Oh shit, it’s time to go.
The tether jerks.
A luminous hand rises from the water, grabs something.
Grabs the invisible umbilicus anchoring him to his body.
Shakes it savagely.
NO!
Shakes it harder.
PLEASE!
The puffy phosphorescent head of the dead man comes out of the lake and bites at the air with black teeth. Andrew feels something like pain where his belly should be.
Now it is pain, excruciating pain.
The tether is down to threads, but the last threads are tough and the thing can’t quite sever them.
Cold I’m cold!
Andrew tries to move away, but he is pulled down by his tether until a fatty dead arm loops around his neck, pulls him under the surface of the water.
How do I have a neck? Oh fuck my soul is almost all here now, I’m about to die. Help! HELP! PLEASE!
The dead face leers at him.
No bubbles.
It doesn’t breathe.
But it speaks.
In Russian.
“It is an unpleasant thing to drown.”
The eyes are not starlight anymore, just milky white lamps, like the lamps deepwater fish use to lure prey.
Panicked, Andrew tries to think of what to do. He cannot escape the half headlock he is in, the soft but insistent mass of it somehow handling his nonmass, nor is his tether strong enough to snap him back.
“With your permission, I would like to show you my new home.”
Dragomirov!
And now they dive.
Down and down.
Past a school of fish, just dark, blunt shapes moving around and through the diving souls.
A ship comes into view on the bottom, lit only by the witch-light given off by the ghost.
“Isn’t it pretty?”
Andrew is shoved now, pushed through a tear in the hull.
He sees a quintet of skeletons through the murk and detritus, all sitting at a table with plates and cups near them, the remains of their clothes around them.
The rusalka had been busy.
Maybe only one drowning a year, if all of them were here, but since this had started before 1930, she had brought a lot of lives to their end.
She is a one-woman disaster, played out in slow motion.
She is a monster.
Now Andrew is held by the nape, brought face-to-face with a skeleton sitting in the corner.
“Look. This one is me. You can see my clothes are in better repair, and those fucking mussels haven’t had time to grow on me like the forgotten ones in the engine room. She tends us, you know, the recent ones. Keeps us clean, like dolls in a dollhouse. I bought those jeans at the Nordstrom, International Mall, Tampa. One hundred fifty dollars. And now, look. Look at the dental work I had done in Mexico, such art, these crowns, art by Dr. Hernan Rodriguez of Leon, and for what? For your pretty bitch to drown me for a joke in a cold lake.”
I’m sorry.
“The devil take your sorry.”
The fatty thing holding him shudders violently, begins to come apart, bits of its not-flesh drifting off it. Andrew can see through parts of it now, but also its witch-light is fading. It is getting dark in this ship.
“I have to go now, the bitch is coming back.”
Nadia!
“But let me tell you something, Mister Andrew. You’ll be sorry soon. I know who you are now, and I will tell her.”
Your niece?
“You poor fucker!”
It laughs now, shaking itself to pieces, its light almost completely gone. Its voice is strangled, as if it is drowning again.
“But I’ll tell her to make it quick. If you do something for me.”
What?
“Find my dog. Find my little Caspar.”
31
Complete darkness.
Cold.
Andrew screams.
Cold arms find him, cradle his head, a stiff, cold nipple brushes his cheek down in the dead ship.
“You idiot,” the rusalka says, kissing his mouth.
32
Light.
Warmth.
Andrew screams.
Warm arms find him, cradle his head, a soft breast beneath the cotton of a T-shirt.
Anneke is crying.
“You idiot,” she says, kissing his mouth.
33
“I thought you were dead. You looked pretty dead.”
She uses a roll of paper towels and a bottle of rubbing alcohol to swab his upper lip and chin. While the weightless parts of Andrew were touring the depths of Lake Ontario, his body sprung the mother of all nosebleeds. It dropped its other ballast, too, but Anneke won’t let go of him yet.
He is lying under a blanket, the blanket topped with his leather jacket.
“I need to change my pants.”
She hugs his head to her chest one more time.
Salvador paces behind her.
“Send Jeeves for new pants. I don’t want you walking yet.”
“Salvador, please get me a pair of jeans.”
Happy to have a task, the wicker man disappears from the buggy barn and heads for the main house.
“Well, since you’re my sponsor, I guess you’re the one I tell I really want a drink right now.”
He nods his head, shivering.
The lake’s cold is in his bones.
“You know what the worst thing was? When I thought Elvis had left the building for real, my first thought wasn’t, ‘Oh God, my friend is dead.’ My first thought was, ‘They’ll think I killed him—I’m going back to prison.’ How’s that for sucking? As a person, I mean. Who’s that selfish?”
She won’t let herself cry.
He wrestles free of her, goes to the barn door, leans over and vomits. Cold lake water comes out of him.
She brings him a paper towel for his mouth.
“I don’t understand half of what happened tonight,” he says. “But somebody’s coming for me. Somebody dangerous. And I think I know who’s sending her.”
“Who?”
“I don’t want to say her name. But I think it’s time I gave you a proper tour of my house. And I think it’s time I told you what happened to me in Russia.”
It stinks of lake now, worse than before.
“Is time you were telling me, too,” the naked woman with the dreadlocked auburn mane says. She walks dripping into the barn, eyeing Anneke territorially.
Anneke does some eyeing of her own.
“You have cigarette for me?”
“You know where they are.”
Nadia pads across the barn floor, reaches into the jacket pocket.
Anneke watches her, willing herself not to react to her smell.
Nadia pulls out a bright yellow cigarette pack, but the cigarette she pulls from it is broken in half.
“Shit,” she says, smelling the blond strands of tobacco.
Anneke offers her a Winston.
The rusalka takes it.
34
He tells them what happened to him in Russia.
PART TWO
35
The man who forgot his own name has been living on the street in Syracuse since March. March was a hard, miserable month to be outdoors, but, with the help of the blanket from the Salvation Army, the down vest from Goodwill, and the shoplifted sleeping bag, he made it.
He’s caveman strong.
A tribe of one.
He is proud of the sleeping bag. Not just for the tactical skill he showed in getting it past the sensors before the stock boy saw him or the sheer athletic prowess that left the pudgy employee huffing and puffing on the wrong side of a wall; he is proud he had the foresight to swipe it while
he still looked okay. He knew it wouldn’t be long before he smelled like Dumpsters and had a beard, and that people like that get watched the minute they enter a place of business.
He is proud, too, of the fight with the shower-cap man. Shower-cap wanted that sleeping bag; it was a hunter’s bag, camouflaged, rated all the way down to ten below. You don’t need to tuck tail and run for the mission in a bag like that. Shower-cap pushed a shopping cart full of stuffed animals around, held the stuffies up and made them wave at cars before he showed his HUNGRY NEED A DOLLAR GOD LOVES U sign. Kids made their parents give him the dollar, and he smiled his gap-toothed smile at them. But not everybody who plays with teddy bears is nice. Shower-cap thought because he was big and had a pipe he was going to get that thermal sleeping bag and make the new guy push on to another on-ramp. Shower-cap was wrong. Shower-cap pushed on. Shower-cap’s smile has more gaps now.
The young man has always been a good fighter.
Going into the infantry seemed right, even though someone he cared about asked him not to. Begged him not to that day on the couch, lying on him and crying down into his eyes.
He had to go, and at the time he thought she didn’t understand, but he has come to believe that maybe she did.
He came back from Afghanistan after only a few weeks in country. He came back different. Not better different. Traumatic-brain-injury-and-severe-tinnitus different. The IED had spun the Humvee like a soda can, popped it in half, killed the lieutenant and the Mexican outright, blinded the guy who played hockey. He didn’t remember names so well anymore, but he knew that guy played hockey. He himself was the luckiest guy in the limo that day, but he wasn’t all that lucky. Kept all his outside parts, but now everything sounded like whining, and he got mad fast. Yelled when he argued, which didn’t play well at the smartphone sales kiosk in the Carousel mall. Or at the Catholic high school that took him on as a janitor. Or at the car wash, where he worked for six hours.
That he grabbed arms and squeezed to emphasize the yelling hadn’t played well with sparrow-tattoo girl. And it was sparrow-tattoo girl’s apartment.
Had been before he left for the army, when he had his own place, too. He had known her for years. Three? Four?
She had cried down into his eyes.
He used to have some letters she wrote.
She was right to kick him out.
He stole the sleeping bag the very same day.
Never went back for his stuff.
He is a caveman now.
• • •
It’s a warm day and he’s wearing the video game T-shirt, his favorite shirt. He has already gotten thirty-three dollars and fifty cents from the good motorists heading away from the airport onto Interstate 81. He has just lain down to nap when he sees a woman walking up to him, a pretty, older woman.
He sits up on one elbow and smiles at her.
He still has a good smile.
He watches her.
It isn’t every day that someone bothers to get out of the car and come over to him here, although it has happened.
She has a carload waiting for her, calling to her in another language. One of the men gets out, starts toward her protectively, which is completely unnecessary. He’s harmless to women unless they argue with him, and then he just squeezes their arms. He doesn’t even mean to do that.
She takes something from her purse; a vial of water? Three ounces, just how they like it at the TSA.
She unscrews the cap.
He just stares at her beauty mark, her pretty, fair skin.
She’s prettier than sparrow-tattoo girl, even though she’s old enough to be her mom.
A MILF.
He hates that word.
“Your name was Victor,” she tells him. She has an accent.
Her voice cuts through the whining in his head, and the whining stops.
Nobody ever did so much for him.
Tinnitus comes and goes as it pleases, doctors can’t help, the VA can’t help, but this woman made it stop.
He wants to cry.
“Victor,” he says, agreeing. “That’s right.”
He remembers it sometimes on his own, but it’s good to have it in his mouth again.
He hears the soft rush of cars, the delicious music of birds.
No whine.
“You are too young to live so hard. Are you thirsty, Victor?”
Come to think of it, he is thirsty.
He licks his lips and nods.
What is it? he thinks.
“Melted snow,” she says. “From home.”
She gives him the vial and he drinks it.
It’s cold, colder than he thought it would be, and clean.
“Don’t waste any,” she says, and he doesn’t, he even licks the back of his hand after he wipes his beard.
Now the foreign man is descending on them, speaking their language.
It’s Russian.
He understands them, though he doesn’t get how.
“This sort of thing is not done here, these people are dangerous. Please, Marina.”
“He’s not dangerous to me,” she says, still kneeling, and winks at him.
She hands him a twenty-dollar bill, but he understands that it isn’t really for him, that it’s just pokazukha, a show she’s putting on for the cousin.
He won’t need money anymore, and the thought makes him smile.
He smiles at this woman, whom he loves with all his heart, whose arms he will never grab and squeeze, and she smiles back.
She gave him his name back, but it was just to let him know how special she was, how right it was for him to trust her.
He isn’t Victor anymore.
He isn’t a caveman anymore.
He doesn’t know what he is, but he goes to sleep under the overpass for the last time before his great adventure, and he dreams of his blind friend playing hockey. He has his sight back, and he’s skating with his stick low, skating fast, skating with agility and grace.
Once-Was-Victor has to look up to watch his friend skate.
He is watching him from under the ice.
36
Morning.
The necromancer’s house.
The birds had been chirping before, and he guesses they still are, but Salvador now fills the house with the sound of vacuuming, perhaps the most domestic sound on the American Foley board.
The previous night had been full of horrors, but the morning seems so placid it all might have been a bad dream.
Awful, really awful, but I learned a lot.
I’m ready to try more.
Maybe today, after I show the girls the house?
He rubs his navel, remembering how much it hurt when the thing from the lake bit down on his tether.
To hell with that.
Nadia smokes and lounges on the patio below, outside.
Anneke isn’t here yet.
Nothing makes the world feel mundane like a nice, soul-numbing dose of social media. Andrew plants himself in front of his desktop Mac, logs in to Facebook, and scrolls down the news feed on his home page. He watches the Honey Badger for perhaps the fifteenth time, chuckling at it anyway. He scrolls past event invites, Farmville crap, the obligatory feel-good story soured at the end by “share if you’re not a bastard” or the like, and then finds the pro-Obama photo he reposted. President O in cool shades, smiling big, extending a hand in a walking drive-by hello, captioned.
SORRY I TOOK SO LONG TO SHOW YOU MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE—I WAS BUSY KILLING BIN LADEN
Thirty-seven comments.
He knew when he reposted it that it was a bad idea, a little more wrong than funny, but he had been tired. Unsurprising that it generated a thread with thirty-something comments; most of his friends are liberal, and most of the conservative ones are polite enough not to start a
donnybrook on someone else’s post, but some people enjoy charging into a hostile audience.
Andrew calls this belligerent Facebook sport “Red Rover,” and, although he never plays, his brother Charley should be in the social media asshole hall of fame.
Along with John Dawes across the street.
The two of them actually found themselves facing the shield wall of Andrew’s friends so often they friended each other, though they would never meet in person, and wouldn’t like each other if they did.
Charley is a big-money infomercial pitchman for Jesus (BMW Jesus, not donkey-and-sandals Jesus), and Dawes owns a vintage German sniper rifle and keeps a balls-mean dog on a run that only just stops him before the road. It’s a three-legged dog (Dawes’s one inarguable virtue is his volunteerism and advocacy for rescued pits), but the fucker really moves. Andrew hates biking past that house, knowing he is one chain link away from hospitalization and that Dawes would treat the whole thing like his fault. Charley would think Dawes was dangerously unbalanced (he is), and Dawes would think Charley was fake and a huge pussy (he is).
Andrew really wants them to hang out sometime.
In this thread, John Dawes (who, it must be said, has never been in the military) is explaining the operational details of the bin Laden mission, while Charles Blankenship is questioning Andrew’s patriotism, which he does about once a month.
Andrew wishes he were better at casting spells over the net—that’s Radha’s thing—because he would cheerfully cause two photos to appear:
1. John Dawes shaving his nuts during Gilligan’s Island.
2. Charley Blankenship, age ten, holding his eye and running away from the black girl he tried out the N-word on in 1965. (Ironically, this was at an all-Dayton Halloween Fair and Charley was dressed as an Indian, feather and all.)
• • •
Anneke knocks.
She has gone home for the night and then returned.
Andrew answers the door wearing his Japanese robe, wool-lined Ugg mules on his feet.
A vacuum cleaner is running but cuts off a second after the door opens.
“This is my house, and you must exit the same way you enter. It’s important.”
The Necromancer's House Page 9