Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

Radha is waiting.

She wants to know if the hunched shape with the pan full of bones is the ancient thing that kidnapped him twenty-nine years ago.

—I think so.

—Awesome! I think so, too. Now you wanna know where she is? Not exactly where she is, but what she’s pretty close to?

He envies Radha her fearlessness, how casually confident she is of her own power. He was the same way before he went to Russia.

—Where is it?

—It’s pretty creepy. And pretty perfect. Nobody will fuck with her there. By the way, Madeline Kahn is kind of a bitch.

—Where is she, Radha?

Radha types.

Andrew knows what word will appear, knows it a microsecond before it appears on his screen like a name on a map of Hell—

Gehenna.

Dis.

Tartarus.

Acheron.

—Chernobyl.

In the other room, Anneke’s phone rings.

Karl Zautke lies on his side with the breathing tube in.

His pillows are damp beneath him. The lymph nodes in his neck hurt him, have grown from acorns to grapes, but he can breathe a bit better, well enough to sleep. He fights it, though, his big blue eyes rolling back, the lids closing, and then he forces them open again for another bleary image of his daughter, her faggish but nice friend sitting next to her.

He feels so bad he doesn’t even want a PBR.

His left foot sticks out, pink and huge, the flesh swollen around the little yellow nails.

Karl is far too big for this place, hates his hospital gown, hates how wet it is. One of the minor nasties (among many nasties, great and small) about leukemia is how much laundry you have to do, how much you sweat. Like a whore in church is his default cliché. His girl has been doing his laundry for him, doing everything. He can’t stand being a burden. But the sweating. He soaks his shirts and underthings so easily he keeps his three window AC units thrumming at sixty-six degrees from June through September.

They’re running now in his empty house.

This is Karl’s third hospitalization for pneumonia in two years, and he knows as well as Anneke does that this is what kills most people with his kind of leukemia. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia, the slower kind. It wears you down. Erodes you. He’s had it for eight years, several stretches of remission making him hopeful he might live long enough to die of heart disease or something that wasn’t so damned… nagging . This is no way for a man to live, constantly tired, afraid of infection. Purel in his shirt pocket. Waterpik-ing his goddamn teeth like a supermodel, crossing the street away from anybody coughing, especially kids. And Karl likes kids. It just isn’t fair he’s had to stay away from them now when he hasn’t done anything wrong .

He looks at Anneke one more time.

An unpleasant thought crosses his mind; he puts that away.

Thinks instead about her learning to ride that powder-blue bike with the streamers on the handles. The face she made (teeth bare, mouth half open, a lion cub about to bite) when he picked gravel out of her scraped knee, sprayed cold Bactine on it. How proud he was of her for getting back on the bike immediately, how he knew she was doing it for him, for that extra scrunch in his eyes when he smiled down at her.

Nothing pleases Karl like watching someone he loves be brave.

This is why Anneke.

Won’t.

Fucking.

Cry.

Her eyes are moist, but that’s as far as it goes.

Father looks at daughter, daughter at father.

Their Germanic blue eyes hold communion for another few seconds before the big man rolls his eyes back under his lids and sleeps.

“I don’t feel good about this one,” she says.

Andrew holds her hand. She allows this but squeezes his every few seconds as if to show him the strength in her hand, as though she is too proud to just let her hand lie in his, take warmth and love from him.

“He’s seventy now. He’s tired,” she says.

Andrew nods, looking at him.

His beard, mostly white with hints of the reddish blond that made him look like a stout Robert Redford in his youth, seems itchy and wrong on him. He only grew it to hide the lymph nodes so nobody asked about them.

“He hates sympathy. Can’t stand people fussing over him,” Anneke explains. She’s taking on a teacher’s voice, assuming an in-control role so she doesn’t have to feel quite so much.

Andrew already knows this about the big ex-navy man, not only because he waited until he had almost suffocated before he phoned his little girl for help, but also because Anneke could have just as easily been describing herself.

The man never thought much of Andrew, never knew him well or wanted to. He was pleasant enough, just didn’t know what locker to put him in so radiated a benign neutrality toward the smaller man. Not his daughter’s boyfriend, she didn’t have those. Effeminate, probably somebody she met in “gay circles,” whatever those were. Andrew always felt vaguely ashamed around him, even now, looking at the faded blue anchor tattoos blurring his forearms, the hint of a sparrow peeking from his chest through the open gown. Karl is all man, and nobody ever doubted that about him. The small, insecure, fatherless part of Andrew wants Karl’s approval and sees the last chance for that slipping away, feels selfish for thinking about himself.

He just sits there, feeling Anneke’s pulsing squeezes, letting her talk about her dad from time to time. Wishing she would put her head on his chest so he could stroke her hair, soothe her. But she rarely shows him that side of herself, and never in front of Karl Zautke.

Andrew wonders, not for the first time, what good it is to fool with magic when this lies at the end no matter what or who you are.

Except perhaps for her.

She’s old.

So old.

Don’t think about her now.

Are there mirrors in here?

He’s relieved to see there aren’t any. Of course there aren’t—the sick don’t like to look at themselves.

Soon Anneke dozes, her head touching Andrew’s shoulder.

The sound of the ventilator makes him drowsy, too.

She enters the bathroom through the mirror.

Andrew hears her, hears the sound she makes coming through, a sort of creak that suggests glass about to break.

I have to put my kerchief on!

Now!

He takes a hand towel from the bedside table, one that Anneke had been using to soothe her father’s sweating head. Lukewarm now and faintly sour with Karl’s sick smell. No matter—Andrew tilts his head back, rests it over his eyes.

The shaking starts.

He wills himself to be calm, but it only partly works.

Fu fu fu.

She’s in the bathroom!

The ventilator stops.

The heart monitor goes wild, flatlines, the long beep announcing another death in the land of air conditioners and SUVs.

Nobody moves.

No nurse comes.

The bathroom door opens; he feels the air get colder.

With a gasp and a sudden full-body clench, Anneke dies next to him.

Baba has used the Hand of Glory he took from the witch’s hut, the one that stops hearts.

Anneke is unimportant to her, so the old thing discards her.

Baba only wants him.

She will not stop his heart.

She will take him back now, back to her hut.

Back to his kennel.

Back to be leeched.

“Hey! Shh! You’re making noises.”

Anneke looking at him, exhausted, irritated, afraid.