The Necromancer's House (10 page)

He tells them what happened to him in Russia.

The man who forgot his own name has been living on the street in Syracuse since March. March was a hard, miserable month to be outdoors, but, with the help of the blanket from the Salvation Army, the down vest from Goodwill, and the shoplifted sleeping bag, he made it.

He's caveman strong.

A tribe of one.

He is proud of the sleeping bag. Not just for the tactical skill he showed in getting it past the sensors before the stock boy saw him or the sheer athletic prowess that left the pudgy employee huffing and puffing on the wrong side of a wall; he is proud he had the foresight to swipe it while he still looked okay. He knew it wouldn't be long before he smelled like Dumpsters and had a beard, and that people like that get watched the minute they enter a place of business.

He is proud, too, of the fight with the shower-cap man. Shower-cap wanted that sleeping bag; it was a hunter's bag, camouflaged, rated all the way down to ten below. You don't need to tuck tail and run for the mission in a bag like that. Shower-cap pushed a shopping cart full of stuffed animals around, held the stuffies up and made them wave at cars before he showed his
HUNGRY NEED A DOLLAR GOD LOVES U
sign. Kids made their parents give him the dollar, and he smiled his gap-toothed smile at them. But not everybody who plays with teddy bears is nice. Shower-cap thought because he was big and had a pipe he was going to get that thermal sleeping bag and make the new guy push on to another on-ramp. Shower-cap was wrong. Shower-cap pushed on. Shower-cap's smile has more gaps now.

The young man has always been a good fighter.

Going into the infantry seemed right, even though someone he cared about asked him not to. Begged him not to that day on the couch, lying on him and crying down into his eyes.

He had to go, and at the time he thought she didn't understand, but he has come to believe that maybe she did.

He came back from Afghanistan after only a few weeks in country. He came back different. Not better different. Traumatic-brain-injury-and-severe-tinnitus different. The IED had spun the Humvee like a soda can, popped it in half, killed the lieutenant and the Mexican outright, blinded the guy who played hockey. He didn't remember names so well anymore, but he knew that guy played hockey. He himself was the luckiest guy in the limo that day, but he wasn't all that lucky. Kept all his outside parts, but now everything sounded like whining, and he got mad fast. Yelled when he argued, which didn't play well at the smartphone sales kiosk in the Carousel mall. Or at the Catholic high school that took him on as a janitor. Or at the car wash, where he worked for six hours.

That he grabbed arms and squeezed to emphasize the yelling hadn't played well with sparrow-tattoo girl. And it was sparrow-tattoo girl's apartment.

Had been before he left for the army, when he had his own place, too. He had known her for years. Three? Four?

She had cried down into his eyes.

He used to have some letters she wrote.

She was right to kick him out.

He stole the sleeping bag the very same day.

Never went back for his stuff.

He is a caveman now.

 • • • 

It's a warm day and he's wearing the video game T-shirt, his favorite shirt. He has already gotten thirty-three dollars and fifty cents from the good motorists heading away from the airport onto Interstate 81. He has just lain down to nap when he sees a woman walking up to him, a pretty, older woman.

He sits up on one elbow and smiles at her.

He still has a good smile.

He watches her.

It isn't every day that someone bothers to get out of the car and come over to him here, although it has happened.

She has a carload waiting for her, calling to her in another language. One of the men gets out, starts toward her protectively, which is completely unnecessary. He's harmless to women unless they argue with him, and then he just squeezes their arms. He doesn't even mean to do that.

She takes something from her purse; a vial of water? Three ounces, just how they like it at the TSA.

She unscrews the cap.

He just stares at her beauty mark, her pretty, fair skin.

She's prettier than sparrow-tattoo girl, even though she's old enough to be her mom.

A MILF.

He hates that word.

“Your name was Victor,” she tells him. She has an accent.

Her voice cuts through the whining in his head, and the whining stops.

Nobody ever did so much for him.

Tinnitus comes and goes as it pleases, doctors can't help, the VA can't help, but this woman made it stop.

He wants to cry.

“Victor,” he says, agreeing. “That's right.”

He remembers it sometimes on his own, but it's good to have it in his mouth again.

He hears the soft rush of cars, the delicious music of birds.

No whine.

“You are too young to live so hard. Are you thirsty, Victor?”

Come to think of it, he
is
thirsty.

He licks his lips and nods.

What is it?
he thinks.

“Melted snow,” she says. “From home.”

She gives him the vial and he drinks it.

It's cold, colder than he thought it would be, and clean.

“Don't waste any,” she says, and he doesn't, he even licks the back of his hand after he wipes his beard.

Now the foreign man is descending on them, speaking their language.

It's Russian.

He understands them, though he doesn't get how.

“This sort of thing is not done here, these people are dangerous. Please, Marina.”

“He's not dangerous to me,” she says, still kneeling, and winks at him.

She hands him a twenty-dollar bill, but he understands that it isn't really for him, that it's just
pokazukha
, a show she's putting on for the cousin.

He won't need money anymore, and the thought makes him smile.

He smiles at this woman, whom he loves with all his heart, whose arms he will never grab and squeeze, and she smiles back.

She gave him his name back, but it was just to let him know how special she was, how right it was for him to trust her.

He isn't Victor anymore.

He isn't a caveman anymore.

He doesn't know what he is, but he goes to sleep under the overpass for the last time before his great adventure, and he dreams of his blind friend playing hockey. He has his sight back, and he's skating with his stick low, skating fast, skating with agility and grace.

Once-Was-Victor has to look up to watch his friend skate.

He is watching him from under the ice.

Morning.

The necromancer's house.

The birds had been chirping before, and he guesses they still are, but Salvador now fills the house with the sound of vacuuming, perhaps the most domestic sound on the American Foley board.

The previous night had been full of horrors, but the morning seems so placid it all might have been a bad dream.

Awful, really awful, but I learned a lot.

I'm ready to try more.

Maybe today, after I show the girls the house?

He rubs his navel, remembering how much it hurt when the thing from the lake bit down on his tether.

To hell with that.

Nadia smokes and lounges on the patio below, outside.

Anneke isn't here yet.

Nothing makes the world feel mundane like a nice, soul-numbing dose of social media. Andrew plants himself in front of his desktop Mac, logs in to Facebook, and scrolls down the news feed on his home page. He watches the Honey Badger for perhaps the fifteenth time, chuckling at it anyway. He scrolls past event invites, Farmville crap, the obligatory feel-good story soured at the end by “share if you're not a bastard” or the like, and then finds the pro-Obama photo he reposted. President O in cool shades, smiling big, extending a hand in a walking drive-by hello, captioned.

SORRY I TOOK SO LONG TO SHOW YOU MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE—I WAS BUSY KILLING BIN LADEN

Thirty-seven comments.

He knew when he reposted it that it was a bad idea, a little more wrong than funny, but he had been tired. Unsurprising that it generated a thread with thirty-something comments; most of his friends are liberal, and most of the conservative ones are polite enough not to start a donnybrook on someone else's post, but some people enjoy charging into a hostile audience.

Andrew calls this belligerent Facebook sport “Red Rover,” and, although he never plays, his brother Charley should be in the social media asshole hall of fame.

Along with John Dawes across the street.

The two of them actually found themselves facing the shield wall of Andrew's friends so often they friended each other, though they would never meet in person, and wouldn't like each other if they did.

Charley is a big-money infomercial pitchman for Jesus (BMW Jesus, not donkey-and-sandals Jesus), and Dawes owns a vintage German sniper rifle and keeps a balls-mean dog on a run that only just stops him before the road. It's a three-legged dog (Dawes's one inarguable virtue is his volunteerism and advocacy for rescued pits), but the fucker really moves. Andrew hates biking past that house, knowing he is one chain link away from hospitalization and that Dawes would treat the whole thing like his fault. Charley would think Dawes was dangerously unbalanced (he is), and Dawes would think Charley was fake and a huge pussy (he is).

Andrew really wants them to hang out sometime.

In this thread, John Dawes (who, it must be said, has never been in the military) is explaining the operational details of the bin Laden mission, while Charles Blankenship is questioning Andrew's patriotism, which he does about once a month.

Andrew wishes he were better at casting spells over the net—that's Radha's thing—because he would cheerfully cause two photos to appear:

1. John Dawes shaving his nuts during
Gilligan's Island
.

2. Charley Blankenship, age ten, holding his eye and running away from the black girl he tried out the N-word on in 1965. (Ironically, this was at an all-Dayton Halloween Fair and Charley was dressed as an Indian, feather and all.)

 • • • 

Anneke knocks.

She has gone home for the night and then returned.

Andrew answers the door wearing his Japanese robe, wool-lined Ugg mules on his feet.

A vacuum cleaner is running but cuts off a second after the door opens.

“This is my house, and you must exit the same way you enter. It's important.”

He says this to her every time she comes over.

“What happens if I don't?”

“It's important.”

Salvador crosses behind Andrew, carrying the vacuum cleaner in one wooden hand, winding the cord with the other.

The rusalka is already here, wearing a dress, almost certainly at Andrew's request. A simple summer dress that's a bit short on her, damp at the top where she keeps wetting her hair.

He really is fucking her. Nose, meet clothespin.

 • • • 

French-press coffee first, Sumatran.

Black for Anneke.

Honey for the rusalka.

Hazelnut syrup for Andrew.

Salvador knows the drill.

He keeps himself out of the way when the tour begins.

 • • • 

First, the staircase.

“All right, this one's cheap and basic. I'll just show you.”

He stands at the top of the steps.

“Anneke, you up for a stunt? It might hurt.”

She smiles at that.

“Yes.”

“Come on up.”

She starts up the stairs.

Andrew says, “
Slippery-slope.
”

The stairs turn into a very sleek, polished ramp.

She falls forward, slides down, lands on her feet.

“Nice!” she says.

“
Ziggurat.
”

The stairs reappear.

“Care to try again?”

She nods, grinning, starts back up.

“
Flytrap
,” he says.

Reality seems to blur.

Anneke has the sensation of falling, stopping.

At first she doesn't understand why she seems shorter, but when she tries to take a step, she realizes she has sunk into the wood beneath her, as if into quicksand that set and became hard again instantly. Everything below her knees is caught fast.

Without even thinking, she glances back to note the location of the rusalka.

Nadia's eyes are narrow and shining faintly luminous green.

“Don't do that,” Anneke says.

“Do what?”

Sounds like
Vaht?

“Look at me like prey in a trap, or whatever that raccoon-fishy look is.”

“Oh. Is reflex.”

 • • • 

“We'll do this top down,” Andrew says as Nadia and Anneke ascend the ladder after him. A bare lightbulb comes to life overhead. “This is my attic. Most of the things up here have to do with keeping the house safe, so please don't touch anything. At all. And don't ask very specific questions about items. Once an aggressive spell is loaded into a physical object, explanation dilutes its power. Sometimes even triggers it.”

“How would it trigger it?”

“Intent. Visualization. If someone other than the creator knows exactly what it does and imagines it happening, it might happen. ‘Someone' meaning a user. Or anyone with a particularly vivid imagination. It's supposed to be rare, and I've never seen something go off because it was discussed, but I've read about that happening.”

Everyone is up.

The girls look around.

The attic is much less cluttered than Anneke expected.

A few cardboard boxes and several sealed plastic tubs sit against the walls, but those aren't what draw the eye.

The owl stands out.

A great horned owl, glass-eyed, the kind that's big enough to drive eagles off their nests, stands atop a long shelf also inhabited by a blue jay, two crows, and a hummingbird.

Both Anneke and the rusalka next notice a vaguely animal-shaped form sitting atop a huge, old steamer trunk, draped with a dusty sheet.

Whatever it is has a long, reptilian tail.

Andrew sees them looking, steps over to it, pulls the sheet back.

“What the fuck is
that
?”

“It's a Tri-Star vintage rolling canister vacuum cleaner, of course. Slightly modified.”

“
Slightly modified
,” Nadia says, displaying her rotten teeth in an appreciative grin. The bulldoggish, triangular canister forms the base for a disturbing amalgamation of tools and taxidermied animal parts; the wheels that would normally support the larger rear of the appliance (now reversed to serve as the beast's puffed-up chest) have been replaced by a chimpanzee's arms, currently resting on their elbows, hands folded as if in prayer. An especially large alligator donated the tail snaking from the tapered end of the wedge, where the hose once attached. Said hose has been grafted to the larger end and pressed into service as the neck supporting the head, a sort of welded brass-and-metal rooster head with gogglish eyeglass lenses for eyes and the tips of kitchen knives for a crest. The beak looks fully capable of biting through a truck tire. For good measure, folded vulture's wings perch on the slanted back.

“Does he have a name?” Anneke asks.

“Actually, she does. And I know it's in the form of a rooster—I thought about calling it ‘Billy' after the guy who welded it for me—but something about it strikes me as feminine.”

He whispers the name to her.

“Electra.”

 • • • 

Next the trio considers a sort of standing fish tank with a great mound of dirt coming halfway up. Crisscrossed coat hangers frame the top, and from this frame, supported by golden threads, hangs a scale model of the necromancer's house, exact in every detail.

“What . . . ?” Anneke starts.

“Don't ask about this one,” Andrew says. “Let's move on.”

 • • • 

“The bedroom,” he says as neutrally as possible.

“Stand at the door,” he says to Anneke.

“Why always her?” the rusalka pouts. “When do I get to do something?”

“I'm not sure how this stuff will work on you.”

“Because. I'm not. A person,” she says, with more than a dash of hurt pride.

Unimpressed, Andrew says, “That's. Exactly. Right.”

He lies down on his bed, stretches out.

“Come to the bed and sit down,” he tells Anneke.

She does so, looking around, wondering what the trick will be.

Nothing happens.

She just sits.

“Now go back and do it again, only this time think about hurting me.”

“Gladly,” she says, laughing.

Now she crosses the room at a slight crouch, her hand held up dramatically as if holding an invisible knife, ready to stab him
Psycho
-style.

When she gets halfway there, the door to the walk-in closet opens.

“Oh shit,” she says.

Takes another step.

Everything happens fast.

The telephone on Andrew's nightstand rings.

Serpentine objects fly from Andrew's closet, brown and black, four of them, whipping at high speed.

She tries to cover her face with her hands.

Not snakes.

Belts.

The leather stings when it hits her.

“Ow, fuck!”

Andrew swears in surprise and mild pain as well.

The belts wrap around Anneke's hands and feet, bind them together, hog-tie her. A fifth belt loops around her neck, but only tightens enough to let her know it's there.

The reason Andrew swore is that the belt he was wearing whipped off him, gave him a nasty burn on the side, dinged his hand good with the buckle as it shot itself at Anneke.

The phone rings again.

Levitates off the bed, floats over to her.

The speaker cozies up to her ear.

Andrew's voice, prerecorded.

“
Honi soit qui mal y pense!
Try not to move too much, as the belts tighten when you struggle. Especially the one around your neck. I'll be with you at my earliest convenience.”

The phone dies, thunks to the floor, lies still.

Nadia gently applauds, as if at the opera.

The magus helps Anneke off with the belts.

“Why did you waste a big one like that?”

“I'll load it up again tomorrow. It's not the only one in here.”

“What was the French?”

“Basically,
Think good thoughts
.”