Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

This strikes him really funny and he laughs the way people do on the subway sometimes when they’ve stopped caring who’s looking at them.

Just as suddenly, he stops laughing, remembers what he was just doing. Shudders to think what those things might have grown into.

Before the shower, he looks at himself in the mirror over the sink.

He looks at the wall behind his shoulder, happy it’s just wall.

Happy there’s nobody behind him.

Is the old witch really dead?

What the fuck is after me?

He is filthy, his hair flecked with something like potato, his skin stippled with blood.

And then there’s his eye.

He has popped the blood vessel in his sclera again.

It hurts.

He decides to let himself get a little older, at least until he has his strength back. Gray runs down his Indian-black hair in several fine skeins, like runs in a nylon stocking. The lines around his mouth deepen. He looks fortyish now, feels sixty. But his eye stops hurting, clears up.

His muscles are so sore he can barely turn the knobs, but the shower is good. Grime and blood run down across the Italian tiles and down the drain.

He’s watching the last of the night’s dirt swirl into the plumbing when he sees her long, pale feet step just behind his. The rusalka can’t resist the water. The smell of deep lake and tide overwhelms him, but seems oddly pleasant after the high, seminal smell of the potatoes. Odd how their scent changed as they grew, became bloodier, more mammalian.

He doesn’t look at her, just her feet. Probably a size ten? The men in her family must have had gunboats. He remembers stories she told him about their boots, the high, black boots of her uncles who worked in the New York workshop where they painted silk ties. She was a teenager when they fled the revolution, but the clomp of those boots had reassured her, had made her feel comforted and homesick all at once, certain at least that she was part of a tribe. Russian intelligentsia. People who wanted to keep their nice homes, couldn’t pretend to love the wild-eyed prophets the bastard Lenin sent out like dirty angels to raise the farmers up in anger, making demands, standing on things to talk.

So they fought alongside the whites.

The losers.

But civilized losers.

Romans fleeing before Vandals.

Romanovs dying in the yard.

The first time he’s connected those words, Roman, Romanov.

Like tsar comes from Caesar.

Did Nadia ever see the tsar?

Who cares?

She drowns people.

They say please and she drowns them.

And I fuck her.

He feels soap slide across his hips, his navel.

She touches him more intimately, takes it in her hand, slicks her thumb expertly over the head.

He moves away.

“Not tonight,” he says.

“When?”

Sounds like Venn?

“I don’t know. Maybe when I forget that ship full of dead people you keep. Or those things in the holes out there. Fucking awful, it’s all so awful.”

“You want I should go?”

He pauses.

She starts to leave.

She’s a monster.

But I am, too.

As long as I do this.

“No,” he says.

“Good. You shouldn’t sleep alone anymore.”

He shakes his head no , as if in agreement.

“In fact, I won’t let you,” she says in Russian.

She dries him off and puts him in bed.

He lets her do that.

She tries again to do the other thing, but he curls up into a ball.

Please , it said.

With dirt in its mouth.

And then I shot it.

He doesn’t sleep so much as passes out.

She remembers the part of herself that used to care about more than fucking and swimming and killing and eating fish cold in the lake.

She enfolds the sleeping magus in her arms, remembers other warm arms that held her once, long ago.

Clinically notes that this is where she would cry if she did that.

Andrew wakes to the sound of Salvador barking.

He had been having a particularly nasty dream in which malign and malformed versions of himself were trying to get into the house.

“The dog is barking,” he says to Sarah.

But it’s not Sarah, warm Sarah with her scent of sandalwood.

It’s a foul-smelling woman with cold feet.

And Salvador isn’t a dog anymore.

Except when someone’s trying to get into the house.

Because that’s part of the spell.

Glass breaks.

“Oh fuck!”

Andrew and the rusalka both sit upright.

The closest thing Andrew ever saw to this was Night of the Living Dead , when the zombies surround the house and stupidly batter their way in. He’s not sure how many there are, but they are most certainly surrounding the house, and one has broken the window in the kitchen door.

How did it break the window?

I charmed these windows against breaking.

Did I drain the magic using other spells?

The thing is now fumbling with the knob, just about to open the door.

Salvador, a border collie again, but bigger, more the size of a German shepherd or a big wolf, prepares to lunge.

Gets confused.

Because what steps through the door is his master.

Or, rather, what his master would look like mutated, or slightly melted, naked, dumb and strong. The thing coming through the door is rippling with muscles.

And so are the ones behind it.

This is why Salvador missed them.

Their smell changed.

When they smelled like me, Sal couldn’t find them in the ground anymore.

How to fight them?

Room of skins.

“Sal! That’s not me! Get ’em!” Andrew says. “Don’t let them get around you!”

Salvador knocks down the first one, shakes its arm.

The second one hammer-fists the dog hard enough to make him yelp and let go; the huge dog beats a retreat into the living room.

Andrew sends Nadia out the way she came, by the front door, but she doesn’t go alone.

She grabs a not-Andrew by the hair and runs with it for the lake.

The rest of them mob in.

“Don’t let them get around you,” one says clumsily.

“Get around you!” one echoes.

Andrew runs into the hall, into the room of skins.

Shoves his thumb under his skin, unzips himself, working as fast as he can.

Good thing you don’t drink.

You couldn’t move, think fast enough drunk.

Move!

Think!

“Don’t let ’em get around you,” one says, pounding on the door now. Pounding hard . That’s an oak door, solid, but the frame can’t take much more of that.

BAM! It goes, and the room shudders.

“Don’t let them get ’round you!” one says from the kitchen, and lots of things break.

They’re trashing the fucking house, hurry.

His skin is off.

He doesn’t usually have to do this fast.

He opens the wardrobe on the right.

Knows which one.

It burns a lot of magic fuel, though.

“Don’t let ’em get around you!!!”

BAM!

(shudder)

“’Round you, ’round you!”

Now out in the living room, a fight in earnest.

Growling, snarling.

Get ’em, Sal!

The flayed man is about to put it on.

It’s a heavy skin.

He remembers to open the window.

One looms in front of the window.

“Don’t let them get around you!” it says, lunges for Andrew.

He steps back, sees its fingernails flash, dirty from clawing its way out of the ground.