Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

They read poetry to each other.

Who reads poetry at a party?

This isn’t precisely a party.

Neither is it not a party.

This is something like a wake, but darker.

Singing, stories, jokes, hints at vengeance to come, these followed by knowing looks between men that suggest more will be said when the women and children have been packed away.

Mikhail Yevgenievich Dragomirov, “Misha,” has been gone one month.

The family came today to take possession of the cabin, which has been paid up through the end of August.

One would think the patriarch of the American wing of the family, Georgi Fyodorovich Dragomirov, cousin of the vanished man, would be the one to dominate the room, but he is old now, he dyes his eyebrows, and his heartburn bothers him when he forgets to take his medicine. He has forgotten to take his medicine.

Next in line might have been the half sister, Valentina Fyodorovna, at whose request the icon of the virgin appeared on the corner shelf, replacing Misha’s whiskey. She expatriated most recently, but she is too sad to speak at any length, and blows her nose often, always into two tissues, always behind her liver-spotted hand, the nails of which shine with the best burgundy nail polish.

The one who captivates them is not even fifty, and none of them have seen her for years. Little Marina, who had such a hard life. Marina of Nizhny Novgorod, the girl from the woods, saved from prostitution by her Baba, then sent to university. For poetry. How she stunned them when they fetched her at Hancock airport in Syracuse.

She is the brightest of them, seems to shame them with how America has diluted the Dragomirov stock.

She is petite, toned, pretty; they have seen the video she sent them as an introduction, to show them she had her uncle’s sense of humor, a video of her working out with kettlebells in the forest to the tune of the Volga Boat Song.

Now she stands before them in her stylish peacoat as evening comes on, her pale, healthy skin, accented by the beauty mark on her cheek, making her look like some lost Romanov.

“My uncle would not want tears,” Marina Yaganishna says.

“Bullshit! He cried at movies. He cried at poetry,” says a nephew-poet.

“He cried at your poetry.”

They laugh.

They love her.

They have eaten the funerary blintzes she cooked in the cabin,

“Marishka has taken the stove’s virginity—Misha used only the grill and the microwave!”

smeared with the quince jam she learned to make in the forest,

“Her Baba must have taught her this before she died!”

and they have plied her with Stolichnaya only to find themselves drunk before a bright-eyed, clearheaded girl

“Girl my ass! She is a tank soldier like her great-uncle Yevgeny!”

who teases with the best of them.

“Alexandr Nikolayevich, will you dishonor your great-uncle’s memory with such a weak fart? Eat more sour cream on your chicken, and fart like a Cossack.”

This boy is twelve, and laughs and blushes like beet juice to have his strange Russian aunt spear him so deftly. Earlier, she had stolen the smartphone from his hand and said, “No man under forty should play with a phone more than his zalupa .”

His father had made them laugh more with, “But I tell him all the time, drop the zalupa !”

One of the American Lutherans, relieved to have something to talk about, explained to Marina what a chalupa was, the dated commercial with the talking chihuahua.

Now, when the last light is gone from the sky, the Lutherans say their good-byes through big-teeth smiles. Marina comically shields her eyes, saying “Your smiles are so perfect in America, you blind me!”

Women and children leave the cabin until it is only Marina and the men who knew Misha. She will be staying—they have all agreed that she can have the cabin as long as she wants it.

But now it is time for men to speak.

They look at her meaningfully, perhaps a bit apologetically, and she understands that they will now fill their glasses more rapidly and exchange oaths of vengeance should the disappearance turn out to be murder—the police said there were signs of a struggle, that DNA evidence of several women has been found, two of them known prostitutes, one of them an unknown. The cousins and nephews of the missing man know his habits; there will be talk of pimps, jealous lovers. The hot-blooded men will vow to handle it personally; the wiser ones will mention, not by name of course, old associates of Misha’s who could be brought in, men who know their way around a Makarov, men who know how to leave a mystery.

She lets herself outside.

She laughs a little when they cannot see her face.

They will be right in their assertions that Dragomirov was the wrong man to fuck with.

They will be wrong as to why.

Marina Yaganishna goes down the stairs, leaving behind the wash of light that bathes the patio. She takes her boots off and walks barefoot out to the edge of the water, barely swaying despite the amount of vodka she has poured into herself. She carries a nearly full bottle with her. Now she removes the rest of her clothes, wades out into the lake with the bottle.

She stands for some time, looking down, as though listening to the waves.

Old Georgi, indicating the nude woman, rubs the burning stomach he knows will kill him soon, says quietly, “Good thing the Americans left.”

They laugh.

“She’s got the devil in her,” one of them says affectionately.

Now they watch their estranged kinswoman upend the bottle, pouring it into the surf.

“Ha! She’s giving Misha a drink!”

“Someone should tell her he likes whiskey better.”

A silence, as the men continue to watch, despite themselves.

Marina Yaganishna looks thirty-five, not almost fifty.

“I think menopause will be late for her,” Georgi says.

They laugh themselves sick, then go back to talk of vengeance.

Out in the lake, the woman pours vodka into the mouth of a kneeling, dead old man with dim lamps for eyes.

“You’re sure?” she says.

He nods.

“It will be done, then.”

“And I will be free?”

“I think so,” she says. “Revenge is liberating.”

He opens his bloated mouth for more vodka.

She got it from the freezer, where one of the Lutherans had stashed it in mock ignorance when clearing the table.

She pours again.

“Sorry it’s cold.”

Misha doesn’t care.

Everything is cold now.

He swallows gratefully.

Sinks.

Andrew hears Anneke throwing up in the sink, goes to find her.

The stink of hot whiskey, coffee, and chocolate assaults him as he steps into the guest bathroom.

“You’ve been to Dino’s,” he says.

She nods, bent over, wiping her mouth.

“And to the Gulch.”

Nods again.

Looks at him, eyes glistening, whether from shame, heaving, or both he can’t tell.

She becomes aware of the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

“Tour’s over for now.”

The shame of relapse starts to steal upon her, but she boots it under.

“What about the roosalsa?”

Anneke was gone for an hour.

Nadia got bored and left after ten minutes, but Andrew just ignores the question.

“Are you okay?”

“No.”

More okay than you should be because you haven’t really crashed yet. This is going to keep happening until you do.

“Are you off the wagon?”

“No.”

He looks into her eyes.

Her eyes say yes.

She looks back, fighting the urge to look down.

The Anneke Anneke wants to be doesn’t hang her head.