Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

John hopes they don’t look at the Russian-language poster showing a huge Jew leading Stalin and a Soviet soldier on a rope.

They do.

“Ti shto fashistskoe gavno?”

Dawes picks out the word fascist .

Correctly guesses the uncomplimentary nature of the second bit.

“Ti anti-semit?”

Remembers that nobody on the Soviet reenactor squad actually speaks Russian.

Some kind of fucking communists for real.

The snow on their helmets and coats has melted.

That was real snow what the fuck?

He looks at the only anachronistic poster in the room, a signed and framed poster of Rush Limbaugh wearing a powdered wig and tri-cornered hat.

Two if by Tea!

From Tea to shining Tea!

Original sweet tea.

No help.

Shakedown keeps barking.

Far, far away.

Like the pistol he dropped.

Now walrus picks up John’s rifle.

John’s Nazi rifle.

Nods and looks up at John Dawes.

Grins.

John pisses his pants.

Another gunshot.

This one from the west side of the house.

The high chipping sound of a bullet hitting glass.

“Salvador! Get away from the window.”

Salvador does as he is told, but the bullet already hit its mark.

A perfect hole has appeared in the canvas, just over Dalí’s left eye.

The automaton is unaffected, but the hole will have to be fixed before he takes dog form again.

“Go patch yourself.”

Sal heads for the stairs, another bullet sailing through the window, hitting the wall near the stuffed owl.

Michael hunkers down, sweating despite the chill in the air.

Andrew pops up, steals another glance through his night-vision binocs.

“We’ve got three on this side.”

Two muzzles flash in the darkness.

The bullets turn, striking bricks and plaster elsewhere in the room.

The Brazilian pendant around Andrew’s neck glows warm.

He knows the charm can be overwhelmed if it’s worked too hard; it has already saved him from at least four bullets.

“Let’s wake up Buttercup.”

Michael nods.

“Take cover.”

Michael takes cover.

Andrew hunches low, goes to the window overlooking the front yard.

He stands erect now, well back from the window, in the shadows, but still they see him.

Bullets punch through the window, making the awful pvvvvvt! sound one hears when being shot at, a sound Andrew had been lucky enough never to hear before now. He counts two men in the tree line. Holds up two fingers at Michael, who has scooted himself behind an old plow blade.

It sparks once with a loud P-TANG .

Michael says two paragraphs in the Greek of Archimedes.

Andrew says a sentence in old French.

The vacuum-cleaner beast rears the roosterish brass head at the end of its tube neck, flaps its vulture wings, knocking off its covering sheet. Flexes its chimpanzee arms. Its neck turns, letting it focus its eyes at Andrew.

The lenses rotate.

Shit, is it going to attack?

No, just looking at its master.

“Allez!”

It flaps harder.

Its vacuum motor runs.

It lurches forward, busts out the north window, toward the lake, then turns. Bullets strike it, do it little harm.

Snow blows into the attic behind it.

It steers toward the shooter.

Its eyes flash and something in the tree line bursts into flames.

Screams.

The screaming stops.

Three more bullets whine toward Andrew, one of them from the Dawes house across the street, and all three are turned.

The chain holding the pendant breaks; the pendant falls off, its magic exhausted.

Andrew drops to the floor as the fourth bullet hits brick behind him.

Michael finishes another verse in Greek.

Andrew adds a verse in German to this.

In the front yard, the sound of a long-dead Mustang’s engine turning over.

Now the ground rumbles.

The stuffed birds on their shelf and the terrarium with the replica house shudder, too.

The magi have started a small earthquake.

Buttercup is waking up.

Kolya and Vanya kneel in the snowy patch of woods near the house.

The woman came to them as they drew playing cards against each other in an improvised game involving making up insults for each other’s mother and sisters (“My king of spades says your three of clubs was poked down your mother’s throat by the lieutenant’s cock.”) while the tanks took fuel. She sat next to them, shared vodka with them. Told them if they would come with her, they could get out of the coming fight with the Germans. All they would have to do is to kill an American for her.

“It will not be easy,” she had said. “He is a wizard and has many tricks. You may die. But I picked you from a list of the dead; I know for a fact that you will die if you go to fight the Germans. Kolya, you will be shot by a sniper while taking a piss. Vanya, an eighty-eight-millimeter shell will land so close to you that no part of you will be found and known to be you.”

Vanya had been troubled by a recurrent dream in which the sun came down next to him and burned him up completely. Nobody could find him, not even his mother walking the field with an icon of Jesus.

Kolya hated pissing precisely because he was terrified of snipers.

It was as though she had seen into both of their hearts.

“What about the Germans?” Vanya had said.

“Leave them to my friend Frost,” she answered. A white wolf with bony ribs moved between trees, and then Vanya was not sure he had seen it. “Russia will be Hitler’s graveyard even without you.”

“Will I be able to piss without fear? Will you promise me that I will not be shot while pissing?” Kolya asked.

She had nodded.

So they agreed and the three of them drank vodka with a drop of blood in it to seal the bargain.

The next thing they had known, they dreamed they were tiny children with rough skin, and they were hungry, so they ate mouthfuls of flesh from a man.

And then they were jumping from a hut that was actually a truck except it walked on legs.

And now they are here, together.

Shooting up into a house.

Kolya shot a strange bird that was looking at them.

Vanya thought he shot a man, had him right in his sights, squeezed the trigger patiently and felt the sweet thrill a well-placed shot produces, but the man went unharmed.

To their right, a Russian bursts into flames, screams.

To their left, an engine tries to start, then does start.

The ground rumbles.

Like an armored column passing, but harder.

“My God,” Vanya says.

Kolya points his rifle, but it seems useless in his hands.

The headlamps of a strange wrecked car have switched on in the front yard, just to their left. Another Soviet soldier they do not know had been sheltering behind a large rock near the car, firing up into the attic.

Now the car’s hood becomes a mouth.

A steer’s iron mouth.

The soldier jumps back, startled.

Quick, like a fox eating a mouse, the car clamps down on the man, crushing him.

The car becomes the head of a giant made of tree, tree roots, boulders, and other cars.

This giant grows horns.

Bull’s horns.

It is a man of metal. Stone and wood with a huge longhorn’s skull made of iron.

Headlamps for eyes.

It rips itself out of the ground, leaving a hole the size of a small basement.

Raining dirt and small rocks.

A rusty truck splits itself into pieces, becomes armor plating.

A Greek hoplite’s armor, greaves, abdomen plate, armored skirt and all, wraps in two seconds around the body of wood and stone and steel.