The Necromancer's House (6 page)

Years ago.

Night.

Another Mustang, the '65.

Upside down, wheels spinning, engine running. Andrew uncomfortable, scratched, confused. Can't reach the keys to shut the motor off because there's a branch in the way. Led Zeppelin is singing about California but it sounds wrong because only one speaker works.

He climbs out into cool spring air, smelling radiator fluid and oil.

Nearly falls; something is wrong with his leg.

The peasants! The peasants cut my leg off!

He looks down, but his leg is there.

Mostly.

His jeans are ripped and lots of little somethings hurt, far away.

His heart is pounding.

Just breathe.

Just walk.

Andrew walks, his back to the lamplit greenery and spinning wheels of the wrecked Mustang.

Ford.

First on Race Day!

(F)ucked (OR) (D)ying.

Andrew in his snakeskin boots and tight black jeans, walking down 104A, tempted to stop at a house but senses he's done something wrong; he needs to get back to his own house and Sarah. He'll be safe there; he'll sleep and he'll know what to do in the morning.

The left leg hurts; he sits on a guardrail and pulls his boot off, pours blood out of it, it won't go back on.

He holds it and keeps limping, waving off several cars that stop, actually yells at one big, Swedish-looking fellow who insists that he should get in his pickup truck, but he won't go away. Looks like he means to wrestle him into the truck. Until Andrew points at the big man's face and gives him a cramp in the cheek muscles

How Prospero of you oh that wasn't nice he just wants to help but I have to have to just please God get home

and the big man drives off, scared because he knows the wild, injured little man did it to him. Andrew doesn't understand how mud got on him, but mud is drying in his hair and on his face and he pulls at this, spits on his hand and wipes his cheek.

The boot swinging in the other hand, the magus limping.

Only ten miles to Dog Neck Harbor, should be there by morning.

He waves off two more cars, but the third one pulls in front of him, its roof exploding in sharp but beautiful flashes of blue light.

Andrew says some words in medieval Russian.

Andrew disappears.

Knows the spell won't last, hobbles into a soy field.

Invisible.

I don't drive so well but I'm not too drunk to fucking DISAPPEAR!

He curls up in the soy plants, feels something like a beetle crawl on his hand but doesn't slap at it.

Says “I pardon you” in a German accent like Ralph Fiennes in
Schindler's List
and laughs until he passes out.

Dreams his car is radioactive, luminous with it, enough to poison Cayuga County, that he has to shovel enough dirt over it to protect everybody, but he can't. He just can't. And he holds his shovel and cries. Because he really, really fucked up.

In the morning, a trio of dogs sniffing him, a man's good, lined face, a giant looking down on him.

Fu fu fu, I smell Russian bones.

“Ambulance is on its way. You want some water?”

He does.

O God I fucked up I did.

He did.

More than he knows.

He sits up.

He reaches into his pocket, thinking something in there will help him.

A napkin with a note on it, a semicircle of cabernet from where the glass rested on it, a crescent moon of vice and folly.

I want you in the library tonight.

I want you to fuck me in that leather chair.

—S.

When did she slip that into his pocket?

Is it even from today?

Sarah.

“Sit up slow. No hurry.”

The farmer again.

He shows the farmer the napkin note.

“Do you know when this was written?”

The farmer shakes his head.

“A pretty girl wrote it. She writes grant applications. And they say she plays guitar. And laughs and sings.”

The man smiles, points at the ambulance, walks off to talk to them, leaves a jug with a thumbprint of red paint on it.

Andrew notices the bright red silo.

Nice work, mister.

The water tastes like plastic.

And dirt.

Dirt in my mouth.

La la la la.

“Whatcha thinking about,
brujo
?”

“My personal bottom.”

“Bang!” Chancho says, swerving the wheel just a little, grinning.

The Mustang is doing seventy on a two-lane country highway.

Andrew jerks, grabs the door.

“Whoever told you you were funny was a
pendejo
.”

Chancho corrects his pronunciation.

Andrew wears his hair in a ponytail to do yard work at the Zautke house because he feels too effeminate in his samurai bun. He walks behind the power mower trying to look like he knows what he's doing, working his way from the curb to the nondescript blue house, circumnavigating the stone birdbath, jogging it past the flagpole, but Salvador has been mowing Andrew's yard for the last few years, and Andrew's feet aren't practiced at taking the turns. He leaves hand-sized patches of taller grass and then has to double back for them; he looks at the shorn front half of the yard and it strikes him funny because it looks just a bit like Karl's squared-off old-man crew cut.

Karl watches him from the porch for a second.

Wants to shout “Need anything?” at his daughter's strange AA friend, but knows he's on the wagon like Anneke and all Karl has that isn't beer is cheap Pick & Save orange juice just this side of brown or tap water just this side of clear, water that tastes like . . . what the hell does the water here taste like?

Not water.

Goddamn Niagara Mohawk anyway.

Karl Zautke hasn't been feeling well lately, his lymph glands swollen up like acorns, his breath short. Not bad enough to go to the hospital, but bad enough that Anneke is coming every other day now instead of twice a week.

She does his dishes, cooks two days' worth of food for him, does his sour laundry.

But does he even try to take care of his flagging health?

Karl drinks his Pabst Blue Ribbon, enjoying the yeasty, cold, carbonated bite on his tongue. It's a good, simple beer for when you're thirsty, not one of these perfumey, pumpernickel microbrews queered up by guys with sideburns.

Anneke has her big suede work gloves on, balanced on an aluminum ladder that has seen better days, shearing branches from the maple tree that had started flirting with the shingles on the west side of the house. She totters just a little, rights herself. Karl sees this, puts down his beer, comes over, and holds the ladder.

“Daddy,” she shouts, just loud enough to get over the mower's chop. She points her gloved finger at the front door, meaning he should retake his place on his sagging chair, but Karl holds the ladder stubbornly, breathing hard through his nose and smiling at her. She doesn't like how red his face is.

It does feel steadier.

If Karl Ernest Zautke is anything, it's solid.

 • • • 

They sit on the porch, the three of them, Karl mopping his head from time to time with a kitchen towel. Karl Zautke is just a little too big for the wicker chair beneath him; Andrew has been watching it collapse in slow motion for a year and a half. Anneke would get him a new one except that she knows Karl finds half-collapsed things comfortable.

Dad.

My same Dad but old now.

Sick.

Doesn't drink like he's sick.

Dad's on his third beer, and Anneke has told herself she'll just pluck from his hand the next one he dares to open in front of her.

Karl senses he's on the last beer he can get away with and knows better than to test her. Settles into his buckling throne.

Andrew feels mismatched sitting on his folding chair, sharing the porch with the two outsized Teutons, like a visitor from a fine-boned, nut-brown little tribe that mows the conqueror's lawns and fetches them PBR against their doctors' orders.

Anneke and he can't share their vulgar wiseasseries in front of Karl, so Andrew confines himself to the practical.

Karl doesn't feel comfortable talking about his illness or the day-to-day problems it creates in front of Andrew. Anneke enjoys having her favorite men together, and if they don't know how to connect, that's their problem.

“Car running okay?” Andrew asks.

Karl drives a Jeep Cherokee Andrew has bewitched to keep from breaking down, and has further bewitched so it will come to a safe stop if the driver passes out. Andrew has a real gift for cars, knows how to improvise automotive magic, massage it into their axles and chassis, synthesize it into their gears and skins. He knows very well the Jeep is running smoothly, but he never knows what to say to the big ex-sailor.

“Yeah, great,” Karl says. “Thanks again for changing her oil.”

“My pleasure.”

Two heartbeats go by.

“Mustang running all right?” Karl says, nodding at Andrew's car.

“Yes, sir.”

“Sure is a nice one.”

“Thanks.”

“Turquoise was an interesting choice.”

“That's how she came.”

“Paint jobs are pricey.”

“They can be.”

Two more heartbeats.

“You need any juice or maybe a glass of water? Must be thirsty. Hot as heck out here.”

It really isn't all that hot.

“Water would be great.”

Both men start to get up, but Anneke gently puts her hand on her dad's shoulder so he keeps his seat.

She goes to get the water.

“So,” Karl says, looking back at the door to make sure Anneke isn't coming yet. He's winding up to ask something awkward, and Andrew's skin crawls.

How does he make me feel twelve and tongue-tied?

“Yes, sir?”

Again with the
sir
.

This kid doesn't
sir
anybody else, I'd bet on it.

Knows I served and wants me to like him.

Kid hell, he's like forty, just wears his hair long so he looks like Pocahontas. Probably puts shoe polish in it.

Probably uses moisturizer and plucks his eyebrows, too.

Goes down to the day spa in Syracuse.

I can see this guy getting a pedicure.

I want to like him, I do.

Anneke sure spends enough time with him.

Guy and a girl don't spend that kind a time together without.

Is he?

I kinda hope he is.

“Are you and Anneke . . . ?”

“Sir?”

There's no way in hell.

A guy like this.

Unless she likes him 'cause he looks a little like a girl.

I don't even know if it works that way.

Shit, here she comes.

“Are you staying for dinner?”

Anneke hands Andrew a water glass with faded sunflowers painted on it, the last one of the eight-piece set from her childhood.

“You know we are, Dad.”

But only Anneke spends the night.

Night.

Andrew opens his eyes in the near-darkness of his own house, two wicks of his three-wick bedside pillar candle still alight, nearly but not quite drowned in red wax.

His paperback copy of
The Baron in the Trees
lies open facedown on the pillow.

Something is watching him.

He knows what.

He also knows it's three in the morning.

That's when it most often comes.

“Ichabod.”

The entity doesn't respond.

“Ichabod, say something.”

“Something.”

It has chosen a little girl's voice.

“Manifest in a form I won't find disagreeable.”

“
Ja, mein
Captain,” it says.

A gently glowing Katzenjammer Kid, the blond one, appears, sitting on Andrew's leather chair, its legs primly crossed at the knee. While Andrew appreciates the novelty of seeing the little German cartoon boy in 3-D, it
is
mildly disturbing. Perhaps a cat's whisker shy of being
disagreeable
.

Ichabod has a sniper's precision when it comes to causing unease.

Ichabod
isn't its name, of course, but then neither was the long Sumerian name whose first three syllables sounded vaguely like
Ichabod
.

“Did you touch my foot?”

“Just playing little piggies.”

“I don't like that.”

“It seemed the gentlest way to wake you.”

“Don't do it again.”

“Is that a command?”

“Yes. Are you going to insist on protocol?”

“Not this time. It seems a modest enough request. Note to myself: no touching Master Andrew's sleeping piggies. Check. Anything else?”

Andrew sits up, gathering the sheet around him.

“Tell me why you're here.”

“What, here?” it says, and now the Katzenjammer Kid is sitting in bed next to Andrew, hands on lap, looking like a child who wants to be read a story. It gives off cold like a ham just out of the freezer. It has chosen to be heavy—it depresses the bed.

Andrew forces himself not to recoil.

“Go back to the chair and remain there until I dismiss you.”

It blinks its big cartoon eyes twice.

Andrew draws a breath to begin the formal command, but Ichabod winks out and winks back in on the leather chair, sitting lotus-style.

“Well?”

“Well what?” it says in an incongruously masculine bass.

“Tell me why you're here.”

“Can't I just visit? I get lonely in my lair. There's not a great deal to do there.”

“Then go back where you came from.”

“And miss the rest of your life? I wouldn't dream of it.”

Andrew sighs anxiously.

It speaks again, using its fallback voice, petulant intellectual.

“I'm worried about you, Captain. Master. Master Andrew Commander.”

“Tell me why.”

“You know why.”

“I don't.”

“It's time.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Only because you don't want to know. But you need to know.”

“Just say what you have to say and go.”

“You might have let me destroy your rusalka. When I offered.”

“I don't want her destroyed.”

“But now it's too late.”

“For what?”

“That Russian she drowned was an extraordinary specimen.”

“Fucking tell me.”

At Andrew's flash of anger, the cartoon child flushes red as though someone had poured blood into it and begins to flicker.

Becomes a writhing squid for a split second, then reverts to Katzenjammer Kid.

“Some people see God's hand in coincidence. Are you one of these?”

Andrew seethes.

“Just . . .”

It cuts him off.

“Ask your rusalka for the dog's collar.”

“Why?”

“You will want to research its owner.”