Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

A sort of hand reaches into the window.

NO! NO! NO! the man says, but it takes him anyway.

Dissolves him utterly, or so it seems.

So ends the shortest haunting in New York State history.

Baba flees downstairs.

Tries to get into the dog, but it runs back and forth on its run, barking at her.

Too tense, too fast.

How does a dog with three legs move so fast?

Now the huge red thing is done with the angry man.

She moves off into the woods.

Considers going back to the Thief’s house and taking a raven.

Too small.

The woods go red.

Not ME!

You won’t get ME!

Wait… what is that?

In the hollow of a log.

Something cowers.

Just big enough, she thinks.

Then she recognizes it.

The indignity of the situation galls her.

A skunk?

Worse than that.

A pregnant skunk?

A sort of eye looks down at her through a crown of maple leaves.

Here is the devil!

Fearful, the skunk shows her its teeth.

It has good reason to be afraid.

Baba Yaga pushes.

The skunk squeals.

The red light goes away.

When the police come, Marina Yaganishna tells them what happened standing twenty yards from Andrew’s corpse.

They see what she wants them to see.

They believe what she tells them.

From the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus :

MAYFIELD

PHILANTHROPIST

DIES

NEAR

CHERNOBYL

Montpelier, VT

—Michael Rudnick, local sculptor and philanthropist, has been found dead in the abandoned Ukrainian town of Pripyat of what appears to have been a massive stroke.

Rudnick, 71, is known for a variety of charitable acts. In 2005 he donated building materials for the new prenatal wing at the Mayfield Memorial Hospital; in 2009 he gave a life-sized sculpture of a charging bear to the Northern Vermont Museum of Natural History, and children from Mayfield to Montpelier know the white-bearded Rudnick as Father Christmas for his appearances at local parks on a reindeer-pulled sled.

A State Department official described Rudnick’s presence in Pripyat, part of the exclusion zone exposed to radiation in the 1986 explosion of reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, as “highly irregular,” but declined to elaborate. Rudnick served in the U.S. Army infantry in 1968 and attended the University of Vermont on the G.I. Bill. He is survived by a sister, Michelle, and a brother, Paul.

Asked about her brother’s tragic journey to Ukraine, Michelle Rudnick-Osborne said, “Michael was always full of surprises, always turning up where you didn’t expect him. But he always had your back. There’s nobody else like him, and we’ll miss him very much.”

From the Syracuse Post-Standard :

METEOR

STRIKE

KILLS 1, INJURES 1

Dog Neck Harbor, NY

—A Cayuga County man is dead and a Cornell professor is injured following a rare meteor strike in west-central New York.

The deceased, John Dawes, 46, appears to have been struck in the neck by flying metal from the destruction of a car owned by neighbor Andrew Blankenship, whose house was also damaged in the freak event. Blankenship was away at the time.

Blankenship’s houseguest, Marina Yaganishna, reported hearing a “rushing sound followed by a chain of god-awful bangs. The house was hit so hard I was afraid it would fall.”

James Coyle, Ph.D., is reported in stable condition with lacerations and head trauma. He has no memory of how he got to Dog Neck Harbor from his summer cabin in nearby Sterling, New York.

The phenomenon occurred at about 9:45 P.M. at Willow Fork Road on the east side of town.

A tractor of unknown provenance was also struck, its gas tank igniting and the resulting fire burning a section of woods.

Andrew-in-Marina walks with Anneke to the feasting crows. Anneke already got Salvador to go inside.

“Don’t look,” Marina tells Anneke, looking. Her accent is pure midwestern American.

“Me don’t look? How about you don’t look?” Anneke says, looking.

“I’ll only get to see this once,” Marina says.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Marina takes a lock of Andrew’s hair.

It will be necessary for the spells Marina will cast to make herself look like him, sound like him.

This won’t be easy, but she won’t have to do it long; just long enough to tie things up legally, make the property Marina’s.

A search of the hut yielded her passport, driver’s license, credit cards.

Near dawn, Marina and Anneke burn Andrew’s remains, making the flames crematorium-hot with the last of the fireglass.

“Andrew Blankenship is dead,” Marina says.

“Long live Marina Yaganishna,” Anneke says, offering Marina a cigarette.

She almost reaches for one, then shakes her head.

“I think I just quit.”

Anneke spends the night.

The two of them spoon, each holding the other as if she were as fragile as a kite.

Sleep comes only in teaspoons.

The one time both of them sleep, one cries out, wakes the other.

Neither is sure who.

In the morning Chancho comes by for a training session Andrew had forgotten about.

Anneke tells Chancho what happened.

“No effin’ way.”

Chancho looks Marina up and down.

He looks at her in silence for a good minute and a half.

“Hey, bruja ,” he says at last, addressing Marina. “Name three people who beat the Iceman.”

“KO or decision?” the woman says.

“Your choice.”

“Rashad Evans. Rampage Jackson. What’s-his-face Jardine. The Dean of Mean. Keith?”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t no knockout.”

“You said, ‘your choice.’”

Chancho nods, very slowly.

“What about Ortiz?”

Marina wrinkles her mouth at Chancho.

“Ortiz never beat Liddel. Ortiz is a pendejo .”

Chancho corrects her pronunciation.

Andrew looks like Andrew thanks to a very powerful, very temporary spell.

He goes to see his lawyer, signs everything over to Marina Yaganishna, whom he describes as a cousin.

“Cousin, eh? Is that what they’re calling Russian Internet brides these days? What are you doing, Andrew?”

“Just trust me.”

“Tax stuff? You hiding assets?”

“Just do it, please.”

Andrew has until sunset to look, smell, and sound like himself.

He calls Salvador.

Sal waggles his hips for the first time since Andrew’s body died.

“Sal, I have to ask you a question.”

The framed portrait of Dalí nods.

“Sal, are you happy?”

Salvador doesn’t respond for some time.

Then it turns the knobs on the Etch-a-Sketch.

I

SERVE

“That’s not an answer. I want to know if you’re happy. Now. Like this.”

One of the automaton’s hands moves toward the knobs to reply.

Then it lies still.

There it is, then.

“I’m going to ask you another question, Sal. It’s a question that means more than it seems to mean, so I want you to think about your answer, okay?”

The portrait nods.

“Do you want to stay inside with me? Or do you want to go outside?”

Salvador bows his head.

Then points at the Etch-a-Sketch.

I

SERVE.