The Necromancer's House

by Christopher Buehlman

  —I dare you to get me info on the niece.

  —Not fair.

  —I double dog dare you.

  —What do I get?

  —What do you want?

  —Madeline Kahn.

  —Ok. I’ll open a trapdoor for five minutes. You know how it works, right?

  —Yeah, you send me a DVD of a movie she’s in, and I get five minutes to get her to talk to me. Only she doesn’t have to. She could tell me to go fuck myself and leave her alone.

  —Or she could freak out. No telling with the dead. Most likely she’ll use your time asking you about friends and family. You should probably Google the shit out of everybody she knew. And it’s going to be VHS. I haven’t figured out how to do it on DVD yet.

  —Better catch up, old man. Even DVDs are old-school now. What are you going to do when it’s all computer streaming? Which it is.

  —I guess you’ll take over.

  —I can’t open trapdoors. I tried. Plenty.

  —Then I guess you’ll have to go to a pawnshop and get a VCR.

  —For Madeline? Ok. And send History of the World. I want to talk to her in that Roman get-up. “YES! No,no,no,no,no,no, YES!”

  —Are you sure you don’t have a family member or friend you’d rather talk to?

  —I’m young. All of my friends are alive. Only dead family were crabby old grayhairs. One nice Grandma on Brick Lane in London just died, but I’d rather talk to Madeline Kahn. “Ohhh, it’s twue, it’s twue!”

  —As you wish.

  —All right. I’ll keep poking. We’ll see if comrade witchiepoo Dragomirov has hackers or slackers in her kennel.

  23

  An apartment in Kiev.

  Small and dirty, littered with decades-old Western kitsch.

  An Eiffel tower perfume bottle, yellowed and empty, cat hair stuck to its sides, dominates a plastic white end table hash-marked at every edge with cigarette scars.

  Next to the table, and taller, stands a Babel tower of books, at the top of which a dog-eared paperback presents a redhead with arched eyebrows, her conical, late-sixties breasts like small missiles all but poking through her bikini as she guns a motorcycle beneath the Czech title, Angels of Road and Beach.

  Fake German steins made in Japan stand on the floor against a peeling once-avocado wall, like very small counterrevolutionaries awaiting their firing squad.

  A curling old poster, its corners peppered with tack holes, features a leering and clearly unauthorized Mickey Mouse pointing a gloved finger back at the legend ORLANDO; oranges spill from the first O, a dolphin jumps through the second. Behind the huge mouse, men and women in early-eighties hairdos, all of them soft around the edges like someone Captain Kirk is about to inseminate, laugh in a sort of twinkling, painted-in, promlike heaven. Mickey’s waist is cut off by a neobiblical invitation, Come and See, Come and See! in Russian and Ukrainian. Under this is the Sunny Skye travel agency logo atop a long-dead phone number. The top and bottom of the poster are torn and taped in the middle where the apartment dweller’s father ripped it from its thumbtacks, ripped it off of the wall of his illegal Donetsk business in 1986, just ahead of the arrival of the police.

  An orange cat with white paws licks itself, ignoring the man hunched over the computer in a sun-bleached pinkish-yellow Izod polo shirt. If it could stand up and look over his shoulder, it would see him typing in English:

  On ffriday, I was at the aunts farm and accidentally saw Huh, just call me, if you really want to join inserting hand up the horses butt, til elbow.

  Hey, have you ever seen something like that?

  Just take a close look at that pic:

  http:// . . . (etc.)

  Tell me please, if you, pervert, want to join me next time I travel to the country side.

  The man’s spine is curled like a question mark, not from an accident of birth, but from years of hunching before monitors. He leans away from the screen now, his back as close to straight as it will go, and regards his work. He is proud of the commas before and after pervert, something only an expert in English would know to do.

  He smokes, still poring over his oeuvre, checking it for errors. He catches the double-effed friday, balances his cigarette on the table ledge, types jerkily, puffs and exhales. Soon he will sell “passage” on this spam to various clients, some in Ukraine, some in China, a few in Africa, who will pay him to insert their toxic URLs and launch them at Americans and Canadians by name. Like spells, but in the millions upon millions. Sperm, his sperm, racing for the ova of personal information. Credit cards will be stolen, e-mail addresses hijacked, spyware implanted, oh the lovely chaos! More importantly, oh the lovely dollars! Hard currency will appear in his several dozen false-front PayPal accounts; he will shunt this money to accounts he holds in Trinidad, St. Martin, and the Bahamas; and his retirement will grow.

  He is thirty-four, means to retire at fifty.

  He has been earning his own money since he was fifteen.

  He will live until eighty-five, with the help of Western medicine and his retirement, thus spending thirty-five years working and thirty-five years doing whatever the fuck he wants. When he visualizes his savings, he sees a cartoon snowball of dollars growing as it rolls downhill, hitting a valley, then shrinking as it rolls uphill until it is gone, and a tiny pop is heard.

  The pop of a .22 against his temple; he means to be so poor at the top of that second hill he has no choice but to shoot himself.

  It must be a .22.

  Small-caliber so the bullet goes in, but cannot exit, ricocheting around inside, making cabbage of his brains, destroying all feeling, all memory. Leaving just a small, bleeding hole. People who shoot themselves with powerful guns are selfish, vulgar.

  Bourgeois.

  Someone must clean their brains from the wall.

  Cursing them and scrubbing.

  The gun will be his first purchase upon retiring.

  Until then, he cannot bring himself to spend any more than necessary. He is a miser of the first house, wearing everything out until it simply cannot be used, only buying things that cost so close to nothing they might as well be free.

  But when he turns fifty . . .

  . . . the next time I travel the countryside.

  “Perfect, pervert,” he says in thickly accented English.

  The cat yawns, showing fangs that are perhaps the only truly white things in the apartment, and stretches, walking the crooked back of the sofa before sitting imperiously on the arm.

  Now the night breeze, cool for June even here, fingers its way beneath the window, blowing the fly-specked curtains up. The view en face consists of yet more ugly block apartments, the lights on in only a few windows, but now these rectangles of light shiver slightly, as though from heat fumes.

  No heat here, though.

  The room gets colder.

  The cat almost hisses, remembers what happened to it the last time it did, and curls itself around its master’s feet, its tail flicking between those heels-up feet and the sooty footprints on the pink flip-flops beneath them.

  Now the man turns in his chair and looks at the window.

  She’s here.

  He looks away quickly.

  His palms grow moist.

  He anticipates the sound just before he hears it.

  The sound of an iron pot scraping against the cheap stucco below the sill, scraping like a rowboat against a pier.

  Baba Yaga riding through the night skies of Kiev, sitting in an iron pot, pushing it with a broom.

  Just like in bedtime fables.

  But she really is outside.

  Some part of her, anyway.

  I’m nine stories up.

  Yuri . . .

  “Yes, little mother,” he manages, smoking again.

  He is careful not to show his teeth when he speaks.r />
  Put on your kerchief.

  The cat shivers violently.

  He pulls the sticking drawer out, pulls out a blue terry cloth hand towel. Is repulsed thinking about putting this over his eyes but does so anyway, tilting his head back, holding it in place because God help him if it falls off and he sees her.

  The crunching sound as the iron pot crumbles stucco.

  Is there really a pot, or do I hear one because I expect to?

  A bare foot on his gritty linoleum floor.

  She is in the apartment now, he knows.

  Yuri, you bought the ticket?

  “Yes. One ticket for Marina Yaganishna, first class. Nizhny to Moscow, Moscow to JFK, JFK to Syracuse.”

  She will not want to sit next to anyone fat.

  “I already looked. The seat next to her on the long flight remained unsold, so I moved a skinny man there.”

  Good.

  A long moment passes.

  There’s something you’re not telling me.

  I don’t like that.

  An acrid smell as the cat pisses on the floor.

  “Sorry, little mother. I . . . There was someone poking around my curtain. In America. Chicago, I think. Magic.”

  Find out who.

  Find out why.

  She comes closer.

  The cat jerks from below the table, sprints for the bedroom, something else moves faster than the cat, which shrieks.

  Yuri dares not look.

  “I . . . I was working on this. I wanted to have the answer before I told you.”

  And this is why you spend your time on filth?

  A bony finger ticks on the screen of his computer.

  Hands in horses? You think this is what happens in the country? I can show you what happens in the country, but I think you will not like it.

  He doesn’t know if she is reading the English on the screen or just peering into his head. He isn’t sure she can do this, but neither is he sure she cannot.

  He doesn’t know what she is.

  Nobody does.

  He smells her scent of iron and cookfat and pepper, undercut with dried blood, mold, fear.

  She smells like fear.

  He presses hard on the towel over his eyes, frightened his shaking hand might betray him, that it might fall away. His urine fingers at its gateway, wants to leak out. He controls it.

  He breathes through his mouth, awkwardly shielding his teeth with his lips.

  She lets him stew for a moment.

  Yuri . . .

  “Yes, little mother?”

  You have needle and thread in this shithole?

  “Yes, little mother.”

  Use it to sew the cat’s tail back on.

  “Thank you, Baba.”

  Somewhere in his head, she grunts.

  Now the sound of a twig broom, sweeping away her footprints.

  She mounts the pot, which scrapes noisily against the bricks.

  The woman in the apartment next door calls through the wall.

  “What have you got over there, Yuri Denisovitch, an African rhinoceros?”

  Then, more quietly, he hears her exclaim, “Shit! Spiders! So many!”

  Now the sound of a broom (cheap, modern) whacking at the floor, a hurried prayer.

  The cat yowls miserably from his bedroom.

  The breeze stops.

  The room warms, if it can be called that, from cold to merely cool.

  Half an hour passes before he dares remove his terry cloth blindfold.

  It is soaked with sweat.

  But he did not piss himself this time.

  24

  An older man on a wide-screened television is speaking in a broad New England dialect that recalls the unhurried pace of a dray horse. The man’s head is long and horselike, handsome even though he is in his late sixties. He looks down at a paper, then up at the viewer.

  Up at Andrew.

  But he doesn’t see the younger man.

  Not yet.

  It’s still just a tape.

  “. . . His life actually depends on obedience to spiritual principles. If he deviates too far, the penalty is sure and swift . . .”

  The man drops his eyes to the paper.

  “Bill.”

  “He sickens and finally dies.”

  Andrew knows the man will look up at the camera before speaking again.

  “Bill Wilson. It’s Andrew Blankenship.”

  “Andrew Blank . . . ?”

  Recognition steals across the older man’s face.

  The trapdoor is open.

  The dead man in the grainy color home movie becomes a little blurrier. But now he is awake, aware. He pokes his horn-rimmed glasses up on his nose and squints at Andrew through the television. He is off-script now. His surroundings are frozen. The tape stops turning in its machine.

  The lights in the media room are warm and reassuring, not bright, but neither dim. Andrew doesn’t know what he looks like through the television, from there. Neither does he know if he is communing with a soul or if he is somehow snatching conversation with the man in his own time.

  What he does know is that the dead souls, or the encapsulated intelligences, or the shades in Hades, or whatever they are, remember him when he finds them again.

  There is continuity.

  “Where are you?” Bill says, squinting.

  “I’m at home.”

  “That’s right. You do this from your basement, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Bill chuckles agreeably. He is an old man in this 1964 clip Andrew got on eBay and converted to VHS from eight-millimeter. He is speaking at a meeting in a private home in Philadelphia. He largely reads from the work of the “first hundred drunks” in this piece, and Andrew has found that this point, where he talks about death, is the easiest point at which to interrupt him. The visible half of a stainless steel water pitcher gleams below Bill, but it gleams like a still photograph.

  He knows the man could touch the pitcher and the condensation would bead again; a droplet would run down the side. He could wake the pitcher up. But he would see the pitcher only if Andrew told him it was there. If he asked the dead man what was around him, he would say it was blurry, or foggy, and then, very probably, cognitive dissonance would rear its head and the dead man would start to get upset. When speaking with the dead through film, it is best to keep their attention on you.

  They’ve already been through this.

  Bill knows he’s dead in 2012.

  Andrew told him.

  Bill knows, too, that Andrew is a sorcerer, but he doesn’t hold that against him. Nor does he seem to mind Andrew’s long hair and odd clothes. Bill is perhaps the least judgmental dead person with whom Andrew has spoken.

  “The last time we spoke,” Bill says, “you told me you were sponsoring a young lady from Wisconsin.”

  “Her father’s from Wisconsin.”

  “That’s right. How’s she doing?”

  “She’s got six months now. And her slips aren’t so bad, so she’s been effectively sober for eight years. Although I don’t think she’s really hit bottom.”

  “How long ago did we speak?”

  “It’s been . . . months.”

  Bill wipes his eyes under his glasses like he’s tired.

  “Seems like five minutes ago. Time doesn’t make any sense here.”

  He begins to look around.

  Begins to look agitated.

  “Bill.”

  Bill looks at Andrew again.

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about. I was just wondering if you’re still comfortable being my sponsor. This is a . . .”

  Andrew trails off.

  “Highly unusual situation, I know
,” Bill finishes for him, “but, sure. I’ll keep meeting with you. What else have I got to do with myself, after all? And I say that without asperity.”

  “Great.”

  “So what’s on your mind?”

  “I . . . wonder if giving up magic and giving up drinking are similar things.”

  “Sure they are. Thinking about going back to church?”

  Bill is in earnest when he says this. Andrew suppresses a laugh but acknowledges that it would have been a sorry, yellow little laugh anyway.

  “No.”

  “That’s up to you, of course.”

  And where did church get you, old man? Is that heaven? Is that even you?

  “Yeah. I just wonder if I could give it up now. If I wanted to.”

  “Not alone, certainly.”

  What exactly is my higher power, anyway?

  “I’m sorry. It just. It feels good to talk to you.”

  “Lost your dad young, did you?”

  “I did.”

  “It’s a hard thing not to have your dad. You look for what you’re not getting from him in other people. And that’s okay. Love is always A-OK.”

  Andrew nods.

  Tears are close.

  He fights them back.

  And here sits the magus in a dim room, using dirty tricks to disturb a dead man’s rest, crying because he wants his daddy and his mommy.

  Boo fucking hoo.

  “We have sponsors in the world of magic, too. Mentors.”

  Bill just listens.

  “Mine lived in Ohio.”

  25

  1977.

  Near Xenia, Ohio.

  The last warm day of the year.

  “I’m not queer,” the driver says.

  “That’s not my business,” Andrew Randolph Blankenship says, although he has just begun to wonder why a bald, bearded man with his shirt unbuttoned to show his potbelly might slow his big, blue Impala to a crawl next to a teenaged boy walking his bicycle.

  “You always walk your bike past this house.”

  The man points at a lopsided 1890s two-story with peeling blue paint and a sun-faded FOR SALE sign.

  Andrew doesn’t say anything. He just furrows his brow as he often does when he is processing a lot of information.