About
The Necromancer's House: Andrew Ranulf
Blankenship is a handsome, stylish nonconformist with wry wit, a
classic Mustang, and a massive library. He is also a recovering
alcoholic and a practicing warlock, able to speak with the dead
through film. His house is a maze of sorcerous booby traps and escape
tunnels, as yours might be if you were sitting on a treasury of
Russian magic stolen from the Soviet Union thirty years ago. Andrew
has long known that magic was a brutal game requiring blood sacrifice
and a willingness to confront death, but his many years of peace and
comfort have left him soft, more concerned with maintaining false
youth than with seeing to his own defense. Now a monster straight
from the pages of Russian folklore is coming for him, and frost and
death are coming with her.
The Necromancer's House
by
Christopher Buehlman
Prologue
The
old man walks from the cabin to the porch behind, palming his whiskey
glass from the bottom and swirling the ice in it. A drop of water
falls from his knuckle, falling on the head of the beagle mix snaking
near his feet. This distracts the dog so that it halts long enough to
get underfoot, almost tripping the old man, who swears viciously in
Russian that Khrushchev might have barked, then apologizes in
Pushkin’s honeyed tones. The dog wags halfheartedly but steers
starboard in case his master kicks at him. The kicks are infrequent
and never hard, so the evasion is lazy, and the kick never comes. An
observer would note how balletic the interaction is, how practiced
each is at his part.
But no one
is watching them.
Not yet.
The man
lips at his glass and sits facing the sunset.
The dog
curls at his feet and begins a snorting, chewing hunt for a flea that
has disgraced him near the base of his tail.
“Kill
that fucker,” the man says in a jovial Slavic growl, scratching
under his left tit in sympathy.
The sun has
already performed its nightly slow-motion dive into Lake Ontario; it
has slipped behind its blue veil like a bulb of molten glass, so
beautifully that a man on Fair Haven Beach, one town west,
spontaneously proposed marriage to his girlfriend of less than six
months, and a group of actors on the McIntyre Bluffs, near the bird
sanctuary not a mile away, silenced their chatter about the day’s
rehearsals and broke into applause. Now the aftershow is wrapping up;
the surface of the lake has turned an iridescent color reminiscent of
mother-of-pearl, a hue that has proven irreproducible in watercolor;
an ephemeral purplish-silver that even the great Eastman Kodak an
hour and change away in ashy Rochester has never brought to shore
alive.
The old
Russian’s nearest neighbor, a former comparative religions
professor in a nearly identical summer cabin a hundred yards down the
ridge, once told him, “These sunsets have been rated the
second-best sunsets in the world.”
“Rated?”
the Russian had said, “Who rates a sunset?”
“The
photographers of National
Geographic.”
“Oh,”
he had said, pushing his lower lip out and nodding. The professor,
who is renting long-term and working on some atheistic magnum opus,
loves sharing that piece of trivia with other visitors just to see
them first reject and then accept the idea that sunsets might be
rankable. He had been disappointed that the Russian did not ask the
usual follow-up question, so he had answered it unbidden.
“The best
sunsets are over the Sea of Japan, looking toward Russia.”
Now the
lake spreads squid’s-ink black beneath a sky like a luminous
bruise. The Russian wants a cigarette, but it is a mild want that
only comes with inebriation and goes away when ignored. He looks at
the dog, at the white in his face that stands out from his
black-and-tan body like a cheap plastic ghost mask.
“Go get
us a pack of Marlboros, Caspar. Caspar the son-of-a-bitch ghost.”
His wife
comes to mind.
She
had called the dog Caspar. She had made him quit smoking. She had
taught him to say son
of a bitch
correctly, separating and emphasizing bitch
where he had always run the three words together and accented son.
This ache
for a dead woman will be harder to chase away than the ache for
nicotine.
Here is the
devil!
It is too
beautiful an evening to wallow in melancholy again. Maybe the
professor will consent to play chess? The thought bores him
senseless; the man is a good conversationalist, but he can’t smell
a trap, is too lazy to think more than two moves ahead, and
understands nothing about keeping force in reserve—he will jabber
away about the Upanishads, or about the cowlike stupidity of
evangelical Christians, and send his pawns out too far, the light
shining on his bald dome, stroking his orthodox-thick beard, crossing
and recrossing his legs and saying “huh” as if surprised that the
center of the board, which he thought he had in his fist, is turning
into a kill box.
Besides, he
is enjoying the night air and doesn’t feel like going anywhere.
He toys
with the notion of turning on his computer and looking for an escort,
but the connection is sketchy at best, and waiting for the pictures
to load on the escort site will be purgatorial. Besides, once he has
selected one, assuming he can talk her into a last-minute meeting far
away with an unknown client, she will have to come from Syracuse or
Rochester, and that will be two hours. Perhaps three. Perhaps there
are prostitutes in Oswego, half an hour east, but he shudders to
think of what one of those might be like; the profile, so poorly
written even a Russian could correct it, will lead to some pale,
plain-faced girl raised in the shadow of the nuclear plant and
plumped on foldable pizza; he can see her now with her bad tattoos
and her mouse-brown hair, undressing clumsily, asking him questions
about his life and interrupting with “uh-huh” when he answers;
then, after ten grim minutes of fucking, slipping one of his liquor
bottles into her backpack while he discards the prophylactic and
struggles to begin a postcoital piss.
Oswego is
for chicken wings and beer.
Oswego is
not for pretty girls.
Not that he
is any prize himself, with his shirt open on his hard, round,
Florida-brown belly and his toenails that barely fit in the clippers,
but a man need not be a horse to buy one.
His father
said such things.
His father
had ridden bare-chested into Berlin on a tank and had paid a month’s
wages for the privilege of taking a shit in Hitler’s bunker.
If
his father were here, he would call the Rochester escort and
the Oswego hooker and send his mother out for cigarettes.
Which is
why he loves and hates him thirty years after his death.
He will
call no escort.
“Caspar,
the son-of-a-bitch dog. Go get us a woman.”
Caspar
squares his black lips and makes a barely audible whimper, as he
often does when a command word like go
is followed by something he does not understand.
Now
Caspar’s nose twitches.
The Russian
smells it, too.
Foul and
tidal, as though something has washed up from the lake.
He had just
been remarking how sweet the night air was, and now this.
Has a whale
beached itself?
“Lakes
have no whales,” he tells Caspar, pointing a nut-colored finger
gravely at him. The dog doesn’t seem to understand, so he tells him
in Russian, too.
Now Caspar
looks toward the lake.
He wags his
tail a little as he does in lieu of barking when a stranger
approaches.
“I
thought I heard Russian,” a woman says, in Russian.
The light
from his cabin lights the area of the porch, ending in the sun-grayed
handrails at the top of the stairs leading down to the beach.
As though
the world ends with those rails.
Beyond is
lake and night, as black as the black behind a star.
“Ha!”
he says, and then, in Russian, “You did. And so did I. Come up the
stairs and say hello.”
“In a
moment,” she says, in accented English. “I’m changing.”
She sounds
young.
He feels
the small thrill a man feels when he is sure he is about to meet a
pretty girl. Of course, one can be disappointed making such
assumptions, as she will be if she thinks him handsome for his deep,
rich voice.
That smell
again.
“Do you
like whiskey?” he says, matching her English, suppressing the
old-man grunt he usually makes when he gets to his feet.
“Oh, very
much,” she says. “Is it scotch?”
“Oban.
You know it?”
“No. But
it smells good.”
“You
can smell it over that”—it wouldn’t do to say shit
before he knows her character—“other smell?”
“I can
smell it. It smells like peat and burned seaweed.”
“Ice?”
“Please.”
He enters
the house and fills two glasses, pleased at the turn the evening is
taking. He glances at his nearly transparent reflection in the hutch,
thinking he doesn’t look so good. But not awful for almost seventy.
He walks out back again, managing the screen door with more
difficulty, burdened as he is with two dripping glasses now.
Still no
woman.
The wooden
handrails stand out, brilliantly illuminated against the primordial
darkness behind them.
He looks
down to see if Caspar is still wagging his welcome at her.
But Caspar
is gone.
He sets the
glasses down and whistles.
He
walks to the rickety stairs and hoists himself down to the level of
the beach, his back deck bathed in light and receding with each step
down. He steps onto sand that soon gives way to rocks, his eyes
adjusting to the darkness. He listens for the sound of Caspar’s
collar, the jingling of the tag with the dog’s name and his
master’s information, and the legend Help
me get home!,
but all he hears is Lake Ontario’s languid whisper and a gentle
breeze in the crowns of the maples and birch trees behind him.
His
sandaled foot plunges into a puddle, which some precivilized part of
his brain registers as incorrect—the tide doesn’t come this far
and it has not rained—but he walks on.
“Girl,
you didn’t take my dog, did you?” he asks in Russian.
Nothing.
He walks
farther down the beach, closer to the water, the smooth rocks pushing
up against his sandals’ bottoms.
“Caspar?”
he says, his concern for the dog growing and mixing with anger. Has
this bitch with the Leningrad accent taken his dog? Is there a market
in upstate New York for old mixed-breed dogs who flatulate like dying
grandmothers?
Here
is the devil,
he thinks.
Now he
hears the jingle of the collar behind him.
Is the old
bastard actually going up the stairs on his own power instead of
whimpering to be carried?
He
remembers the smoky amber of his whiskey and feels happy to be making
his way back to it.
He climbs
up, hearing the jingle inside the house.
“You
little fucker,” he says, smiling.
Warm light
spills from the windows and door of the cabin.
He looks
for the whiskey and finds only two wet rings on the table.
That
is incorrect.
Another
sound registers as incorrect, though familiar.
His shower
is running.
A sly smile
creeps onto his face.
The girl.
What game is she playing? This night will be very good or very bad,
but at least it will produce a story.
This was
the sort of thing his father said.
He takes
his sandals off and opens the screen door, stepping in. He finds the
floor wet. He goes to the hallway and stands before the closed
bathroom door—God in heaven, it stinks of the lake in here—and
then he turns the handle. The shower is running, the curtain pulled
back to show the rusty showerhead and the bad grout.
No steam,
though.
The water
runs cold.
He turns it
off.
An empty
rocks glass sits in the sink, one very long auburn hair coiled near
it. He plucks this from the off-white porcelain and looks at it—how
coarse it is!
Hearing
Caspar’s jingle, he goes into the hallway again, and his heart
skips a beat.
A woman
stands in the hallway, pale and nude, her hair thick and
russet-colored and wetly quilting her shoulders and breasts. His eyes
trail down to her tight, alabaster navel, below which a scud of curly
hair leads to the kind of prodigious bush one doesn’t see on young
women these days except on specialty Internet sites.
The second
whiskey glass drips in her hand.
With the
pointer finger of her other hand, she makes her collar jingle.
Caspar’s collar, more properly, which she wears on her neck.
The man has
bounced between shock, worry, anger, and glad surprise so
precipitously that when he speaks he only sounds old and bewildered.
“Where’s
my fucking dog?”
“Help me
get home,” she says, showing yellow-gray teeth that don’t belong
in the mouth of a first-world girl. “That is very sweet, Misha.”
The smell
that pollutes his cabin is coming from her, maybe from that thick,
cabled wet hair, maybe even from her mouth or cunt. How can something
so beautiful smell like that?
He notices
now how scarred and sinewy she is, how strong her limbs look.
“You
didn’t hurt him, did you?” he asks in Russian.
“You’ll
kiss me now even if I did,” she says in English, moving the mouth
with the bad teeth and the beautiful lips closer.
He thinks
to pull away, but he does not.
Something
about her eyes fixes him in place.
How green
they are.
How cold
her mouth is.
He tries to
pull away, but her hand has found the back of his head and anchors it
where she wants it. His mouth is too full of cold tongue for him to
yell.
Past her,
he sees his collarless dog pad from the kitchen, squaring his lips
and wagging gently, unsure what to make of the struggle in the
hallway.
When she
drags the old Russian down the stairs and to the lake, the dog
follows, even down the stairs, but he only walks to the lip of the
water, where he paces back and forth as the woman who does not smell
like a woman pushes his master’s head below the surface.
He
thrashes, but she holds him under with ease.
The dog has
enough beagle in him to make him howl.
Owoooooooooo
She howls
back at him playfully until her head goes under, and the dog is
alone.
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About Christopher Buehlman (from his website): Christopher Buehlman is a writer and performer based in St. Petersburg,
Florida. He is the winner of the 2007 Bridport Prize in Poetry and a
finalist for the 2008 Forward Prize for best poem (UK). He spent his
twenties and thirties touring renaissance festivals with his very
popular show Christophe the Insultor, Verbal Mercenary. He holds a
Bachelor’s degree in French Language from Florida State University,
where he minored in History. He enjoys theater, independent films,
chess, archery, running, cooking with lots of garlic, and thick, inky,
bone-dry red wines with sediment at the bottom.
