The Necromancer's House

by Christopher Buehlman

  She glances at the window.

  Glimpses the bartender’s head between trucks and over cars. She could have played that cooler, acted like she was just going to her car, but adrenaline got her. He looks purposeful. He’ll vault when there’s a break in the traffic.

  Anneke says “Fuck!” and kicks the bathroom door open, the tiny bolt tinkling on the floor.

  “Fuck!” echoes a peaceful skinhead type with quarter-sized wooden disks in his ears. She yanks him out from in front of the toilet just before he starts urinating, then pushes him into the coffee shop, his pierced cock a-jiggle.

  “Wh’th’fuck, man!” he says.

  The counterman sees the push, starts to say “Hey!”

  Before he can, both counterman and baldy see Anneke jump into the toilet and disappear.

  More properly, she jumps at the toilet, but no part of her touches it.

  Her cracked oxblood Docs vanish last, flailing.

  Both men instantly forget her.

  When the exasperated bartender flings open the door of the coffee shop—ding-a-ling-a-ling!!!—the counterman asks if there’s a problem.

  The bartender scratches his beard.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, realizing he was rough with the door but absolutely blanking on why.

  He covers.

  “Do you have any fives?”

  39

  The cabin is full of Russians. They have come from Florida, New Jersey, Little Odessa. A few Americans, stunned-looking relatives of Dragomirov’s late wife, all tall, sandy-blond, and blue-eyed, sit in their own corner of the back porch, almost on top of each other because there is no room. The intensity of the Russians scares them, these Lutherans whose stewardess-model married a man of dubious past employment and dangerous associations. This Dragomirov tribe is wild-eyed, dark-haired, quick to laugh, quick to anger.

  They read poetry to each other.

  Who reads poetry at a party?

  This isn’t precisely a party.

  Neither is it not a party.

  This is something like a wake, but darker.

  Singing, stories, jokes, hints at vengeance to come, these followed by knowing looks between men that suggest more will be said when the women and children have been packed away.

  Mikhail Yevgenievich Dragomirov, “Misha,” has been gone one month.

  The family came today to take possession of the cabin, which has been paid up through the end of August.

  One would think the patriarch of the American wing of the family, Georgi Fyodorovich Dragomirov, cousin of the vanished man, would be the one to dominate the room, but he is old now, he dyes his eyebrows, and his heartburn bothers him when he forgets to take his medicine. He has forgotten to take his medicine.

  Next in line might have been the half sister, Valentina Fyodorovna, at whose request the icon of the virgin appeared on the corner shelf, replacing Misha’s whiskey. She expatriated most recently, but she is too sad to speak at any length, and blows her nose often, always into two tissues, always behind her liver-spotted hand, the nails of which shine with the best burgundy nail polish.

  The one who captivates them is not even fifty, and none of them have seen her for years. Little Marina, who had such a hard life. Marina of Nizhny Novgorod, the girl from the woods, saved from prostitution by her Baba, then sent to university. For poetry. How she stunned them when they fetched her at Hancock airport in Syracuse.

  She is the brightest of them, seems to shame them with how America has diluted the Dragomirov stock.

  She is petite, toned, pretty; they have seen the video she sent them as an introduction, to show them she had her uncle’s sense of humor, a video of her working out with kettlebells in the forest to the tune of the Volga Boat Song.

  Now she stands before them in her stylish peacoat as evening comes on, her pale, healthy skin, accented by the beauty mark on her cheek, making her look like some lost Romanov.

  “My uncle would not want tears,” Marina Yaganishna says.

  “Bullshit! He cried at movies. He cried at poetry,” says a nephew-poet.

  “He cried at your poetry.”

  They laugh.

  They love her.

  They have eaten the funerary blintzes she cooked in the cabin,

  “Marishka has taken the stove’s virginity—Misha used only the grill and the microwave!”

  smeared with the quince jam she learned to make in the forest,

  “Her Baba must have taught her this before she died!”

  and they have plied her with Stolichnaya only to find themselves drunk before a bright-eyed, clearheaded girl

  “Girl my ass! She is a tank soldier like her great-uncle Yevgeny!”

  who teases with the best of them.

  “Alexandr Nikolayevich, will you dishonor your great-uncle’s memory with such a weak fart? Eat more sour cream on your chicken, and fart like a Cossack.”

  This boy is twelve, and laughs and blushes like beet juice to have his strange Russian aunt spear him so deftly. Earlier, she had stolen the smartphone from his hand and said, “No man under forty should play with a phone more than his zalupa.”

  His father had made them laugh more with, “But I tell him all the time, drop the zalupa!”

  One of the American Lutherans, relieved to have something to talk about, explained to Marina what a chalupa was, the dated commercial with the talking chihuahua.

  Now, when the last light is gone from the sky, the Lutherans say their good-byes through big-teeth smiles. Marina comically shields her eyes, saying “Your smiles are so perfect in America, you blind me!”

  Women and children leave the cabin until it is only Marina and the men who knew Misha. She will be staying—they have all agreed that she can have the cabin as long as she wants it.

  But now it is time for men to speak.

  They look at her meaningfully, perhaps a bit apologetically, and she understands that they will now fill their glasses more rapidly and exchange oaths of vengeance should the disappearance turn out to be murder—the police said there were signs of a struggle, that DNA evidence of several women has been found, two of them known prostitutes, one of them an unknown. The cousins and nephews of the missing man know his habits; there will be talk of pimps, jealous lovers. The hot-blooded men will vow to handle it personally; the wiser ones will mention, not by name of course, old associates of Misha’s who could be brought in, men who know their way around a Makarov, men who know how to leave a mystery.

  She lets herself outside.

  She laughs a little when they cannot see her face.

  They will be right in their assertions that Dragomirov was the wrong man to fuck with.

  They will be wrong as to why.

  Marina Yaganishna goes down the stairs, leaving behind the wash of light that bathes the patio. She takes her boots off and walks barefoot out to the edge of the water, barely swaying despite the amount of vodka she has poured into herself. She carries a nearly full bottle with her. Now she removes the rest of her clothes, wades out into the lake with the bottle.

  She stands for some time, looking down, as though listening to the waves.

  Old Georgi, indicating the nude woman, rubs the burning stomach he knows will kill him soon, says quietly, “Good thing the Americans left.”

  They laugh.

  “She’s got the devil in her,” one of them says affectionately.

  Now they watch their estranged kinswoman upend the bottle, pouring it into the surf.

  “Ha! She’s giving Misha a drink!”

  “Someone should tell her he likes whiskey better.”

  A silence, as the men continue to watch, despite themselves.

  Marina Yaganishna looks thirty-five, not almost fifty.

  “I think menopause will be late for her,” Georgi says.

 
They laugh themselves sick, then go back to talk of vengeance.

  • • •

  Out in the lake, the woman pours vodka into the mouth of a kneeling, dead old man with dim lamps for eyes.

  “You’re sure?” she says.

  He nods.

  “It will be done, then.”

  “And I will be free?”

  “I think so,” she says. “Revenge is liberating.”

  He opens his bloated mouth for more vodka.

  She got it from the freezer, where one of the Lutherans had stashed it in mock ignorance when clearing the table.

  She pours again.

  “Sorry it’s cold.”

  Misha doesn’t care.

  Everything is cold now.

  He swallows gratefully.

  Sinks.

  40

  Andrew hears Anneke throwing up in the sink, goes to find her.

  The stink of hot whiskey, coffee, and chocolate assaults him as he steps into the guest bathroom.

  “You’ve been to Dino’s,” he says.

  She nods, bent over, wiping her mouth.

  “And to the Gulch.”

  Nods again.

  Looks at him, eyes glistening, whether from shame, heaving, or both he can’t tell.

  She becomes aware of the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

  “Tour’s over for now.”

  The shame of relapse starts to steal upon her, but she boots it under.

  “What about the roosalsa?”

  Anneke was gone for an hour.

  Nadia got bored and left after ten minutes, but Andrew just ignores the question.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  More okay than you should be because you haven’t really crashed yet. This is going to keep happening until you do.

  “Are you off the wagon?”

  “No.”

  He looks into her eyes.

  Her eyes say yes.

  She looks back, fighting the urge to look down.

  The Anneke Anneke wants to be doesn’t hang her head.

  “Well, maybe the tour’s not completely over. I want to show you a movie.”

  “Okay,” she says. “As long as it’s not Papillon.”

  • • •

  Down the stairs to the media room.

  He turns the lights on, dims them, actually uses the wall switch.

  He goes to the combination-locked cedar trunk wherein fifty or so cassettes stand in alphabetized rows, bearing strips of Scotch tape; the tapes on the left are for the famous—Muhammad ALI, Isaac ASIMOV, Sir Winston CHURCHILL, Harry HOUDINI (no sound), John LENNON, et cetera. The ones on the right, fewer in number, are not alphabetized, and many have no last name: Marisol, DAD, SARAH, Aunt Katie, Bill BARNETT.

  A separate locked box sits at the bottom of the chest.

  “What’s in that?” Anneke says.

  “You always want the forbidden fruit, don’t you?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Yes. I guess we all do. All of us who do this. The box has tapes of dead users.”

  “Why is it locked?”

  “They’re dangerous. They can still cast spells. One of them’s actually not dead—he just left it as an insurance policy. But you need a different kind of magic, I think.”

  Andrew takes the tape reading Bill WILSON from the bottom left.

  “That’s not . . .” she says.

  “Yes.”

  She looks at the tape.

  Shakes her head no.

  Andrew sets it on the VCR in front of the television.

  He puts his arm around her and she allows it.

  They snuggle in on the leather couch, the needle of the intimacy meter moving further away from “buddies,” but stopping shy of “lovers.” He just holds her, pets her hair, until at last she nods.

  He puts the tape in.

  • • •

  Bill speaks.

  “Every AA member knows that he has to conform to the principles of recovery. His life actually depends upon obedience to spiritual principles . . .”

  “Can he hear us?” she whispers.

  “Not yet.”

  Andrew kisses the top of Anneke’s head, separates himself from her enough for decorum, prepares himself to open the trapdoor.

  “. . . If he deviates too far, the penalty is sure and swift. He sickens and finally dies.”

  “Bill Wilson. It’s Andrew Blankenship.”

  Bill continues, oblivious.

  “He comes to understand that no personal sacrifice is too great for the preservation of this fellowship.”

  “Bill, can you hear me?”

  Apparently not.

  “He learns that the clamor of desires and ambitions within him must be silenced whenever these could damage the group.”

  “Bill Wilson.”

  Bill ignores him.

  Andrew stops the tape.

  Rewinds.

  Plays.

  The same thing happens, or, rather, doesn’t happen.

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “No shit,” she says.

  He goes through the song and dance again, gets a little further.

  “. . . It becomes plain that the group must survive, or the individual will not.”

  “Bill Wilson, hello.”

  Bill continues.

  But something changes.

  His New England accent goes Slavic.

  “. . . And when the individual doesn’t survive, ho, hey! This is a tragedy, small in the grand mechanic of things, but signifying to those who know and care for him . . .”

  Andrew blinks dumbly at the screen.

  He senses magic.

  She does, too.

  “Fuck,” he says.

  “What’s happening?”

  He grabs her knee, leans forward, intrigued and spooked.

  “. . . and if there is a God, perhaps signifying big deal to him. But there is no God.”

  Bill is angry—his head whips and spit flies when he says God.

  Andrew says, “This isn’t the same tape. He doesn’t say these things.”

  Anneke feels gooseflesh ripple down her left side.

  “. . . Of course, a man doesn’t say, never, is no God. A man does not say that he is denying of God if he wants to farm the benefits of ‘polite’ society.”

  Bill gets up from his desk, walks over to a curtained window.

  The camera follows him.

  “Ichabod?” Andrew says. “I command you to stop tampering with this tape.”

  Nothing. This is not Ichabod’s doing. The entity doesn’t leave the warm tingle of magic in a room; rather a sort of dead, flat emptiness.

  This room is tingling.

  On the television, Bill grabs the cord to the curtains, turns to address the camera.

  “But when a man knows heartfully how society can be not polite, hey, sometimes fully rude, we are forgiving him for crying himself atheist.”

  Bill pulls the cord.

  The film jerks, jumps out of frame, goes white, comes back on.

  A bad splice.

  Bill is standing in the same spot, but the colors have shifted.

  Orange and red light tints everything.

  The sound of propeller planes outside.

  Bombers?

  Help me, bomber!

  Out the windows, fire.

  A city on fire.

  Stalingrad?

  The window Bill opens is on the third or fourth floor of a building that shakes now as a bomb explodes nearby.

  A chorus of screaming rises up.

  “Oh God,” Anneke says.

  Now the film jerks again.

  Th
e tame, grainy interior colors from the original tape return.

  The curtain has been closed, or was never opened, and Bill is sitting at his desk again.

  Only the silver water pitcher is gone.

  A nearly empty bottle of vintage Soviet vodka has replaced it, a darkly handsome Joseph Stalin leering on the label beneath the Cyrillic legend NOT ONE STEP BACK!

  Bill’s necktie hangs sloppy and loose, the first buttons of his shirt undone. His hair uncombed. He is drunk.

  The sounds of war have gone away.

  A musician of small talent plays a violin in another room.

  “Do you see what you have driven me to?” he says, in Ukrainian-accented Russian, looking at Andrew.

  “Stop it,” Andrew says, pointing authoritatively at the television.

  “Stop it!” shitfaced Bill Wilson says, in English, mocking him, laughing, pointing.

  Andrew presses the power button on the remote.

  The television flicks off.

  Then turns itself back on.

  Bill points at Andrew, says, in Russian, “You think you got away with something, don’t you? But your time has run out. We know where you are. And we are coming.”

  Subtitles appear in yellow, doubtless for Anneke’s benefit.

  “You will die, you sloppy little shit. Sloppy. Weak. Little. Shit.”

  “Who are you?”

  Bill W. smiles, but it’s not a pleasant smile.

  The image freezes.

  The celluloid burns exactly where his mouth is, burns in the nearly flat U of his smile. His eyes burn, too.

  The violin stops.

  Now the television screen begins to smoke where the mouth and eyes were.

  Anneke jumps to her feet, puts the couch between her and the Sony.

  “Christ!” Andrew yells.

  The television catches fire.

  41

  The fire is magical in origin, but thankfully not in nature; an ordinary extinguisher stifles it in seconds. Not that the house would burn; Andrew set very powerful dousing wards at every corner of the property. The smoke alarm goes off, hurting their ears with its shrill chirps. Andrew sets down the extinguisher, silences the alarm. The room is murky with smoke and nitrogen. Anneke, her stomach still queasy following her belly flop out of sobriety, fights the urge to heave.

  “Well,” Andrew says, “this is what magic looks like when used as a weapon. It’s not pretty.”