Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

“You didn’t eat the poor thing.”

“I wanted to. He was old, but plump and spoiled with good meat on his thighs. But I knew you would be upset.”

“So you ate him and resolved to lie to me about it.”

“I cannot lie to you.”

“You cannot lie to me and get away with it.”

“Is same thing.”

“Is not same thing. Is question of intent.”

“I left him where he was. The door was open. He can stay, he can go, is up to him. Someone will find him. Maybe you? You want an old shitty dog?”

“Salvador wouldn’t like that.”

“No,” she agrees.

He lights his own Spirit and inhales deeply, exhales slowly, mouth closed, eyes closed, letting the smoke come out of his nose in a luxurious rush.

Poison.

Everything I enjoy is connected to death.

“Did you ever get the feeling that something bad has happened, something just outside your control, and perhaps outside your understanding, which will set in motion a series of events that will lead to deep tragedy? And great loss.”

She considers this. Draws smoke with difficulty because she has wet the filter. Lets it out of her nose, as he did.

“Yes.”

As if summoned, Salvador walks downstairs carrying the soaked and reeking bedsheets from the master bedroom toward the laundry room in the basement. If the framed portrait of Salvador Dalí that served as his head could bear any expression other than the self-consciously crazed eyes of the surrealist, the stick-and-wicker man might raise an eyebrow. He loves to hear his name.

As it is, he swivels his painted gaze at them on his way down, hoping to be called over, but, when he isn’t, continues dutifully down the steps on his military-grade prosthetic legs.

Once in the basement, it is all Salvador can do not to spread the sheets out and roll in them; the basket at the center of him holds the salted heart of the border collie he had been before the magus revived him in this form, and that heart still gladdens at strong smells, particularly fishy or fecal ones. He inclines his flat portrait head toward the armful of bedclothes, reveling in their filth. It will be criminal to wash these delicious odors away, but he loves his master as only dogs love, and he sighs a canine sigh and opens the door of the washing machine.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses come soon after the storm is over. The air is damp and the receding dark clouds in the east make their white shirts pop as they walk up the drive between the young maple trees. Andrew stands on his front porch with his leather coat on, knowing he looks and smells every inch the career sinner, combing out waist-length hair redolent of tobacco and myrrh. He frowns at a new white hair, plucks it, winds it around a finger.

It will take them a moment to make it up the steep walk.

He realizes he is about to sigh, recognizes impatience as a sign of entitlement, thinks he really should read another book about Buddhism and try to meditate. He has a date with being Buddhist, but he isn’t there yet.

And here come two of God’s warriors, both of them African American, one in his sixties, one about twenty.

At least they mean it, I’ll give them that. They wear out a lot of shoe leather doing what Jesus said to do. No Christmas. No Halloween. But this is a little like trick-or-treating. Do they eat candy? Do I even have any candy?

The older one is slowing them down.

That guy doesn’t need any candy.

That wasn’t very Buddhist, and he’s not fat, just a little soft around the middle, and probably a grandfather, so give him a break.

Maybe that kid’s grandfather?

The elder raises a hand, smiles a winning smile.

“Quite a driveway you have here,” he says. “You must be in good shape!”

“I might be if I ever left. I’m a hermit. All I do up here is talk to God and wait for strangers to come so I can tell them God’s plan for them. Didn’t they warn you about me at the Kingdom Hall?”

“Well, they did say…”

“Where’s Barbara?”

“She moved to Syracuse.”

“More action in the big city. A rich crop of the godless there, I tell you.”

“Something like that.”

He stands with his hands on his hips, bent forward just a little, his elbows fanning out his open coat, Sears, granddad gray. Tie the color of an excited brick. He’s smiling and panting, catching his breath.

“You okay?” Andrew says.

He nods, still panting.

The younger Witness senses he should say something, but he’s a shy one. He’s also more than a little distracted by the garden of rocks and rusted-out cars piled in Andrew’s front yard. The ’65 Mustang he wrecked, an old Chevy truck, a Dodge Dart. All of them wound through with young trees and big, handsome boulders. Its aesthetic leans just more toward art installation than junkyard fodder.

The boy is fascinated with it, especially the bleached longhorn steer skull crowning it all, its dry teeth yellowing in their sockets, its horns leather-wrapped at the base, slightly tilted.

The lad knows there’s something more to it than meets the eye.

He knows he’s the one who’s supposed to break the silence, though, so he speaks.

“Quite a… quite a storm, wasn’t it?”

“Sure was,” Andrew says.

They exchange a look.

The boy glances at the steer skull again, then tilts his head a little bit at the magus, like a dog trying to process a strange sound.

Holy shit, is this kid luminous?

A natural?

Andrew smiles more broadly.

Damn if he isn’t. Marching around with armfuls of The Watchtower when he’s just humming with receptivity for magic. Anneke’s got a little, but this kid’s like I was.

Ready to explode.

One spell book away from a lifetime of…

What?

Now the older man stands.

“Arthur. Arthur Madden,” he says, holding out a hand. “And this handsome fellow is Marcus Madden, Jr. No relation. Just kidding.”

“Andrew Blankenship.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Blankenship.”

This is a genuinely nice guy. I’ll keep it dialed down.

It’s hard to keep the mischief out of his voice.

“Would you like to come in?”

They leave twenty minutes later.

It isn’t the conversation about the reliability of the gospels, nor is it Andrew’s Socratic minefield of questions; it isn’t even Andrew’s assertion that a God who intended sex for procreation alone would not have built a clitoris, nor made it so compatible with the tongue. (“Must be nice to be so close to the lake,” Arthur says to change the subject, although Andrew enjoys the unintended symbolism, as he enjoys that this is how faultlessly polite Arthur chooses to comment about the fishy smell permeating the house.)

It’s Marcus.

Marcus sees too much.

First he’s distracted, looking out at the lake through the back windows.

“Is there something more interesting than us out there, young man?”

“I… thought I saw a… dolphin.”

“Lakes don’t have dolphins,” Arthur says.

“We have some very big fish,” Andrew offers.

The kid looks at him dubiously.

“Very big,” Andrew says.

They return to the topic of whether homosexuality is a sin or a natural state of being. Marcus always lets Arthur (his great-uncle, as it turns out) field the questions, but Andrew drags him in from time to time.

“C’mon, Marcus—you’ve seen gay kids.”

Marcus almost laughs at that and Arthur steers the conversation back around to God’s capacity for forgiveness, clearly meaning Andrew.