The Necromancer's House (9 page)

Full dark.

The fireflies outside have largely given up.

Andrew has spread himself lengthwise on the couch, hands on chest like a pharaoh ready for the wrap. Feet bare. Blue jeans. No belt. No shirt. His hair a dark pillow under his head.

He asked her to watch him, so she sits opposite, on the rusty folding chair.

She bats a moth away from her eyes.

Another, larger moth crawls on his face, but she is afraid to touch him now, so the moth remains.

Andrew watches the moth, too.

He's next to her, out of his body.

When he realizes this, his body gets goose bumps.

He sees his body get goose bumps.

He turns now—it feels like turning his body but he believes this is just how he explains it to himself—and looks at Anneke. He wants to put his nose in the hollow of her ear and smell her unadorned, slightly spicy scent, but the part of him that wants that has no nose. Her neck is tan and lovely, and her eyes shine with curiosity and concern as she looks down on his body. He sees

with what eyes?

the fine hairs on her cheeks, sees her pulse gently thrumming in her temples, feels the rhythm of her heart. He moves closer to her, almost mingling with her, begins to feel that he is putting off what he fears to do. But it's so
good
to be this near her. Is this what it is to be a ghost? No . . . he is still connected with his body. He tries to breathe in her scent, hears

with what ears?

his lungs fill where he lies on the couch, thinks he can smell her now.
Anneke.
She smiles a little, looking down at him, turns down the corners of her mouth trying to suppress the smile, so he follows her gaze and sees why.

He's getting an erection, bulging at the zipper of his faded jeans.

Oh, that's great.

Just great.

He has the urge to cover himself, and now his hands obey the impulse, his face flushing red, a worry line on his half-sleeping forehead. Anneke bites her knuckle to keep from braying laughter, but the laughter wells up in her. Andrew-on-the-couch now half turns his body away from her, makes an involuntary growl like a frustrated bear.

Anneke turns away, too, laughter escaping in hitches around her fist. She fishes out a cigarette and puts it in her mouth, but she doesn't light it.

“Say,” she stage-whispers between laughs, “I can light this even if you're floating around, right? You're not flammable or anything? Like methane?”

She's laughing so hard she's almost crying.

“Help! My friend turned himself into a fart and I burned him up!”

Now Andrew laughs next to her, his belly hitching where he lies on the couch. He reaches out

with what hand?

and tries to light her cigarette for her, his physical hand twitching.

She steps farther away from the couch now, moves
through
Andrew, who, almost against his will, allows himself to be dragged along
in
her.

He has never felt anything like this—it is electric, delicious . . . it feels like burnt caramel tastes. He senses that if he lingers, he will soon be the one feeling through her skin, moving her limbs,

and what will happen to Anneke?

but this is only for an instant—he pushes out of her.

And that sensation of pushing makes him remember something from the text . . . the
push
can be turned around so it happens entering the body. If you
push
while entering, snapping your own tether, you can knock the other soul completely free and into death. If you try and you're weak at it, if you don't believe, you'll be the dead one.

But Andrew did not push.

He melted into her like liquid caramel, and it was hard to leave.

 • • • 

All Anneke has time to feel is a flash of numbness, as though her heart has skipped two beats, and she understands what has happened. Her laughter dies like a caught breeze. She shivers. Fear winks in her eye, then turns, as it always does with her, into curiosity. She turns to where she thinks he is and says, as if she has dared herself to speak before she can take it back, “Do it again.”

She heels a tear of laughter from under the corner of her eye.

“Do it again, I want you to,” she says, and looks down at his body. His head is gently shaking
no
.

She lights the cigarette.

Andrew-out-of-Andrew rushes away from the barn, at the speed of a sprint, faster than a sprint, now at a gallop, and he takes off. He looks back at the barn below him, only it isn't precisely like looking behind him, as he has no neck to swivel; it feels a bit like he's a nautilus, jetting backward through inky water, tentacles trailing behind it. Nothing trails behind Andrew. He is nothing, has nothing.

The barn recedes, light bleeding through the pineboard walls, etching the high grass and short trees around it in faint gold. Anneke is in there, smoking her Winston down to the filter, mantling her consciousness over his half-vacant body while his consciousness soars over Cayuga County. He turns now, the nautilus transforming to owl, attention cast forward. Trees loom at him and he pushes through them, feeling their slower, muted rhythms, rustling their leaves as if he himself has become a breeze.

No drug can do this.

Now he follows the coast south and west, away from Dog Neck Harbor, skimming low over the water, watching the lights in the windows, the bluish glow of televisions anesthetizing tired fishermen and waitresses and one winks out—there!—where young parents begin to caress each other in earnest now that their children have gone to sleep.

Don't look in that window, you pervert.

He knows his body chuckles in the barn behind him, miles behind him now, but he can't think about that or his tether, stretched like a rubber band, might snap him back into himself.

He sees something over the water.

Reddish light collected in a form that moves on the lake, its nucleus a ball of white. It is the size of an oil tanker. He moves away from it.

What is that?

Don't let it see you.

No, really, what the fuck IS that?

This is not the first strange thing he's seen while traveling out-of-body. Nor is it the scariest. But it might be the biggest.

It roils and rolls in on itself, moving slowly, flashing as if with internal lightning. He thinks that he will probably never know just what it is. He senses it, senses neither malevolence nor goodwill, just power. Indifference. A god? A devil? An alien? None of the above?

If you sense it, maybe it can sense you.

His tether spasms, nearly whips him back into his body, then nearly . . . what? Breaks?

Not out here.

Not with that.

It stops.

It starts to drift toward him now.

He thinks of the
Titanic
steering away from its iceberg, slowly, too late.

Only I'm the
Titanic
and that's the iceberg.

Oh, fuck that.

He flies lower, skimming the water like a pelican.

He knows he is moaning in the barn.

The tether pulls at him, but he resists.

Not yet, I haven't learned enough yet, and I'm not going to let that thing scare me off; even if I'm what it's looking for, even if it eats souls, I defy it to find me.

(Careful!)

He moves over the shore, up a small bluff, into the woods.

He moves now as if on legs, down a fire trail.

A bat flutters near him,
through
him, reaping mosquitoes and moths. He flinches, his body jerking on the couch, but then it flies through him again, then again; it knows he's there, it likes the feeling like Anneke did. He relaxes, lets it. Feels the purr of its tiny heart beating hundreds of beats per minute, feels the craving for moth in its mouth, the dusty, gritty joy that moth flesh is, and then he wants the bat to go away and it does, careening off into the night.

Behind him, a reddish glow on the water, still far away, but he moves faster now. The fire trail becomes a paved road and he moves along its side. A cabin looms on his left, light pouring from its front window. Inside, a sixtyish bald man with a beard and small glasses hunches over a chessboard, his legs crossed at the knees European-style, but he senses that the man is American, has trained himself to do that. He moves a white pawn, consults a book, then moves a black pawn. He lifts a glass of wine to his lips, a rubyish droplet spilling down his beard, then disappearing within it.

Now the glow is over land, but farther away, heading toward Rochester. It moved fast when he wasn't watching.

Or there are more than one of them.

That's your fear talking. There's only one. It doesn't see you, doesn't want you.

He flies again, moving left, back toward the water.

To his right, a dark cabin, wooden stairs leading sharply down from its back deck.

Beneath him dry sand becomes wet sand becomes rocks, here and there punctuated with driftwood or seaweed. He pelicans over the water again, and then he sees it.

It sees him.

A ghost.

Under the water.

A bloated older man's ghost floats under the surface of the lake, its form luminous gray-green, like algae, its eyes two holes of starlight, locked on Andrew.

It surfaces.

Oh shit, it's time to go.

The tether jerks.

A luminous hand rises from the water, grabs something.

Grabs the invisible umbilicus anchoring him to his body.

Shakes it savagely.

NO!

Shakes it harder.

PLEASE!

The puffy phosphorescent head of the dead man comes out of the lake and bites at the air with black teeth. Andrew feels something like pain where his belly should be.

Now it is pain, excruciating pain.

The tether is down to threads, but the last threads are tough and the thing can't quite sever them.

Cold I'm cold!

Andrew tries to move away, but he is pulled down
by his tether
until a fatty dead arm loops around his neck, pulls him under the surface of the water.

How do I have a neck? Oh fuck my soul is almost all here now, I'm about to die. Help! HELP! PLEASE!

The dead face leers at him.

No bubbles.

It doesn't breathe.

But it speaks.

In Russian.

“It is an unpleasant thing to drown.”

The eyes are not starlight anymore, just milky white lamps, like the lamps deepwater fish use to lure prey.

Panicked, Andrew tries to think of what to do. He cannot escape the half headlock he is in, the soft but insistent mass of it somehow handling his nonmass, nor is his tether strong enough to snap him back.

“With your permission, I would like to show you my new home.”

Dragomirov!

And now they dive.

Down and down.

Past a school of fish, just dark, blunt shapes moving around and through the diving souls.

A ship comes into view on the bottom, lit only by the witch-light given off by the ghost.

“Isn't it pretty?”

Andrew is shoved now, pushed through a tear in the hull.

He sees a quintet of skeletons through the murk and detritus, all sitting at a table with plates and cups near them, the remains of their clothes around them.

The rusalka had been busy.

Maybe only one drowning a year, if all of them were here, but since this had started before 1930, she had brought a lot of lives to their end.

She is a one-woman disaster, played out in slow motion.

She is a monster.

Now Andrew is held by the nape, brought face-to-face with a skeleton sitting in the corner.

“Look. This one is me. You can see my clothes are in better repair, and those fucking mussels haven't had time to grow on me like the forgotten ones in the engine room. She tends us, you know, the recent ones. Keeps us clean, like dolls in a dollhouse. I bought those jeans at the Nordstrom, International Mall, Tampa. One hundred fifty dollars. And now, look. Look at the dental work I had done in Mexico, such art, these crowns, art by Dr. Hernan Rodriguez of Leon, and for what? For your pretty bitch to drown me for a joke in a cold lake.”

I'm sorry.

“The devil take your sorry.”

The fatty thing holding him shudders violently, begins to come apart, bits of its not-flesh drifting off it. Andrew can see through parts of it now, but also its witch-light is fading. It is getting dark in this ship.

“I have to go now, the bitch is coming back.”

Nadia!

“But let me tell you something, Mister Andrew. You'll be sorry soon. I know who you are now, and I will tell
her
.”

Your niece?

“You poor fucker!”

It laughs now, shaking itself to pieces, its light almost completely gone. Its voice is strangled, as if it is drowning again.

“But I'll tell her to make it quick. If you do something for me.”

What?

“Find my dog. Find my little Caspar.”

Complete darkness.

Cold.

Andrew screams.

Cold arms find him, cradle his head, a stiff, cold nipple brushes his cheek down in the dead ship.

“You idiot,” the rusalka says, kissing his mouth.

Light.

Warmth.

Andrew screams.

Warm arms find him, cradle his head, a soft breast beneath the cotton of a T-shirt.

Anneke is crying.

“You idiot,” she says, kissing his mouth.

“I thought you were dead. You looked pretty dead.”

She uses a roll of paper towels and a bottle of rubbing alcohol to swab his upper lip and chin. While the weightless parts of Andrew were touring the depths of Lake Ontario, his body sprung the mother of all nosebleeds. It dropped its other ballast, too, but Anneke won't let go of him yet.

He is lying under a blanket, the blanket topped with his leather jacket.

“I need to change my pants.”

She hugs his head to her chest one more time.

Salvador paces behind her.

“Send Jeeves for new pants. I don't want you walking yet.”

“Salvador, please get me a pair of jeans.”

Happy to have a task, the wicker man disappears from the buggy barn and heads for the main house.

“Well, since you're my sponsor, I guess you're the one I tell I really want a drink right now.”

He nods his head, shivering.

The lake's cold is in his bones.

“You know what the worst thing was? When I thought Elvis had left the building for real, my first thought wasn't, ‘Oh God, my friend is dead.' My first thought was, ‘They'll think I killed him—I'm going back to prison.' How's that for sucking? As a person, I mean. Who's that selfish?”

She won't let herself cry.

He wrestles free of her, goes to the barn door, leans over and vomits. Cold lake water comes out of him.

She brings him a paper towel for his mouth.

“I don't understand half of what happened tonight,” he says. “But somebody's coming for me. Somebody dangerous. And I think I know who's sending her.”

“Who?”

“I don't want to say her name. But I think it's time I gave you a proper tour of my house. And I think it's time I told you what happened to me in Russia.”

It stinks of lake now, worse than before.

“Is time you were telling me, too,” the naked woman with the dreadlocked auburn mane says. She walks dripping into the barn, eyeing Anneke territorially.

Anneke does some eyeing of her own.

“You have cigarette for me?”

“You know where they are.”

Nadia pads across the barn floor, reaches into the jacket pocket.

Anneke watches her, willing herself not to react to her smell.

Nadia pulls out a bright yellow cigarette pack, but the cigarette she pulls from it is broken in half.

“Shit,” she says, smelling the blond strands of tobacco.

Anneke offers her a Winston.

The rusalka takes it.