Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

The man still dangles from its mouth.

It spits him out.

It is as tall as the house.

What lands on the yard is not a man, but a lifeless doll.

No bigger than a cat.

Buttons for eyes.

“Jesus Christ,” Andrew says, the headlamps level with the attic, sweeping the attic with light. “It’s fucking Buttercup.”

“Yep,” Michael Rudnick says, grinning.

He stops grinning as they watch the Soviet soldier fall from the bull’s mouth, his neck on wrong.

I drove that car into a tree with Sarah in it.

Drunk I’m worthless I should die.

Stop it!

Focus!

You’re a warlock now.

Look what you made!

You have to stop the witch.

Save Anneke.

Andrew says, “Buttercup.”

It looks at him, robes him in light.

“Kill the soldiers. Break the hut’s legs.”

The lights sweep off, illuminating snowflakes as the minotaur heads for the tree line, the ground shaking at its steps.

Vanya shoots it, shoots one of its headlamps out, but it keeps coming. It bends for a log. It sees Kolya frozen in fear, quite near it. Squashes him with the log as easily as a man would kill a toad, squashes him down into the soil. Kolya is gone entirely. Vanya runs into thick forest, away from the giant.

Something trips him.

The tail of a dragon?

Attached to a vacuum cleaner?

Now a brass-and-metal beaked head turns to look at him, great black wings spreading.

He tries to point his rifle, but its eyes flash.

I’m burning!

The pain is immeasurable.

Then he isn’t burning.

He’s running through a field of sunflowers, running at a German artillery position.

A cacophony of noise around him, but he feels great relief.

It’s so good not to be burning that he laughs, still running.

Then he hears the whine.

An eighty-eight-millimeter shell drawing nearer.

It’s coming for me, right at me!

He flings himself to the ground.

Still the whine grows louder.

He knows it will land almost on him, seems to see the shadow of it growing on the spot exactly near his head where it will punch into soil and sunflowers and explode.

He will be mixed with sunflowers.

Time for one last thought.

Sunflowers. This isn’t so bad.

Kolya huddles, mad with fear, when the giant bull comes for him.

It raises its huge tree trunk.

It’s going to crush me! Help! Help!

But then he isn’t in a snowy yard outside a rich man’s house getting crushed by a giant bull-man.

Now he is standing, wiener in hand, urinating on a low stone wall near a collapsed farmhouse.

“Ah,” he says, relieved to feel his bladder emptying.

Relaxed.

Suddenly Kolya feels pressure in his head, massive pressure.

Can’t see anymore.

Hears the rifle’s crack.

Ow!

Sniper!

Kolya feels himself falling in a muted way, as if someone else is falling.

He hears his friends returning fire into the tree line.

A mile away and receding.

He manages to say one last sentence.

“This bitch lies.”

Andrew scoots to the other end of the attic, risks a peek.

The minotaur has crossed behind the house, drawing rifle fire from the soldiers on the west side. A grenade lands near it and goes off, blowing off part of one greave, causing it to bleed oil and limp. But it knocks down trees and bellows, flushing the soldier who threw the grenade so the vacuum-cockatrice flies down on him. Its fire magic is exhausted, but it grabs him with its chimp arms and flies him into a tree until his head caves in and he, too, reverts into a lifeless burlap doll.

Exhausted, Electra collapses next to the doll and lies still.

Now Buttercup sweeps its remaining headlight over the backyard again, letting its light fall on a tractor.

As soon as the beam hits it, the tractor changes into the hut on chicken legs.

The minotaur gives chase.

Back around to the front yard.

Andrew follows the action, peeking out the front window now, Michael Rudnick next to him, drawing one missed shot from the sniper’s roost at the Dawes house.

This starts Shakedown barking again.

“We need to take care of that,” Andrew says.

Michael nods.

“You have something?”

“I was saving it,” Andrew says, “but, yeah.”

He puts a finger down his throat.

Regurgitates a golf-ball-sized chicken’s eye onto the oak floorboards.

It floats up, hovers, blinks at Andrew.

Heads across the lawn toward the Dawes house.

Anneke wakes up from an awful dream about a snake on her mouth into an equally disturbing dream in which a teetering hut is being knocked down by a giant.

She is in the hut.

Hanging suspended, upside down.

Things slide across the floor, fly up, banging into her.

A bucket busts her lip.

Pain in her shoulder.

The hut has lurched, fallen sideways; she has careened with it, her cuffed arms and feet jerking her short.

The beardy man has fallen, too, yelping as coals from the stove scatter around the hut.

He grunts and puts these out with his hands.

Andrew sees Buttercup intercept the hut; the chase was almost comical.

But now he concentrates on the eye.

Eagle’s eye could have done it from here.

He guides it near, nearer.

Puts his own vision into it.

Sees them.

Two Russians, two rifles.

One in some kind of steel breast-gear.

Big mustache.

They lie side to side.

Close enough.

This spell is old Slavic forest magic.

He says “Strike!” in medieval Russian.

The men both look up at the eye, more in wonder than fear.

They have their helmets off, so he gets to see their hair stand up on end.

Bright flash!

Now his sight switches dizzyingly back into his own head; he sees the lightning bolt originate from the chicken’s eye, incinerating it, leaping down into the two soldiers, lighting Dawes’s curtains on fire.

Thunder cracks and booms.

He knows both men are dead.

He is blind in his right eye, as if it has stared at the sun.

Believes his sight will return, but isn’t sure.

In the yard, the hut has fallen.

The chicken’s legs scrabble ineffectually at the minotaur.

It grabs one, breaks it over its knee.

“Buttercup,” Andrew says.

It stops with the broken leg in its hands, like a woman interrupted in the business of dressing a hen for the oven.

“Get Anneke out safely. Bring her here.”

Now it peels part of the roof back.

Peers in.

Another flash.

Starting in the woods.

BANG!

The minotaur’s right shoulder explodes, the arm turning back into tree, rocks, car parts, raining down the steep driveway.

Buttercup falls on its huge ass, its weight causing the house to shudder.

It struggles to get to its feet, wanting to use the missing arm, falling heavily, getting back up to its knees.

The hut, too, tries to stand.

It manages.

Holds its broken leg up, hops to the tree line.

The minotaur is almost up.

BANG!

The shell catches it in the throat, blowing its head up and off.

The whole monstrosity turns back into cars and boulders, some of this airborne.

“Oh shit,” Andrew says.

He and Rudnick both drop, cover their heads with their hands.

The old Mustang, on fire, flips end over end, clips the top of the house off, exposing stars and sky and letting in cold air.