“Nothing’s pretty when used as a weapon.”
“I love your zero-tolerance approach to bullshit.”
“You’re trying to sound authoritative, like you’re in control. But you’re not, are you?”
“Not entirely.”
“Not entirely? More bullshit. Do you even know who did this?”
“I think so.”
“How did they get into the house? Your house?”
He notices the cord connecting a MacBook Pro to the television from his last streamed movie.
“Through that,” he says, pointing.
He disconnects it, handling it like a snake that might still bite.
“I need to e-mail somebody.”
42
Chicagohoney85: You’re going to owe me big for this. I don’t know if you understand how hard something like this is.
Ranulf: It can’t have been that hard if you’re already getting back to me.
—Difficulty is not measured in duration.
—It took you 24 hours.
—Labor can take 24 hours. Or it can take two. I’ve never popped one out, but word on the corner is that it sucks either way.
—Point taken. But it’s going to take me some time to trick out a car for you. That’s what you want, right? A car that cops, thieves and meter maids don’t notice?
—Yep. Tell me what else it’ll do again . . . City car stuff, right? I’ve got no use for big or fast.
—Runs on water. I know another user who can do that, but fitting in extra-tight spaces by making them bigger is mine alone. So far, anyway.
—Sounds awesome! Parking sucks here. That’s exactly what I want!
—So be it! But I’ll need a week or two to find the right car, and another week to do the work. Twenty four hours, my ass!
—What, should I have acted like it took longer? Mechanics always make less per hour than IT people. And you like working on cars
—No more than you like solving puzzles
—You got me. I do! And this one was a bitch. Here’s what you gave me—a hut somewhere in rural Russia, probably the Volga region, but maybe anywhere in Russia. Maybe Belorussia, maybe the Ukraine, maybe Poland, somewhere Slavic. Real specific, right?
—I gave you more than that!
—You did & I’ll get to that; I’m just pointing out that I had to search a pretty big chunk of the earth’s total land mass.
—But you have some way to detect magic, right? Some tweak to Google Earth or something?
—Yes, something like that. But I told you before she’s got somebody veiling her. Another techno-savvy user. And a good one, spooky good.
—I think I got a taste of how good he is.
Andrew remembers the burning smile, the burning eyes, how they stuck to the glass, then burned out the other side.
—You’re sure it’s a he? I’m not a he.
—I think he’s a he. I think you’re a she. I don’t know either one for sure.
—If you were ten years younger, I’d tell you to come to Chicago so I could show you. I’ve seen old pictures of you, you know. I Facebook stalked you. Hot! But you’re too old now, so you’ll have to take my word for it. I’m just saying don’t make assumptions-that can kill you in this game.
—True enough. But my point was that however good he or she is, I feel good having you in my corner. You’re spooky good, too.
—I am! Which is why I think I found her anyway.
—May I ask how?
—You just did. And, yes. I found her with shadows.
—I’m not sure I get it.
—First I used the magic-detection, then flagged areas that looked indistinct; veiling draws a screen, and a lesser witch wouldn’t even see the screen. But I can. I pick up a slight blur. Flagged all the blurs in Slavic countries. There’s a fuckload of magic over there, BTW. You were brave to go over there, what, during the cold war?
—You say brave. Some would say stupid.
—Now I took something else you told me. She eats kids, right? Actually eats them.
Andrew leans back from the screen, rubs his eyes with his hands, as if to massage away the pictures in his head.
—You there?
—Yes. She eats them.
—I hacked police records. I don’t speak those languages, so I had to outsource the translations. These people aren’t luminous, they just want money, I sent you an invoice. It’s a bit steep. Good, fast and cheap, you can’t have all three, right?
—I got the invoice.
—So I looked for reports of missing children. Infants. The Volga lit up, just like you said it would. But so did a few other areas where I saw blurs. Now we’ve checked for magic, hidden magic and missing kids. Still a bit of crossover. But the Volga stuff was old, like a few years old. You know what lit up since 2008?
—Tell me.
—You’re going to like it. Not that kids are missing, I mean, but where I think she is. It fits. But let me tell you the third thing I looked for, cause I’m proud of it.
—Shadows, you said.
—Shadows, sure, but what kind?
—I give up.
—So now I bring in the military eyes-in-the-sky. Hacked the shit out of them, and they’re mighty. Hi-res satellite images. I can find a fly sitting on poop in Mongolia.
—Ha!
—Now I think about the physical structure. You said the hut stands on chicken’s feet, right? Big ones, like taller than a man.
—Not everybody can see them.
—Film still records things like that. It’s why we sometimes see ghosts in photos. The camera doesn’t lie-the lie happens in our heads.
—But the angle? A satellite wouldn’t see feet under a hut.
—Think.
Andrew furrows his brow, taps his index finger on the table like a woodpecker seeking grubs. It’s easier for her to puzzle things out—she’s a plodder, not a natural. She worked her way into magic with brains. But Andrew is far from stupid. The last tap is hard, a percussive Eureka!
—The shadow! The hut is higher, as if on stilts.
—And stilts aren’t a big thing in these countries. Louisiana, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, sure. But, aside from ice-fishing huts, it’s not a Slavic thing.
—But I remember it was in forest . . . it was dark. She likes dark. What about the trees?
—You also said she had a garden. Gardens need sun. She’s not going to park herself in total darkness. There’ll be a break in the canopy.
—There was! There was a patch of sunlight.
—Now we’ve got three criteria . . . magic, child disappearances, and a hut with a shadow that suggests 6-10’ clearance. One match. Check it out.
A photograph appears.
A straw-roofed hut, not big.
Not on the outside, anyway.
Fu fu fu, I smell Russian bones!
And then a second cursor appears.
Points at a hunched figure carrying a pan of what look like pork bones, mostly in shadow. Indistinct.
Andrew shudders.
• • •
Do not look at me with your eyes or I’ll take them.
Do not smile at me with your teeth or I’ll take them.
Piss squatting or I’ll carve a cunt on you.
—You there?
—Give me a minute.
—K
Andrew feels himself begin to shudder, an involuntary response he can observe, as if it were someone else’s shudder, but which he cannot stop.
—Is that her, Ranulf?
The cursor wiggles over the crone.
Andrew feels his testicles ice over.
His palms go clammy, he wipes them on his jeans.
—Is that Baba Yaga?
He can’t seem to will his fingers to type.
/>
Her name has been invoked.
He glances behind him at a handsome brass mirror, terrified he’ll see her image, but his own scared face looks back at him.
Brass mirrors are safe, can’t serve as gates for her.
He notices the tension in his mouth, how carefully he keeps his lips pressed together.
Radha is waiting.
She wants to know if the hunched shape with the pan full of bones is the ancient thing that kidnapped him twenty-nine years ago.
—I think so.
—Awesome! I think so, too. Now you wanna know where she is? Not exactly where she is, but what she’s pretty close to?
He envies Radha her fearlessness, how casually confident she is of her own power. He was the same way before he went to Russia.
—Where is it?
—It’s pretty creepy. And pretty perfect. Nobody will fuck with her there. By the way, Madeline Kahn is kind of a bitch.
—Where is she, Radha?
Radha types.
Andrew knows what word will appear, knows it a microsecond before it appears on his screen like a name on a map of Hell—
Gehenna.
Dis.
Tartarus.
Acheron.
—Chernobyl.
In the other room, Anneke’s phone rings.
43
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 wil
l 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.
44
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.
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