Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

But he is not like her.

He did not bite that boy, only hit him.

And it was enough.

They fought; the larger boy beat Misha badly but got a black eye doing it.

He moved on to easier prey.

Misha knew the boy beat smaller children because his stepfather burned him with cigarettes.

That was long ago.

Now.

The girl is dying.

Her red hair floats about her in a cloud, no longer knotted into ugly tails. Her cruel muscles and scars are gone.

Her tail is gone, replaced by legs.

Let her die!

But that is not his voice, it is the woman behind the curtain.

The woman at night, in the trees.

He grows a shoulder.

Butts into the girl’s ass and thigh, forces her up.

Her head breaks the surface and she gasps air in, shuddering.

He yells at her in English.

“Swim!”

She does not swim.

Begins to sink again.

He nudges her up.

Yells at her in Russian.

“Swim, goddammit!”

She swims.

The couple on the sailing ship scarcely believe what they’re seeing.

A retired astronomer and his wife who come out from Fair Haven on calm nights and anchor deep to stargaze.

A naked girl is climbing up over the rail, sprawling out on the deck, throwing up lake water.

The wife dumps her glass of Riesling on the deck, her boat shoes squeaking.

The astronomer sits agog.

“Don’t just sit there, Harry, get her a blanket! And call the Coast Guard! A boat might have gone down.”

The girl is barely conscious.

Warm hands have her.

A blanket.

English coming down at her.

“Do you know your name? Is anybody else with you? Can you hear me?”

She understands, but she is too tired to speak English.

“Nadia. My name is Nadia. I am from St. Petersburg. My father is a professor. My brother is in the cavalry. We know the tsar.”

She says this in exquisite Russian.

The older couple doesn’t understand, but they are kind.

They’ll see her home.

She turns her head away from them, looks at the white head bobbing in the black lake.

The old dead man.

She met him before he was dead but can’t remember how.

In the shower?

With a dog?

Was I dead with him?

He howls at her playfully.

Owwwwwooooooooooo.

He smiles for the first time in months.

She smiles back.

Weakly, but sincerely.

She moves her fingers in the echo of a wave.

He sinks.

The light is under the water.

A second moon.

The best thing he has ever seen.

He swims down.

A school of silvery fish he does not recognize parts for him.

He swims into the moon.

The warm, yellow moon.

Saffron made light.

Misha laughs deeply.

A woman he has not seen for several years laughs, too.

Mikhail Yevgenievich Dragomirov dissolves.

Really and gladly and finally dissolves.

Your father is coming.

The man who used to be Professor Coyne tries not to tremble while assembling the little plastic tank. The kit came in the mail two days ago, a Tamiya 1/35 scale T-34 tank. He is to paint it in winter white, with forest netting made from moss and birch twigs. The moss is hard, but the model itself was harder. His eyes aren’t so good and he shakes. When he trembles, he makes mistakes, and she has no tolerance for mistakes.

He has cut himself twice with his X-Acto knife. He looked for ten minutes on his hands and knees for a track wheel that rolled away.

These were minor mistakes.

He puts his hood on when she comes to check his work; she is just a shape to him.

When he makes minor mistakes, the Cold Man burns his skin with cold.

Yesterday he made a huge mistake.

He took a sandwich bag from the kitchen drawer, squirted a generous dollop of modeling glue into it and bagged it over his nose and mouth. He breathed it in and opened up dangerous, pleasant windows in his head. He had been without wine since they adopted him. They only gave him meat and moldy bread to eat, and he knew it was wrong to eat the meat.

He needed something.

The high was good.

It made him brave.

And foolish.

He tried to run.

Because of Jim Wilson.

It wasn’t so bad, picking up the large box from the airport.

The Cold Man had waited in the back of the rental van.

He knew if he tried to run, the Cold Man would catch him, would go find his wife.

He had gone to the American Eagle desk at the Syracuse Hancock International Airport, identified himself as the man who was here to pick up Jim Wilson.

Jim Wilson was the airline’s euphemism for human remains.

He signed the papers, drove the van around to where the box could be loaded.

Took the cardboard box and air tray from around the dirty, old pine coffin.

Drove back, gave her the coffin.

She had done things to it that night, after she got back from the lake.

She raised the dead man up.

He had seen the dead man doing exercises, a short dead man almost all bones, brown bones with just a little skin. Military uniform hanging off him, too big now, medals on his chest. Embalmed all those years ago. Now doing slow exercises, learning to walk again, holding her shoulder. More spells. More exercises. His flesh was coming back, starting to, at least. She tossed him a child’s ball in the yard, improving his reflexes.

It was too much.

They told the professor to build the model, and he had built models as a child.

But when the dead man with the coat of medals came to watch him, instruct him, it was too much.

The horsefly had been bad.

She made him sit shirtless in the woods until one came, and she caught it. Spoke to it in her cupped hands. Put it in his ear.

It flew into his brain.

Now when someone spoke Russian to him, the fly told him what they said in English. Spoke it directly to his brain.

The dead man thought in Russian, raspy, awful Russian.

The fly buzzed the dead man’s thoughts into his head.

“We painted brown in with the green like branches. Here. And here.”

The dead finger pointed at parts of the turret.

It was too much.

So when the dead man left to learn to balance on a beam, the Man Who Would Not Look At Her huffed glue.

It was the best he had felt since it got cold.

He saw it clearly.

That he could run and get to other people.

Drive his wife away somewhere warm.

But it was the dead man who caught him.

On the road, near the cornfield.

A car drove by, the driver looking at it, how the dead man tackled him around the knees, flipped him over, straddled his chest with his awful old stink pouring off him.

The driver just drove away, never stopped.

Perhaps never saw.

The dead man held his jaw in the bony, brown hand,

I am making friends with death!

grinned his awful grin down at him.

Waggled his finger as if at a naughty child.

Dragged him back by the heel.

He was just another exercise.

She knew he would run, wanted the dead man to catch him.

Now the tank is almost done, and it looks good.

He will help her make the button-men next.

She is building a tiny army to punish the Thief.

To show American witches what a Russian witch looks like.

Then she will go back home.

Perhaps.

She likes it here.

Anneke opens up her A-frame house, goes in. Everything looks smaller now, since her apprenticeship in the quarry. She thrums with magic fuel, feels like she can see inside rocks, mugs, even metal. The drive home was difficult; everything distracted and amazed her: brick houses, rocky hillocks, even a rusted-out iron grill next to a Sharpied FREE sign by the roadside. Without entirely meaning to, she made the grill jump, knocked the sign over. Almost ran her Subaru into the metal pole of a SNOWPLOW TURN sign. Then a second spell launched out of her by reflex—she displaced the signpost with magic so violent a sharp metal PANG! rang out at the same time as a whip-crack Pop! sounded, the sign relocating faster than the speed of sound, the yellow diamond quivering on the wrong side of a farmer’s fence.