Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

You’re in trouble.

He breathes hard, wanting to take the whiskey bottle from her and swallow until a big warm pond pools around his heart, but he concentrates on her tongue. It is a dirty tongue, always coated with something; it feels the way your skin feels when you shower somewhere with soft water, always slick, always filmy.

The Jack Daniel’s bottle lies on the bed, its handsome black label and the good feel of it in his palm only a scoot and a reach away.

Fuck your way out of this.

Andrew looks down past the twin hanging cones of Althea’s breasts to where her belly rolls, pale above her dark bush and only just beginning to dimple as she approaches her fortieth year.

He begins to harden again, flicking her oily nakedness with the top of his shaft.

“Hmm,” she half growls, reaching down for it, but he dumps her off him and holds her down. She snakes her legs around him now, high up around his ribs, and wiggles, waiting for him.

Definitely still teaching yoga.

He hardens to three quarters.

Closes his eyes and sees Anneke.

Wanting me, naked and eager.

Except that Anneke already loves me.

Just not sexually, “as a wife loves a husband.”

Or the raven’s beak would kill her.

As surely as cancer is killing her father.

Stop sabotaging this, you need this.

Why?

What happens when you get too old to hide in a cunt?

And it’s just you alone with you.

Andrew opens his eyes, sees the beautiful, eely woman beneath him; he flares his nostrils and takes in the punk aroma of her excited sex. Althea has a strong smell, but mild and sweet compared to the rusalka. He closes his eyes again.

Karl Zautke is dying.

Anneke is relapsing.

She needs you, and you’re here.

Opens his eyes.

“You don’t love me, do you?”

His own voice surprises him.

Althea brays a laugh, then shakes her head slowly and wickedly at him.

“I love my husband,” she says. And she does. She loves her husband so much, in fact, that she will strap him down when he gets home from the bar and tell him in luxurious detail about her unprotected sex with her gris-gris New York lover. He will want her to ride him while she is still full of his rival, emasculating him until he is half sobbing, and then, when it’s over, turning mommy on him, cleaning him off and cradling him until sunrise. You would never look at the big, dangerous-looking bouncer with his bald dome and huge biceps and think, This guy only gets hard when he’s being ground down , but that’s how it is.

“I know. I just wanted to hear it.”

“Stop talking,” she says.

He stops talking.

He puts a coin between her eyes that lets him think thoughts into her head, and he shows her a dream where she is raping men on a Persian slave galley—she yowls so hard at the end of it that one of the neighbors accompanies her vocals with the percussion of shoe on wall.

Someone outside and below claps.

Andrew emerges from his bathroom, carrying the little duffel he took to New Orleans. No baggage claim, no bored security guards watching you walk past the point of no return; fuck you, Homeland Security. The day a user decides to go terrorist is going to be a bad day indeed.

His phone, temporarily confused, and perhaps insulted, by the rapid shift from Central to Eastern Time zones, resets itself and chimes the arrival of a text message it had temporarily misplaced.

Anneke Zautke

Dad’s on the way out. Don’t come. I’ll keep you posted though. Sorry & thanks. God damn this anyway.

Und zo.

He goes upstairs, sits on the edge of his bed, and peels off his Old Gringos. The warm, animal smell of his own feet hits him—it was so hot in the Quarter—and he notices a hole that will soon allow his big toe to peep through his sock.

Time to get rid of these.

Knot them together and give them to the dog to chew.

Only the dog isn’t a dog now.

As if summoned, Salvador knocks at the door frame, keeping politely out of sight, the clack of wood on wood startling the tired magus.

“Come in,” he says, almost adding boy .

Isn’t a dog.

Then what the fuck is he?

A monster. You’ve turned him into something unnatural, as you do with everything. He should be a handful of ashes on the breeze. He should be chasing rabbits in Elysium.

Will you put Karl Zautke’s heart in a basket and make him wash your boxers, too?

Salvador walks in, the Etch-a-Sketch he uses to communicate hanging by a leather cord around his wicker neck. The knobs turn themselves, and black-on-gray letters appear.

“Closer, Sal, I can’t see.”

The automaton lopes close, the knobs still turning.

Salvador has cleaned up the media room and put in a new television.

He chopped garlic because, even though he doesn’t know what Andrew wants to eat, it will certainly contain garlic.

“I’ll cook. Thanks.”

Boy.

I can’t even scratch your ears now.

The picture frame cocks, Salvador Dalí’s head now at a quizzical angle. He wants further orders. Just like a border collie, happier with a task.

He always asks who cooks even though Andrew hasn’t let him near the gas range since he caught himself on fire two years ago. But he’s not afraid of fire, not afraid of anything except displeasing his master.

What else has he got?

Me.

He just has me.

Andrew stands up, puts on the orange running shoes Anneke teases him about, and grabs a tennis ball from the closet. They go into the backyard. For the next half an hour, Andrew throws the ball and the wicker man sprints on his synthetic legs to grab it, scooping it with his wooden hands as nimbly as an outfielder, then throwing it back to his master. When it goes into the brush, Salvador turns his framed head sideways so it doesn’t drag branches.

John Dawes, the neighbor across the street, watches with military binoculars, can’t figure out for the life of him why the Spanish-looking butler would play catch with the strange bachelor, both of them laughing, only one of them soaked with sweat when they go back into the house.

It isn’t the strangest thing he’s seen at 4700 Willow Fork Road, though.

Not by half.

Dusk is coming on.

Andrew’s fingers are yellow with turmeric and his squash soup is boiling when the phone chimes again.

He knows what it says.

Anneke Zautke

Dog tell, og tell.

Let Go, Let God.

Elvis has left the building.

Out of nowhere he cries.

For his dead policeman father.

For his dead user mentor.

But also for Anneke, who’ll have to learn for herself how hard it is when the second parent goes. How real it gets when you’re sweating down into the cardboard boxes bound for Goodwill and the Salvation Army. When the other parent isn’t there to tell you stories from before you were born. When you go in the attic and the plastic tchotchkes crumble in your hand, and you sob like a bitch when you realize your mom saved a little bundle of report cards from third and fourth grade because they said something nice about her kid.

About you.

And that those cards waited in that peeling old folder for your adult hand to fish them out and throw them away because there’s just nobody else in this world who’ll ever give a damn about them again.