Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

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 .