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Chloe Chew and the Museum of Undead Art

by Olivia B. Chan

In Chloe Chew’s suffocating hometown, there’s only one place fit for necromancy: the parking lot outside Em’s motel, where summer heat wavers above cracked pavement, blurring the darkness on the horizon. Forest fires have driven away all the tourists, so Chloe’s safe to prepare her resurrection materials between the yellow lines.

She presses her hands to the torn-up canvas as it flaps in the wind off the highway, Asperthbell’s skyline rippling in its peeling acrylic. Her victim is a painting she found in the back of Miss Plent’s classroom, wedged between old answer keys, entirely forgotten. Perfect for a resurrection. She recognizes Asperthbell’s gas station in its streaks of red, but besides that the painting’s portrayal of her hometown is unrecognizable—no ash. No smoke.

The painting’s ghost trembles in her hands.

With the singular precision of a scalpel, Chloe closes her eyes and she wants. Necromancy is a delicate art—each swoop of her stomach, each tear, is calculated to the second. She clenches her jaw in time with death’s ancient rhythm. Her ears fill with the painting’s soft hum, and then she’s running through Asperthbell, forty years ago, and the pavement beneath her feet burns, and the air is clear enough to shatter, and she’s alive to feel it all. The horizon burns gold. Her shirt is soft when she hugs herself.

She opens her eyes. Ash peppers the parking lot, and clouds blossom overhead the way flowers used to. In front of her, the once-torn painting is whole. Her heart hammers with the echo of all that love. With Asperthbell, before everything went to hell.

Glowing from another successful resurrection, Chloe scribbles down the date in her notebook, titling the painting ASPERTHBELL MINUS 40 YEARS. Some days her museum of undead art is all that keeps her going. Even when the whole world feels wrong, she can pull out the box hidden under her bed and be anywhere else. Necromancy without a permit is mildly illegal (mild in this sense having the same weight it does when selecting a variety of jalapeno), but she wouldn’t give it up for anything. She reaches for this newest painting to bring it home.

It jerks away from her hand.

She frowns and moves to grab it. It evades her by an inch.

She pushes off the ground and lunges for it, but the painting judders away. To her horror, it catches on a rift in the pavement, and when she scrabbles toward it the corner snags. She races to grab the painting, but she’s too late.

Asperthbell’s soft skyline rips. As if by an invisible hand, the painting shreds itself to pieces, and Chloe watches helplessly. The pieces drift onto the highway, warping in the heat.

She gapes. None of her previous resurrections reacted like this. She will admit she’s not the most experienced necromancer, since all her knowledge comes from a stolen book, but by now she knows what to expect. And “what to expect” does not include a tier forty-four revival destroying itself. Something is wrong.

She glances at the motel’s office and stops short. Normally, the spirit of a solid first ollie loiters under the awning, crackling confidence and throwing pebbles, but where the ghost was is now—nothing.

Lightning sparks in the hills. With a scowl at the swelling clouds, Chloe picks up her bike and buckles her helmet. She can figure this out inside.

---

The storm breaks before she reaches home. It lights the sky in dazzling purple-blues, but Chloe doesn’t have much appreciation to spare while the rain soaks her shirt, then moves onto her bones. Shivering, she abandons her bike to sprint into the grocery store, willing the automatic doors to move faster. She darts to the nearest aisle and pretends to be fascinated by cake mix. The store seems empty.

“Chew?”

Or not. She crouches so her head doesn’t show over the top of the shelf.

In order to be a good (read: passable) necromancer, one must first be able to see ghosts, and secondly have strong force of want—want you could sharpen a blade on, could use to light a match. Mostly Chloe wants to be happy. However, when that classic, timeless want isn’t enough, she forges patterns in the dust of the dead using her soul-consuming desire to never talk to Daisy Plent ever, ever again.

Daisy Plent says, “Chloe, you look ridiculous.”

Chloe stands up straight and makes eye contact with Daisy over a can of icing. Damn her height. Damn how this store is built for people who can’t ride rollercoasters.

From behind the cash register, Daisy says, “You look like you just ran a mile in the rain.”

“I did, actually.” She tries to keep it short, she truly does, but her rambling is as much a part of her as her height and ability to see spirits. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s kind of pouring out there, and it’s not like we have a bus, and you know my mom won’t let me get a license. Congratulations, Daisy, your observations are stunning and insightful.”

But Daisy’s already gone back to tying a bracelet on the register. “Yeah. Thanks.” Six years of friendship, and they’re gone as quick as a Yeah.

Chloe goes to roll her eyes in unity with the spirit of an impromptu musical theatre performance that hangs out by the boxed cake mix, except—it’s not there. The rest of the aisle is empty. This aisle is never empty. And theatre ghosts don’t leave; it’s a rule of life.

“Hey, Daisy,” Chloe says. “Has anyone new passed through Asperthbell lately? Anyone at all?”

Another necromancer is the only explanation. Another ’mancer could curse the motel parking lot, could banish some spirits.

Daisy is ignoring her.

“Hey, Daisy—”

“No. Why would anyone pass through Asperthbell?”

Fair enough. Chloe goes again to share a look of solidarity with the theatre kids’ last hurrah, then remembers it’s gone. She drifts to the refrigerated section. Rain drums on the windows, showing no signs of slowing. She hopes her bike’s okay.

Her hand passes through a fridge handle.

Her reflection, superimposed over a block of cheese, stares back at her.

She pinches herself—she’s definitely awake, definitely corporeal. On her second try, the door yields to her touch. The overhead lights flicker. Logically, she knows cold air is rushing out of the fridge, but she’s warm. She’s warm, as if she were basking in the sun dressed all in black instead of standing in a building with frigid air conditioning.

Daisy calls out, “I don’t pay the power bills, but watch it!”

Chloe shuts the door.

---

If resurrections are the careful, soulful music of a trained orchestra, exorcisms are screamo concerts where no one but the person manning the strobe lights knows what they’re doing.

Chloe barricades herself in the grocery store’s storage room with a box of markers and a paper pad, both from the back to school display. This isn’t how she planned to spend her summer break, but not everything goes to plan. The girl who taught her how to sneak back here last year is proof of that.

She sits on the tile floor, back pressed against a rack of cereal, and rips open the marker package. The faster this is over with the better.

With one strong stroke, she draws Asperthbell’s horizon. She can’t exactly remember what the painting looked like—she saw it whole for all of three seconds—but she remembers how it felt to hold its soul in her hands. Dots of yellow for laughter, scribbles of blue for air you could leave a lipstick stain on. Grey for bare feet and gravel. Red, bright red, for the gas station, grinning and gleaming. She takes a deep breath and smells grass, not ash, then tears the scribbled-on page from the pad. Her heart pounds in her ears.

The storage room door hits the shelf Chloe had pulled in front of it. Daisy’s muffled voice swears.

Chloe rips the paper in half, and her head splits with it. She throws her hand to her mouth, brain screaming, and drops the drawing. It shouldn’t be hurting her. It shouldn’t.

The door bangs against the shelf again. As the shelf teeters, Chloe sees disaster. Glass spice bottles slide toward the ground, and at the last moment Chloe heaves the thing upright. Before Daisy can knock it again, she drags it away, wheels screeching.

From the doorway, Daisy says, “Chloe?”

Chloe, who is immune to the idea of shutting up, says, “Well, obviously.”

“What are you doing back here? Are you stealing? Should I call the—”

“You don’t need to call anyone! I thought I heard—a noise. So I came to check.” Her head throbs.

Daisy’s eyes alight on the exorcism supplies. “Hm,” she says, like a critic about to deliver a career-ending review.

“You know. A noise.”

A little less than a year ago, Chloe made the questionable decision to tell Daisy about her ability to see ghosts. Daisy’s response was to ask if she was going to get a permit—as if anything in Asperthbell would be important enough for a resurrection permit to be granted—then to tell her she should “ignore it,” and finally to cut her off completely. In hindsight Chloe should’ve expected it. It was a small miracle she didn’t tell anyone else.

Now, Daisy’s eyes go wide. “Oh.”

Chloe nods, hoping her silence will have an impact.

“It was probably Brason,” Daisy says. “He was on the opening shift.”

Who does Daisy think she is, the Sherlock Holmes of art murder? It’s not like a ripped scribble in the back of a grocery store is a book burning, something that might genuinely be investigated. “Has the rain stopped?” she asks.

“It’s just drizzling now.” Daisy gawks at the drawing. “Do you need any help?”

Help means admitting that she’s been committing crimes every week since school ended. It means Daisy being even more disgusted with her than she already is. To ask for help, in this situation, is to ask for ridicule and embarrassment. Chloe has never needed help before and she doesn’t intend to start now. She will not be made a torn-up painting in the back of a classroom cabinet, a splotchy yearbook memory in need of resurrection, by Daisy Plent.

“Nah,” she says. “I’m all good. Incredibly so.”

And because she can’t resist, she adds, “I’m fine by myself.”

---

As she zips through puddles, Chloe formulates an excuse for her parents. I got caught in the rain gets five points for truthfulness, but minus two because it encourages questioning into a) why she was so unprepared, and b) why she couldn’t bike for a couple minutes further than the grocery store. I was illegally resurrecting this painting and then I think it tried to possess me so I had to do an exorcism, also Miss Plent’s daughter caught me doing the exorcism—maybe the first excuse would have to suffice.

She reaches the bridge without incident, slowing there because the puddles are monstrous. After a brief splash assessment, she dismounts from her bike. She borrowed these pants from her sister and isn’t in the mood to risk her life.

The bridge over Asperthbell’s Rumbling Ravine has no name. The Rumbling Ravine isn’t formally named, either, since the earthquake that split the town occurred barely a year ago, but the bridge lacks even a nickname. However, this doesn’t stop it from being a hotspot for spirit activity. It’s where casual checkmates from the elementary school’s chess club meet to chat up impeccable touchdowns, watching while old dance routines tiptoe on the railings. During the school year, Chloe has to barrel through gaggles of marching band performances just to get to homeroom on time.

Despite the chaos, though, Chloe loves the ghosts of Rumbling Ravine. Even though Asperthbell seems tangential at best to the wider world, the souls make her feel like she’s a part of something. Like she’s art, too. Something that matters, that will never be truly gone even if it’s forgotten. When it comes to Chloe Chew’s grand ambition of happiness, the Rumbling Ravine is to her what she imagines an Ivy League acceptance is to Daisy and her meticulous dreams.

Which is why the silence stops her dead in her tracks.

Ash and rain pepper her skin as she studies each gnarled, wooden board to be certain the ghosts aren’t hiding. Chloe takes a step forward and she—

And she falls. Her foot passes through the bridge and the rest of her follows suit, like a gaggle of moths racing after each other to the fire. She skids down to the mouth of the ravine, screaming and flailing for grip on the slick earth. At the last moment she latches onto a rock, and fire jolts up her arms. She steadies herself. Inches away from the abyss, she struggles to catch her breath.

“Shit,” she whispers. “Goddammit. Goddammit.” She raises her voice. “Help! Somebody!” But everyone will be waiting out the storm inside, and her voice only echoes through the ravine.

Bit by bit, Chloe inches up the incline, chest heaving. Her arms shriek. By the time she reaches level ground, the storm has kicked up again. Through the swirling hail, Asperthbell’s lights glow a dim, soggy yellow. Something about the town looks off, but she’s too exhausted to interrogate it. She collapses next to her bike.

She can’t go home. The bridge is the sole route, and she can’t risk another fall. But another exorcism would be dangerous; the last time should never have hurt her.

When Chloe realizes what she has to do, she covers her eyes with her hands and gives a long-suffering groan.

---

The road to the grocery store warps under Chloe’s bike. One moment the street is gravel, and the next it’s splintering pavement. She grits her teeth and dodges a branch that appears out of nowhere. The town she’s known since birth is suddenly unfamiliar: the horizon kaleidoscopes and cracks, jagged and dark then flat and blistering with bursts of colour.

She tries not to think about where she’s going. Thinking ignites her headache and forces her to reckon with what she’s about to do.

The grocery store flickers into view. Ivy charges up wooden walls which were brick this morning. Chloe discards her bike on the sidewalk and runs to the sliding doors. She bangs her fist against rain-streaked glass. “Daisy! Hey, Daisy!”

Through the windows that can’t decide if they have panes or not, Daisy’s head pops out of the cleaning closet. She yells something Chloe can’t quite make out, then disappears as the windows board themselves up altogether.

“I need you to help me,” shouts Chloe. “I—I did this thing, and I messed up, and I’ll explain once you let me in!”

Daisy storms into view, unlocking the doors with pursed lips. As they slide open, she says, “You almost set off the alarm.”

“Well, I didn’t,” says Chloe, slipping through sideways. She trips on a step that isn’t there. “I know you’re closing, but this shouldn’t take long. I… I need you to make me a promise. You can’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you.”

Chloe expects Daisy to roll her eyes and tell her to leave, or to make a comment about the state of her clothes, but she just asks, “Have I ever given you a reason not to trust me?”

Silence hangs heavier between them than the rain outside.

Chloe blurts, “I tried to resurrect this painting I found in your mom’s cabinet before school ended, but something went wrong and I think it’s possessing me. Also I tried to do an exorcism in the storage room—I promise I will pay for the markers and paper when I can—but it just made things worse and I fell off the bridge over Rumbling Ravine and I need you to—I need you to help me.”

“Okay.”

Chloe blinks.

“Do you want to bring your bike inside?”

“Isn’t that like, not allowed?”

Daisy Plent, who has never so much as jaywalked, says, “Eh.” She picks a bell pepper off the floor and tosses it back onto the shelf.

Daisy leads Chloe and her bike to the cash register, where Chloe can drip over the conveyor belt instead of the newspaper stand. For a heartbeat, Chloe stops falling between Asperthbell, now, and Asperthbell, forty years ago, and returns to Asperthbell, last year, when Daisy first got hired. Shoes squeaking on the floor Daisy just mopped, come on guys. The inside jokes, the rhythm of Chloe’s basketball shaking shelves in the storage room. Eating slightly expired food on the bridge.

And the day that ended.

Daisy asks, “What do you need me to do?”

“Why are you helping me,” says Chloe, and it’s not quite a question. “I don’t get it. It breaks all the rules, Daisy—permitless necromancy is a crime. I’m not complaining, but—why?”

Sighing, Daisy turns to the rack of magazines beside the register. “Because you asked.” She tucks her hair behind her ear, and Chloe can’t tell whether her hands are shaking or the world is. “For once in your life, you asked, Chloe, instead of running away and pretending things are fine. Because you’re my friend, and maybe I regret what I said, and maybe I’ve been trying to find a way to apologize all year.”

Daisy turns back to Chloe. The magazines behind her coruscate through covers, each variation more garish than the last. The floor shakes and the windows pulse and sunlight hits ash, and throughout it all Daisy is the only constant. The ghost in her head can raze Asperthbell but it can’t touch this girl with a lanyard tan line, who hates this small town and is still of it so much she is timeless, who used to embody every flawless Asperthbell sunset to Chloe.

Chloe says, “I need an exorcism. Did you throw out the drawing in the storage room?”

---

In the cereal aisle—which is closest to the cleaning closet, in case Chloe’s innards need to be mopped off the floor—Daisy holds up Chloe’s drawing. For the tenth time, she asks, “Are you sure this is safe?”

The spirit of The Painting Ruining Chloe’s Life (TPRCL) is tethered to Chloe, and by extension tethered to the art she created. If the drawing yanks on TPRCL, it will be removed from Chloe and pulled to reside fully within the drawing, where it can then be banished. In order for the drawing to yank on TPRCL, the drawing must be killed, which is what Chloe tried to do in the storage room. Since spirits are not corporeal, the process should be painless.

Theoretically. Chloe’s previous attempt was an avalanche in her brain and didn’t even do anything. To repeat it with someone who won’t know when to stop is dangerous, foolhardy, and possibly, maybe, somewhat potentially fatal.

From the floor, Chloe says, “No yeah, it’s totally safe.”

So Daisy rips the drawing.

The floor beneath Chloe is tile and grass and the grocery store is freezing and the forecast says it’s the hottest day of the year and the forest fires are getting too close for comfort and the sky is one stained-glass snapshot after the other and she loves this town she hates this town she’s running she’s falling and isn’t she art isn’t she immortal isn’t she every part of this rotten wonderful world and she’s laughing but she’s not and she lied, but she asked for help.

Chloe stares at a cereal box until the letters stop blurring, then exclaims, “I’m not dead!”

Daisy stares at her. “Why do you sound surprised?”

“Nothing. Hand me the pieces.”

“Now what? Do we banish it?” She passes Chloe the shredded drawing.

“Banish it?” Chloe takes the pieces and examines them. She doesn’t know what she’s about to say until she says it. “No way. This is one for the museum.”

“The museum?”

Chloe stands, a resurrection in her own right. This moment deserves a place on the bridge, alongside the other pieces of art: the day she stopped hiding, cartwheeling down wooden planks, blazing as blue as the sky without ash. Sometimes her great ambition is enough. Sometimes she is enough.

But she doesn’t have to be alone. Chloe grins. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

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Host Commentary

Stories by young authors are always among our very favourites to share with you, and this piece is no exception. There’s so much depth to the world building here, but what really makes this story work for us is the through-line of the teen experience. Friendship struggles, dreams and aspirations, shared joys and embarrassments. The stories that become the landmarks of our lives.  Life can be complicated, being a teenager – for Chloe or Daisy in this story, for you or the teens in your lives. This year, my eldest son and his friends have gone through their first  major school exams, chosen their college destinations, and celebrated their achievements at Prom. They’ll each have museums of their own, with some artefacts they’ll share with us, and some…well, maybe best not. I think that’s what growing up is all about in the end: discovering who we are, separate from our families, and filling our lives with meaningful, rich experiences that belong to us, and our friends.