Elliott's skull said, "but why exactly are you trying to resurrect the soul of a dead woman into a lawn ornament?"

"It's a long story—deal with the Devil, convoluted infernal bureaucracy, et cetera, et cetera. If I do this right, I may get Tansy back." Theo fixed the missing ulna into place, picked up Elliott's skull, and positioned it atop his reassembled body. The thought of his beloved wife had put a smile back onto his face, just for a moment. "How's that?"

"I think you have transposed my forelegs, but I will overlook your gross incompetence for the time being in the interest of getting this business over with. I am two naps behind schedule, Theodosius." He paused. "And it might be tolerable to see Tansy again. Perhaps."

Theo trudged over to the Discount Soopers bags thrown haphazardly to the side of the door and rooted around for the soul towel. It still thrummed and pulsed with that eerie pink light, illuminating the untidy garden shed in a way that would have been pretty if it weren't—you know what? Let's just call it pretty. We're all mature readers here. Just because it's a hotel towel infused with the life force of an innocent insurance salesman doesn't mean we can't objectively appreciate the way the pink light reflects off of that weed whacker over there.

Theo gazed down at the little lawn gnome, frowning in thought. This entire situation was most irregular. He wasn't certain how to approach the spells. He blamed it on the lack of black candles, which had thrown off his groove most irreparably.

After a moment's consideration, he draped the towel over the lawn gnome. It now looked like a tiny piece of pointy, shrouded furniture. Then, he closed his eyes. "Well, here goes nothing."

But what went was most definitely not nothing.