The Necromancer's House (12 page)

Andrew hears Anneke throwing up in the sink, goes to find her.

The stink of hot whiskey, coffee, and chocolate assaults him as he steps into the guest bathroom.

“You've been to Dino's,” he says.

She nods, bent over, wiping her mouth.

“And to the Gulch.”

Nods again.

Looks at him, eyes glistening, whether from shame, heaving, or both he can't tell.

She becomes aware of the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

“Tour's over for now.”

The shame of relapse starts to steal upon her, but she boots it under.

“What about the roosalsa?”

Anneke was gone for an hour.

Nadia got bored and left after ten minutes, but Andrew just ignores the question.

“Are you okay?”

“No.”

More okay than you should be because you haven't really crashed yet. This is going to keep happening until you do.

“Are you off the wagon?”

“No.”

He looks into her eyes.

Her eyes say yes.

She looks back, fighting the urge to look down.

The Anneke Anneke wants to be doesn't hang her head.

“Well, maybe the tour's not completely over. I want to show you a movie.”

“Okay,” she says. “As long as it's not
Papillon
.”

 • • • 

Down the stairs to the media room.

He turns the lights on, dims them, actually uses the wall switch.

He goes to the combination-locked cedar trunk wherein fifty or so cassettes stand in alphabetized rows, bearing strips of Scotch tape; the tapes on the left are for the famous—
Muhammad ALI
,
Isaac ASIMOV
,
Sir Winston CHURCHILL
,
Harry HOUDINI (no sound)
,
John LENNON
, et cetera. The ones on the right, fewer in number, are not alphabetized, and many have no last name:
Marisol
,
DAD
,
SARAH
,
Aunt Katie
,
Bill BARNETT
.

A separate locked box sits at the bottom of the chest.

“What's in that?” Anneke says.

“You always want the forbidden fruit, don't you?”

“Don't you?”

“Yes. I guess we all do. All of us who do this. The box has tapes of dead users.”

“Why is it locked?”

“They're dangerous. They can still cast spells. One of them's actually not dead—he just left it as an insurance policy. But you need a different kind of magic, I think.”

Andrew takes the tape reading
Bill WILSON
from the bottom left.

“That's not . . .” she says.

“Yes.”

She looks at the tape.

Shakes her head no.

Andrew sets it on the VCR in front of the television.

He puts his arm around her and she allows it.

They snuggle in on the leather couch, the needle of the intimacy meter moving further away from “buddies,” but stopping shy of “lovers.” He just holds her, pets her hair, until at last she nods.

He puts the tape in.

 • • • 

Bill speaks.

“Every AA member knows that he has to conform to the principles of recovery. His life actually depends upon obedience to spiritual principles . . .”

“Can he hear us?” she whispers.

“Not yet.”

Andrew kisses the top of Anneke's head, separates himself from her enough for decorum, prepares himself to open the trapdoor.

“. . . If he deviates too far, the penalty is sure and swift. He sickens and finally dies.”

“Bill Wilson. It's Andrew Blankenship.”

Bill continues, oblivious.

“He comes to understand that no personal sacrifice is too great for the preservation of this fellowship.”

“Bill, can you hear me?”

Apparently not.

“He learns that the clamor of desires and ambitions within him must be silenced whenever these could damage the group.”

“Bill Wilson.”

Bill ignores him.

Andrew stops the tape.

Rewinds.

Plays.

The same thing happens, or, rather, doesn't happen.

“Something's wrong.”

“No shit,” she says.

He goes through the song and dance again, gets a little further.

“. . . It becomes plain that the group must survive, or the individual will not.”

“Bill Wilson, hello.”

Bill continues.

But something changes.

His New England accent goes Slavic.

“. . . And when the individual doesn't survive, ho, hey! This is a tragedy, small in the grand mechanic of things, but signifying to those who know and care for him . . .”

Andrew blinks dumbly at the screen.

He senses magic.

She does, too.

“Fuck,” he says.

“What's happening?”

He grabs her knee, leans forward, intrigued and spooked.

“. . . and if there is a God, perhaps signifying big deal to him. But there is no God.”

Bill is angry—his head whips and spit flies when he says
God
.

Andrew says, “
This isn't the same tape. He doesn't say these things.
”

Anneke feels gooseflesh ripple down her left side.

“. . . Of course, a man doesn't say, never, is no God. A man does not say that he is denying of God if he wants to farm the benefits of ‘polite' society.”

Bill gets up from his desk, walks over to a curtained window.

The camera follows him.

“Ichabod?” Andrew says. “I command you to stop tampering with this tape.”

Nothing. This is not Ichabod's doing. The entity doesn't leave the warm tingle of magic in a room; rather a sort of dead, flat emptiness.

This room is tingling.

On the television, Bill grabs the cord to the curtains, turns to address the camera.

“But when a man knows heartfully how society can be not polite, hey, sometimes fully rude, we are forgiving him for crying himself atheist.”

Bill pulls the cord.

The film jerks, jumps out of frame, goes white, comes back on.

A bad splice.

Bill is standing in the same spot, but the colors have shifted.

Orange and red light tints everything.

The sound of propeller planes outside.

Bombers?

Help me, bomber!

Out the windows, fire.

A city on fire.

Stalingrad?

The window Bill opens is on the third or fourth floor of a building that shakes now as a bomb explodes nearby.

A chorus of screaming rises up.

“Oh God,” Anneke says.

Now the film jerks again.

The tame, grainy interior colors from the original tape return.

The curtain has been closed, or was never opened, and Bill is sitting at his desk again.

Only the silver water pitcher is gone.

A nearly empty bottle of vintage Soviet vodka has replaced it, a darkly handsome Joseph Stalin leering on the label beneath the Cyrillic legend
NOT ONE STEP BACK!

Bill's necktie hangs sloppy and loose, the first buttons of his shirt undone. His hair uncombed. He is drunk.

The sounds of war have gone away.

A musician of small talent plays a violin in another room.

“Do you see what you have driven me to?” he says, in Ukrainian-accented Russian, looking at Andrew.

“Stop it,” Andrew says, pointing authoritatively at the television.

“Stop it!” shitfaced Bill Wilson says, in English, mocking him, laughing, pointing.

Andrew presses the power button on the remote.

The television flicks off.

Then turns itself
back on
.

Bill points at Andrew, says, in Russian, “You think you got away with something, don't you? But your time has run out. We know where you are. And we are coming.”

Subtitles appear in yellow, doubtless for Anneke's benefit.

“You will die, you sloppy little shit. Sloppy. Weak. Little. Shit.”

“Who are you?”

Bill W. smiles, but it's not a pleasant smile.

The image freezes.

The celluloid burns exactly where his mouth is, burns in the nearly flat U of his smile. His eyes burn, too.

The violin stops.

Now the television screen begins to smoke where the mouth and eyes were.

Anneke jumps to her feet, puts the couch between her and the Sony.

“Christ!” Andrew yells.

The television catches fire.

The fire is magical in origin, but thankfully not in nature; an ordinary extinguisher stifles it in seconds. Not that the house would burn; Andrew set very powerful dousing wards at every corner of the property. The smoke alarm goes off, hurting their ears with its shrill chirps. Andrew sets down the extinguisher, silences the alarm. The room is murky with smoke and nitrogen. Anneke, her stomach still queasy following her belly flop out of sobriety, fights the urge to heave.

“Well,” Andrew says, “this is what magic looks like when used as a weapon. It's not pretty.”

“Nothing's pretty when used as a weapon.”

“I love your zero-tolerance approach to bullshit.”

“You're trying to sound authoritative, like you're in control. But you're not, are you?”

“Not entirely.”

“Not entirely? More bullshit. Do you even know who did this?”

“I think so.”

“How did they get into the house?
Your
house?”

He notices the cord connecting a MacBook Pro to the television from his last streamed movie.

“Through that,” he says, pointing.

He disconnects it, handling it like a snake that might still bite.

“I need to e-mail somebody.”

Chicagohoney85:
You're going to owe me big for this. I don't know if you understand how hard something like this is.

Ranulf:
It can't have been that hard if you're already getting back to me.

—Difficulty is not measured in duration.

—It took you 24 hours.

—Labor can take 24 hours. Or it can take two. I've never popped one out, but word on the corner is that it sucks either way.

—Point taken. But it's going to take me some time to trick out a car for you. That's what you want, right? A car that cops, thieves and meter maids don't notice?

—Yep. Tell me what else it'll do again . . . City car stuff, right? I've got no use for big or fast.

—Runs on water. I know another user who can do that, but fitting in extra-tight spaces by making them bigger is mine alone. So far, anyway.

—Sounds awesome! Parking sucks here. That's exactly what I want!

—So be it! But I'll need a week or two to find the right car, and another week to do the work. Twenty four hours, my ass!

—What, should I have acted like it took longer? Mechanics always make less per hour than IT people. And you like working on cars

—No more than you like solving puzzles

—You got me. I do! And this one was a bitch. Here's what you gave me—a hut somewhere in rural Russia, probably the Volga region, but maybe anywhere in Russia. Maybe Belorussia, maybe the Ukraine, maybe Poland, somewhere Slavic. Real specific, right?

—I gave you more than that!

—You did & I'll get to that; I'm just pointing out that I had to search a pretty big chunk of the earth's total land mass.

—But you have some way to detect magic, right? Some tweak to Google Earth or something?

—Yes, something like that. But I told you before she's got somebody veiling her. Another techno-savvy user. And a good one, spooky good.

—I think I got a taste of how good he is.

Andrew remembers the burning smile, the burning eyes, how they stuck to the glass, then burned out the other side.

—You're sure it's a he? I'm not a he.

—I think he's a he. I think you're a she. I don't know either one for sure.

—If you were ten years younger, I'd tell you to come to Chicago so I could show you. I've seen old pictures of you, you know. I Facebook stalked you. Hot! But you're too old now, so you'll have to take my word for it. I'm just saying don't make assumptions-that can kill you in this game.

—True enough. But my point was that however good he or she is, I feel good having you in my corner. You're spooky good, too.

—I am! Which is why I think I found her anyway.

—May I ask how?

—You just did. And, yes. I found her with shadows.

—I'm not sure I get it.

—First I used the magic-detection, then flagged areas that looked indistinct; veiling draws a screen, and a lesser witch wouldn't even see the screen. But I can. I pick up a slight blur. Flagged all the blurs in Slavic countries. There's a fuckload of magic over there, BTW. You were brave to go over there, what, during the cold war?

—You say brave. Some would say stupid.

—Now I took something else you told me. She eats kids, right? Actually eats them.

Andrew leans back from the screen, rubs his eyes with his hands, as if to massage away the pictures in his head.

—You there?

—Yes. She eats them.

—I hacked police records. I don't speak those languages, so I had to outsource the translations. These people aren't luminous, they just want money, I sent you an invoice. It's a bit steep. Good, fast and cheap, you can't have all three, right?

—I got the invoice.

—So I looked for reports of missing children. Infants. The Volga lit up, just like you said it would. But so did a few other areas where I saw blurs. Now we've checked for magic, hidden magic and missing kids. Still a bit of crossover. But the Volga stuff was old, like a few years old. You know what lit up since 2008?

—Tell me.

—You're going to like it. Not that kids are missing, I mean, but where I think she is. It fits. But let me tell you the third thing I looked for, cause I'm proud of it.

—Shadows, you said.

—Shadows, sure, but what kind?

—I give up.

—So now I bring in the military eyes-in-the-sky. Hacked the shit out of them, and they're mighty. Hi-res satellite images. I can find a fly sitting on poop in Mongolia.

—Ha!

—Now I think about the physical structure. You said the hut stands on chicken's feet, right? Big ones, like taller than a man.

—Not everybody can see them.

—Film still records things like that. It's why we sometimes see ghosts in photos. The camera doesn't lie-the lie happens in our heads.

—But the angle? A satellite wouldn't see feet under a hut.

—Think.

Andrew furrows his brow, taps his index finger on the table like a woodpecker seeking grubs. It's easier for her to puzzle things out—she's a plodder, not a natural. She worked her way into magic with brains. But Andrew is far from stupid. The last tap is hard, a percussive
Eureka!

—The shadow! The hut is higher, as if on stilts.

—And stilts aren't a big thing in these countries. Louisiana, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, sure. But, aside from ice-fishing huts, it's not a Slavic thing.

—But I remember it was in forest . . . it was dark. She likes dark. What about the trees?

—You also said she had a garden. Gardens need sun. She's not going to park herself in total darkness. There'll be a break in the canopy.

—There was! There was a patch of sunlight.

—Now we've got three criteria . . . magic, child disappearances, and a hut with a shadow that suggests 6-10' clearance. One match. Check it out.

A photograph appears.

A straw-roofed hut, not big.

Not on the outside, anyway.

Fu fu fu, I smell Russian bones!

And then a second cursor appears.

Points at a hunched figure carrying a pan of what look like pork bones, mostly in shadow. Indistinct.

Andrew shudders.

 • • • 

Do not look at me with your eyes or I'll take them.

Do not smile at me with your teeth or I'll take them.

Piss squatting or I'll carve a cunt on you.

—You there?

—Give me a minute.

—K

Andrew feels himself begin to shudder, an involuntary response he can observe, as if it were someone else's shudder, but which he cannot stop.

—Is that her, Ranulf?

The cursor wiggles over the crone.

Andrew feels his testicles ice over.

His palms go clammy, he wipes them on his jeans.

—Is that Baba Yaga?

He can't seem to will his fingers to type.

Her name has been invoked.

He glances behind him at a handsome brass mirror, terrified he'll see her image, but his own scared face looks back at him.

Brass mirrors are safe, can't serve as gates for her.

He notices the tension in his mouth, how carefully he keeps his lips pressed together.

Radha is waiting.

She wants to know if the hunched shape with the pan full of bones is the ancient thing that kidnapped him twenty-nine years ago.

—I think so.

—Awesome! I think so, too. Now you wanna know where she is? Not exactly where she is, but what she's pretty close to?

He envies Radha her fearlessness, how casually confident she is of her own power. He was the same way before he went to Russia.

—Where is it?

—It's pretty creepy. And pretty perfect. Nobody will fuck with her there. By the way, Madeline Kahn is kind of a bitch.

—Where is she, Radha?

Radha types.

Andrew knows what word will appear, knows it a microsecond before it appears on his screen like a name on a map of Hell—

Gehenna.

Dis.

Tartarus.

Acheron.

—Chernobyl.

In the other room, Anneke's phone rings.