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 tig
hten 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.”
37
“This is my bathroom. These silver fists you see holding the roll of toilet paper make the roll inexhaustible. Very popular with the ladies, as is the lid, which lowers itself when the room is vacated. Subtle magic, that. Less subtle is the claw-foot bathtub. If you dive into it headfirst, hard enough to break your neck,”
(Nadia winces at this)
“it will send you to a bathroom in whatever place you say and think about. If you say nothing, it will send you to the last place it gated to.”
Anneke thinks about this. It makes sense . . . bathrooms are private. One wouldn’t want to appear in the middle of a public fountain or even a kitchen. If Superman had been real, he would have changed in a toilet, not a phone booth. Maybe he uses a toilet now since phone booths are nearly extinct. Andrew might know—he seems dork enough to have a secret comic book habit.
“Do you get wet?”
“Only if the bathtub’s full. The water in the pipes conducts, it doesn’t immerse.”
“How do you get back?”
“Any fixture in the bathroom you got sent to will send you right back to this tub. Another tub is best; toilet works, too, though the idea is off-putting. The sink will stretch wide enough to accommodate you if you believe it will, though I once cracked a rib on the spigot when I wondered if I was going to clear the spigot. Belief is more than half of all magic.”
“What is the last place it gated to?” Anneke asks.
“I don’t remember,” he says. “Would you like to see for yourself?”
She gives him a you-must-have-forgotten-whom-you’re-daring look and dives. Nadia, startled (and a little impressed), swears in Russian, stepping back so as not to be clipped by Anneke’s foot.
38
Anneke finds herself in a bathroom, painted green from the waist down, white on the top half. She’s on the can, the lid of which is thankfully down. A startled young man with a sandy white-boy Afro was washing his hands at the sink. His mind can’t deal with the idea that she suddenly appeared, so it performs a kind of emergency rewrite.
“People knock, you know. I’ll be done in a minute.”
She’s in shock, too, though, so all she does is blink at him.
He wonders if she has a head injury.
“Are you all right?”
She nods.
The paper towels are out, so the young man wipes on his pants.
It doesn’t even occur to him that he has to draw the tiny bolt to open the door because nobody came in that way after him.
“Want it closed?” he asks.
Sweet kid.
She nods.
She stands up on shaky legs and locks the door again so she can gather herself. Sits back down. A water heater dominates the cramped bathroom, a yellow sticker warning her that gasoline should not be stored nearby as the pilot light will ignite the fumes. The walls are hung with memorabilia from a cable mafia show.
She thinks about just jumping into the toilet and returning to the house, but doubt strikes her. The fixture looks harder somehow, more real than the one she launched herself into in Andrew’s house. She imagines braining herself in the old commode. Afro-boy would tell the paramedics she looked confused, walked in on him, didn’t seem right to begin with.
And there she is, rolling around at an LGBT mixer in a wheelchair.
“How did you get paralyzed?”
“UTI.”
“Urinary—”
(She cuts off her imaginary interlocutor, who looks strangely like Shelly Bertolucci.)
“Unfortunate Toilet Incident.”
She doesn’t know how long she stands looking at the toilet (which could use a brushing), but a timid knock shakes her from her reverie.
“Just a minute.”
“No problem,” a girl says.
Wherever she is, they’re nice here.
• • •
She leaves the bathroom on weak knees, walks into a bright room—a coffee shop—filled with kids studying, old hippies talking politics, a mean-faced woman in line crossing and recrossing her arms, impatient to order her complicated drink. A reflective red truck goes by on the street outside and the whole room flashes red. Anneke opens the door, the little bell on top of which jingles, and the affable man making the cappuccino machine hiss says, “Come back and see us.”
“Thanks,” she says, walking onto the sidewalk.
Where am I?
How do I get back?
Am I really going to jump in a toilet?
Yes, I am.
Then you had better just go in there and do it because the longer you think about it, the worse this will be.
She glances back in the picture window of the coffee shop, sees an abandoned newspaper on a table. Makes the door ding-a-ling again. Looks at the paper. USA Today. Not helpful. Where did it come from? She sees the rack now, near the counter, approaches it as cross-arm-woman eyes her, suspicious she’ll try to cut.
The New York Times.
USA Today.
Ah!
The Dayton Daily News.
This townlet looks too small and clean for Dayton, though.
She spots a small rack on the other side of the coffee line, cranes her head to look; the woman winds up to say Excuse me, but the pleasant fellow at the counter shuts her down with, “What can I start for you?”
Anneke excuses herself behind the woman, plucks a paper, looks at it.
The Yellow Springs News.
Yellow Springs, Ohio.
Jesus Christ, this is real!
I should get out of here.
They’re waiting.
Are they?
Is this happening in real time?
She contemplates another trip to the bathroom, but a heavily bearded poet-type shuts himself in.
Fuck.
I’m not ready to jump in the toilet yet, anyway.
She gets in the coffee line.
Looks behind her, out the front window.
A saloon across the street, all wooden and old-timey.
Oh, that’s all I fucking need.
No, that’s EXACTLY what you fucking need.
Nerve.
She feels herself start to sweat.
Stays in line, gets a hot chocolate with the cash in her front pocket.
Sips the hot chocolate primly, looking now at the bathroom, now at the saloon. Drums her fingers on the table.
Okay, this isn’t your fault. You’re in a situation. You have to do this.
Wow, you’re cunning.
You’re through a magic portal. Whatever happens here won’t count.
[Yawn] Wow, you’re baffling.
You already know you’re going to do it. That, or head to the bus station and get yourself a ticket to Rochester. All you’re doing now is wasting time. Yours, Andrew’s, and fish-cunt’s.
Okay, that was powerful.
Higher power time.
I haven’t really got one.
I’m a phony in AA.
I’m only six months in since my last slip.
What’s six months?
During the next half an hour, Anneke uses the remaining ten in her pants to order one more hot chocolate and a decaf hazelnut latte. She moves her lips while talking to herself. After her third trip int
o the bathroom to stare down the throat of the potty, she says “Fuck it,” marches out the door,
Ding-a-ling!
and into the tavern across the street, where she orders three shots of Jack Daniel’s, only to be told they don’t serve hard liquor. She asks who does. Walks the block and a half to the Dayton Street Gulch, looking pissed about it.
Now she orders her three shots.
“Fifteen dollars,” says the bartender from a very red mouth sunk in a white-blond beard.
She reaches for her pocket.
Out of bills.
She sees herself tucking her wallet under the front seat of her Subaru.
I don’t have my wallet!
The bartender turns to the fridge, fetches out a beer for the fedora-wearing black man who had been wiping up the pool table with a college kid in an ironically name-tagged mechanic’s shirt. Anneke slams the first shot. She goes to the bathroom of the saloon (just to pee). Returns to the bar. Slams the second shot. Watches the soundless television, where some daytime TV judge reprimands a woman with an improbable weave. A series of commercials follows:
Detergent, with smiley MILF and smilier babies.
A self-help tape for getting rich through faith, presented by an oddly familiar-looking smiley hypocrite.
Diapers.
More babies.
Fuck daytime television anyway.
She downs the third shot.
“What’s your favorite brand of diaper?” she asks the bearded young bartender.
“No preference.”
“Very diplomatic of you,” she says.
He grins.
She used to be able to outdrink men, but now she’s a lightweight. The whiskey slips its hairy fingers around her heart.
It’s good.
Here comes the buzz.
It’s really good.
Maybe he’ll pour me two more.
I’ll ask if they take Visa first so he thinks I’m okay.
I want them.
But then I’ll be shitfaced.
Magic is dangerous enough sober, eh, brujo?
Now or never.
Anneke slips out the door, is nearly struck by a van, runs across the gas station parking lot, nearly hits a stroller, sprints past the tavern and into the coffee shop,
Ding-a-ling-a-ling!!
finds the bathroom door latched!
The Necromancer's House Page 10
