Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

He nods.

Sits up straighter.

Feels his heart racing.

The sound of the ventilator confuses him.

She pets his hair.

Soothes him.

Day.

The necromancer’s house.

Andrew stands in the front living room near the unlit fireplace watching the feral man crouching in the tree line. The feral man wears a T-shirt of indeterminate color, so torn his bony shoulders and one nipple show—the ring of the collar is most of what holds it together—the image on the chest picturing what looks to be a faded Pac-Man being chased by his ghosts. His legs are sheathed in a pair of muddy jeans that look ready to slough off him and show thighs that might be satyr’s thighs. His matted hair and unkempt beard mark him as some sort of latter-day John the Baptist, or more boyish Manson. No thread of silver shoots through that black mane. He is young. By his movements, less catlike than monkeyish, Andrew guesses the boy to be about twenty. He arms aside the bushes and walks in a crouch, sniffing and listening as much as looking. But it is the looking Andrew likes least.

He sees the house.

Nobody uninvited sees the fucking house.

That was the point of the three-month-long spell he wove around it, burying mirror shards and the dried skins of chameleons in a circle, painting the walls with paint he’d hidden in public for a month and added octopus ink to, intoning both the Iliad and the Odyssey in Homer’s Greek to provoke a benign blindness in those who climbed the hill and looked at the house. Sure, people who knew he was here could see it. But since he kept his address unlisted, the only people who knew the house was here were people he told and people from the neighborhood who knew the house before he bought it all those years ago.

This young man looks right through his window and at him. Even without magic cloaking, the angle of the sun should make the windows reflective, should throw so much light back that the panes become shields of trees and sky that let no gaze past them and into the house’s cool heart.

But this man sees him.

Andrew walks backward, out of the picture window’s frame—the boy seems to track him as he moves, and he waits by the fireplace before continuing to the second picture window. By the time he gets there the boy is gone. Utterly gone. Had he even been there? He licks his lips and looks at the space on the mantel where his best scotch used to sit before he emptied the house of booze.

Wish a bottle there you have a spell for that six sentences and a pinprick and a bottle will sprout where the blood drop falls.

He shakes that away and goes back to the left-hand window, peering into the woods where he saw Pac-Man boy, using a hunter’s patient eyes, and he sees no movement, no line of shoulder or haunch breaking the bloom of foliage. But now he wants a drink, and he wants it bad.

One remedy works better than any other for chasing that particular noise out of his head.

The room of skins.

He goes to the raw oak door and closes his eyes, remembering his first hunt, remembering the sliver of raw stag heart his uncle had offered him off the knife.

This door will open for you only if you have eaten the heart of something killed with your own hand.

He slides the brass handle into his palm and turns, feeling the door open easily on its hinge. This is a small room, its walls hung with stags’ heads and hide maps and an antique wardrobe on either side. One window gives on a sort of brambled alley leading down the hill toward the forest path, and he goes to open this.

I’ll kill two birds at once here; I’ll have a boozeless run in the brambles and see if I can find the Jesus-looking boy.

Should I go scary or fast?

Does the boy have a gun?

It didn’t seem so.

What if he’s watching me change?

Fuck him, then. Let him watch. Maybe he’ll shit himself.

Andrew opens the window as slowly and quietly as he can; it is always best to open the window first, while one still has thumbs.

He opens the left wardrobe now, its door cutting off his view of the window, and he regards the selection of furs hanging from their iron hooks. Fox. Wolf. Bear. Stag. Bobcat. All the indigenous beasts, safest to run in these woods. The right-hand wardrobe holds more exotic skins, skins for special occasions.

No, he will run a New York beast today.

He runs his hand on the black bear pelt.

He killed this bear with an Osage orange longbow and a flint arrowhead made by a master fletcher in Pennsylvania.

He has named the bear Norris.

Norris will do.

Now he sticks his thumb in his navel and pushes, saying in old French, “I open myself.” He imagines his thumb slipping bloodlessly under his skin, and so it does. It doesn’t precisely hurt, but the feeling is deeply creepy. He works the thumb under and skins himself. He hangs his skin from the one bare hook in the wardrobe. He has to be quick now—one can’t just hang out skinless—so he takes up the black bear skin and puts it over his flayed shoulders, feeling it grab him, feeling it wrap all of him so his legs are bear legs and his cock a bear’s cock and his snout smells berries and sap and he chuffs his bearness and climbs comically out the window.

Let’s see how Pac-Man shirt likes this.

Picking up the boy’s scent is easy with the bear’s nose; the smell is tangy and human and strong, innocent of soap. He dips his head and trundles into the underbrush, his shiny black bear-shoulders working as he tracks. Not far from the house, near the strawberry patch he has to put off foraging from by sheer force of man-will over bear-will, he smells out a pile of shit. Human shit in the woods doesn’t seem odd to the bear, but Andrew-in-the-bear is mildly offended that somebody would not only come slinking and spying near his actual house, but would have the territorial nerve to leave droppings.

Odd droppings for a man, too.

This boy clearly eats fast food like many boys, cheap mash of discarded, hormone-bloated cow full of preservatives and despair, but he doesn’t chew much before he swallows. He also eats beetles. He had fingered cicada larvae out of the ground. He had eaten earthworms raw and had cooked beetles in squirrel fat, and had gorged on squirrel and even fine squirrel-bones.

Very fast, or a good trapper.

Or a good shot.

But I smell no gun, or gun oil.

A man can kill a bear without metal.

You did.

This is more boy than man.

The boy has also eaten strawberries.

My strawberries!

Oh, this will not do, not by half.

He snuffs and makes his way around to where the boy had been crouched in the woods, looking at the picture window. Tracks and scent loop back into the woods, so he follows, and soon finds himself looking back at the window leading to the room of skins.

The boy is halfway between the tree line and the open window, contemplating a dash for it. He not only sees the house, he is about to go in!

Fuck this!

Andrew-in-the-bear chuffs and lopes at the boy, who turns and looks passively at the bear. It would be fair to say the boy looks curious, but he does not give off the satisfying rush of fear-smell Andrew-in-the-bear hoped for.

The bear four-legs up to the boy, then stands.

Only a little taller on his hind legs—Norris had not been a huge bear—but still lethal.

He breathes his hot bear-breath into the boy’s face, but the boy just blinks at him.

Why doesn’t he run?

He pushes the boy’s chest with his forepaws, not hard, but more than gently. The boy staggers back, but still makes no meaningful move to retreat.