The Necromancer's House (35 page)

The caveman wakes up under his overpass.

He had a dream about a woman.

She gave him twenty dollars.

(Lying under the brick he uses to smash cans)

She took away his tinnitus.

(It's still gone)

And then?

Blurry.

But at the end, the Heat Miser character from the Christmas special carried him like a bride.

Carried him from some hellish North Pole, where the elves had button eyes and bloody mouths.

But he's in Syracuse now.

At the end of summer.

A warm night.

It's ten minutes ago.

He knows that somehow.

The Heat Miser gets to play with time.

Because he's the Heat Miser.

It's ten minutes ago, but no different than any other time, as far as he can tell.

He's still a caveman.

Cars and trucks rush above him as they always have, as they always will.

Bled-out urban sky above the overpass.

He is sick of the city.

He wishes he were somewhere where he could watch the stars.

He sees one, though.

A falling star, quite bright.

He wishes on it
.

My name is Victor.

Michael Rudnick collects himself at the window.

Nausea hit him seconds after he tugged the meteor down.

No time for this.

Get your shit together, Rudnick.

Hears the fight downstairs, feels the building rock as the Russian grenade blows the front door in.

He needs to get downstairs, even though the meteor strike took everything out of him.

It was a big spell, maybe too big.

He's out of gas, doesn't feel capable of levitating a grain of sand.

Rifle fire cracks loudly just downstairs.

Andrew.

He's alone.

More concussions downstairs, a sound like Gabriel's trumpet blaring.

Quite suddenly his head feels like it has a horseshoe in it.

He moves through the snowy attic, makes his way to the ladder.

The first step is all right, but then he can't make his right arm or leg work so well, and he half slides, half falls down to the hardwood hall floor.

Hears something coming from the master bedroom.

The bathtub?

He looks at the door handle, but it looks blurry.

Manages to stand, but it's hard.

An old-fashioned telephone rings in Andrew's bedroom; he hears the sound of a door bursting open below.

I have to get in there.

Half of his body just isn't taking orders.

And his head.

Christ, his head.

The telephone rings again.

Someone smashes the phone.

Below, another trumpet-scream that shakes the house.

An iron candleholder in the shape of a woman's open hand falls from the wall, leaving a hole bisecting a savage crack in the plaster.

My head!

The myth of Athena's birth occurs to him, and he thinks himself well capable of pushing an armored woman out of his temple.

Shooting.

Andrew!

Michael Rudnick stands up just in time to see the bedroom door handle turn.

The door opens on a woman in military gear.

Athena?

No.

Baba's daughter.

She pulls a belt like a dead snake from around her neck.

She is as surprised as he is, braces herself to receive or cast a spell.

Michael Rudnick is a warlock to be reckoned with, and she knows it.

Not everyone can crank a blistering-fast meteor out of the sky and smash a tank with it.

And nobody can do it without paying a price.

Michael tries to say the word to make the sconce fly up and brain her, but when he speaks a garbled sound comes out.

They both understand at once.

Stroke.

I've had a stroke.

And not a small one.

I'm a dead man.

She smiles.

Not unkindly.

Pulls him firmly to the bathroom.

She works against his weak side.

He can't fight her.

An awkward moment as she negotiates the ailing magus through the bathroom door, the saber on her belt tangling them up. He tries to claw at her face with his good hand, but she is stronger.

She would like to take her time and experience this, look into his eyes as it happens to him; this is a rare thing.

But the Thief.

She will settle things with the Thief.

She has Michael against the tub now.

She says the name of a place, pushes the old man down into the tub.

He hears the name of the place.

He doesn't want to go there.

It's warm there, and it smells like trees and plants in flower.

He falls.

Looking at her all the way down.

What happens next isn't very gratifying.

No climactic collision of shapeshifting witch and wizard.

It just happens.

An older man with long white hair and a bomber jacket walks out into the yard, steering for the woods, looking for the hut with the broken leg.

A tank burns.

Bloody dolls, pieces of car, strange rocks litter the snow.

He wants to find the woman he loves.

The new witch.

He sees the hut, lying lopsided, leaning against a tree.

Out of gas.

A bearded madman looks out the window at him, holding a lens up to one eye.

This distracts him.

The magus doesn't see
her
until it's too late.

Coming at him from his blinded right side.

The witch.

Grinning at him.

Unkindly.

Showing her teeth.

Coming at him with the saber upraised.

He has something in his pocket that might or might not stop her heart, but it's too late to pull it out.

He vomits his last mouthful of darts at her.

But she has hardened her skin and they bend their points or shatter altogether.

The blade still comes.

He knows that saber.

It's the one he used on her mother.

On her.

He understands in a flash.

Marina never showed her teeth when she smiled.

The smile is her mother's smile.

Self-satisfied, superior, predatory.

A wolf's snarl.

This
is
Baba Yaga.

She has taken her own daughter's body.

As she always does.

As she always has.

His lover is long dead.

But her body is still strong.

The saber flashes in the streetlamp's glow.

Strangely suburban light to fall on a cavalry saber.

Coming down at his neck.

He remembers his shillelagh.

Sketches the gesture of raising it.

Too late.

It hurts.

Then it doesn't.

“She decapitated you. On the second stroke. The first was rather . . . messy. Happily, there wasn't a great deal of time between them. She's quite fast. Must be all the kettlebells.”

Andrew is sitting in his library

With what body?

speaking with an old British actor, perhaps Sir Alec Guinness, perhaps Sir Laurence Olivier, maybe even Sir Ian McKellen. It seems to morph between them. It sits in a leather chair. Legs crossed at the knee. It wears a yellow carnation and exquisite saddle-brown oxfords.

Argyle socks at the ankles.

Ichabod.

What now?

“Oh, you'll like this. This will be most gratifying. Get into this egg.”

So saying, the old thespian smiles and holds up a large, brown hen's egg.

Why?

“First of all, because you haven't any alternative, have you? None you'd enjoy, at least. Secondly, because it will have a delightful resonance. An echo, if you will. She murdered you with the same saber you tried to destroy her with. Now I shall teach you a trick perfected by one of her compatriots. What the generation behind yours calls a
frenemy
. Of course, these usually become enemies. I sense you preparing to ask who Baba Yaga's frenemy was, so save your strength. A fellow named Koschey. He used to hide his death far away from his body so you couldn't properly kill him. He used to hide it in an egg. You're a sort of echo of him, you know. Of Koschey. You have the same birthday, the same way of walking. Even the same slight tilt to your eyes, his a soupçon of Tartar, yours Shawnee. An echo is a very important thing; symmetry and repetition are the very knees of science and magic and creation. Creation is binary.”

He summoned you, too.

“Yes, he did. Most effectively. He bade me destroy a certain witch for him. The problem was, she commanded me not to harm her. Most effectively. You'll understand the distress that caused me, being bound in contradictory directions. Unfulfilled commands don't sit well with my sort. Perhaps it's the closest thing we feel to guilt. In either event . . .”

You knew. About all of this. And you used me. To finish things with her.

“Quite so. Have I vexed you? On second thought, I withdraw the question as immaterial. It doesn't matter if I have vexed you.”

The distinguished old actor strikes a match, lights a pipe.

Ichabod. Go help Anneke.

“I'm afraid I don't take orders from you anymore.”

Why not?

It looks at him as if at a disappointing student.

“Because you're dead.”

The entity smiles a winning smile.

“Now get into the egg or I take you to hell.”

The woman who used to be Marina Yaganishna stands in the library of the necromancer's house. She hasn't really been Marina since 1983, of course, when she cast the soul from her betraying daughter and began to live as her. The daughter who freed the Thief. The pretty but weak one with the mole. Baba took her body from her and made that body strong.

Now the ancient witch looks at the library in which the Thief had kept the books he stole from her.

The Book of Sorrows.

Love Spells of the Magyars.

On Becoming Invisible.

On the Mutability of the Soul and How Best to Survive Death.

She found her hand, too, the withered Hand of Glory that takes life.

It was in the Thief's jacket pocket, as if it were a wallet or a bunch of keys!

He respected nothing. This is an American disease.

And now he lies in the melting snow with a coat of ravens barking over him, fighting over his eyes.

The police will come soon, she knows, but they will be easy to charm away; she is good at charming, almost as good as a vampire.

She will need to fill a sack, take what she wants, burn the rest.

She already destroyed the tub in the Thief's bathroom so the old man could not return.

She will burn the professor in the hut.

She will burn the new witch, too.

Baba drained the new witch close to death to make herself stronger for the fighting, to power the hut and the doll-soldiers without compromising her own strength. As she used to drain the Thief, and many others.

Now she gets nothing from her—she is unconscious or dead.

She will also burn the stick-man with the painting for a head.

It whimpers in the Thief's bedroom and will not leave. She thought about destroying it, but it is a harmless thing, good for fetching and spying, but unable to think for itself. She will take it apart and smell its magic out before she burns it, though—it is a good spell, one she is unfamiliar with.

The library is safe now.

Various booby-traps sprung at her; a drill broke itself on her head, a minor Hand of Glory tried pathetically to punch her, a rubber snake became a real cobra, which she ate. A nasty bug even tried to slither up her privates, but she turned herself caustic and burned it to a crisp.

She was obliged to play Russian roulette so she could collect the
Book of Sorrows
; there's just no getting around the risk of death to handle that book.

But death is no obstacle to her.

She's too good at resisting the pull, at finding another warm body to wedge herself into.

Most of them don't know how to fight to hold on to their skin.

Mostly it's an easy thing.

And even a witch can be pushed out if taken by surprise.

Now she takes up the sack.

It is heavy—she didn't stop with her books.

She will take a French book on shapeshifting and an American text on automobiles and a book by Saint Delphinia of Amiens that claims the Revelation of St. John happened in 1348; that angels and devils fought a second war that destroyed Lucifer and left Mammon in charge.

She remembers that time dimly, thinks it may well be true that greed and envy replaced wrath and pride as man's chief evils.

A pity.

She hoists her sack.

She is about to leave the library when she notices a pretty carved box she had not seen before.

Up on the mantelpiece of the library's fireplace.

Beneath a painting of an oak tree.

She sets the bag down.

Examines the box, a box of cedar and ivory.

She tries to open it but finds it locked.

She spits in the keyhole and the lock smokes, opens.

A rabbit?

A stuffed rabbit.

She sees her reflection in its shiny, convex eyes, and it surprises her. It always surprises her to see herself young. She prefers the body of a crone, prefers to be underestimated and ignored, to make clear decisions because she is not distracted by a quick womb and its siren song of sex and children.

And she can always make herself look pretty when she needs to seduce.

What is this rabbit?

A relic?

She tries to feel magic, feels only an odd, flat deadness.

She picks it up.

When she does, it opens its mouth and, impossibly, an egg rolls out.

Breaks on the hardwood floor.

This triggers a memory in her, but too late.

“Here is the devil!” she says.

And then it happens.

 • • • 

Andrew Ranulf Blankenship, or his death, or his life essence, or his soul, if you prefer, rushes up from the broken shell and the mess of yolk and albumen on the floor of his library, rushes at the body of his onetime lover.

If he hesitates, she will become aware of him, will defend herself, and he will be a ghost.

He doesn't give her time.

He pushes for all he's worth, leaps into her body and crowds it, gives her no room to hide, feels himself in all of her at once.

For a dizzying moment, both of them occupy the flesh of the unfortunate Marina Yaganishna, but the old witch is surprised. Off-balance.

She tries to hold on.

If she gains purchase, he will lose.

He does something he understands as bracing his foot against her hip bone and straining at her, pushing her up and out through the nose and mouth.

The mouth of Marina Yaganishna opens and she wails as if in labor. Clenches her fists. But she can't hold. Momentum and surprise are his, and he pushes her out of the body she stole.

And takes it for himself.