The Necromancer's House (4 page)

“It's just that I was swimming and I heard Russian. I could not resist. I love to speak Russian,” Nadia says.

The next day.

Andrew's house.

“What did you do with him?”

“I took him to the ship, of course, with the others.”

The man rolls his long, dark hair into a bun and fixes it in place with a two-pronged little cherrywood fork, samurai-style.

“I thought you agreed only to do that farther away.”

She nods gravely, playing with the three-tiered necklace of shells, to which she has added the dog's tag.

Help me get home!

“It is June, you know,” she says. Andrew knows she's referring to the festival of Rusal'naya, when her sisters dance in the fields and on the roads from Poland to the Urals, luring young men to watery deaths. “I cannot assist myself.”

“
Help myself
, you mean. And the Russian thing is no excuse. I speak Russian. You should speak it with me.”

“No,” she corrects, holding up a pale finger, “you read Russian. When you force it out from your mouth, it goes unwillingly. Stinking of Ohio.”

He smiles at her Slavic palatalization of the
h
.

“What do you know about Ohio?”

“I know Geneva on the Lake. I know Erie.”

“That's Pennsylvania.”

“Is the same.”

He gets up from his couch and goes to the window that gives on the lake, turning his back to her, his shoulders hard and angular as though the antique Japanese robe he wears were hung on a block of tilted wood. She can't see his face but knows he is smiling at the darkness on the horizon. A storm is coming, and he likes storms, especially these nasty little June squalls that form so quickly they shame the weathermen. It will come ashore within the hour, bringing Canadian air with it, and he will put on his leather coat and go out to the balcony.

The coat with the cigarettes in the pocket.

“Is
not
the same,” he says, mocking her accent.

“Give me a cigarette,” she says.

“You know where they are.”

“I know. I just wanted to see if you had become a gentleman yet. But you are still from Ohio.”

She gets up and feels around in the pocket of the leather bomber jacket hanging near the door, pulling his yellow packet of American Spirits out and tamping it against her hand to pack the tobacco. Never mind that he has already done this. She redoes everything he does to show that it might be done better. She pulls one out and lights it, frowning at it as though even she cannot believe that something living (or existing, if you prefer) at the bottom of a lake might need tobacco.

“I feel your . . . disapproval,” she says. “You have something else to say?”

“You know what I would say.”

“That you hate it when I drown them.”

“To which you will reply that nothing makes you come as hard as drowning someone, and that you'll come like that for a month afterward. Besides, it's in your nature.”

“And you will say go to Oswego to do that. Or Rochester. Or Canada.”

“But Canada is so faaaar to svim, and I vill miss you,” he says, imitating her again. He takes the cigarette from her mouth and puffs it, ignoring the fishy, dead taste, as he has learned so well to do in other situations. She takes the cigarette back and reaches for the spray bottle full of lake water, misting her dreadlocked auburn mane until it drips.

“Then you will ask,” she continues, spearing each of the next words with the end of her cigarette as she enunciates them, “What. Did. You. Do. With. The. Dog?”

“You didn't eat the poor thing.”

“I wanted to. He was old, but plump and spoiled with good meat on his thighs. But I knew you would be upset.”

“So you ate him and resolved to lie to me about it.”

“I cannot lie to you.”

“You cannot lie to me and get away with it.”

“Is same thing.”

“Is not same thing. Is question of intent.”

“I left him where he was. The door was open. He can stay, he can go, is up to him. Someone will find him. Maybe you? You want an old shitty dog?”

“Salvador wouldn't like that.”

“No,” she agrees.

He lights his own Spirit and inhales deeply, exhales slowly, mouth closed, eyes closed, letting the smoke come out of his nose in a luxurious rush.

Poison.

Everything I enjoy is connected to death.

“Did you ever get the feeling that something bad has happened, something just outside your control, and perhaps outside your understanding, which will set in motion a series of events that will lead to deep tragedy? And great loss.”

She considers this. Draws smoke with difficulty because she has wet the filter. Lets it out of her nose, as he did.

“Yes.”

As if summoned, Salvador walks downstairs carrying the soaked and reeking bedsheets from the master bedroom toward the laundry room in the basement. If the framed portrait of Salvador Dalí that served as his head could bear any expression other than the self-consciously crazed eyes of the surrealist, the stick-and-wicker man might raise an eyebrow. He loves to hear his name.

As it is, he swivels his painted gaze at them on his way down, hoping to be called over, but, when he isn't, continues dutifully down the steps on his military-grade prosthetic legs.

Once in the basement, it is all Salvador can do not to spread the sheets out and roll in them; the basket at the center of him holds the salted heart of the border collie he had been before the magus revived him in this form, and that heart still gladdens at strong smells, particularly fishy or fecal ones. He inclines his flat portrait head toward the armful of bedclothes, reveling in their filth. It will be criminal to wash these delicious odors away, but he loves his master as only dogs love, and he sighs a canine sigh and opens the door of the washing machine.

The Jehovah's Witnesses come soon after the storm is over. The air is damp and the receding dark clouds in the east make their white shirts pop as they walk up the drive between the young maple trees. Andrew stands on his front porch with his leather coat on, knowing he looks and smells every inch the career sinner, combing out waist-length hair redolent of tobacco and myrrh. He frowns at a new white hair, plucks it, winds it around a finger.

It will take them a moment to make it up the steep walk.

He realizes he is about to sigh, recognizes impatience as a sign of entitlement, thinks he really should read another book about Buddhism and try to meditate. He has a date with being Buddhist, but he isn't there yet.

And here come two of God's warriors, both of them African American, one in his sixties, one about twenty.

At least they mean it, I'll give them that. They wear out a lot of shoe leather doing what Jesus said to do. No Christmas. No Halloween. But this is a little like trick-or-treating. Do they eat candy? Do I even have any candy?

The older one is slowing them down.

That guy doesn't need any candy.

That wasn't very Buddhist, and he's not fat, just a little soft around the middle, and probably a grandfather, so give him a break.

Maybe that kid's grandfather?

The elder raises a hand, smiles a winning smile.

“Quite a driveway you have here,” he says. “You must be in good shape!”

“I might be if I ever left. I'm a hermit. All I do up here is talk to God and wait for strangers to come so I can tell them God's plan for them. Didn't they warn you about me at the Kingdom Hall?”

“Well, they did say . . .”

“Where's Barbara?”

“She moved to Syracuse.”

“More action in the big city. A rich crop of the godless there, I tell you.”

“Something like that.”

He stands with his hands on his hips, bent forward just a little, his elbows fanning out his open coat, Sears, granddad gray. Tie the color of an excited brick. He's smiling and panting, catching his breath.

“You okay?” Andrew says.

He nods, still panting.

The younger Witness senses he should say something, but he's a shy one. He's also more than a little distracted by the garden of rocks and rusted-out cars piled in Andrew's front yard. The '65 Mustang he wrecked, an old Chevy truck, a Dodge Dart. All of them wound through with young trees and big, handsome boulders. Its aesthetic leans just more toward art installation than junkyard fodder.

The boy is fascinated with it, especially the bleached longhorn steer skull crowning it all, its dry teeth yellowing in their sockets, its horns leather-wrapped at the base, slightly tilted.

The lad knows there's something more to it than meets the eye.

He knows he's the one who's supposed to break the silence, though, so he speaks.

“Quite a . . . quite a storm, wasn't it?”

“Sure was,” Andrew says.

They exchange a look.

The boy glances at the steer skull again, then tilts his head a little bit at the magus, like a dog trying to process a strange sound.

Holy shit, is this kid luminous?

A natural?

Andrew smiles more broadly.

Damn if he isn't. Marching around with armfuls of
The Watchtower
when he's just humming with receptivity for magic. Anneke's got a little, but this kid's like I was.

Ready to explode.

One spell book away from a lifetime of . . .

What?

Now the older man stands.

“Arthur. Arthur Madden,” he says, holding out a hand. “And this handsome fellow is Marcus Madden, Jr. No relation. Just kidding.”

“Andrew Blankenship.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Blankenship.”

This is a genuinely nice guy. I'll keep it dialed down.

It's hard to keep the mischief out of his voice.

“Would you like to come in?”

 • • • 

They leave twenty minutes later.

It isn't the conversation about the reliability of the gospels, nor is it Andrew's Socratic minefield of questions; it isn't even Andrew's assertion that a God who intended sex for procreation alone would not have built a clitoris, nor made it so compatible with the tongue. (“Must be nice to be so close to the lake,” Arthur says to change the subject, although Andrew enjoys the unintended symbolism, as he enjoys that this is how faultlessly polite Arthur chooses to comment about the fishy smell permeating the house.)

It's Marcus.

Marcus sees too much.

First he's distracted, looking out at the lake through the back windows.

“Is there something more interesting than us out there, young man?”

“I . . . thought I saw a . . . dolphin.”

“Lakes don't have dolphins,” Arthur says.

“We have some very big fish,” Andrew offers.

The kid looks at him dubiously.

“Very big,” Andrew says.

They return to the topic of whether homosexuality is a sin or a natural state of being. Marcus always lets Arthur (his great-uncle, as it turns out) field the questions, but Andrew drags him in from time to time.

“C'mon, Marcus—you've seen gay kids.”

Marcus almost laughs at that and Arthur steers the conversation back around to God's capacity for forgiveness, clearly meaning Andrew.

Offers of Witness literature are countered with offers of Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucian books.

Mutual refusal.

“Or, if you want to come back another time, I've got a reference library that might really interest you.”

He directs this at Marcus, trying not to sound creepy, and failing.

When Salvador brings Andrew French-press coffee, the young man goes gray, looks at Arthur, watches Arthur nod at the servant, and doesn't understand why Arthur isn't shitting himself, too.

That's because Arthur sees a young Spanish man who bears a slight resemblance to John Leguizamo. You, on the other hand, see the false human form flicker from time to time, and that's when you see the lacquered branches that make his radius and ulna, the awkward but delicate way his artist's-model articulated hands pluck a spoon from the tray or press down the plunger of the coffee press. You glimpse the steam wafting over the portrait. You see ghosts, too, and hear voices. You think you're crazy sometimes and sometimes you think you're possessed. But really you're just awake.

How unlucky.

“I want to go, Uncle.”

Arthur raises an eyebrow at the boy, suggesting that a conversation about manners will take place on the drive back, but then he checks his watch, a big seventies-style Timex on a silver watchband.

Salvador offers them both coffee.

Arthur politely declines.

Half-turns his wrist to check his watch again.

Andrew realizes Arthur has no cell phone and loves him for it.

Marcus stares, suddenly peaceful, as though resigned to the mental breakdown he thinks he's having.

“Well, I guess Mrs. Simpson will be bringing the car around soon, and we'd best not keep her waiting. Thank you for your hospitality, Mr. Blankenship.”

“Thank you for the conversation.”

All three men rise.

Salvador is standing between them and the front door, so Marcus steals for the side door leading from the kitchen.

“Oh, no!” Andrew says. “The stairs over there are dangerous. It's better if you go out the way you came.”

Salvador moves aside, bowing slightly.

This is my house, and you must exit the same way you entered.

“Remember what I said about the library,” he tells Marcus. “It might explain things a bit.”

“Thank you,” Marcus says quietly, but he just wants out.

His eyes don't meet Andrew's again.

It is all he can do not to race ahead of his ponderous uncle, race down the wooded drive and into the heated SUV where Mrs. Simpson hums along with 1950s music on the radio and Jesus and the angels still hold fast against the devil's wicked, confusing world.