The Necromancer's House (27 page)

1978.

Yellow Springs, Ohio.

October.

The wizard with the potbelly and the bald head has his shirt open even though the leaves in Glen Helen have yellowed. He and the boy and the girl can all see their breaths.

Andrew's in sweatpants, wearing a terry cloth headband.

“Try again,” the older man says.

Andrew doesn't want to try again.

A big, dirty smudge on his left buttock and thigh evidence the outcome of his last try.

He steels himself, runs at his mentor again.

Runs like his brother used to run at tackle dummies.

When he leaps, he leaps at waist height just to the right of the shorter, stockier man, seemingly at nothing, his face scrunched up for impact.

He makes impact in midair, and the world around the three jerks with the characteristic bad-splice jerk that happens whenever reality and illusion collide. The man winks out from where he was, winks in again falling with Andrew, going “Whooof!” but it looks like he was always in Andrew's path.

The mind smooths things out.

The instructor's false teeth come out.

He puts them back in, untroubled.

He also picks up three quarters that fell into the grass.

Leaves the penny because it's tails up.

Stands up.

“That's it!” he says, claps his meaty hands twice. “Well done!”

Addresses the girl as Andrew brushes himself off.

“How do you think he did it?”

“Listened for sound? I'd say watched your breath, but your breath was coming out of your mouth. I mean, where your mouth seemed to be.”

“Was it sound, Blankenship?”

He shakes his head, pulls a twig out of his hair.

“I watched the leaves. You crunched leaves under your actual feet.”

“Good,” he says. “Can't argue with results.”

They wait.

“Displacement works nicely against human, nonmagical attackers, and it's a cheap spell. Not much gas. You should be able to run a couple of other things at the same time, once you practice.”

He lisps a little.

Adjusts his false teeth.

They wait.

Cats before a can opener.

“Now,” he says. “If you should chance to tangle with another user, what's rule number one?”

“Don't,” they both say quickly, as they've been taught. Not because they mean it, but because they want to get to the good stuff.

“Right. Don't. And why not?”

“Both are likely to die,” they say in stereo.

“Yes,” he says. “Fighting another evenly matched user with magic is like driving head-on into another car. You might come out a little better, but, unless you get lucky, you won't come out well.”

“And if you're not evenly matched?” Andrew asks.

“Then it's either stupid or unsportsman-like, and I disapprove of both qualities. Sometimes, however, stupid and unsportsman-like conditions arise. And so, your third lesson to date on black magic. To the pine grove with you, and find the most swordlike stick you feel you can levitate nimbly. We're going to do some fencing.”

Dog Neck Harbor, New York.

Today.

Andrew jabs his index finger with a pub dart, old-school, wooden handle. He bleeds twelve drops into a hole he cut into an apple. He sings “The British Grenadiers” as well as he can, trying to really boom out the
With a TO-RO-RO-RO-RO
. Any pub song would work, but he rather likes that one.

He eats the apple.

 • • • 

Andrew goes to a farm on 104A, a farm where he knows he can buy a live chicken. Butchers it. The farmhand asks if it's for eating, and when he says “yes,” the kid offers to butcher it for him.

“Prefer to do it myself,” he says.

Something about the way he says it makes the kid look at him funny.

He takes the hen home, cores her eye out. Pronounces a spell in Russian, the words of which he has to rememorize from a book. Burns the eye on a sliver of wood taken from a lightning-struck tree, mixes the ash with rainwater and magic oil, smears the grimy black balm on each of his eyelids. The spell calls for the eye of an eagle, owl, or hawk. Bald eagles nest near the bluffs, but he just can't bring himself to do that to an eagle.

“Ethical wizards get their ass kicked,” he tells Salvador, pulling chicken feathers. But he thinks a chicken will do.

Range might suffer, but this is a fuck-all mighty spell.

He bakes the chicken.

Salvador remembers the smell of roast fowl, wiggles his hips the whole time.

He used to get the gizzards.

 • • • 

Evening.

Andrew takes the walking stick down from over the fireplace.

Oak with an iron tip and an ovoid iron knob on the end, a knob that fits smoothly into the hand, but which is obviously a perfect shape for thumping. A silver collar sits under the knob, inscribed with Gaelic words reading,
Think while your skull is sound. Drink while your mouth is whole. Shake this man's hand while he offers it.

He rubs it with walnut oil.

Kisses it.

Takes it out back to the fire pit, puts the iron tip into the embers, says words in Gaelic that make it glow red-hot. Walks it over to the turtle shell he found—it was no easy thing finding a dead turtle with a whole shell by the side of the road—and punches the cane's tip through, loading the trigger word.

Buckler.

 • • • 

Andrew goes to the thrift store.

Buys a set of six yellow glass tumblers.

Not enough.

Drives to the Pier 1 just north of Syracuse.

Buys a dozen yellow wineglasses.

Makes a whole vase full of fireglass stones.

Puts it in the attic.

Fishes a trumpet out of an attic tub.

 • • • 

The next one's his favorite.

His mentor invented it.

He rubs six pennies with magical oil, puts them heads up on a tree stump, arranged like a tiny audience.

Plays the trumpet loudly (and poorly) down at the sextet of Abe Lincolns for better than an hour.

Puts the pennies in a leather pouch he hangs around his neck.

Nadia courses under the water, following the
Jaybird Sally
. She has been tailing the boat since it left the Oswego Marina around noon, partly because she likes the boat's name, partly because one of the two men who periodically fishes from the stern is handsome in a craggy way; his short beard covers the kind of chin one mostly finds on soldiers and athletes.

She's very good at going unseen; dull people will see her as driftwood or a fish unless she wants their attention. For the sake of sharper ones, she knows how to stay in a boat's shadow, she knows how to use chop and murk and to anticipate a glance in her direction, how to submerge before it comes.

When the boat stops, she catches pieces of the conversation between the two men as she floats, her ear overlapped by waves.

“Going to Rochester tomorrow . . . that three-bedroom house we got at auction. I'll be . . . flip it the week after, put some new carpet . . . stripped copper . . . else it needs.”

“It burns my ass that . . . things like that . . . plumbing and mark up . . . out of spite because . . . get their shit together. No class.”

“None.”

The men talk business and switch to women and Nadia begins to regret eavesdropping; it was better when she didn't know how ordinary the handsome one was, when she could pretend he was a cavalry officer with a bright saber and a wool coat, not a house-flipper with a motel mistress and an unobservant wife. She's about to swim off in a state of helpless ennui when the men reel in their lines and the motor starts up. Another race! But it isn't much of a race. She follows the boat, easily keeping up with its drowsy chug, swimming serpentine beneath it.

Then it happens.

A glass bottle hits the water, bobs there.

She doesn't know if anybody on the boat sees her white hand reach up and pluck the bottle under, but she doesn't care.

She's pissed.

She didn't spend all morning breaking those disgusting zebra mussels off her shipwreck just to let these inconsiderate swindlers pollute her lake. So bourgeois. She knows that's a Bolshevik word and she hates Bolsheviks, but
bourgeois
, with its suggestion of new money and bad manners, best describes the specimens on the
Jaybird Sally
.

“Sam Adams,” she says, looking at the little brown-vested colonial on the blue label, air escaping from her mouth in a wash of small bubbles. Stale air. She uses her lungs only to smoke and to speak.

When the
Jaybird Sally
stops again, she sees the hooked bait-fish plop into the water, watches a gorgeous chinook salmon swim toward it. She waves it off, still holding the beer bottle.

No fish for you, bourgeois!

But that's not enough.

She bangs the bottom of the boat with her fist, hard.

Not hard enough.

She gets some distance, swims into the hull.

Likes the way that feels.

Attacks several more times, battering the
Jaybird Sally
with her shoulders and head; two of the blows open gashes below the waterline.

Especially the last head butt.

That hole is serious.

About the size of three strips of bacon laid end-to-end.

The lake starts pouring in.

She peeks through the hole, sees the startled captain see her.

He takes the Lord's name in vain.

The alarm sounds ringing as the first float switch is tripped and the pump starts.

She puts her lips to the hole now and says, “Don't litter,” swims off.

Realizes she was so mad she said it in Russian, swims back and says it in English now, adding, “Bourgeois assholes” for good measure.

The handsome one, still on deck, gripping the rail in anticipation of another collision, sees the rusalka's pale, slender arm throw the bottle, watches it spin, watches it land amidships with a clunk.

He'll forget he saw this by the time the others come up and the captain starts barking “Mayday” on VHF 16.

By the time the deck of the
Jaybird Sally
starts to tilt, he'll put on his life vest, text wife and girlfriend, put his cell phone in a baggie.

“Don't worry,” the captain says. “We're not going in the drink.”

He points.

They would have already heard the helicopter but for the alarm.

The helicopter from Canada is coming with a P250 that will flush a thousand gallons a minute out of the ship.

Of course the rusalka could put her fingers in the gash and yank it so large that even the Canadians' pump won't help.

Or she could roll the boat; this would be hard, but not impossible.

No.

Not for one bottle.

But if so much as a cigarette butt hits the water.

When the
Jaybird Sally
finds suitable, safe mooring, she will put in for repairs. The diver will pull several long, coarse red hairs from the gash in the hull.

The boat will not be lost today.

The man who flips houses will fish again.

But, without remembering exactly why, he will never again toss litter overboard.

Skinning below the water like the dangerous thing she is, Nadia passes the Coast Guard ship coming to escort the listing
Sally
in.

Salutes it.

 • • • 

Later.

Nadia snatches down a placid seagull who stopped to float on the lake, so smoothly its fellows don't even fly away.

She feeds violently at first, blood and feathers everywhere, then delicately, picking meat from bones like a girl on a picnic. She means to swim back to the wreck, and police it one more time before heading in to grow her legs back and spend the night protecting her magus.

She's looking forward to growing her vagina back.

She hopes he'll be ready for sex.

Drowning all those lumpy miscarriages of Andrew Blankenship
really
turned her on.

So much, in fact, she decides not to wait.

Swims down to the Niagara Mohawk nuclear plant, turns girl, and floats in the warm discharge current.

Pleasures herself.

Cries so loudly a custodian at the plant scans the water.

Sees only driftwood.

 • • • 

When she gets near her wreck, the sun is going down, throwing lavender and pink all over the sky, the water reflecting it on its gently rippling skin.

A silhouette in black stands out.

A boat.

Very small this time.

A rowboat, the kind you can rent at Fair Haven Beach State Park.

Whoever brought it here must have rowed for hours.

She makes out one shape.

A man.

She dives and swims under the water, comes up near.

He's playing the guitar now, playing well.

He sings a song in Russian.

Improvised, perhaps, no rhymes, but sung in a gravelly voice full of pain and sweetness.

“I loved a girl who wore sparrows on her breast,

Two sparrows on her breast.

She tried to love me back, but it was hard

To find my heart

My heart could never fly like hers

I had no sparrows on my breast,

No sparrows on my breast.”

The man in the boat is young.

Not much light left in the sky, but her eyes are quite good in the dark. She sees he's bearded, like boys back home were bearded. What is that accent? Someplace rural. Is it a boy? White hairs mix with black on his head, but, yes, a boy. Twenty or so.

He sees her.

“What are you doing so far away?” he asks.

“From shore? I might ask the same of you.”

She doesn't mean to sound flirtatious but knows she does.

“Not from shore.”

A pelican glides to a landing nearby, nothing but a black shape, as much heard as seen. It positions a fish in the pouch below its beak, setting it up to be swallowed.

“From home,” he says.

“Home.”

He smiles at her.

It is a good smile.

“Are you Russian?” she says.

“So Russian I'm practically made of snow.”

“From what village?”

He raises an eyebrow.

“Why do you say
village
? Do you think I am a farmer?”

A planet, she's not sure which one, shines dimly in the freshly minted night.

“City, then. What city?”

“Your city.”

“You are not from St. Petersburg.”

“But I am!” he declares in his rural accent. “And not a farmer.”

“What then? Besides a liar?”

She is smiling when she says this.

“A soldier.”

It is easy to picture him on a horse with a wool coat and a saber, fine boots showing off his fine ankles. It is easy to picture him kissing her, coming underwater with her, down to the ship. She knows just where she will put him.

“I like soldiers,” she says.

“Then come closer!”

She does.

“I want to kiss you!” he says suddenly, like a boy saying it for the first time.

She flicks her tail, moves closer.

No.

Not yet.

They should enjoy this part . . . the other is so brief!

She stays just out of arm's reach, smiling, her dreadlocks trailing in the water.

“Will you tease me now? Is that your game?”

“You can't begin to guess my game, boy-who's-not-from-St.- Petersburg.”

So dark.

Can he even see me?

“You have a beautiful smile.”

She laughs.

“You are from a village of blind men! My smile is the worst part of me.”

“And you smell like Samarkand.”

“If Samarkand had a fish market perhaps. Are you being cruel? Is that your game?”

He just smiles at her.

You can't begin to guess my game.

She thinks it is time.

She moves to the side of the boat, wiggles
come hither
with her finger.

He leans down.

Tickles her nose with his beard.

She giggles.

Stars behind him now.

The planet faintly red, must be Mars.

The moon past half full.

He puts his lips to hers.

Cold.

Colder than hers.

She withdraws, looking at him.

“Who are you?” she says. “You do seem familiar.”

“I am your lover,” he says.

“You're not Nikolai. You're not the boy I jumped for.”

“No. I am your new lover.”

“Are you dead?” she says.

“Very much alive.”

“Your name?”

“Moroz.”

Frost?

He shows her his index finger.

Looks at her with great significance and solemnity as he slips his finger into the water.

As if consummating their marriage.

Taking her hymen.

It stings, but not down there.

Her skin stings with cold where the water has frozen in a block around her.

She is the core of a small iceberg.

She cannot move.

She begins to speak, but he puts his finger to his lips.

“Shhhhhh,” he says, and a gentle snow falls, as fine as ice shavings, only over them, coming from no cloud.

Mars still glinting above him.

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.”