The Necromancer's House

by Christopher Buehlman

  The pelican takes flight nearby; she hears it but cannot turn her head.

  It lands on the boat with the man, its feet squeaking on the wet wood.

  Still has the fish in its mouth, now spits it out.

  Not a fish.

  It lands with a metallic clunk.

  A knife.

  The stars all seem to blur at once, and then, when they become sharp again, the pelican is a woman.

  Naked.

  Holding the knife.

  Pretty, with a mole.

  Like old nobility.

  She levels the knife at the rusalka’s eyes so the point seems to disappear. Nadia senses this is not a normal knife.

  “No, it is not a normal knife,” the woman says.

  She knew my thoughts!

  “And such simple thoughts. What a shame that such a crude thing as yourself could kill my Misha. Do you remember doing that? The man in the cabin?”

  Nodding is difficult, but the rusalka nods.

  “Good,” she says. “Tonight will pay for half.”

  She draws the edge of the knife across Nadia’s cheeks and nose, cutting her. Her blood is thick, barely runs, as if it can’t remember how to.

  It hurts.

  When did I last feel pain?

  She gasps.

  How did she cut me?

  “I told you, rusalka. This is no ordinary knife. It is the Knife of St. Olga of Kiev. It drinks magic. It turns fantastical creatures ordinary. It has turned a basilisk into a snake, a cockatrice into a chicken, and a vampire into an effeminate man who did not enjoy the sun. You,” she says, licking the knife, “are already becoming a young girl again. So you may have the pleasure of dying a second death.”

  Nadia remembers her first death. The rocks looming up at her, the breeze on her tear-wet cheeks, pressure and a smell like pumpernickel when she hit. The sensation of everything emptying and wrecking like a basket of spilled eggs. It seems closer than it did, more vivid.

  “No, you will not be so lucky as to break your neck. And you will not freeze. Freezing is easy. You will die exactly like my Misha died. Drowning. There are far worse things than drowning, but this seems just. You will go to hell more wet than cold.”

  So saying, she waves her hand over the water as if over a pot of soup, says, “Warm her heart and bones” in medieval Russian. The ice around her relents, turns slushy, dissolves.

  Her lungs fill with fresh air, they need air again.

  She slips under the water, sputtering.

  She is not a strong swimmer now.

  Manages to break the surface of the water.

  Hears pieces of what the woman says.

  She is not talking to Nadia anymore.

  “. . . will not rob you of your revenge . . . down to the ship . . . where she put you. Do it . . . be free.”

  Nadia goes under.

  When she comes up, a pelican has taken flight.

  She hears its wings.

  Something brushes against her foot.

  A lamprey?

  How harmless they were before, but now she has living blood again.

  For a moment.

  I’m miles from shore.

  A boat full of dead men lies under me.

  I put them there in a dream I had.

  A long, long dream.

  The boy in the rowboat is rowing away, humming a song.

  “Wait!” she says. “Please.”

  The oars dip, the humming recedes.

  She kicks desperately.

  Her human eyes can’t see in this darkness, even with the lamp of the moon.

  She is alone.

  She is already beginning to tire.

  At that moment a strong hand grabs her foot.

  81

  The girl stole a big gulp of air before Misha yanked her down.

  But now he is losing his grip on her—it is hard for him to make himself real enough to touch things, but he has been working on it. He has longed for the moment he might do this, grab the unnatural thing and break her. Even as he practiced picking up rocks or moving seaweed, he knew it would never be so. The rusalka was so strong she could dissolve him and the three other ghosts in the wreck just by looking at them crossly, scatter them like schools of small fish.

  But this is not a rusalka anymore.

  He feels no anger now.

  It was very good for him to berate the wizard.

  It felt just, he has just grievances.

  But to let this girl drown?

  He looks into her frightened eyes, sees no recognition, only the eyes of a young woman afraid to die.

  Afraid of him.

  How young she is.

  Twenty-one?

  She should be at university, kissing a boy, not dying over a boat full of corpses.

  How horrible he must look to her, as horrible as the others look to him. The Canadian who has been here since 1960 has no lower jaw, gestures frantically to make himself understood. The rock-and-roll singer from 1989 has the long hair in the back and short on top that people now call a mullet; it has stayed doggedly attached to his wormy skull, still platinum blond with dark roots. His SUNY Oswego sweatshirt flutters like a ragged flag when he swims, tiny fish in his wake.

  It is dark but Misha glows just enough for the girl to see his eyes.

  His hand fades out and she kicks to the surface, coughs, tries to yell help but only sputters lake water.

  She will die.

  And what then?

  Turn back into the thing she was?

  He does not think so.

  Become a ghost, like them?

  He shudders.

  Nothing is quite so perverse and lonely as a ghost condemned to haunt a lake.

  She slips under again.

  He can almost hear his Baba upbraiding him for weakness.

  Let her die! The bitch killed you. This death is too merciful for her.

  He remembers her at his window near the Volga.

  The crone his mama pretended not to see.

  The woman from the forest he was not allowed to look at.

  She only spoke to him through the curtain, just a shape.

  Your father is coming. Do you think he wants to see what a weak son he has? Do you know what fathers do to weak sons? That boy who bullies you, I was going to hang him from a tree, but that will not teach you. Your father would tell you to punch him, but that is not enough. You bite his nose, Misha. Not off, they will commit you if you bite it off. But bite it hard enough to scar him. If you punch him, he will work up his courage and hit you again. Or come back with friends. But if you bite his nose, you will surprise him, hurt him, make him afraid of you because he will never know what you might do. He will look at the ground when you pass.

  But he is not like her.

  He did not bite that boy, only hit him.

  And it was enough.

  They fought; the larger boy beat Misha badly but got a black eye doing it.

  He moved on to easier prey.

  Misha knew the boy beat smaller children because his stepfather burned him with cigarettes.

  That was long ago.

  Now.

  The girl is dying.

  Her red hair floats about her in a cloud, no longer knotted into ugly tails. Her cruel muscles and scars are gone.

  Her tail is gone, replaced by legs.

  Let her die!

  But that is not his voice, it is the woman behind the curtain.

  The woman at night, in the trees.

  He grows a shoulder.

  Butts into the girl’s ass and thigh, forces her up.

  Her head breaks the surface and she gasps air in, shuddering.

  He yells at her in English.

  “Swim!”<
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  She does not swim.

  Begins to sink again.

  He nudges her up.

  Yells at her in Russian.

  “Swim, goddammit!”

  She swims.

  • • •

  The couple on the sailing ship scarcely believe what they’re seeing.

  A retired astronomer and his wife who come out from Fair Haven on calm nights and anchor deep to stargaze.

  A naked girl is climbing up over the rail, sprawling out on the deck, throwing up lake water.

  The wife dumps her glass of Riesling on the deck, her boat shoes squeaking.

  The astronomer sits agog.

  “Don’t just sit there, Harry, get her a blanket! And call the Coast Guard! A boat might have gone down.”

  • • •

  The girl is barely conscious.

  Warm hands have her.

  A blanket.

  English coming down at her.

  “Do you know your name? Is anybody else with you? Can you hear me?”

  She understands, but she is too tired to speak English.

  “Nadia. My name is Nadia. I am from St. Petersburg. My father is a professor. My brother is in the cavalry. We know the tsar.”

  She says this in exquisite Russian.

  The older couple doesn’t understand, but they are kind.

  They’ll see her home.

  She turns her head away from them, looks at the white head bobbing in the black lake.

  The old dead man.

  She met him before he was dead but can’t remember how.

  In the shower?

  With a dog?

  Was I dead with him?

  He howls at her playfully.

  Owwwwwooooooooooo.

  He smiles for the first time in months.

  She smiles back.

  Weakly, but sincerely.

  She moves her fingers in the echo of a wave.

  He sinks.

  • • •

  The light is under the water.

  A second moon.

  The best thing he has ever seen.

  He swims down.

  A school of silvery fish he does not recognize parts for him.

  He swims into the moon.

  The warm, yellow moon.

  Saffron made light.

  Misha laughs deeply.

  A woman he has not seen for several years laughs, too.

  Mikhail Yevgenievich Dragomirov dissolves.

  Really and gladly and finally dissolves.

  • • •

  Your father is coming.

  82

  The man who used to be Professor Coyne tries not to tremble while assembling the little plastic tank. The kit came in the mail two days ago, a Tamiya 1/35 scale T-34 tank. He is to paint it in winter white, with forest netting made from moss and birch twigs. The moss is hard, but the model itself was harder. His eyes aren’t so good and he shakes. When he trembles, he makes mistakes, and she has no tolerance for mistakes.

  He has cut himself twice with his X-Acto knife. He looked for ten minutes on his hands and knees for a track wheel that rolled away.

  These were minor mistakes.

  He puts his hood on when she comes to check his work; she is just a shape to him.

  When he makes minor mistakes, the Cold Man burns his skin with cold.

  Yesterday he made a huge mistake.

  He took a sandwich bag from the kitchen drawer, squirted a generous dollop of modeling glue into it and bagged it over his nose and mouth. He breathed it in and opened up dangerous, pleasant windows in his head. He had been without wine since they adopted him. They only gave him meat and moldy bread to eat, and he knew it was wrong to eat the meat.

  He needed something.

  The high was good.

  It made him brave.

  And foolish.

  He tried to run.

  Because of Jim Wilson.

  • • •

  It wasn’t so bad, picking up the large box from the airport.

  The Cold Man had waited in the back of the rental van.

  He knew if he tried to run, the Cold Man would catch him, would go find his wife.

  He had gone to the American Eagle desk at the Syracuse Hancock International Airport, identified himself as the man who was here to pick up Jim Wilson.

  Jim Wilson was the airline’s euphemism for human remains.

  He signed the papers, drove the van around to where the box could be loaded.

  Took the cardboard box and air tray from around the dirty, old pine coffin.

  Drove back, gave her the coffin.

  She had done things to it that night, after she got back from the lake.

  She raised the dead man up.

  • • •

  He had seen the dead man doing exercises, a short dead man almost all bones, brown bones with just a little skin. Military uniform hanging off him, too big now, medals on his chest. Embalmed all those years ago. Now doing slow exercises, learning to walk again, holding her shoulder. More spells. More exercises. His flesh was coming back, starting to, at least. She tossed him a child’s ball in the yard, improving his reflexes.

  It was too much.

  They told the professor to build the model, and he had built models as a child.

  But when the dead man with the coat of medals came to watch him, instruct him, it was too much.

  The horsefly had been bad.

  She made him sit shirtless in the woods until one came, and she caught it. Spoke to it in her cupped hands. Put it in his ear.

  It flew into his brain.

  Now when someone spoke Russian to him, the fly told him what they said in English. Spoke it directly to his brain.

  The dead man thought in Russian, raspy, awful Russian.

  The fly buzzed the dead man’s thoughts into his head.

  “We painted brown in with the green like branches. Here. And here.”

  The dead finger pointed at parts of the turret.

  It was too much.

  So when the dead man left to learn to balance on a beam, the Man Who Would Not Look At Her huffed glue.

  It was the best he had felt since it got cold.

  He saw it clearly.

  That he could run and get to other people.

  Drive his wife away somewhere warm.

  But it was the dead man who caught him.

  On the road, near the cornfield.

  A car drove by, the driver looking at it, how the dead man tackled him around the knees, flipped him over, straddled his chest with his awful old stink pouring off him.

  The driver just drove away, never stopped.

  Perhaps never saw.

  The dead man held his jaw in the bony, brown hand,

  I am making friends with death!

  grinned his awful grin down at him.

  Waggled his finger as if at a naughty child.

  Dragged him back by the heel.

  He was just another exercise.

  She knew he would run, wanted the dead man to catch him.

  • • •

  Now the tank is almost done, and it looks good.

  He will help her make the button-men next.

  She is building a tiny army to punish the Thief.

  To show American witches what a Russian witch looks like.

  Then she will go back home.

  Perhaps.

  • • •

  She likes it here.

  83

  Anneke opens up her A-frame house, goes in. Everything looks smaller now, since her apprenticeship in the quarry. She thrums with magic fuel, feels like she can see inside rocks, mugs, even metal. The drive home was difficult; everything distracted a
nd amazed her: brick houses, rocky hillocks, even a rusted-out iron grill next to a Sharpied FREE sign by the roadside. Without entirely meaning to, she made the grill jump, knocked the sign over. Almost ran her Subaru into the metal pole of a SNOWPLOW TURN sign. Then a second spell launched out of her by reflex—she displaced the signpost with magic so violent a sharp metal PANG! rang out at the same time as a whip-crack Pop! sounded, the sign relocating faster than the speed of sound, the yellow diamond quivering on the wrong side of a farmer’s fence.

  That’s going to be hard to explain.

  What had really been distracting her, however, was her basement.

  The things in her basement, more precisely.

  Things she had never told Andrew about.

  She walks into her house thinking about those things, one in particular, and she thinks about it as she sits in her smoking chair, burning through three Winstons in a row, the lake’s blue all but invisible to her unfocused eyes, the Nag Champa incense stick wreathing the little statue of Andrew in smoke. She stubs the last cigarette out in the camel-bone ashtray, takes the small key from under the statue, gets up and unlocks the padlock to the trapdoor that leads down.

  Almost descends but doesn’t.

  Leaves the padlock lying open next to the hasp.

  Puts the key away.

  Opens up her bottle of Maker’s Mark.

  Paces the floor, swigging.

  Remembers Michael’s words.

  All new users get a surge sometime after they uncork their power. It might take a day, it might take three months, but it’ll come. It might last an hour, it might last a week. It’s like opening a can of soda that’s been shaken; all that stored-up potential comes gushing out. This is actually pretty dangerous; when it comes, you sit on your hands. You let it pass. Watch TV. Read a book. Do that Sudoku. Keep your mind busy. You don’t know how to control magic yet, and you could do something bad. It’ll be tempting; it’ll take you years to get that strong again. Trying to run spells while you’re surging would be like trying to drive a car when you’re five years old. I’m tempted to keep you here, but there’s no telling when it’ll hit. Besides, you probably shouldn’t be around the kind of big statues I have here; you animate one while I’m not watching and it could kill you, or decide to go to town and play Godzilla. And you might not be able to stop it.

  It’s happening now.

  She’s surging.

  Moving the snowplow sign out of the way, that was the beginning of it.