Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

Maybe you really and finally grow up when you see the wall behind the last box of mysteries and it’s just a wall.

Your wall now.

Andrew drives with the foreknowledge that he will see at least one deer, which has nothing to do with magic; these farm-mottled woods are teeming with them, and they fling themselves across the roads with such abandon that wise drivers scan the margins of the trees. Their once-balletic bodies lie strewn from here to Buffalo, and if more of them are visible on the great deer-killing buzz saw that is Interstate 81, that’s only because the highway department cuts the grass there. Here in the sticks they tumble into ditches choked with greenery, hidden from the eyes of motorists, but advertising their spoiling perfume every few miles to those who go on foot or bicycle or in the slow, open tractors that beetle along between farms.

Andrew is not beetling tonight.

He has opened up the Mustang’s 302 and it roars like something hungry, like something that has been waiting too long to run.

It is the day after Karl’s death, two days before his funeral, and Karl’s daughter is drunk. She has a lapful of her dad’s PBR and a bottle of Tullamore Dew between her feet, and she has turned the volume knob up almost as high as it goes. One of the classic rock stations; Andrew switches between them at every commercial, so he rarely knows which one he’s listening to. Whichever one it is, “From the Beginning” plays so loudly Andrew has to shout to speak to Anneke.

“Look!” he says, pointing across the road to his left, where a doe stands so still she might be made of felt, her eyes blazing coke-bottle green in the headlights, a tiara of fireflies winking about her head. Anneke does not look, just hangs her heavy shag of hair down and does her best to sing along with the radio. Ignorance of a song’s lyrics is not proving to be an impediment to Anneke tonight.

Andrew readies his hand above the horn and readies his foot for braking, but the doe does not stir, and, as always with her kind, he wonders afterward if he has really seen her.

Now he relaxes.

He has seen his nightly deer.

Anneke is watching the road now.

Andrew is tempted to do that naughty thing he used to do quite often in the days before sobriety—the very thing he had been doing when he wrecked the ’65.

Yes, let’s do this.

When he sees that the road is empty of traffic both coming and going, he slows to twenty miles per hour. He cuts his headlights now so they can see the ballet of fireflies where they twinkle in the low places on the farms to right and left.

Showing off.

Anneke loves it, smiles with her cheeks shining, her eyes big like the eyes of a little girl at the circus. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer still pours from the speakers, unaccompanied now. How beautiful the fireflies are, a small galaxy of them signaling to one another as the last violet light fails above them.

“Exquisite,” he breathes, unheard under the music, then pulls his lights back on.

“More!” she shouts. “Encore!”

Instead he speeds again, and she honks the Mustang’s horn, then howls from the window like a wolf.

At the bluffs.

The whispering of the surf makes him think of the thing that came from the water at him in a dream.

Not a dream.

You were flying without your body and you almost didn’t make it back.

But he loves these bluffs and so does Anneke and he’ll be damned if he’ll let some bloated nasty in a sunken ship keep him away. The ship’s far out, and the Russian’s cabin is a good mile away.

They’re safe.

The two witches, master and apprentice, are alone.

The two recovering alcoholics, one holding on, one in full relapse, are alone.

The grieving daughter and her best friend are alone.

And kissing.

When they arrived he spread an Indian throw over the high grass and they both comically rolled on it to flatten it out; it’s still lumpy beneath them, but they want to be off the main trail in case some other celebrants arrive. The Sterling Renaissance festival is opening soon and musicians, actors, and vendors wander out here in the summer months to sing, drink, and couple. Oswegian teenagers also frequent these bluffs, breaking into parked cars, smoking pot, drinking hooch. But now nothing stirs but the lake and the breeze. Andrew and Anneke lie together, cocooned in their small, grassy cell.

Hidden.

Occult , in the original and medical meaning of the word.

And kissing.

They had barely spoken on the walk from the car, just trudged out here, hopped the rusted guardrail, hiked the rise that, by daylight, gives on the lake and the little promontory one dare not walk now. They had just gotten the blanket down when her mouth was on his, hot and boozy.

And the kissing was good.

Is good.

She fumbles for his belt, and, to his utter surprise, he stops her, playing goalie like a good Catholic girl.

She stops, squints her bleary eyes at him.

“Don’t you want this?”

He sees that she’s crying.

“I’m just afraid you don’t want this.”

“You’re wrong.”

Her strong hands on his belt again, more insistent; she unbuckles it. He scooches back away from her.

“Are you fucking serious?” she says, wristing a tear out from under her eye.

“Anneke, you’re plastered.”

“So?”

“You’ll regret this, that’s all.”

She pushes him down.

Holy shit, is she actually stronger than me?

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed. But regret?”

She’s too drunk to say the words she wants to say, but shakes her head. He gets it. Anneke doesn’t do regret, or at least she tells herself that enough that it has become her mantra. If she were in Game of Thrones , her household words would be, “Yes, I did do that. And fuck you.”

“I need this,” she says.

She’s straddling his hips now, towering over him, the horns of the moon behind her and an embarrassment of stars about her like a fay court, bearing witness to her need and to her primacy in this.

My father is dead and you’re going to help me fuck some of it away. Just that first little bit of it. Because when the tribe shrinks by one, the sons and daughters go into the fields and make increase.

This won’t be Papillon .

She’s not laughing with him now.

She’s fearsome.

Will this bring the raven down?

“Do you love me?”

Her silhouette nods.

“Brother. Not husband. But we’re doing this tonight.”

She bends down, a tear falling ridiculously into his nostril, but this is still not funny, and she grabs two fistfuls of his inky hair, painfully, the hair at the temples. She kisses him softly, though, wetly, until the tension leaves his body. He feels it in the crotch now, that first twitch, and she feels it, too.

Off him now, and down with his pants.

She has never put her mouth to him before, perhaps never to a man before; she doesn’t entirely know what she’s doing, hurts him a little, but it doesn’t matter.

It feels to Andrew like that warm, wet contact point between them is the geographical center of all creation.

This is so unlike Althea—he feels this; his heart is as warm as the marrow of a roast lamb’s bone, melting like that, and she could beak under his sternum and lick it right out of him.

They both know it’s going to happen.

And it does.

Urgently.

Quickly.

She barely gets her jeans off.

He spends around her navel, in it, abundantly like a twenty-year-old, and gasps as he does.

She clenches her teeth to keep from sobbing, not with pleasure, he’s sure she didn’t come, but with grief and thwarted love and mortality and gratitude for this little bit of warmth, this sliver of divinity, and she holds him, her wet belly hitching.