The Necromancer's House

by Christopher Buehlman

  He thinks quickly, trying to remember if he has anything controversial lying about in the living or dining room.

  He thinks not.

  “Would you like to come in?”

  Now Andrew sees why the older Jehovah’s Witness is huffing and puffing so much—a produce basket and two full grocery bags stand on the porch behind them. The climb up the drive is nearly too much for Arthur without sacks to carry, so these really tested the poor geezer.

  “Oh, we couldn’t impose on your hospitality so close to suppertime,” she says.

  A second and a half ticks by like an awkward musical pause.

  “We were just in the neighborhood and thought we’d bring you some leftovers.”

  Leftovers?

  Andrew attempts several polite refusals, but Mrs. Simpson is expert at parrying these. She wears him down. He takes the plate, peeps under the foil.

  Looks like pot roast, creamed corn, and coleslaw.

  “It’s pot roast,” she says. “I made it myself, so you’ll have to eat it all up.”

  “Mmmm-mm,” he says. “Well, thank you.”

  Arthur has enough wind back in him to speak.

  “We also brought you some groceries.”

  “Mr. . . .”

  “Madden, it’s okay.”

  “I really don’t feel comfortable taking groceries from you. I have plenty of food, and I’m sure you can think of someone in need who would love to get these.”

  “Well, here’s the situation, Andrew. I am too tired to carry these bags back down your drive, and, may the Lord forgive me, too proud to let you or Mrs. Simpson do it. So you are just. Going. To have. To take. The groceries. Call it a favor to me.”

  This guy could charm the mustache off a gay trucker.

  What the hell is going on?

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “Call it a random act of kindness. Have you seen that bumper sticker? Perform something-something-beauty and random acts of kindness?”

  “All right,” Andrew says. “You win.”

  “I usually do. I mean, is this stuff that you will eat?”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  Andrew peeks in the first bag.

  First item, weirdly, a ziplock bag holding about half a dozen pickled eggs.

  A block of sharp cheddar.

  Canned goods.

  Tomatoes, peas, chicken soup.

  Creamed corn.

  “And don’t you worry about a thing. I know things may seem tough now, but with the Lord’s help, all trials are temporary, and all burdens bearable.”

  He peeks in the second bag.

  Rice. Mac and cheese. Dry spaghetti noodles in their long, coffinish boxes.

  “Trials?”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Mr. Blankenship. This recession is very real, and jobs are hard to come by, and hard to keep. A good many of our congregation are also unexpectedly seeking new employment, and I understand you’ve been off the job for a while.”

  Andrew pauses. Looks at Arthur. Looks back down at the produce basket and then pulls the cloth off the top, revealing a prodigious heap of potatoes.

  And a mirror.

  A small hand mirror.

  Sitting on top of the potatoes.

  He sees his own reflection in it.

  A spell.

  His heart skips a beat.

  He throws the cloth back over it as if covering a snake.

  “She said you might be reluctant to accept help, but I assured her . . .”

  “She?” Andrew says a little too loudly.

  Heart skidding.

  “Why yes. Your mother’s friend.”

  “My mother’s friend who?”

  “You know, she didn’t tell me her name. The Polish lady.”

  “Russian,” corrects Mrs. Simpson.

  “That’s right, Russian. Very nice. She said she was just speaking with your mother . . .”

  My mother’s dead.

  “. . . and told her she was bringing you potatoes from her own garden because homegrown food tastes best. And promised your mother you would visit her soon.”

  “Forgive me, but you have to go now.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Please go,” he says, gently pushing Arthur just a little, then calling “Salvador!”

  “Well, yes, all right, but if there’s anything we can do to . . .”

  “SALVADOR!”

  Andrew takes the mirror from under the cloth, breaks it violently on his porch.

  Mrs. Simpson takes her colleague by the elbow and begins to lead him down the long drive.

  “Good night, Mr. Blankenship,” she says. “God bless.”

  • • •

  Salvador comes trotting around the side of the house, holding a pair of pruning shears, his prosthetic knees smeared with dirt. Some sort of weed is caught in the wicker of his left arm.

  His framed head cocks to one side, awaiting instructions.

  Before Andrew can issue any, however, the produce basket turns over on its own and the potatoes roll and bounce away from it like so many tailless rats escaping a ship.

  Their paths cone away from Andrew and diverge; he dives, grabs one, but then it flips out of his hand and keeps rolling.

  “Find out where they’re going!” he shouts at Salvador.

  The wicker man obeys, trailing the biggest group of them.

  Andrew follows the one he grabbed.

  It heads east, into the patch of woods near his house. He sees others moving in the low brush; to his left, one stops rolling, begins spinning in place. Burrows underground with a distinctive skirring noise.

  He hears this happening all around him.

  “Oh shit.”

  His does it, too, as soon as it gets half a dozen yards away from him.

  Planting themselves.

  I don’t know this spell.

  I don’t like this spell.

  Salvador finds him, points urgently, in several directions.

  “Okay, okay. Thanks, boy. First, get me a shovel. No, a spade. No, I’ll get the spade, you pile firewood in the pit.”

  Salvador tilts his head and moves his thumb and forefinger as if measuring an inch.

  How much?

  “All of it.”

  69

  This was Andrew explaining fireglass to Anneke last month when he let her watch him make it:

  • • •

  “Any glass will work, but I like yellow glass so I know what it is. This wineglass will do fine. Smoky amber like. You break it. When you enchant it, you’ll instruct the pieces to fold in on themselves, become smooth and handleable, like little stones. So when you first break it, gather just the bigger shards, and for God’s sake don’t cut yourself—if you make fireglass with your blood in it, the fire will try to find you, will creep out of the fireplace toward you, on the carpet, up your clothes. You get the point.”

  “Could you kill someone with it? Like put their blood in a lightbulb, turn it into fireglass, and put it in their bathroom? Instruct the glass to ignite not on a voice command but when the filament gets hot?”

  He just looks at her.

  Gets a little more frightened of her.

  Falls a little more in love with her.

  70

  Andrew runs to the barn, grabs a few fireglass stones from their vase, runs back, and throws them beneath the first load of wood Salvador has stacked teepee-shaped. He says bhastrika and they jet flame and hot air like small torches until they are spent and a good fire blazes in the pit. He passes Salvador on his way with another double armload of wood, tells him, “Be careful!” and runs for a spade and gloves.

  And a flashlight.

  It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting late.

 
• • •

  He finds the first one by its telltale mound of dirt.

  Uses the long-handled, leaf-bladed garden spade to lever it up.

  It’s bigger than it was, just slightly bigger than a big potato, and has sprouted tendrils.

  He fishes it up with his hand, wary that it might sprout thorns or something.

  At exactly that moment, it sprouts thorns.

  “Fuck!”

  He drops it instantly, only just manages not to get jabbed as one of the spines catches and breaks its tip off in his glove.

  He quickly pinches out and flings down the point.

  The thing rolls back into its hole, starts using its tendrils as sweepers, covering itself with dirt.

  “You little fucker.”

  He jabs at it with the spade, finds its texture not wholly potato-like, tougher on the outside, slimier inside.

  Probably turning animal, probably full of blood.

  It writhes away from the jabbing spade but can’t escape. At last he strikes it hard enough to make it rupture, and bleed it does. It’s still writhing and dripping, like a spiny liver or other organ, as he waddle-runs it around back to the fire.

  He braces himself for a sound.

  It shrieks when he throws it in, high and infantile, though not exactly human. Outraged that it never had a chance to do its job.

  To kill me.

  But how?

  It was growing.

  The fire is huge now, and here comes Salvador with another armload of split logs, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, literally ready to throw all the wood in.

  “That’s enough, Sal.”

  Sal puts the wood down.

  “Help me find them now.”

  He holds the spade up; the portrait head inclines slightly, the automaton’s articulated hand touching the spade’s blade almost tenderly, as if it were a flower.

  The fire casting amber light on the painting’s glossy finish.

  Dalí’s nostrils appear to widen just a bit as Salvador takes in the scent.

  His wicker hips waggle just a little.

  Smelling things is so deliciously doglike.

  All right, you anticipated the thorns and the blood and the shrieking. You have her number, know how she thinks. What’s next? Prepare yourself. The next one will be bigger.

  Salvador points at the ground where a quartet of tendrils are carefully smoothing down the mound the thing made burying itself.

  Clever, awful little things.

  Andrew spades up the dirt.

  This one is the size of a small squash, not a potato.

  It starts burrowing farther down.

  He spades the hell out of it until it, too, bleeds, burbles, and weakens.

  No thorns on this one. Could they all be different?

  Now a tiny mouth, like a baby’s, forms, bites feebly at the blade.

  He grimaces, strikes a few more times.

  Ruins the tiny mouth.

  Pulps it all.

  Shovels that out and takes it to the fire.

  Have to work faster, they’re growing.

  The next one, the size of a cat, has enough tendrils to try to fight him for the spade. It loses.

  The sun has gone down.

  Think!

  The next one must be carried into the fire in a bucket.

  When the blisters begin to weep and sting within his gloves, Salvador digs.

  The one after burrows farther down before he spades the life from it, and he gets an idea.

  When the next one goes deeper, Andrew flings fireglass into the hole.

  Bhastrika!

  Fire gouts up from the hole, licks Andrew’s jeans.

  The potato-thing screams and dies.

  His nonluminous neighbors don’t hear a scream.

  They hear a train.

  • • •

  The work goes on into the night.

  He digs them up, finds abominations ever larger, stronger, harder to look at. He burns them, they shriek or squeal, he shovels out the smoldering mess and buckets it over to the bigger fire.

  The last one Salvador finds is as large as a bear cub.

  When the magus shines the light down into the hole, eyes shine up at him. He pauses, stunned. The eyes look human. It starts covering itself back up.

  He runs for the house, gets his revolver, a .357 Smith and Wesson, and a fire extinguisher. Salvador is losing the garden spade to it, holding the light on it with one hand, clutching the spade with the other, digging furrows with his planted prosthetic heels.

  A whitish vine has snaked around one of Sal’s legs.

  He’s whimpering and growling.

  Andrew levels his magnum’s six-inch barrel at the thing in the hole.

  It blinks at him.

  I wonder if it knows.

  It lets go of the spade, covers its face with the larger tendrils, tendrils that look suspiciously like hands.

  Andrew fans a hand over the gun, imagines a kid banging on a metal garbage can lid. When he fires, that’s what the neighbors will hear.

  I wonder if it’s going to say please.

  It says please, or tries to, its mouth full of dirt.

  “Prease.”

  It sounds a lot like the ghost in the car.

  Slavic forest magic.

  Very, very strong.

  It almost has a hand-tendril around the barrel when Andrew recovers from its mild charm.

  The trash can lid bangs six times.

  A train whistles.

  The thing in the hole mostly dies.

  “Stand back, Sal.”

  The wizard throws so many fireglass stones into the hole that when he says bhastrika the flame burps up, makes a ring that lights brush and lower branches.

  He uses the extinguisher.

  Turns around to find Nadia looking at him, pleased with him.

  • • •

  It is near two A.M. when he satisfies himself that he has found them all. Salvador covers the whole property. They trespass onto the neighbor’s land, Nadia holding the light, all of them invisible; if they are spotted, they will look like errant fireflies. This spell strains the already weary magus, but it must be done.

  Slogging up to his front door, he sees a raccoon running off, dragging the bag of pickled eggs.

  Just a raccoon.

  Just eggs.

  This strikes him really funny and he laughs the way people do on the subway sometimes when they’ve stopped caring who’s looking at them.

  Just as suddenly, he stops laughing, remembers what he was just doing. Shudders to think what those things might have grown into.

  • • •

  Before the shower, he looks at himself in the mirror over the sink.

  He looks at the wall behind his shoulder, happy it’s just wall.

  Happy there’s nobody behind him.

  Is the old witch really dead?

  What the fuck is after me?

  He is filthy, his hair flecked with something like potato, his skin stippled with blood.

  And then there’s his eye.

  He has popped the blood vessel in his sclera again.

  It hurts.

  He decides to let himself get a little older, at least until he has his strength back. Gray runs down his Indian-black hair in several fine skeins, like runs in a nylon stocking. The lines around his mouth deepen. He looks fortyish now, feels sixty. But his eye stops hurting, clears up.

  His muscles are so sore he can barely turn the knobs, but the shower is good. Grime and blood run down across the Italian tiles and down the drain.

  He’s watching the last of the night’s dirt swirl into the plumbing when he sees her long, pale feet step just behind his. The rusalka can’t resist the water
. The smell of deep lake and tide overwhelms him, but seems oddly pleasant after the high, seminal smell of the potatoes. Odd how their scent changed as they grew, became bloodier, more mammalian.

  He doesn’t look at her, just her feet. Probably a size ten? The men in her family must have had gunboats. He remembers stories she told him about their boots, the high, black boots of her uncles who worked in the New York workshop where they painted silk ties. She was a teenager when they fled the revolution, but the clomp of those boots had reassured her, had made her feel comforted and homesick all at once, certain at least that she was part of a tribe. Russian intelligentsia. People who wanted to keep their nice homes, couldn’t pretend to love the wild-eyed prophets the bastard Lenin sent out like dirty angels to raise the farmers up in anger, making demands, standing on things to talk.

  So they fought alongside the whites.

  The losers.

  But civilized losers.

  Romans fleeing before Vandals.

  Romanovs dying in the yard.

  The first time he’s connected those words, Roman, Romanov.

  Like tsar comes from Caesar.

  Did Nadia ever see the tsar?

  Who cares?

  She drowns people.

  They say please and she drowns them.

  And I fuck her.

  He feels soap slide across his hips, his navel.

  She touches him more intimately, takes it in her hand, slicks her thumb expertly over the head.

  He moves away.

  “Not tonight,” he says.

  “When?”

  Sounds like Venn?

  “I don’t know. Maybe when I forget that ship full of dead people you keep. Or those things in the holes out there. Fucking awful, it’s all so awful.”

  “You want I should go?”

  He pauses.

  She starts to leave.

  She’s a monster.

  But I am, too.

  As long as I do this.

  “No,” he says.

  “Good. You shouldn’t sleep alone anymore.”

  He shakes his head no, as if in agreement.

  “In fact, I won’t let you,” she says in Russian.

  She dries him off and puts him in bed.

  He lets her do that.

  She tries again to do the other thing, but he curls up into a ball.

  Please, it said.

  With dirt in its mouth.