The Necromancer's House (19 page)

Chicagohoney85:
This is pretty cool if you like dark stuff. But I don't think you do as much as I do. You sure you want to see this?

Ranulf:
Just show me. I need to know.

—What, don't you trust me? I'm not going to say I know if I don't know. And that's one dead witch. Deaddity dead dead dead.

—Cute. Just show me.

—How's my car?

—You'll splee.

—I think you're trying to say squee. As in, make a squee noise. Because splee is more like have a male orgasm which is anatomically misplaced, and just a little off sides.

—I meant squee.

—I know. A guy like you can still get action and doesn't need to be a creeper. There's nothing I hate like a creeper.

—Understandable. Are you going to show me?

—What color is it?

—?

—The car!

—Plum. A Mini Cooper.

—*SQUEEEEEE!* Okay, here's your morbid little treat, and it's weird. I didn't know things like this happened. Pretty f'd up. The images were shot at two-second intervals.

A picture loads. Black-and-white, military satellite photography. The hut, the garden, hard to make out. Early morning. An old woman's foot, a slipper near it. The echo of
The Wizard of Oz
is impossible not to notice.

Ding dong, your bitch is dead.

—Can you get a closer shot of that shoe?

She zooms in. It gets grainy, but he thinks it may be an old-timey slipper. Not ruby. Embroidered.

He can't be sure, but he thinks he's seen it before.

His stomach does a slow roll.

—Just click when you're ready to see the next one. This'll flip your shit.

He clicks.

A wolf crouches on the path. A skinny wolf, not like the ones you see in pictures from Alaska or Yellowstone—this critter is gray and ratty and hungry-looking.

Small.

Nose pointed like a gun at the owner of the inanimate foot.

(Click)

That wolf is nearly out of the shot, its tail all that's visible; it's sniffing her. Perhaps doing more to her than that. Two more wolves have appeared on the path before the hut, coming to share the prize.

—Now watch the house.

(Click)

The house has turned.

He sees one of its windows like a dark eye.

It has turned ninety degrees toward the wolves, the dead woman.

(Click)

Fully turned, facing them.

More wolves have come, two of them crouched and growling at the house, the rest circled around her.

Feeding.

—You won't believe this. Are you sitting down?

(Click)

Motion. Things get blurry now. Something has flashed from beneath the house; the wolves have reacted. One was too slow. The blur has the wolf.

(Click)

A huge chicken's foot.

That's what has the wolf.

Still blurry, but less so, still in motion.

The wolf struggling, trying to twist out.

(Click)

The wolf is dead.

Its brains dashed on the ground, as dead as Haint's iguana.

Two others are growling at the house, front halves low as if salaaming, like dogs at play but not playing. Not surrounding it as they might a giant elk, but blocking it while the others retreat.

The rest are dragging the old woman away, about a third of her in the shot now, swathed in dried blood.

(Click)

Everything blurred, house twisting, motion beneath it.

(Click)

The house turning away, just a corner of it in frame.

Two dead wolves as limp as dishrags.

The woman and the other wolves have gone.

(Click)

Just the garden.

The path.

One of the wolves trying to get up.

Wasn't dead after all.

Will be soon.

Too much of its insides outside.

 • • • 

That is the last image.

He clicks back through them two more times.

—What do you think?

—I think maybe you're right.

—I am right. She's deader than hell. You're in the clear, my man.

—Thanks. Really, Radha. Thanks.

Andrew feels pretty good as June gives way to July and July sheds days.

Baba Yaga is dead.

He has Radha's car to work on, and it's a damned fun little car.

The woman he loves is newly confirmed in witchcraft and studying for a month in Vermont.

Chancho, who has family coming up from Texas, has invited him to a fiesta, and that means piles of oily tamales and pans of enchiladas and bowls of the best guacamole this side of Austin.

Who cares if his cousins move drugs for the Zetas?

He can almost completely ignore the tinny little voice in his ear sayin
g

Something's wrong,

Something's coming.

July 14.

Bastille Day.

Anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in Paris, of course, but also a very personal anniversary for Andrew Blankenship.

Seven years exactly since Sarah collapsed at Darien Lake.

Aneurysm.

Just after she rode the Mind Eraser.

One of life's stupid, mean little jokes.

Enough to make one conclude there is a God and he isn't all that nice.

He was handing her her earrings to put back on when she said she didn't feel well.

Wanted to sit down.

Slumped over like a kid playing a prank.

And that was it.

He had just started looking for a ring, was thinking about asking her on Halloween.

 • • • 

Now he hovers at the top of the stairs that lead down to the media room.

 • • • 

I shouldn't be doing this.

Why am I doing this?

It doesn't hurt her.

No, but it hurts me.

I just have to see her again.

God.

God.

 • • • 

Downstairs.

Quickly, before he loses his nerve.

From the box of VHS tapes, one tape marked
SARAH
.

In it goes.

Stop.

He does stop, but only because he has to shut the door to the media room and lock it.

Salvador cannot, must not see this.

Sits back down.

Pushes play.

Push stop.

No, really. PUSH STOP.

 • • • 

The woman throws a Frisbee, probably an hour before sunset.

The McIntyre Bluffs.

2004.

Eight years ago, before the path to the promontory had eroded into a crumbling saddle, when a brave or foolish soul might still skitter upright over something of a spine to the platform of turf that remained.

But the woman.

Thirtyish, sandy brown hair cut into bangs.

That smile would melt an iron heart.

That smile could stop evil itself.

It is the sun on toast, it is the sun on Christmas morning with all wars over.

It is a smile to give up magic for.

Her faded jeans, all the rings on her fingers, one a teaspoon ring.

Should have thrown myself from that promontory.

Just like the rusalka did all those years ago.

What have I done with myself since Sarah?

She hated this part of you, this self-pitying part of you.

No she didn't.

Sarah didn't hate.

Now the camera follows something flashing through the high grass.

A swatch of the lake behind it.

It's really tearing ass.

A dog.

A young border collie, not a year old, already an acrobat.

It leaps, yanks the red disk from the air as if tearing it from the swatch of blue sky hung behind the cliff.

The camera dips back to where the woman laughs and claps.

The trapdoor is coming.

“Good Sal! Good, smart Sal!” she says, and the dog drops the Frisbee in the grass at her feet. Her lace-up thrift store boots. Sarah is a thrift store empress, five foot four, size seven shoe, tiny through the waist, fucking everything fits her.

And the thrift stores took it all back.

Here's the trapdoor.

The drop of the Frisbee marks it.

He can call her name, have her lock eyes with him, speak to her.

He has done it exactly three times.

Only once sober.

Not today.

Not never, it doesn't work like that.

Just not today.

“That's my boy,” she says, and gives the Frisbee a lusty throw.

“Some arm on you,” younger Andrew says.

His one contribution to this tape.

She looks at the camera.

Looks at the younger Andrew she loved like that.

The trapdoor is still open.

If he speaks.

If he says
Sarah
.

She is about to speak to younger Andrew.

Her eyes cut left and she smiles that smile instead.

Now Salvador bounds into view but doesn't drop the Frisbee.

Wants to play chase this time.

The hump of his running back in the high grass.

Whatever she was going to say goes unsaid, turns to laughter as she runs after the dog. Out of frame. Young Andrew is smart enough to stop filming, put the camera down, join the chase. Live. Soon the young couple will pack their dog and blankets and empty wine bottle into the Mustang, go home, back to this house, and make love.

Older Andrew isn't welcome to that party.

Let's say
now-Andrew
, shall we?

Now-Andrew isn't welcome to that party.

But that's okay.

He's not entirely sure he believes in time anymore, and if there is no time, he is making love to Sarah even now.

He often thinks of the Russian word for
wing
when he thinks of making love to Sarah.
Krihlo.
Said with that little Russian vowel that sounds like
i
but in the front of the mouth, like you're trying to sneak a
w
in there. That
o
that opens the lips instead of closing them.

God Sarah God Sarah God

Her rings on the nightstand.

Her boots on the floor, making a sort of happy swastika with his.

Her soft, joyful whimpers.

Salvador the dog crying to be let in with them.

 • • • 

Salvador the wicker man taps on the door to the media room.

Let's say
now-Salvador
.

Now-Salvador, then.

Now-Andrew sleeves his cheeks dry.

Puts the tape away.

Opens the door.

The UPS man has arrived with a parcel Andrew must sign for.

A parcel from Frenchman Street in New Orleans.

He can tell by the weight of the package.

He recognizes Miss Mathilda's squared-off, careful print.

Three tapes.

The dead in their black plastic shells.

Souls trapped in amber.

He can't free them, but he can make them dance.

Oh God, he wants a drink.

The house is quiet with a quiet that television and music are powerless to interrupt. The night groans by on rusted wheels.

The dream is the same dream.

Always the same dream.

The Soviet dream.

 • • • 

He is twenty-three again, arrogant, strong, as pretty as a girl, irresistible to girls and women of every stripe. He travels easily through Soviet Russia, using magic to outdance its bureaucracy, its lethal but ponderous bureaucracy, clever in places but cold. Secular. Unable to allow for the impossible. He is playing chess with adversaries who cannot see all the pieces, who might beat him if they allowed for the
possibility
that they could not see all the pieces.

His papers say he is a Soviet citizen.

Magic gives him flawless Russian.

Magic summons perfect answers to his lips.

He is too light for the police.

He is too clever for the KGB.

He is looking for treasuries of magic tomes lost since the days of the tsars.

“Of all of the spell books and relics known to exist, whether seen by reliable witnesses or referenced in other works, only a quarter or so are in known hands,” his mentor had told him; on mention of secret magic books, Andrew had sat like a cat before a can opener. “Of the remainder, it is believed that a disproportionate amount have accumulated in what is now the Soviet Union. Some hiding in plain sight, no doubt, waiting in bookstores for the first luminous person to buy them for less than an American dollar. Most will have been hoarded and stored.”

“Hoarded and stored by whom?”

“We don't know. Various users, even more deeply hidden than Western ones, perhaps more powerful. I know a man, a Walloon Belgian, who went to Leningrad in 1973 and came back with a book on traveling underwater, a bit redundant in the age of scuba, but still. I also know a man and wife who went together to the Volga and never came back. The Volga's probably where most of it is.”

“When did they go?”

“1975? Jesus, three years ago. I saw them get married the year before.”

Now, in the 1983 dream, Andrew has left the city of Gorky, in the Volga region, and makes his way by train and bus into the countryside, hitchhiking rides from farm trucks, beat-up Zaporozhets with their goldfish-eye headlights, even a horse-drawn cart full of barreled milk.

And then.

And then.

 • • • 

Andrew has been hitching all day, with mixed success.

He just realizes how hungry he is, how long it's been since he ate, when he finds himself looking at a scene from the nineteenth century.

Two men in baggy shirts, short woolen vests and brown pants swing scythes into the high grass, looking for all the world like they had stepped out of
Fiddler on the Roof
. They work their way down the side of a hill, the sky chalky blue above them, one of them humming to keep his time, the younger one swinging less rhythmically, fighting the scythe, tired. Maybe sixteen years old.

“I see you have made an enemy of the grass, Lyosha,” the older man says from beneath a tsarist mustache. “This will not do. Make friends with it. Let it know that you only want to let it lie down and rest.”

He goes back to humming his song, but still the boy chops and sweats, stopping for a moment to wipe his brow with his cap.

“Call your idiot brother and see if he can show you how.”

“He will not come, Uncle. He is lying on the stove.”

“Call him anyway.”

“Ivan!” the boy calls.

Andrew keeps walking down the path, keeping an eye out for another potential ride, but this.

This is something else.

He slows down a bit because he wants to see how this idyll will play out. Do they still make idiot brothers who like to lie on the stove in Cold War Russia?

Clearly they do; the large man who crests the hill and lopes down at the other two has the characteristic eye tilt of Down syndrome, and he breathes through his mouth as he says, “What do you want? I was catching flies.”

“You caught no flies unless they landed in your mouth,” the mustachioed man says. “Now show your weakling brother how a man mows hay.”

The boy hands the scythe to his brother, and Ivan whacks at the grass like a mad thing, shearing great armloads of it down with each stroke, giggling. Soon the little brother takes up a fistful of grass and throws it at Ivan, ducking back out of range before the scythe's blade swishes down again. It becomes a game. The older man sets down his scythe and joins in, baiting the laughing peasant with flung grass and dancing away from the flashing blade. Andrew now has to turn his head back to watch, so he stops walking altogether and slides his arms free of his backpack. He lights a shitty Soviet cigarette so he will not appear to be nosy, just a man having a rest and a smoke, and he sits on the big canvas sack he has been lugging.

A flight of sparrows wheels about, lands briefly on the road near him and then takes off again.

And then.

It happens.

The younger boy takes greater and greater risks with the scythe, forgetting the grass-throwing, just leaping in and out Cossack-style while his uncle claps and shouts in time. Andrew knows what is going to happen an instant before it does; at last the idiot brother swings faster than the boy had anticipated and lops into the acrobatic youth's leg.

It comes off just below the knee.

He collapses into the grass with a look of astonishment on his face.

How pale his face is!

How dark the O of his mouth!

Andrew's own mouth hangs open, the cigarette stuck on his lower lip.

The injured boy howls in pain; the older man goes to him.

The idiot stares openmouthed, a long strand of spit reaching down to the grass.

Andrew's paralysis breaks, and he says, “Jesus.”

The boy goes silent.

The uncle had been removing his rope belt to tie off the boy's leg, but he stops and turns his head toward Andrew. The idiot brother looks at him too. Now the boy sits up, holding his bloody stump, less concerned with the blood fountaining through his interlaced fingers than with Andrew.

“Can I help?” Andrew says in decent but accented Russian, his own Russian, Russian that stinks of Ohio, walking toward them now, his hands open in a timeless gesture of harmlessness.

He doesn't even notice that his fluency charm has failed.

All three of them look at Andrew with flinty, suspicious eyes. Their gazes are so malevolent, in fact, that Andrew stops coming toward them. He isn't sure this is what it appears to be.

Then it hits him.

Magic.

It has been so long since he felt the flutter of magic that he has now been blindsided.

He
didn't see the pieces.

Fear wakes up in him.

This could be bad.

This could be very bad.

“Can I help?” the uncle says, mocking Andrew's American accent. “Who could help
this
?”

He gestures at the boy's gushing leg.

“Or this?” he continues, nodding at the idiot brother, who draws back his scythe.

Strikes off the uncle's head.

O mother of fuck fuck fuck

Andrew's legs buckle in fear.

He begins to back up at something more than a leisurely pace, unable, however, to turn his head from the scene in the field.

Now the big idiot bends over, legs splayed, the crack of his ass winking below his too-short shirt, and delicately picks the cap from the uncle's head so he can get a handful of his hair. He lifts the head, the white and rolled-back eyes of which now slot into place.

Fix on Andrew.

A few yards away, the uncle's body sits up.

Then it stands up, arterial blood jetting.

It takes the rope belt between two fists and pulls it slack.

“Now do you want to help? Does Jesus Christ want to help?” the head asks from the idiot's huge fist, now hawking and spitting out a bright clot of blood. The idiot takes his scythe up in the other hand and begins to stumble toward Andrew.

“I think he wants to hear American, Uncle,” the bleeding boy says, using a scythe as a crutch and standing on his remaining leg. “Two kopecks says he does.”

The head hanging from Ivan's hand now opens its mouth and a sound like television static comes out of it.

The
chunk chunk chunk
of a television dial being turned, and then . . .

News.

A newswoman speaks through the uncle's open mouth, in perfect midwestern American English.

“The remains of an American backpacker missing in the Soviet Union since June were returned to his family today. . . .”

Andrew backs up faster.

He spits his cigarette out.

“The young man's mother and elder brother flew to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to claim the body, which had suffered great violence at the hands of unknown assailants . . .”

The idiot holding the severed head, the bleeding boy hobbling along with his scythe, and the headless peasant with the rope belt between his fists advance on Andrew.

Andrew feels backward with his feet, terrified to fall.

“. . . His hands, feet, and genitals were cut from his body by what appeared to be a farm instrument, although the cause of death has been established as strangulation . . .”

Andrew keeps backing up, not wanting to take his gaze from them. As long as he looks at them, they aren't closing distance.

“General Secretary Andropov has promised a full investigation into the killing, which he will see to personally as soon as his nagging cough goes away.”

“Help,” Andrew shouts. “I need help!”

“HELP!” the head screams, much louder than Andrew had, making wide eyes at him.

Oh, to turn and run.

He dares a glance behind him and sees that the road keeps straight, intermittent trees punctuating pastures in which sheep and the odd cow walk, heads bent to the grass, chewing.

When he turns his gaze back to them, the three peasants are yards closer, though he can see no difference in their gaits. He notices now their grass-stained boots.

“You owe me two kopecks, Lyosha. The man did not want to hear American.”

The head hawks and spits again.

I'm dreaming.

This is 1983 and I'm dreaming.

Look up!

A series of very tight jet contrails etch themselves in the clear summer sky.

Bomber

“BOMBER!” the head screams, never looking away from Andrew. “HELP ME, BOMBER!”

The idiot likes this, says it also, as if to himself.

“Help me, bomber.”

They continue down the road for some time, Andrew sweating more than the cool day should call for.

He hopes to hear a truck behind him, all but prays to hear one blow its horn. No sooner has he thought this than the uncle's head blares the
AH-ooo-GAH!
of a farm truck.

Mustn't look away again

“Hey, Lyosha,” the head says to the hobbling boy, “I don't think he means to look away again.”

“I think you're right, Uncle.”

“It's no good if he sees us; he can just keep the same distance all day long.”

“Right again, Uncle.”

“He is young with long legs. Not like you since your accident, stupid boy.”

“You had an accident, too, Uncle.”

“But mine did not slow me down, as you see.”

So saying, the body walking with the strangling rope executes something between a spasm and a
tour jeté.

The simple man laughs, then bites the head's ear to hold it so he can clap his pancake hands together.

The body leaps again.

“Vanka,” the head says, rolling its eyes dramatically back to look at the simple man carrying it, “how many flies did you catch?”

The head goes back to the fist so Vanka can reply.

“Many.”

“Enough to bring on night?”

“Night! Night! Night!” the big man chants, and it is clear he would clap his hands except for the head he carries.

“Do it, then, big boy!”

Now the idiot opens his mouth and what looks like a big, black pudding begins to emerge from it. He vomits this into the road, where it writhes and undulates, weak light from the sun playing on its slick surface.

Now the boy hops up on his remaining leg and uses his scythe to take a huge swing at the pudding, which bursts into a swarm of blackflies that cover the sun.

And it is night.

Night without stars.

Andrew runs.

 • • • 

The dream changes so he finds himself in a nest.

Or perhaps a bed of dry hay?

Something woolly nuzzles his arm aside, chewing.

He pushes at its head to get it away from him, but it baas explosively, showing him its black tongue.

A sheep.

Where the fuck am I?

A crude wooden roof stands above him.

No walls.

A stable?

The sun is setting, or perhaps rising, casting a dim violet light. A pitchfork stands up from the ground, backlit, tines up, two of those tines spearing an oblong, head-shaped something, also backlit.

Oh, it is a head

It hawks and spits, then speaks.

“Our little baby is awake now, yes?”

Husky laughter comes from near the water trough, against which the idiot brother sits, Andrew's backpack spilled out near him. He unrolls a pair of faded blue jeans and marvels at them, a lit cigarette in his mouth.

Wait until he finds the Playboys

He shouldn't smoke

Why, because he's retarded?

Special, we say
special
now because it's nicer

“Don't burn a hole in those, Vanka—we can sell them to a party member for a lot of money,” the head says from its perch. “So, little baby, you like Jesus, yes?”

Andrew says nothing.

“You like him so much we put you in a manger.”

The sheep baas again, as if prompted.