Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

This is really mighty stuff.

“Probably still be there in another ten years. We did good.”

Anneke joins them at breakfast the next day, her hair frosted with clay dust, her eyes baggy from poor rest. She smells like sweat and anger. Andrew cracks eggs and tips their treasure into holes in sizzling French bread while she glares at Michael Rudnick. Salvador brings the coffee press, pours coffee in her cup. She reaches for it, but Michael wags a finger at her.

“What?”

This is the first thing she’s said since she entered.

“Use your hand to touch that mug and I’ll pop it in your face.”

She blinks twice to keep herself from flinging it at him.

She really wants to fling something at him.

Speaks instead.

“ You’re using your hands. You’re lifting that mug to your face just like everybody else.”

He takes a sip of coffee just to rub it in.

Looks at her, eyes twinkling like flaws in quartz.

He doesn’t need to say it; she gets it. He has nothing to prove. He has his own regimen, has cracked the foundation of his house and fixed it six times this year, juggles forty bricks as high as a Ferris wheel every Sunday, turns rabbit, squirrel, or doe to stone in midrun then animates it again. He’s a mighty motherfucker with eyes like Medusa and a geologist’s heart, and he’ll use his hands if he wants to.

She’s the one on coffee cup detail.

She swivels her angry glare from Michael’s eyes to the steaming earthenware mug in front of her. Terra-cotta colored, artsy, from an art fair in Ithaca. She feels the clay in it as if it’s an exiled part of her, believes it’s part of her, feels the heat of the coffee in the cup that is now her own brittle flesh somehow, but the feeling is muted, fades in and out.

The cup is like an extremity that has gone to sleep. It is a struggle for her to move it; her arm tingles in sympathy.

This is harder than lifting the empty pots and plates, which actually got easy at the end; by the time she was near the bottom of the wall, she had two pieces in the air at a time.

The first one, though. It hurt her between the eyes, like an ice cream headache in the wrong place. Took her two hours to wiggle it, and then it slipped immediately from her phantom grasp and broke. Almost brought down the whole wall. Michael peeked through the slot, helped her a little by nudging the wall back and into a more solid configuration. The second item, a wine goblet, had been hard, too, had also broken. The third thing, a beer mug, made it, also slipping from her grasp, but in a controlled descent that she could not stop, but managed to slow enough, just enough, so it survived its landing. It had been like watching a skydiver fall a little harder than he meant to.

That had been her first significant act of magic.

She had been doing exercises with a penny, then a pot shard, had moved sand around as gently as a kitten pawing at it, had managed to put a crack in a thin wineglass.

Taking that mug down from on high was a different thing.

She would save that mug.

Drink Mountain Dew out of it one day when she got back into recovery.

This, though.

A full coffee cup. And she didn’t make this cup, hasn’t already got an intuitive connection to it. The weight of the liquid confounds her, has multiplied itself like weight at the wrong end of a lever. It’s heavier, yes, but she’s stronger than she was a day ago; this is a fair fight. She clenches her teeth, feels something coiling inside her, getting ready to expand.

She sees the coffee cup lifting, manages to jog it, sloshes a plap of coffee onto Andrew’s table.

Grunts.

Tries again.

It wobbles, coffee spilling over its sides, dribbling onto the table.

She brings it to her lips, starts to incline toward it, sees Michael gesturing for her to sit back.

Make the cup do the work , she thinks, then remembers his words as he stood outside the door instructing her.

Let the cup move, don’t make it move. Like archery, or golf, or bowling, it’s a relaxing, not a stiffening.

Something in her relaxes.

The cup drifts closer, drunkenly, uncertain it wants to stay aloft. Now it trembles at her lips, quivering so fast the surface of the coffee ripples in intricate patterns.

She sips.

The hot coffee on her lips jars her out of it.

The cup falls, makes a thunk but doesn’t break, coffee splashes on the table, her lap, everywhere.

Michael nods in lieu of saying, Nice job .

He says, “Next time you’ll be ready, won’t let the heat shock you.”

Andrew, who has just taken breakfast off the burner, comes over with a dishrag.

Why is he handing me a dishrag?

Oh, the coffee.

Drops of blood patter on the table, mixing with coffee.

Not just the coffee.

Nosebleed.

Magic made me bleed.

The first time was just messing around, but now I’m in.

Cherry popped, as the boys who helped me prefer girls used to say.

She takes the rag.

“Welcome to the club,” Andrew says.

Breakfast is good.

Before they leave the kitchen, Michael makes Anneke change a cherry tomato into a rock. This takes half an hour. Her period, which isn’t due until next week, comes on hard, sending her running for the tampons she left behind for herself in the guest bathroom.

She lies down in the spare room, meaning to rest her eyes and her throbbing head, but she falls asleep and stays that way for two days.

When she wakes up, Andrew hands her an envelope.

The rock is in it, and a note.

Michael Rudnick’s address.

She takes the stone cherry tomato with her and leaves.

Chicagohoney85:This is pretty cool if you like dark stuff. But I don’t think you do as much as I do. You sure you want to see this?

Ranulf:Just show me. I need to know.

—What, don’t you trust me? I’m not going to say I know if I don’t know. And that’s one dead witch. Deaddity dead dead dead.

—Cute. Just show me.

—How’s my car?

—You’ll splee.

—I think you’re trying to say squee. As in, make a squee noise. Because splee is more like have a male orgasm which is anatomically misplaced, and just a little off sides.

—I meant squee.

—I know. A guy like you can still get action and doesn’t need to be a creeper. There’s nothing I hate like a creeper.

—Understandable. Are you going to show me?

—What color is it?

—?

—The car!

—Plum. A Mini Cooper.

—*SQUEEEEEE!* Okay, here’s your morbid little treat, and it’s weird. I didn’t know things like this happened. Pretty f’d up. The images were shot at two-second intervals.

A picture loads. Black-and-white, military satellite photography. The hut, the garden, hard to make out. Early morning. An old woman’s foot, a slipper near it. The echo of The Wizard of Oz is impossible not to notice.

Ding dong, your bitch is dead.

—Can you get a closer shot of that shoe?

She zooms in. It gets grainy, but he thinks it may be an old-timey slipper. Not ruby. Embroidered.

He can’t be sure, but he thinks he’s seen it before.

His stomach does a slow roll.

—Just click when you’re ready to see the next one. This’ll flip your shit.