The Necromancer's House
Page 35
She runs.
Ignores the splinters and glass and blood.
Tromps upstairs in her heavy Docs, tracking snow.
Goes to the library.
126
Anneke enters the library.
Shelly Bertolucci struggles and grunts, locked in combat with the witch who put Anneke in the hut. A bloody saber lies on the floor near them. The witch has scratches near her eyes. Shelly has a broken nose. Books, a broken drill, an overturned table, and other debris litter the floor near the combatants.
Both of them move like they’re drunk.
Anneke stands transfixed.
She looks again at the saber.
Dives for it, her shoulder screaming in protest.
Holds it.
The women fight.
Both of them have seen Anneke take up the weapon; each seems intent on keeping the other from speaking.
The witch lashes out with a vicious elbow, catches Shelly in the ear.
Anneke steps forward, cocks the saber for a thrust.
Marina speaks.
“Anneke Zautke! I’m Andrew! In the wrong body!”
Anneke stops the thrust, which would have taken Marina Yaganishna through the ribs.
A trick. Fuck this Russian whore.
She cocks the weapon back.
Inspired, Marina speaks again.
“Let’s watch Papillon!”
Now Shelly swats Marina across the jaw, catches her hard, if gracelessly, with the heel of her hand.
Shuts her up.
Earns a second to speak.
“What are you doing? Don’t let her hurt me!”
A simulated lover’s simulated plea.
Russian accent?
Anneke squints.
“Hurry!” barks Shelly.
Palatalized H.
Sounds like xhoory!
“Funny,” Anneke says.
Shelly sees Marina about to speak again, catches her with a weak but painful punch in the throat, drives her back.
Marina puts her hands to her neck, falls back into Andrew’s prized leather reading chair.
Shelly is clear now.
Shelly with the Russian accent.
Anneke, in shock, white-faced.
Decides.
Pushes through her instinct not to harm Shelly, uses that momentum to strike.
Hard.
NOW!
Stabs the curved point overhand, down at the red Japanese sun on the younger woman’s T-shirt.
The saber halts for a microsecond at the sternum, pushes through sickeningly, comes out the other side, tenting the cotton there before piercing it.
Shelly’s look of fury turns to pain and disbelief.
She puts her hands on the saber.
And turns back to stone.
Around the steel saber.
Wearing a bloody T-shirt and oversized jeans.
Anneke makes a primal noise something like a wail.
“She’ll try to take your body!” the witch in the chair squeaks through her bruised windpipe. “Tense your muscles . . . breathe deliberately, fast and shallow.”
Anneke does.
127
Baba Yaga finds herself bodyless again.
The warlock in her last body is not vulnerable.
Panting in the leather chair like a whelping bitch.
The new witch is shutting her out, too.
She has never felt so weak.
If I don’t find a body soon . . . Even if I do, I’m not sure I’ll have the strength to take someone.
But I think so.
One more.
That’s when she sees the warm, red light.
Police car?
A policewoman would make a fine host. She would be tempted to walk back in here and shoot these two, but her strength is so low she might not be able to jump back out of the new one without preparing certain potions, using Milk-witch to drain some luminous boy or girl to fuel her. No good. To end her days in an American prison wouldn’t be a very funny joke.
No, wherever she goes next, she’ll need time to gather her strength.
She goes outside, through the ruined front door.
The light glows through the trees.
Down in the road below?
She moves past the tank, past the dead warlock.
The stick-man with the portrait head is slapping pathetically at ravens, trying to get them to stop eating his master.
Good luck, sobaka.
When she gets to the road, she sees no police car.
The red glow is coming from above.
That is incorrect.
She cranes up
with what neck?
and looks
with what eyes?
to see it.
A huge red cloud of whirling lights (eyes?), a cloud as big as a zeppelin, some of its size obscured by the oily smoke and the fog left by the snow and then the absence of snow.
She knows what this thing is.
A collector.
A cleaner.
It comes for recalcitrant spirits.
In a body you can’t see it and it can’t see you.
Ghosts hide from it, but eventually, in ten years or three hundred, it gets them.
I’m a ghost!
She flees, goes into the house across the street.
A dog with three legs barks at her.
She goes into the house, nobody downstairs, upstairs only a dead man and two burnt dolls.
Burnt curtains.
An angry-looking ghost stands near them.
Get out of my house! it yells at her.
She sees his life in an instant.
A weak, angry man.
Go shave your balls, she says.
The dog barks.
The dog then! I’ll hide in the dog!
Would she even live long enough in a dog to gather the strength to push a person out?
Would enough of her be left to have language?
She could be stuck in a cripple dog for years.
Forever, even.
The house fills with red light.
A sort of eye looks in.
Better a dog than in that fucking thing.
The eye sees the angry man fuming.
A sort of hand reaches into the window.
NO! NO! NO! the man says, but it takes him anyway.
Dissolves him utterly, or so it seems.
So ends the shortest haunting in New York State history.
Baba flees downstairs.
Tries to get into the dog, but it runs back and forth on its run, barking at her.
Too tense, too fast.
How does a dog with three legs move so fast?
Now the huge red thing is done with the angry man.
She moves off into the woods.
Considers going back to the Thief’s house and taking a raven.
Too small.
The woods go red.
Not ME!
You won’t get ME!
Wait . . . what is that?
In the hollow of a log.
Something cowers.
Just big enough, she thinks.
Then she recognizes it.
The indignity of the situation galls her.
A skunk?
Worse than that.
A pregnant skunk?
A sort of eye looks down at her through a crown of maple leaves.
Here is the devil!
Fearful, the skunk shows her its teeth.
It has good reason to be afraid.
Baba Yaga pushes.
The skunk squeals.
The red light goes away.
128
When the police come, Marina Yaganishna tells them what happened standing twenty yards from Andrew’s corpse.
They see what she wants them to see.
They believe what she tells them.
129
From the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus:
MAYFIELD PHILANTHROPIST DIES NEAR CHERNOBYL
Montpelier, VT—Michael Rudnick, local sculptor and philanthropist, has been found dead in the abandoned Ukrainian town of Pripyat of what appears to have been a massive stroke.
Rudnick, 71, is known for a variety of charitable acts. In 2005 he donated building materials for the new prenatal wing at the Mayfield Memorial Hospital; in 2009 he gave a life-sized sculpture of a charging bear to the Northern Vermont Museum of Natural History, and children from Mayfield to Montpelier know the white-bearded Rudnick as Father Christmas for his appearances at local parks on a reindeer-pulled sled.
A State Department official described Rudnick’s presence in Pripyat, part of the exclusion zone exposed to radiation in the 1986 explosion of reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, as “highly irregular,” but declined to elaborate. Rudnick served in the U.S. Army infantry in 1968 and attended the University of Vermont on the G.I. Bill. He is survived by a sister, Michelle, and a brother, Paul.
Asked about her brother’s tragic journey to Ukraine, Michelle Rudnick-Osborne said, “Michael was always full of surprises, always turning up where you didn’t expect him. But he always had your back. There’s nobody else like him, and we’ll miss him very much.”
• • •
From the Syracuse Post-Standard:
METEOR STRIKE KILLS 1, INJURES 1
Dog Neck Harbor, NY—A Cayuga County man is dead and a Cornell professor is injured following a rare meteor strike in west-central New York.
The deceased, John Dawes, 46, appears to have been struck in the neck by flying metal from the destruction of a car owned by neighbor Andrew Blankenship, whose house was also damaged in the freak event. Blankenship was away at the time.
Blankenship’s houseguest, Marina Yaganishna, reported hearing a “rushing sound followed by a chain of god-awful bangs. The house was hit so hard I was afraid it would fall.”
James Coyle, Ph.D., is reported in stable condition with lacerations and head trauma. He has no memory of how he got to Dog Neck Harbor from his summer cabin in nearby Sterling, New York.
The phenomenon occurred at about 9:45 P.M. at Willow Fork Road on the east side of town.
A tractor of unknown provenance was also struck, its gas tank igniting and the resulting fire burning a section of woods.
130
Andrew-in-Marina walks with Anneke to the feasting crows. Anneke already got Salvador to go inside.
“Don’t look,” Marina tells Anneke, looking. Her accent is pure midwestern American.
“Me don’t look? How about you don’t look?” Anneke says, looking.
“I’ll only get to see this once,” Marina says.
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Marina takes a lock of Andrew’s hair.
It will be necessary for the spells Marina will cast to make herself look like him, sound like him.
This won’t be easy, but she won’t have to do it long; just long enough to tie things up legally, make the property Marina’s.
A search of the hut yielded her passport, driver’s license, credit cards.
Near dawn, Marina and Anneke burn Andrew’s remains, making the flames crematorium-hot with the last of the fireglass.
“Andrew Blankenship is dead,” Marina says.
“Long live Marina Yaganishna,” Anneke says, offering Marina a cigarette.
She almost reaches for one, then shakes her head.
“I think I just quit.”
• • •
Anneke spends the night.
The two of them spoon, each holding the other as if she were as fragile as a kite.
Sleep comes only in teaspoons.
The one time both of them sleep, one cries out, wakes the other.
Neither is sure who.
131
In the morning Chancho comes by for a training session Andrew had forgotten about.
Anneke tells Chancho what happened.
“No effin’ way.”
Chancho looks Marina up and down.
He looks at her in silence for a good minute and a half.
“Hey, bruja,” he says at last, addressing Marina. “Name three people who beat the Iceman.”
“KO or decision?” the woman says.
“Your choice.”
“Rashad Evans. Rampage Jackson. What’s-his-face Jardine. The Dean of Mean. Keith?”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t no knockout.”
“You said, ‘your choice.’”
Chancho nods, very slowly.
“What about Ortiz?”
Marina wrinkles her mouth at Chancho.
“Ortiz never beat Liddel. Ortiz is a pendejo.”
Chancho corrects her pronunciation.
132
Andrew looks like Andrew thanks to a very powerful, very temporary spell.
He goes to see his lawyer, signs everything over to Marina Yaganishna, whom he describes as a cousin.
“Cousin, eh? Is that what they’re calling Russian Internet brides these days? What are you doing, Andrew?”
“Just trust me.”
“Tax stuff? You hiding assets?”
“Just do it, please.”
• • •
Andrew has until sunset to look, smell, and sound like himself.
He calls Salvador.
Sal waggles his hips for the first time since Andrew’s body died.
“Sal, I have to ask you a question.”
The framed portrait of Dalí nods.
“Sal, are you happy?”
Salvador doesn’t respond for some time.
Then it turns the knobs on the Etch-a-Sketch.
I
SERVE
“That’s not an answer. I want to know if you’re happy. Now. Like this.”
One of the automaton’s hands moves toward the knobs to reply.
Then it lies still.
There it is, then.
“I’m going to ask you another question, Sal. It’s a question that means more than it seems to mean, so I want you to think about your answer, okay?”
The portrait nods.
“Do you want to stay inside with me? Or do you want to go outside?”
Salvador bows his head.
Then points at the Etch-a-Sketch.
I
SERVE.
Andrew shakes his head.
“Tell me really. Tell me what you want.”
The automaton squirms.
Then writes.
OUTSIDE
Sal shakes the screen clear and turns the knobs again.
YOU OUTSIDE
WITH SAL LATER
Andrew laughs, feels a tear start in one eye, knuckles it away.
“It’s a date,” he says.
• • •
First, Andrew watches the tape with Sal and Sarah a dozen or thirteen times, never opening the trapdoor. Just watching. Then he pops the tape out, takes it upstairs.
The microwave is destroyed, so Andrew uses the stove to thaw a piece of filet he had been saving in the freezer, a big red bastard wrapped in applewood-smoked bacon.
That done, he turns Salvador back into a border collie, using the last of the alarm magic woven into his wicker limbs.
This will last only twenty minutes at most.
He gives Sal the filet.
Watches the greedy, beautiful dog gobble it down.
All ten ounces of it.
He t
akes Sal outside, throws a Frisbee for him.
Laughs as Sal plucks the orange disc from the air once, twice, then gets distracted and chases a raven, probably one of those that ate Andrew’s face not so long ago.
Then they just run together.
The dog is big-legging it through the last warm day of the year, his tongue hanging behind him for what seems like half a mile, barking and jumping.
Then they fall into a tumble of scratches and playful bites and cheek-licking, a dance as old as man and dog and meat and fire. At last they rest, Sal’s head on his lap.
Andrew smells the dog’s good smells, from the waxy scent of the fur near his ears to the grassy, leathery black pads of his feet, even his steaky, hot breath.
A squirrel chirrs from a tree and Sal raises his head, pricks his ears up, but doesn’t chase it.
Just wags.
Happy as he’s ever been with the smells of squirrel and fresh air and dead raccoons in the air and the sun on his coat, his master’s hand in his fur, his master’s voice in his ear and smell in his nose.
For the last time.
It has to be here.
It has to be now.
The dog begins to blur.
Stands up and yawns, curling his tongue.
Andrew stands, too.
The dog blurs and stays blurry.
Rises from four feet to stand on two.
Now Sal is an automaton again.
Before he can lose his nerve, Andrew pulls the lid off the basket at the center of the wicker man, yanks out the dog’s salted heart.
Not unlike pulling a plug.
The wicker man collapses, falls into an almost fetal position with Dalí looking up at the sky.
The portrait will hang in the library.
The prosthetic legs will go to the VA, where some bewildered young man or woman home from a hot country may be glad for them.
The wicker man and the dog’s heart go in the fire.
As does the VHS tape.
Sal and Sarah.
Outside.
Later.
It’s a date.
Andrew Blankenship watches the sun go down, sitting by the fire in his Japanese robe.
Marina Yaganishna gets up, ties the robe tighter.
Hears the cell phone ringing.
Picks it up.
• • •
It’s Anneke.
133