Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

Looks at Anneke.

“Its name is Milk-witch,” she says in Russian that Anneke somehow understands. “And it serves me, not you.”

The old woman walks into the woods as ravens caw.

Anneke wakes up in the hut.

Her lips hurt from where the snake’s mouth was on hers, where it drew most of her breath out.

It has settled back around her neck now, cool iron.

The stove glows magma red.

The beardy man is leaking bloody drool from between his busted lips, but he is tying Anneke’s feet together, vocalizing incoherently, syllables that aren’t words. With strength something lent him, he pulls Anneke upside down, hangs her by her feet, her hands still cuffed to the wall. It’s a bit too far, but he stretches her anyway. She grits her teeth, grunts. Manages not to shout.

Michael Rudnick calls her again.

Anneke left her wallet behind.

She’s not the most organized person, so this seems typical.

And, since she only left him a few hours ago, it shouldn’t raise red flags that she isn’t answering.

But it does.

He calls Andrew.

Andrew hears her.

Barely.

More in his head than outside.

HEY!

It’s enough.

He knows where she is.

Turns around.

The longest three-point turn in the history of wheeled vehicles.

The magic is so strong on the goddamned thing that it has started to look like a tractor again. He unconsciously goes to pass it, and then it turns chicken-legs and one of those legs lashes down at him, hooks his bumper, wrenches it just a little loose, but the bumper hangs on.

“FUCK!” he yells.

Fishtails a little, not like the SUV, not top heavy.

One tire hits and spits gravel, but he gets back on the road.

Gets ahead of it, stops.

It’s coming.

Not all that fast, maybe twenty miles per hour?

He thinks about spinning a tree across its knobby knees, but the witch could boomerang it back at him. Without breaking a sweat. He’s not sure he could stop the return volley.

And Anneke’s in there.

“Fuck.”

It comes on, hopping a little now.

Can he fight it here?

Can he fight her here?

On 104A from the front seat of his car?

Not well.

“COME ON!” he says. “COME ON OVER TO MY HOUSE! LET’S PLAY A GAME!”

He punches the accelerator, squeals his tires, races home.

His phone buzzes in his pocket.

He senses it’s relevant, fishes it out, beaches it on the passenger seat.

Michael Rudnick’s name.

Michael Rudnick’s ringtone.

Queen’s “We Will Rock You.”

He answers.

“Yeah?”

“Everything okay?” the older man asks.

Andrew regrets answering.

Hates his choice, has to make it fast.

Protect Michael or protect Anneke.

Michael is not an easy man to lie to; the pause has already given it away.

And love speaks in imperatives.

“No. It’s not okay.”

The man who used to be Professor Coyle knows his duties.

Muster the troops , she had said. They will know what to do. You guard the little witch, keep her there, mind the hut.

He looks at the troops now.

Nine little burlap dolls.

A model tank.

Three plastic crew members, carefully painted.

On top of the tank, the smallest dead man he has ever seen, frozen behind the top hatch. She shrank him. On the side of the turret the Russian graffiti:

The hut has almost walked to the house of the Thief.

The professor looks out the front window, sees the road bounce beneath him in the glow of the streetlights. In those houses, blurry houses without glasses to correct his myopia and astigmatism, blurry people are eating blurry dinners and squinting at television and doing other things he used to do before. But before is all over for him. An unmeltable wall of ice separates him from before. When he was warm. He knows he is making noise but he can’t seem to stop, so he tries at least to do it rhythmically. He looks at the little witch. She looks up at him, like those lions Marlin Perkins used to dart on Wild Kingdom , able only to look at you, hate you, too drugged to move. She is like that, and that’s good. She kicks really hard. He wasn’t even mad when she broke his tooth and glasses, just frustrated she didn’t understand she was going to get both of them punished.

He gets frustrated with how blurry everything is, picks up one lens of his ruined glasses, holds it to his eye. Now the street is clear. He feels like a giant.

A cyclops.

The slave of a witch.

He says the witch’s words.

Badly, through busted lips.

He thinks his jaw may be broken, too.

But pain is different now, pain’s little cousin.

“Fu, fu, fu.”

Andrew has minutes before the hut comes.

Two? Six? Not ten.

He drives the Mustang up the steep drive, turns left in front of his garage, drives over his herb garden, leaves the car behind the house.

Goes to the kitchen door.

Says words that will undo the magic locks he knows Salvador will have set. Sal greets him, anxious, pelvis tilted forward as though he wished he had a tail to tuck.

The Etch-a-Sketch scrawls MICHAEL and the stick-man points upstairs. Andrew grabs his shillelagh from above the fireplace, takes the stairs in twos, goes into his master bathroom, and finds Michael Rudnick wet in the tub, blinking, dazed.

He’s wet because he jumped in the quarry to get here, grafted his escape tunnel to Andrew’s.

“I hate that goddamned thing,” he says. “I don’t have to leave that way, do I?”

“The tub’s the exception,” Andrew says. “You just can’t come in one door and go out the other.”

Michael gets a good look at him with his white hair fanned out across his shoulders.

“’Bout time,” he says. “You look good. You look like a grown-up.”

Rudnick steps out, dripping, sloshes a plastic trash bag onto the floor, tears it open to produce an oiled leather backpack.

Hefts it.

Andrew goes to his library.

Takes an object from a box he has to reach through an old-style metal fan to get into.

A monkeyish little hand.

Puts this in his jacket pocket.

“Is that—?”

“Yep.”

“Shit,” Michael says.

“Shit,” Andrew says, looking out the attic window.

“Yep,” Michael agrees.

Snowflakes have begun sticking to the window and melting.

An unoccupied tractor is puttering up the drive.

It turns sideways, seems to keep coming sideways, against the direction of the turning wheels, and then the illusion fails and the men see a cabin on chicken’s feet turning its way up the incline, the maples around it pulling back their branches or bending outright to let it pass.

Just as Michael warms up to try to petrify its legs, it ducks sideways, lopes across the lawn, disappears into the woods.

“Fuck,” Andrew says.

“Yep.”

“Wake up,” the bearded man says, in Russian.

He says it to a burlap doll with button eyes.

The doll grows human eyes that blink, man-sized eyes disproportionate to its small head. Now little fingers sprout from its tied-off arms and it grasps handfuls of the man’s sleeve, the sleeve stippled with blood from where he jabbed himself with sewing needles. The doll grows a mouth the size of an almond, black-lipped, its pink gums studded with vicious little teeth like a pike’s teeth.