Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

One Prussian blue octopus from a trip to Florida drifts amid the school as though lost.

“Gyotaku?”

“Gyotaku,” he corrects, but she can’t hear the difference.

Now he takes a piece of rice paper and lays it over the walleye, tucking it under and around the fish, massaging the color up into the paper. He details the fins with a plastic spoon.

“Okay, I like this. I’m not saying I want to learn. But I like it.”

He grunts again, his barely blinking eyes fixed on his work.

He pulls the paper off.

“Nice!” she says.

“I’ll let this dry for a bit and then I’ll do the eyes. I’m not much of an artist, but I can handle fish eyes.”

He clothespins the paper to a line, then sits down on the moth-eaten Goodwill couch next to the dorm-sized fridge he used to keep stocked with German and British brown ales.

He pulls a fizzy water out instead.

They both just sit for a long while.

The sun goes down and moths wheel and flutter around the bare bulb overhead.

“Are you nervous?” she asks.

“No,” he lies.

Full dark.

The fireflies outside have largely given up.

Andrew has spread himself lengthwise on the couch, hands on chest like a pharaoh ready for the wrap. Feet bare. Blue jeans. No belt. No shirt. His hair a dark pillow under his head.

He asked her to watch him, so she sits opposite, on the rusty folding chair.

She bats a moth away from her eyes.

Another, larger moth crawls on his face, but she is afraid to touch him now, so the moth remains.

Andrew watches the moth, too.

He’s next to her, out of his body.

When he realizes this, his body gets goose bumps.

He sees his body get goose bumps.

He turns now—it feels like turning his body but he believes this is just how he explains it to himself—and looks at Anneke. He wants to put his nose in the hollow of her ear and smell her unadorned, slightly spicy scent, but the part of him that wants that has no nose. Her neck is tan and lovely, and her eyes shine with curiosity and concern as she looks down on his body. He sees

with what eyes?

the fine hairs on her cheeks, sees her pulse gently thrumming in her temples, feels the rhythm of her heart. He moves closer to her, almost mingling with her, begins to feel that he is putting off what he fears to do. But it’s so good to be this near her. Is this what it is to be a ghost? No… he is still connected with his body. He tries to breathe in her scent, hears

with what ears?

his lungs fill where he lies on the couch, thinks he can smell her now. Anneke. She smiles a little, looking down at him, turns down the corners of her mouth trying to suppress the smile, so he follows her gaze and sees why.

He’s getting an erection, bulging at the zipper of his faded jeans.

Oh, that’s great.

Just great.

He has the urge to cover himself, and now his hands obey the impulse, his face flushing red, a worry line on his half-sleeping forehead. Anneke bites her knuckle to keep from braying laughter, but the laughter wells up in her. Andrew-on-the-couch now half turns his body away from her, makes an involuntary growl like a frustrated bear.

Anneke turns away, too, laughter escaping in hitches around her fist. She fishes out a cigarette and puts it in her mouth, but she doesn’t light it.

“Say,” she stage-whispers between laughs, “I can light this even if you’re floating around, right? You’re not flammable or anything? Like methane?”

She’s laughing so hard she’s almost crying.

“Help! My friend turned himself into a fart and I burned him up!”

Now Andrew laughs next to her, his belly hitching where he lies on the couch. He reaches out

with what hand?

and tries to light her cigarette for her, his physical hand twitching.

She steps farther away from the couch now, moves through Andrew, who, almost against his will, allows himself to be dragged along in her.

He has never felt anything like this—it is electric, delicious… it feels like burnt caramel tastes. He senses that if he lingers, he will soon be the one feeling through her skin, moving her limbs,

and what will happen to Anneke?

but this is only for an instant—he pushes out of her.

And that sensation of pushing makes him remember something from the text… the push can be turned around so it happens entering the body. If you push while entering, snapping your own tether, you can knock the other soul completely free and into death. If you try and you’re weak at it, if you don’t believe, you’ll be the dead one.

But Andrew did not push.

He melted into her like liquid caramel, and it was hard to leave.

All Anneke has time to feel is a flash of numbness, as though her heart has skipped two beats, and she understands what has happened. Her laughter dies like a caught breeze. She shivers. Fear winks in her eye, then turns, as it always does with her, into curiosity. She turns to where she thinks he is and says, as if she has dared herself to speak before she can take it back, “Do it again.”

She heels a tear of laughter from under the corner of her eye.

“Do it again, I want you to,” she says, and looks down at his body. His head is gently shaking no .

She lights the cigarette.

Andrew-out-of-Andrew rushes away from the barn, at the speed of a sprint, faster than a sprint, now at a gallop, and he takes off. He looks back at the barn below him, only it isn’t precisely like looking behind him, as he has no neck to swivel; it feels a bit like he’s a nautilus, jetting backward through inky water, tentacles trailing behind it. Nothing trails behind Andrew. He is nothing, has nothing.

The barn recedes, light bleeding through the pineboard walls, etching the high grass and short trees around it in faint gold. Anneke is in there, smoking her Winston down to the filter, mantling her consciousness over his half-vacant body while his consciousness soars over Cayuga County. He turns now, the nautilus transforming to owl, attention cast forward. Trees loom at him and he pushes through them, feeling their slower, muted rhythms, rustling their leaves as if he himself has become a breeze.

No drug can do this.

Now he follows the coast south and west, away from Dog Neck Harbor, skimming low over the water, watching the lights in the windows, the bluish glow of televisions anesthetizing tired fishermen and waitresses and one winks out—there!—where young parents begin to caress each other in earnest now that their children have gone to sleep.

Don’t look in that window, you pervert.

He knows his body chuckles in the barn behind him, miles behind him now, but he can’t think about that or his tether, stretched like a rubber band, might snap him back into himself.

He sees something over the water.

Reddish light collected in a form that moves on the lake, its nucleus a ball of white. It is the size of an oil tanker. He moves away from it.

What is that?

Don’t let it see you.

No, really, what the fuck IS that?

This is not the first strange thing he’s seen while traveling out-of-body. Nor is it the scariest. But it might be the biggest.

It roils and rolls in on itself, moving slowly, flashing as if with internal lightning. He thinks that he will probably never know just what it is. He senses it, senses neither malevolence nor goodwill, just power. Indifference. A god? A devil? An alien? None of the above?

If you sense it, maybe it can sense you.