The Necromancer's House (25 page)

Vermont.

Anneke squats froglike, fingering the leaves of the maple sapling she just petrified.

“I want to rest,” she says.

Her head hurts and she's nauseated; the living tree fought with all its sap and chlorophyll and nonverbal stored-up common sense against the unnatural thing she was doing to it. It felt like having an argument in which you knew you were wrong but won because you were better at arguing and eventually, unjustly, wore your opponent down. She wrung the juicy and vibrant parts of it out with an ugly, strong hand she never knew she had, and now it stands before her white and bleached and dead; still beautiful, but beautiful because it is impossible; no sculptor could carve or shape such thin and perfect leaves from granite. Even as she thinks this, a leaf falls from its branch.

It's exquisite
, she thinks.

This would sell for twenty grand.

Michael just looks at her, sitting in his camp chair, drinking his coffee. The lesson takes place in a patch of woods between the farmhouse and the quarry.

This old bastard's not going to let me rest.

He sees her looking at him and just nods at the tree.

“I don't feel good,” she says.

“You're not supposed to. You just broke the laws of nature. Now make it right.”

She bites her tongue.

Broken laws of nature surround them; Michael Rudnick appears to live in a quaint New England farmhouse neighboring an old quarry, but really he lives in the quarry. A perfect overhang of granite hung with vines shields a vintage Airstream trailer. Doric columns modeled after those supporting the Athenian temple of Hephaestus seem to prop the ledge, and brick walls of varying heights partition the space, keyholed with nooks and alcoves wherein unquenchable oil lamps glimmer by night. Stone benches and chairs surround an impressive fire pit topped by a chimney in the shape of a human mouth open to breathe in smoke. How the trailer got into or is supposed to get out of the neoclassic wonderland is not apparent. Rock stairs lead down to the opening beneath the ledge, and another set leads to water.

The trapezoidal lake that has collected at the quarry's bottom half submerges an outsized sculpture and cypress garden: a granite elephant jets water from its upraised trunk, cyclopic giants, Atlas-like, hunch beneath gardens erupting from stone troughs, a mischievous-looking cherub crouches on a pedestal above the waterline, holding a stone to its chest in the posture of a pitcher, a pile of other such stones at its feet. It seems to be eyeing the steps. The stones are the size of volleyballs. Woe betide anyone approaching Michael's cave with fell intent.

She looks at the stone tree.

Feels the echo of its vanished life, how surprised it was to find itself so violated, cut off from water, numb to sunlight. Dead. When she touches its trunk she feels its absence.

“Put life back into it.”

She tries.

“See it happening.”

She pictures the breeze blowing through supple leaves.

Nothing happens.

“It's not like moving rocks,” she says.

“No. It's intimate.”

She tries.

Her head throbs.

“Why are there no schools?” she says. “Harry Potter and all that.”

He just looks at her.

“Are there?”

“You're in one.”

“But a big one. Like a university.”

He shakes his head.

“Magic is artisanal. You apprentice. One at a time. You'll teach somebody, too, one day. I'll make you promise before you leave here.”

“Somebody must have a school.”

“Workshops go on in some actual universities. Grafted to them, working veiled. Antioch College in Yellow Springs is a fine example. They had three users in the faculty at one point. They made students they wanted to teach magic get accepted in other fields, fields they taught in the system.”

She remembers her embarrassing introduction to that town, how she hurled herself into a bathtub, off the wagon, and at a toilet.

“Andrew went there?”

Michael nods.

“Studied Russian. And more.”

“I still don't get it.”

“There's talk every few years. But everyone's scared. Three's the most users it's wise to gather at one place for very long.”

“Why?”

“Something changes.”

“So nobody ever tried to found a big, dedicated university?”

“Schools were founded. Couple of times.”

“What happened?” she says, absently touching the leaves of the dead tree.

“Different things.”

“Bad?”

“You could say that.”

“Tell me.”

“Most successful one was in England, started in the 1580s. Hid in plain sight. In Deptford, just down the river from London. Did some big things. You know how Spain could never seem to land an armada? It wasn't just once. They tried three times, got swamped by storms three times. That was no accident.”

“And?”

“They kept killing each other. The survivors determined that too many users together makes it turn dark. They agreed to separate.”

Now she just looks at him. There's more, and she wants to hear it.

“Last big one was France, outside Paris. Between the wars. Like a dozen users, thirty or so students. They exchanged oaths of fraternity, made loyalty and friendship more important than the magic, drummed out anybody who seemed greedy. Called themselves The Order of the Duck. I saw pictures. Real cute with the short pants and tall socks, even berets and sacks of baguettes, like the stereotype.”

“And then?”

“Something came and killed them.”

“A demon?”

“Sort of. Hitler.”

She furrows her brow.

“Couldn't they fight, or hide?”

“Can't fight an army. And it's hard to hide from other users.”

“Hitler had users?”

He looks at her.

She remembers a picture she saw of Adolf Hitler, surrounded by wide-eyed adorers, all of them half mad. Hitler calm in the middle of the storm of madness. They were looking at him like they were starving for something, something in his words and eyes, something only he could give them. They were addicted to him.

“Oh my God,” she says. “He was one.”

Michael nods.

“Only the very luminous can make it out, but those tapes of him ranting in German? I've listened to them. It's not German. It's not a human language at all. Something taught him those words. Something he conjured. And you can only hear it for a moment. Because it starts to work on you, starts to sound like German. And if you speak German, it starts to sound like the truth.”

She goes pale.

Wonders what she's gotten herself into.

Wonders if she wants to know these things.

Thinks
it's too late
.

“Don't worry,” he says. “It's not all rotten. Now fix the tree.”

 • • • 

She looks at one stone leaf.

She plucks the leaf. Holds it by the stem, holds it up to the sun. So thin opaque light filters through it, lights up its veins and capillaries. You could almost shave with its edges.

She'll need a word.

Ancient Greek is best for stone.

“
Pneuma
,” she says.

“
Ezasa
,” she says.

It liked
pneuma
better.

It tingled.

She concentrates on the part that glows with the sun behind it, sees the glow turning maple-green.

“
Pneuma
,” she says again, and breathes on it, as if kindling fire.

Green glows where her breath touched the leaf, starts to creep out toward the edges as fire would creep on paper.

“Ah! Ah!”

The leaf is almost a leaf again.

“Hurry,” he says.

She understands.

She touches the leaf to the rest of the tree, watches the green catch, spread. She blows on it as one would blow kindling, watches it move from leaf to leaf, revivifying the sapling until at last it trembles in the breeze again, at last the sapling winks back into life. Exists again. It wasn't there, and then it was. As her father had been there, and then gone, in the length of a breath.

The beautiful girl furrows her brow, looking at her phone. The handsome man sitting across from her at the hip Lincoln Square sushi restaurant says, “Everything okay?” She nods, still looking into her palm, but the furrow remains. She pockets the phone.

“Sorry. I know that's rude,” she says, still not looking at him, but she's said it before, and still keeps checking her phone. When she does this, he doesn't know where to rest his own eyes. Sometimes on her cleavage, sometimes on the restaurant's expensive-looking water feature. He knew she would be high maintenance; she looked high maintenance strolling down Clark Street with a bag full of shoe boxes and mustard-yellow pumps, but he took a sheet from his sketch pad, drew a flower on it, wrote down his information, and left it under her windshield wiper anyway because she also looked smart. Girls who aren't that smart can be fun, but they're not impressive. This might be the most impressive girl he's ever brought to Fugu Sushi.

He's brought seventeen girls to Fugu Sushi.

He calls ahead to get the window seat. Figures everybody wins because he gets a nice view, the restaurant looks hip because he looks hip, and the server always gets twenty-five percent. Twenty percent makes a server happy, twenty-five gets you remembered. The staff remembers him.

Not the way he thinks, though.

They call him manwhore, as in “I'm cut for the night, you've got manwhore.”

Always a two-top.

Always by the window.

Staff sympathies turned decidedly against him when, on companion number eight, he left his website and e-mail address for the waitress, along with a pen-and-ink sketch of an octopus (he had dined on tako that night), which he had prepared in advance. He managed to do it while helping that evening's date put her coat on, did it with the skill of a cardsharp.

The waitress showed everyone the octopus, and now an octopus-like wave of the fingers means
manwhore
. Thus, pointing at oneself and waving the fingers, with a gently repulsed lip curl, means “I'll take manwhore.” The bartender's in on it, too. Finger wave followed by cup-to-lips uptilt gesture means, “What are manwhore and the young lady drinking?”

The exotic-looking number seventeen, sipping Bride of the Fox sake, would have already figured out manwhore's deal except that she has been too distracted by computer problems to vet him pre-date, and, tonight, so distracted by her phone that she's not plumbing his charmingly self-deprecating monologues for sincerity or spontaneity.

“If there's a problem and you need to call it an early night, I understand,” he says. He knows that's what he's supposed to say, but he doesn't want an early night—he wants to get her back to his loft, put on Portishead and send a finger up under that orange suede skirt to test his theory that small-boned women are tighter and full-lipped women are wetter.

The phone hasn't been in her pocket a minute when it buzzes again.

She decides to let him in on the problem.

“Somebody's sending me odd texts.”

“Why don't you turn it off?”

“Good idea,” she says, and starts to, then doesn't. “Only I'm intrigued.”

“By what?”

She considers him; he only just clears her threshold for minor confidences.

“What do you see?” she says, showing him her phone.

“A horse.”

“Yeah. A horse.”

She scrolls down.

“More horses,” he says. “Are you an equestrian?”

She shakes her head no.

He sees them.

That's something.

Now she knows the texted photos are not themselves magical, though she's picking up magic around them, and the sender's number is blocked. She's sure that if she saw it, it would be international, originating in Ukraine. It's the middle of the night over there. She turns the phone back to herself, scrolls down the photos, all twenty-something of them showing different horses: bays, roans, and blacks; Arabs, quarter horses, and Belgians.

This is an attack.

This is how wizards fight; they begin by psyching out their opponent.

It's not going to work on me.

Horses?

My hacker must be a man, and a very silly man.

“May I try your sake?” her date says.

She looks at him as if only just realizing he's there.

She gets a tickle in her ear, telling her there's a conversation she may wish to eavesdrop on. She swivels a sort of invisible cat's ear toward the kitchen.

. . . way too hot for that creeper, I don't know how he even gets them here.

Well he's hot, hot's not his problem. Kinda looks like a watered-down Johnny Depp. He's just clueless. Wonder what he drew for this one.

Do you think they sleep with him?

Some, I'm sure, or he wouldn't keep dropping Benjamins. Must be a trust fund kid. Told me once he's an actor, his Visa has three first names like an actor, Michael Oliver Scott or something, but they don't make that kind of money, not in Chicago. Unless it's commercials.

She listens for another moment, making eye contact with Michael Anthony Scott.

She smiles at him.

He's still waiting for an answer about the sake, wondering what game she's playing.

As he'll find out in less than a minute, she's playing the “finish her sake and leave her date at the restaurant” game.

She's also playing the “steal his wallet with a spell” game.

She's also just about to play the “what's in its pocketses?” game.

When he fishes for his wallet, he'll find a piece of paper with a child's crayon drawing of a crying man getting arrested outside FUGU SOOSHI. When he shows it to the manager as evidence that somebody must be playing a prank on him, the manager will not see the child's drawing. What he will see will be a newspaper blurb about local actor Michael Scott's dine-and-dash arrest at a Ravenswood pizza parlor, complete with mug shot.

Radha, sitting on the zebra-skin seat of her idling Mini Cooper, dictates the nature of the drawing, the photo and text of the article, and where she wants these articles placed into her phone, into an app she made for herself, clicks Preview, giggles, then presses Cast.

She drives off toward home.

As she turns onto Damen, she sees a homeless man sitting on cardboard, two dusty-looking heeler dogs napping near him.

She rolls down her window.

Throws the wallet.

It skids to a stop between his legs.

“Do as thou wilt,” she says.

He grins, gives her a thumbs-up.

Plays a peppy version of “Blue Skies” on his kazoo.