Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

His fault.

All his fault.

He had flipped the lights off for a joke, doing fifty.

She had said “Andrew” in admonition, her last intelligible word.

He can’t save her.

But he knows something that can.

He sticks his thumb out and the big Swede in the pickup truck stops.

“I’m taking you to the hospital,” the man insists.

“You’re taking me home,” Andrew tells him, charming him hard. Too hard.

“Sure!” the man says, his cheek twitching with a brand-new tic that may or may not be permanent. He drives the crazed, injured drunk home.

“See you later!” the Swede says, pulling out and waving, his face a-twitch.

Poor bastard just wanted to help but I can’t think about him Sarah Sarah Sarah.

All folded around her tree.

Salvador barks, jumps up on him, tries to lick the tears and snot and blood from his cheeks. Spins in glad circles.

“Not now, Sal,” the magus says.

He goes to the library.

Kneels before a trunk.

Opens it by telling it his name.

The trunk contains a Russian cavalry officer’s revolver, one bullet, and a shaving razor. He loads the bullet, spins the cylinder.

Puts the barrel in his mouth.

Sarah.

Pulls the trigger.

Click.

A book appears.

He puts the gun down.

Cracked blue leather. Engraved in circles of gold and silver.

Hair soaked in long-dried blood laid into sixteenth-century Russian letters:

BOOK OF SORROWS.

He cuts his thumb, bleeds several drops into the hair.

He thinks about what he wants.

The book opens to a page near the end.

Handwritten letters, ink, not blood, tell him what to do.

He does the first part correctly, despite his inebriation.

He is not in his library anymore.

“Going to California” plays on the radio of his wrecked car.

It stands there.

Black, its blackness seeming to stick to everything around it.

Not magic, but a weird, dead feeling antithetical to magic.

A headless, hulking form that’s about to need arms and legs, so it forms those. No head yet.

The headless horseman.

Ichabod Crane.

Its name sounded like Ichabod.

“Ichabod will do just fine,” it says.

It unfolds the dead woman from her awful nest of sticks and greenery.

It picks her up.

Its size reminds him of Frankenstein’s monster, and now it leaches the image from his mind and turns into that, a black-and-white version. Like Karloff’s monster but not quite. Karloff’s version filtered through Andrew’s mind, corrupted a bit with a graphic novel version he once saw, and just a whiff of Herman Munster. It winks at him, holding the broken girl, who already looks a little less broken. It passes its palm over Andrew’s face.

“Forget,” it says. “For now.”

He is already forgetting it as it lopes off home.

He knows he will find her safe and well in their bed.

He follows behind it, much more slowly.

He stops to pour blood out of his boot.

A pickup truck pulls over.

Sarah lives another year and a day.

The length of a handfasting.

She has her aneurysm at Darien Lake.

After the roller coaster.

Sits down.

Falls over.

And that’s all.

The following year, Salvador chases a doe into the road.

The big Swede in the pickup truck misses the doe.

Not the dog.

Andrew drinks for two more years.

Thinks that’s when he calls Ichabod.

Thinks that’s when he botches the spell to send him back.

Thinks it’s time to stop drinking.

When really it’s long past time.

The cave near the railroad tracks.

Now.

“Will you destroy her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Silence.

“Why not, Ichabod?”

The sound of water dripping.

“I can’t.”

A moment later.

Andrew has just left the cave.

The sun is going down.

He was in there for six hours somehow.

He turns back and looks at the mouth of the cave.

All the bats fly out around him into the new night.

Hunting.

Home.

Andrew calls Haint for the first time since New Orleans.

He wants to arrange a drop-off of the Hand of Glory, the one that kills. That hand might serve him well against her , but then it might not, and he had promised it in payment to the scarred little man—the last thing he needs atop his other woes is to piss off a dangerous citizen like Haint.

Four rings.

Five.

He knows the message will play at six, anticipates this, but, to Andrew’s mild surprise, Haint picks up.

Goes to Facetime.

Andrew braces himself for a comment about how old he looks now.

Haint comes in, his face filling the screen.

“Salutations,” Andrew says.

Haint works his lips like he wants to speak, or perhaps to spit out some unpleasant thing from under his tongue, but then he just shakes his head.

“You all right?” Andrew says. “I owe you this,” he says, holding up the withered little hand, as light as a dried chili pepper.

The hoodoo man doesn’t even seem to see it.

He shakes his head harder, his eyes a little wide.

Bricks behind him—he’s in his mobile apartment.

“Haint, do you need help?”

Haint closes his eyes, keeps shaking his head, like a stubborn toddler shaking off a parental command.

Now he seems to be thinking very hard.

Gags.

Opens his mouth.

A snake pokes its head out of Haint’s mouth, not a large one, perhaps a garter snake, its tongue a-flick. Its head probes the air, turns to look at Haint’s eye. Haint squints. He snatches the snake’s head, winds it around his hand twice, pulling it entirely out. He wrings its neck, throws it.

Looks angrily at the screen.

Points.

The camera follows his finger.

In the corner of the apartment, behind a knocked-over chair, stands a knee-high heap of dead snakes, mostly small, a few less so.

Many of them bloody.

A knife stuck in the table nearby.

Vomit on the floor.

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Now Haint sets the camera down, returns with a piece of paper and a pen.

Writes, pressing hard with the pen.

“I don’t know,” Andrew says.

Several expressions pass across Haint’s face; anger, fear, and, finally, something like resignation.

He nods.

The nod says, I knew I was playing with fire.

Now I pay.

Writes.

He points at his chest.

Andrew shakes his head.

Haint looks incredulous, then angry.

Bares his chest, jabs violently at it with his thumb, points at the screen.

Fills the screen with his enraged eyes.

Writes.

“I can’t,” Andrew says.

He only just notices Haint is wearing a wool coat, doesn’t yet process this.

Radha might help me find a counterspell, but I think she got Radha.

Could go to New Orleans, but what would I do for him?

Miss Mathilda knows hoodoo and voodoo people, but none as strong as Haint.

He’s dead.