Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

Tears are close.

He fights them back.

And here sits the magus in a dim room, using dirty tricks to disturb a dead man’s rest, crying because he wants his daddy and his mommy.

Boo fucking hoo.

“We have sponsors in the world of magic, too. Mentors.”

Bill just listens.

“Mine lived in Ohio.”

1977.

Near Xenia, Ohio.

The last warm day of the year.

“I’m not queer,” the driver says.

“That’s not my business,” Andrew Randolph Blankenship says, although he has just begun to wonder why a bald, bearded man with his shirt unbuttoned to show his potbelly might slow his big, blue Impala to a crawl next to a teenaged boy walking his bicycle.

“You always walk your bike past this house.”

The man points at a lopsided 1890s two-story with peeling blue paint and a sun-faded FOR SALE sign.

Andrew doesn’t say anything. He just furrows his brow as he often does when he is processing a lot of information.

Watching me? Is this guy dangerous? Does he know why I walk my bike here? Does he see her too?

“You know there’s a ghost in that house, don’t you?”

Andrew feels his heart thudding in his chest.

There is a ghost and it scares the shit out of me.

I walk my bike because I’ve wrecked twice knowing it was looking at me.

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t sir me.”

“Okay.”

Andrew scratches at one of the sideburns he has begun to grow in emulation of his older brother. Although Charles will soon shave his because they look too “hippy-dippy.”

But this dude.

Who is this dude?

“She swells up like a balloon when you ride your bike past it because she has a crush on you. She was seventeen when she died. Your age now, if I’m correct?”

“Yes s— Yes.”

Andrew peers into the car, which is closer now. He is relieved to see that the driver is wearing pants. Dungarees, to be precise.

“Do you know why you can see her?”

Andrew shakes his head.

A car horn blares because the older man has let his Impala wander into the other lane. He looks at the road again and corrects his path as a mud-colored flatbed pickup truck stacked with pumpkins goes by, losing a pumpkin, its driver half-unfurling an arthritic bird-finger.

“Do you want a ride past the house? I’ll take you the rest of the way to Enon.”

Andrew does want a ride.

He doesn’t want to see the floating girl in the window leering at him, her head as big as a head on a parade float.

And he doesn’t want to spend forty minutes pedaling when those forty minutes might be spent napping. He got almost no sleep last night and the girl he made love to in the cornfield got grounded.

It was worth it.

The lovemaking, quick and earnest, was after they tampered with the letters on the Xenia Baptist Church marquee so that REPENT, MY PEOPLE, YOUR TIME TO SIN GROWETH SHORT now said GO SIT ON PETERS HOT POLE .

Now a pale yellow station wagon underbellied with rust the color of Chef Boyardee spaghetti sauce swings around the Impala, the driver barking some hostile syllable through his open window.

The bald man’s eyes stay fixed on Andrew.

“And I’ll tell you why you and I can see the dead girl and that guy can’t.”

The boy stops.

A turkey buzzard kites lazily overhead.

“Is there room for my bike?”

“There is.”

Now the man who will teach Andrew his first spell pulls his car over in front of the boy. He opens the huge trunk so the Impala looks like a whale opening its mouth.

Its mouth is very black.

Its tongue a spare tire.

Andrew feeds the whale his Schwinn and prepares to go to Nineveh.

“Is he still living?”

“No.”

Silence.

“He taught you what you’re doing now? With me?”

“Yes,” Andrew says.

“I’m sure it occurred to you to try this with him.”

“He asked me not to.”

“Why’s that?”

“He didn’t say.”

And yet I do it to you.

Bill nods inscrutably. Then says, “There’s something else, isn’t there? You’re not just lonely. You’re scared.”

“Yes.”

“And this fear’s got you missing John Barleycorn.”

“More like Gilbert Grape for me, but yes.”

He won’t know that reference.

“I’m glad you sought me out.”

“Are you really?”

“I am.”

“Are you really you , Bill?”

“I don’t know how to answer that.”

Bill wipes his eyes again.

How many alcoholics would like to be able to do this? Would give anything for this chance? To talk to HIM. Thank HIM personally. Why is it fair that I get to have this to myself? And if I let Anneke see him, what is that? Showing off? I should let him go. Burn this tape.

“Andy.”

Only he gets to call me Andy.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t send me back yet.”

Andrew raises his eyebrows in place of asking Why?

Bill W. says, “The next time I’m awake… talking… I’ll be talking to you. I’m always the same, but you… I’m a little concerned about what you’ll have to tell me when I see you again. There’s a cloud over you.”

“A cloud?”

“I don’t know how else to put it. Just… sit with me here for a minute. Is there music there?”

“Music?”

“You know, a phonograph?”

“There’s music.”

“Play me something. Please.”

Andrew goes to his stereo.

Turns on satellite radio.

Turns on the forties channel, turns it up good and loud.

Betty Hutton’s “Blue Skies” pours from the speakers in no great hurry.

Bill W. closes his eyes, leans toward the screen.

Moves his head in time to the music, subtly, reminding Andrew of a cobra coming out of its basket for a snake charmer.

Now Andrew cries.

“There it comes,” Bill says, eyes still closed.

And then he says, opening his eyes suddenly, fiercely,

“You’re the one who needed the music. It’s a shoehorn for your feelings, like the booze used to be. Shut me down when you want to, son. Everything’s A-OK.”

Early evening.

The barn behind Andrew’s house.

Anneke belches and excuses herself, moves away from the warm pocket of garlicky air she has just made. The ghost of the penne, spicy sausage, and basil Andrew sautéed for them earlier can’t overpower the stronger odor of hot, raw walleye.

“How lonely and deranged do you have to be to want to blow-dry a fish, anyway?”

He touches the yellow pike’s side with the back of his hand, decides it wants another blast. He flicks the on switch and wands hot air back and forth over the fish. Wrinkles his nose as he detects her belch and aims the dryer at it, making her laugh.

“Better than hot fish. It smells like your dead mermaid friend in here,” she says, raising her voice over the dryer’s petulant whine.

Andrew smiles.

“It makes the skin thirsty so it drinks pigment,” he says.

“I’m not five. I know why you do it. I’m just saying it stinks.”

She sips her diet soda.

Now Andrew brushes a brownish, mustardy shade of yellow on the fish, which sits almost flush in the fish-shaped niche Andrew cut into a silvery panel of insulation foam.

“I thought you said you wanted to watch me do this.”

“I do. I’ll be good.”

Andrew grunts skeptically, begins swabbing rusty orange ink onto the fins he pinned in place against the foam. She looks up and around, taking in the twenty-odd fish prints he has framed and hung out here. Sturgeons, carp, black bass, coho salmon, in many colors, some naturalistic, some fantastical, all swimming north, as though toward the lake they were pulled from.