The Necromancer's House

35

The man who forgot his own name has been living on the street in Syracuse since March. March was a hard, miserable month to be outdoors, but, with the help of the blanket from the Salvation Army, the down vest from Goodwill, and the shoplifted sleeping bag, he made it.

He’s caveman strong.

A tribe of one.

He is proud of the sleeping bag. Not just for the tactical skill he showed in getting it past the sensors before the stock boy saw him or the sheer athletic prowess that left the pudgy employee huffing and puffing on the wrong side of a wall; he is proud he had the foresight to swipe it while he still looked okay. He knew it wouldn’t be long before he smelled like Dumpsters and had a beard, and that people like that get watched the minute they enter a place of business.

He is proud, too, of the fight with the shower-cap man. Shower-cap wanted that sleeping bag; it was a hunter’s bag, camouflaged, rated all the way down to ten below. You don’t need to tuck tail and run for the mission in a bag like that. Shower-cap pushed a shopping cart full of stuffed animals around, held the stuffies up and made them wave at cars before he showed his HUNGRY NEED A DOLLAR GOD LOVES U sign. Kids made their parents give him the dollar, and he smiled his gap-toothed smile at them. But not everybody who plays with teddy bears is nice. Shower-cap thought because he was big and had a pipe he was going to get that thermal sleeping bag and make the new guy push on to another on-ramp. Shower-cap was wrong. Shower-cap pushed on. Shower-cap’s smile has more gaps now.

The young man has always been a good fighter.

Going into the infantry seemed right, even though someone he cared about asked him not to. Begged him not to that day on the couch, lying on him and crying down into his eyes.

He had to go, and at the time he thought she didn’t understand, but he has come to believe that maybe she did.

He came back from Afghanistan after only a few weeks in country. He came back different. Not better different. Traumatic-brain-injury-and-severe-tinnitus different. The IED had spun the Humvee like a soda can, popped it in half, killed the lieutenant and the Mexican outright, blinded the guy who played hockey. He didn’t remember names so well anymore, but he knew that guy played hockey. He himself was the luckiest guy in the limo that day, but he wasn’t all that lucky. Kept all his outside parts, but now everything sounded like whining, and he got mad fast. Yelled when he argued, which didn’t play well at the smartphone sales kiosk in the Carousel mall. Or at the Catholic high school that took him on as a janitor. Or at the car wash, where he worked for six hours.

That he grabbed arms and squeezed to emphasize the yelling hadn’t played well with sparrow-tattoo girl. And it was sparrow-tattoo girl’s apartment.

Had been before he left for the army, when he had his own place, too. He had known her for years. Three? Four?

She had cried down into his eyes.

He used to have some letters she wrote.

She was right to kick him out.

He stole the sleeping bag the very same day.

Never went back for his stuff.

He is a caveman now.

It’s a warm day and he’s wearing the video game T-shirt, his favorite shirt. He has already gotten thirty-three dollars and fifty cents from the good motorists heading away from the airport onto Interstate 81. He has just lain down to nap when he sees a woman walking up to him, a pretty, older woman.

He sits up on one elbow and smiles at her.

He still has a good smile.

He watches her.

It isn’t every day that someone bothers to get out of the car and come over to him here, although it has happened.

She has a carload waiting for her, calling to her in another language. One of the men gets out, starts toward her protectively, which is completely unnecessary. He’s harmless to women unless they argue with him, and then he just squeezes their arms. He doesn’t even mean to do that.

She takes something from her purse; a vial of water? Three ounces, just how they like it at the TSA.

She unscrews the cap.

He just stares at her beauty mark, her pretty, fair skin.

She’s prettier than sparrow-tattoo girl, even though she’s old enough to be her mom.

A MILF.

He hates that word.

“Your name was Victor,” she tells him. She has an accent.

Her voice cuts through the whining in his head, and the whining stops.

Nobody ever did so much for him.

Tinnitus comes and goes as it pleases, doctors can’t help, the VA can’t help, but this woman made it stop.

He wants to cry.

“Victor,” he says, agreeing. “That’s right.”

He remembers it sometimes on his own, but it’s good to have it in his mouth again.

He hears the soft rush of cars, the delicious music of birds.

No whine.

“You are too young to live so hard. Are you thirsty, Victor?”

Come to think of it, he is thirsty.

He licks his lips and nods.

What is it? he thinks.

“Melted snow,” she says. “From home.”

She gives him the vial and he drinks it.

It’s cold, colder than he thought it would be, and clean.

“Don’t waste any,” she says, and he doesn’t, he even licks the back of his hand after he wipes his beard.

Now the foreign man is descending on them, speaking their language.

It’s Russian.

He understands them, though he doesn’t get how.

“This sort of thing is not done here, these people are dangerous. Please, Marina.”

“He’s not dangerous to me,” she says, still kneeling, and winks at him.

She hands him a twenty-dollar bill, but he understands that it isn’t really for him, that it’s just pokazukha, a show she’s putting on for the cousin.

He won’t need money anymore, and the thought makes him smile.

He smiles at this woman, whom he loves with all his heart, whose arms he will never grab and squeeze, and she smiles back.

She gave him his name back, but it was just to let him know how special she was, how right it was for him to trust her.

He isn’t Victor anymore.

He isn’t a caveman anymore.

He doesn’t know what he is, but he goes to sleep under the overpass for the last time before his great adventure, and he dreams of his blind friend playing hockey. He has his sight back, and he’s skating with his stick low, skating fast, skating with agility and grace.

Once-Was-Victor has to look up to watch his friend skate.

He is watching him from under the ice.

36

Morning.

The necromancer’s house.

The birds had been chirping before, and he guesses they still are, but Salvador now fills the house with the sound of vacuuming, perhaps the most domestic sound on the American Foley board.

The previous night had been full of horrors, but the morning seems so placid it all might have been a bad dream.

Awful, really awful, but I learned a lot.

I’m ready to try more.

Maybe today, after I show the girls the house?

He rubs his navel, remembering how much it hurt when the thing from the lake bit down on his tether.

To hell with that.

Nadia smokes and lounges on the patio below, outside.

Anneke isn’t here yet.

Nothing makes the world feel mundane like a nice, soul-numbing dose of social media. Andrew plants himself in front of his desktop Mac, logs in to Facebook, and scrolls down the news feed on his home page. He watches the Honey Badger for perhaps the fifteenth time, chuckling at it anyway. He scrolls past event invites, Farmville crap, the obligatory feel-good story soured at the end by “share if you’re not a bastard” or the like, and then finds the pro-Obama photo he reposted. President O in cool shades, smiling big, extending a hand in a walking drive-by hello, captioned.

Thirty-seven comments.

He knew when he reposted it that it was a bad idea, a little more wrong than funny, but he had been tired. Unsurprising that it generated a thread with thirty-something comments; most of his friends are liberal, and most of the conservative ones are polite enough not to start a donnybrook on someone else’s post, but some people enjoy charging into a hostile audience.

Andrew calls this belligerent Facebook sport “Red Rover,” and, although he never plays, his brother Charley should be in the social media asshole hall of fame.

Along with John Dawes across the street.

The two of them actually found themselves facing the shield wall of Andrew’s friends so often they friended each other, though they would never meet in person, and wouldn’t like each other if they did.

Charley is a big-money infomercial pitchman for Jesus (BMW Jesus, not donkey-and-sandals Jesus), and Dawes owns a vintage German sniper rifle and keeps a balls-mean dog on a run that only just stops him before the road. It’s a three-legged dog (Dawes’s one inarguable virtue is his volunteerism and advocacy for rescued pits), but the fucker really moves. Andrew hates biking past that house, knowing he is one chain link away from hospitalization and that Dawes would treat the whole thing like his fault. Charley would think Dawes was dangerously unbalanced (he is), and Dawes would think Charley was fake and a huge pussy (he is).

Andrew really wants them to hang out sometime.

In this thread, John Dawes (who, it must be said, has never been in the military) is explaining the operational details of the bin Laden mission, while Charles Blankenship is questioning Andrew’s patriotism, which he does about once a month.

Andrew wishes he were better at casting spells over the net—that’s Radha’s thing—because he would cheerfully cause two photos to appear:

1. John Dawes shaving his nuts during Gilligan’s Island.

2. Charley Blankenship, age ten, holding his eye and running away from the black girl he tried out the N-word on in 1965. (Ironically, this was at an all-Dayton Halloween Fair and Charley was dressed as an Indian, feather and all.)

Anneke knocks.

She has gone home for the night and then returned.

Andrew answers the door wearing his Japanese robe, wool-lined Ugg mules on his feet.

A vacuum cleaner is running but cuts off a second after the door opens.

“This is my house, and you must exit the same way you enter. It’s important.”

He says this to her every time she comes over.

“What happens if I don’t?”

“It’s important.”

Salvador crosses behind Andrew, carrying the vacuum cleaner in one wooden hand, winding the cord with the other.

The rusalka is already here, wearing a dress, almost certainly at Andrew’s request. A simple summer dress that’s a bit short on her, damp at the top where she keeps wetting her hair.

He really is fucking her. Nose, meet clothespin.

French-press coffee first, Sumatran.

Black for Anneke.

Honey for the rusalka.

Hazelnut syrup for Andrew.

Salvador knows the drill.

He keeps himself out of the way when the tour begins.

First, the staircase.

“All right, this one’s cheap and basic. I’ll just show you.”

He stands at the top of the steps.

“Anneke, you up for a stunt? It might hurt.”

She smiles at that.

“Yes.”

“Come on up.”

She starts up the stairs.

Andrew says, “Slippery-slope.”

The stairs turn into a very sleek, polished ramp.

She falls forward, slides down, lands on her feet.

“Nice!” she says.

“Ziggurat.”

The stairs reappear.

“Care to try again?”

She nods, grinning, starts back up.

“Flytrap,” he says.

Reality seems to blur.

Anneke has the sensation of falling, stopping.

At first she doesn’t understand why she seems shorter, but when she tries to take a step, she realizes she has sunk into the wood beneath her, as if into quicksand that set and became hard again instantly. Everything below her knees is caught fast.

Without even thinking, she glances back to note the location of the rusalka.

Nadia’s eyes are narrow and shining faintly luminous green.

“Don’t do that,” Anneke says.

“Do what?”

Sounds like Vaht?

“Look at me like prey in a trap, or whatever that raccoon-fishy look is.”

“Oh. Is reflex.”

“We’ll do this top down,” Andrew says as Nadia and Anneke ascend the ladder after him. A bare lightbulb comes to life overhead. “This is my attic. Most of the things up here have to do with keeping the house safe, so please don’t touch anything. At all. And don’t ask very specific questions about items. Once an aggressive spell is loaded into a physical object, explanation dilutes its power. Sometimes even triggers it.”

“How would it trigger it?”

“Intent. Visualization. If someone other than the creator knows exactly what it does and imagines it happening, it might happen. ‘Someone’ meaning a user. Or anyone with a particularly vivid imagination. It’s supposed to be rare, and I’ve never seen something go off because it was discussed, but I’ve read about that happening.”

Everyone is up.

The girls look around.

The attic is much less cluttered than Anneke expected.

A few cardboard boxes and several sealed plastic tubs sit against the walls, but those aren’t what draw the eye.

The owl stands out.

A great horned owl, glass-eyed, the kind that’s big enough to drive eagles off their nests, stands atop a long shelf also inhabited by a blue jay, two crows, and a hummingbird.

Both Anneke and the rusalka next notice a vaguely animal-shaped form sitting atop a huge, old steamer trunk, draped with a dusty sheet.

Whatever it is has a long, reptilian tail.

Andrew sees them looking, steps over to it, pulls the sheet back.

“What the fuck is that?”

“It’s a Tri-Star vintage rolling canister vacuum cleaner, of course. Slightly modified.”

“Slightly modified,” Nadia says, displaying her rotten teeth in an appreciative grin. The bulldoggish, triangular canister forms the base for a disturbing amalgamation of tools and taxidermied animal parts; the wheels that would normally support the larger rear of the appliance (now reversed to serve as the beast’s puffed-up chest) have been replaced by a chimpanzee’s arms, currently resting on their elbows, hands folded as if in prayer. An especially large alligator donated the tail snaking from the tapered end of the wedge, where the hose once attached. Said hose has been grafted to the larger end and pressed into service as the neck supporting the head, a sort of welded brass-and-metal rooster head with gogglish eyeglass lenses for eyes and the tips of kitchen knives for a crest. The beak looks fully capable of biting through a truck tire. For good measure, folded vulture’s wings perch on the slanted back.

“Does he have a name?” Anneke asks.

“Actually, she does. And I know it’s in the form of a rooster—I thought about calling it ‘Billy’ after the guy who welded it for me—but something about it strikes me as feminine.”

He whispers the name to her.

“Electra.”

Next the trio considers a sort of standing fish tank with a great mound of dirt coming halfway up. Crisscrossed coat hangers frame the top, and from this frame, supported by golden threads, hangs a scale model of the necromancer’s house, exact in every detail.

“What… ?” Anneke starts.

“Don’t ask about this one,” Andrew says. “Let’s move on.”

“The bedroom,” he says as neutrally as possible.

“Stand at the door,” he says to Anneke.

“Why always her?” the rusalka pouts. “When do I get to do something?”

“I’m not sure how this stuff will work on you.”

“Because. I’m not. A person,” she says, with more than a dash of hurt pride.

Unimpressed, Andrew says, “That’s. Exactly. Right.”

He lies down on his bed, stretches out.

“Come to the bed and sit down,” he tells Anneke.

She does so, looking around, wondering what the trick will be.

Nothing happens.

She just sits.

“Now go back and do it again, only this time think about hurting me.”

“Gladly,” she says, laughing.

Now she crosses the room at a slight crouch, her hand held up dramatically as if holding an invisible knife, ready to stab him Psycho-style.

When she gets halfway there, the door to the walk-in closet opens.

“Oh shit,” she says.

Takes another step.

Everything happens fast.

The telephone on Andrew’s nightstand rings.

Serpentine objects fly from Andrew’s closet, brown and black, four of them, whipping at high speed.

She tries to cover her face with her hands.

Not snakes.

Belts.

The leather stings when it hits her.

“Ow, fuck!”

Andrew swears in surprise and mild pain as well.

The belts wrap around Anneke’s hands and feet, bind them together, hog-tie her. A fifth belt loops around her neck, but only tightens enough to let her know it’s there.

The reason Andrew swore is that the belt he was wearing whipped off him, gave him a nasty burn on the side, dinged his hand good with the buckle as it shot itself at Anneke.

The phone rings again.

Levitates off the bed, floats over to her.

The speaker cozies up to her ear.

Andrew’s voice, prerecorded.

“Honi soit qui mal y pense! Try not to move too much, as the belts tighten when you struggle. Especially the one around your neck. I’ll be with you at my earliest convenience.”

The phone dies, thunks to the floor, lies still.

Nadia gently applauds, as if at the opera.

The magus helps Anneke off with the belts.

“Why did you waste a big one like that?”

“I’ll load it up again tomorrow. It’s not the only one in here.”

“What was the French?”

“Basically, Think good thoughts.”

37

“This is my bathroom. These silver fists you see holding the roll of toilet paper make the roll inexhaustible. Very popular with the ladies, as is the lid, which lowers itself when the room is vacated. Subtle magic, that. Less subtle is the claw-foot bathtub. If you dive into it headfirst, hard enough to break your neck,”

(Nadia winces at this)

“it will send you to a bathroom in whatever place you say and think about. If you say nothing, it will send you to the last place it gated to.”

Anneke thinks about this. It makes sense… bathrooms are private. One wouldn’t want to appear in the middle of a public fountain or even a kitchen. If Superman had been real, he would have changed in a toilet, not a phone booth. Maybe he uses a toilet now since phone booths are nearly extinct. Andrew might know—he seems dork enough to have a secret comic book habit.

“Do you get wet?”

“Only if the bathtub’s full. The water in the pipes conducts, it doesn’t immerse.”

“How do you get back?”

“Any fixture in the bathroom you got sent to will send you right back to this tub. Another tub is best; toilet works, too, though the idea is off-putting. The sink will stretch wide enough to accommodate you if you believe it will, though I once cracked a rib on the spigot when I wondered if I was going to clear the spigot. Belief is more than half of all magic.”

“What is the last place it gated to?” Anneke asks.

“I don’t remember,” he says. “Would you like to see for yourself?”

She gives him a you-must-have-forgotten-whom-you’re-daring look and dives. Nadia, startled (and a little impressed), swears in Russian, stepping back so as not to be clipped by Anneke’s foot.

38

Anneke finds herself in a bathroom, painted green from the waist down, white on the top half. She’s on the can, the lid of which is thankfully down. A startled young man with a sandy white-boy Afro was washing his hands at the sink. His mind can’t deal with the idea that she suddenly appeared, so it performs a kind of emergency rewrite.

“People knock, you know. I’ll be done in a minute.”

She’s in shock, too, though, so all she does is blink at him.

He wonders if she has a head injury.

“Are you all right?”

She nods.

The paper towels are out, so the young man wipes on his pants.

It doesn’t even occur to him that he has to draw the tiny bolt to open the door because nobody came in that way after him.

“Want it closed?” he asks.

Sweet kid.

She nods.

She stands up on shaky legs and locks the door again so she can gather herself. Sits back down. A water heater dominates the cramped bathroom, a yellow sticker warning her that gasoline should not be stored nearby as the pilot light will ignite the fumes. The walls are hung with memorabilia from a cable mafia show.

She thinks about just jumping into the toilet and returning to the house, but doubt strikes her. The fixture looks harder somehow, more real than the one she launched herself into in Andrew’s house. She imagines braining herself in the old commode. Afro-boy would tell the paramedics she looked confused, walked in on him, didn’t seem right to begin with.

And there she is, rolling around at an LGBT mixer in a wheelchair.

“How did you get paralyzed?”

“UTI.”

“Urinary—”

(She cuts off her imaginary interlocutor, who looks strangely like Shelly Bertolucci.)

“Unfortunate Toilet Incident.”

She doesn’t know how long she stands looking at the toilet (which could use a brushing), but a timid knock shakes her from her reverie.

“Just a minute.”

“No problem,” a girl says.

Wherever she is, they’re nice here.

She leaves the bathroom on weak knees, walks into a bright room—a coffee shop—filled with kids studying, old hippies talking politics, a mean-faced woman in line crossing and recrossing her arms, impatient to order her complicated drink. A reflective red truck goes by on the street outside and the whole room flashes red. Anneke opens the door, the little bell on top of which jingles, and the affable man making the cappuccino machine hiss says, “Come back and see us.”

“Thanks,” she says, walking onto the sidewalk.

Where am I?

How do I get back?

Am I really going to jump in a toilet?

Yes, I am.

Then you had better just go in there and do it because the longer you think about it, the worse this will be.

She glances back in the picture window of the coffee shop, sees an abandoned newspaper on a table. Makes the door ding-a-ling again. Looks at the paper. USA Today. Not helpful. Where did it come from? She sees the rack now, near the counter, approaches it as cross-arm-woman eyes her, suspicious she’ll try to cut.

The New York Times.

USA Today.

Ah!

The Dayton Daily News.

This townlet looks too small and clean for Dayton, though.

She spots a small rack on the other side of the coffee line, cranes her head to look; the woman winds up to say Excuse me, but the pleasant fellow at the counter shuts her down with, “What can I start for you?”

Anneke excuses herself behind the woman, plucks a paper, looks at it.

The Yellow Springs News.

Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Jesus Christ, this is real!

I should get out of here.

They’re waiting.

Are they?

Is this happening in real time?

She contemplates another trip to the bathroom, but a heavily bearded poet-type shuts himself in.

Fuck.

I’m not ready to jump in the toilet yet, anyway.

She gets in the coffee line.

Looks behind her, out the front window.

A saloon across the street, all wooden and old-timey.

Oh, that’s all I fucking need.

No, that’s EXACTLY what you fucking need.

Nerve.

She feels herself start to sweat.

Stays in line, gets a hot chocolate with the cash in her front pocket.

Sips the hot chocolate primly, looking now at the bathroom, now at the saloon. Drums her fingers on the table.

Okay, this isn’t your fault. You’re in a situation. You have to do this.

Wow, you’re cunning.

You’re through a magic portal. Whatever happens here won’t count.

[Yawn] Wow, you’re baffling.

You already know you’re going to do it. That, or head to the bus station and get yourself a ticket to Rochester. All you’re doing now is wasting time. Yours, Andrew’s, and fish-cunt’s.

Okay, that was powerful.

Higher power time.

I haven’t really got one.

I’m a phony in AA.

I’m only six months in since my last slip.

What’s six months?

During the next half an hour, Anneke uses the remaining ten in her pants to order one more hot chocolate and a decaf hazelnut latte. She moves her lips while talking to herself. After her third trip into the bathroom to stare down the throat of the potty, she says “Fuck it,” marches out the door,

Ding-a-ling!

and into the tavern across the street, where she orders three shots of Jack Daniel’s, only to be told they don’t serve hard liquor. She asks who does. Walks the block and a half to the Dayton Street Gulch, looking pissed about it.

Now she orders her three shots.

“Fifteen dollars,” says the bartender from a very red mouth sunk in a white-blond beard.

She reaches for her pocket.

Out of bills.

She sees herself tucking her wallet under the front seat of her Subaru.

I don’t have my wallet!

The bartender turns to the fridge, fetches out a beer for the fedora-wearing black man who had been wiping up the pool table with a college kid in an ironically name-tagged mechanic’s shirt. Anneke slams the first shot. She goes to the bathroom of the saloon (just to pee). Returns to the bar. Slams the second shot. Watches the soundless television, where some daytime TV judge reprimands a woman with an improbable weave. A series of commercials follows:

Detergent, with smiley MILF and smilier babies.

A self-help tape for getting rich through faith, presented by an oddly familiar-looking smiley hypocrite.

Diapers.

More babies.

Fuck daytime television anyway.

She downs the third shot.

“What’s your favorite brand of diaper?” she asks the bearded young bartender.

“No preference.”

“Very diplomatic of you,” she says.

He grins.

She used to be able to outdrink men, but now she’s a lightweight. The whiskey slips its hairy fingers around her heart.

It’s good.

Here comes the buzz.

It’s really good.

Maybe he’ll pour me two more.

I’ll ask if they take Visa first so he thinks I’m okay.

I want them.

But then I’ll be shitfaced.

Magic is dangerous enough sober, eh, brujo?

Now or never.

Anneke slips out the door, is nearly struck by a van, runs across the gas station parking lot, nearly hits a stroller, sprints past the tavern and into the coffee shop,

Ding-a-ling-a-ling!!

finds the bathroom door latched!

She glances at the window.

Glimpses the bartender’s head between trucks and over cars. She could have played that cooler, acted like she was just going to her car, but adrenaline got her. He looks purposeful. He’ll vault when there’s a break in the traffic.

Anneke says “Fuck!” and kicks the bathroom door open, the tiny bolt tinkling on the floor.

“Fuck!” echoes a peaceful skinhead type with quarter-sized wooden disks in his ears. She yanks him out from in front of the toilet just before he starts urinating, then pushes him into the coffee shop, his pierced cock a-jiggle.

“Wh’th’fuck, man!” he says.

The counterman sees the push, starts to say “Hey!”

Before he can, both counterman and baldy see Anneke jump into the toilet and disappear.

More properly, she jumps at the toilet, but no part of her touches it.

Her cracked oxblood Docs vanish last, flailing.

Both men instantly forget her.

When the exasperated bartender flings open the door of the coffee shop—ding-a-ling-a-ling!!!—the counterman asks if there’s a problem.

The bartender scratches his beard.

“I’m sorry,” he says, realizing he was rough with the door but absolutely blanking on why.

He covers.

“Do you have any fives?”

39

The cabin is full of Russians. They have come from Florida, New Jersey, Little Odessa. A few Americans, stunned-looking relatives of Dragomirov’s late wife, all tall, sandy-blond, and blue-eyed, sit in their own corner of the back porch, almost on top of each other because there is no room. The intensity of the Russians scares them, these Lutherans whose stewardess-model married a man of dubious past employment and dangerous associations. This Dragomirov tribe is wild-eyed, dark-haired, quick to laugh, quick to anger.

They read poetry to each other.

Who reads poetry at a party?

This isn’t precisely a party.

Neither is it not a party.

This is something like a wake, but darker.

Singing, stories, jokes, hints at vengeance to come, these followed by knowing looks between men that suggest more will be said when the women and children have been packed away.

Mikhail Yevgenievich Dragomirov, “Misha,” has been gone one month.

The family came today to take possession of the cabin, which has been paid up through the end of August.

One would think the patriarch of the American wing of the family, Georgi Fyodorovich Dragomirov, cousin of the vanished man, would be the one to dominate the room, but he is old now, he dyes his eyebrows, and his heartburn bothers him when he forgets to take his medicine. He has forgotten to take his medicine.

Next in line might have been the half sister, Valentina Fyodorovna, at whose request the icon of the virgin appeared on the corner shelf, replacing Misha’s whiskey. She expatriated most recently, but she is too sad to speak at any length, and blows her nose often, always into two tissues, always behind her liver-spotted hand, the nails of which shine with the best burgundy nail polish.

The one who captivates them is not even fifty, and none of them have seen her for years. Little Marina, who had such a hard life. Marina of Nizhny Novgorod, the girl from the woods, saved from prostitution by her Baba, then sent to university. For poetry. How she stunned them when they fetched her at Hancock airport in Syracuse.

She is the brightest of them, seems to shame them with how America has diluted the Dragomirov stock.

She is petite, toned, pretty; they have seen the video she sent them as an introduction, to show them she had her uncle’s sense of humor, a video of her working out with kettlebells in the forest to the tune of the Volga Boat Song.

Now she stands before them in her stylish peacoat as evening comes on, her pale, healthy skin, accented by the beauty mark on her cheek, making her look like some lost Romanov.

“My uncle would not want tears,” Marina Yaganishna says.

“Bullshit! He cried at movies. He cried at poetry,” says a nephew-poet.

“He cried at your poetry.”

They laugh.

They love her.

They have eaten the funerary blintzes she cooked in the cabin,

“Marishka has taken the stove’s virginity—Misha used only the grill and the microwave!”

smeared with the quince jam she learned to make in the forest,

“Her Baba must have taught her this before she died!”

and they have plied her with Stolichnaya only to find themselves drunk before a bright-eyed, clearheaded girl

“Girl my ass! She is a tank soldier like her great-uncle Yevgeny!”

who teases with the best of them.

“Alexandr Nikolayevich, will you dishonor your great-uncle’s memory with such a weak fart? Eat more sour cream on your chicken, and fart like a Cossack.”

This boy is twelve, and laughs and blushes like beet juice to have his strange Russian aunt spear him so deftly. Earlier, she had stolen the smartphone from his hand and said, “No man under forty should play with a phone more than his zalupa.”

His father had made them laugh more with, “But I tell him all the time, drop the zalupa!”

One of the American Lutherans, relieved to have something to talk about, explained to Marina what a chalupa was, the dated commercial with the talking chihuahua.

Now, when the last light is gone from the sky, the Lutherans say their good-byes through big-teeth smiles. Marina comically shields her eyes, saying “Your smiles are so perfect in America, you blind me!”

Women and children leave the cabin until it is only Marina and the men who knew Misha. She will be staying—they have all agreed that she can have the cabin as long as she wants it.

But now it is time for men to speak.

They look at her meaningfully, perhaps a bit apologetically, and she understands that they will now fill their glasses more rapidly and exchange oaths of vengeance should the disappearance turn out to be murder—the police said there were signs of a struggle, that DNA evidence of several women has been found, two of them known prostitutes, one of them an unknown. The cousins and nephews of the missing man know his habits; there will be talk of pimps, jealous lovers. The hot-blooded men will vow to handle it personally; the wiser ones will mention, not by name of course, old associates of Misha’s who could be brought in, men who know their way around a Makarov, men who know how to leave a mystery.

She lets herself outside.

She laughs a little when they cannot see her face.

They will be right in their assertions that Dragomirov was the wrong man to fuck with.

They will be wrong as to why.

Marina Yaganishna goes down the stairs, leaving behind the wash of light that bathes the patio. She takes her boots off and walks barefoot out to the edge of the water, barely swaying despite the amount of vodka she has poured into herself. She carries a nearly full bottle with her. Now she removes the rest of her clothes, wades out into the lake with the bottle.

She stands for some time, looking down, as though listening to the waves.

Old Georgi, indicating the nude woman, rubs the burning stomach he knows will kill him soon, says quietly, “Good thing the Americans left.”

They laugh.

“She’s got the devil in her,” one of them says affectionately.

Now they watch their estranged kinswoman upend the bottle, pouring it into the surf.

“Ha! She’s giving Misha a drink!”

“Someone should tell her he likes whiskey better.”

A silence, as the men continue to watch, despite themselves.

Marina Yaganishna looks thirty-five, not almost fifty.

“I think menopause will be late for her,” Georgi says.

They laugh themselves sick, then go back to talk of vengeance.

Out in the lake, the woman pours vodka into the mouth of a kneeling, dead old man with dim lamps for eyes.

“You’re sure?” she says.

He nods.

“It will be done, then.”

“And I will be free?”

“I think so,” she says. “Revenge is liberating.”

He opens his bloated mouth for more vodka.

She got it from the freezer, where one of the Lutherans had stashed it in mock ignorance when clearing the table.

She pours again.

“Sorry it’s cold.”

Misha doesn’t care.

Everything is cold now.

He swallows gratefully.

Sinks.

40

Andrew hears Anneke throwing up in the sink, goes to find her.

The stink of hot whiskey, coffee, and chocolate assaults him as he steps into the guest bathroom.

“You’ve been to Dino’s,” he says.

She nods, bent over, wiping her mouth.

“And to the Gulch.”

Nods again.

Looks at him, eyes glistening, whether from shame, heaving, or both he can’t tell.

She becomes aware of the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

“Tour’s over for now.”

The shame of relapse starts to steal upon her, but she boots it under.

“What about the roosalsa?”

Anneke was gone for an hour.

Nadia got bored and left after ten minutes, but Andrew just ignores the question.

“Are you okay?”

“No.”

More okay than you should be because you haven’t really crashed yet. This is going to keep happening until you do.

“Are you off the wagon?”

“No.”

He looks into her eyes.

Her eyes say yes.

She looks back, fighting the urge to look down.

The Anneke Anneke wants to be doesn’t hang her head.

“Well, maybe the tour’s not completely over. I want to show you a movie.”

“Okay,” she says. “As long as it’s not Papillon.”

Down the stairs to the media room.

He turns the lights on, dims them, actually uses the wall switch.

He goes to the combination-locked cedar trunk wherein fifty or so cassettes stand in alphabetized rows, bearing strips of Scotch tape; the tapes on the left are for the famous—Muhammad ALI, Isaac ASIMOV, Sir Winston CHURCHILL, Harry HOUDINI (no sound), John LENNON, et cetera. The ones on the right, fewer in number, are not alphabetized, and many have no last name: Marisol, DAD, SARAH, Aunt Katie, Bill BARNETT.

A separate locked box sits at the bottom of the chest.

“What’s in that?” Anneke says.

“You always want the forbidden fruit, don’t you?”

“Don’t you?”

“Yes. I guess we all do. All of us who do this. The box has tapes of dead users.”

“Why is it locked?”

“They’re dangerous. They can still cast spells. One of them’s actually not dead—he just left it as an insurance policy. But you need a different kind of magic, I think.”

Andrew takes the tape reading Bill WILSON from the bottom left.

“That’s not…” she says.

“Yes.”

She looks at the tape.

Shakes her head no.

Andrew sets it on the VCR in front of the television.

He puts his arm around her and she allows it.

They snuggle in on the leather couch, the needle of the intimacy meter moving further away from “buddies,” but stopping shy of “lovers.” He just holds her, pets her hair, until at last she nods.

He puts the tape in.

Bill speaks.

“Every AA member knows that he has to conform to the principles of recovery. His life actually depends upon obedience to spiritual principles…”

“Can he hear us?” she whispers.

“Not yet.”

Andrew kisses the top of Anneke’s head, separates himself from her enough for decorum, prepares himself to open the trapdoor.

“…If he deviates too far, the penalty is sure and swift. He sickens and finally dies.”

“Bill Wilson. It’s Andrew Blankenship.”

Bill continues, oblivious.

“He comes to understand that no personal sacrifice is too great for the preservation of this fellowship.”

“Bill, can you hear me?”

Apparently not.

“He learns that the clamor of desires and ambitions within him must be silenced whenever these could damage the group.”

“Bill Wilson.”

Bill ignores him.

Andrew stops the tape.

Rewinds.

Plays.

The same thing happens, or, rather, doesn’t happen.

“Something’s wrong.”

“No shit,” she says.

He goes through the song and dance again, gets a little further.

“…It becomes plain that the group must survive, or the individual will not.”

“Bill Wilson, hello.”

Bill continues.

But something changes.

His New England accent goes Slavic.

“…And when the individual doesn’t survive, ho, hey! This is a tragedy, small in the grand mechanic of things, but signifying to those who know and care for him…”

Andrew blinks dumbly at the screen.

He senses magic.

She does, too.

“Fuck,” he says.

“What’s happening?”

He grabs her knee, leans forward, intrigued and spooked.

“…and if there is a God, perhaps signifying big deal to him. But there is no God.”

Bill is angry—his head whips and spit flies when he says God.

Andrew says, “This isn’t the same tape. He doesn’t say these things.”

Anneke feels gooseflesh ripple down her left side.

“…Of course, a man doesn’t say, never, is no God. A man does not say that he is denying of God if he wants to farm the benefits of ‘polite’ society.”

Bill gets up from his desk, walks over to a curtained window.

The camera follows him.

“Ichabod?” Andrew says. “I command you to stop tampering with this tape.”

Nothing. This is not Ichabod’s doing. The entity doesn’t leave the warm tingle of magic in a room; rather a sort of dead, flat emptiness.

This room is tingling.

On the television, Bill grabs the cord to the curtains, turns to address the camera.

“But when a man knows heartfully how society can be not polite, hey, sometimes fully rude, we are forgiving him for crying himself atheist.”

Bill pulls the cord.

The film jerks, jumps out of frame, goes white, comes back on.

A bad splice.

Bill is standing in the same spot, but the colors have shifted.

Orange and red light tints everything.

The sound of propeller planes outside.

Bombers?

Help me, bomber!

Out the windows, fire.

A city on fire.

Stalingrad?

The window Bill opens is on the third or fourth floor of a building that shakes now as a bomb explodes nearby.

A chorus of screaming rises up.

“Oh God,” Anneke says.

Now the film jerks again.

The tame, grainy interior colors from the original tape return.

The curtain has been closed, or was never opened, and Bill is sitting at his desk again.

Only the silver water pitcher is gone.

A nearly empty bottle of vintage Soviet vodka has replaced it, a darkly handsome Joseph Stalin leering on the label beneath the Cyrillic legend NOT ONE STEP BACK!

Bill’s necktie hangs sloppy and loose, the first buttons of his shirt undone. His hair uncombed. He is drunk.

The sounds of war have gone away.

A musician of small talent plays a violin in another room.

“Do you see what you have driven me to?” he says, in Ukrainian-accented Russian, looking at Andrew.

“Stop it,” Andrew says, pointing authoritatively at the television.

“Stop it!” shitfaced Bill Wilson says, in English, mocking him, laughing, pointing.

Andrew presses the power button on the remote.

The television flicks off.

Then turns itself back on.

Bill points at Andrew, says, in Russian, “You think you got away with something, don’t you? But your time has run out. We know where you are. And we are coming.”

Subtitles appear in yellow, doubtless for Anneke’s benefit.

“You will die, you sloppy little shit. Sloppy. Weak. Little. Shit.”

“Who are you?”

Bill W. smiles, but it’s not a pleasant smile.

The image freezes.

The celluloid burns exactly where his mouth is, burns in the nearly flat U of his smile. His eyes burn, too.

The violin stops.

Now the television screen begins to smoke where the mouth and eyes were.

Anneke jumps to her feet, puts the couch between her and the Sony.

“Christ!” Andrew yells.

The television catches fire.

41

The fire is magical in origin, but thankfully not in nature; an ordinary extinguisher stifles it in seconds. Not that the house would burn; Andrew set very powerful dousing wards at every corner of the property. The smoke alarm goes off, hurting their ears with its shrill chirps. Andrew sets down the extinguisher, silences the alarm. The room is murky with smoke and nitrogen. Anneke, her stomach still queasy following her belly flop out of sobriety, fights the urge to heave.

“Well,” Andrew says, “this is what magic looks like when used as a weapon. It’s not pretty.”

“Nothing’s pretty when used as a weapon.”

“I love your zero-tolerance approach to bullshit.”

“You’re trying to sound authoritative, like you’re in control. But you’re not, are you?”

“Not entirely.”

“Not entirely? More bullshit. Do you even know who did this?”

“I think so.”

“How did they get into the house? Your house?”

He notices the cord connecting a MacBook Pro to the television from his last streamed movie.

“Through that,” he says, pointing.

He disconnects it, handling it like a snake that might still bite.

“I need to e-mail somebody.”

42

Andrew remembers the burning smile, the burning eyes, how they stuck to the glass, then burned out the other side.

Andrew leans back from the screen, rubs his eyes with his hands, as if to massage away the pictures in his head.

Andrew furrows his brow, taps his index finger on the table like a woodpecker seeking grubs. It’s easier for her to puzzle things out—she’s a plodder, not a natural. She worked her way into magic with brains. But Andrew is far from stupid. The last tap is hard, a percussive Eureka!

A photograph appears.

A straw-roofed hut, not big.

Not on the outside, anyway.

Fu fu fu, I smell Russian bones!

And then a second cursor appears.

Points at a hunched figure carrying a pan of what look like pork bones, mostly in shadow. Indistinct.

Andrew shudders.

Do not look at me with your eyes or I’ll take them.

Do not smile at me with your teeth or I’ll take them.

Piss squatting or I’ll carve a cunt on you.

Andrew feels himself begin to shudder, an involuntary response he can observe, as if it were someone else’s shudder, but which he cannot stop.

The cursor wiggles over the crone.

Andrew feels his testicles ice over.

His palms go clammy, he wipes them on his jeans.

He can’t seem to will his fingers to type.

Her name has been invoked.

He glances behind him at a handsome brass mirror, terrified he’ll see her image, but his own scared face looks back at him.

Brass mirrors are safe, can’t serve as gates for her.

He notices the tension in his mouth, how carefully he keeps his lips pressed together.

Radha is waiting.

She wants to know if the hunched shape with the pan full of bones is the ancient thing that kidnapped him twenty-nine years ago.

He envies Radha her fearlessness, how casually confident she is of her own power. He was the same way before he went to Russia.

Radha types.

Andrew knows what word will appear, knows it a microsecond before it appears on his screen like a name on a map of Hell—

Gehenna.

Dis.

Tartarus.

Acheron.

In the other room, Anneke’s phone rings.

43

Karl Zautke lies on his side with the breathing tube in.

His pillows are damp beneath him. The lymph nodes in his neck hurt him, have grown from acorns to grapes, but he can breathe a bit better, well enough to sleep. He fights it, though, his big blue eyes rolling back, the lids closing, and then he forces them open again for another bleary image of his daughter, her faggish but nice friend sitting next to her.

He feels so bad he doesn’t even want a PBR.

His left foot sticks out, pink and huge, the flesh swollen around the little yellow nails.

Karl is far too big for this place, hates his hospital gown, hates how wet it is. One of the minor nasties (among many nasties, great and small) about leukemia is how much laundry you have to do, how much you sweat. Like a whore in church is his default cliché. His girl has been doing his laundry for him, doing everything. He can’t stand being a burden. But the sweating. He soaks his shirts and underthings so easily he keeps his three window AC units thrumming at sixty-six degrees from June through September.

They’re running now in his empty house.

This is Karl’s third hospitalization for pneumonia in two years, and he knows as well as Anneke does that this is what kills most people with his kind of leukemia. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia, the slower kind. It wears you down. Erodes you. He’s had it for eight years, several stretches of remission making him hopeful he might live long enough to die of heart disease or something that wasn’t so damned… nagging. This is no way for a man to live, constantly tired, afraid of infection. Purel in his shirt pocket. Waterpik-ing his goddamn teeth like a supermodel, crossing the street away from anybody coughing, especially kids. And Karl likes kids. It just isn’t fair he’s had to stay away from them now when he hasn’t done anything wrong.

He looks at Anneke one more time.

An unpleasant thought crosses his mind; he puts that away.

Thinks instead about her learning to ride that powder-blue bike with the streamers on the handles. The face she made (teeth bare, mouth half open, a lion cub about to bite) when he picked gravel out of her scraped knee, sprayed cold Bactine on it. How proud he was of her for getting back on the bike immediately, how he knew she was doing it for him, for that extra scrunch in his eyes when he smiled down at her.

Nothing pleases Karl like watching someone he loves be brave.

This is why Anneke.

Won’t.

Fucking.

Cry.

Her eyes are moist, but that’s as far as it goes.

Father looks at daughter, daughter at father.

Their Germanic blue eyes hold communion for another few seconds before the big man rolls his eyes back under his lids and sleeps.

“I don’t feel good about this one,” she says.

Andrew holds her hand. She allows this but squeezes his every few seconds as if to show him the strength in her hand, as though she is too proud to just let her hand lie in his, take warmth and love from him.

“He’s seventy now. He’s tired,” she says.

Andrew nods, looking at him.

His beard, mostly white with hints of the reddish blond that made him look like a stout Robert Redford in his youth, seems itchy and wrong on him. He only grew it to hide the lymph nodes so nobody asked about them.

“He hates sympathy. Can’t stand people fussing over him,” Anneke explains. She’s taking on a teacher’s voice, assuming an in-control role so she doesn’t have to feel quite so much.

Andrew already knows this about the big ex-navy man, not only because he waited until he had almost suffocated before he phoned his little girl for help, but also because Anneke could have just as easily been describing herself.

The man never thought much of Andrew, never knew him well or wanted to. He was pleasant enough, just didn’t know what locker to put him in so radiated a benign neutrality toward the smaller man. Not his daughter’s boyfriend, she didn’t have those. Effeminate, probably somebody she met in “gay circles,” whatever those were. Andrew always felt vaguely ashamed around him, even now, looking at the faded blue anchor tattoos blurring his forearms, the hint of a sparrow peeking from his chest through the open gown. Karl is all man, and nobody ever doubted that about him. The small, insecure, fatherless part of Andrew wants Karl’s approval and sees the last chance for that slipping away, feels selfish for thinking about himself.

He just sits there, feeling Anneke’s pulsing squeezes, letting her talk about her dad from time to time. Wishing she would put her head on his chest so he could stroke her hair, soothe her. But she rarely shows him that side of herself, and never in front of Karl Zautke.

Andrew wonders, not for the first time, what good it is to fool with magic when this lies at the end no matter what or who you are.

Except perhaps for her.

She’s old.

So old.

Don’t think about her now.

Are there mirrors in here?

He’s relieved to see there aren’t any. Of course there aren’t—the sick don’t like to look at themselves.

Soon Anneke dozes, her head touching Andrew’s shoulder.

The sound of the ventilator makes him drowsy, too.

She enters the bathroom through the mirror.

Andrew hears her, hears the sound she makes coming through, a sort of creak that suggests glass about to break.

I have to put my kerchief on!

Now!

He takes a hand towel from the bedside table, one that Anneke had been using to soothe her father’s sweating head. Lukewarm now and faintly sour with Karl’s sick smell. No matter—Andrew tilts his head back, rests it over his eyes.

The shaking starts.

He wills himself to be calm, but it only partly works.

Fu fu fu.

She’s in the bathroom!

The ventilator stops.

The heart monitor goes wild, flatlines, the long beep announcing another death in the land of air conditioners and SUVs.

Nobody moves.

No nurse comes.

The bathroom door opens; he feels the air get colder.

With a gasp and a sudden full-body clench, Anneke dies next to him.

Baba has used the Hand of Glory he took from the witch’s hut, the one that stops hearts.

Anneke is unimportant to her, so the old thing discards her.

Baba only wants him.

She will not stop his heart.

She will take him back now, back to her hut.

Back to his kennel.

Back to be leeched.

“Hey! Shh! You’re making noises.”

Anneke looking at him, exhausted, irritated, afraid.

He nods.

Sits up straighter.

Feels his heart racing.

The sound of the ventilator confuses him.

She pets his hair.

Soothes him.

44

Day.

The necromancer’s house.

Andrew stands in the front living room near the unlit fireplace watching the feral man crouching in the tree line. The feral man wears a T-shirt of indeterminate color, so torn his bony shoulders and one nipple show—the ring of the collar is most of what holds it together—the image on the chest picturing what looks to be a faded Pac-Man being chased by his ghosts. His legs are sheathed in a pair of muddy jeans that look ready to slough off him and show thighs that might be satyr’s thighs. His matted hair and unkempt beard mark him as some sort of latter-day John the Baptist, or more boyish Manson. No thread of silver shoots through that black mane. He is young. By his movements, less catlike than monkeyish, Andrew guesses the boy to be about twenty. He arms aside the bushes and walks in a crouch, sniffing and listening as much as looking. But it is the looking Andrew likes least.

He sees the house.

Nobody uninvited sees the fucking house.

That was the point of the three-month-long spell he wove around it, burying mirror shards and the dried skins of chameleons in a circle, painting the walls with paint he’d hidden in public for a month and added octopus ink to, intoning both the Iliad and the Odyssey in Homer’s Greek to provoke a benign blindness in those who climbed the hill and looked at the house. Sure, people who knew he was here could see it. But since he kept his address unlisted, the only people who knew the house was here were people he told and people from the neighborhood who knew the house before he bought it all those years ago.

This young man looks right through his window and at him. Even without magic cloaking, the angle of the sun should make the windows reflective, should throw so much light back that the panes become shields of trees and sky that let no gaze past them and into the house’s cool heart.

But this man sees him.

Andrew walks backward, out of the picture window’s frame—the boy seems to track him as he moves, and he waits by the fireplace before continuing to the second picture window. By the time he gets there the boy is gone. Utterly gone. Had he even been there? He licks his lips and looks at the space on the mantel where his best scotch used to sit before he emptied the house of booze.

Wish a bottle there you have a spell for that six sentences and a pinprick and a bottle will sprout where the blood drop falls.

He shakes that away and goes back to the left-hand window, peering into the woods where he saw Pac-Man boy, using a hunter’s patient eyes, and he sees no movement, no line of shoulder or haunch breaking the bloom of foliage. But now he wants a drink, and he wants it bad.

One remedy works better than any other for chasing that particular noise out of his head.

The room of skins.

He goes to the raw oak door and closes his eyes, remembering his first hunt, remembering the sliver of raw stag heart his uncle had offered him off the knife.

This door will open for you only if you have eaten the heart of something killed with your own hand.

He slides the brass handle into his palm and turns, feeling the door open easily on its hinge. This is a small room, its walls hung with stags’ heads and hide maps and an antique wardrobe on either side. One window gives on a sort of brambled alley leading down the hill toward the forest path, and he goes to open this.

I’ll kill two birds at once here; I’ll have a boozeless run in the brambles and see if I can find the Jesus-looking boy.

Should I go scary or fast?

Does the boy have a gun?

It didn’t seem so.

What if he’s watching me change?

Fuck him, then. Let him watch. Maybe he’ll shit himself.

Andrew opens the window as slowly and quietly as he can; it is always best to open the window first, while one still has thumbs.

He opens the left wardrobe now, its door cutting off his view of the window, and he regards the selection of furs hanging from their iron hooks. Fox. Wolf. Bear. Stag. Bobcat. All the indigenous beasts, safest to run in these woods. The right-hand wardrobe holds more exotic skins, skins for special occasions.

No, he will run a New York beast today.

He runs his hand on the black bear pelt.

He killed this bear with an Osage orange longbow and a flint arrowhead made by a master fletcher in Pennsylvania.

He has named the bear Norris.

Norris will do.

Now he sticks his thumb in his navel and pushes, saying in old French, “I open myself.” He imagines his thumb slipping bloodlessly under his skin, and so it does. It doesn’t precisely hurt, but the feeling is deeply creepy. He works the thumb under and skins himself. He hangs his skin from the one bare hook in the wardrobe. He has to be quick now—one can’t just hang out skinless—so he takes up the black bear skin and puts it over his flayed shoulders, feeling it grab him, feeling it wrap all of him so his legs are bear legs and his cock a bear’s cock and his snout smells berries and sap and he chuffs his bearness and climbs comically out the window.

Let’s see how Pac-Man shirt likes this.

Picking up the boy’s scent is easy with the bear’s nose; the smell is tangy and human and strong, innocent of soap. He dips his head and trundles into the underbrush, his shiny black bear-shoulders working as he tracks. Not far from the house, near the strawberry patch he has to put off foraging from by sheer force of man-will over bear-will, he smells out a pile of shit. Human shit in the woods doesn’t seem odd to the bear, but Andrew-in-the-bear is mildly offended that somebody would not only come slinking and spying near his actual house, but would have the territorial nerve to leave droppings.

Odd droppings for a man, too.

This boy clearly eats fast food like many boys, cheap mash of discarded, hormone-bloated cow full of preservatives and despair, but he doesn’t chew much before he swallows. He also eats beetles. He had fingered cicada larvae out of the ground. He had eaten earthworms raw and had cooked beetles in squirrel fat, and had gorged on squirrel and even fine squirrel-bones.

Very fast, or a good trapper.

Or a good shot.

But I smell no gun, or gun oil.

A man can kill a bear without metal.

You did.

This is more boy than man.

The boy has also eaten strawberries.

My strawberries!

Oh, this will not do, not by half.

He snuffs and makes his way around to where the boy had been crouched in the woods, looking at the picture window. Tracks and scent loop back into the woods, so he follows, and soon finds himself looking back at the window leading to the room of skins.

The boy is halfway between the tree line and the open window, contemplating a dash for it. He not only sees the house, he is about to go in!

Fuck this!

Andrew-in-the-bear chuffs and lopes at the boy, who turns and looks passively at the bear. It would be fair to say the boy looks curious, but he does not give off the satisfying rush of fear-smell Andrew-in-the-bear hoped for.

The bear four-legs up to the boy, then stands.

Only a little taller on his hind legs—Norris had not been a huge bear—but still lethal.

He breathes his hot bear-breath into the boy’s face, but the boy just blinks at him.

Why doesn’t he run?

He pushes the boy’s chest with his forepaws, not hard, but more than gently. The boy staggers back, but still makes no meaningful move to retreat.

Okay, you want it rougher? I can do rougher.

Now he grabs the boy’s pants with his jaws, slipping his fangs surgically under the waistband, and he throws the boy back, half tearing the jeans. The boy falls but gets to his feet again. Beginning to walk away, but not frightened.

Faster, you little shit.

Now the bear swipes at him, curling his claws back so he doesn’t lay him open, but heavily enough to send him sprawling.

To Andrew’s surprise, Pac-Man shirt doesn’t stand up this time, but breaks and runs on all fours. The bear shuffles after him on two legs, Andrew-in-the-bear dimly aware of the irony.

Just before the feral young man makes the tree line, he stands again and gives the bear one more longish look. A look of assessment, calculation.

Calculate this.

The bear charges, and the boy sprints away.

Who was that boy?

No, really, who the fuck was he?

The bear lumbers back toward the house, checking over his shoulder and sniffing the air once or twice to make sure the interloper is really gone.

Then he waddles over to the strawberry patch and eats himself almost sick.

Too dominated by bear-hunger to notice or care that the berries are frozen.

45

This is what Andrew does at the AA meeting.

He greets Bob, the chair, on his way in, remarking once again on how happy Bob is. How goddamned, unassailably happy. The man went to jail four times for DUI and involuntary manslaughter, got evicted, lost two marriages, a boat, and a career as a charter captain; now he works at a church resale shop, hasn’t got a pot to piss in, and yet…

“Andrew! Haven’t seen you in a week or two. We missed you!”

“I must have felt you missing me, Bob. Here I am.”

Bob hugs him like Andrew’s his little brother, nothing fake about it.

Unlike when his own brother hugs him, though that hasn’t happened for a while.

Maybe fifteen years since Charles gave Andrew something other than a perfunctory manshake.

Bob has fifteen years sober, a bona fide elder statesman.

Bob’s nothing like Charley.

Bob went for donkey-and-sandals Jesus, knows Charley’s BMW Jesus is something else.

Bob’s eyes twinkle like he figured out God’s his secret Santa and he knows you’ll figure out he’s yours, too, in your own sweet time. Early on, Andrew swung between feeling inspired by Bob and really resenting him; where does a beat-up old fellow who isn’t much to look at, can’t do magic, can’t afford a restaurant meal, and hasn’t gotten laid since the Berlin Wall fell get off just glowing like that? It’s a little like being luminous, only Bob will never learn magic out of a book and make things happen in the world. All the magic happens in Bob’s head—he stopped trying to change the world and just changed how he looks at it.

It’s genius, really, if you can manage it.

Why make a big house for yourself when you’re happy in a shack?

Why lust for a new car when your crank-handle windows work fine and Chancho fixes your rusted-out old beater at cost?

You could shit in Bob’s shirt pocket and he would run to spread it on his blueberry patch.

Between her introduction to the hostile side of magic and the coming death of her father, Anneke needs Bob.

With the ancient Russian crone who captured and tortured Andrew twenty-nine years before now stalking him, the magus needs Bob, too.

Bob doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong in their lives, they don’t share tonight, but he’s glad they came. He reads from the Big Book, and then he talks about forgiveness.

Andrew has trouble staying on message.

He’s not thinking about forgiveness.

He’s thinking about self-defense.

He’s thinking about revenge.

46

New Orleans in June is a sort of bright, dangerous sauna whose steam seems to come from the crotches and armpits of its citizens; its nucleus is a tangle of colonial streets where tourists tread on bones; they drink liquors distilled from the sweat of dead West Africans, the grandchildren of whom have been pushed to low ground to await their centennial drowning, but some of these don’t wait quietly. It is easy to get shot here, or stabbed, or clubbed toothless, even in the bright places that smell of rum and fruit juice, even as rotten cops look down at you from the saddles of their horses and fat Iowans and Michiganders sleep above them in overpriced hotels, dreaming of the morning’s beignets.

Haint likes this about the French Quarter; he likes walking among the entitled and the blind and feeling their condescension toward him; he is another curiosity in a city teeming with them, an intentionally scarred and branded black man with skin that looks almost indigo, his crown of graying hair horseshoeing a balding dome that bears a front-to-back row of scars he inflicted himself with a hot razor.

“I liked your letter,” Haint says to Andrew as both men sit sweating in Coops. “You write your words tight and plain and press hard with the pen, none of this loopy shit.”

“I e-mailed you,” Andrew says.

Haint enunciates each of the next words carefully, as if explaining things to a well-meaning but disappointing child.

“I am talking. About the way. I saw it in my head. I saw your e-mail as a letter.”

Haint is one of those half-mad users whose conversation must be sifted to separate delusion from actual magic. This is often difficult.

“You press hard with the pen,” he continues. “You mean what you say’s what that says, and I keep such men close to my heart.”

He wipes his ridged dome with the greasy and formless bicycle cap he carries more than wears, then takes another bite of the jambalaya he has rendered lukewarm in temperature (if not in taste) with Crystal hot sauce that pools like orangey blood around its rim.

“Will you help me?” Andrew says.

“Another thing I like ’bout you is you don’ try and act like you ain’t scared.”

Andrew nods.

“Anybody smart’s scared of that ol’… her. Her, I mean. I didn’t even know she was real. Heard bad stories, figured they was stories. But if she is an actual actuality, and she is that old, she gonna make Marie Laveau look like a Girl Scout, home team pride aside and all. Yeah, I’ll help. But keep the book. I ain’t got no use for books and I don’t read English so good’s I got any hope of readin’ Russian.”

The part about not reading English is a flat lie. Haint reads like an Oxford scholar but hides his brilliance behind a hedge of ain’ts and cain’ts.

Andrew’s e-mail offered one of the treasures he brought home in 1983, a beautiful tome on invisibility written in the time of Peter the Great, a remarkably valuable book for reasons both aesthetic and practical.

But what Haint says next tells Andrew the hoodoo man already knows how to disappear and isn’t interested in acquiring something to barter with.

“I want that hand.”

“You already have a Hand of Glory. Hell, I heard you had three of them.”

“Not like that one. Mine open locks and turn lights on and off. Useful as hell, don’t get me wrong. But you know what that Russian hand does, don’t you?”

“Stops hearts.”

“Works, don’t it?”

“It works.”

“How do you know?”

“It works.”

“Prolly you knocked a squirrel out of a tree with it. Only you ain’t never tried on a person ’cause you ain’t like that. Me, I’m like that. That’s why you want me.”

Andrew nods. Of course Haint had heard of Baba’s lethal Hand of Glory; Haint is a collector of murders, a man who has gathered an arsenal of artifacts that take life. He is rumored to have a Turkish knife that, when used on a piece of lambskin the user has bled on, will cut or stab whatever the user thinks about cutting or stabbing, even across the sea, provided he has seen it and can picture it clearly. Years ago he carried a Polaroid camera around his neck in case he wanted to capture your image.

Now Steve Jobs has armed him with a smartphone.

If you are on Facebook, or if your image can be Googled, it is said this man can cut your throat no matter how far away you live from his warehouse apartment on Frenchman Street. Or Carondelet. Or wherever it is this week—it is also rumored that Haint’s apartment is actually in a black trash bag he can blow up into the window of any abandoned place, and leave with in minutes.

He received Andrew’s e-mail under the name hoodoohowdoyoudo@gmail.com. Until 2000, when he finally went digital, he used to get letters through a PO box under the name Sam E. DiBaron. It was the same PO box he used to arrange killings, but never for money.

Always for things.

Never yet for anything he wanted as much as Baba Yaga’s Hand of Glory.

“Can you do it?”

“If I cain’t, you cain’t.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No. ’Cause I don’t have one. I don’t know if she can die, and if she cain’t, I don’t know if I can stay hid from her.”

“I did.”

“I know. That’s the only reason I’m thinking about trying this crazy shit. How’s your boudin?”

Andrew nods appreciatively.

“They don’t put it on the menu; never on the menu ’cause they cain’t sell enough for how fast it goes bad; just on special sometimes. Normally you don’t want restaurant boudin—what you want is gas station boudin somebody’s mama boiled up in a Crock-Pot out in Grosse Tête or Scott or Breaux Bridge, if you can stand them coon-asses out there. But it ain’t bad here. They know what they doin’ here. Dreddy white fella in the kitchen plays a mean fiddle, too. I’m goin’ to hear him tonight. You wanna come?”

“Love to. Thanks.”

Haint now swigs his beer and uses a thumb-struck stove match to relight the reeking stub of cigar he has rested on the crown of his bottle cap. At his third puff, a woman at the booth to the right issues a dainty cough behind a dainty hand, at which the polo-shirted man with his back to them turns and throws a disapproving glance.

It was probably this fucker who stacked Jack Johnson songs on the Internet jukebox.

Haint discreetly raps the table with his knuckle and a car alarm goes off on Decatur Street outside. The man looks doorward now and excuses himself, fumbling with his keys. As he crosses the threshold, Haint deftly snaps the matchstick between two fingers with his thumb and the big man trips, foolishly trying to break his fall with his hand. His wrist snaps audibly and he issues a gagging cry. The woman gets to her feet, her distaste for cigar smoke and shirtless black men forgotten. The waitress runs to help, wiping her hands on her apron. The dreddy bearded fellow peers out the kitchen door, and a teenaged boy begins to film the incident with his phone, ignoring his mother’s admonitions. The jukebox sputters now, aborting the song it had been playing and starting up Billie Holiday’s “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.”

Haint keeps eye contact with Andrew throughout, puffing contentedly on his cigar. Mismatched earrings shine dully in the hoodoo man’s ears.

“Maybe you can.”

“Maybe I can,” the man agrees, his eyes twinkling.

47

Andrew has some time to kill before night comes down, so he walks around the Quarter. Construction everywhere, as usual; torn-up roads blocked off with orange webbing, tourists filtering by one another on what’s left of the sidewalk, stepping carefully around piles of shelving for this or that new store. On Royal Street, women in Mardi Gras feathers dance in the heat while cameras turn and film crewmen detour folks up Orleans, some of these pooling up in the margins and holding up phones to film or snap stills of the dancers.

On Dauphine, the woman who runs a perfumery is yelling at the owner of the tattoo parlor next door because the new electric purple paint job smells like paint. He nods at her briefly, then goes inside. She yells at his retreating back, is still yelling at the door when he comes back out holding a ukulele, which he plays in accompaniment to her oration, driving her volume up and making her widen her eyes with fury. Andrew is nearly jabbed in the eye by her gesticulating finger, laughs as he continues past them, has the good sense not to answer when she screams, “What’s so funny!” at his back.

Andrew’s shirt is good and soaked by the time he gets to his former apartment on St. Ann, a small second-floor flat now annexed to the Sanson boutique hotel. He stands below it and looks up, noting how much neater and more inviting it looks now. Hanging plants cascade from the balconies thereof in majestic gouts of green. A woman in a turquoise bathrobe stares unashamedly down at him, a sort of bright balcony house cat drinking something red from a clear plastic cup. Her colors go so well with the aqua stucco behind her that she might have been paid to hold that post.

“Afternoon,” he says to her.

She raises her glass and inclines her head slightly, with the gentility of diurnal inebriation.

He misses his Vieux Carré flat but cut it loose after Katrina. He wasn’t really coming here often enough to justify the expense, after all, and it’s normally not too hard to find a hotel.

Normally.

He heads south again, then left on Bourbon, right on Frenchman.

The Frenchman voodoo shop sits beneath a wooden sign depicting a bat in an eighteenth-century powdered wig. The bat holds a tiny skull in one foot and a tarot pack in the other, echoing the American eagle motif with its olive branch and quiver. Miss Mathilda, an enormous black woman in an Indian-print dress, advises a pinch-faced man in a tweed suit.

“Now, this kind of service is not cheap because it is real. Do you understand me, sir? This is not a joke.”

She cuts her eyes to Andrew when he enters.

The man in tweed does, too.

She winks at Andrew, looks back at the man, actually uses her finger to turn his face back toward hers. He suffers this. She goes on.

“You will need to bring me film of your father, plus one or two personal effects of his, preferably things he handled frequently.”

The man looks at Andrew again.

Miss Mathilda says, “He’s a friend, we can speak in front of him.”

She can barely contain her smile.

She turns the man’s face once more with her finger, swallows him with her eyes.

“In two weeks or thereabouts we will receive the tape and call you. About the tape; it must be VHS.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you have VHS footage of your father?”

“Doing what?”

“Anything.”

“Christmas. Is Christmas okay?”

“We love Christmas at the Frenchman voodoo shop.”

“But I only have one copy. And nobody makes VHS anymore.”

She plucks a business card from between the teeth of a cat’s skull.

“This man on Tchopitoulas does. Ring the bell downstairs. And don’t be alarmed if he answers in his boxers. Just between us, he’s a little touched, but he’s the best man in the city for vintage electronics.”

“How do I…”

“Know it’s real?”

She uncurls a finger, points a black fingernail with a triangle of diamond chips in it like stars. Points at a red door hung with testimonials.

“That room. You’ll watch it the first time in that room. If your father does not speak to you, you will not be charged.”

His eyes dance over her face, looking for the scam.

“I won’t?”

“Of course not. I told you, this is the real thing. We have no need to cheat anyone.”

“Three thousand even? No tax?”

She nods.

“Where does the tape go?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Is this legal?”

She smiles broadly.

“My friend, nobody has ever asked me that before.”

When the man leaves, Andrew and Miss Mathilda bear-hug each other, laugh together, talk.

“How long are you here for, pretty man?”

“Not long.”

“You smell like hoodoo.”

“Guilty.”

“And boudin. Have you been eating boudin?”

He nods.

“Where’s mine?”

He shrugs, smiling. She’s younger than him by a decade but always makes him feel twelve. He resolves to bring her boudin when he leaves.

“But how about that? That guy. You think he’ll want a trapdoor?”

“Could be.”

“What a coincidence. Walking in just then, I mean.”

“Not as much as you might think.”

“How so?”

“My dear Mr. Blankenship, I offer your service several times a day most days. To anyone who lingers at the altar of the dead with hope or sadness in their eyes. And of course to anyone who buys a candle to light or hangs a photo. Look how many!”

The tin tree standing over the waxy altar blooms with pictures of the dead. Incense lingers.

She goes on.

“It’s just that so few people have that kind of money now. Even for parlance with the blessed dead.”

“I’m doing all right.”

“If you were doing all right, you wouldn’t have given up that sweet little apartment.”

He blinks twice, squints like he does when he’s about to ask a favor.

She anticipates him.

“Seeing a friend, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Gun show this week,” she says.

“Uh-huh.”

“Hotels all booked.”

He’s ashamed of his poor planning.

“That’s right.”

She fishes around near the register.

Holds up three brass keys as if fanning three cards.

“Pick.”

48

Andrew opens the door to room 373 of the Brass Key Apartments, his left hand flipping up a dead wall switch, his nostrils flaring to take in the damp air. Hot and dark. It smells of nylon stockings and stale semen, the nosegay of adultery, but why shouldn’t it? Adultery is his business here, too.

He crosses to the AC unit beneath the window and turns the knob, glad to hear it sputter on. The air coming from the crosshatched mouth is dog’s-breath warm, though, and turning the loose temperature knob all the way into the blue only cools it marginally. A drop of sweat milky with salt runs down his nose and disappears into the vent.

He tries the window and it refuses to rise, so he braces himself and pushes up hard. Painted shut. A young couple on the street below whinnies self-conscious laughter, and he laughs, too, as he imagines himself pawing at the glass at them like a dog stuck in a hot car. His guayabera is beginning to stick to his back again.

Across the street, a balding man in suspenders and a blood-soaked shirt looms behind a filthy window, fanning himself with a fedora. His look suggests mild curiosity, incongruous with his recently cut throat. A ghost. So many of them here. Andrew suppresses the urge to wave and turns from the window.

Lights from the bars on St. Louis wash the room in red light that recalls the engine room of a World War II submarine, even through the flimsy curtains. He sits on the futon and feels the cord of the table lamp until he finds the switch, which he is immediately sorry to have pushed. Now the gaudy purple and gold wall hanging, bearing the obligatory fleur-de-lis, pounces at him. Now he sees the truly impressive cum stain on the futon cover, as big as a map of Cuba. He has the impression its author is a minor league baseball player, but has no idea where that comes from.

He notes a filmy glass ashtray near the lamp and decides to give the window another try before he lights up.

Brace.

Strain.

Window still shut.

Drop of sweat in the eye.

An idea comes to him then.

He is reluctant to bother Haint again, having left him at the Tin Shack to listen to the fiddler’s second set, but Haint is the best man he knows to solve this problem; the only one who might be able to do it remotely. Miss Mathilda gave him the key, but she will already be settling down to sleep, having read her autistic girl an article from Scientific American or Popular Science.

He texts Haint a photo of the window with the message:

Painted shut. Hot as fuck. HOG?

Less than a minute passes before the “Ring of Fire” ringtone goes off and he sees Haint on his screen. He enables the camera. Haint is drunker than hell, holding a dead cat by the neck with one hand. He holds a tiny, gnarled claw-hand in the other. Haint gestures with the claw-hand that Andrew should point his phone’s camera at the window.

“Tap tap,” his phone says, and Andrew taps the phone twice on the glass.

A chip with a crack for a tail appears in the pane as though a small rock has hit it. Flakes of paint fly as a seam gouges itself furiously in a square circuit defining the frame, as though the window is unzipping itself, as though a very strong hand wields an invisible putty knife. The whole assembly shudders and the window pops, easing itself up an inch. Andrew pushes up with his free hand now and the window opens as if on greased rails.

Air comes in, not cool air but fresh.

He turns the phone’s screen faceward to thank Haint, but the man is dancing in the candlelight of his mobile brick apartment, slow-dancing with his limp cat and kissing its dead mouth, holding the Hand of Glory up in the other. Etta James plays tinny and small through the phone’s speaker.

“Good night, Haint,” he says, and the man dips the hand in his hand twice in acknowledgment.

Andrew hangs up and sits back on the futon, well away from the map of Cuba. His cell phone tells him it is 12:22 A.M.

He lights a Spirit and inhales gratefully, blowing smoke in a drowsy billow toward the window that yawns subtropical night on the other side of the room.

Althea.

She will be here in eight minutes if she keeps her word, but she never keeps her word.

“Did you find a meeting?” she asks him as they lie on the damp bed. He is still panting. She is already toeing around in the sheet-nest for the panties she will be slipping back on soon.

It is nearly three A.M. and she will want to welcome her man home after his shift. Then sleep from morning until nearly five P.M., when she will make some weird vinegary salad with apricots or strawberries or pomegranate seeds and run off for three hours of teaching Kundalini, Hatha, and hot yoga, if she is still doing that.

“Not here,” he says. “I’m not in town long. Like a day.”

“But you’ve been to one recently? A meeting?”

“Last night.”

“Good. So you’re feeling strong?”

“Don’t start that,” he says, instantly regretting it. Telling Althea not to do something is like pressing the accelerator to stop a car.

She takes a small bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of her tin purse and sips it, straddling him and bending down to put her lips to his. He turns his head away.

“C’mon,” he says, “it isn’t funny.”

“Who said it was?” she says, swigging again, loading up with a mouthful she will now try to squirt between his lips.

He jabs his thumbs roughly just under her armpits and wiggles, causing her to laugh and cough, whiskey spattering from her mouth and down her chin. She tries unsuccessfully to catch it in a cupped hand.

Pleased, she bends to kiss him and this time he allows it, her shag of curly brown hair engulfing him along with her riverbed scent while the forbidden taste of booze rides her tongue into his mouth.

And just like that it is awake again.

The big electric animal under his skin that doesn’t understand the word no.

You’re in trouble.

He breathes hard, wanting to take the whiskey bottle from her and swallow until a big warm pond pools around his heart, but he concentrates on her tongue. It is a dirty tongue, always coated with something; it feels the way your skin feels when you shower somewhere with soft water, always slick, always filmy.

The Jack Daniel’s bottle lies on the bed, its handsome black label and the good feel of it in his palm only a scoot and a reach away.

Fuck your way out of this.

Andrew looks down past the twin hanging cones of Althea’s breasts to where her belly rolls, pale above her dark bush and only just beginning to dimple as she approaches her fortieth year.

He begins to harden again, flicking her oily nakedness with the top of his shaft.

“Hmm,” she half growls, reaching down for it, but he dumps her off him and holds her down. She snakes her legs around him now, high up around his ribs, and wiggles, waiting for him.

Definitely still teaching yoga.

He hardens to three quarters.

Closes his eyes and sees Anneke.

Wanting me, naked and eager.

Except that Anneke already loves me.

Just not sexually, “as a wife loves a husband.”

Or the raven’s beak would kill her.

As surely as cancer is killing her father.

Stop sabotaging this, you need this.

Why?

What happens when you get too old to hide in a cunt?

And it’s just you alone with you.

Andrew opens his eyes, sees the beautiful, eely woman beneath him; he flares his nostrils and takes in the punk aroma of her excited sex. Althea has a strong smell, but mild and sweet compared to the rusalka. He closes his eyes again.

Karl Zautke is dying.

Anneke is relapsing.

She needs you, and you’re here.

Opens his eyes.

“You don’t love me, do you?”

His own voice surprises him.

Althea brays a laugh, then shakes her head slowly and wickedly at him.

“I love my husband,” she says. And she does. She loves her husband so much, in fact, that she will strap him down when he gets home from the bar and tell him in luxurious detail about her unprotected sex with her gris-gris New York lover. He will want her to ride him while she is still full of his rival, emasculating him until he is half sobbing, and then, when it’s over, turning mommy on him, cleaning him off and cradling him until sunrise. You would never look at the big, dangerous-looking bouncer with his bald dome and huge biceps and think, This guy only gets hard when he’s being ground down, but that’s how it is.

“I know. I just wanted to hear it.”

“Stop talking,” she says.

He stops talking.

He puts a coin between her eyes that lets him think thoughts into her head, and he shows her a dream where she is raping men on a Persian slave galley—she yowls so hard at the end of it that one of the neighbors accompanies her vocals with the percussion of shoe on wall.

Someone outside and below claps.

49

Andrew emerges from his bathroom, carrying the little duffel he took to New Orleans. No baggage claim, no bored security guards watching you walk past the point of no return; fuck you, Homeland Security. The day a user decides to go terrorist is going to be a bad day indeed.

His phone, temporarily confused, and perhaps insulted, by the rapid shift from Central to Eastern Time zones, resets itself and chimes the arrival of a text message it had temporarily misplaced.

Und zo.

He goes upstairs, sits on the edge of his bed, and peels off his Old Gringos. The warm, animal smell of his own feet hits him—it was so hot in the Quarter—and he notices a hole that will soon allow his big toe to peep through his sock.

Time to get rid of these.

Knot them together and give them to the dog to chew.

Only the dog isn’t a dog now.

As if summoned, Salvador knocks at the door frame, keeping politely out of sight, the clack of wood on wood startling the tired magus.

“Come in,” he says, almost adding boy.

Isn’t a dog.

Then what the fuck is he?

A monster. You’ve turned him into something unnatural, as you do with everything. He should be a handful of ashes on the breeze. He should be chasing rabbits in Elysium.

Will you put Karl Zautke’s heart in a basket and make him wash your boxers, too?

Salvador walks in, the Etch-a-Sketch he uses to communicate hanging by a leather cord around his wicker neck. The knobs turn themselves, and black-on-gray letters appear.

“Closer, Sal, I can’t see.”

The automaton lopes close, the knobs still turning.

Salvador has cleaned up the media room and put in a new television.

He chopped garlic because, even though he doesn’t know what Andrew wants to eat, it will certainly contain garlic.

“I’ll cook. Thanks.”

Boy.

I can’t even scratch your ears now.

The picture frame cocks, Salvador Dalí’s head now at a quizzical angle. He wants further orders. Just like a border collie, happier with a task.

He always asks who cooks even though Andrew hasn’t let him near the gas range since he caught himself on fire two years ago. But he’s not afraid of fire, not afraid of anything except displeasing his master.

What else has he got?

Me.

He just has me.

Andrew stands up, puts on the orange running shoes Anneke teases him about, and grabs a tennis ball from the closet. They go into the backyard. For the next half an hour, Andrew throws the ball and the wicker man sprints on his synthetic legs to grab it, scooping it with his wooden hands as nimbly as an outfielder, then throwing it back to his master. When it goes into the brush, Salvador turns his framed head sideways so it doesn’t drag branches.

John Dawes, the neighbor across the street, watches with military binoculars, can’t figure out for the life of him why the Spanish-looking butler would play catch with the strange bachelor, both of them laughing, only one of them soaked with sweat when they go back into the house.

It isn’t the strangest thing he’s seen at 4700 Willow Fork Road, though.

Not by half.

Dusk is coming on.

Andrew’s fingers are yellow with turmeric and his squash soup is boiling when the phone chimes again.

He knows what it says.

Let Go, Let God.

Elvis has left the building.

Out of nowhere he cries.

For his dead policeman father.

For his dead user mentor.

But also for Anneke, who’ll have to learn for herself how hard it is when the second parent goes. How real it gets when you’re sweating down into the cardboard boxes bound for Goodwill and the Salvation Army. When the other parent isn’t there to tell you stories from before you were born. When you go in the attic and the plastic tchotchkes crumble in your hand, and you sob like a bitch when you realize your mom saved a little bundle of report cards from third and fourth grade because they said something nice about her kid.

About you.

And that those cards waited in that peeling old folder for your adult hand to fish them out and throw them away because there’s just nobody else in this world who’ll ever give a damn about them again.

Maybe you really and finally grow up when you see the wall behind the last box of mysteries and it’s just a wall.

Your wall now.

50

Andrew drives with the foreknowledge that he will see at least one deer, which has nothing to do with magic; these farm-mottled woods are teeming with them, and they fling themselves across the roads with such abandon that wise drivers scan the margins of the trees. Their once-balletic bodies lie strewn from here to Buffalo, and if more of them are visible on the great deer-killing buzz saw that is Interstate 81, that’s only because the highway department cuts the grass there. Here in the sticks they tumble into ditches choked with greenery, hidden from the eyes of motorists, but advertising their spoiling perfume every few miles to those who go on foot or bicycle or in the slow, open tractors that beetle along between farms.

Andrew is not beetling tonight.

He has opened up the Mustang’s 302 and it roars like something hungry, like something that has been waiting too long to run.

It is the day after Karl’s death, two days before his funeral, and Karl’s daughter is drunk. She has a lapful of her dad’s PBR and a bottle of Tullamore Dew between her feet, and she has turned the volume knob up almost as high as it goes. One of the classic rock stations; Andrew switches between them at every commercial, so he rarely knows which one he’s listening to. Whichever one it is, “From the Beginning” plays so loudly Andrew has to shout to speak to Anneke.

“Look!” he says, pointing across the road to his left, where a doe stands so still she might be made of felt, her eyes blazing coke-bottle green in the headlights, a tiara of fireflies winking about her head. Anneke does not look, just hangs her heavy shag of hair down and does her best to sing along with the radio. Ignorance of a song’s lyrics is not proving to be an impediment to Anneke tonight.

Andrew readies his hand above the horn and readies his foot for braking, but the doe does not stir, and, as always with her kind, he wonders afterward if he has really seen her.

Now he relaxes.

He has seen his nightly deer.

Anneke is watching the road now.

Andrew is tempted to do that naughty thing he used to do quite often in the days before sobriety—the very thing he had been doing when he wrecked the ’65.

Yes, let’s do this.

When he sees that the road is empty of traffic both coming and going, he slows to twenty miles per hour. He cuts his headlights now so they can see the ballet of fireflies where they twinkle in the low places on the farms to right and left.

Showing off.

Anneke loves it, smiles with her cheeks shining, her eyes big like the eyes of a little girl at the circus. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer still pours from the speakers, unaccompanied now. How beautiful the fireflies are, a small galaxy of them signaling to one another as the last violet light fails above them.

“Exquisite,” he breathes, unheard under the music, then pulls his lights back on.

“More!” she shouts. “Encore!”

Instead he speeds again, and she honks the Mustang’s horn, then howls from the window like a wolf.

At the bluffs.

The whispering of the surf makes him think of the thing that came from the water at him in a dream.

Not a dream.

You were flying without your body and you almost didn’t make it back.

But he loves these bluffs and so does Anneke and he’ll be damned if he’ll let some bloated nasty in a sunken ship keep him away. The ship’s far out, and the Russian’s cabin is a good mile away.

They’re safe.

The two witches, master and apprentice, are alone.

The two recovering alcoholics, one holding on, one in full relapse, are alone.

The grieving daughter and her best friend are alone.

And kissing.

When they arrived he spread an Indian throw over the high grass and they both comically rolled on it to flatten it out; it’s still lumpy beneath them, but they want to be off the main trail in case some other celebrants arrive. The Sterling Renaissance festival is opening soon and musicians, actors, and vendors wander out here in the summer months to sing, drink, and couple. Oswegian teenagers also frequent these bluffs, breaking into parked cars, smoking pot, drinking hooch. But now nothing stirs but the lake and the breeze. Andrew and Anneke lie together, cocooned in their small, grassy cell.

Hidden.

Occult, in the original and medical meaning of the word.

And kissing.

They had barely spoken on the walk from the car, just trudged out here, hopped the rusted guardrail, hiked the rise that, by daylight, gives on the lake and the little promontory one dare not walk now. They had just gotten the blanket down when her mouth was on his, hot and boozy.

And the kissing was good.

Is good.

She fumbles for his belt, and, to his utter surprise, he stops her, playing goalie like a good Catholic girl.

She stops, squints her bleary eyes at him.

“Don’t you want this?”

He sees that she’s crying.

“I’m just afraid you don’t want this.”

“You’re wrong.”

Her strong hands on his belt again, more insistent; she unbuckles it. He scooches back away from her.

“Are you fucking serious?” she says, wristing a tear out from under her eye.

“Anneke, you’re plastered.”

“So?”

“You’ll regret this, that’s all.”

She pushes him down.

Holy shit, is she actually stronger than me?

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed. But regret?”

She’s too drunk to say the words she wants to say, but shakes her head. He gets it. Anneke doesn’t do regret, or at least she tells herself that enough that it has become her mantra. If she were in Game of Thrones, her household words would be, “Yes, I did do that. And fuck you.”

“I need this,” she says.

She’s straddling his hips now, towering over him, the horns of the moon behind her and an embarrassment of stars about her like a fay court, bearing witness to her need and to her primacy in this.

My father is dead and you’re going to help me fuck some of it away. Just that first little bit of it. Because when the tribe shrinks by one, the sons and daughters go into the fields and make increase.

This won’t be Papillon.

She’s not laughing with him now.

She’s fearsome.

Will this bring the raven down?

“Do you love me?”

Her silhouette nods.

“Brother. Not husband. But we’re doing this tonight.”

She bends down, a tear falling ridiculously into his nostril, but this is still not funny, and she grabs two fistfuls of his inky hair, painfully, the hair at the temples. She kisses him softly, though, wetly, until the tension leaves his body. He feels it in the crotch now, that first twitch, and she feels it, too.

Off him now, and down with his pants.

She has never put her mouth to him before, perhaps never to a man before; she doesn’t entirely know what she’s doing, hurts him a little, but it doesn’t matter.

It feels to Andrew like that warm, wet contact point between them is the geographical center of all creation.

This is so unlike Althea—he feels this; his heart is as warm as the marrow of a roast lamb’s bone, melting like that, and she could beak under his sternum and lick it right out of him.

They both know it’s going to happen.

And it does.

Urgently.

Quickly.

She barely gets her jeans off.

He spends around her navel, in it, abundantly like a twenty-year-old, and gasps as he does.

She clenches her teeth to keep from sobbing, not with pleasure, he’s sure she didn’t come, but with grief and thwarted love and mortality and gratitude for this little bit of warmth, this sliver of divinity, and she holds him, her wet belly hitching.

He knows he’ll hear the sound a second before he does, and it seems so clichéd and awful and obvious that he’s angry at whatever passes for God that he should have to hear it, that the gears should move so predictably and so intractably toward sorrow.

Always sorrow.

A raven in the trees.

Kwaaar!

He tries to tell himself it’s a crow, and maybe it is.

He only hears it once.

And he isn’t sure.

51

Noisy crows in the trees greet Jim Coyle, former professor of comparative religions at Cornell University, as he clambers out of his Toyota. He arms up his modest bag of groceries—important not to overshop when you’re about to leave a place—and heads for the cabin.

He has mostly enjoyed his half-summer on Lake Ontario. The landlady lives in Pennsylvania, does all her business by mail and over the Internet; nobody disturbs him out here, and he is halfway through with his manuscript, working title The God Mechanism: Making Friends with Death. He’s ahead of schedule and still has most of his advance in the bank.

The time away from his wife has been restorative, too. The system they’ve used since her son moved out is simple: When we need space, someone leaves. When we miss each other, we reunite. The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Use Protection” rule has, at least on his end, been vestigial since he turned sixty—he just doesn’t care about all the wrestling and sweating anymore, and has no feelings approaching jealousy regarding Nancy. He half hopes someone is paying attention to her that way—she’s still aesthetically attractive enough—as long as she doesn’t give him permanent walking papers; he would really miss her, even if he doesn’t easily respond to her below the waist these days. Truth be told, he feels guilty about his apathy in that department. Hormone therapy has occurred to him, but it would undoubtedly involve testosterone, and testosterone is his prime suspect in the case of his assholish youth. Interrogating girlfriends about past lovers, obsessing over sophomores and freshmen and sometimes bedding them, getting in loud fights on pay phones, it was all a ridiculous storm of ego from which he was glad to feel himself emerging in middle age. He began balding young; he purses his lips, remembering how carefully he used to hide his patchy tonsure in the days before baseball caps were cool for adults.

Nancy had been good for him—sane, unromantic, cerebral. Easy to laugh, slow to anger. An early music professor. Unsure she wanted to marry at all, but finally consenting on a trip to Chicago when he asked her on the Navy Pier Ferris wheel after a live taping of the NPR show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.

If only he still wanted her.

That way.

“You know who I do want that way,” he mumbles into his elbow-crooked reusable Pick & Save grocery bag (plastic is not okay) while he fumbles his key at the lock, “that Russian tea cake who moved into Dragomirov’s place, that’s who.”

The crows yap at him.

He unsacks whole-wheat linguine, alla vodka pasta sauce, cold-pressed olive oil, half a gallon of organic skim milk, and a half dozen other items one might expect a health-and-environment-conscious upper-middle-class intellectual to unsack, smirking at his own bourgeois habits as he cabinets and refrigerates his goods.

“Not my fault,” he tells nobody. “I ate enough beanie wienies and mac and cheese growing up. I get artisanal Tuscan boules if I want them.”

But back to the niece of the unfortunate Mr. Dragomirov.

That mole on her cheek drives him to distraction—a classic beauty mark worthy of Marie Antoinette—and she has the firmest body he’s seen on someone her age who wasn’t a movie star or aerobics instructor. He half imagined she had smiled at him that way, but knows better than to embarrass himself. She’s way out of his bald, myopic, professor-bearded league, no matter how well-stocked his cabernet shelf may be or how close he came to beating her brilliant uncle in chess. All right, he wasn’t actually close to beating him, not once in their half dozen games, but he made him think.

Now that the locust swarm of Russians has dispersed, she seems to be on her own. Good riddance to that horde, too. He actually caught one of them, a man the color of ashy leather wearing socks and sandals, standing in his yard, swaying drunk, blatantly pissing on his basil plants.

But it was a funeral, after all.

Too bad about Dragomirov.

A likable fellow.

With an eminently likable niece.

Who enjoys swimming in the lake.

It has occurred to him to offer his services as guide, maybe take her to the McIntyre Bluffs for one of the world’s second-best sunsets, but he knows that she’ll be laughing inside, even if she treats him politely.

No, he’ll steer wide of that Charybdis, and count himself lucky to return to his pragmatic Penelope and her excellent collection of viola da gamba CDs.

As he muses on these things, he plucks a sweater from the back of a chair.

Cold in here.

Isn’t it July?

He thinks about checking the air conditioner to see if he left it on, remembers that there isn’t one. It’s just cold. This makes him feel a spasm of anxiety—just one cold summer day arms his über-Republican lich of a dad (eighty-eight and still shoots trap) with enough anti-global-warming jokes to last through a whole snowless winter and an Easter in T-shirts.

But it’s warm outside.

Isn’t it?

He walks outside again, and feels sunshine on his face, feels the pleasantly warm lakeside air. A little cool in the shade, but downright cold in his house. He walks around the side of the house now, crows a-caw behind him, and sees that there’s something odd about his bedroom window. It takes him a moment to register what it is.

Condensation?

Water has beaded on the panes, trickles down in rivulets.

His bedroom window is sweating like a Pepsi can on a picnic.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” he says, heading back into the dark mouth of the cabin’s front door. He goes to his bedroom, finds the door to that shut. He never shuts interior doors.

He grabs the knob.

Cold.

Ice cold.

And locked.

He never locks interior doors.

It occurs to him to call the police, and then he chuckles at his own cowardice.

Hello, officer? Yes, I’d like to report a suspicious locking and a temperature anomaly. Is there a squad car in the vicinity? With a thermos of hot cocoa and a trauma counselor?

He goes outside again.

The crows are quiet.

He glances at their tree, thinking they’ll be gone, but they aren’t gone. They’re just quiet. And watching him.

He looks at his Toyota.

Just get in it and go—something’s wrong.

Hi, Nancy. I left all my clothes and books and my computer in the cabin because my room was cold and locked and birds were looking at me.

I know, but it’s the WAY they were looking at me.

He looks at the crows again.

Still watching him.

Get stuffed, birds.

Jim gives in to a juvenile impulse and flips the branch gallery off.

He walks across the yard now and looks at the window.

He can’t quite see inside his bedroom for the condensation.

He uses his sweatered elbow to wipe a pane dry, looks in.

Someone’s in there!

His heart skips a beat, then hammers.

A strange man is sitting on his bed, reading something.

A strange, feral man in a filthy T-shirt.

Is that my manuscript?

He calms down a bit—people who read aren’t dangerous.

He knocks on the window.

The young man turns around.

Wild-bearded, black haired. Wild-eyed, too. Probably one of the damned Russians. Not the one who pissed on the basil, though. That one had a potbelly and this one is skinny. Emaciated, even. The front of the T-shirt is visible now.

Pac-Man?

The man smiles at him, but it’s not friendly.

“Excuse me!” he says.

Call the police, this is trespassing and it’s legitimate to call.

Hello, officer? Yes, a badly groomed boy is reading on my bed. Does the National Guard have a spare tank it can send by? This looks dangerous.

He taps again.

“What are you doing in my house?”

Jim shields his eyes against the glare, peering through the dry pane. He watches the man go into the bathroom, fish around in a drawer, come out with a hair dryer. The dryer he uses to dry the henna dye he puts in his beard.

The boy returns with the dryer, points it at the pane the man squints through. Turns it on—he hears it whine.

But he didn’t plug it in.

A patch of fog appears on the glass where it was heated.

No, really, he didn’t plug it in.

Now the boy’s finger traces letters in the fog.

Why didn’t he breathe on the pane?

Because he doesn’t breathe.

Get in the car.

Just get in the car figure it out later you’re hypnotized this is dangerous what about the birds and the dryer HE DIDN’T PLUG THE FUCKING DRYER IN! RUN!

When the youth’s finger dots the bottom of the question mark, the windowpane cracks. The professor backs up, backs straight into his nightstand.

He is inside his bedroom now.

Somehow the room and outside switched shell-game fast.

Like teacups, one of them poisoned, in a spy movie.

He feels dizzy.

He sees his breath.

It plumes from his open mouth.

So cold.

He can’t seem to shut his mouth.

None of this is real.

I was just at the store!

He can only gape and shake his head as he watches snow begin to fall from the roof of his bedroom.

52

Andrew appears in the bathroom at Dino’s coffee shop in Yellow Springs, Ohio. A fortyish woman sits on the commode next to him, openmouthed, smartphone in hand, confused. He wouldn’t have guessed her as the type to enjoy Angry Birds, but that is in fact what she is playing. She begins to pull her pants up over her knees, moves her mouth as if to form a word. It looks like it’s going to be Who. Before she can speak, however, he smiles disarmingly and says, “I know you’re a bit startled, but there’s nothing to worry about. I’m not actually here.”

“Of course you aren’t,” she says, as if confirming the innocence of a wrongly accused child, and goes back to her game.

Andrew steps into the hallway, shuts the door behind him, peeks into the back room. His friend Eric, an eminently likable red-bearded poet and musician who serves as the unofficial mayor of Yellow Springs, says “Paisan!” when he sees the magus, stands up and gives him a back-slapping, fraternal hug.

“Can I borrow your car for two hours?”

Eric hands him the keys.

The borrowed car smells like kids.

Andrew loads his bouquet of sunflowers and single bottle of Yuengling into the backseat, next to a toy hammer and a tiny pink sock.

He drives to Enon.

He drives home.

The sky shines with the kind of bright, sunless gray made to punish hangovers. Luckily, Anneke is nursing hers two states away, and Andrew hasn’t got one. He’s just exhausted.

The Enon cemetery is one of three in Enon; Mud Run and Prairie Knob (behind the Speedway corporate office) are closed now, stacked thick with Civil War–era dead. The Enon cemetery holds a number of these, mostly resting under tombstones, but a few dozen of the white obelisks favored by the nineteenth century’s wealthier dead stick up like fish spines; the largest spire pokes heavenward from atop a hill and reads:

The second largest remembers one Leander J. M. Baker and his wife, Martha. An Ed Baker’s phallic monument juts nearby, both of these overtopping a sextet of smaller spires in the foreground, all belonging to the fun-loving Funderburghs. Andrew follows a sort of reverse Mohawk of shorter, darker monuments plowed between the old obelisks and tombstones, these dating from the middle eighties when it was decided to eliminate the walkway that used to bisect this part of the boneyard and to start planting Enonites between their forefathers.

Andrew kneels before and kisses his mother’s small stone, then lays his armful of sunflowers down, not bothering with a pot or water. This was how his mom left flowers for Grampa John Standingcorn.

The flowers are for the dead, not the living. All these folks who stand ’em up in water’s just showing off. Sooner these flowers brown, the sooner Grampa gets ’em.

The letters crowd awkwardly on the pinkish-gray stone, and he furrows his brow remembering the fight he had with his brother about including their mother’s Shawnee maiden name.

She never went by that. It’s too long. And it’s not Christian.

He sees Charley standing in front of him, pointing a finger for each of these arguments until he has made a proper pitchfork of his hand, the irony lost on him.

Charles Stewart Blankenship doesn’t do irony.

He also doesn’t do follow-up, which was why Andrew’s last-minute call to the monument company decided the Standingcorn matter.

Charley hates his Indian blood and probably thanks his beefy white Jesus every night that he inherited his father’s pink tones and brown hair and left Andrew with the nutshell complexion and inky black mane of his grandfather.

Charley wants nothing to do with his “occult-dabbling” Indian-looking brother.

The elder Blankenship sibling has made himself rich on a series of instructional CDs about how to make oneself rich. With Jesus. It’s called The Catch, and it tells the listener how to focus concentration and will on making wealth appear. To say certain ritualistic things every day and to believe and visualize. To implore the Fisherman for a bountiful catch.

It works.

At least, it does for Charley, who is mildly luminous.

And probably for anybody else who is, too.

That his magic-hating older brother has made himself a millionaire by unwittingly practicing low-grade magic is one of the most beautiful ironies Andrew Ranulf Blankenship is aware of.

Charley would argue that it’s not magic because he calls on Jesus to make the money roll in. Andrew doesn’t know much about Jesus, if there is a Jesus, but he doubts that the guy who said it was easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than a rich man into heaven would be shoveling Benjamins at his believers.

Charley is tone-deaf to hypocrisy.

Charley doesn’t do irony.

Their shared father did, though.

Their father the cop, the actual fisherman, not of men or Benjamins, but of river trout.

Andrew opens the Yuengling and pours it into the grass before the stone just next to Elizabeth’s, which says simply:

“Sorry it’s warm, Dad.”

He drives Eric’s car a few blocks from the cemetery, parks it on Indian Drive just off the roundabout that encloses the mound. The mound is Adena Indian, not Shawnee; the Adena were all done here by the time Jesus popped his first pimple.

He hops the little fence around the base of it, remembering how irreverent he and the other kids were to it, how he dubbed it the “earth boob,” smoked his first joint on it on a moonless night in November 1975, its three trees holding on to the year’s last leaves. That wasn’t so bad, but then he took a good long piss against one of those trees to make his friends laugh.

They did, but they didn’t mean it.

He made himself laugh, too.

He remembers the dream he had that night. He was tied to the tree he had pissed on and a man with actual strawberries for eyes danced around him, periodically jabbing at his face with a dead porcupine on the end of a spear. The porcupine smelled rank. He was sure he would be blinded by a final, decisive thrust, and then, suddenly, painfully, he was. Apparently he had not fully voided his bladder earlier, because he woke up in cold, pissy sheets.

He never urinated on the Adena burial mound again.

He just sits there for ten minutes.

The sun warm on his face.

Warmer here than in New York.

And then he goes.

53

Haint’s picture comes up on Andrew’s phone.

He’s smiling, leering toothily at the camera on his computer.

Standing far enough away so Andrew can see around him, behind him—he gets his best view to date of Haint’s portable apartment.

The dreddy violin player lounges behind the hoodoo man, smoking an immense, poorly rolled joint that looks like it wants to fall apart. An iguana watches from the arm of the sofa, serenity made flesh. Bricks behind the couch, a shelf with an altar of sorts, big leather Bible, a jar of dice. Candles. Four Thieves vinegar. Junk-sculpture art on the walls. The most clearly visible piece looks like an iron sun—chains of different gauges and states of oxidization arranged in rows forming a ferrous circle, at the center of which hangs a malign, rusted bear trap, cocked and ready.

Isn’t hard to guess what that thing does if the wrong person comes in.

Neither Haint nor Andrew speaks for a moment.

“I like it that you don’t say hello. You’re waitin’ for news and that’s all you want to hear, and anything else is bullshit.”

Andrew blinks his icon eyes, feels the stirrings of elation; Haint seems pleased with himself. He has good news.

Could it be?

Haint holds up a lambskin covered in dried blood, a smile-shaped gash letting a flap of it hang. Haint begins to dance, showing off the skin, then begins to sing.

“Ding-dong, your bitch is dead, she’s really dead, I killed her dead, ding-dong, your Russian bitch is deeeeeeaaad.”

The man on the couch blinks through the cannabis smoke wreathing his head, as if it has only just occurred to him that his eccentric host might really kill people. He seems to reject the idea, takes another puff, leans close to exhale his smoke in the iguana’s face. As if doing it a favor. Only makes it blink.

Andrew’s heart is racing; his breath comes in little hitches. He remembers the hut, the last time he thought she was dead. The ancient, ghoulish thing. You don’t get ancient being killed easily, but this is a new age. Technology just might have made her vulnerable. Haint’s cursed Ephesian knife married to satellite photography, swooping down like some drone’s missile to kill the witch in her own garden.

Help me, bomber!

He pushes his old fear down, clings to the hope Haint offers him. The evidence on the skin.

So much of it.

“You’re sure?”

Haint doesn’t speak.

Then he does.

“That little smudge there, that’s my blood, to prime the knife. The rest of this, all of this, come outta her. I seen it in my mind. She was hunchin’ in her garden, digging up a turnip or something, and she didn’t even see the shine on the knife blade. Not that there was much shine, man, that’s some hunka deep dark woods. But I went zip and she went gaa! And it wasn’t no harder than this—”

So saying, he lunges fluidly backward, plucks up the iguana by the tail and whips it hard against the floor, holding it up so Andrew can see its last spasms. He forces himself not to show disgust in his eyes, his calm eyes. The dreddy man is not so poised. Haint’s speed and brutality have startled him, made him drop the spliff all over himself, burn himself, say “FUCK, man!”

“FUCK, man!” Haint mocks him, throwing the limp reptile on him now, causing the musician to leap to his feet, still swatting at the ember on his pants.

Drops of blood from the lizard’s head have spotted his T-shirt.

“Not COOL!” he says, looking less frightened than he should be.

This is so much worse than not cool!

Get out of there!

Haint looks at Andrew, eyebrows comically raised as if to say, Can you believe this guy?

“Verify, then bring the hand,” he tells Andrew.

Sounding happy with himself.

Andrew nods.

Should turn off his phone but can’t.

This is a user’s biggest weakness: the need to know what happens, how things work, to see what others don’t get to, no matter how cruel and ugly it is. Especially if it’s cruel and ugly.

The dreddy man gathers up his canvas bag, stomps off behind Haint, then stomps back in the other direction.

“Where’s the fucking door?” he says.

Haint raises his eyebrows again.

Rubs his hand front-to-back along the neatly scarred ridges of his scalp.

Turns off the camera.

Leaves the sound on.

Knows Andrew will listen.

Is doing this for Andrew because he likes him and wants him awed and uncomfortable and repulsed.

Haint only respects other users.

“Are you really telling me what’s cool and what’s not cool in MY house?”

“Just where’s the door, I’m outta here.”

“You THINK you’re outta here, but you ain’t gone yet.”

“Look, we’re good, man, I just want the door.”

“We ain’t good, man. It’s my door, man, and you only gonna use it when I say so.”

“Put that down.”

Andrew’s finger hovers over the end call button, but of course he can’t press it.

“There you go, tellin’ me what to do in my house…”

They speak over each other.

“Please, just…”

“In MY fuckin’ HOUSE!”

“I want to go…”

“A man’s home is my castle, and you are in my CASTLE…”

“Okay, okay, calm down… I mean let’s…”

“And in my CASTLE, you do not refuse my HOSPITALITY.”

“Okay, please don’t…”

“Eat it.”

Silence.

“I like your cookin’ and I like your playin’ so Imma give you this chance. Imma make the door come back and let you outta here if you eat this motherfucker. All of it.”

“Please.”

“PLEASE NOTHIN’ I AIN’T IN THE PLEASE BUSINESS YOU EAT THAT FUCKIN’ THING.”

Silence.

“Here’s some hot sauce.”

Call ended.