The Necromancer's House (13 page)

Karl Zautke lies on his side with the breathing tube in.

His pillows are damp beneath him. The lymph nodes in his neck hurt him, have grown from acorns to grapes, but he can breathe a bit better, well enough to sleep. He fights it, though, his big blue eyes rolling back, the lids closing, and then he forces them open again for another bleary image of his daughter, her faggish but nice friend sitting next to her.

He feels so bad he doesn't even want a PBR.

His left foot sticks out, pink and huge, the flesh swollen around the little yellow nails.

Karl is far too big for this place, hates his hospital gown, hates how wet it is. One of the minor nasties (among many nasties, great and small) about leukemia is how much laundry you have to do, how much you sweat.
Like a whore in church
is his default cliché. His girl has been doing his laundry for him, doing everything. He can't stand being a burden. But the sweating. He soaks his shirts and underthings so easily he keeps his three window AC units thrumming at sixty-six degrees from June through September.

They're running now in his empty house.

This is Karl's third hospitalization for pneumonia in two years, and he knows as well as Anneke does that this is what kills most people with his kind of leukemia. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia, the slower kind. It wears you down. Erodes you. He's had it for eight years, several stretches of remission making him hopeful he might live long enough to die of heart disease or something that wasn't so damned . . .
nagging
. This is no way for a man to live, constantly tired, afraid of infection. Purel in his shirt pocket. Waterpik-ing his goddamn teeth like a supermodel, crossing the street away from anybody coughing, especially kids. And Karl
likes
kids. It just isn't fair he's had to stay away from them now when he hasn't done anything
wrong
.

He looks at Anneke one more time.

An unpleasant thought crosses his mind; he puts that away.

Thinks instead about her learning to ride that powder-blue bike with the streamers on the handles. The face she made (teeth bare, mouth half open, a lion cub about to bite) when he picked gravel out of her scraped knee, sprayed cold Bactine on it. How proud he was of her for getting back on the bike immediately, how he knew she was doing it for him, for that extra scrunch in his eyes when he smiled down at her.

Nothing pleases Karl like watching someone he loves be brave.

This is why Anneke.

Won't.

Fucking.

Cry.

Her eyes are moist, but that's as far as it goes.

Father looks at daughter, daughter at father.

Their Germanic blue eyes hold communion for another few seconds before the big man rolls his eyes back under his lids and sleeps.

 • • • 

“I don't feel good about this one,” she says.

Andrew holds her hand. She allows this but squeezes his every few seconds as if to show him the strength in her hand, as though she is too proud to just let her hand lie in his, take warmth and love from him.

“He's seventy now. He's tired,” she says.

Andrew nods, looking at him.

His beard, mostly white with hints of the reddish blond that made him look like a stout Robert Redford in his youth, seems itchy and wrong on him. He only grew it to hide the lymph nodes so nobody asked about them.

“He hates sympathy. Can't stand people fussing over him,” Anneke explains. She's taking on a teacher's voice, assuming an in-control role so she doesn't have to feel quite so much.

Andrew already knows this about the big ex-navy man, not only because he waited until he had almost suffocated before he phoned his little girl for help, but also because Anneke could have just as easily been describing herself.

The man never thought much of Andrew, never knew him well or wanted to. He was pleasant enough, just didn't know what locker to put him in so radiated a benign neutrality toward the smaller man. Not his daughter's boyfriend, she didn't have those. Effeminate, probably somebody she met in “gay circles,” whatever those were. Andrew always felt vaguely ashamed around him, even now, looking at the faded blue anchor tattoos blurring his forearms, the hint of a sparrow peeking from his chest through the open gown. Karl is all man, and nobody ever doubted that about him. The small, insecure, fatherless part of Andrew wants Karl's approval and sees the last chance for that slipping away, feels selfish for thinking about himself.

He just sits there, feeling Anneke's pulsing squeezes, letting her talk about her dad from time to time. Wishing she would put her head on his chest so he could stroke her hair, soothe her. But she rarely shows him that side of herself, and never in front of Karl Zautke.

Andrew wonders, not for the first time, what good it is to fool with magic when this lies at the end no matter what or who you are.

Except perhaps for her.

She's old.

So old.

Don't think about her now.

Are there mirrors in here?

He's relieved to see there aren't any. Of course there aren't—the sick don't like to look at themselves.

Soon Anneke dozes, her head touching Andrew's shoulder.

The sound of the ventilator makes him drowsy, too.

 • • • 

She enters the bathroom through the mirror.

Andrew hears her, hears the sound she makes coming through, a sort of creak that suggests glass about to break.

I have to put my kerchief on!

Now!

He takes a hand towel from the bedside table, one that Anneke had been using to soothe her father's sweating head. Lukewarm now and faintly sour with Karl's sick smell. No matter—Andrew tilts his head back, rests it over his eyes.

The shaking starts.

He wills himself to be calm, but it only partly works.

Fu fu fu.

She's in the bathroom!

The ventilator stops.

The heart monitor goes wild, flatlines, the long beep announcing another death in the land of air conditioners and SUVs.

Nobody moves.

No nurse comes.

The bathroom door opens; he feels the air get colder.

With a gasp and a sudden full-body clench, Anneke dies next to him.

Baba has used the Hand of Glory he took from the witch's hut, the one that stops hearts.

Anneke is unimportant to her, so the old thing discards her.

Baba only wants him.

She will not stop his heart.

She will take him back now, back to her hut.

Back to his kennel.

Back to be leeched.

 • • • 

“Hey! Shh! You're making noises.”

Anneke looking at him, exhausted, irritated, afraid.

He nods.

Sits up straighter.

Feels his heart racing.

The sound of the ventilator confuses him.

She pets his hair.

Soothes him.

Day.

The necromancer's house.

Andrew stands in the front living room near the unlit fireplace watching the feral man crouching in the tree line. The feral man wears a T-shirt of indeterminate color, so torn his bony shoulders and one nipple show—the ring of the collar is most of what holds it together—the image on the chest picturing what looks to be a faded Pac-Man being chased by his ghosts. His legs are sheathed in a pair of muddy jeans that look ready to slough off him and show thighs that might be satyr's thighs. His matted hair and unkempt beard mark him as some sort of latter-day John the Baptist, or more boyish Manson. No thread of silver shoots through that black mane. He is young. By his movements, less catlike than monkeyish, Andrew guesses the boy to be about twenty. He arms aside the bushes and walks in a crouch, sniffing and listening as much as looking. But it is the looking Andrew likes least.

He sees the house.

Nobody uninvited sees the fucking house.

That was the point of the three-month-long spell he wove around it, burying mirror shards and the dried skins of chameleons in a circle, painting the walls with paint he'd hidden in public for a month and added octopus ink to, intoning both the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
in Homer's Greek to provoke a benign blindness in those who climbed the hill and looked at the house. Sure, people who knew he was here could see it. But since he kept his address unlisted, the only people who knew the house was here were people he told and people from the neighborhood who knew the house before he bought it all those years ago.

This young man looks right through his window and
at
him. Even without magic cloaking, the angle of the sun should make the windows reflective, should throw so much light back that the panes become shields of trees and sky that let no gaze past them and into the house's cool heart.

But this man sees him.

Andrew walks backward, out of the picture window's frame—the boy seems to track him as he moves, and he waits by the fireplace before continuing to the second picture window. By the time he gets there the boy is gone. Utterly gone. Had he even been there? He licks his lips and looks at the space on the mantel where his best scotch used to sit before he emptied the house of booze.

Wish a bottle there you have a spell for that six sentences and a pinprick and a bottle will sprout where the blood drop falls.

He shakes that away and goes back to the left-hand window, peering into the woods where he saw Pac-Man boy, using a hunter's patient eyes, and he sees no movement, no line of shoulder or haunch breaking the bloom of foliage. But now he wants a drink, and he wants it bad.

One remedy works better than any other for chasing that particular noise out of his head.

The room of skins.

 • • • 

He goes to the raw oak door and closes his eyes, remembering his first hunt, remembering the sliver of raw stag heart his uncle had offered him off the knife.

This door will open for you only if you have eaten the heart of something killed with your own hand.

He slides the brass handle into his palm and turns, feeling the door open easily on its hinge. This is a small room, its walls hung with stags' heads and hide maps and an antique wardrobe on either side. One window gives on a sort of brambled alley leading down the hill toward the forest path, and he goes to open this.

I'll kill two birds at once here; I'll have a boozeless run in the brambles and see if I can find the Jesus-looking boy.

Should I go scary or fast?

Does the boy have a gun?

It didn't seem so.

What if he's watching me change?

Fuck him, then. Let him watch. Maybe he'll shit himself.

Andrew opens the window as slowly and quietly as he can; it is always best to open the window first, while one still has thumbs.

He opens the left wardrobe now, its door cutting off his view of the window, and he regards the selection of furs hanging from their iron hooks. Fox. Wolf. Bear. Stag. Bobcat. All the indigenous beasts, safest to run in these woods. The right-hand wardrobe holds more exotic skins, skins for special occasions.

No, he will run a New York beast today.

He runs his hand on the black bear pelt.

He killed this bear with an Osage orange longbow and a flint arrowhead made by a master fletcher in Pennsylvania.

He has named the bear Norris.

Norris will do.

Now he sticks his thumb in his navel and pushes, saying in old French, “I open myself.” He imagines his thumb slipping bloodlessly under his skin, and so it does. It doesn't precisely hurt, but the feeling is deeply creepy. He works the thumb under and skins himself. He hangs his skin from the one bare hook in the wardrobe. He has to be quick now—one can't just hang out skinless—so he takes up the black bear skin and puts it over his flayed shoulders, feeling it grab him, feeling it wrap all of him so his legs are bear legs and his cock a bear's cock and his snout smells berries and sap and he chuffs his bearness and climbs comically out the window.

Let's see how Pac-Man shirt likes this.

 • • • 

Picking up the boy's scent is easy with the bear's nose; the smell is tangy and human and strong, innocent of soap. He dips his head and trundles into the underbrush, his shiny black bear-shoulders working as he tracks. Not far from the house, near the strawberry patch he has to put off foraging from by sheer force of man-will over bear-will, he smells out a pile of shit. Human shit in the woods doesn't seem odd to the bear, but Andrew-in-the-bear is mildly offended that somebody would not only come slinking and spying near his actual house, but would have the territorial nerve to leave droppings.

Odd droppings for a man, too.

This boy clearly eats fast food like many boys, cheap mash of discarded, hormone-bloated cow full of preservatives and despair, but he doesn't chew much before he swallows. He also eats beetles. He had fingered cicada larvae out of the ground. He had eaten earthworms raw and had cooked beetles in squirrel fat, and had gorged on squirrel and even fine squirrel-bones.

Very fast, or a good trapper.

Or a good shot.

But I smell no gun, or gun oil.

A man can kill a bear without metal.

You did.

This is more boy than man.

The boy has also eaten strawberries.

My strawberries!

Oh, this will not do, not by half.

He snuffs and makes his way around to where the boy had been crouched in the woods, looking at the picture window. Tracks and scent loop back into the woods, so he follows, and soon finds himself looking back at the window leading to the room of skins.

The boy is halfway between the tree line and the open window, contemplating a dash for it. He not only sees the house, he is about to go in!

Fuck this!

Andrew-in-the-bear chuffs and lopes at the boy, who turns and looks passively at the bear. It would be fair to say the boy looks curious, but he does not give off the satisfying rush of fear-smell Andrew-in-the-bear hoped for.

The bear four-legs up to the boy, then stands.

Only a little taller on his hind legs—Norris had not been a huge bear—but still lethal.

He breathes his hot bear-breath into the boy's face, but the boy just blinks at him.

Why doesn't he run?

He pushes the boy's chest with his forepaws, not hard, but more than gently. The boy staggers back, but still makes no meaningful move to retreat.

Okay, you want it rougher? I can do rougher.

Now he grabs the boy's pants with his jaws, slipping his fangs surgically under the waistband, and he throws the boy back, half tearing the jeans. The boy falls but gets to his feet again. Beginning to walk away, but not frightened.

Faster, you little shit.

Now the bear swipes at him, curling his claws back so he doesn't lay him open, but heavily enough to send him sprawling.

To Andrew's surprise, Pac-Man shirt doesn't stand up this time, but breaks and runs on all fours. The bear shuffles after him on two legs, Andrew-in-the-bear dimly aware of the irony.

Just before the feral young man makes the tree line, he stands again and gives the bear one more longish look. A look of assessment, calculation.

Calculate this.

The bear charges, and the boy sprints away.

Who was that boy?

No, really, who the fuck was he?

The bear lumbers back toward the house, checking over his shoulder and sniffing the air once or twice to make sure the interloper is really gone.

Then he waddles over to the strawberry patch and eats himself almost sick.

Too dominated by bear-hunger to notice or care that the berries are frozen.