Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

She gave him his name back, but it was just to let him know how special she was, how right it was for him to trust her.

He isn’t Victor anymore.

He isn’t a caveman anymore.

He doesn’t know what he is, but he goes to sleep under the overpass for the last time before his great adventure, and he dreams of his blind friend playing hockey. He has his sight back, and he’s skating with his stick low, skating fast, skating with agility and grace.

Once-Was-Victor has to look up to watch his friend skate.

He is watching him from under the ice.

Morning.

The necromancer’s house.

The birds had been chirping before, and he guesses they still are, but Salvador now fills the house with the sound of vacuuming, perhaps the most domestic sound on the American Foley board.

The previous night had been full of horrors, but the morning seems so placid it all might have been a bad dream.

Awful, really awful, but I learned a lot.

I’m ready to try more.

Maybe today, after I show the girls the house?

He rubs his navel, remembering how much it hurt when the thing from the lake bit down on his tether.

To hell with that.

Nadia smokes and lounges on the patio below, outside.

Anneke isn’t here yet.

Nothing makes the world feel mundane like a nice, soul-numbing dose of social media. Andrew plants himself in front of his desktop Mac, logs in to Facebook, and scrolls down the news feed on his home page. He watches the Honey Badger for perhaps the fifteenth time, chuckling at it anyway. He scrolls past event invites, Farmville crap, the obligatory feel-good story soured at the end by “share if you’re not a bastard” or the like, and then finds the pro-Obama photo he reposted. President O in cool shades, smiling big, extending a hand in a walking drive-by hello, captioned.

SORRY I TOOK SO LONG TO SHOW YOU MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE—I WAS BUSY KILLING BIN LADEN

Thirty-seven comments.

He knew when he reposted it that it was a bad idea, a little more wrong than funny, but he had been tired. Unsurprising that it generated a thread with thirty-something comments; most of his friends are liberal, and most of the conservative ones are polite enough not to start a donnybrook on someone else’s post, but some people enjoy charging into a hostile audience.

Andrew calls this belligerent Facebook sport “Red Rover,” and, although he never plays, his brother Charley should be in the social media asshole hall of fame.

Along with John Dawes across the street.

The two of them actually found themselves facing the shield wall of Andrew’s friends so often they friended each other, though they would never meet in person, and wouldn’t like each other if they did.

Charley is a big-money infomercial pitchman for Jesus (BMW Jesus, not donkey-and-sandals Jesus), and Dawes owns a vintage German sniper rifle and keeps a balls-mean dog on a run that only just stops him before the road. It’s a three-legged dog (Dawes’s one inarguable virtue is his volunteerism and advocacy for rescued pits), but the fucker really moves. Andrew hates biking past that house, knowing he is one chain link away from hospitalization and that Dawes would treat the whole thing like his fault. Charley would think Dawes was dangerously unbalanced (he is), and Dawes would think Charley was fake and a huge pussy (he is).

Andrew really wants them to hang out sometime.

In this thread, John Dawes (who, it must be said, has never been in the military) is explaining the operational details of the bin Laden mission, while Charles Blankenship is questioning Andrew’s patriotism, which he does about once a month.

Andrew wishes he were better at casting spells over the net—that’s Radha’s thing—because he would cheerfully cause two photos to appear:

1. John Dawes shaving his nuts during Gilligan’s Island .

2. Charley Blankenship, age ten, holding his eye and running away from the black girl he tried out the N-word on in 1965. (Ironically, this was at an all-Dayton Halloween Fair and Charley was dressed as an Indian, feather and all.)

Anneke knocks.

She has gone home for the night and then returned.

Andrew answers the door wearing his Japanese robe, wool-lined Ugg mules on his feet.

A vacuum cleaner is running but cuts off a second after the door opens.

“This is my house, and you must exit the same way you enter. It’s important.”

He says this to her every time she comes over.

“What happens if I don’t?”

“It’s important.”

Salvador crosses behind Andrew, carrying the vacuum cleaner in one wooden hand, winding the cord with the other.

The rusalka is already here, wearing a dress, almost certainly at Andrew’s request. A simple summer dress that’s a bit short on her, damp at the top where she keeps wetting her hair.

He really is fucking her. Nose, meet clothespin.

French-press coffee first, Sumatran.

Black for Anneke.

Honey for the rusalka.

Hazelnut syrup for Andrew.

Salvador knows the drill.

He keeps himself out of the way when the tour begins.

First, the staircase.

“All right, this one’s cheap and basic. I’ll just show you.”

He stands at the top of the steps.

“Anneke, you up for a stunt? It might hurt.”

She smiles at that.

“Yes.”

“Come on up.”

She starts up the stairs.

Andrew says, “ Slippery-slope. ”

The stairs turn into a very sleek, polished ramp.

She falls forward, slides down, lands on her feet.

“Nice!” she says.

“ Ziggurat. ”

The stairs reappear.

“Care to try again?”

She nods, grinning, starts back up.

“ Flytrap ,” he says.

Reality seems to blur.

Anneke has the sensation of falling, stopping.

At first she doesn’t understand why she seems shorter, but when she tries to take a step, she realizes she has sunk into the wood beneath her, as if into quicksand that set and became hard again instantly. Everything below her knees is caught fast.

Without even thinking, she glances back to note the location of the rusalka.

Nadia’s eyes are narrow and shining faintly luminous green.

“Don’t do that,” Anneke says.

“Do what?”

Sounds like Vaht?

“Look at me like prey in a trap, or whatever that raccoon-fishy look is.”

“Oh. Is reflex.”

“We’ll do this top down,” Andrew says as Nadia and Anneke ascend the ladder after him. A bare lightbulb comes to life overhead. “This is my attic. Most of the things up here have to do with keeping the house safe, so please don’t touch anything. At all. And don’t ask very specific questions about items. Once an aggressive spell is loaded into a physical object, explanation dilutes its power. Sometimes even triggers it.”

“How would it trigger it?”

“Intent. Visualization. If someone other than the creator knows exactly what it does and imagines it happening, it might happen. ‘Someone’ meaning a user. Or anyone with a particularly vivid imagination. It’s supposed to be rare, and I’ve never seen something go off because it was discussed, but I’ve read about that happening.”

Everyone is up.

The girls look around.

The attic is much less cluttered than Anneke expected.

A few cardboard boxes and several sealed plastic tubs sit against the walls, but those aren’t what draw the eye.

The owl stands out.

A great horned owl, glass-eyed, the kind that’s big enough to drive eagles off their nests, stands atop a long shelf also inhabited by a blue jay, two crows, and a hummingbird.