Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

God Sarah God Sarah God

Her rings on the nightstand.

Her boots on the floor, making a sort of happy swastika with his.

Her soft, joyful whimpers.

Salvador the dog crying to be let in with them.

Salvador the wicker man taps on the door to the media room.

Let’s say now-Salvador .

Now-Salvador, then.

Now-Andrew sleeves his cheeks dry.

Puts the tape away.

Opens the door.

The UPS man has arrived with a parcel Andrew must sign for.

A parcel from Frenchman Street in New Orleans.

He can tell by the weight of the package.

He recognizes Miss Mathilda’s squared-off, careful print.

Three tapes.

The dead in their black plastic shells.

Souls trapped in amber.

He can’t free them, but he can make them dance.

Oh God, he wants a drink.

The house is quiet with a quiet that television and music are powerless to interrupt. The night groans by on rusted wheels.

The dream is the same dream.

Always the same dream.

The Soviet dream.

He is twenty-three again, arrogant, strong, as pretty as a girl, irresistible to girls and women of every stripe. He travels easily through Soviet Russia, using magic to outdance its bureaucracy, its lethal but ponderous bureaucracy, clever in places but cold. Secular. Unable to allow for the impossible. He is playing chess with adversaries who cannot see all the pieces, who might beat him if they allowed for the possibility that they could not see all the pieces.

His papers say he is a Soviet citizen.

Magic gives him flawless Russian.

Magic summons perfect answers to his lips.

He is too light for the police.

He is too clever for the KGB.

He is looking for treasuries of magic tomes lost since the days of the tsars.

“Of all of the spell books and relics known to exist, whether seen by reliable witnesses or referenced in other works, only a quarter or so are in known hands,” his mentor had told him; on mention of secret magic books, Andrew had sat like a cat before a can opener. “Of the remainder, it is believed that a disproportionate amount have accumulated in what is now the Soviet Union. Some hiding in plain sight, no doubt, waiting in bookstores for the first luminous person to buy them for less than an American dollar. Most will have been hoarded and stored.”

“Hoarded and stored by whom?”

“We don’t know. Various users, even more deeply hidden than Western ones, perhaps more powerful. I know a man, a Walloon Belgian, who went to Leningrad in 1973 and came back with a book on traveling underwater, a bit redundant in the age of scuba, but still. I also know a man and wife who went together to the Volga and never came back. The Volga’s probably where most of it is.”

“When did they go?”

“1975? Jesus, three years ago. I saw them get married the year before.”

Now, in the 1983 dream, Andrew has left the city of Gorky, in the Volga region, and makes his way by train and bus into the countryside, hitchhiking rides from farm trucks, beat-up Zaporozhets with their goldfish-eye headlights, even a horse-drawn cart full of barreled milk.

And then.

And then.

Andrew has been hitching all day, with mixed success.

He just realizes how hungry he is, how long it’s been since he ate, when he finds himself looking at a scene from the nineteenth century.

Two men in baggy shirts, short woolen vests and brown pants swing scythes into the high grass, looking for all the world like they had stepped out of Fiddler on the Roof . They work their way down the side of a hill, the sky chalky blue above them, one of them humming to keep his time, the younger one swinging less rhythmically, fighting the scythe, tired. Maybe sixteen years old.

“I see you have made an enemy of the grass, Lyosha,” the older man says from beneath a tsarist mustache. “This will not do. Make friends with it. Let it know that you only want to let it lie down and rest.”

He goes back to humming his song, but still the boy chops and sweats, stopping for a moment to wipe his brow with his cap.

“Call your idiot brother and see if he can show you how.”

“He will not come, Uncle. He is lying on the stove.”

“Call him anyway.”

“Ivan!” the boy calls.

Andrew keeps walking down the path, keeping an eye out for another potential ride, but this.

This is something else.

He slows down a bit because he wants to see how this idyll will play out. Do they still make idiot brothers who like to lie on the stove in Cold War Russia?

Clearly they do; the large man who crests the hill and lopes down at the other two has the characteristic eye tilt of Down syndrome, and he breathes through his mouth as he says, “What do you want? I was catching flies.”

“You caught no flies unless they landed in your mouth,” the mustachioed man says. “Now show your weakling brother how a man mows hay.”

The boy hands the scythe to his brother, and Ivan whacks at the grass like a mad thing, shearing great armloads of it down with each stroke, giggling. Soon the little brother takes up a fistful of grass and throws it at Ivan, ducking back out of range before the scythe’s blade swishes down again. It becomes a game. The older man sets down his scythe and joins in, baiting the laughing peasant with flung grass and dancing away from the flashing blade. Andrew now has to turn his head back to watch, so he stops walking altogether and slides his arms free of his backpack. He lights a shitty Soviet cigarette so he will not appear to be nosy, just a man having a rest and a smoke, and he sits on the big canvas sack he has been lugging.

A flight of sparrows wheels about, lands briefly on the road near him and then takes off again.

And then.

It happens.

The younger boy takes greater and greater risks with the scythe, forgetting the grass-throwing, just leaping in and out Cossack-style while his uncle claps and shouts in time. Andrew knows what is going to happen an instant before it does; at last the idiot brother swings faster than the boy had anticipated and lops into the acrobatic youth’s leg.

It comes off just below the knee.

He collapses into the grass with a look of astonishment on his face.

How pale his face is!

How dark the O of his mouth!

Andrew’s own mouth hangs open, the cigarette stuck on his lower lip.

The injured boy howls in pain; the older man goes to him.

The idiot stares openmouthed, a long strand of spit reaching down to the grass.

Andrew’s paralysis breaks, and he says, “Jesus.”

The boy goes silent.

The uncle had been removing his rope belt to tie off the boy’s leg, but he stops and turns his head toward Andrew. The idiot brother looks at him too. Now the boy sits up, holding his bloody stump, less concerned with the blood fountaining through his interlaced fingers than with Andrew.

“Can I help?” Andrew says in decent but accented Russian, his own Russian, Russian that stinks of Ohio, walking toward them now, his hands open in a timeless gesture of harmlessness.

He doesn’t even notice that his fluency charm has failed.

All three of them look at Andrew with flinty, suspicious eyes. Their gazes are so malevolent, in fact, that Andrew stops coming toward them. He isn’t sure this is what it appears to be.

Then it hits him.

Magic.

It has been so long since he felt the flutter of magic that he has now been blindsided.

He didn’t see the pieces.