Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

Says Thank you .

Anneke laughs and cries.

Says, “Oh, fuck.”

Oh, fuck , Andrew-in-Marina thinks.

This is happening.

There’s no other way.

Shelly’s double and Marina both begin to stand, shakily, twitching, muscles misfiring.

Two foals in new bodies.

About to fight to the death.

Anneke wakes up still attached at wrists and ankles, hanging like a hammock in a sinking ship. The hut is on the ground, cracked open, snow falling in. The bearded madman holds his knees, looks out the window, then looks out the window again.

“She got him,” he says.

He keeps repeating “she got him” and looking out the window as if he is stuck in some sort of loop.

She got who?

Andrew, who else?

This guy’s bugshit, he’s like Renfield, don’t listen.

Anneke takes inventory.

Her shoulder really hurts; must have gotten yanked when the hut went down.

The snake torque around her neck is no longer draining her.

Just cold iron.

She has enough magic in her to will it off her, making it groan and twist and finally fall dead to the floor, which is actually the wall now. She breaks the loop holding her feet; they clunk down. Now her hands; she sharpens the inside of the metal loop, uses it to cut her rope.

Renfield sees her struggling free, comes over, tries to hold her down, but he doesn’t mean it. All he manages to do is bleed and cry on her. She stomps him in the chest, crawls out the window, and dumps herself in the snow.

Snow?

It’s fucking August!

Ravens form a loud bully-ring around something to her left.

I don’t want to know what that is, not yet, it’s a deer, just a deer.

She sees the burning T-34, the strange black rocks around it, sees the scattered debris of the wrecked cars and boulders.

Steps on a doll with button eyes and it bleeds into the snow.

Senses she needs to get inside.

Upstairs.

Fast.

She runs.

Ignores the splinters and glass and blood.

Tromps upstairs in her heavy Docs, tracking snow.

Goes to the library.

Anneke enters the library.

Shelly Bertolucci struggles and grunts, locked in combat with the witch who put Anneke in the hut. A bloody saber lies on the floor near them. The witch has scratches near her eyes. Shelly has a broken nose. Books, a broken drill, an overturned table, and other debris litter the floor near the combatants.

Both of them move like they’re drunk.

Anneke stands transfixed.

She looks again at the saber.

Dives for it, her shoulder screaming in protest.

Holds it.

The women fight.

Both of them have seen Anneke take up the weapon; each seems intent on keeping the other from speaking.

The witch lashes out with a vicious elbow, catches Shelly in the ear.

Anneke steps forward, cocks the saber for a thrust.

Marina speaks.

“Anneke Zautke! I’m Andrew! In the wrong body!”

Anneke stops the thrust, which would have taken Marina Yaganishna through the ribs.

A trick. Fuck this Russian whore.

She cocks the weapon back.

Inspired, Marina speaks again.

“Let’s watch Papillon !”

Now Shelly swats Marina across the jaw, catches her hard, if gracelessly, with the heel of her hand.

Shuts her up.

Earns a second to speak.

“What are you doing? Don’t let her hurt me!”

A simulated lover’s simulated plea.

Russian accent?

Anneke squints.

“Hurry!” barks Shelly.

Palatalized H .

Sounds like xhoory!

“Funny,” Anneke says.

Shelly sees Marina about to speak again, catches her with a weak but painful punch in the throat, drives her back.

Marina puts her hands to her neck, falls back into Andrew’s prized leather reading chair.

Shelly is clear now.

Shelly with the Russian accent.

Anneke, in shock, white-faced.

Decides.

Pushes through her instinct not to harm Shelly, uses that momentum to strike.

Hard.

NOW!

Stabs the curved point overhand, down at the red Japanese sun on the younger woman’s T-shirt.

The saber halts for a microsecond at the sternum, pushes through sickeningly, comes out the other side, tenting the cotton there before piercing it.

Shelly’s look of fury turns to pain and disbelief.

She puts her hands on the saber.

And turns back to stone.

Around the steel saber.

Wearing a bloody T-shirt and oversized jeans.

Anneke makes a primal noise something like a wail.

“She’ll try to take your body!” the witch in the chair squeaks through her bruised windpipe. “Tense your muscles… breathe deliberately, fast and shallow.”

Anneke does.

Baba Yaga finds herself bodyless again.

The warlock in her last body is not vulnerable.

Panting in the leather chair like a whelping bitch.

The new witch is shutting her out, too.

She has never felt so weak.

If I don’t find a body soon… Even if I do, I’m not sure I’ll have the strength to take someone.

But I think so.

One more.

That’s when she sees the warm, red light.

Police car?

A policewoman would make a fine host. She would be tempted to walk back in here and shoot these two, but her strength is so low she might not be able to jump back out of the new one without preparing certain potions, using Milk-witch to drain some luminous boy or girl to fuel her. No good. To end her days in an American prison wouldn’t be a very funny joke.

No, wherever she goes next, she’ll need time to gather her strength.

She goes outside, through the ruined front door.

The light glows through the trees.

Down in the road below?

She moves past the tank, past the dead warlock.

The stick-man with the portrait head is slapping pathetically at ravens, trying to get them to stop eating his master.

Good luck, sobaka .

When she gets to the road, she sees no police car.

The red glow is coming from above.

That is incorrect.

She cranes up

with what neck?

and looks

with what eyes?

to see it.

A huge red cloud of whirling lights (eyes?), a cloud as big as a zeppelin, some of its size obscured by the oily smoke and the fog left by the snow and then the absence of snow.

She knows what this thing is.

A collector.

A cleaner.

It comes for recalcitrant spirits.

In a body you can’t see it and it can’t see you.

Ghosts hide from it, but eventually, in ten years or three hundred, it gets them.

I’m a ghost!

She flees, goes into the house across the street.

A dog with three legs barks at her.

She goes into the house, nobody downstairs, upstairs only a dead man and two burnt dolls.

Burnt curtains.

An angry-looking ghost stands near them.

Get out of my house! it yells at her.

She sees his life in an instant.

A weak, angry man.

Go shave your balls , she says.

The dog barks.

The dog then! I’ll hide in the dog!

Would she even live long enough in a dog to gather the strength to push a person out?

Would enough of her be left to have language?

She could be stuck in a cripple dog for years.

Forever, even.

The house fills with red light.

A sort of eye looks in.

Better a dog than in that fucking thing.

The eye sees the angry man fuming.