The Necromancer's House (23 page)

This was Andrew explaining fireglass to Anneke last month when he let her watch him make it
:

 • • • 

“Any glass will work, but I like yellow glass so I know what it is. This wineglass will do fine. Smoky amber like. You break it. When you enchant it, you'll instruct the pieces to fold in on themselves, become smooth and handleable, like little stones. So when you first break it, gather just the bigger shards, and for God's sake don't cut yourself—if you make fireglass with your blood in it, the fire will try to find you, will creep out of the fireplace toward you, on the carpet, up your clothes. You get the point.”

“Could you kill someone with it? Like put their blood in a lightbulb, turn it into fireglass, and put it in their bathroom? Instruct the glass to ignite not on a voice command but when the filament gets hot?”

He just looks at her.

Gets a little more frightened of her.

Falls a little more in love with her.

Andrew runs to the barn, grabs a few fireglass stones from their vase, runs back, and throws them beneath the first load of wood Salvador has stacked teepee-shaped. He says
bhastrika
and they jet flame and hot air like small torches until they are spent and a good fire blazes in the pit. He passes Salvador on his way with another double armload of wood, tells him, “Be careful!” and runs for a spade and gloves.

And a flashlight.

It's not dark yet, but it's getting late.

 • • • 

He finds the first one by its telltale mound of dirt.

Uses the long-handled, leaf-bladed garden spade to lever it up.

It's bigger than it was, just slightly bigger than a big potato, and has sprouted tendrils.

He fishes it up with his hand, wary that it might sprout thorns or something.

At exactly that moment, it sprouts thorns.

“Fuck!”

He drops it instantly, only just manages not to get jabbed as one of the spines catches and breaks its tip off in his glove.

He quickly pinches out and flings down the point.

The thing rolls back into its hole, starts using its tendrils as sweepers, covering itself with dirt.

“You little fucker.”

He jabs at it with the spade, finds its texture not wholly potato-like, tougher on the outside, slimier inside.

Probably turning animal, probably full of blood.

It writhes away from the jabbing spade but can't escape. At last he strikes it hard enough to make it rupture, and bleed it does. It's still writhing and dripping, like a spiny liver or other organ, as he waddle-runs it around back to the fire.

He braces himself for a sound.

It shrieks when he throws it in, high and infantile, though not exactly human. Outraged that it never had a chance to do its job.

To kill me.

But how?

It was growing.

The fire is huge now, and here comes Salvador with another armload of split logs, like the sorcerer's apprentice, literally ready to throw all the wood in.

“That's enough, Sal.”

Sal puts the wood down.

“Help me find them now.”

He holds the spade up; the portrait head inclines slightly, the automaton's articulated hand touching the spade's blade almost tenderly, as if it were a flower.

The fire casting amber light on the painting's glossy finish.

Dalí's nostrils appear to widen just a bit as Salvador takes in the scent.

His wicker hips waggle just a little.

Smelling things is so deliciously doglike.

All right, you anticipated the thorns and the blood and the shrieking. You have her number, know how she thinks. What's next? Prepare yourself. The next one will be bigger.

Salvador points at the ground where a quartet of tendrils are carefully smoothing down the mound the thing made burying itself.

Clever, awful little things.

Andrew spades up the dirt.

This one is the size of a small squash, not a potato.

It starts burrowing farther down.

He spades the hell out of it until it, too, bleeds, burbles, and weakens.

No thorns on this one. Could they all be different?

Now a tiny mouth, like a baby's, forms, bites feebly at the blade.

He grimaces, strikes a few more times.

Ruins the tiny mouth.

Pulps it all.

Shovels that out and takes it to the fire.

Have to work faster, they're growing.

The next one, the size of a cat, has enough tendrils to try to fight him for the spade. It loses.

The sun has gone down.

Think!

The next one must be carried into the fire in a bucket.

When the blisters begin to weep and sting within his gloves, Salvador digs.

The one after burrows farther down before he spades the life from it, and he gets an idea.

When the next one goes deeper, Andrew flings fireglass into the hole.

Bhastrika!

Fire gouts up from the hole, licks Andrew's jeans.

The potato-thing screams and dies.

His nonluminous neighbors don't hear a scream.

They hear a train.

 • • • 

The work goes on into the night.

He digs them up, finds abominations ever larger, stronger, harder to look at. He burns them, they shriek or squeal, he shovels out the smoldering mess and buckets it over to the bigger fire.

The last one Salvador finds is as large as a bear cub.

When the magus shines the light down into the hole, eyes shine up at him. He pauses, stunned. The eyes look human. It starts covering itself back up.

He runs for the house, gets his revolver, a .357 Smith and Wesson, and a fire extinguisher. Salvador is losing the garden spade to it, holding the light on it with one hand, clutching the spade with the other, digging furrows with his planted prosthetic heels.

A whitish vine has snaked around one of Sal's legs.

He's whimpering and growling.

Andrew levels his magnum's six-inch barrel at the thing in the hole.

It blinks at him.

I wonder if it knows.

It lets go of the spade, covers its face with the larger tendrils, tendrils that look suspiciously like hands.

Andrew fans a hand over the gun, imagines a kid banging on a metal garbage can lid. When he fires, that's what the neighbors will hear.

I wonder if it's going to say please.

It says
please
, or tries to, its mouth full of dirt.

“Prease.”

It sounds a lot like the ghost in the car.

Slavic forest magic.

Very, very strong.

It almost has a hand-tendril around the barrel when Andrew recovers from its mild charm.

The trash can lid bangs six times.

A train whistles.

The thing in the hole mostly dies.

“Stand back, Sal.”

The wizard throws so many fireglass stones into the hole that when he says
bhastrika
the flame burps up, makes a ring that lights brush and lower branches.

He uses the extinguisher.

Turns around to find Nadia looking at him, pleased with him.

 • • • 

It is near two
A.M.
when he satisfies himself that he has found them all. Salvador covers the whole property. They trespass onto the neighbor's land, Nadia holding the light, all of them invisible; if they are spotted, they will look like errant fireflies. This spell strains the already weary magus, but it must be done.

Slogging up to his front door, he sees a raccoon running off, dragging the bag of pickled eggs.

Just a raccoon.

Just eggs.

This strikes him really funny and he laughs the way people do on the subway sometimes when they've stopped caring who's looking at them.

Just as suddenly, he stops laughing, remembers what he was just doing. Shudders to think what those things might have grown into.

 • • • 

Before the shower, he looks at himself in the mirror over the sink.

He looks at the wall behind his shoulder, happy it's just wall.

Happy there's nobody behind him.

Is the old witch really dead?

What the fuck is after me?

He is filthy, his hair flecked with something like potato, his skin stippled with blood.

And then there's his eye.

He has popped the blood vessel in his sclera again.

It hurts.

He decides to let himself get a little older, at least until he has his strength back. Gray runs down his Indian-black hair in several fine skeins, like runs in a nylon stocking. The lines around his mouth deepen. He looks fortyish now, feels sixty. But his eye stops hurting, clears up.

His muscles are so sore he can barely turn the knobs, but the shower is good. Grime and blood run down across the Italian tiles and down the drain.

He's watching the last of the night's dirt swirl into the plumbing when he sees her long, pale feet step just behind his. The rusalka can't resist the water. The smell of deep lake and tide overwhelms him, but seems oddly pleasant after the high, seminal smell of the potatoes. Odd how their scent changed as they grew, became bloodier, more mammalian.

He doesn't look at her, just her feet. Probably a size ten? The men in her family must have had gunboats. He remembers stories she told him about their boots, the high, black boots of her uncles who worked in the New York workshop where they painted silk ties. She was a teenager when they fled the revolution, but the clomp of those boots had reassured her, had made her feel comforted and homesick all at once, certain at least that she was part of a tribe. Russian intelligentsia. People who wanted to keep their nice homes, couldn't pretend to love the wild-eyed prophets the bastard Lenin sent out like dirty angels to raise the farmers up in anger, making demands, standing on things to talk.

So they fought alongside the whites.

The losers.

But civilized losers.

Romans fleeing before Vandals.

Romanovs
dying in the yard.

The first time he's connected those words, Roman, Romanov.

Like
tsar
comes from
Caesar.

Did Nadia ever see the tsar?

Who cares?

She drowns people.

They say please and she drowns them.

And I fuck her.

He feels soap slide across his hips, his navel.

She touches him more intimately, takes it in her hand, slicks her thumb expertly over the head.

He moves away.

“Not tonight,” he says.

“When?”

Sounds like
Venn?

“I don't know. Maybe when I forget that ship full of dead people you keep. Or those things in the holes out there. Fucking awful, it's all so awful.”

“You want I should go?”

He pauses.

She starts to leave.

She's a monster.

But I am, too.

As long as I do this.

“No,” he says.

“Good. You shouldn't sleep alone anymore.”

He shakes his head
no
, as if in agreement.

“In fact, I won't let you,” she says in Russian.

She dries him off and puts him in bed.

He lets her do that.

She tries again to do the other thing, but he curls up into a ball.

Please
, it said.

With dirt in its mouth.

And then I shot it.

He doesn't sleep so much as passes out.

She remembers the part of herself that used to care about more than fucking and swimming and killing and eating fish cold in the lake.

She enfolds the sleeping magus in her arms, remembers other warm arms that held her once, long ago.

Clinically notes that this is where she would cry if she did that.

Andrew wakes to the sound of Salvador barking.

He had been having a particularly nasty dream in which malign and malformed versions of himself were trying to get into the house.

“The dog is barking,” he says to Sarah.

But it's not Sarah, warm Sarah with her scent of sandalwood.

It's a foul-smelling woman with cold feet.

And Salvador isn't a dog anymore.

Except when someone's trying to get into the house.

Because that's part of the spell.

Glass breaks.

“Oh fuck!”

Andrew and the rusalka both sit upright.

 • • • 

The closest thing Andrew ever saw to this was
Night of the Living Dead
, when the zombies surround the house and stupidly batter their way in. He's not sure how many there are, but they are most certainly surrounding the house, and one has broken the window in the kitchen door.

How did it break the window?

I charmed these windows against breaking.

Did I drain the magic using other spells?

The thing is now fumbling with the knob, just about to open the door.

Salvador, a border collie again, but bigger, more the size of a German shepherd or a big wolf, prepares to lunge.

Gets confused.

Because what steps through the door is his master.

Or, rather, what his master would look like mutated, or slightly melted, naked, dumb and strong. The thing coming through the door is rippling with muscles.

And so are the ones behind it.

This is why Salvador missed them.

Their smell changed.

When they smelled like me, Sal couldn't find them in the ground anymore.

How to fight them?

Room of skins.

“Sal! That's not me! Get 'em!” Andrew says. “Don't let them get around you!”

Salvador knocks down the first one, shakes its arm.

The second one hammer-fists the dog hard enough to make him yelp and let go; the huge dog beats a retreat into the living room.

Andrew sends Nadia out the way she came, by the front door, but she doesn't go alone.

She grabs a not-Andrew by the hair and runs with it for the lake.

The rest of them mob in.

“Don't let them get around you,” one says clumsily.

“Get around you!” one echoes.

Andrew runs into the hall, into the room of skins.

Shoves his thumb under his skin, unzips himself, working as fast as he can.

Good thing you don't drink.

You couldn't move, think fast enough drunk.

Move!

Think!

“Don't let 'em get around you,” one says, pounding on the door now. Pounding
hard
. That's an oak door, solid, but the frame can't take much more of that.

BAM! It goes, and the room shudders.

“Don't let them get 'round you!” one says from the kitchen, and lots of things break.

They're trashing the fucking house, hurry.

His skin is off.

He doesn't usually have to do this fast.

He opens the wardrobe on the right.

Knows which one.

It burns a lot of magic fuel, though.

“Don't let 'em get around you!!!”

BAM!

(shudder)

“'Round you, 'round you!”

Now out in the living room, a fight in earnest.

Growling, snarling.

Get 'em, Sal!

The flayed man is about to put it on.

It's a heavy skin.

He remembers to open the window.

One looms in front of the window.

“Don't let them get around you!” it says, lunges for Andrew.

He steps back, sees its fingernails flash, dirty from clawing its way out of the ground.

It picks up its foot to come in, but a fast, white arm is around its neck. Its eyes bug, a pretty face terrible behind it framed in red dreadlocks, her teeth gritted in pleasure. She giggles while she runs with it, bigger than her, but it might as well be a doll.

My friend the monster.

Like me.

Andrew picks up the skin again, is about to put it on.

Can't resist while he still has a mouth, but has to hurry—soon you start to feel your skinlessness and that REALLY hurts, your whole body an open blister.

But he does say it.

Yells it through the door.

“Whoever made me is a giant asshole!”

On with the skin now.

His favorite one.

Oh, it feels good.

 • • • 

Three of them have gathered in the room of skins.

One stomps on the pelt of their father.

Two have cornered Sal, are beating him and getting savaged in return. The lake-woman has drowned two and is loping up, hoping to take a third.

One has gone upstairs.

“Whoever made me is a giant ASSHOLE!” one says, kicking in the door to the room of skins. The other yells, “Asshole!” in agreement. They are supposed to kill their father. But this room is empty, except for a human pelt that looks strangely like their father.

In the living room, the dog fights hard but has been injured.

A broken foreleg.

One of them gets an idea, sacrifices itself, lets the dog tear its belly open so its brother can grab the dog's neck.

Fighting hurts, but it's better than being in the ground, which is all they have to compare it to.

The one who got torn open is dying but still kicking at the dog.

The other is about to kill the dog by twisting its head.

Although it senses the dog has already died before.

If the dog dies again, the magic in it will go out; the other thing it is will not move again.

That would be good.

Except that it can't feel its arms or legs anymore because something has it by the neck, yes? Yes. Something much stronger than the dog has broken its neck.

It sees a piece of the thing, consults its father's murky bag of facts.

Dog?

No.

Tiger.

Bengal tiger, native to India.

They can get up to ten feet long, tail included.

This one is ten feet long.

“Whoever made me . . . giant asshole,” it complains.

And dies.

 • • • 

The tiger goes through the three in the room of skins like they're nothing. They
are
nothing next to the five-hundred-pound cat, which twists heads, rakes out insides, and bites off limbs with the ruthlessness of a wild animal and the tactical savvy of a man. It takes less than a minute.

Worrisome that one of them had the man-pelt in its hand, but Andrew-in-the-tiger will think about that later.

Thinking like a man is harder in the tiger; tiger essence is truly dominant, and much less manlike than bear is.

Andrew-in-the tiger licks his gory chops, yawns a big, tongue-curling yawn (it has been a
very
long night, after all), licks the injured dog in the living room, who licks him back, and then smells with his tiger nose.

One more.

Upstairs.

In the library!

Must kill it!

Big books there!

 • • • 

Up the stairs.

Library door is open.

The last not-Andrew stands there, dirty and nude, looking around, not touching anything.

Its eyes shine blue.

It isn't like the others.

When it sees the tiger stalk in, it smiles.

The tiger was about to launch itself on the little monkey-thing, but something about its smile, its luminous blue eyes makes the tiger stop.

Andrew-in-the-tiger growls, though it feels doubt.

Like it hasn't felt since it met an elephant in 1913, the day it was shot.

“Congratulations,” not-Andrew says.

Andrew's voice, but thicker.

Slavic accent.

The tiger's growl rolls on, continuous.

“You passed the test. Now the fight begins. You are a very pretty man. I wonder if you are too pretty to fight? Pretty or ugly, here is what you have to look forward to.”

It reaches down now and, with some difficulty,
yanks off its own testicles
.

Begins to eat them.

Holy shit! NOOOO!
Andrew-in-the-tiger thinks.

Tiger-around-Andrew thinks
I was going to do that!

The tiger pounces.

Finishes things.

Drags it out of the library.

Down the stairs.

Outside.

 • • • 

“Oh no,” Andrew says, looking in the mirror.

Even in the yellow brass he can see how bad it is.

“Oh Christ.”