The Necromancer's House

by Christopher Buehlman

  12

  As if summoned, Salvador walks downstairs carrying the soaked and reeking bedsheets from the master bedroom toward the laundry room in the basement. If the framed portrait of Salvador Dalí that served as his head could bear any expression other than the self-consciously crazed eyes of the surrealist, the stick-and-wicker man might raise an eyebrow. He loves to hear his name.

  As it is, he swivels his painted gaze at them on his way down, hoping to be called over, but, when he isn’t, continues dutifully down the steps on his military-grade prosthetic legs.

  Once in the basement, it is all Salvador can do not to spread the sheets out and roll in them; the basket at the center of him holds the salted heart of the border collie he had been before the magus revived him in this form, and that heart still gladdens at strong smells, particularly fishy or fecal ones. He inclines his flat portrait head toward the armful of bedclothes, reveling in their filth. It will be criminal to wash these delicious odors away, but he loves his master as only dogs love, and he sighs a canine sigh and opens the door of the washing machine.

  13

  The Jehovah’s Witnesses come soon after the storm is over. The air is damp and the receding dark clouds in the east make their white shirts pop as they walk up the drive between the young maple trees. Andrew stands on his front porch with his leather coat on, knowing he looks and smells every inch the career sinner, combing out waist-length hair redolent of tobacco and myrrh. He frowns at a new white hair, plucks it, winds it around a finger.

  It will take them a moment to make it up the steep walk.

  He realizes he is about to sigh, recognizes impatience as a sign of entitlement, thinks he really should read another book about Buddhism and try to meditate. He has a date with being Buddhist, but he isn’t there yet.

  And here come two of God’s warriors, both of them African American, one in his sixties, one about twenty.

  At least they mean it, I’ll give them that. They wear out a lot of shoe leather doing what Jesus said to do. No Christmas. No Halloween. But this is a little like trick-or-treating. Do they eat candy? Do I even have any candy?

  The older one is slowing them down.

  That guy doesn’t need any candy.

  That wasn’t very Buddhist, and he’s not fat, just a little soft around the middle, and probably a grandfather, so give him a break.

  Maybe that kid’s grandfather?

  The elder raises a hand, smiles a winning smile.

  “Quite a driveway you have here,” he says. “You must be in good shape!”

  “I might be if I ever left. I’m a hermit. All I do up here is talk to God and wait for strangers to come so I can tell them God’s plan for them. Didn’t they warn you about me at the Kingdom Hall?”

  “Well, they did say . . .”

  “Where’s Barbara?”

  “She moved to Syracuse.”

  “More action in the big city. A rich crop of the godless there, I tell you.”

  “Something like that.”

  He stands with his hands on his hips, bent forward just a little, his elbows fanning out his open coat, Sears, granddad gray. Tie the color of an excited brick. He’s smiling and panting, catching his breath.

  “You okay?” Andrew says.

  He nods, still panting.

  The younger Witness senses he should say something, but he’s a shy one. He’s also more than a little distracted by the garden of rocks and rusted-out cars piled in Andrew’s front yard. The ’65 Mustang he wrecked, an old Chevy truck, a Dodge Dart. All of them wound through with young trees and big, handsome boulders. Its aesthetic leans just more toward art installation than junkyard fodder.

  The boy is fascinated with it, especially the bleached longhorn steer skull crowning it all, its dry teeth yellowing in their sockets, its horns leather-wrapped at the base, slightly tilted.

  The lad knows there’s something more to it than meets the eye.

  He knows he’s the one who’s supposed to break the silence, though, so he speaks.

  “Quite a . . . quite a storm, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure was,” Andrew says.

  They exchange a look.

  The boy glances at the steer skull again, then tilts his head a little bit at the magus, like a dog trying to process a strange sound.

  Holy shit, is this kid luminous?

  A natural?

  Andrew smiles more broadly.

  Damn if he isn’t. Marching around with armfuls of The Watchtower when he’s just humming with receptivity for magic. Anneke’s got a little, but this kid’s like I was.

  Ready to explode.

  One spell book away from a lifetime of . . .

  What?

  Now the older man stands.

  “Arthur. Arthur Madden,” he says, holding out a hand. “And this handsome fellow is Marcus Madden, Jr. No relation. Just kidding.”

  “Andrew Blankenship.”

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Blankenship.”

  This is a genuinely nice guy. I’ll keep it dialed down.

  It’s hard to keep the mischief out of his voice.

  “Would you like to come in?”

  • • •

  They leave twenty minutes later.

  It isn’t the conversation about the reliability of the gospels, nor is it Andrew’s Socratic minefield of questions; it isn’t even Andrew’s assertion that a God who intended sex for procreation alone would not have built a clitoris, nor made it so compatible with the tongue. (“Must be nice to be so close to the lake,” Arthur says to change the subject, although Andrew enjoys the unintended symbolism, as he enjoys that this is how faultlessly polite Arthur chooses to comment about the fishy smell permeating the house.)

  It’s Marcus.

  Marcus sees too much.

  First he’s distracted, looking out at the lake through the back windows.

  “Is there something more interesting than us out there, young man?”

  “I . . . thought I saw a . . . dolphin.”

  “Lakes don’t have dolphins,” Arthur says.

  “We have some very big fish,” Andrew offers.

  The kid looks at him dubiously.

  “Very big,” Andrew says.

  They return to the topic of whether homosexuality is a sin or a natural state of being. Marcus always lets Arthur (his great-uncle, as it turns out) field the questions, but Andrew drags him in from time to time.

  “C’mon, Marcus—you’ve seen gay kids.”

  Marcus almost laughs at that and Arthur steers the conversation back around to God’s capacity for forgiveness, clearly meaning Andrew.

  Offers of Witness literature are countered with offers of Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucian books.

  Mutual refusal.

  “Or, if you want to come back another time, I’ve got a reference library that might really interest you.”

  He directs this at Marcus, trying not to sound creepy, and failing.

  When Salvador brings Andrew French-press coffee, the young man goes gray, looks at Arthur, watches Arthur nod at the servant, and doesn’t understand why Arthur isn’t shitting himself, too.

  That’s because Arthur sees a young Spanish man who bears a slight resemblance to John Leguizamo. You, on the other hand, see the false human form flicker from time to time, and that’s when you see the lacquered branches that make his radius and ulna, the awkward but delicate way his artist’s-model articulated hands pluck a spoon from the tray or press down the plunger of the coffee press. You glimpse the steam wafting over the portrait. You see ghosts, too, and hear voices. You think you’re crazy sometimes and sometimes you think you’re possessed. But really you’re just awake.

  How unlucky.

  “I want to go, Uncle.”

  Arthur raises an eyebrow at the boy, suggesting that a conve
rsation about manners will take place on the drive back, but then he checks his watch, a big seventies-style Timex on a silver watchband.

  Salvador offers them both coffee.

  Arthur politely declines.

  Half-turns his wrist to check his watch again.

  Andrew realizes Arthur has no cell phone and loves him for it.

  Marcus stares, suddenly peaceful, as though resigned to the mental breakdown he thinks he’s having.

  “Well, I guess Mrs. Simpson will be bringing the car around soon, and we’d best not keep her waiting. Thank you for your hospitality, Mr. Blankenship.”

  “Thank you for the conversation.”

  All three men rise.

  Salvador is standing between them and the front door, so Marcus steals for the side door leading from the kitchen.

  “Oh, no!” Andrew says. “The stairs over there are dangerous. It’s better if you go out the way you came.”

  Salvador moves aside, bowing slightly.

  This is my house, and you must exit the same way you entered.

  “Remember what I said about the library,” he tells Marcus. “It might explain things a bit.”

  “Thank you,” Marcus says quietly, but he just wants out.

  His eyes don’t meet Andrew’s again.

  It is all he can do not to race ahead of his ponderous uncle, race down the wooded drive and into the heated SUV where Mrs. Simpson hums along with 1950s music on the radio and Jesus and the angels still hold fast against the devil’s wicked, confusing world.

  14

  Andrew lights the oil lamps on the big pine farm table that sits in the middle of his library while Salvador hovers near; the magus never lets the wicker man, whose wooden left hand is newer and paler than the right one, handle fire.

  The servant writes on the Etch-a-Sketch around his neck, turning the knobs with his clever fingers, his wicker hips moving gently with the ghost of his wagging tail.

  HELP?

  “Wine,” Andrew says, and Salvador turns his portrait gaze toward the hall, starting off in that direction; then he seems to remember something important—he shudders, making a sound like a dry whimper and shaking his flat head. He clasps his hands in supplication and stares at Andrew now, still huskily whining.

  “I know, boy. That was mean. I was just testing. Fizzy water will do.”

  The automaton visibly relaxes and hurries out of the library. Andrew goes to the hanging shelf, a weathered blue bookcase suspended close to the high ceiling by belts, just out of reach, a baby doll with wild hair and no eyes hanging from a shoestring noose nailed to its bottom. An Indian-print blanket veils the volumes waiting within. Andrew stands close to the doll and says, “Hello, Sally. I declare myself to be Andrew Ranulf Blankenship, son of George Blankenship, grandson of Charles Thaddeus Blankenship, and I am the true owner of this house and these books.”

  The doll kicks her feet now to start herself gently swinging. After three swings’ worth of momentum, she latches onto Andrew’s hair with one of her plastic hands. She feels his face with her other hand and, satisfied, kisses his cheek and goes inanimate again, swinging limply from the bottom of the shelf. The belts that hold the shelf loosen themselves now and it lowers so he can reach within. He pulls aside the curtain. The power drill that would have lashed out and blinded anyone but Andrew whirrs once to show it’s on duty. The drill sits on the bottom of two levels, next to a rubber cobra and a mummified fist wearing brass knuckles (this Hand of Glory doesn’t pick locks or light candles or stop hearts—it belonged to a Cossack pugilist hanged for beating his wife’s lover and that man’s two brothers to death). On the top level, nine identical-looking huge leather books lie stacked in threes, bindings out. The magus eases his fingers around the second book in the rightmost pile and slides it out from under its top neighbor, which lifts itself up obligingly. Each of the eight decoys holds a nasty surprise for anyone, Andrew included, who begins to pull it out; the book below the actual book, for example, contains several dozen dried, wormlike Amazonian parasites, normally river dwellers, that will slither under the clothes of any intruders and race for the urethra, fighting each other, if necessary, for the honor of burrowing within and affixing themselves in front of the bladder with backward-facing spines. Only a blessing from the shaman of a nearly extinct tribe administered in the actual Amazon would make the thing let go, but this has to happen within a week or the beast will catch fire. Not as immediate as the shotgun shells (once owned by Doc Holliday) that wait in book two, but any spell-caster (and who else would have gotten this far?) will have trouble concentrating on anything above the waist while the wigglers do their wiggly work.

  He cradles the book and sets it on the table, now pulling a dictionary of Old Russian from a more ordinary shelf behind him, fetching a spiral notebook and pencils, and sitting down to read. Of the four books he brought home from forests near the Volga (each with its own shelf and booby traps), this is one of the two he understands least.

  After The Book of Sorrows, that is.

  But this one.

  Of the Soul and Its Mutability and

  How Best to Survive Death

  He knows, as well, that it is the most precious book he owns, and that any magus who becomes aware of its existence will stop at nothing to get it. It is said that Rasputin was protected by some of the lesser spells held within, and that Koschey the Deathless mastered the whole thing before the crone extorted it from him in the time of the Tsar Alexander II.

  So far, Andrew has come to understand parts of it but is afraid to try anything beyond a sort of dream-walking wherein he sends his consciousness, still well tethered to his sleeping body, to roam the beaches of the lake or through walls into the homes of his neighbors.

  He gave this last bit up after observing his misanthropic survivalist neighbor John Dawes (across Willow Fork Road, binocular distance) drunkenly shaving his scrotum with a straight razor while watching a Gilligan’s Island rerun. The sight had so startled Andrew that he experienced a sort of spasm and suspects he nearly snapped his tether. He has seen nothing yet to convince him that an actual hell exists (or that it does not), but leaving his body comatose while his soul haunts the house of a lonely, gun-happy ball-shaver sounds close enough. Now he confines his experiments to beachcombing and low-altitude flight, never straying more than a mile or two away from himself; he intends to push himself further if he can understand how to get back into himself without the comforting astral umbilicus that anchors him. Getting back into your own body without it is the first step. Next and harder will be taking over another body, which is a fearful business that smacks of actual evil. Temporary possession is possible, but the language in Of the Soul warns that stuffing two souls in one body is draining to both: The original host might succeed in pushing you out and into death’s embrace; if not, the presence of multiple souls in one body attracts “other beings,”

  Sign off, Ichthus70

  whose company might be undesirable. Permanent occupation is, of course, murder.

  And yet, one might use this to live indefinitely, practicing a sort of biological alchemy, transmuting the lead of aging and sick bodies into the gold of healthy, young ones. One might live on in beauty and strength for centuries.

  Andrew strongly suspects some are doing this now.

  He often muses that if he were to walk into a room full of those who actually run the world, the invisibles that heads of state and oil barons take their marching orders from, it would look like the audition room for a TV soap opera: They would all be lovely; they would all look twenty-five to forty, and whether this was accomplished by the witchcraft of science or the science of witchcraft would be even money. Those who trade in magic value money less than others, true, because they can always manufacture, steal, win, or conjure it as needed; most really powerful conjurers regard those who hoard money as nothing but glorified squirrels saving for
a winter they will never live to see. But when you stack enough zeroes behind an integer, enough, say, to bribe a prime minister or buy a vast old-growth forest, even a sorcerer won’t ignore it; a handful of people may well be buying their way into extended youth.

  “But not eternal youth,” Andrew says at half voice.

  Nothing is forever.

  A memory makes him almost smile, and he shakes it off, turning his mind to the problem of the tether.

  Now Salvador walks into the room and pours Gerolsteiner water from a clay pitcher (one of Anneke’s) into Andrew’s glass, hoping to receive another command, but resigning himself to being ignored—his master has inclined his head to study, and, although the days are past when the dry man with the dog’s heart has to clear two empty wine bottles from the table and cork a third before pulling his sodden master to bed by the heels, it will be nearly dawn before the magus shuts his book.

  15

  “Get that pinché thing away from me,” Chancho says.

  Ten A.M., time for training.

  Chancho has taken the morning off from the North Star Garage, which is his prerogative since he owns it. Todd, Rick, and Gonzo, his three employees who vary so much in height they could be a totem pole, will handle things at a slower pace in his absence, but they will still get the work done well, and God help them if they fart around and charge for the farting-around time. Chancho wants his customers to tell all their friends how cheap repairs are at North Star, how fast the work gets done, how polite the mechanics are. Gonzo, six and a half feet tall but so thin he looks like he stepped out of an El Greco, handles the counter and the phone—he wears his hair long and has a shitty goatee he used to wear a rubber band around

  • • •

  Why the f do you wear that thing in your beard?

  You can say fuck to me, I won’t be offended.

  I don’t say fuck no more.

  You just did.

  Why do you wear it?

  I dunno.

  Then stop. I won’t make you cut the beard, even though it makes you look like a pimp, but that rubber band got to go. Put it around some money.