Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

Okay, you want it rougher? I can do rougher.

Now he grabs the boy’s pants with his jaws, slipping his fangs surgically under the waistband, and he throws the boy back, half tearing the jeans. The boy falls but gets to his feet again. Beginning to walk away, but not frightened.

Faster, you little shit.

Now the bear swipes at him, curling his claws back so he doesn’t lay him open, but heavily enough to send him sprawling.

To Andrew’s surprise, Pac-Man shirt doesn’t stand up this time, but breaks and runs on all fours. The bear shuffles after him on two legs, Andrew-in-the-bear dimly aware of the irony.

Just before the feral young man makes the tree line, he stands again and gives the bear one more longish look. A look of assessment, calculation.

Calculate this.

The bear charges, and the boy sprints away.

Who was that boy?

No, really, who the fuck was he?

The bear lumbers back toward the house, checking over his shoulder and sniffing the air once or twice to make sure the interloper is really gone.

Then he waddles over to the strawberry patch and eats himself almost sick.

Too dominated by bear-hunger to notice or care that the berries are frozen.

This is what Andrew does at the AA meeting.

He greets Bob, the chair, on his way in, remarking once again on how happy Bob is. How goddamned, unassailably happy . The man went to jail four times for DUI and involuntary manslaughter, got evicted, lost two marriages, a boat, and a career as a charter captain; now he works at a church resale shop, hasn’t got a pot to piss in, and yet…

“Andrew! Haven’t seen you in a week or two. We missed you!”

“I must have felt you missing me, Bob. Here I am.”

Bob hugs him like Andrew’s his little brother, nothing fake about it.

Unlike when his own brother hugs him, though that hasn’t happened for a while.

Maybe fifteen years since Charles gave Andrew something other than a perfunctory manshake.

Bob has fifteen years sober, a bona fide elder statesman.

Bob’s nothing like Charley.

Bob went for donkey-and-sandals Jesus, knows Charley’s BMW Jesus is something else.

Bob’s eyes twinkle like he figured out God’s his secret Santa and he knows you’ll figure out he’s yours, too, in your own sweet time. Early on, Andrew swung between feeling inspired by Bob and really resenting him; where does a beat-up old fellow who isn’t much to look at, can’t do magic, can’t afford a restaurant meal, and hasn’t gotten laid since the Berlin Wall fell get off just glowing like that? It’s a little like being luminous, only Bob will never learn magic out of a book and make things happen in the world. All the magic happens in Bob’s head—he stopped trying to change the world and just changed how he looks at it.

It’s genius, really, if you can manage it.

Why make a big house for yourself when you’re happy in a shack?

Why lust for a new car when your crank-handle windows work fine and Chancho fixes your rusted-out old beater at cost?

You could shit in Bob’s shirt pocket and he would run to spread it on his blueberry patch.

Between her introduction to the hostile side of magic and the coming death of her father, Anneke needs Bob.

With the ancient Russian crone who captured and tortured Andrew twenty-nine years before now stalking him, the magus needs Bob, too.

Bob doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong in their lives, they don’t share tonight, but he’s glad they came. He reads from the Big Book, and then he talks about forgiveness.

Andrew has trouble staying on message.

He’s not thinking about forgiveness.

He’s thinking about self-defense.

He’s thinking about revenge.

New Orleans in June is a sort of bright, dangerous sauna whose steam seems to come from the crotches and armpits of its citizens; its nucleus is a tangle of colonial streets where tourists tread on bones; they drink liquors distilled from the sweat of dead West Africans, the grandchildren of whom have been pushed to low ground to await their centennial drowning, but some of these don’t wait quietly. It is easy to get shot here, or stabbed, or clubbed toothless, even in the bright places that smell of rum and fruit juice, even as rotten cops look down at you from the saddles of their horses and fat Iowans and Michiganders sleep above them in overpriced hotels, dreaming of the morning’s beignets.

Haint likes this about the French Quarter; he likes walking among the entitled and the blind and feeling their condescension toward him; he is another curiosity in a city teeming with them, an intentionally scarred and branded black man with skin that looks almost indigo, his crown of graying hair horseshoeing a balding dome that bears a front-to-back row of scars he inflicted himself with a hot razor.

“I liked your letter,” Haint says to Andrew as both men sit sweating in Coops. “You write your words tight and plain and press hard with the pen, none of this loopy shit.”

“I e-mailed you,” Andrew says.

Haint enunciates each of the next words carefully, as if explaining things to a well-meaning but disappointing child.

“I am talking. About the way. I saw it in my head. I saw your e-mail as a letter.”

Haint is one of those half-mad users whose conversation must be sifted to separate delusion from actual magic. This is often difficult.

“You press hard with the pen,” he continues. “ You mean what you say ’s what that says, and I keep such men close to my heart.”

He wipes his ridged dome with the greasy and formless bicycle cap he carries more than wears, then takes another bite of the jambalaya he has rendered lukewarm in temperature (if not in taste) with Crystal hot sauce that pools like orangey blood around its rim.

“Will you help me?” Andrew says.

“Another thing I like ’bout you is you don’ try and act like you ain’t scared.”

Andrew nods.

“Anybody smart’s scared of that ol’… her. Her, I mean. I didn’t even know she was real. Heard bad stories, figured they was stories. But if she is an actual actuality , and she is that old, she gonna make Marie Laveau look like a Girl Scout, home team pride aside and all. Yeah, I’ll help. But keep the book. I ain’t got no use for books and I don’t read English so good’s I got any hope of readin’ Russian.”

The part about not reading English is a flat lie. Haint reads like an Oxford scholar but hides his brilliance behind a hedge of ain’t s and cain’t s.

Andrew’s e-mail offered one of the treasures he brought home in 1983, a beautiful tome on invisibility written in the time of Peter the Great, a remarkably valuable book for reasons both aesthetic and practical.

But what Haint says next tells Andrew the hoodoo man already knows how to disappear and isn’t interested in acquiring something to barter with.

“I want that hand.”

“You already have a Hand of Glory. Hell, I heard you had three of them.”

“Not like that one. Mine open locks and turn lights on and off. Useful as hell, don’t get me wrong. But you know what that Russian hand does, don’t you?”

“Stops hearts.”

“Works, don’t it?”

“It works.”

“How do you know?”

“It works.”

“Prolly you knocked a squirrel out of a tree with it. Only you ain’t never tried on a person ’cause you ain’t like that. Me, I’m like that. That’s why you want me.”

Andrew nods. Of course Haint had heard of Baba’s lethal Hand of Glory; Haint is a collector of murders, a man who has gathered an arsenal of artifacts that take life. He is rumored to have a Turkish knife that, when used on a piece of lambskin the user has bled on, will cut or stab whatever the user thinks about cutting or stabbing, even across the sea, provided he has seen it and can picture it clearly. Years ago he carried a Polaroid camera around his neck in case he wanted to capture your image.