Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

Now Steve Jobs has armed him with a smartphone.

If you are on Facebook, or if your image can be Googled, it is said this man can cut your throat no matter how far away you live from his warehouse apartment on Frenchman Street. Or Carondelet. Or wherever it is this week—it is also rumored that Haint’s apartment is actually in a black trash bag he can blow up into the window of any abandoned place, and leave with in minutes.

He received Andrew’s e-mail under the name hoodoohowdoyoudo@gmail.com. Until 2000, when he finally went digital, he used to get letters through a PO box under the name Sam E. DiBaron. It was the same PO box he used to arrange killings, but never for money.

Always for things.

Never yet for anything he wanted as much as Baba Yaga’s Hand of Glory.

“Can you do it?”

“If I cain’t, you cain’t.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No. ’Cause I don’t have one. I don’t know if she can die, and if she cain’t, I don’t know if I can stay hid from her.”

“I did.”

“I know. That’s the only reason I’m thinking about trying this crazy shit. How’s your boudin?”

Andrew nods appreciatively.

“They don’t put it on the menu; never on the menu ’cause they cain’t sell enough for how fast it goes bad; just on special sometimes. Normally you don’t want restaurant boudin—what you want is gas station boudin somebody’s mama boiled up in a Crock-Pot out in Grosse Tête or Scott or Breaux Bridge, if you can stand them coon-asses out there. But it ain’t bad here. They know what they doin’ here. Dreddy white fella in the kitchen plays a mean fiddle, too. I’m goin’ to hear him tonight. You wanna come?”

“Love to. Thanks.”

Haint now swigs his beer and uses a thumb-struck stove match to relight the reeking stub of cigar he has rested on the crown of his bottle cap. At his third puff, a woman at the booth to the right issues a dainty cough behind a dainty hand, at which the polo-shirted man with his back to them turns and throws a disapproving glance.

It was probably this fucker who stacked Jack Johnson songs on the Internet jukebox.

Haint discreetly raps the table with his knuckle and a car alarm goes off on Decatur Street outside. The man looks doorward now and excuses himself, fumbling with his keys. As he crosses the threshold, Haint deftly snaps the matchstick between two fingers with his thumb and the big man trips, foolishly trying to break his fall with his hand. His wrist snaps audibly and he issues a gagging cry. The woman gets to her feet, her distaste for cigar smoke and shirtless black men forgotten. The waitress runs to help, wiping her hands on her apron. The dreddy bearded fellow peers out the kitchen door, and a teenaged boy begins to film the incident with his phone, ignoring his mother’s admonitions. The jukebox sputters now, aborting the song it had been playing and starting up Billie Holiday’s “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.”

Haint keeps eye contact with Andrew throughout, puffing contentedly on his cigar. Mismatched earrings shine dully in the hoodoo man’s ears.

“Maybe you can.”

“Maybe I can,” the man agrees, his eyes twinkling.

Andrew has some time to kill before night comes down, so he walks around the Quarter. Construction everywhere, as usual; torn-up roads blocked off with orange webbing, tourists filtering by one another on what’s left of the sidewalk, stepping carefully around piles of shelving for this or that new store. On Royal Street, women in Mardi Gras feathers dance in the heat while cameras turn and film crewmen detour folks up Orleans, some of these pooling up in the margins and holding up phones to film or snap stills of the dancers.

On Dauphine, the woman who runs a perfumery is yelling at the owner of the tattoo parlor next door because the new electric purple paint job smells like paint. He nods at her briefly, then goes inside. She yells at his retreating back, is still yelling at the door when he comes back out holding a ukulele, which he plays in accompaniment to her oration, driving her volume up and making her widen her eyes with fury. Andrew is nearly jabbed in the eye by her gesticulating finger, laughs as he continues past them, has the good sense not to answer when she screams, “What’s so funny!” at his back.

Andrew’s shirt is good and soaked by the time he gets to his former apartment on St. Ann, a small second-floor flat now annexed to the Sanson boutique hotel. He stands below it and looks up, noting how much neater and more inviting it looks now. Hanging plants cascade from the balconies thereof in majestic gouts of green. A woman in a turquoise bathrobe stares unashamedly down at him, a sort of bright balcony house cat drinking something red from a clear plastic cup. Her colors go so well with the aqua stucco behind her that she might have been paid to hold that post.

“Afternoon,” he says to her.

She raises her glass and inclines her head slightly, with the gentility of diurnal inebriation.

He misses his Vieux Carré flat but cut it loose after Katrina. He wasn’t really coming here often enough to justify the expense, after all, and it’s normally not too hard to find a hotel.

Normally.

He heads south again, then left on Bourbon, right on Frenchman.

The Frenchman voodoo shop sits beneath a wooden sign depicting a bat in an eighteenth-century powdered wig. The bat holds a tiny skull in one foot and a tarot pack in the other, echoing the American eagle motif with its olive branch and quiver. Miss Mathilda, an enormous black woman in an Indian-print dress, advises a pinch-faced man in a tweed suit.

“Now, this kind of service is not cheap because it is real. Do you understand me, sir? This is not a joke.”

She cuts her eyes to Andrew when he enters.

The man in tweed does, too.

She winks at Andrew, looks back at the man, actually uses her finger to turn his face back toward hers. He suffers this. She goes on.

“You will need to bring me film of your father, plus one or two personal effects of his, preferably things he handled frequently.”

The man looks at Andrew again.

Miss Mathilda says, “He’s a friend, we can speak in front of him.”

She can barely contain her smile.

She turns the man’s face once more with her finger, swallows him with her eyes.

“In two weeks or thereabouts we will receive the tape and call you. About the tape; it must be VHS.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you have VHS footage of your father?”

“Doing what?”

“Anything.”

“Christmas. Is Christmas okay?”

“We love Christmas at the Frenchman voodoo shop.”

“But I only have one copy. And nobody makes VHS anymore.”

She plucks a business card from between the teeth of a cat’s skull.

“This man on Tchopitoulas does. Ring the bell downstairs. And don’t be alarmed if he answers in his boxers. Just between us, he’s a little touched, but he’s the best man in the city for vintage electronics.”

“How do I…”

“Know it’s real?”

She uncurls a finger, points a black fingernail with a triangle of diamond chips in it like stars. Points at a red door hung with testimonials.

“That room. You’ll watch it the first time in that room. If your father does not speak to you, you will not be charged.”

His eyes dance over her face, looking for the scam.

“I won’t?”

“Of course not. I told you, this is the real thing. We have no need to cheat anyone.”

“Three thousand even? No tax?”

She nods.

“Where does the tape go?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Is this legal?”

She smiles broadly.