She sips.
The hot coffee on her lips jars her out of it.
The cup falls, makes a thunk but doesn’t break, coffee splashes on the table, her lap, everywhere.
Michael nods in lieu of saying, Nice job.
He says, “Next time you’ll be ready, won’t let the heat shock you.”
Andrew, who has just taken breakfast off the burner, comes over with a dishrag.
Why is he handing me a dishrag?
Oh, the coffee.
Drops of blood patter on the table, mixing with coffee.
Not just the coffee.
Nosebleed.
Magic made me bleed.
The first time was just messing around, but now I’m in.
Cherry popped, as the boys who helped me prefer girls used to say.
She takes the rag.
“Welcome to the club,” Andrew says.
• • •
Breakfast is good.
Before they leave the kitchen, Michael makes Anneke change a cherry tomato into a rock. This takes half an hour. Her period, which isn’t due until next week, comes on hard, sending her running for the tampons she left behind for herself in the guest bathroom.
She lies down in the spare room, meaning to rest her eyes and her throbbing head, but she falls asleep and stays that way for two days.
When she wakes up, Andrew hands her an envelope.
The rock is in it, and a note.
IF YOU WANT TO LEARN TO
MAKE THIS A TOMATO AGAIN,
COME TO VERMONT FOR A WEEK.
NO BOOZE, THOUGH.
I NEED YOU CLEAR.
Michael Rudnick’s address.
She takes the stone cherry tomato with her and leaves.
58
Chicagohoney85: This is pretty cool if you like dark stuff. But I don’t think you do as much as I do. You sure you want to see this?
Ranulf: Just show me. I need to know.
—What, don’t you trust me? I’m not going to say I know if I don’t know. And that’s one dead witch. Deaddity dead dead dead.
—Cute. Just show me.
—How’s my car?
—You’ll splee.
—I think you’re trying to say squee. As in, make a squee noise. Because splee is more like have a male orgasm which is anatomically misplaced, and just a little off sides.
—I meant squee.
—I know. A guy like you can still get action and doesn’t need to be a creeper. There’s nothing I hate like a creeper.
—Understandable. Are you going to show me?
—What color is it?
—?
—The car!
—Plum. A Mini Cooper.
—*SQUEEEEEE!* Okay, here’s your morbid little treat, and it’s weird. I didn’t know things like this happened. Pretty f’d up. The images were shot at two-second intervals.
A picture loads. Black-and-white, military satellite photography. The hut, the garden, hard to make out. Early morning. An old woman’s foot, a slipper near it. The echo of The Wizard of Oz is impossible not to notice.
Ding dong, your bitch is dead.
—Can you get a closer shot of that shoe?
She zooms in. It gets grainy, but he thinks it may be an old-timey slipper. Not ruby. Embroidered.
He can’t be sure, but he thinks he’s seen it before.
His stomach does a slow roll.
—Just click when you’re ready to see the next one. This’ll flip your shit.
He clicks.
A wolf crouches on the path. A skinny wolf, not like the ones you see in pictures from Alaska or Yellowstone—this critter is gray and ratty and hungry-looking.
Small.
Nose pointed like a gun at the owner of the inanimate foot.
(Click)
That wolf is nearly out of the shot, its tail all that’s visible; it’s sniffing her. Perhaps doing more to her than that. Two more wolves have appeared on the path before the hut, coming to share the prize.
—Now watch the house.
(Click)
The house has turned.
He sees one of its windows like a dark eye.
It has turned ninety degrees toward the wolves, the dead woman.
(Click)
Fully turned, facing them.
More wolves have come, two of them crouched and growling at the house, the rest circled around her.
Feeding.
—You won’t believe this. Are you sitting down?
(Click)
Motion. Things get blurry now. Something has flashed from beneath the house; the wolves have reacted. One was too slow. The blur has the wolf.
(Click)
A huge chicken’s foot.
That’s what has the wolf.
Still blurry, but less so, still in motion.
The wolf struggling, trying to twist out.
(Click)
The wolf is dead.
Its brains dashed on the ground, as dead as Haint’s iguana.
Two others are growling at the house, front halves low as if salaaming, like dogs at play but not playing. Not surrounding it as they might a giant elk, but blocking it while the others retreat.
The rest are dragging the old woman away, about a third of her in the shot now, swathed in dried blood.
(Click)
Everything blurred, house twisting, motion beneath it.
(Click)
The house turning away, just a corner of it in frame.
Two dead wolves as limp as dishrags.
The woman and the other wolves have gone.
(Click)
Just the garden.
The path.
One of the wolves trying to get up.
Wasn’t dead after all.
Will be soon.
Too much of its insides outside.
• • •
That is the last image.
He clicks back through them two more times.
—What do you think?
—I think maybe you’re right.
—I am right. She’s deader than hell. You’re in the clear, my man.
—Thanks. Really, Radha. Thanks.
59
Andrew feels pretty good as June gives way to July and July sheds days.
Baba Yaga is dead.
He has Radha’s car to work on, and it’s a damned fun little car.
The woman he loves is newly confirmed in witchcraft and studying for a month in Vermont.
Chancho, who has family coming up from Texas, has invited him to a fiesta, and that means piles of oily tamales and pans of enchiladas and bowls of the best guacamole this side of Austin.
Who cares if his cousins move drugs for the Zetas?
He can almost completely ignore the tinny little voice in his ear saying
Something’s wrong,
Something’s coming.
60
July 14.
Bastille Day.
Anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in Paris, of course, but also a very personal anniversary for Andrew Blankenship.
Seven years exactly since Sarah collapsed at Darien Lake.
Aneurysm.
Just after she rode the Mind Eraser.
One of life’s stupid, mean little jokes.
Enough to make one conclude there is a God and he isn’t all that nice.
He was handing her her earrings to put back on when she said she didn’t feel well.
Wanted to sit down.
Slumped over like a kid playing a prank.
And that was it.
He had just started looking for a ring, was thinking about asking her on Halloween.
• • •
/> Now he hovers at the top of the stairs that lead down to the media room.
• • •
I shouldn’t be doing this.
Why am I doing this?
It doesn’t hurt her.
No, but it hurts me.
I just have to see her again.
God.
God.
• • •
Downstairs.
Quickly, before he loses his nerve.
From the box of VHS tapes, one tape marked SARAH.
In it goes.
Stop.
He does stop, but only because he has to shut the door to the media room and lock it.
Salvador cannot, must not see this.
Sits back down.
Pushes play.
Push stop.
No, really. PUSH STOP.
• • •
The woman throws a Frisbee, probably an hour before sunset.
The McIntyre Bluffs.
2004.
Eight years ago, before the path to the promontory had eroded into a crumbling saddle, when a brave or foolish soul might still skitter upright over something of a spine to the platform of turf that remained.
But the woman.
Thirtyish, sandy brown hair cut into bangs.
That smile would melt an iron heart.
That smile could stop evil itself.
It is the sun on toast, it is the sun on Christmas morning with all wars over.
It is a smile to give up magic for.
Her faded jeans, all the rings on her fingers, one a teaspoon ring.
Should have thrown myself from that promontory.
Just like the rusalka did all those years ago.
What have I done with myself since Sarah?
She hated this part of you, this self-pitying part of you.
No she didn’t.
Sarah didn’t hate.
Now the camera follows something flashing through the high grass.
A swatch of the lake behind it.
It’s really tearing ass.
A dog.
A young border collie, not a year old, already an acrobat.
It leaps, yanks the red disk from the air as if tearing it from the swatch of blue sky hung behind the cliff.
The camera dips back to where the woman laughs and claps.
The trapdoor is coming.
“Good Sal! Good, smart Sal!” she says, and the dog drops the Frisbee in the grass at her feet. Her lace-up thrift store boots. Sarah is a thrift store empress, five foot four, size seven shoe, tiny through the waist, fucking everything fits her.
And the thrift stores took it all back.
Here’s the trapdoor.
The drop of the Frisbee marks it.
He can call her name, have her lock eyes with him, speak to her.
He has done it exactly three times.
Only once sober.
Not today.
Not never, it doesn’t work like that.
Just not today.
“That’s my boy,” she says, and gives the Frisbee a lusty throw.
“Some arm on you,” younger Andrew says.
His one contribution to this tape.
She looks at the camera.
Looks at the younger Andrew she loved like that.
The trapdoor is still open.
If he speaks.
If he says Sarah.
She is about to speak to younger Andrew.
Her eyes cut left and she smiles that smile instead.
Now Salvador bounds into view but doesn’t drop the Frisbee.
Wants to play chase this time.
The hump of his running back in the high grass.
Whatever she was going to say goes unsaid, turns to laughter as she runs after the dog. Out of frame. Young Andrew is smart enough to stop filming, put the camera down, join the chase. Live. Soon the young couple will pack their dog and blankets and empty wine bottle into the Mustang, go home, back to this house, and make love.
Older Andrew isn’t welcome to that party.
Let’s say now-Andrew, shall we?
Now-Andrew isn’t welcome to that party.
But that’s okay.
He’s not entirely sure he believes in time anymore, and if there is no time, he is making love to Sarah even now.
He often thinks of the Russian word for wing when he thinks of making love to Sarah. Krihlo. Said with that little Russian vowel that sounds like i but in the front of the mouth, like you’re trying to sneak a w in there. That o that opens the lips instead of closing them.
God Sarah God Sarah God
Her rings on the nightstand.
Her boots on the floor, making a sort of happy swastika with his.
Her soft, joyful whimpers.
Salvador the dog crying to be let in with them.
• • •
Salvador the wicker man taps on the door to the media room.
Let’s say now-Salvador.
Now-Salvador, then.
Now-Andrew sleeves his cheeks dry.
Puts the tape away.
Opens the door.
61
The UPS man has arrived with a parcel Andrew must sign for.
A parcel from Frenchman Street in New Orleans.
He can tell by the weight of the package.
He recognizes Miss Mathilda’s squared-off, careful print.
Three tapes.
The dead in their black plastic shells.
Souls trapped in amber.
He can’t free them, but he can make them dance.
Oh God, he wants a drink.
The house is quiet with a quiet that television and music are powerless to interrupt. The night groans by on rusted wheels.
62
The dream is the same dream.
Always the same dream.
The Soviet dream.
• • •
He is twenty-three again, arrogant, strong, as pretty as a girl, irresistible to girls and women of every stripe. He travels easily through Soviet Russia, using magic to outdance its bureaucracy, its lethal but ponderous bureaucracy, clever in places but cold. Secular. Unable to allow for the impossible. He is playing chess with adversaries who cannot see all the pieces, who might beat him if they allowed for the possibility that they could not see all the pieces.
His papers say he is a Soviet citizen.
Magic gives him flawless Russian.
Magic summons perfect answers to his lips.
He is too light for the police.
He is too clever for the KGB.
He is looking for treasuries of magic tomes lost since the days of the tsars.
“Of all of the spell books and relics known to exist, whether seen by reliable witnesses or referenced in other works, only a quarter or so are in known hands,” his mentor had told him; on mention of secret magic books, Andrew had sat like a cat before a can opener. “Of the remainder, it is believed that a disproportionate amount have accumulated in what is now the Soviet Union. Some hiding in plain sight, no doubt, waiting in bookstores for the first luminous person to buy them for less than an American dollar. Most will have been hoarded and stored.”
“Hoarded and stored by whom?”
“We don’t know. Various users, even more deeply hidden than Western ones, perhaps more powerful. I know a man, a Walloon Belgian, who went to Leningrad in 1973 and came back with a book on traveling underwater, a bit redundant in the age of scuba, but still. I also know a man and wife who went together to the Volga and never came back. The Volga’s probably where most of it is.”
“When did they go?”
“1975? Jesus, three years ago. I saw them get married the year before.”
Now, in the 1983 dream, Andrew has left the city of Gorky, in the Volga region, and makes his way by train and bus into the countryside, hitchhiking rides from farm trucks, beat-up Zaporozhets with their goldfish-eye headlights, even a horse-drawn cart full of barreled milk.
And then.
And then.
• • •
Andrew has been hitching all day, with mixed success.
He just realizes how hungry he is, how long it’s been since he ate, when he finds himself looking at a scene from the nineteenth century.
Two men in baggy shirts, short woolen vests and brown pants swing scythes into the high grass, looking for all the world like they had stepped out of Fiddler on the Roof. They work their way down the side of a hill, the sky chalky blue above them, one of them humming to keep his time, the younger one swinging less rhythmically, fighting the scythe, tired. Maybe sixteen years old.
“I see you have made an enemy of the grass, Lyosha,” the older man says from beneath a tsarist mustache. “This will not do. Make friends with it. Let it know that you only want to let it lie down and rest.”
He goes back to humming his song, but still the boy chops and sweats, stopping for a moment to wipe his brow with his cap.
“Call your idiot brother and see if he can show you how.”
“He will not come, Uncle. He is lying on the stove.”
“Call him anyway.”
“Ivan!” the boy calls.
Andrew keeps walking down the path, keeping an eye out for another potential ride, but this.
This is something else.
He slows down a bit because he wants to see how this idyll will play out. Do they still make idiot brothers who like to lie on the stove in Cold War Russia?
Clearly they do; the large man who crests the hill and lopes down at the other two has the characteristic eye tilt of Down syndrome, and he breathes through his mouth as he says, “What do you want? I was catching flies.”
“You caught no flies unless they landed in your mouth,” the mustachioed man says. “Now show your weakling brother how a man mows hay.”
The boy hands the scythe to his brother, and Ivan whacks at the grass like a mad thing, shearing great armloads of it down with each stroke, giggling. Soon the little brother takes up a fistful of grass and throws it at Ivan, ducking back out of range before the scythe’s blade swishes down again. It becomes a game. The older man sets down his scythe and joins in, baiting the laughing peasant with flung grass and dancing away from the flashing blade. Andrew now has to turn his head back to watch, so he stops walking altogether and slides his arms free of his backpack. He lights a shitty Soviet cigarette so he will not appear to be nosy, just a man having a rest and a smoke, and he sits on the big canvas sack he has been lugging.
The Necromancer's House Page 18
