A Taxidermist’s Guide to the Love and Care of Undead Pets

The squirrel in the pink tutu was staring at her.

Morgan Finch leaned closer, squinting at the squirrel in the pink tutu as if proximity would make it less horrifying. It didn’t. The glass eyes were crossed—one pointing skyward, the other glaring accusingly at her wallet, pleading for release from its eternal tutu-wearing humiliation. 

“Ten bucks,” the seller said, her gravelly voice sounding as though she’d been gargling ashtrays. 

Morgan squinted at the taxidermied squirrel’s half-missing tail and garish tutu, its crossed eyes pleading for release. “Five,” she said, handing over a crumpled bill.

The squirrel joined her growing collection of cursed oddities: a jar labeled “Genuine Ghost” (likely mayonnaise), a vampire Santa snow globe (complete with tiny, blood-splattered reindeer), and a ceramic rooster so hideous its own beak had apparently fled in protest.

That’s when she saw it.

The book was wedged between a stack of yellowed magazines and a tarnished brass candlestick. Its leather cover, cracked and faintly green, gleamed in the weak sunlight. Morgan’s fingers tingled the moment they brushed the cracked leather.  The book hummed faintly under her fingers, its faded title glinting in the light: Necromantis Manuale de Cura Animarum Mortuarum.

“That’s haunted,” the seller called, flicking ash.

Morgan arched an eyebrow. “How much?”

“Five,” the woman shot back, her grin sly. “No refunds, though. If it starts chanting Latin in the middle of the night, that’s your problem.”

Morgan hesitated. The book felt wrong, but curiosity won out. “What could go wrong?” she muttered, pulling out another crumpled five.

Behind her, Elliot sighed audibly. “Because that’s a risk worth taking.”

“It’s fine,” she said, waving him off, tucking the book under her arm as it hummed faintly. “What could possibly go wrong?”

*******

Morgan dropped her bag on the workbench, displacing a pile of old feathers and a jar of mismatched glass eyes. Half-finished projects loomed around her: a fox missing its snout, a stuffed owl wearing steampunk goggles, and Sprinkles, her latest endeavor.

She pulled Necromantis Manuale de Cura Animarum Mortuarum from her bag and placed it on the cluttered desk with a thud. Morgan stared at it for a moment, the faint hum beneath her fingertips sending an odd shiver up her arm.

"Must be the caffeine," she muttered, shaking it off. She flipped it open, her brows knitting as she scanned the cramped Latin script that marched across the pages in uneven lines.

Something about it fascinated her. The illustrations were intricate—anatomical diagrams paired with symbols that could’ve been from the world’s weirdest IKEA instructions. She found a page featuring a cat skeleton surrounded by swirling glyphs. A header she vaguely recognized as Vita Felis Restituta.

She grabbed her phone, tapping open Google Translate. "Let’s see. ‘Return life to the feline’? Oh, that’s totally what I need. Sprinkles could use a little pizzazz." She looked at the lifeless cat on her table, its crooked whiskers and slightly mangled ear giving it a permanent scowl.

Morgan cleared her throat, holding the phone up with one hand while she waved the other over the cat’s head as if conjuring a spirit from a discount séance.

"Vee-tah Fell-ees Res-tit-oot-ah," she intoned, tripping over the syllables.

The workshop shifted. A low vibration thrummed through the floor, rattling the jars of eyes and shaking the owl’s goggles askew. Green light flared, so bright she stumbled back into her chair. A smell hit her, an unholy blend of scorched fur and electrical fire.

The cat sprung to life.

Morgan froze, one hand gripping the edge of the desk. “Sprinkles?”

The cat turned, jerking unnaturally, its glowing eyes fixing on her. It let out a sound somewhere between a hiss and the roar of a small, angry demon.

She screamed.

Sprinkles launched itself off the table, claws scrabbling against the wooden surface. It darted across the room, a streak of undead fur, sending a jar of beetle specimens crashing to the floor.

“What the—stop! Sprinkles! Bad—uh—thing!”

Elliot appeared in the doorway, clutching a coffee cup. “What now—” His gaze landed on the glowing cat scaling the fridge, its tail twitching as though it were charged with raw electricity.

Morgan flailed at the creature with a broom, the bristles barely brushing its fur as it let out another otherworldly screech. “I think I broke physics!”

Elliot took a slow sip of his coffee, his expression unreadable. “Physics broke itself. You just handed it the hammer.”

The cat jumped from the fridge, landing with a thud on the workbench before scuttling toward the ceiling. It clung there, upside down, defying gravity as it batted at an imaginary insect.

Morgan grabbed a mason jar and threw it. The cat dodged effortlessly, the jar smashing against the wall. “What do I do?!”

“Not this,” Elliot said, setting his coffee down. “Where’s that manual? The cursed book thing? Maybe it has instructions for ‘undo whatever fresh hell you’ve summoned.’”

“It’s not cursed,” Morgan snapped, jabbing at the air with the broom. “It’s a very old, possibly misunderstood book of artistic techniques.”

Sprinkles leapt down, claws scratching sparks across the floor.

Morgan lunged, managing to trap the cat under a plastic storage bin. She crouched over it, panting, while the creature snarled and rattled against the walls of its makeshift prison.

Elliot peered over her shoulder, his face calm but his tone dry as desert air. “You definitely owe me a raise.”

Outside Morgan’s workshop, a figure watched from the shadows. Todd shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his boots scraping against cobblestones. He squinted toward the workshop window, catching a glimpse of glowing fur.

“Great,” he muttered. “She’s already using it.”

The cold air nipped at his ears, but the bigger discomfort gnawed at his gut. She doesn’t even know what she’s holding, he thought bitterly. Todd clenched his fists. She’s just a taxidermist. This is going to be easy.

His mentor’s voice echoed through his memory: Failure, Todd, is not only unacceptable. It’s pathetic. He shivered and rubbed his arms for warmth.

His lips moving quickly, he recited the spell for low-level reconnaissance minions. The words rolled off his tongue, his tone sharp, commanding—until a hiccup caught him halfway through.

The ground trembled. Three skeletal squirrels emerged, their bones rattling in a discordant symphony of clattering windchimes caught in a storm.

“Perfect,” Todd whispered.

One of the squirrels promptly tripped over its own femur. Another wandered toward a nearby trash heap, its skull tilting as if entranced by the glittering shards of a broken bottle. The third stared up at Todd with the unnerving intensity of something with no eyeballs but plenty of judgment.

Todd sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Okay, team. Workshop. Go find the book."

The squirrels didn’t move.

"Now!"

Two scampered off, their bony tails dragging along the cobblestones. The third hesitated before clattering off in the wrong direction entirely.

Todd rubbed his hands together, forcing a grin onto his face. "You’ve got this, Todd. You’re a force to be reckoned with. A master of necromancy in training. The lichliest lich-to-be."

As the last squirrel toppled into a storm drain, his grin faltered. Nothing said future lord of the undead more than losing a squirrel to a storm drain. If his mentor saw this, he’d be reassigned to ghost toilets faster than you could say ectoplasmic plumbing.

He squared his shoulders and slinked into the shadows, watching the glow of Morgan’s workshop. Even from here, he could hear the faint hum of Necromantis Manuale de Cura Animarum Mortuarum.

“I’ll have you soon,” he whispered.

Inside, Morgan sat cross-legged on the workshop floor, The Manual open in front of her, evoking the guilty look of a naughty dog refusing to explain where the chewed-up shoes had gone. The pages emitted a faint green glow, and the words squirmed when she looked directly at it. She frowned, her finger tracing the cramped Latin script.

“‘Caveat vi… something, something, animae.’ What’s that? Beware…? Oh, that’s not helpful.”

A soft thud drew her attention. Her heart sank as her gaze landed on Mr. Waddles, a taxidermied pug, wobbling unsteadily on legs that had been inanimate ten seconds ago. His crooked tail twitched in perfect rhythm, a metronome counting down, as a thin stream of glowing ectoplasm dribbled from his mouth.”

“Oh no. No, no—”

The pug barked—or tried to. What came out was closer to the sound of a clogged drain gurgling its death rattle.

“Elliot!” Morgan shouted, scrambling backward as Mr. Waddles tottered toward her, his drooling maw leaving a slimy trail across the floor.

Elliot appeared in the doorway, a mug of coffee in hand. His gaze traveled from the glowing pug to the hissing zombie cat to Morgan, who was brandishing a broom as if it were a sword.

“What,” he said slowly, “are you doing?”

“Fixing things!” Morgan snapped, jabbing the broom handle at Mr. Waddles. The pug ignored it, instead wobbling over to a stack of taxidermy supplies and sneezing ectoplasm onto a jar of buttons.

“This is your version of fixing things?” Elliot sipped his coffee. “If we die, I’m putting ‘death by zombie raccoon’ on my tombstone.”

“What raccoon—”

A crash from the workbench cut her off. Rocky, her carefully mounted raccoon, leapt onto the counter, clutching a pair of scissors in his skeletal paws. His ribcage rattled with each movement, a sound of dice tumbling in a gambler’s hand, ready to roll.

“Rocky, no!”

Rocky skittered toward the shelf of shiny trinkets, stuffing a handful of safety pins into the gaping hole where his stomach used to be.

Morgan turned on Elliot. “A little help?”

Elliot gestured at the glowing, ectoplasm-dripping pug. “What do you want me to do? Wrestle that thing?”

Before she could answer, the workshop window rattled. A series of sharp taps drew their attention to the glass, where three skeletal squirrels clung with their bony claws. Their empty eye sockets glowed faintly, and one of them gnawed at the wooden frame as though it could chew its way inside.

Morgan froze. “What are those?”

The squirrels scurried inside through the partially open window tumbling to the floor. Rocky hissed at them, then launched himself into battle.

What followed was chaos. Sprinkles leapt from the fridge, claws slashing at one squirrel, which exploded into a cloud of bone dust. Mr. Waddles charged another, his ectoplasm leaving a trail of goo that made the skeletal creature slip and collapse into itself. Rocky grabbed the third by the tail, swinging it around as though it were a particularly unruly nunchuck.

Morgan flattened herself against the wall, clutching the broom with white-knuckled hands. “What is happening?”

Elliot looked at the glowing book, the undead pets, and the skeletal squirrels. “I think someone’s after the book,” he said, remarkably calm for a man dodging a squirrel skulls flying across the room.

“That’s ridiculous!”

“Is it?” He gestured at the chaos. “You have a zombie menagerie, Morgan. Ridiculous left the building hours ago.”

The last squirrel disintegrated under Sprinkles’ claws. The room fell into an uneasy silence, broken only by the faint gurgle of Mr. Waddles licking up a puddle of ectoplasm.

Morgan’s gaze landed on the open Manual. It glowed faintly, the symbols shifting across its surface, restless as swarming insects. Outside the window, she caught a glimpse of movement—robes disappearing into the alley shadows.

Her stomach sank.

“Elliot,” she said quietly.

“Yeah?”

“Grab the book. We’re going to the cemetery.”

Elliot blinked. “Brilliant. When danger strikes, run straight to the land of corpses. Why the cemetery?”

“Because it’s full of death energy just like this book,” Morgan snapped, yanking her coat off the hook. “Maybe we can use it. Or maybe they won’t follow us there because it’s creepy. Either way, we’re going.”

Elliot sighed, grabbing his bag. “Your plans are always so comforting.”

*******

The cemetery loomed under a heavy moon, shadows clawing at the ground. Morgan clutched the manual and a flashlight, Sprinkles purring with the intensity of a chainsaw on her shoulder.

She took a shaky step forward, her boots crunching against dead leaves and broken twigs. Behind her, Mr. Waddles wheezed, his glowing pug eyes fixed on the shifting shadows ahead, and Rocky scuttled ahead, tail twitching.

The sound of slow clapping broke the stillness.

“Well, well, if it isn’t the amateur necromancer,” Todd called, stepping out from behind a mausoleum. His skeletal squirrels chittered around his feet, and a line of undead ferrets materialized from the shadows, their jaws snapping in eerie unison.

“Amateur?” Morgan called back, setting her flashlight down and holding up the book. “I’m a certified taxidermist. This is a side gig.”

Todd ignored her, lifting his wand dramatically. “Surrender the book now, and I might consider letting you leave with only moderate psychological damage.”

Rocky bolted forward. In one fluid motion, the raccoon scaled Todd’s leg, grabbed his wand, and leapt away, clutching the magical weapon in his tiny, skeletal paws.

“What—get back here!” Todd lunged after him, only to trip over his own robe. He hit the ground with a grunt as Rocky scampered toward a gravestone, brandishing the wand as though it were a trophy.

Morgan’s lips twitched. “Great start, Voldemort.”

“Attack!” Todd bellowed, pointing at her while still trying to untangle himself from his robes.

The ferrets surged forward, their glowing eyes fixed on Morgan.

Sprinkles hissed and launched off her shoulder, hitting the first ferret mid-leap. The two tangled in a blur of glowing claws and gnashing teeth before the ferret disintegrated in a puff of bone dust.

Mr. Waddles lurched forward with surprising speed, his mouth oozing ectoplasm. He barreled into two ferrets, drooling on one so thoroughly that it slipped, slid into the other, and exploded into a pile of twitching limbs.

Morgan flipped through The Manual, desperate for something useful. “Come on, come on. What’s Latin for ‘fix this mess’?”

Her fingers paused on a page, her heart hammering. She could feel something—an energy humming in her chest, waiting to be used. She planted her feet, raised her hands, and focused on Todd.

“Custodiendi!” she shouted, the word ripping from her throat.

Green light erupted, forming a shimmering barrier between her and Todd. He banged his fists against it, his face twisting with fury.

This wasn’t supposed to happen, he thought. He was the necromancer. She was just some glue-wielding amateur! And yet, here he was, on the wrong side of a magical wall, watching his ferrets implode.

“This isn’t over!” he shouted, his voice cracking as he stumbled away into the shadows. “You’ll rue the day you crossed Todd, future Lord of Bones!” he shouted. 

The light dimmed. The cemetery fell silent.

Morgan lowered her hands, swaying slightly. Sprinkles padded over, his glowing eyes softening as he curled around her feet. Mr. Waddles burped ectoplasm, and Rocky returned, holding the wand triumphantly.

Morgan exhaled, her knees weak as she gathered her pets. “Home, guys. Let’s… never do this again.”

*******

Morgan slumped onto the threadbare couch in the corner of her workshop, her head falling back against the faded fabric.

Mr. Waddles sat proudly on the workbench, drooling glowing ectoplasm onto an unfinished fox mount. Rocky had climbed onto the highest shelf, clutching Todd’s wand as though it were the crown jewels. And Sprinkles, her feline terror, stalked the floor with glowing eyes, his tail twitching in agitated triumph.

Morgan surveyed the room, the corners of her mouth twitching upward. “Well, we’re not dead,” she said, mostly to herself.

Elliot appeared in the doorway, holding two steaming mugs “Barely,” he said, handing her a mug.

She took it gratefully, inhaling the scent of cheap coffee mixed with something burnt. She didn’t ask what; she didn’t care.

Sprinkles leapt onto her lap, curling into a tight ball of glowing fur. The faint hum of necromantic energy buzzed under her fingertips as she scratched behind his ears. He purred and she felt a pang of affection for the little nightmare.

“I think I broke the cat,” she said, watching as Sprinkles’ glowing tail flicked against her leg.

“You didn’t break him,” Elliot said, settling into the chair across from her. “You gave him… personality. Horrible, undead personality.” He raised an eyebrow, then nodded toward Mr. Waddles, who was now chewing on a discarded screwdriver. “I’ll admit, though, they’re growing on me. Except the pug. That thing is an abomination.”

Morgan chuckled, her laughter breaking the lingering tension in the room. She glanced down at Sprinkles, whose glow had softened, and felt something settle in her chest—a strange, unexpected warmth.

For years, her life had been a series of oddities and mishaps, each more ridiculous than the last. But now, sitting amidst her undead menagerie, she felt a flicker of purpose. They were hers—chaotic, monstrous, and entirely hers.

“I should’ve known better than to think I’d ever have a normal life,” she murmured, scratching behind Sprinkles’ glowing ears. “But somehow, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

The hum of The Manual broke through her thoughts. She turned her head to see it on the table, its pages flipping on their own. The glow intensified, and the words Advanced Necromancy for Beginners appeared, etched in pulsing green.

Morgan groaned. “Oh no. No, no, no. We’re not doing this again.”

Elliot leaned over, squinting at the book. “You’re absolutely doing this again.”

Morgan sighed, leaning back against the couch. A reluctant smile tugged at her lips. “Maybe. But next time, I’m getting hazard pay.”

Elliot raised his mug. “To undead pets.”

“To undead pets,” she echoed, her voice light with fondness.

From its perch on the highest shelf, Rocky gave a conspiratorial squeak and waved the wand. The lights flickered ominously. Morgan groaned. Tomorrow’s problems, she decided. For now, undead pets and burnt coffee were enough.