The Necromancer's House (31 page)

Andrew reflexively pounds the horn, but only for a split second; he needs both hands, now, quick, swerves hard, the driver of the SUV visible in a flash, her mouth a classic O of panic.

She swerves, too.

She wasn't going all that fast, fishtails anyway.

Top heavy.

Rolls.

Lands right-side up in corn.

Her air bag goes off.

Andrew pulls a U-turn, meaning to help the SUV driver.

Then he sees the tractor she was trying to go around.

Only it's not a tractor.

Magic makes it look like a tractor, strong enough magic to fool even him, until he really looks at it.

His heart skips a beat.

Two beats.

He's still got clonazepam in his system, or else he would likely go into a full-blown panic.

A hut on chicken legs.

Loping down the road away from me.

It's HER.

Not the hut she had in the woods, but its modern sister.

He thinks the hut will stop, turn around, come for him.

It keeps going.

Toward my house!!!!!

Now he sits, breathing hard, trying to process.

Anneke.

House.

Shit, the other driver!

He drives up and looks at her.

Fortyish lady in short hair.

One drop of blood on her forehead.

“You okay?” he shouts.

“I think so,” she says, unbuckling, stepping out into the flattened corn.

She's got her cell phone out, motions to him to pull over and park, dials.

Nick on her forehead.

Shit flies around in a crash.

She's probably okay.

I don't know, but probably.

Help's coming either way.

But not for Anneke.

“Sorry,” he says, drives off, leaves her screaming, “HEY!” after him.

Anneke hears the accident.

Hears the horn.

Recognizes it as Andrew's Mustang.

“HEY!” she screams with everything in her.

Even magic.

The torque drinks most of that down.

But not all of it.

Beard man hits Anneke.

It's more of a hard, awkward heel-slap than a hit.

He never hit many people in his other life and has no talent for it now, even though desperation and insanity have made him stronger.

The blow hurts Anneke a little, but now she knows where he is.

She kicks the
fuck
out of him.

Just lies back on her skinned and burning ass and donkey-kicks him until he squeals and backs against the hut's wall away from her, his glasses broken, blood in his beard.

“Uncool!” he says. “Help! Help!”

She almost laughs at this.

She tries to feel the metal in the handcuffs, wonders if she can pop them with the same energy she used to relocate the road sign.

Not with the damned torque on me.

Now she tunes in to the metal of the torque.

Imagines it wrenching open.

It doesn't.

She pushes harder, trying to feel the most basic structure of the iron. It warms on her neck. It moves just a little, writhing in tiny motions, a snake waking up. She begins to force its tail away from its mouth. The torque squeals the fine squeal of agonized metal.

Something else is in the hut now.

She sees me.

Knows what I'm trying to do.

 • • • 

And just like that the hut goes away.

 • • • 

A woman squats beside a river, light snow dusting the ground, a birch forest mostly bare behind her. November? Late fall. A woman washes clothes in the water, an old woman in a colorful scarf, Slavic. Is that her? No. Baba Yaga is coming up behind her. Not the woman with the mole, but an old, sallow woman whose skin hangs from her jowls. But it's her. Anneke wants to shout a warning to the washerwoman, but whatever part of Anneke sees this has no mouth. This is not today, and it is not yesterday. This is before trains. Now the woman at the river becomes aware of the other, reaches for a stick, magic tickles the air. A witch. She has the stick, but before she can point it at Baba, the older crone jabs a birch-broom at a birch tree. Something very like a snake ripples from the upper branches, down the trunk almost too fast to see in a shower of fallen brown leaves, rides up the old woman's stick and arm, and coils around her neck. Its mouth fixes to her mouth. Baba Yaga breathes in even as the snake breathes in, drawing the washerwoman's breath from her. The washerwoman struggles and dies, suffocating. The snake crawls from around the corpse's neck, eats the stick the woman had been grasping, then slithers up around Baba's neck. Gently. It breathes into her mouth. A wind shakes the last of the leaves from the trees by the river. Baba grows less sallow; her cheeks take on a rosy glow. Even the scarf around her head, sort of a faded red, glows more brightly, as if freshly dyed. Two old babushkas in headwraps and embroidered blouses. They should have been exchanging recipes or bitching about their children, but they were both witches and one has murdered the other with an iron snake. Baba Yaga gathers the clothes from the river, balances the basket on her hip, and leaves the dead woman there. Her broom stays behind, sweeps the beginnings of a grave it will roll the body into. At last, almost too far away to see, Baba turns and gathers her shawl about her, looks over her shoulder.

Looks at Anneke.

“Its name is Milk-witch,” she says in Russian that Anneke somehow understands. “And it serves me, not you.”

The old woman walks into the woods as ravens caw.

 • • • 

Anneke wakes up in the hut.

Her lips hurt from where the snake's mouth was on hers, where it drew most of her breath out.

It has settled back around her neck now, cool iron.

The stove glows magma red.

The beardy man is leaking bloody drool from between his busted lips, but he is tying Anneke's feet together, vocalizing incoherently, syllables that aren't words. With strength something lent him, he pulls Anneke upside down, hangs her by her feet, her hands still cuffed to the wall. It's a bit too far, but he stretches her anyway. She grits her teeth, grunts. Manages not to shout.

Michael Rudnick calls her again.

Anneke left her wallet behind.

She's not the most organized person, so this seems typical.

And, since she only left him a few hours ago, it shouldn't raise red flags that she isn't answering.

But it does.

He calls Andrew.

Andrew hears her.

Barely.

More in his head than outside.

HEY!

It's enough.

He knows where she is.

Turns around.

The longest three-point turn in the history of wheeled vehicles.

The magic is so strong on the goddamned thing that it has started to look like a tractor again. He unconsciously goes to pass it, and then it turns chicken-legs and one of those legs lashes down at him, hooks his bumper, wrenches it just a little loose, but the bumper hangs on.

“FUCK!” he yells.

Fishtails a little, not like the SUV, not top heavy.

One tire hits and spits gravel, but he gets back on the road.

Gets ahead of it, stops.

It's coming.

Not all that fast, maybe twenty miles per hour?

He thinks about spinning a tree across its knobby knees, but the witch could boomerang it back at him. Without breaking a sweat. He's not sure he could stop the return volley.

And Anneke's in there.

“Fuck.”

It comes on, hopping a little now.

Can he fight it here?

Can he fight
her
here?

On 104A from the front seat of his car?

Not well.

“COME ON!” he says. “COME ON OVER TO MY HOUSE! LET'S PLAY A GAME!”

He punches the accelerator, squeals his tires, races home.

His phone buzzes in his pocket.

He senses it's relevant, fishes it out, beaches it on the passenger seat.

Michael Rudnick's name.

Michael Rudnick's ringtone.

Queen's “We Will Rock You.”

He answers.

“Yeah?”

“Everything okay?” the older man asks.

Andrew regrets answering.

Hates his choice, has to make it fast.

Protect Michael or protect Anneke.

Michael is not an easy man to lie to; the pause has already given it away.

And love speaks in imperatives.

“No. It's not okay.”

The man who used to be Professor Coyle knows his duties.

Muster the troops
, she had said.
They will know what to do. You guard the little witch, keep her there, mind the hut.

He looks at the troops now.

Nine little burlap dolls.

A model tank.

Three plastic crew members, carefully painted.

On top of the tank, the smallest dead man he has ever seen, frozen behind the top hatch. She shrank him. On the side of the turret the Russian graffiti:

TIGER KILLER

The hut has almost walked to the house of the Thief.

The professor looks out the front window, sees the road bounce beneath him in the glow of the streetlights. In those houses, blurry houses without glasses to correct his myopia and astigmatism, blurry people are eating blurry dinners and squinting at television and doing other things he used to do before. But
before
is all over for him. An unmeltable wall of ice separates him from before. When he was warm. He knows he is making noise but he can't seem to stop, so he tries at least to do it rhythmically. He looks at the little witch. She looks up at him, like those lions Marlin Perkins used to dart on
Wild Kingdom
, able only to look at you, hate you, too drugged to move. She is like that, and that's good. She kicks really hard. He wasn't even mad when she broke his tooth and glasses, just frustrated she didn't understand she was going to get both of them punished.

He gets frustrated with how blurry everything is, picks up one lens of his ruined glasses, holds it to his eye. Now the street is clear. He feels like a giant.

A cyclops.

The slave of a witch.

He says the witch's words.

Badly, through busted lips.

He thinks his jaw may be broken, too.

But pain is different now, pain's little cousin.

“Fu, fu, fu.”

Andrew has minutes before the hut comes.

Two? Six? Not ten.

He drives the Mustang up the steep drive, turns left in front of his garage, drives over his herb garden, leaves the car behind the house.

Goes to the kitchen door.

Says words that will undo the magic locks he knows Salvador will have set. Sal greets him, anxious, pelvis tilted forward as though he wished he had a tail to tuck.

The Etch-a-Sketch scrawls
MICHAEL
and the stick-man points upstairs. Andrew grabs his shillelagh from above the fireplace, takes the stairs in twos, goes into his master bathroom, and finds Michael Rudnick wet in the tub, blinking, dazed.

He's wet because he jumped in the quarry to get here, grafted his escape tunnel to Andrew's.

“I hate that goddamned thing,” he says. “I don't have to leave that way, do I?”

“The tub's the exception,” Andrew says. “You just can't come in one door and go out the other.”

Michael gets a good look at him with his white hair fanned out across his shoulders.

“'Bout time,” he says. “You look good. You look like a grown-up.”

Rudnick steps out, dripping, sloshes a plastic trash bag onto the floor, tears it open to produce an oiled leather backpack.

Hefts it.

 • • • 

Andrew goes to his library.

Takes an object from a box he has to reach through an old-style metal fan to get into.

A monkeyish little hand.

Puts this in his jacket pocket.

“Is that—?”

“Yep.”

“Shit,” Michael says.

 • • • 

“Shit,” Andrew says, looking out the attic window.

“Yep,” Michael agrees.

Snowflakes have begun sticking to the window and melting.

An unoccupied tractor is puttering up the drive.

It turns sideways, seems to keep coming sideways, against the direction of the turning wheels, and then the illusion fails and the men see a cabin on chicken's feet turning its way up the incline, the maples around it pulling back their branches or bending outright to let it pass.

Just as Michael warms up to try to petrify its legs, it ducks sideways, lopes across the lawn, disappears into the woods.

“Fuck,” Andrew says.

“Yep.”

“Wake up,” the bearded man says, in Russian.

He says it to a burlap doll with button eyes.

The doll grows human eyes that blink, man-sized eyes disproportionate to its small head. Now little fingers sprout from its tied-off arms and it grasps handfuls of the man's sleeve, the sleeve stippled with blood from where he jabbed himself with sewing needles. The doll grows a mouth the size of an almond, black-lipped, its pink gums studded with vicious little teeth like a pike's teeth.

That's why I sprinkled fish scales on them.

The man winces in anticipation, vocalizes.

It takes a bite out of his arm.

An almond-sized bite.

Enough to make him whimper.

And bleed.

It spits out shirtsleeve.

It chews.

A tongue comes out of its head. He suffers it to lap at him; it clutches him almost tenderly, it is not unlike nursing. A thought from his days as a man occurs to him.

For thy desires are wolvish, bloody, starved and ravenous.

He makes a sound like laughing.

There is no time for one and one. Call them all.

She is not in the hut, at least not all of her.

Just her voice, the horsefly in his brain.

“Wake up, wake up, wake up,” he says, crying and laughing, gesturing like a mother calling children to come hear a story.

ALL!

He says it five more times.

Their outsized eyes blink in their burlap heads.

All looking at him.

The first one moves, then they all do.

They crawl to him, cover him.

He brays laughter to get through the pain.

His eyes watering and bugging.

This is hard, but he does it.

She will not punish him.