Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

She will not want to sit next to anyone fat.

“I already looked. The seat next to her on the long flight remained unsold, so I moved a skinny man there.”

Good.

A long moment passes.

There’s something you’re not telling me.

I don’t like that.

An acrid smell as the cat pisses on the floor.

“Sorry, little mother. I… There was someone poking around my curtain. In America. Chicago, I think. Magic.”

Find out who.

Find out why.

She comes closer.

The cat jerks from below the table, sprints for the bedroom, something else moves faster than the cat, which shrieks.

Yuri dares not look.

“I… I was working on this. I wanted to have the answer before I told you.”

And this is why you spend your time on filth?

A bony finger ticks on the screen of his computer.

Hands in horses? You think this is what happens in the country? I can show you what happens in the country, but I think you will not like it.

He doesn’t know if she is reading the English on the screen or just peering into his head. He isn’t sure she can do this, but neither is he sure she cannot.

He doesn’t know what she is.

Nobody does.

He smells her scent of iron and cookfat and pepper, undercut with dried blood, mold, fear.

She smells like fear.

He presses hard on the towel over his eyes, frightened his shaking hand might betray him, that it might fall away. His urine fingers at its gateway, wants to leak out. He controls it.

He breathes through his mouth, awkwardly shielding his teeth with his lips.

She lets him stew for a moment.

Yuri…

“Yes, little mother?”

You have needle and thread in this shithole?

“Yes, little mother.”

Use it to sew the cat’s tail back on.

“Thank you, Baba.”

Somewhere in his head, she grunts.

Now the sound of a twig broom, sweeping away her footprints.

She mounts the pot, which scrapes noisily against the bricks.

The woman in the apartment next door calls through the wall.

“What have you got over there, Yuri Denisovitch, an African rhinoceros?”

Then, more quietly, he hears her exclaim, “Shit! Spiders! So many!”

Now the sound of a broom (cheap, modern) whacking at the floor, a hurried prayer.

The cat yowls miserably from his bedroom.

The breeze stops.

The room warms, if it can be called that, from cold to merely cool.

Half an hour passes before he dares remove his terry cloth blindfold.

It is soaked with sweat.

But he did not piss himself this time.

An older man on a wide-screened television is speaking in a broad New England dialect that recalls the unhurried pace of a dray horse. The man’s head is long and horselike, handsome even though he is in his late sixties. He looks down at a paper, then up at the viewer.

Up at Andrew.

But he doesn’t see the younger man.

Not yet.

It’s still just a tape.

“…His life actually depends on obedience to spiritual principles. If he deviates too far, the penalty is sure and swift…”

The man drops his eyes to the paper.

“Bill.”

“He sickens and finally dies.”

Andrew knows the man will look up at the camera before speaking again.

“Bill Wilson. It’s Andrew Blankenship.”

“Andrew Blank…?”

Recognition steals across the older man’s face.

The trapdoor is open.

The dead man in the grainy color home movie becomes a little blurrier. But now he is awake, aware. He pokes his horn-rimmed glasses up on his nose and squints at Andrew through the television. He is off-script now. His surroundings are frozen. The tape stops turning in its machine.

The lights in the media room are warm and reassuring, not bright, but neither dim. Andrew doesn’t know what he looks like through the television, from there . Neither does he know if he is communing with a soul or if he is somehow snatching conversation with the man in his own time.

What he does know is that the dead souls, or the encapsulated intelligences, or the shades in Hades, or whatever they are, remember him when he finds them again.

There is continuity.

“Where are you?” Bill says, squinting.

“I’m at home.”

“That’s right. You do this from your basement, right?”

“Yes.”

Bill chuckles agreeably. He is an old man in this 1964 clip Andrew got on eBay and converted to VHS from eight-millimeter. He is speaking at a meeting in a private home in Philadelphia. He largely reads from the work of the “first hundred drunks” in this piece, and Andrew has found that this point, where he talks about death, is the easiest point at which to interrupt him. The visible half of a stainless steel water pitcher gleams below Bill, but it gleams like a still photograph.

He knows the man could touch the pitcher and the condensation would bead again; a droplet would run down the side. He could wake the pitcher up. But he would see the pitcher only if Andrew told him it was there. If he asked the dead man what was around him, he would say it was blurry, or foggy, and then, very probably, cognitive dissonance would rear its head and the dead man would start to get upset. When speaking with the dead through film, it is best to keep their attention on you.

They’ve already been through this.

Bill knows he’s dead in 2012.

Andrew told him.

Bill knows, too, that Andrew is a sorcerer, but he doesn’t hold that against him. Nor does he seem to mind Andrew’s long hair and odd clothes. Bill is perhaps the least judgmental dead person with whom Andrew has spoken.

“The last time we spoke,” Bill says, “you told me you were sponsoring a young lady from Wisconsin.”

“Her father’s from Wisconsin.”

“That’s right. How’s she doing?”

“She’s got six months now. And her slips aren’t so bad, so she’s been effectively sober for eight years. Although I don’t think she’s really hit bottom.”

“How long ago did we speak?”

“It’s been… months.”

Bill wipes his eyes under his glasses like he’s tired.

“Seems like five minutes ago. Time doesn’t make any sense here.”

He begins to look around.

Begins to look agitated.

“Bill.”

Bill looks at Andrew again.

“Yeah, sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. I was just wondering if you’re still comfortable being my sponsor. This is a…”

Andrew trails off.

“Highly unusual situation, I know,” Bill finishes for him, “but, sure. I’ll keep meeting with you. What else have I got to do with myself, after all? And I say that without asperity.”

“Great.”

“So what’s on your mind?”

“I… wonder if giving up magic and giving up drinking are similar things.”

“Sure they are. Thinking about going back to church?”

Bill is in earnest when he says this. Andrew suppresses a laugh but acknowledges that it would have been a sorry, yellow little laugh anyway.

“No.”

“That’s up to you, of course.”

And where did church get you, old man? Is that heaven? Is that even you?

“Yeah. I just wonder if I could give it up now. If I wanted to.”

“Not alone, certainly.”

What exactly is my higher power, anyway?

“I’m sorry. It just. It feels good to talk to you.”

“Lost your dad young, did you?”

“I did.”

“It’s a hard thing not to have your dad. You look for what you’re not getting from him in other people. And that’s okay. Love is always A-OK.”

Andrew nods.