Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

“My friend, nobody has ever asked me that before.”

When the man leaves, Andrew and Miss Mathilda bear-hug each other, laugh together, talk.

“How long are you here for, pretty man?”

“Not long.”

“You smell like hoodoo.”

“Guilty.”

“And boudin. Have you been eating boudin?”

He nods.

“Where’s mine?”

He shrugs, smiling. She’s younger than him by a decade but always makes him feel twelve. He resolves to bring her boudin when he leaves.

“But how about that? That guy. You think he’ll want a trapdoor?”

“Could be.”

“What a coincidence. Walking in just then, I mean.”

“Not as much as you might think.”

“How so?”

“My dear Mr. Blankenship, I offer your service several times a day most days. To anyone who lingers at the altar of the dead with hope or sadness in their eyes. And of course to anyone who buys a candle to light or hangs a photo. Look how many!”

The tin tree standing over the waxy altar blooms with pictures of the dead. Incense lingers.

She goes on.

“It’s just that so few people have that kind of money now. Even for parlance with the blessed dead.”

“I’m doing all right.”

“If you were doing all right, you wouldn’t have given up that sweet little apartment.”

He blinks twice, squints like he does when he’s about to ask a favor.

She anticipates him.

“Seeing a friend, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Gun show this week,” she says.

“Uh-huh.”

“Hotels all booked.”

He’s ashamed of his poor planning.

“That’s right.”

She fishes around near the register.

Holds up three brass keys as if fanning three cards.

“Pick.”

Andrew opens the door to room 373 of the Brass Key Apartments, his left hand flipping up a dead wall switch, his nostrils flaring to take in the damp air. Hot and dark. It smells of nylon stockings and stale semen, the nosegay of adultery, but why shouldn’t it? Adultery is his business here, too.

He crosses to the AC unit beneath the window and turns the knob, glad to hear it sputter on. The air coming from the crosshatched mouth is dog’s-breath warm, though, and turning the loose temperature knob all the way into the blue only cools it marginally. A drop of sweat milky with salt runs down his nose and disappears into the vent.

He tries the window and it refuses to rise, so he braces himself and pushes up hard. Painted shut. A young couple on the street below whinnies self-conscious laughter, and he laughs, too, as he imagines himself pawing at the glass at them like a dog stuck in a hot car. His guayabera is beginning to stick to his back again.

Across the street, a balding man in suspenders and a blood-soaked shirt looms behind a filthy window, fanning himself with a fedora. His look suggests mild curiosity, incongruous with his recently cut throat. A ghost. So many of them here. Andrew suppresses the urge to wave and turns from the window.

Lights from the bars on St. Louis wash the room in red light that recalls the engine room of a World War II submarine, even through the flimsy curtains. He sits on the futon and feels the cord of the table lamp until he finds the switch, which he is immediately sorry to have pushed. Now the gaudy purple and gold wall hanging, bearing the obligatory fleur-de-lis, pounces at him. Now he sees the truly impressive cum stain on the futon cover, as big as a map of Cuba. He has the impression its author is a minor league baseball player, but has no idea where that comes from.

He notes a filmy glass ashtray near the lamp and decides to give the window another try before he lights up.

Brace.

Strain.

Window still shut.

Drop of sweat in the eye.

An idea comes to him then.

He is reluctant to bother Haint again, having left him at the Tin Shack to listen to the fiddler’s second set, but Haint is the best man he knows to solve this problem; the only one who might be able to do it remotely. Miss Mathilda gave him the key, but she will already be settling down to sleep, having read her autistic girl an article from Scientific American or Popular Science .

He texts Haint a photo of the window with the message:

Painted shut. Hot as fuck. HOG?

Less than a minute passes before the “Ring of Fire” ringtone goes off and he sees Haint on his screen. He enables the camera. Haint is drunker than hell, holding a dead cat by the neck with one hand. He holds a tiny, gnarled claw-hand in the other. Haint gestures with the claw-hand that Andrew should point his phone’s camera at the window.

“Tap tap,” his phone says, and Andrew taps the phone twice on the glass.

A chip with a crack for a tail appears in the pane as though a small rock has hit it. Flakes of paint fly as a seam gouges itself furiously in a square circuit defining the frame, as though the window is unzipping itself, as though a very strong hand wields an invisible putty knife. The whole assembly shudders and the window pops, easing itself up an inch. Andrew pushes up with his free hand now and the window opens as if on greased rails.

Air comes in, not cool air but fresh.

He turns the phone’s screen faceward to thank Haint, but the man is dancing in the candlelight of his mobile brick apartment, slow-dancing with his limp cat and kissing its dead mouth, holding the Hand of Glory up in the other. Etta James plays tinny and small through the phone’s speaker.

“Good night, Haint,” he says, and the man dips the hand in his hand twice in acknowledgment.

Andrew hangs up and sits back on the futon, well away from the map of Cuba. His cell phone tells him it is 12:22 A.M.

He lights a Spirit and inhales gratefully, blowing smoke in a drowsy billow toward the window that yawns subtropical night on the other side of the room.

Althea.

She will be here in eight minutes if she keeps her word, but she never keeps her word.

“Did you find a meeting?” she asks him as they lie on the damp bed. He is still panting. She is already toeing around in the sheet-nest for the panties she will be slipping back on soon.

It is nearly three A.M. and she will want to welcome her man home after his shift. Then sleep from morning until nearly five P.M., when she will make some weird vinegary salad with apricots or strawberries or pomegranate seeds and run off for three hours of teaching Kundalini, Hatha, and hot yoga, if she is still doing that.

“Not here,” he says. “I’m not in town long. Like a day.”

“But you’ve been to one recently? A meeting?”

“Last night.”

“Good. So you’re feeling strong?”

“Don’t start that,” he says, instantly regretting it. Telling Althea not to do something is like pressing the accelerator to stop a car.

She takes a small bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of her tin purse and sips it, straddling him and bending down to put her lips to his. He turns his head away.

“C’mon,” he says, “it isn’t funny.”

“Who said it was?” she says, swigging again, loading up with a mouthful she will now try to squirt between his lips.

He jabs his thumbs roughly just under her armpits and wiggles, causing her to laugh and cough, whiskey spattering from her mouth and down her chin. She tries unsuccessfully to catch it in a cupped hand.

Pleased, she bends to kiss him and this time he allows it, her shag of curly brown hair engulfing him along with her riverbed scent while the forbidden taste of booze rides her tongue into his mouth.

And just like that it is awake again.

The big electric animal under his skin that doesn’t understand the word no .