The Necromancer's House (32 page)

“There it is. I see it.”

Michael is looking through a brass naval telescope from 1888.

Andrew can see Michael's breath.

“How far?”

“Hundred yards. Hundred and ten.”

“Too far?”

“Yep. Twice too far for that. I'll have to wait till it comes closer. You sure she's in there? Anneke?”

“Yes,” Andrew says.

Michael shakes his head a little.

Andrew looks over at Salvador, who holds night-vision binoculars flat against his portrait head, scanning the other side.

“Whoooa Nelly,” Michael says.

“What?”

“Something's coming out of the window.”

“Binoculars!” Andrew says, and Salvador crosses the attic with them.

Michael counts.

“Two, three-four. Six.”

Andrew looks.

The hut is pitched forward, like a man getting sick.

He watches three burlap dolls fall from its eye window, like it's crying them. No, they're not falling. They're leaping.

“
Caprimulgus.
Go see,” he says, and points at a stuffed nightjar. It gives itself a shake and a stretch, then just looks at him.

“Ah, right.”

He opens the window.

Snow wisps in.

The bird flies off, churring and buzzing.

 • • • 

A moment later.

Andrew sees through the bird's eye.

It flies to the hut, peers through the window.

Anneke upside down, hanging like meat, all but asleep.

A torque on her neck.

I know that fucking thing.

I know what it's doing to her.

A madman bleeding, rocking himself, manacled. His skin gouged.

It doesn't take long to go nuts in there.

Don't lose your shit now, Blankenship, stay strong.

Higher power, help me.

Now the hut moves off.

Have to see what came out of it.

The bird flies from tree to tree now, scanning the ground.

Movement!

A man in military gear?

Soviet, 1940s.

The bird turns just in time to see a second man pointing a rifle.

The muzzle flashes.

 • • • 

“Ow FUCK I'm shot! I'm shot!”

Andrew falls to the ground, holding his eye, panicked.

Michael, who got away from the window and ducked at the sound of the gunshot, bends to him, pulls his hand away.

“Let me see.”

The eye and face are whole.

“You're okay,” Michael says. “Calm down. It's just the bird. Get the rest of the way out of the bird.”

Andrew does.

Looks at Michael, who raises both eyebrows at him.

“Soviet soldiers. World War Two.”

“Shit,” Michael says.

“Yep.”

Where the other neighbors hear a dog barking or a car horn, John Dawes hears a gunshot. He's about as luminous as a brick, but he has spent so much time at the gun range and on maneuvers with his World War II reenactor friends that he hears the sound as it is, magical or not.

He had been standing in front of the open refrigerator with mustard and a pack of hot dogs in his hand, scanning for relish. No relish, no hot dog. That's just how it goes. He had just caught sight of the jar, was in the process of gauging whether he could spoon out enough of the green sludge to properly coat a wiener, when he heard the
pop
of a 7.62- millimeter round.

So now he stands there, eyes wide.

He shuts the fridge door, kills the kitchen light.

Shakedown is barking in the yard.

Back and forth on his run.

Good boy!

Call the cops?

Hell with that, Fruitloop's already on the phone.

Fruitloop, the widowed lady next door who sets out no fewer than fifteen versions of the nativity on her lawn each Christmas, is actually watching today's recorded episode of
The Price Is Right
for the third time. She heard the gunshot as an extra-loud squeal of enthusiasm from the Iowa stewardess who just won a set of patio furniture.

Dawes grabs the loaded Luger he had duct-taped to the side of the fridge, goes upstairs as quickly as he can in the darkness, picking off tape, opens the door to the spare room he has converted into a sniper's roost and German militaria shrine. Kneels a few feet from the window, tucks the pistol in his waistband, picks up his
Liebling
, a German K98 sniper rifle with Hensoldt scope.

“That's it,” he says. “Come to Johannes.”

He scans the street.

Too dark to see much.

Couldn't bear to fit a modern night-vision scope to his vintage rifle.

Doesn't actually believe there's a problem—he's very much playing a game. Lots of people shoot things around here; it's just on the edge of farm country. He waits for a moment. Watches. Gets bored. Decides to go back downstairs and see about his hot dogs.

The light comes on.

He didn't flip the switch.

Someone else.

“Hunh!” he says, reaching for the pistol, drops it.

He hops a little, as if he expects it to go off.

Like in
Band of Brothers
when the guy shot himself in the leg.

Two highly authentic-looking Soviet soldiers stand before him, one in a sapper's steel breastplate. Both of them dirty and stinking of cigarettes. And gasoline? And lots and lots of sour sweat. One carries a Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle. The engineer a Tokarev pistol and a handheld bayonet.

A very sharp-looking bayonet dark from scrubbed-off rust.

Is that snow on their shoulders?

“Very funny,” he says, thinking at first it's two guys from the Soviet team in his reenactor group. Then he's not so sure.

He's never seen these guys.

The one with the rifle looks rough.

Like he hasn't been eating so well.

And like he's shot people.

The one in the sapper's plate looks around at the room, enjoying himself. Smiling beneath his walrusy mustache.

Something catches his eye.

“
Shto eta?
” he says.

Dawes doesn't speak Russian, but the meaning is clear enough.

The man is tickling a poster with the edge of his bayonet.

What's this?

John Dawes has a lot of posters, and they've been hanging so long he doesn't much see them anymore. He sees this one now. The bayonet traces a blown-up cover of a Hitler Youth propaganda magazine called
Der Pimpf
, showing a German tank running over Polish cavalry.

Next the walrus-man looks at the poster next to it, a homoerotic masterpiece showing a brown-shirted, black-tied bohunk with blond televangelist hair and a swastika flag smiling unrepentantly, the legend reading
Der Deutsche Student kämpft für Führer und Volk!

John hopes they don't look at the Russian-language poster showing a huge Jew leading Stalin and a Soviet soldier on a rope.

They do.

“Ti shto fashistskoe gavno?”

Dawes picks out the word
fascist
.

Correctly guesses the uncomplimentary nature of the second bit.

“Ti anti-semit?”

Remembers that nobody on the Soviet reenactor squad actually speaks Russian.

Some kind of fucking communists for real.

The snow on their helmets and coats has melted.

That was real snow what the fuck?

He looks at the only anachronistic poster in the room, a signed and framed poster of Rush Limbaugh wearing a powdered wig and tri-cornered hat.

Two if by Tea!

From Tea to shining Tea!

Original sweet tea.

No help.

Shakedown keeps barking.

Far, far away.

Like the pistol he dropped.

Now walrus picks up John's rifle.

John's Nazi rifle.

Nods and looks up at John Dawes.

Grins.

John pisses his pants.

Another gunshot.

This one from the west side of the house.

The high chipping sound of a bullet hitting glass.

“Salvador! Get away from the window.”

Salvador does as he is told, but the bullet already hit its mark.

A perfect hole has appeared in the canvas, just over Dalí's left eye.

The automaton is unaffected, but the hole will have to be fixed before he takes dog form again.

“Go patch yourself.”

Sal heads for the stairs, another bullet sailing through the window, hitting the wall near the stuffed owl.

Michael hunkers down, sweating despite the chill in the air.

Andrew pops up, steals another glance through his night-vision binocs.

“We've got three on this side.”

Two muzzles flash in the darkness.

The bullets turn, striking bricks and plaster elsewhere in the room.

The Brazilian pendant around Andrew's neck glows warm.

He knows the charm can be overwhelmed if it's worked too hard; it has already saved him from at least four bullets.

“Let's wake up Buttercup.”

Michael nods.

“Take cover.”

Michael takes cover.

Andrew hunches low, goes to the window overlooking the front yard.

He stands erect now, well back from the window, in the shadows, but still they see him.

Bullets punch through the window, making the awful
pvvvvvt!
sound one hears when being shot at, a sound Andrew had been lucky enough never to hear before now. He counts two men in the tree line. Holds up two fingers at Michael, who has scooted himself behind an old plow blade.

It sparks once with a loud
P-TANG
.

Michael says two paragraphs in the Greek of Archimedes.

Andrew says a sentence in old French.

The vacuum-cleaner beast rears the roosterish brass head at the end of its tube neck, flaps its vulture wings, knocking off its covering sheet. Flexes its chimpanzee arms. Its neck turns, letting it focus its eyes at Andrew.

The lenses rotate.

Shit, is it going to attack?

No, just looking at its master.

“Allez!”

It flaps harder.

Its vacuum motor runs.

It lurches forward, busts out the north window, toward the lake, then turns. Bullets strike it, do it little harm.

Snow blows into the attic behind it.

It steers toward the shooter.

Its eyes flash and something in the tree line bursts into flames.

Screams.

The screaming stops.

Three more bullets whine toward Andrew, one of them from the Dawes house across the street, and all three are turned.

The chain holding the pendant breaks; the pendant falls off, its magic exhausted.

Andrew drops to the floor as the fourth bullet hits brick behind him.

Michael finishes another verse in Greek.

Andrew adds a verse in German to this.

In the front yard, the sound of a long-dead Mustang's engine turning over.

Now the ground rumbles.

The stuffed birds on their shelf and the terrarium with the replica house shudder, too.

The magi have started a small earthquake.

Buttercup is waking up.

Kolya and Vanya kneel in the snowy patch of woods near the house.

The woman came to them as they drew playing cards against each other in an improvised game involving making up insults for each other's mother and sisters (“My king of spades says your three of clubs was poked down your mother's throat by the lieutenant's cock.”) while the tanks took fuel. She sat next to them, shared vodka with them. Told them if they would come with her, they could get out of the coming fight with the Germans. All they would have to do is to kill an American for her.

“It will not be easy,” she had said. “He is a wizard and has many tricks. You may die. But I picked you from a list of the dead; I know for a fact that you
will
die if you go to fight the Germans. Kolya, you will be shot by a sniper while taking a piss. Vanya, an eighty-eight-millimeter shell will land so close to you that no part of you will be found and known to be you.”

Vanya had been troubled by a recurrent dream in which the sun came down next to him and burned him up completely. Nobody could find him, not even his mother walking the field with an icon of Jesus.

Kolya hated pissing precisely because he was terrified of snipers.

It was as though she had seen into both of their hearts.

“What about the Germans?” Vanya had said.

“Leave them to my friend Frost,” she answered. A white wolf with bony ribs moved between trees, and then Vanya was not sure he had seen it. “Russia will be Hitler's graveyard even without you.”

“Will I be able to piss without fear? Will you promise me that I will not be shot while pissing?” Kolya asked.

She had nodded.

So they agreed and the three of them drank vodka with a drop of blood in it to seal the bargain.

The next thing they had known, they dreamed they were tiny children with rough skin, and they were hungry, so they ate mouthfuls of flesh from a man.

And then they were jumping from a hut that was actually a truck except it walked on legs.

 • • • 

And now they are here, together.

Shooting up into a house.

Kolya shot a strange bird that was looking at them.

Vanya thought he shot a man, had him right in his sights, squeezed the trigger patiently and felt the sweet thrill a well-placed shot produces, but the man went unharmed.

To their right, a Russian bursts into flames, screams.

To their left, an engine tries to start, then does start.

The ground rumbles.

Like an armored column passing, but harder.

“My God,” Vanya says.

Kolya points his rifle, but it seems useless in his hands.

The headlamps of a strange wrecked car have switched on in the front yard, just to their left. Another Soviet soldier they do not know had been sheltering behind a large rock near the car, firing up into the attic.

Now the car's hood becomes a mouth.

A steer's iron mouth.

The soldier jumps back, startled.

Quick, like a fox eating a mouse, the car clamps down on the man, crushing him.

The car becomes the head of a giant made of tree, tree roots, boulders, and other cars.

This giant grows horns.

Bull's horns.

It is a man of metal. Stone and wood with a huge longhorn's skull made of iron.

Headlamps for eyes.

It rips itself out of the ground, leaving a hole the size of a small basement.

Raining dirt and small rocks.

A rusty truck splits itself into pieces, becomes armor plating.

A Greek hoplite's armor, greaves, abdomen plate, armored skirt and all, wraps in two seconds around the body of wood and stone and steel.

The man still dangles from its mouth.

It spits him out.

It is as tall as the house.

What lands on the yard is not a man, but a lifeless doll.

No bigger than a cat.

Buttons for eyes.