The Necromancer's House

54

Michael Rudnick drives his old pickup truck to Anneke’s house, following a small, golden finch. It perches in trees near the turns he’s supposed to take, flutters around and flies on to the next turn. The birds he charms to guide him fall behind him on the interstates, but he doesn’t need them on the interstates. Maps work just fine there. He only calls a guide bird on the sort of rural roads so many American users choose to live near. Users are a solitary breed, after all, more big cat than wolf.

“Andy was right. You do look like a lion. I’m Michael Rudnick. Mike’s fine.”

Anneke stands on her front porch, perplexed.

She only got the text this morning.

Mike Rudnick offers his big, tough hand and she allows it to swallow hers.

Tough, callused hands with small thick nails.

Worker’s hands, not reader’s hands.

And he’s had so much sun on him that the white in his mostly white beard almost glows. He looks like a less self-indulgent Hemingway, harder and leaner. Michael Rudnick is the last guy you’d look at and think user. He carries himself like a rancher, or maybe a circus man—someone who works with large animals and makes them do what he wants because that’s the only way.

He looks seventy.

“Nobody calls him Andy,” she says.

He ignores this, except to smile at it. Paternally, somewhat amused. She’s not sure she likes him.

She’s not sure she doesn’t.

But still.

A bird sings.

What the fuck was Andrew thinking, sending this old geezer here like some kind of replacement dad?

She knows she’s surly, knows the booze does that, feels good and surly anyway.

His truck cools.

Her hangover throbs like a bass line to the duet of chirping finch and ticking truck.

“So you’re good with minerals.”

“I sculpt.”

“That’s something. That’s really something. I sculpt, too. May I see?”

“Uh… now’s not…”

“Pottery, too, right? Mugs. Cups.”

“You know, I’m not sure this is going to work. This is a bad time for me.”

“It’s actually a good time.”

She blinks twice.

The balls on him!

“Says who?”

“Grief is a catalyst for magic. We get growth spurts when we’re hurting, and the worse we’re hurting the faster we might grow. If we push it.”

She looks at him, her mouth opening a little but not settling on a word. Her teeth are still dark from last night’s boxed wine, a thin line of dried cab/merlot circumnavigating her lips.

She looks rough and knows it.

Remembers spitting into the toilet last night, her spit nearly black from tobacco and wine.

He takes her hand again; she almost pulls it away but doesn’t. With his other hand he pulls a small pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket. Inspects her hand, looking for calluses. Like it’s a tool he might buy if the price is right.

“I’ll go away,” he says, turning her hand over, letting go of it, taking up the other one. Now he looks at her, over his glasses. “But I won’t come back.”

She returns his gaze, unblinking.

“Look, Mr.—”

She blanks.

“Rudnick,” he says, unoffended.

His face a brown-red mask, deep lines around his mouth and eyes.

“Nobody asked me about this. I appreciate you coming all the way out here.”

He just looks at her.

The bird chirps.

He waves a hand at it, a subtle gesture, and it flies away forever.

“But I just lost my father, days ago, and I can’t focus right now. All I do is turn pieces, play Sudoku and. And nothing. Sudoku is pretty much it.”

He looks at her.

He doesn’t know or care what Sudoku is.

“I know you’re the best teacher I could have, if I’m really doing this. I read your book. I can do a few of those things. But if now is the only time you have for me, I have to say no.”

This is where he should say graceful words, shake her hand, and get back in his truck.

Or tell her to fuck off, turn on his heel, and get back in his truck.

But he doesn’t move.

Just looks at her, like he’s waiting for her to realize she’s fucking up, and that makes her a little mad. Even Karl Zautke knew better than to patronize her; he learned that when she was a little girl. One may disagree with an Anneke Zautke, but one must not treat her like she’s stupid.

Big mistake, rock-mover-old-man.

“Well, enjoy your day,” she says, and shuts the door.

Not a slam, but neither an apologetically slow close.

Shuts it like she would if nobody was there at all.

Yeah, a bit rude.

She breathes for a minute, still looking at the door, knowing he’s just standing there. She doesn’t think he’s a danger to her, but she does wonder if she’s making a mistake. What does she really have to do just now but turn mugs for the festival and play number games until she can sleep? And wish she could cry for her daddy, drink, and then cry for her daddy. She nearly opens the door, then remembers his wizened, sure-of-himself half smile and gets pissed again.

Turns decisively away from the door.

Says Haaa!

She has been walled in. By her own stock. Every mug, bowl, and plate she has, finished, unfinished, purchased, every one of them, stands stacked before her. From floor to high, A-frame ceiling. A frozen waterfall of clayware. All precariously balanced, some pieces on their corners, the whole thing ready to fall. If she removes one cup, it will pour down like a dynamited chimney. On her. A month’s hard work wrecked. Black eyes, lacerations, worse perhaps, and a herculean mess of shards and clay dust instead of half a summer’s income.

Kat, the multiply pierced woman who manages Anneke’s booth at the Renaissance festival, is coming tomorrow in her bumper-stickered van with the dried roses on the dashboard to get the finished pieces. With her father’s illness, Anneke has put Kat off several times, and now her booth has bare shelves. Will have nothing but bare shelves if this deadfall crashes.

Fuck that old guy.

She breathes hard.

She turns to open the door.

Can’t.

It has been mortared shut, concrete caulking the jamb, the hinges. A tongue of poured stone licks down from the wrecked lock. The only part of the door not slathered with freshly set concrete is the brass mail slot. Which now opens. She steps back a half step, which is all the room she’s got if she doesn’t want to bring down the wall of pottery.

A Snickers bar and a small box of raisins slide through, fall on her hickory floor.

“What the FUCK!” she says. “You let me out of here, you old COOT! DO YOU FUCKING HEAR ME?”

The pottery wall shudders, a saucer slipping headily close to falling out, nearly releases the threatened avalanche.

“Temper,” he says. “Ask me a question civilly and I’ll answer you.”

She makes an uncivil noise.

Stamps the Snickers bar flat, pushes it flat through the slot.

It comes back.

“Try not to step on your food. You’re going to get hungry. Probably very hungry. Depends on how good you are and how well you listen. I’m going to tell you how to unstack that wall, if you want to know. But you’re not to use your hands. You’ll have to start from the top.”

She seethes.

He waits.

“What if I can’t?”

“After a day or two I’ll let you out if I have to.”

“Do it now.”

“Sorry. You were ready to waste my time by sending me away; now I’m wasting yours. If you can pull that wall down, I’ll be happy to teach you more. If not, well, it was nice to meetcha.”

She seethes, cools down.

“I’ll get thirsty before I get hungry.”

Silence.

“Well?”

Silence.

The garden hose pokes its snout through the slot, hangs there.

Waits.

55

The tailpipes really draw the eye.

Two perfect holes on a tight little rear end.

The car Andrew will give to Radha.

First, a distraction.

His phone chimes.

He pulls it out.

He texts.

Slips the phone back in his pocket.

Andrew and Chancho stand under the Mini Cooper on its elevated lift. Chancho raises a stubby finger, crescent-mooned with oil on the cuticle, and points.

“The cat-back exhaust, that’s performance, like a double-barrel shotgun, BANG! BANG! ’Cept a quiet shotgun, she’s got a sweet purr, kitty-cat purr. This is a nice car, man. 2003, but cherry.”

“Dude came from Arizona.”

“Yeah, eff that road salt. What you get her for?”

“Six one.”

“I give you seventy-five hunnert right now.”

Andrew shakes his head.

“Eight.”

“Not selling. I have to fix her up.”

“You mean brujo the chicharrones out of her, right?”

Andrew smiles.

“Yep. Woman did me a favor, I do one back. Did you find why she was pulling?”

“Yeah. Strut towers are shroomin’. ’Specially the right one. Must be potholes in Arizona. Got Rick runnin’ back from Syracuse with parts, picked a coupla plates up from the import place. All polished and all. Bling.”

“This girl won’t care about bling. She probably won’t even pop the hood.”

“Yeah, but whoever does, BLINGITTY BLING!”

Gonzo looks over from the reception desk, where a big-eyed woman is mooning at him, about to hand over her keys.

Andrew’s smile widens.

“But she passes? The Cooper?”

“More than passes. You screwed that guy.”

—It was generous of you to advertise such a nice car for six thousand. Is everyone in Arizona this good-natured? And do you play tennis professionally?

—Professionally? No.

—You look like a tennis pro.

—I think you read it wrong. No Mini in this shape is going for six. It’s ten thousand. Have anyone you like check it out. Did you see the exhaust? The alloy wheels? The stereo alone is worth a grand.

—You’re right. It is a sweet machine. Sorry to hear you’ve been ill.

—Excuse me?

—All this damp New York air, a guy from Arizona’s bound to have a bad reaction. Even an athlete. Of course you’re under the weather.

—What are you talking about?

—Am I mistaken?

—Actually, yes. I never felt better.

Andrew blinks, looks confused.

—What did I say?

—That I was sick.

—What?

—You said I was sick.

—Six will be fine.

Now the young man looks confused, comes almost back to himself.

—I can’t…

—You’re what, five eleven?

—No.

—What then, six feet even?

—Six one.

The young man puffs up proudly.

—Sorry?

—Six one.

—Five ten?

—Six one, goddammit, six one!

Andrew smiles disarmingly.

—Sold!

He offers his hand.

The young man shakes.

“Just charmed him a little.”

“Effing brujo.”

Chancho smiles despite himself.

Claps Andrew on the back.

Leaves a smudge.

56

Andrew drives the Cooper down the farm roads from the North Star Garage, admiring the handling, the clockwork feel. A little rough on the bumps, but damned fine on curves. It doesn’t gobble road like the Mustang; it ticks off distance (the damned thing clearly thinks in kilometers, whatever the odometer says) like seconds on a runner’s watch. Radha is bound to be pleased. Six hours’ worth of incantations and directed thought, a pinch of hummingbird feathers in the gas tank, a good massage of the body with prepared wax.

Wax ingredients: beeswax, badger hair, ground snail shells, filings from a Slinky, ash from thirty burned parking citations. Getting the badger hair was going to suck until Andrew remembered that old-timey shaving brushes use it and rush-ordered a Vulfix #403 Best Badger from the mildly luminous but untrained young owner of Classicshaving.com.

Now the Cooper runs on water and will fit into any parking space so long as the owner believes it will.

Perfect for Chicagohoney85.

She believes any story that involves her success.

It’s why she’s so fucking powerful.

Andrew pulls up to his house, sees a man waiting on his porch.

An older man.

Michael Rudnick.

They exchange brief waves.

He pulls the plum-colored Mini in beside his Mustang, keeps going until he’s just in front of his separate garage.

Cuts that sweet watchmaker’s motor.

Michael is already walking over to him.

“You look the same,” the older magus says as Andrew gets out, stands.

It’s not a compliment.

Michael knows Andrew is burning magic to make himself look young.

Probably a lot of magic.

Michael doesn’t look the same. His hair was still mostly dark the last time Andrew saw him. His skin looks blotchier, too, the browns and reds more separated, less the healthy rancher’s tan Andrew remembers.

This man looks like a candidate for skin cancer.

“It’s good to see you, Michael.”

Andrew’s a bit of a hugger, but Michael isn’t, so Michael offers him a preemptive shake in the driveway, moves up to the porch.

“What do you think of Anneke?”

“Luminous as hell.”

“I thought just a little.”

“Just a little to you. Mechanics and the dead on film are your specialties. When it comes to stone, you’re just a little luminous. How big a rock can you move?”

“Maybe a brick.”

“She’ll be moving bricks by the end of the week, if she tries. Maybe more. I see what she can do with minerals, and it’s kind of scary. You were right to call me.”

“Where is she? Is she coming?”

“Not tonight. I gave her some homework.”

The two men don’t go inside just yet.

Michael walks to the installation of junk cars and boulders, lays hands and cheeks to the rocks.

Twines his fingers in the vines and touches the saplings and the shoots on the tree.

He climbs up and touches the horns on the skull of the longhorn steer. Wiggles one flat, yellow, herbivorous tooth in its socket as the skull grins, tied to its post, an out-of-place western exile in this damp, northern province.

Back to the biggest rocks, three of them: one the size of a large old-style television; one the size of a love seat; one the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, a proper boulder.

A scattering of smaller rocks, still too heavy to lift.

Cheek and hands on all of them, like a doctor.

Like he should have a stethoscope.

No hurry, maybe ten minutes of this.

“How is it?”

Michael smiles.

Whistles in appreciation.

The way older men do to say damn.

“Still there. Still all there.”

He looks as proud of himself as he ever lets himself look.

It had been ten years since they built this.

Since they put a spell in it.

Salvador had still been a dog.

Andrew had still been drinking.

Sarah.

Let’s not start thinking about Sarah, now.

This spell.

This big-ass spell.

Evidently he didn’t mess everything up in those days.

“Really?” he asks the other magus.

But he knows.

He puts his hand to the hood of the wrecked Mustang, feels the thrum of buried ferrous magic.

This is really mighty stuff.

“Probably still be there in another ten years. We did good.”

57

Anneke joins them at breakfast the next day, her hair frosted with clay dust, her eyes baggy from poor rest. She smells like sweat and anger. Andrew cracks eggs and tips their treasure into holes in sizzling French bread while she glares at Michael Rudnick. Salvador brings the coffee press, pours coffee in her cup. She reaches for it, but Michael wags a finger at her.

“What?”

This is the first thing she’s said since she entered.

“Use your hand to touch that mug and I’ll pop it in your face.”

She blinks twice to keep herself from flinging it at him.

She really wants to fling something at him.

Speaks instead.

“You’re using your hands. You’re lifting that mug to your face just like everybody else.”

He takes a sip of coffee just to rub it in.

Looks at her, eyes twinkling like flaws in quartz.

He doesn’t need to say it; she gets it. He has nothing to prove. He has his own regimen, has cracked the foundation of his house and fixed it six times this year, juggles forty bricks as high as a Ferris wheel every Sunday, turns rabbit, squirrel, or doe to stone in midrun then animates it again. He’s a mighty motherfucker with eyes like Medusa and a geologist’s heart, and he’ll use his hands if he wants to.

She’s the one on coffee cup detail.

She swivels her angry glare from Michael’s eyes to the steaming earthenware mug in front of her. Terra-cotta colored, artsy, from an art fair in Ithaca. She feels the clay in it as if it’s an exiled part of her, believes it’s part of her, feels the heat of the coffee in the cup that is now her own brittle flesh somehow, but the feeling is muted, fades in and out.

The cup is like an extremity that has gone to sleep. It is a struggle for her to move it; her arm tingles in sympathy.

This is harder than lifting the empty pots and plates, which actually got easy at the end; by the time she was near the bottom of the wall, she had two pieces in the air at a time.

The first one, though. It hurt her between the eyes, like an ice cream headache in the wrong place. Took her two hours to wiggle it, and then it slipped immediately from her phantom grasp and broke. Almost brought down the whole wall. Michael peeked through the slot, helped her a little by nudging the wall back and into a more solid configuration. The second item, a wine goblet, had been hard, too, had also broken. The third thing, a beer mug, made it, also slipping from her grasp, but in a controlled descent that she could not stop, but managed to slow enough, just enough, so it survived its landing. It had been like watching a skydiver fall a little harder than he meant to.

That had been her first significant act of magic.

She had been doing exercises with a penny, then a pot shard, had moved sand around as gently as a kitten pawing at it, had managed to put a crack in a thin wineglass.

Taking that mug down from on high was a different thing.

She would save that mug.

Drink Mountain Dew out of it one day when she got back into recovery.

This, though.

A full coffee cup. And she didn’t make this cup, hasn’t already got an intuitive connection to it. The weight of the liquid confounds her, has multiplied itself like weight at the wrong end of a lever. It’s heavier, yes, but she’s stronger than she was a day ago; this is a fair fight. She clenches her teeth, feels something coiling inside her, getting ready to expand.

She sees the coffee cup lifting, manages to jog it, sloshes a plap of coffee onto Andrew’s table.

Grunts.

Tries again.

It wobbles, coffee spilling over its sides, dribbling onto the table.

She brings it to her lips, starts to incline toward it, sees Michael gesturing for her to sit back.

Make the cup do the work, she thinks, then remembers his words as he stood outside the door instructing her.

Let the cup move, don’t make it move. Like archery, or golf, or bowling, it’s a relaxing, not a stiffening.

Something in her relaxes.

The cup drifts closer, drunkenly, uncertain it wants to stay aloft. Now it trembles at her lips, quivering so fast the surface of the coffee ripples in intricate patterns.

She sips.

The hot coffee on her lips jars her out of it.

The cup falls, makes a thunk but doesn’t break, coffee splashes on the table, her lap, everywhere.

Michael nods in lieu of saying, Nice job.

He says, “Next time you’ll be ready, won’t let the heat shock you.”

Andrew, who has just taken breakfast off the burner, comes over with a dishrag.

Why is he handing me a dishrag?

Oh, the coffee.

Drops of blood patter on the table, mixing with coffee.

Not just the coffee.

Nosebleed.

Magic made me bleed.

The first time was just messing around, but now I’m in.

Cherry popped, as the boys who helped me prefer girls used to say.

She takes the rag.

“Welcome to the club,” Andrew says.

Breakfast is good.

Before they leave the kitchen, Michael makes Anneke change a cherry tomato into a rock. This takes half an hour. Her period, which isn’t due until next week, comes on hard, sending her running for the tampons she left behind for herself in the guest bathroom.

She lies down in the spare room, meaning to rest her eyes and her throbbing head, but she falls asleep and stays that way for two days.

When she wakes up, Andrew hands her an envelope.

The rock is in it, and a note.

Michael Rudnick’s address.

She takes the stone cherry tomato with her and leaves.

58

A picture loads. Black-and-white, military satellite photography. The hut, the garden, hard to make out. Early morning. An old woman’s foot, a slipper near it. The echo of The Wizard of Oz is impossible not to notice.

Ding dong, your bitch is dead.

She zooms in. It gets grainy, but he thinks it may be an old-timey slipper. Not ruby. Embroidered.

He can’t be sure, but he thinks he’s seen it before.

His stomach does a slow roll.

He clicks.

A wolf crouches on the path. A skinny wolf, not like the ones you see in pictures from Alaska or Yellowstone—this critter is gray and ratty and hungry-looking.

Small.

Nose pointed like a gun at the owner of the inanimate foot.

(Click)

That wolf is nearly out of the shot, its tail all that’s visible; it’s sniffing her. Perhaps doing more to her than that. Two more wolves have appeared on the path before the hut, coming to share the prize.

(Click)

The house has turned.

He sees one of its windows like a dark eye.

It has turned ninety degrees toward the wolves, the dead woman.

(Click)

Fully turned, facing them.

More wolves have come, two of them crouched and growling at the house, the rest circled around her.

Feeding.

(Click)

Motion. Things get blurry now. Something has flashed from beneath the house; the wolves have reacted. One was too slow. The blur has the wolf.

(Click)

A huge chicken’s foot.

That’s what has the wolf.

Still blurry, but less so, still in motion.

The wolf struggling, trying to twist out.

(Click)

The wolf is dead.

Its brains dashed on the ground, as dead as Haint’s iguana.

Two others are growling at the house, front halves low as if salaaming, like dogs at play but not playing. Not surrounding it as they might a giant elk, but blocking it while the others retreat.

The rest are dragging the old woman away, about a third of her in the shot now, swathed in dried blood.

(Click)

Everything blurred, house twisting, motion beneath it.

(Click)

The house turning away, just a corner of it in frame.

Two dead wolves as limp as dishrags.

The woman and the other wolves have gone.

(Click)

Just the garden.

The path.

One of the wolves trying to get up.

Wasn’t dead after all.

Will be soon.

Too much of its insides outside.

That is the last image.

He clicks back through them two more times.

59

Andrew feels pretty good as June gives way to July and July sheds days.

Baba Yaga is dead.

He has Radha’s car to work on, and it’s a damned fun little car.

The woman he loves is newly confirmed in witchcraft and studying for a month in Vermont.

Chancho, who has family coming up from Texas, has invited him to a fiesta, and that means piles of oily tamales and pans of enchiladas and bowls of the best guacamole this side of Austin.

Who cares if his cousins move drugs for the Zetas?

He can almost completely ignore the tinny little voice in his ear saying

Something’s wrong,

Something’s coming.

60

July 14.

Bastille Day.

Anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in Paris, of course, but also a very personal anniversary for Andrew Blankenship.

Seven years exactly since Sarah collapsed at Darien Lake.

Aneurysm.

Just after she rode the Mind Eraser.

One of life’s stupid, mean little jokes.

Enough to make one conclude there is a God and he isn’t all that nice.

He was handing her her earrings to put back on when she said she didn’t feel well.

Wanted to sit down.

Slumped over like a kid playing a prank.

And that was it.

He had just started looking for a ring, was thinking about asking her on Halloween.

Now he hovers at the top of the stairs that lead down to the media room.

I shouldn’t be doing this.

Why am I doing this?

It doesn’t hurt her.

No, but it hurts me.

I just have to see her again.

God.

God.

Downstairs.

Quickly, before he loses his nerve.

From the box of VHS tapes, one tape marked SARAH.

In it goes.

Stop.

He does stop, but only because he has to shut the door to the media room and lock it.

Salvador cannot, must not see this.

Sits back down.

Pushes play.

Push stop.

No, really. PUSH STOP.

The woman throws a Frisbee, probably an hour before sunset.

The McIntyre Bluffs.

2004.

Eight years ago, before the path to the promontory had eroded into a crumbling saddle, when a brave or foolish soul might still skitter upright over something of a spine to the platform of turf that remained.

But the woman.

Thirtyish, sandy brown hair cut into bangs.

That smile would melt an iron heart.

That smile could stop evil itself.

It is the sun on toast, it is the sun on Christmas morning with all wars over.

It is a smile to give up magic for.

Her faded jeans, all the rings on her fingers, one a teaspoon ring.

Should have thrown myself from that promontory.

Just like the rusalka did all those years ago.

What have I done with myself since Sarah?

She hated this part of you, this self-pitying part of you.

No she didn’t.

Sarah didn’t hate.

Now the camera follows something flashing through the high grass.

A swatch of the lake behind it.

It’s really tearing ass.

A dog.

A young border collie, not a year old, already an acrobat.

It leaps, yanks the red disk from the air as if tearing it from the swatch of blue sky hung behind the cliff.

The camera dips back to where the woman laughs and claps.

The trapdoor is coming.

“Good Sal! Good, smart Sal!” she says, and the dog drops the Frisbee in the grass at her feet. Her lace-up thrift store boots. Sarah is a thrift store empress, five foot four, size seven shoe, tiny through the waist, fucking everything fits her.

And the thrift stores took it all back.

Here’s the trapdoor.

The drop of the Frisbee marks it.

He can call her name, have her lock eyes with him, speak to her.

He has done it exactly three times.

Only once sober.

Not today.

Not never, it doesn’t work like that.

Just not today.

“That’s my boy,” she says, and gives the Frisbee a lusty throw.

“Some arm on you,” younger Andrew says.

His one contribution to this tape.

She looks at the camera.

Looks at the younger Andrew she loved like that.

The trapdoor is still open.

If he speaks.

If he says Sarah.

She is about to speak to younger Andrew.

Her eyes cut left and she smiles that smile instead.

Now Salvador bounds into view but doesn’t drop the Frisbee.

Wants to play chase this time.

The hump of his running back in the high grass.

Whatever she was going to say goes unsaid, turns to laughter as she runs after the dog. Out of frame. Young Andrew is smart enough to stop filming, put the camera down, join the chase. Live. Soon the young couple will pack their dog and blankets and empty wine bottle into the Mustang, go home, back to this house, and make love.

Older Andrew isn’t welcome to that party.

Let’s say now-Andrew, shall we?

Now-Andrew isn’t welcome to that party.

But that’s okay.

He’s not entirely sure he believes in time anymore, and if there is no time, he is making love to Sarah even now.

He often thinks of the Russian word for wing when he thinks of making love to Sarah. Krihlo. Said with that little Russian vowel that sounds like i but in the front of the mouth, like you’re trying to sneak a w in there. That o that opens the lips instead of closing them.

God Sarah God Sarah God

Her rings on the nightstand.

Her boots on the floor, making a sort of happy swastika with his.

Her soft, joyful whimpers.

Salvador the dog crying to be let in with them.

Salvador the wicker man taps on the door to the media room.

Let’s say now-Salvador.

Now-Salvador, then.

Now-Andrew sleeves his cheeks dry.

Puts the tape away.

Opens the door.

61

The UPS man has arrived with a parcel Andrew must sign for.

A parcel from Frenchman Street in New Orleans.

He can tell by the weight of the package.

He recognizes Miss Mathilda’s squared-off, careful print.

Three tapes.

The dead in their black plastic shells.

Souls trapped in amber.

He can’t free them, but he can make them dance.

Oh God, he wants a drink.

The house is quiet with a quiet that television and music are powerless to interrupt. The night groans by on rusted wheels.

62

The dream is the same dream.

Always the same dream.

The Soviet dream.

He is twenty-three again, arrogant, strong, as pretty as a girl, irresistible to girls and women of every stripe. He travels easily through Soviet Russia, using magic to outdance its bureaucracy, its lethal but ponderous bureaucracy, clever in places but cold. Secular. Unable to allow for the impossible. He is playing chess with adversaries who cannot see all the pieces, who might beat him if they allowed for the possibility that they could not see all the pieces.

His papers say he is a Soviet citizen.

Magic gives him flawless Russian.

Magic summons perfect answers to his lips.

He is too light for the police.

He is too clever for the KGB.

He is looking for treasuries of magic tomes lost since the days of the tsars.

“Of all of the spell books and relics known to exist, whether seen by reliable witnesses or referenced in other works, only a quarter or so are in known hands,” his mentor had told him; on mention of secret magic books, Andrew had sat like a cat before a can opener. “Of the remainder, it is believed that a disproportionate amount have accumulated in what is now the Soviet Union. Some hiding in plain sight, no doubt, waiting in bookstores for the first luminous person to buy them for less than an American dollar. Most will have been hoarded and stored.”

“Hoarded and stored by whom?”

“We don’t know. Various users, even more deeply hidden than Western ones, perhaps more powerful. I know a man, a Walloon Belgian, who went to Leningrad in 1973 and came back with a book on traveling underwater, a bit redundant in the age of scuba, but still. I also know a man and wife who went together to the Volga and never came back. The Volga’s probably where most of it is.”

“When did they go?”

“1975? Jesus, three years ago. I saw them get married the year before.”

Now, in the 1983 dream, Andrew has left the city of Gorky, in the Volga region, and makes his way by train and bus into the countryside, hitchhiking rides from farm trucks, beat-up Zaporozhets with their goldfish-eye headlights, even a horse-drawn cart full of barreled milk.

And then.

And then.

Andrew has been hitching all day, with mixed success.

He just realizes how hungry he is, how long it’s been since he ate, when he finds himself looking at a scene from the nineteenth century.

Two men in baggy shirts, short woolen vests and brown pants swing scythes into the high grass, looking for all the world like they had stepped out of Fiddler on the Roof. They work their way down the side of a hill, the sky chalky blue above them, one of them humming to keep his time, the younger one swinging less rhythmically, fighting the scythe, tired. Maybe sixteen years old.

“I see you have made an enemy of the grass, Lyosha,” the older man says from beneath a tsarist mustache. “This will not do. Make friends with it. Let it know that you only want to let it lie down and rest.”

He goes back to humming his song, but still the boy chops and sweats, stopping for a moment to wipe his brow with his cap.

“Call your idiot brother and see if he can show you how.”

“He will not come, Uncle. He is lying on the stove.”

“Call him anyway.”

“Ivan!” the boy calls.

Andrew keeps walking down the path, keeping an eye out for another potential ride, but this.

This is something else.

He slows down a bit because he wants to see how this idyll will play out. Do they still make idiot brothers who like to lie on the stove in Cold War Russia?

Clearly they do; the large man who crests the hill and lopes down at the other two has the characteristic eye tilt of Down syndrome, and he breathes through his mouth as he says, “What do you want? I was catching flies.”

“You caught no flies unless they landed in your mouth,” the mustachioed man says. “Now show your weakling brother how a man mows hay.”

The boy hands the scythe to his brother, and Ivan whacks at the grass like a mad thing, shearing great armloads of it down with each stroke, giggling. Soon the little brother takes up a fistful of grass and throws it at Ivan, ducking back out of range before the scythe’s blade swishes down again. It becomes a game. The older man sets down his scythe and joins in, baiting the laughing peasant with flung grass and dancing away from the flashing blade. Andrew now has to turn his head back to watch, so he stops walking altogether and slides his arms free of his backpack. He lights a shitty Soviet cigarette so he will not appear to be nosy, just a man having a rest and a smoke, and he sits on the big canvas sack he has been lugging.

A flight of sparrows wheels about, lands briefly on the road near him and then takes off again.

And then.

It happens.

The younger boy takes greater and greater risks with the scythe, forgetting the grass-throwing, just leaping in and out Cossack-style while his uncle claps and shouts in time. Andrew knows what is going to happen an instant before it does; at last the idiot brother swings faster than the boy had anticipated and lops into the acrobatic youth’s leg.

It comes off just below the knee.

He collapses into the grass with a look of astonishment on his face.

How pale his face is!

How dark the O of his mouth!

Andrew’s own mouth hangs open, the cigarette stuck on his lower lip.

The injured boy howls in pain; the older man goes to him.

The idiot stares openmouthed, a long strand of spit reaching down to the grass.

Andrew’s paralysis breaks, and he says, “Jesus.”

The boy goes silent.

The uncle had been removing his rope belt to tie off the boy’s leg, but he stops and turns his head toward Andrew. The idiot brother looks at him too. Now the boy sits up, holding his bloody stump, less concerned with the blood fountaining through his interlaced fingers than with Andrew.

“Can I help?” Andrew says in decent but accented Russian, his own Russian, Russian that stinks of Ohio, walking toward them now, his hands open in a timeless gesture of harmlessness.

He doesn’t even notice that his fluency charm has failed.

All three of them look at Andrew with flinty, suspicious eyes. Their gazes are so malevolent, in fact, that Andrew stops coming toward them. He isn’t sure this is what it appears to be.

Then it hits him.

Magic.

It has been so long since he felt the flutter of magic that he has now been blindsided.

He didn’t see the pieces.

Fear wakes up in him.

This could be bad.

This could be very bad.

“Can I help?” the uncle says, mocking Andrew’s American accent. “Who could help this?”

He gestures at the boy’s gushing leg.

“Or this?” he continues, nodding at the idiot brother, who draws back his scythe.

Strikes off the uncle’s head.

O mother of fuck fuck fuck

Andrew’s legs buckle in fear.

He begins to back up at something more than a leisurely pace, unable, however, to turn his head from the scene in the field.

Now the big idiot bends over, legs splayed, the crack of his ass winking below his too-short shirt, and delicately picks the cap from the uncle’s head so he can get a handful of his hair. He lifts the head, the white and rolled-back eyes of which now slot into place.

Fix on Andrew.

A few yards away, the uncle’s body sits up.

Then it stands up, arterial blood jetting.

It takes the rope belt between two fists and pulls it slack.

“Now do you want to help? Does Jesus Christ want to help?” the head asks from the idiot’s huge fist, now hawking and spitting out a bright clot of blood. The idiot takes his scythe up in the other hand and begins to stumble toward Andrew.

“I think he wants to hear American, Uncle,” the bleeding boy says, using a scythe as a crutch and standing on his remaining leg. “Two kopecks says he does.”

The head hanging from Ivan’s hand now opens its mouth and a sound like television static comes out of it.

The chunk chunk chunk of a television dial being turned, and then…

News.

A newswoman speaks through the uncle’s open mouth, in perfect midwestern American English.

“The remains of an American backpacker missing in the Soviet Union since June were returned to his family today… .”

Andrew backs up faster.

He spits his cigarette out.

“The young man’s mother and elder brother flew to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to claim the body, which had suffered great violence at the hands of unknown assailants…”

The idiot holding the severed head, the bleeding boy hobbling along with his scythe, and the headless peasant with the rope belt between his fists advance on Andrew.

Andrew feels backward with his feet, terrified to fall.

“… His hands, feet, and genitals were cut from his body by what appeared to be a farm instrument, although the cause of death has been established as strangulation…”

Andrew keeps backing up, not wanting to take his gaze from them. As long as he looks at them, they aren’t closing distance.

“General Secretary Andropov has promised a full investigation into the killing, which he will see to personally as soon as his nagging cough goes away.”

“Help,” Andrew shouts. “I need help!”

“HELP!” the head screams, much louder than Andrew had, making wide eyes at him.

Oh, to turn and run.

He dares a glance behind him and sees that the road keeps straight, intermittent trees punctuating pastures in which sheep and the odd cow walk, heads bent to the grass, chewing.

When he turns his gaze back to them, the three peasants are yards closer, though he can see no difference in their gaits. He notices now their grass-stained boots.

“You owe me two kopecks, Lyosha. The man did not want to hear American.”

The head hawks and spits again.

I’m dreaming.

This is 1983 and I’m dreaming.

Look up!

A series of very tight jet contrails etch themselves in the clear summer sky.

Bomber

“BOMBER!” the head screams, never looking away from Andrew. “HELP ME, BOMBER!”

The idiot likes this, says it also, as if to himself.

“Help me, bomber.”

They continue down the road for some time, Andrew sweating more than the cool day should call for.

He hopes to hear a truck behind him, all but prays to hear one blow its horn. No sooner has he thought this than the uncle’s head blares the AH-ooo-GAH! of a farm truck.

Mustn’t look away again

“Hey, Lyosha,” the head says to the hobbling boy, “I don’t think he means to look away again.”

“I think you’re right, Uncle.”

“It’s no good if he sees us; he can just keep the same distance all day long.”

“Right again, Uncle.”

“He is young with long legs. Not like you since your accident, stupid boy.”

“You had an accident, too, Uncle.”

“But mine did not slow me down, as you see.”

So saying, the body walking with the strangling rope executes something between a spasm and a tour jeté.

The simple man laughs, then bites the head’s ear to hold it so he can clap his pancake hands together.

The body leaps again.

“Vanka,” the head says, rolling its eyes dramatically back to look at the simple man carrying it, “how many flies did you catch?”

The head goes back to the fist so Vanka can reply.

“Many.”

“Enough to bring on night?”

“Night! Night! Night!” the big man chants, and it is clear he would clap his hands except for the head he carries.

“Do it, then, big boy!”

Now the idiot opens his mouth and what looks like a big, black pudding begins to emerge from it. He vomits this into the road, where it writhes and undulates, weak light from the sun playing on its slick surface.

Now the boy hops up on his remaining leg and uses his scythe to take a huge swing at the pudding, which bursts into a swarm of blackflies that cover the sun.

And it is night.

Night without stars.

Andrew runs.

The dream changes so he finds himself in a nest.

Or perhaps a bed of dry hay?

Something woolly nuzzles his arm aside, chewing.

He pushes at its head to get it away from him, but it baas explosively, showing him its black tongue.

A sheep.

Where the fuck am I?

A crude wooden roof stands above him.

No walls.

A stable?

The sun is setting, or perhaps rising, casting a dim violet light. A pitchfork stands up from the ground, backlit, tines up, two of those tines spearing an oblong, head-shaped something, also backlit.

Oh, it is a head

It hawks and spits, then speaks.

“Our little baby is awake now, yes?”

Husky laughter comes from near the water trough, against which the idiot brother sits, Andrew’s backpack spilled out near him. He unrolls a pair of faded blue jeans and marvels at them, a lit cigarette in his mouth.

Wait until he finds the Playboys

He shouldn’t smoke

Why, because he’s retarded?

Special, we say special now because it’s nicer

“Don’t burn a hole in those, Vanka—we can sell them to a party member for a lot of money,” the head says from its perch. “So, little baby, you like Jesus, yes?”

Andrew says nothing.

“You like him so much we put you in a manger.”

The sheep baas again, as if prompted.

He looks into the field, where the headless body jerkily brushes down a plow horse, who stands placidly, swishing its tail against flies. Clearly headless bodies groom horses all the time in this hellish fairy-tale Russia.

Maybe I am in hell?

I ran into something hard in the dark.

A fence?

A plow?

Maybe I died?

“What, you have nothing to say?”

Andrew just blinks.

The head hawks and spits again, excusing itself.

A dream that’s all just a dream

But I thought that when it happened

And it was real

“Even in a dream, one must be polite. But no. You are badly raised in America. Even if you did speak, all I would hear would be the sound of America coming from your mouth. Do you know this sound?”

Andrew says nothing.

“Would you like to hear this sound? The sound of America?”

Andrew shakes his head weakly, causing his head and neck to hurt.

“At last! The baby has an opinion! Well, here is the devil, baby, you will hear anyway.”

The head growls then, showing the crooked teeth below that thick mustache. The growl grows into the sound of an engine starting up. A helicopter engine. It opens its mouth as the rotors of the unseen helicopter spin more rapidly, then, as the rotors chop and roar at flight velocity, it opens its mouth impossibly wide and blows a jet of wind, hot and stinking of gasoline, blowing the straw in the stables about furiously, frightening the sheep away and scattering a trio of hens. The idiot brother shields his cigarette with his cupped hands, but it blows away anyway, and he cries.

The head shuts its mouth now, cutting off the roaring wind.

“It’s all right, Ivan. America is gone now, and it is time for hot towels.”

“Hot towels? I like hot towels.”

“I know. Hot towels feel nice.”

Now the boy comes from behind Andrew

Neck hurts too much to turn and see where he came from

somehow carrying a bucket, towels, a lit oil lamp, and a shaving box. The boy has his leg back on

?

but limps slightly as he sloshes the steaming bucket along.

His big brother fetches himself a stool and sits, chin poked forward, loosening his collar. The boy packs a steaming towel around the simple man’s neck and he coos.

The headless body now comes, washes the horse sweat from its hands in the soapy water, unwraps the towel, and then soaps and shaves Ivan’s face, gently slapping a cheek when it wants him to pucker and tighten.

It wields the straight razor expertly.

Andrew shudders.

If they were going to hurt me, they would have done it already

Says who?

“Hurt you?” the head says from its tines, squinting with concentration at the remote-control shaving job its body undertakes. “More light!” it barks, and the boy winds the tiny knob that adjusts the length of the wick, leaning the lamp closer.

“Now you’re in my way.”

The boy steps to one side.

“Good. Stay there.”

It hawks and spits a black clot and then addresses Andrew again.

“Hurt you? Why would we hurt you when you do such a good job hurting yourself? You should see the goose egg on your head. No, we want you well. We have many accidents here. Farmwork is perilous—but what would you know about it with your supermarkets and whores and ghettos? We want you safe and sound so you can heal us, little Jesus. See how you helped Lyosha?”

I want to wake up

“Wake up, then!”

I want to go home

“Who is stopping you? Go!” the head says, looking at Andrew now. The body has turned his way as well, and gestures with the razor as if to indicate the road Andrew is welcome to walk.

With some effort, Andrew swivels his hips over the lip of the manger, but something is wrong, something more than his throbbing head and ground-glass-packed neck.

He tries to stand but collapses to the ground, knocking his chin and biting his tongue. A startled rooster flaps its wings halfheartedly and continues to strut.

Of course he has fallen.

He has only one leg.

Andrew wakes up.

Adjusts the sweat-dampened pillow beneath him.

In the distance, a train.

63

“Ichabod.”

Nothing.

“Ichabod, I command you to appear to me.”

Nothing.

If it isn’t listening, it isn’t disobeying.

He’ll have to formally invoke it or go see it.

The idea of going to see it in its cave makes him shudder.

Its cave by the train tracks.

And formal invocation is a pain in the ass.

He looks at the antique clock on his nightstand.

One ten A.M.

Just after midnight in New Orleans.

He has a debt to pay.

He appears in the restroom of a fine-dining restaurant off Chartres, one he knows keeps late weekend hours. Knows also that it won’t be so busy he’s likely to have company in a private stall. He gets lucky, appears in front of the sinks, sees himself in the mirror.

Looking older.

Looking fortyish, not thirty-five.

Hair still black, skin tight, but there’s something.

Still beats looking fifty-three… what would that look like?

Before his eyes, his hair goes mostly white, loses its luster; deep lines bracket his mouth, his eyes get crow’s feet.

Not ready for that. Not yet. Go back.

He concentrates, believes himself younger.

Gets younger, thirty-five again.

Pops a blood vessel in his eye.

“Ow, FUCK!”

His left eye goes red; he bends over.

A waiter peeks in the bathroom door.

“You all right, sir?”

“I’m perfect, thanks.”

He’s far from perfect, but people don’t press things in this city, and the waiter disappears.

His sclera will clear up; he’ll still be younger when it does.

It gets harder every year, though; they all lose this battle.

He feels the bulge in his coat pocket, wonders if the waiter thought he had a gun.

It’s worse than a gun!

He goes by the zinc bar where a bartender with retro-lacquered hair cracks an egg, looks at Andrew, looks back at his work, finishes making the pre-Prohibition fizz for the rich young lady in the antique silk stockings. It could be a scene from 1935 until her cell phone buzzes and she looks down at it, smiles privately.

Now his phone is out, dialing Haint.

It rings five times, and then he hears the message.

“You know who this is if you got this number. Don’t fuck around.”

Now the sound of something small and squeaky getting killed by something hard and heavy, underscored by Haint’s gravelly laughter.

Beeep

“Andrew. Call me back. I’ll be at Lafitte’s. For a while.”

He’s there for longer than a while.

A bearded boy in a bowler hat tears up Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” in the back, fenced behind listeners perched directly at the piano, wobbly on their stools. The pianist’s buddy leans against the wall near him, accompanying him on harmonica. Everything is dim. Everyone is drunk. The steamy little building reeks of whiskey and sways with inebriation.

If Dionysus came back, this would be his temple.

No sooner has Andrew thought this than Dionysus walks in.

WTF?

Did I just think WTF instead of what the fuck?

Is that fucking Dionysus?

Andrew relaxes a bit when he realizes the grape-leaf-crowned figure moving through the crowd is wearing a papier-mâché mask. He tenses again when he notices that nobody else looks at it. It’s looking at him. No, correct that; it points its eyeholes at him, but those holes are black and eyeless. Sleeves hang past where the hands would be, but he is nauseatingly sure it has no hands. It floats rather than walks.

Andrew white-knuckles the table.

Now the piano man aborts the Doobie Brothers song he had just started, bangs his hands discordantly on the keys, looks at Andrew, and says, “May I sit?”

Nobody else notices.

They sway and drink and talk as if they’re still hearing the song.

The harmonica man plays on.

“Sure,” Andrew says.

The chair opposite him pulls out on its own and the empty Dionysus collapses into it, the grape leaf garland and mask landing on top, the eyeholes fixed on the ceiling.

The waitress, a depressive woman with a lazy eye and a Who Dat? T-shirt, plucks the crown of grape leaves from the chair and walks it over to the piano player, fitting it down over his hat.

“Thank you, Felicity. Your next period will be crampless.”

“Awesome,” she says, sounding upbeat for the first time tonight.

The piano player tickles the keys and speaks to Andrew again.

“I believe you’re the only person in this establishment drinking virgin soda water. You profane my temple, sir.”

“Ichabod?”

“At your service, as ever.”

“I called you hours ago.”

“You commanded me to appear before you. You did not specify a time.”

Everyone around the piano claps and cheers.

A man in a ridiculous toupee reaches past other celebrants to tuck a fiver in the well-stuffed tip pitcher.

The waitress points at the musician’s near-empty glass by way of asking him if he’d like another drink.

“Absinthe,” he calls to her.

Looks back at Andrew.

“What is your pleasure, O magus?”

“I have a question, but I’d like to ask it in private.”

“Ask away! Nobody’s listening.”

Now everyone in the bar turns and looks at Andrew.

“Ichabod.”

“I know. The manners in this city aren’t what they used to be. Friends, might we have a little privacy?”

The drinkers all put their fingers in their ears, still staring at Andrew.

Andrew’s fear grows, but then he remembers he’s in charge.

Sort of.

“That was good,” he tells it.

“They’re easier to control when they’re drunk. But you know about that.”

He plays a little piano riff.

“Make them stop.”

“MAKE THEM STOP!” they all say.

“I command you.”

“I COMMAND YOU!”

“Do you really?” the piano player says.

His buddy starts making a train noise with the harmonica.

“Yes,” Andrew says.

The harmonica choos like a train whistle.

The harmonica player now lowers his harmonica, looks at Andrew too.

Silence.

The piano man spins his garlanded hat, puts it back on his head at a more rakish angle.

“I choose to interpret ‘Make them stop’ as ‘Make them stop living.’ That’s a tall order. Forty souls in this room, including the piano man. I’ll have to tamper with a gas line.”

“That’s not…”

The waitress comes back with a glass of liquid that glows green like antifreeze. The piano man takes it.

Nods at her and says, “Forty-one!”

“My life sucks anyway!” she says.

“Forty-one dead in New Orleans gas explosion, America’s oldest bar destroyed. You and I will survive, of course. But this is going to be on CNN!” says the piano player.

“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

“I don’t have to know what you meant. I only have to know what you said. Now either you insist and they all die, or I disobey. Your call entirely.”

Now everyone in the bar drops to both knees, bowing their heads, their hands extended palms up in supplication.

“No, that’s more classical, isn’t it? Let’s do something modern.”

Now they all look up, interlace their fingers, tears streaming down their cheeks as if they were all attached to the same irrigation system.

Andrew can’t speak.

“Just say ‘live’ or ‘die.’ I won’t insist on protocol.”

Andrew’s mind races. He can’t think of a way out of this.

“Friends,” it says. “I believe the wizard fears to slacken my leash, even just a little. If you have any last words, now would be a good time to say them.”

They speak in chorus.

All eyes rest on the magus.

The sound of gas hissing rises up.

One of the candles leaps.

“Live!” Andrew says.

The hissing stops.

The candle leaps again, throwing too much light, casting the piano man’s shadow against the brick wall behind him, but of course it isn’t a man—tentacles, a writhing squid, just a split second of that.

Now he bangs out “Happy Days Are Here Again” on the piano.

All the drinkers look at each other, reach out to each other. They kiss indiscriminately, with no regard to age or gender. They begin to reach down pants, up skirts, fish out breasts.

A wild-eyed Asian man on his knees begins to stroke Andrew’s thigh. Andrew moves away forcefully, stands up. The Asian man attaches himself to another couple, pets them, is petted in return.

“Shall I make them stop?” asks the grinning piano man.

Andrew speaks slowly, considering every word.

“I, Andrew Ranulf Blankenship, command you by the conditions of your entry into this sphere, and by the power of the words I here intone, which bind you to my service, to release all men and women currently in your power from said power, and to restore them to the state of independent thought and action in which you discovered them upon your entry to this building.”

The piano player stops playing.

“Nicely done.”

Raises his glass to Andrew.

It’s going to leave before I can ask it if the witch is really dead.

“To you, sir. And to wormwood.”

He knocks back his absinthe.

“Ichabod, wait…”

The room blurs.

The bearded boy in the bowler hat belts out “Werewolves of London,” his friend accompanying him on the harmonica.

The entity

it’s a demon just say it

is gone.

It came on its own terms and fucked with him until it got him to make a mistake.

It inched that much closer to liberty.

It kicked his ass.

Haint never comes, does not answer subsequent texts.

When Andrew gets back to the restaurant, he finds it closed and locked.

He will sleep among the crypts in the cemetery north of the Quarter, not far from Marie Laveau. He will sleep there, unafraid of molestation; he will make himself invisible.

Failing that, he has other means of self-defense.

Very persuasive means, indeed.

It will be the next day before Andrew takes his Hand of Glory and his unanswered question back through the rabbit hole, back to Dog Neck Harbor, New York.

To you, sir.

And to wormwood.

64

Cayuga County Deputy Brant McGowan follows the red Toyota on a hunch.

Just slips behind it as it pulls out of the Fair Haven gas station, decides to try to get a look at the driver.

A child abduction in Syracuse has everybody from here to Watertown on edge. This is the second one in two weeks, but the only one they’ve got a lead on. First one was an infant snatched from its stroller, just gone and nobody knows when or how, and that was in Red Creek. Mother is the primary person of interest. This time, some creep yanked a toddler off his sister’s arm while they were walking back from the park just two blocks from home. The suspect appears in flashes on a security camera, swooping up from his parked red Toyota Prius, the action reminding Brant of a trap-door spider he saw at an insect zoo when he was a kid. Not so long ago. Deputy McGowan is a young man.

So was the perp in the video. Young, and dirty to be in that kind of car.

Deputy McGowan is off duty, coming home from Auburn in his own Saturn—not the kind of vehicle to draw attention, although he would freely admit his sunglasses look a bit coppish.

He doesn’t think the driver knows he has a tail.

He’s seen maybe three of the distinctive Toyota hybrids in red since he saw the footage, but this is the first one driven by a male. Also the first one that makes his guts crawl. He has only seen the driver from behind so far, sees that it’s a bald or short-haired man, indeterminate age. He needs to get up beside him for a proper peek, but the one-lane roads here in farm country won’t allow for that unless he goes to pass.

Might as well stick with him for a while.

As it turns out, he sticks with him all the way to Marsh Road.

When he sees the Prius slow down and signal to turn off 104A, he has to decide whether to turn with it; if he does, there will be no ambiguity. The guy will know he’s being followed. If it’s the guy, that is. Most honest citizens don’t notice shit unless they’ve got a good reason to.

He turns, too, keeping a good distance behind, almost letting him get out of sight.

Got a glimpse of him as he turned.

Older guy, big beard.

Too old to be the perp.

But maybe he’s not the only one who drives that car.

When the beardy guy turns up the dead-end road leading to the cabins, the game is definitely up; he can’t just swivel in there after him. He drives past the turn, pulls in the driveway of a house, sits there until the Toyota is out of sight.

Wasn’t there a disappearance out this way, maybe these cabins?

Yeah… German tourist or something. State police said they got some weird DNA, but no body, no suspect.

A woman peeps at him through drapes.

He pretends to be checking something on his phone, pulls out, parks a bit farther down.

Heads down the road to the cabins on foot.

Just a guy taking a stroll.

In cop glasses.

I really suck at this.

I left my gun in the car.

I’ll never be a detective.

I need a story in case he talks to me.

He sees the Prius now.

Walks closer to the trees, in shadow now, pretends to look at his phone again.

Sees the man getting out.

Kind of a smarty-arty-looking old dude.

Getting something out of the back now.

A cage?

A cage.

With a rooster in it!

Flapping its wings halfheartedly, feathers floating.

The man wrinkles his nose.

Takes the cage in the house.

What does a latte-drinking guy like that want with a rooster?

Should I go talk to him?

I’ll say I’m looking for a buddy’s cabin.

Bob?

Too generic.

Kyle.

Big guy with a red beard, having a keg party.

He’ll hate that, he’ll be so busy hating it he won’t stop to wonder if I’m a cop, if he’s not involved.

If he’s not, who cares?

Might tip him off if he’s involved.

Looks twitchy, wonder if he’s scared about something.

I’d like to know what.

If anyone else lives there, I might see who.

Movement behind him.

He turns around, but whatever it was is still or gone.

Squirrel.

No, bigger than a squirrel.

He looks back toward the house.

All still and quiet.

Don’t think anyone else lives there.

This is stupid.

He stands with his arms folded, weighing the pros and cons of approaching the house.

Something weird’s going on here, but weird isn’t illegal. I don’t think this is the guy. And if it is, I’m more likely to fuck things up than make myself useful. Still, I’ll tell Syracuse about the car and chicken-man, see if they want somebody on duty to roll by and ask questions.

He senses motion behind him now, turns around just too late again.

Birds flutter near the crowns of the trees.

His hand strays to where his gun should be.

He decides it’s official.

He’s creeped out.

Hell with this.

He walks back down the road now, feeling watched.

He walks more quickly.

Strong late-afternoon sun, not even close to dark, and he feels like a teenaged girl in a graveyard.

Laughs at himself.

Still walks fast, though.

He sees his car.

Something’s different.

I had the window up.

Now it’s down.

Did I have it up?

He approaches the car from the blind spot just in case.

Pops his trunk with the fob.

A slate-gray Volkswagen Jetta slides by, the driver eyeing him suspiciously.

He waves without meaning to, an instinct.

Puts on his gun belt.

Feels better.

Looks in the window, sees nobody, relaxes a bit.

Sits down, a chill going through him.

Damn it’s cold in here, I was running the air but damn.

Freon leak or something?

He starts the car.

Cocks the mirror to look at himself, thinks he looks ridiculous in his badass shades.

Opens the glove box to put them away and get a piece of gum.

Sees it.

The antler.

He checks his windows and mirrors again to make sure there’s nobody near the car, then looks at it again.

It’s a goddamned antler, an antler from a young buck.

He nearly picks it up, then thinks about DNA and prints and decides not to touch it until he has a sandwich bag.

It really is cold in the car, cold enough to make him put the heat on.

He closes the glove box and drives off with his sunglasses on, chewing no gum.

65

The men in the slate-gray Volkswagen Jetta don’t talk much.

They are on their way to avenge Mikhail Dragomirov, whom Georgi believes was murdered by a female associate of one Andrew Blankenship, who lives on Willow Fork Road, but whose dwelling should be identified by a turquoise Mustang from the late sixties, what Americans of a certain age call a muscle car.

Sergei Alexandrovich Rozhkov doesn’t like this.

He doesn’t like Georgi, either.

Sergei is nearly seventy-seven, but still vigorous. Still dangerous. His son back in Brooklyn looks older than he does now, ever since the liver problems turned him the color of bad salmon.

Georgi is not his son.

Georgi is the nephew of an old friend, the kind of friend you do inconvenient things for.

Even when that friend is dead.

Georgi has stumbled into his midthirties, neither fully American nor truly Russian, too scared to join the mob, an honest citizen who doesn’t notice shit. The man they passed on the road was a policeman putting on a gun. Georgi looked at him obviously, drawing his attention. Getting his own face looked at. There would have been no room for such a man in the Odessa operation, but that was a long time ago now.

What’s more, he’s clearly in love with his estranged cousin, the niece, and wants to impress her by killing those who may or may not have killed Misha. The little niece believes it was this Blankenship, a man of small consequence, who killed Misha over a whore, and she won’t say how she knows this.

Sergei is all but sure Misha drowned.

It’s always this way. When we lose someone we love, we want a villain. What if the villain was the whiskey Misha was drinking and the currents in the lake? He should shoot a bottle of scotch, empty a clip into the lake, and go home.

Misha was a good man, strong at chess, a genius with numbers, but he comes from a degenerate tribe with their best days behind them. Everybody’s best days are behind them. The world has become a playground of idiots and zealots, where the ever-shrinking center of reasonable men must work harder and harder to keep the lights on and the bombs from going off.

Sergei wants to go back to Brooklyn and get out of this paradise of horseshit and apples where you must drive everywhere.

He misses the pastrami at the deli on the street full of Greeks.

Now they wind their way up Willow Fork Road, looking for a house that doesn’t seem to be there.

“This address she gave us is correct?”

Sergei speaks English because Georgi spends too long searching for his words in Russian and this is annoying.

Georgi answers him in Russian anyway.

“I don’t know. She says so, but his address is not listed. The Mustang is known; the… what is the word? sales record has been found. On the Internet. And this color, blue-green and bright.”

Sergei says the Russian word for turquoise.

Georgi switches to English.

“Yes, biryuzoviy. It’s an unusual color, and an unusual car. Look,” he says, showing him a cut-out page from an auto sales magazine, a 1968 Mustang circled in red pen, a tiny skull drawn badly near it.

“It’s a nice car,” Sergei says.

They come to the end of the road, execute a three-point turn, and go back.

And then, good luck!

The turquoise Mustang appears from a tree-hidden drive that seems to lead to no house; it has to be the same car. And it is a magnificent beast. It takes a right onto the road and tears out, using its big, Vietnam-era motor to vault down the winding road. The motor is louder than those in modern cars; it sounds powerful, like a predator. And classic. The man who owns such a car will be good with his hands, a good worker. It occurs to Sergei that he may like the man in the Mustang more than the nephew of his old associate.

But a promise is a promise.

They follow the Mustang out of Dog Neck Harbor all the way past Fair Haven, where it pulls off 104A and parks behind a barn that has been converted into an auto garage across the street from silos. North Star. Nice name.

The driver has already gone into the garage when they pull around.

“Remember,” Georgi says, “he has long black hair like an Indian and he is thin.”

“Am I a man you must say things twice to?”

“Sorry.”

“Let me see your gun.”

Georgi looks around, then removes his snub-nosed .38.

Sergei takes it from him, opens the cylinder, spins it, his heart gladdening at the sight of brass. Shell casings are his favorite jewelry.

“This is ready. Try not to shoot me.”

He now pulls out his own Makarov, flips down the safety, puts it back into his coat.

They get out.

Open the door, walk in like they know what they’re doing. Sneaking is for idiots; people who look as though they have a purpose rarely get questioned.

They find themselves in a back room, an employee room of sorts, where a number of heavily tattooed Mexicans sit around a table littered with tequila bottles and half-eaten plates smeared with brown and green sauces.

The place smells like chocolate, cinnamon, and garlic.

Now a voice behind them.

Mexican accent.

“Keep your hands out of your pockets.”

They do.

“Why were you following me?”

“I like Mustangs,” Sergei says. “I was hoping that one might be for sale. Is it?”

Chancho grunts.

The men at the table look at the Russians with eyes like brown stone. Several of them have their hands ominously under the table.

“Why were you coming in the back door to talk about buying a car?”

“That’s the way you came in. We wanted to talk to you.”

Chancho grunts.

Gonzo walks in, sees guns, puts his hands over his eyes like the see-no-evil monkey and walks briskly out.

“Why the pistolas? You know, it’s not nice to bring guns to the back door to ask about buying a car.”

“Please,” Georgi starts.

Sergei says, in Russian, “If you beg I will shoot you myself.”

Then, in English, “This was our mistake. I apologize for disturbing you. With your permission, we will leave now and we will not return.”

“Give me your wallets,” Chancho says. “And put your guns on the table. Like slow, though. Super slow.”

They do.

Chancho looks in the wallets, grunts.

“Lotta money in these wallets. If I still stole I’d be real happy about these wallets.”

The Russians stay quiet.

“But I don’t steal, not no more,” he says. “Not money, anyway.”

He takes the driver’s licenses out of both wallets, gives the wallets back, always behind the Russians, and they do not look at him.

Now he tosses the driver’s licenses on the table. Georgi’s lands in pico de gallo.

“My cousins, they gonna keep those. They could be fake, but I don’t think so. If something bad happens to me, something real bad’s gonna happen to you. ¿Comprende, pendejos?”

“Ponymayu,” Sergei says, nodding.

The Mexicans walk them outside.

Chancho asks them to open the car doors.

They do.

Chancho pulls out a large, brutal-looking knife and cuts long slashes in the upholstery. He does this impassively, taking his time, like fucking up car seats is just another service they offer at North Star, like it’s something he wants to do well.

He motions for them to get back in their cars.

They do.

“Adios, pendejos. And don’t come back.”

Before the disgraced Volkswagen pulls out of the North Star Garage, Sergei Alexandrovich Rozhkov looks at Georgi.

“You let a woman tell you what to do, and this is what happens.”

“But…”

“Be quiet. Misha drowned. You’re an idiot. I’m going back to Brooklyn.”

66

Night.

A new moon, the sky and the lake beneath it as black as oil.

The woman stands naked atop the cabin, naked but for a canvas bag slung over her shoulder. She readies two bottles, vodka bottles now filled to the neck with blood.

One contains rooster’s blood.

One does not.

She takes a swig from that one, then empties both into a bucket from which a birch broom juts. She ties the empty bottles together and hangs them around her neck. She uses the broom to drizzle and flick the blood on her roof, knowing she’ll have flies tomorrow, but there’s nothing for it. This is how it’s done. She doesn’t have to coat the whole roof—there isn’t enough for that anyway—but she must not leave two handsbreadths unbloodied.

This is an old spell, and the old spells are particular.

She walks backward toward the ladder, walking the bucket with her, sweeping behind so she doesn’t get any on the bottoms of her feet. Every yard or so she rests the broom, takes hen feathers from her shoulder sack and sprinkles these on the roof, repeating a verse in Russian and concentrating on what she wants.

The bottles knock together tenderly sometimes, reminding her how testes, breasts, and ovaries—all the genitive organs—come in twos. Three is the number for gating, invocation, and killing. Four is for protection and weather. But two is for creation.

Two babes, a boy and a girl.

Two chickens, a rooster and a hen.

Down the ladder now, and she gives the Man Who Will Not Look At Her the bottles. He puts them in the garbage bag with the bones. The hen and rooster bones, and the bones that are not hen or rooster bones.

And the clothes.

The little clothes.

In the bag that will be rowed out to the lake.

She stands now on the porch watching the Cold Man row.

Moroz.

The Man Who Will Not Look At Her will not row—he will go back to his room hooded like a bird and sitting somewhere between sleep and waking. He learned quickly, hoods himself obediently, goes to town to run errands and never dares to run. Knows the Cold Man would come for him, and for his. He took to it so naturally because he is a coward. Not like the thief.

Things are beginning to move against the thief.

He is strong now, not like then.

He has killed the Baba in the woods, or caused her to be killed.

His bitch in the water killed sweet Misha.

His house is full of tricks.

He has friends, many friends.

First, the friends.

Then the fear will come to him, weaken him.

And then she will close his eyes.

Take back what is hers.

He hid himself, but that magic is waning.

She knows his town, even what road.

He has spread himself too thin with other spells.

She will find him soon.

Tonight’s magic must sleep, but it will awaken when the moon waxes fat and full.

“Wait a moment,” she says. “The potatoes.”

The Man Who Will Not Look At Her is tying up the bag, putting it in the boat. He hears her, says,

“Potatoes? Do you need potatoes?”

“Yes. That might be enough for him. You will go tomorrow and find me a bucket of potatoes. Other things, too.”

“Of course.”

“Are you hungry?”

He shakes his head, looking at his feet.

“You’ll have to eat.”

He shakes his head again.

A tear falls on his feet.

“Go to your kennel.”

He leaves, still looking down, his shoulders folded in on themselves.

She smells the air.

Smiles.

Garlic, rosemary, wine, black pepper.

And meat.

She salivates.

The first roast is done.

67

Andrew drives Salvador to the North Star Garage, where Radha’s car waits to be driven north to Chicago. Salvador will drive it in a day, needing neither rest nor sleep, looking to all but the very luminous like a handsome young Latino. And the very luminous will be used to seeing strange things; will not think much of seeing a portrait of Salvador Dalí swiveling in the window of a Mini Cooper, checking the blind spot twice as it changes lanes. He will return through Radha’s shower, perhaps in time for lunch tomorrow.

Chancho shows Andrew the final touch. Zebra skin seats. He had seen on her Facebook page her post about her new zebra-skin pillow, how much she liked that particular pelt.

She’s going to squee.

Chancho looks ashen, distracted.

“You still thinking about the Russians, Chanch?”

“Them? No. One was a pussy, the other didn’t care. Not enough to tangle with us. They ain’t comin’ back.”

Andrew is thinking about the Russians, though. He thinks it might be prudent to acquire a pendant that turns bullets, a lovely bit of sorcery made from Kevlar, lead, silver, armadillo blood, and the ground tooth of someone who died of natural causes, but the user who makes these lives in Rio de Janeiro and doesn’t care for tapes of the dead or cars.

What the Brazilian wants is a cloak of feathers that will change him into a hawk. Andrew could make such a cloak, but it would take him weeks, maybe months. Birds are hard, and this is not his specialty. The user in Brazil doesn’t know Andrew and has a reputation for being kind of a prick—very QPQ. Quid pro quo. Reputation is everything between users, so they tend to trust each other. Not bullet guy. QPQ. He wants payment upon delivery. And Andrew wants the protection pendant stat.

The best shapeshifter, the one who taught Andrew, lives near Québec; she could make the hawk cloak in days, probably has one or two ready for trade. He doesn’t know what she might want, other than a really mighty youth potion, and those are in high, high demand. She has asked for stone spells before, though. If so, back to Michael Rudnick, who is sequestered with Anneke until the full moon. Luckily, the Québécoise trusts other users, knows Andrew, and would be willing to wait. Unluckily, she’s old, very old-school, and doesn’t use the Internet. Thinks it’s evil. So he’ll have to call her on her landline. Again. She didn’t answer last night, but that’s not unusual; she shifts and spends days at a time as an animal. It’s widely thought she’s close to opting out permanently, rebooting into a young critter and spending her last years on earth flying or running on all fours.

There’s a man in the city who knows about birds and shapeshifting, but he’s old, too.

And he helped Andrew once before.

The kind of help you can’t pay back, and you can’t ask other favors after.

Back to Chancho and his ashen face.

“What’s wrong?”

“Saw something messed up this morning.”

“You’ve seen plenty of messed-up shit.”

“Not like this.”

“Not like what?”

“You wanna see?”

“No. Yes.”

They walk through the employee room. An AK-47 leans in the corner looking insouciant.

“State police brought it in; I’m supposed to clean it up. They took the muerto, left the deer. Effing big effer. Look at this pinché deer.”

First he’s looking at the car.

The crumpled, dirty mess of a car.

Now he looks at the beast stoppering the hole where the windshield should be.

It is an effing big effer of a pinché deer.

Two hundred twenty-five pounds or better. Fifteen points or more on the rack, if the rack were intact. But it’s not. It’s through the windshield of the Saturn that clearly also hit a tree. The stag is practically fused into the car.

“You can see where they had to cut the poor dude out on this side, cut part of the deer’s horns off, too, where they were through him. All the way through him. Look at this seat.”

Andrew suppresses the urge to gag.

“But this is what I don’t get…”

Now he points at a hole in the deer’s rear shoulder, another flowering out of the back of the neck.

“Bullets. Homeboy shot this deer. Probably through the glass, but the glass is gone. They took the gun, too. He had it in his hand. They asked for pliers to get it out, that’s how tight he had it.”

Andrew tries to process this.

“Yeah, I know. Messed up. But look at this…”

His strong, brown finger indicates a broken headlight, blood, fur.

“And this.”

Muddy hoofprints on the roof, scratches on the door.

“More than one deer,” I say.

“Yeah, and it’s the tree that crunched in the front end, not the deer. Not this deer.”

“He didn’t hit this deer?”

“Nah. He hit another deer. Wrecked his car. Then deer come along… Maybe more than one. Look… hoof-ding, hoof-ding. Coming out of the woods and going at the car, looks like. Then the big boy came like a cannonball, ran through the effin’ windshield so fast it broke it and put its horns through his heart. Even though he shot it, shot it good. Look.”

He points again at the lethal bullet wounds.

“This is brujo stuff, isn’t it?”

Andrew touches the car.

“Isn’t it?”

Andrew nods.

Brujo stuff of the first order.

Slavic forest magic.

And very, very strong.

Then it happens.

A young man appears, pale, speared by the deer, writhing in his seat. He wears aviator sunglasses; blood comes out of his mouth, makes bubbles every time he says the word please. He says it several times.

Chancho can’t see it, is still examining the hoof and antler gouges in the Saturn’s finish as if they were a rude hieroglyph that might explain how such things happened in the world.

The ghost starts to swell up.

Take it easy, Andrew thinks. I see you.

THEN HELP ME

The pallid young man puts the phantom of his gun in his mouth, pulls the trigger impotently, coughs blood all over the gun, and cries.

Help me

How?

It shivers. Points the gun at him. Spasms its fist as it pulls the trigger. Nothing happens, but it shoots Andrew several times, then Chancho, then itself.

Get Them.

Who?

Them, it wheezes.

Becomes frustrated that Andrew doesn’t understand, begins to get tired. New ghosts get tired easily.

It vomits black liquid all over itself and fades away.

The dead deer jerks, kicks.

Chancho jumps, crosses himself.

The stag deflates a little, lies very still, won’t move again.

Andrew rubs his temples.

“Headache?”

Andrew smiles, shakes his head, closes his eyes.

“I’m in trouble, Chancho. Bad trouble.”

Chancho nods.

“I told you not to eff with this stuff anymore. ¡Cabron!”

Chancho hammer-fists himself in the thigh, looks angrily at Andrew.

“This is from before, Chancho. From before I met you.”

“Yeah, but you’re still in it. Don’t you see? It’s why they can get to you, still. Get out of it.”

“It’s not like that.”

Chancho throws his arms up.

“No, it’s like this,” he says, indicating the wreck, the improbable deer, the bloody seat.

Andrew nods.

“I’ll stay away from you until this is over. After I help you clean this up. This isn’t your mess.”

“Nah, go home. You’ll get in the way. And don’t stay away after. Just quit with the books and the chingada brujerías.”

Andrew laughs a little, still rubbing his temples.

Looks at Chancho.

“I’ve noticed that you say very bad things in Spanish but not English. Why is that?”

Chancho pauses.

“Because I’m American now. Them other words are in my blood. I can’t help it. But I got to start over with American.”

“Ah,” the magus says, clearly unconvinced.

The bigger man walks over, encircles Andrew with a mighty arm.

“I’ll ask the boys to stay around,” Chancho says. “I’ll pray, too. Get some Jésus down here.”

If only.

Andrew doesn’t know if there is a Jésus, and, if there is, whether he was God or man.

If he was a man, though, he must have been a user.

Water into wine sounds really.

Fucking.

Good.

68

Early evening.

The doorbell rings.

As Salvador is engaged in the garden, Andrew opens the door himself to find Arthur Madden and Mrs. Simpson standing on his porch, Mr. Madden panting somewhat more than usual, Mrs. Simpson smiling broadly and holding a paper plate covered in tinfoil.

“Good evening, Mr. Blankenship,” she says, her massive, jacketed bosom forming a sort of brooched cliff. “Sorry to drop by so late. I hope we’re not disturbing you,”

She’s doing the talking so Arthur can catch his breath.

“Not at all.”

He thinks quickly, trying to remember if he has anything controversial lying about in the living or dining room.

He thinks not.

“Would you like to come in?”

Now Andrew sees why the older Jehovah’s Witness is huffing and puffing so much—a produce basket and two full grocery bags stand on the porch behind them. The climb up the drive is nearly too much for Arthur without sacks to carry, so these really tested the poor geezer.

“Oh, we couldn’t impose on your hospitality so close to suppertime,” she says.

A second and a half ticks by like an awkward musical pause.

“We were just in the neighborhood and thought we’d bring you some leftovers.”

Leftovers?

Andrew attempts several polite refusals, but Mrs. Simpson is expert at parrying these. She wears him down. He takes the plate, peeps under the foil.

Looks like pot roast, creamed corn, and coleslaw.

“It’s pot roast,” she says. “I made it myself, so you’ll have to eat it all up.”

“Mmmm-mm,” he says. “Well, thank you.”

Arthur has enough wind back in him to speak.

“We also brought you some groceries.”

“Mr… .”

“Madden, it’s okay.”

“I really don’t feel comfortable taking groceries from you. I have plenty of food, and I’m sure you can think of someone in need who would love to get these.”

“Well, here’s the situation, Andrew. I am too tired to carry these bags back down your drive, and, may the Lord forgive me, too proud to let you or Mrs. Simpson do it. So you are just. Going. To have. To take. The groceries. Call it a favor to me.”

This guy could charm the mustache off a gay trucker.

What the hell is going on?

“What’s the occasion?”

“Call it a random act of kindness. Have you seen that bumper sticker? Perform something-something-beauty and random acts of kindness?”

“All right,” Andrew says. “You win.”

“I usually do. I mean, is this stuff that you will eat?”

“I’m sure it is.”

Andrew peeks in the first bag.

First item, weirdly, a ziplock bag holding about half a dozen pickled eggs.

A block of sharp cheddar.

Canned goods.

Tomatoes, peas, chicken soup.

Creamed corn.

“And don’t you worry about a thing. I know things may seem tough now, but with the Lord’s help, all trials are temporary, and all burdens bearable.”

He peeks in the second bag.

Rice. Mac and cheese. Dry spaghetti noodles in their long, coffinish boxes.

“Trials?”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Mr. Blankenship. This recession is very real, and jobs are hard to come by, and hard to keep. A good many of our congregation are also unexpectedly seeking new employment, and I understand you’ve been off the job for a while.”

Andrew pauses. Looks at Arthur. Looks back down at the produce basket and then pulls the cloth off the top, revealing a prodigious heap of potatoes.

And a mirror.

A small hand mirror.

Sitting on top of the potatoes.

He sees his own reflection in it.

A spell.

His heart skips a beat.

He throws the cloth back over it as if covering a snake.

“She said you might be reluctant to accept help, but I assured her…”

“She?” Andrew says a little too loudly.

Heart skidding.

“Why yes. Your mother’s friend.”

“My mother’s friend who?”

“You know, she didn’t tell me her name. The Polish lady.”

“Russian,” corrects Mrs. Simpson.

“That’s right, Russian. Very nice. She said she was just speaking with your mother…”

My mother’s dead.

“… and told her she was bringing you potatoes from her own garden because homegrown food tastes best. And promised your mother you would visit her soon.”

“Forgive me, but you have to go now.”

“Pardon?”

“Please go,” he says, gently pushing Arthur just a little, then calling “Salvador!”

“Well, yes, all right, but if there’s anything we can do to…”

“SALVADOR!”

Andrew takes the mirror from under the cloth, breaks it violently on his porch.

Mrs. Simpson takes her colleague by the elbow and begins to lead him down the long drive.

“Good night, Mr. Blankenship,” she says. “God bless.”

Salvador comes trotting around the side of the house, holding a pair of pruning shears, his prosthetic knees smeared with dirt. Some sort of weed is caught in the wicker of his left arm.

His framed head cocks to one side, awaiting instructions.

Before Andrew can issue any, however, the produce basket turns over on its own and the potatoes roll and bounce away from it like so many tailless rats escaping a ship.

Their paths cone away from Andrew and diverge; he dives, grabs one, but then it flips out of his hand and keeps rolling.

“Find out where they’re going!” he shouts at Salvador.

The wicker man obeys, trailing the biggest group of them.

Andrew follows the one he grabbed.

It heads east, into the patch of woods near his house. He sees others moving in the low brush; to his left, one stops rolling, begins spinning in place. Burrows underground with a distinctive skirring noise.

He hears this happening all around him.

“Oh shit.”

His does it, too, as soon as it gets half a dozen yards away from him.

Planting themselves.

I don’t know this spell.

I don’t like this spell.

Salvador finds him, points urgently, in several directions.

“Okay, okay. Thanks, boy. First, get me a shovel. No, a spade. No, I’ll get the spade, you pile firewood in the pit.”

Salvador tilts his head and moves his thumb and forefinger as if measuring an inch.

How much?

“All of it.”

69

This was Andrew explaining fireglass to Anneke last month when he let her watch him make it:

“Any glass will work, but I like yellow glass so I know what it is. This wineglass will do fine. Smoky amber like. You break it. When you enchant it, you’ll instruct the pieces to fold in on themselves, become smooth and handleable, like little stones. So when you first break it, gather just the bigger shards, and for God’s sake don’t cut yourself—if you make fireglass with your blood in it, the fire will try to find you, will creep out of the fireplace toward you, on the carpet, up your clothes. You get the point.”

“Could you kill someone with it? Like put their blood in a lightbulb, turn it into fireglass, and put it in their bathroom? Instruct the glass to ignite not on a voice command but when the filament gets hot?”

He just looks at her.

Gets a little more frightened of her.

Falls a little more in love with her.

70

Andrew runs to the barn, grabs a few fireglass stones from their vase, runs back, and throws them beneath the first load of wood Salvador has stacked teepee-shaped. He says bhastrika and they jet flame and hot air like small torches until they are spent and a good fire blazes in the pit. He passes Salvador on his way with another double armload of wood, tells him, “Be careful!” and runs for a spade and gloves.

And a flashlight.

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting late.

He finds the first one by its telltale mound of dirt.

Uses the long-handled, leaf-bladed garden spade to lever it up.

It’s bigger than it was, just slightly bigger than a big potato, and has sprouted tendrils.

He fishes it up with his hand, wary that it might sprout thorns or something.

At exactly that moment, it sprouts thorns.

“Fuck!”

He drops it instantly, only just manages not to get jabbed as one of the spines catches and breaks its tip off in his glove.

He quickly pinches out and flings down the point.

The thing rolls back into its hole, starts using its tendrils as sweepers, covering itself with dirt.

“You little fucker.”

He jabs at it with the spade, finds its texture not wholly potato-like, tougher on the outside, slimier inside.

Probably turning animal, probably full of blood.

It writhes away from the jabbing spade but can’t escape. At last he strikes it hard enough to make it rupture, and bleed it does. It’s still writhing and dripping, like a spiny liver or other organ, as he waddle-runs it around back to the fire.

He braces himself for a sound.

It shrieks when he throws it in, high and infantile, though not exactly human. Outraged that it never had a chance to do its job.

To kill me.

But how?

It was growing.

The fire is huge now, and here comes Salvador with another armload of split logs, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, literally ready to throw all the wood in.

“That’s enough, Sal.”

Sal puts the wood down.

“Help me find them now.”

He holds the spade up; the portrait head inclines slightly, the automaton’s articulated hand touching the spade’s blade almost tenderly, as if it were a flower.

The fire casting amber light on the painting’s glossy finish.

Dalí’s nostrils appear to widen just a bit as Salvador takes in the scent.

His wicker hips waggle just a little.

Smelling things is so deliciously doglike.

All right, you anticipated the thorns and the blood and the shrieking. You have her number, know how she thinks. What’s next? Prepare yourself. The next one will be bigger.

Salvador points at the ground where a quartet of tendrils are carefully smoothing down the mound the thing made burying itself.

Clever, awful little things.

Andrew spades up the dirt.

This one is the size of a small squash, not a potato.

It starts burrowing farther down.

He spades the hell out of it until it, too, bleeds, burbles, and weakens.

No thorns on this one. Could they all be different?

Now a tiny mouth, like a baby’s, forms, bites feebly at the blade.

He grimaces, strikes a few more times.

Ruins the tiny mouth.

Pulps it all.

Shovels that out and takes it to the fire.

Have to work faster, they’re growing.

The next one, the size of a cat, has enough tendrils to try to fight him for the spade. It loses.

The sun has gone down.

Think!

The next one must be carried into the fire in a bucket.

When the blisters begin to weep and sting within his gloves, Salvador digs.

The one after burrows farther down before he spades the life from it, and he gets an idea.

When the next one goes deeper, Andrew flings fireglass into the hole.

Bhastrika!

Fire gouts up from the hole, licks Andrew’s jeans.

The potato-thing screams and dies.

His nonluminous neighbors don’t hear a scream.

They hear a train.

The work goes on into the night.

He digs them up, finds abominations ever larger, stronger, harder to look at. He burns them, they shriek or squeal, he shovels out the smoldering mess and buckets it over to the bigger fire.

The last one Salvador finds is as large as a bear cub.

When the magus shines the light down into the hole, eyes shine up at him. He pauses, stunned. The eyes look human. It starts covering itself back up.

He runs for the house, gets his revolver, a .357 Smith and Wesson, and a fire extinguisher. Salvador is losing the garden spade to it, holding the light on it with one hand, clutching the spade with the other, digging furrows with his planted prosthetic heels.

A whitish vine has snaked around one of Sal’s legs.

He’s whimpering and growling.

Andrew levels his magnum’s six-inch barrel at the thing in the hole.

It blinks at him.

I wonder if it knows.

It lets go of the spade, covers its face with the larger tendrils, tendrils that look suspiciously like hands.

Andrew fans a hand over the gun, imagines a kid banging on a metal garbage can lid. When he fires, that’s what the neighbors will hear.

I wonder if it’s going to say please.

It says please, or tries to, its mouth full of dirt.

“Prease.”

It sounds a lot like the ghost in the car.

Slavic forest magic.

Very, very strong.

It almost has a hand-tendril around the barrel when Andrew recovers from its mild charm.

The trash can lid bangs six times.

A train whistles.

The thing in the hole mostly dies.

“Stand back, Sal.”

The wizard throws so many fireglass stones into the hole that when he says bhastrika the flame burps up, makes a ring that lights brush and lower branches.

He uses the extinguisher.

Turns around to find Nadia looking at him, pleased with him.

It is near two A.M. when he satisfies himself that he has found them all. Salvador covers the whole property. They trespass onto the neighbor’s land, Nadia holding the light, all of them invisible; if they are spotted, they will look like errant fireflies. This spell strains the already weary magus, but it must be done.

Slogging up to his front door, he sees a raccoon running off, dragging the bag of pickled eggs.

Just a raccoon.

Just eggs.

This strikes him really funny and he laughs the way people do on the subway sometimes when they’ve stopped caring who’s looking at them.

Just as suddenly, he stops laughing, remembers what he was just doing. Shudders to think what those things might have grown into.

Before the shower, he looks at himself in the mirror over the sink.

He looks at the wall behind his shoulder, happy it’s just wall.

Happy there’s nobody behind him.

Is the old witch really dead?

What the fuck is after me?

He is filthy, his hair flecked with something like potato, his skin stippled with blood.

And then there’s his eye.

He has popped the blood vessel in his sclera again.

It hurts.

He decides to let himself get a little older, at least until he has his strength back. Gray runs down his Indian-black hair in several fine skeins, like runs in a nylon stocking. The lines around his mouth deepen. He looks fortyish now, feels sixty. But his eye stops hurting, clears up.

His muscles are so sore he can barely turn the knobs, but the shower is good. Grime and blood run down across the Italian tiles and down the drain.

He’s watching the last of the night’s dirt swirl into the plumbing when he sees her long, pale feet step just behind his. The rusalka can’t resist the water. The smell of deep lake and tide overwhelms him, but seems oddly pleasant after the high, seminal smell of the potatoes. Odd how their scent changed as they grew, became bloodier, more mammalian.

He doesn’t look at her, just her feet. Probably a size ten? The men in her family must have had gunboats. He remembers stories she told him about their boots, the high, black boots of her uncles who worked in the New York workshop where they painted silk ties. She was a teenager when they fled the revolution, but the clomp of those boots had reassured her, had made her feel comforted and homesick all at once, certain at least that she was part of a tribe. Russian intelligentsia. People who wanted to keep their nice homes, couldn’t pretend to love the wild-eyed prophets the bastard Lenin sent out like dirty angels to raise the farmers up in anger, making demands, standing on things to talk.

So they fought alongside the whites.

The losers.

But civilized losers.

Romans fleeing before Vandals.

Romanovs dying in the yard.

The first time he’s connected those words, Roman, Romanov.

Like tsar comes from Caesar.

Did Nadia ever see the tsar?

Who cares?

She drowns people.

They say please and she drowns them.

And I fuck her.

He feels soap slide across his hips, his navel.

She touches him more intimately, takes it in her hand, slicks her thumb expertly over the head.

He moves away.

“Not tonight,” he says.

“When?”

Sounds like Venn?

“I don’t know. Maybe when I forget that ship full of dead people you keep. Or those things in the holes out there. Fucking awful, it’s all so awful.”

“You want I should go?”

He pauses.

She starts to leave.

She’s a monster.

But I am, too.

As long as I do this.

“No,” he says.

“Good. You shouldn’t sleep alone anymore.”

He shakes his head no, as if in agreement.

“In fact, I won’t let you,” she says in Russian.

She dries him off and puts him in bed.

He lets her do that.

She tries again to do the other thing, but he curls up into a ball.

Please, it said.

With dirt in its mouth.

And then I shot it.

He doesn’t sleep so much as passes out.

She remembers the part of herself that used to care about more than fucking and swimming and killing and eating fish cold in the lake.

She enfolds the sleeping magus in her arms, remembers other warm arms that held her once, long ago.

Clinically notes that this is where she would cry if she did that.

71

Andrew wakes to the sound of Salvador barking.

He had been having a particularly nasty dream in which malign and malformed versions of himself were trying to get into the house.

“The dog is barking,” he says to Sarah.

But it’s not Sarah, warm Sarah with her scent of sandalwood.

It’s a foul-smelling woman with cold feet.

And Salvador isn’t a dog anymore.

Except when someone’s trying to get into the house.

Because that’s part of the spell.

Glass breaks.

“Oh fuck!”

Andrew and the rusalka both sit upright.

The closest thing Andrew ever saw to this was Night of the Living Dead, when the zombies surround the house and stupidly batter their way in. He’s not sure how many there are, but they are most certainly surrounding the house, and one has broken the window in the kitchen door.

How did it break the window?

I charmed these windows against breaking.

Did I drain the magic using other spells?

The thing is now fumbling with the knob, just about to open the door.

Salvador, a border collie again, but bigger, more the size of a German shepherd or a big wolf, prepares to lunge.

Gets confused.

Because what steps through the door is his master.

Or, rather, what his master would look like mutated, or slightly melted, naked, dumb and strong. The thing coming through the door is rippling with muscles.

And so are the ones behind it.

This is why Salvador missed them.

Their smell changed.

When they smelled like me, Sal couldn’t find them in the ground anymore.

How to fight them?

Room of skins.

“Sal! That’s not me! Get ’em!” Andrew says. “Don’t let them get around you!”

Salvador knocks down the first one, shakes its arm.

The second one hammer-fists the dog hard enough to make him yelp and let go; the huge dog beats a retreat into the living room.

Andrew sends Nadia out the way she came, by the front door, but she doesn’t go alone.

She grabs a not-Andrew by the hair and runs with it for the lake.

The rest of them mob in.

“Don’t let them get around you,” one says clumsily.

“Get around you!” one echoes.

Andrew runs into the hall, into the room of skins.

Shoves his thumb under his skin, unzips himself, working as fast as he can.

Good thing you don’t drink.

You couldn’t move, think fast enough drunk.

Move!

Think!

“Don’t let ’em get around you,” one says, pounding on the door now. Pounding hard. That’s an oak door, solid, but the frame can’t take much more of that.

BAM! It goes, and the room shudders.

“Don’t let them get ’round you!” one says from the kitchen, and lots of things break.

They’re trashing the fucking house, hurry.

His skin is off.

He doesn’t usually have to do this fast.

He opens the wardrobe on the right.

Knows which one.

It burns a lot of magic fuel, though.

“Don’t let ’em get around you!!!”

BAM!

(shudder)

“’Round you, ’round you!”

Now out in the living room, a fight in earnest.

Growling, snarling.

Get ’em, Sal!

The flayed man is about to put it on.

It’s a heavy skin.

He remembers to open the window.

One looms in front of the window.

“Don’t let them get around you!” it says, lunges for Andrew.

He steps back, sees its fingernails flash, dirty from clawing its way out of the ground.

It picks up its foot to come in, but a fast, white arm is around its neck. Its eyes bug, a pretty face terrible behind it framed in red dreadlocks, her teeth gritted in pleasure. She giggles while she runs with it, bigger than her, but it might as well be a doll.

My friend the monster.

Like me.

Andrew picks up the skin again, is about to put it on.

Can’t resist while he still has a mouth, but has to hurry—soon you start to feel your skinlessness and that REALLY hurts, your whole body an open blister.

But he does say it.

Yells it through the door.

“Whoever made me is a giant asshole!”

On with the skin now.

His favorite one.

Oh, it feels good.

Three of them have gathered in the room of skins.

One stomps on the pelt of their father.

Two have cornered Sal, are beating him and getting savaged in return. The lake-woman has drowned two and is loping up, hoping to take a third.

One has gone upstairs.

“Whoever made me is a giant ASSHOLE!” one says, kicking in the door to the room of skins. The other yells, “Asshole!” in agreement. They are supposed to kill their father. But this room is empty, except for a human pelt that looks strangely like their father.

In the living room, the dog fights hard but has been injured.

A broken foreleg.

One of them gets an idea, sacrifices itself, lets the dog tear its belly open so its brother can grab the dog’s neck.

Fighting hurts, but it’s better than being in the ground, which is all they have to compare it to.

The one who got torn open is dying but still kicking at the dog.

The other is about to kill the dog by twisting its head.

Although it senses the dog has already died before.

If the dog dies again, the magic in it will go out; the other thing it is will not move again.

That would be good.

Except that it can’t feel its arms or legs anymore because something has it by the neck, yes? Yes. Something much stronger than the dog has broken its neck.

It sees a piece of the thing, consults its father’s murky bag of facts.

Dog?

No.

Tiger.

Bengal tiger, native to India.

They can get up to ten feet long, tail included.

This one is ten feet long.

“Whoever made me… giant asshole,” it complains.

And dies.

The tiger goes through the three in the room of skins like they’re nothing. They are nothing next to the five-hundred-pound cat, which twists heads, rakes out insides, and bites off limbs with the ruthlessness of a wild animal and the tactical savvy of a man. It takes less than a minute.

Worrisome that one of them had the man-pelt in its hand, but Andrew-in-the-tiger will think about that later.

Thinking like a man is harder in the tiger; tiger essence is truly dominant, and much less manlike than bear is.

Andrew-in-the tiger licks his gory chops, yawns a big, tongue-curling yawn (it has been a very long night, after all), licks the injured dog in the living room, who licks him back, and then smells with his tiger nose.

One more.

Upstairs.

In the library!

Must kill it!

Big books there!

Up the stairs.

Library door is open.

The last not-Andrew stands there, dirty and nude, looking around, not touching anything.

Its eyes shine blue.

It isn’t like the others.

When it sees the tiger stalk in, it smiles.

The tiger was about to launch itself on the little monkey-thing, but something about its smile, its luminous blue eyes makes the tiger stop.

Andrew-in-the-tiger growls, though it feels doubt.

Like it hasn’t felt since it met an elephant in 1913, the day it was shot.

“Congratulations,” not-Andrew says.

Andrew’s voice, but thicker.

Slavic accent.

The tiger’s growl rolls on, continuous.

“You passed the test. Now the fight begins. You are a very pretty man. I wonder if you are too pretty to fight? Pretty or ugly, here is what you have to look forward to.”

It reaches down now and, with some difficulty, yanks off its own testicles.

Begins to eat them.

Holy shit! NOOOO! Andrew-in-the-tiger thinks.

Tiger-around-Andrew thinks I was going to do that!

The tiger pounces.

Finishes things.

Drags it out of the library.

Down the stairs.

Outside.

“Oh no,” Andrew says, looking in the mirror.

Even in the yellow brass he can see how bad it is.

“Oh Christ.”

72

“What happened to you?”

This is Bob, just outside the church before the AA meeting.

His normally huge smile has been shelved, his twinkling eyes now radiating sincere concern. A few of the others hover near.

“I got mugged.”

He looks like he got mugged, all right.

On his way back from getting run over by an ice-cream truck.

“Where?” the bottle-red mom asks.

“Syracuse. Clinton Street.”

They all nod.

When the others walk away, Bob says, “If you need anything, and I mean anything, don’t be shy about asking me. Okay?”

“Thanks, Bob.”

That night is an open meeting. Friends, the curious, anybody who wants to show up can. Not the best night for Andrew to come in looking like a lopsided eggplant who ran halfway out of hair dye, but he needs this tonight. Now. He had slept all day, nearly got talked into going to the emergency room by Chancho, decided against it, but then Chancho mentioned the meeting and Andrew had nodded, holding frozen peas against the side of his face and drooling.

The bruising was wretched, covered what seemed like a third of his body. Getting his cast-off epidermis stomped against the hardwood floor by a Neanderthal version of himself had spared him broken bones and damaged connective tissue, but when he suited back up he started bleeding in six places and the swelling was horrible. His left eye swelled shut, the right one nearly so. He looked a bit like the raccoon he had seen running with the bag of eggs.

First he had seen to Salvador, who swiftly ran out of alarm-triggered dog-magic and changed back into wicker. That had been hard to watch, but then so had a lot of things. At least a wicker arm was easier to fix than a dog’s broken foreleg.

Then Sal helped him, got him ice, a bag of frozen peas and ibuprofen, sat with him rotating the ice and peas.

He watched Nadia drag one lumpy, dead Andrew after another out into the lake, far into the lake.

Tiger-killed bodies make a big mess.

Salvador mopped first, and that took some time. Then he spread stain-removing goop on the oriental runner rugs in the hallway, only one of which would probably be salvageable. In the kitchen, he gathered the broken shards of the coffeepot, plates, and glassware, trashed the wrecked blender, as well as the coffee table and several nonmagical statues. He had just been duct-taping plastic sheeting over the kitchen door window when Chancho came over.

Made a face when Salvador opened the door on Andrew.

Some at the AA meeting had made the same face when he walked in. He felt like the Elephant Man.

The looky-loos are thinking I’ve been in a car wreck, gotten in a drunken fight. Okay, I have done those things, but not last night. It’s okay. Let them look. Let them think they’re not as bad as me, therefore they’re just fine, because if you’re still playing that game you probably haven’t hit bottom yet, won’t make it stick. Some can, but not most.

I almost died last night.

Would have died if I had a bottle of wine in me.

That was.

Awful.

I need to get out of this.

But first I have to get ready for her.

The niece, the relative.

She’s so fucking strong.

And she found me.

How?

His eyes widen as far as they can in their catcher’s mitt of bruises.

The Jehovah’s fucking Witnesses.

She saw them canvassing, maybe they even ding-donged her wherever she is and she charmed them.

Got them to deliver her magic payload.

It’s only starting.

I could run, but where?

She found me here, she’ll find me again, only next time I won’t be in my own house, on my land. Terroir isn’t just important for grapes; it’s important for users. We take strength from our own land; it’s why so many here have at least a pinch of Indian blood.

Flee or dig in?

I could abandon my books, give up magic, go back to Ohio. Or anywhere. She’d like that… to take my library without a fight, then find me cowering in Enon and pinch me between her thumbnails like a flea. Crucify me and hang me upside down at the Apple Butter Festival as a big Fuck you to Christ, Ohio, and apple pie. I could fight her on the Adena mound, but with what? Dead porcupine guy wouldn’t help me; I peed on his grave.

Chancho nudges Andrew, whispers in his ear.

“Hey, brujo, you dreamin’? At least look like you care—this guy’s talkin’ about his mom who beat him up.”

A guy with a curly red frizz of hair and one of those necks that looks like it has an extra joint in it,

a neck like the pipe under a sink

is talking about his mom who would huff gas and drink cheap gin and sometimes work him over with a toilet plunger, but he got away from her and went to college, where he, too, started drinking and found out he couldn’t stop.

Andrew writes on his coffee napkin.

Chancho grunts, then writes back.

Andrew flips the napkin.

Now they’re both trying not to laugh.

Chancho bites the inside of his cheek so hard a tear falls down his face.

After the meeting, the DUI guy from before, the ejecta from the Lexus, approaches Andrew at the doughnut box. Andrew isn’t hungry, but he’s standing next to Chancho, who is tucking half a cruller into his mouth.

“Andrew? Right?”

“Yep.”

“I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Jim. Here’s my card. Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

Now it clicks.

He’s seen this guy’s obnoxious commercials; his billboards are all over Rochester.

An ambulance chaser of the first house.

Probably sidestepped the DUI conviction, used his own dark magic to transmute it into reckless driving, but the AA meetings?

Judge wouldn’t budge.

I got a card because I look like a PORPLE TURD.

He manages not to laugh.

He manages not to say three words in Aramaic that would make Jim Simko have a minor seizure in court tomorrow, voiding bladder and bowels.

Ten years ago he would have said those words.

Last night, in his tiger suit, he would have cheerfully batted half the lawyer’s face off, then sat on his legs and watched him expire, because tigers are all about impulse.

Now he just takes the card, puts it in his back pocket where he knows it will get mushed into a ball in the washing machine.

I don’t like this guy, I don’t have to like this guy, but I have no right to judge him. He’s doing the best he knows how, just like me.

Oh, but he is a smug bastard, isn’t he?

Stop hanging good or bad on everything.

He just is.

Like that killing bitch who’s after you.

No, you can’t suburban-Buddha your way out of this one.

No gray area on her.

She’s bad.

She’s really, really bad.

And she’s not going to walk away from this unhurt.

He should give her the card.

“Thanks, Jim,” he says.

Follows still-chewing Chancho outside to smoke.

Pats Bob gently on the back on his way out.

I’m not running.

I’m digging in like a goddamned badger.

73

Andrew hasn’t been on the Internet in a while.

He logs in, holding frozen okra to his head.

He’s had the okra for a while because he’s meant to make gumbo, but hasn’t gotten around to it. Okra works almost as well as peas, but he ate the peas.

It delights him to see an e-mail from Radha in his inbox.

74

Vermont.

Anneke squats froglike, fingering the leaves of the maple sapling she just petrified.

“I want to rest,” she says.

Her head hurts and she’s nauseated; the living tree fought with all its sap and chlorophyll and nonverbal stored-up common sense against the unnatural thing she was doing to it. It felt like having an argument in which you knew you were wrong but won because you were better at arguing and eventually, unjustly, wore your opponent down. She wrung the juicy and vibrant parts of it out with an ugly, strong hand she never knew she had, and now it stands before her white and bleached and dead; still beautiful, but beautiful because it is impossible; no sculptor could carve or shape such thin and perfect leaves from granite. Even as she thinks this, a leaf falls from its branch.

It’s exquisite, she thinks.

This would sell for twenty grand.

Michael just looks at her, sitting in his camp chair, drinking his coffee. The lesson takes place in a patch of woods between the farmhouse and the quarry.

This old bastard’s not going to let me rest.

He sees her looking at him and just nods at the tree.

“I don’t feel good,” she says.

“You’re not supposed to. You just broke the laws of nature. Now make it right.”

She bites her tongue.

Broken laws of nature surround them; Michael Rudnick appears to live in a quaint New England farmhouse neighboring an old quarry, but really he lives in the quarry. A perfect overhang of granite hung with vines shields a vintage Airstream trailer. Doric columns modeled after those supporting the Athenian temple of Hephaestus seem to prop the ledge, and brick walls of varying heights partition the space, keyholed with nooks and alcoves wherein unquenchable oil lamps glimmer by night. Stone benches and chairs surround an impressive fire pit topped by a chimney in the shape of a human mouth open to breathe in smoke. How the trailer got into or is supposed to get out of the neoclassic wonderland is not apparent. Rock stairs lead down to the opening beneath the ledge, and another set leads to water.

The trapezoidal lake that has collected at the quarry’s bottom half submerges an outsized sculpture and cypress garden: a granite elephant jets water from its upraised trunk, cyclopic giants, Atlas-like, hunch beneath gardens erupting from stone troughs, a mischievous-looking cherub crouches on a pedestal above the waterline, holding a stone to its chest in the posture of a pitcher, a pile of other such stones at its feet. It seems to be eyeing the steps. The stones are the size of volleyballs. Woe betide anyone approaching Michael’s cave with fell intent.

She looks at the stone tree.

Feels the echo of its vanished life, how surprised it was to find itself so violated, cut off from water, numb to sunlight. Dead. When she touches its trunk she feels its absence.

“Put life back into it.”

She tries.

“See it happening.”

She pictures the breeze blowing through supple leaves.

Nothing happens.

“It’s not like moving rocks,” she says.

“No. It’s intimate.”

She tries.

Her head throbs.

“Why are there no schools?” she says. “Harry Potter and all that.”

He just looks at her.

“Are there?”

“You’re in one.”

“But a big one. Like a university.”

He shakes his head.

“Magic is artisanal. You apprentice. One at a time. You’ll teach somebody, too, one day. I’ll make you promise before you leave here.”

“Somebody must have a school.”

“Workshops go on in some actual universities. Grafted to them, working veiled. Antioch College in Yellow Springs is a fine example. They had three users in the faculty at one point. They made students they wanted to teach magic get accepted in other fields, fields they taught in the system.”

She remembers her embarrassing introduction to that town, how she hurled herself into a bathtub, off the wagon, and at a toilet.

“Andrew went there?”

Michael nods.

“Studied Russian. And more.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“There’s talk every few years. But everyone’s scared. Three’s the most users it’s wise to gather at one place for very long.”

“Why?”

“Something changes.”

“So nobody ever tried to found a big, dedicated university?”

“Schools were founded. Couple of times.”

“What happened?” she says, absently touching the leaves of the dead tree.

“Different things.”

“Bad?”

“You could say that.”

“Tell me.”

“Most successful one was in England, started in the 1580s. Hid in plain sight. In Deptford, just down the river from London. Did some big things. You know how Spain could never seem to land an armada? It wasn’t just once. They tried three times, got swamped by storms three times. That was no accident.”

“And?”

“They kept killing each other. The survivors determined that too many users together makes it turn dark. They agreed to separate.”

Now she just looks at him. There’s more, and she wants to hear it.

“Last big one was France, outside Paris. Between the wars. Like a dozen users, thirty or so students. They exchanged oaths of fraternity, made loyalty and friendship more important than the magic, drummed out anybody who seemed greedy. Called themselves The Order of the Duck. I saw pictures. Real cute with the short pants and tall socks, even berets and sacks of baguettes, like the stereotype.”

“And then?”

“Something came and killed them.”

“A demon?”

“Sort of. Hitler.”

She furrows her brow.

“Couldn’t they fight, or hide?”

“Can’t fight an army. And it’s hard to hide from other users.”

“Hitler had users?”

He looks at her.

She remembers a picture she saw of Adolf Hitler, surrounded by wide-eyed adorers, all of them half mad. Hitler calm in the middle of the storm of madness. They were looking at him like they were starving for something, something in his words and eyes, something only he could give them. They were addicted to him.

“Oh my God,” she says. “He was one.”

Michael nods.

“Only the very luminous can make it out, but those tapes of him ranting in German? I’ve listened to them. It’s not German. It’s not a human language at all. Something taught him those words. Something he conjured. And you can only hear it for a moment. Because it starts to work on you, starts to sound like German. And if you speak German, it starts to sound like the truth.”

She goes pale.

Wonders what she’s gotten herself into.

Wonders if she wants to know these things.

Thinks it’s too late.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s not all rotten. Now fix the tree.”

She looks at one stone leaf.

She plucks the leaf. Holds it by the stem, holds it up to the sun. So thin opaque light filters through it, lights up its veins and capillaries. You could almost shave with its edges.

She’ll need a word.

Ancient Greek is best for stone.

“Pneuma,” she says.

“Ezasa,” she says.

It liked pneuma better.

It tingled.

She concentrates on the part that glows with the sun behind it, sees the glow turning maple-green.

“Pneuma,” she says again, and breathes on it, as if kindling fire.

Green glows where her breath touched the leaf, starts to creep out toward the edges as fire would creep on paper.

“Ah! Ah!”

The leaf is almost a leaf again.

“Hurry,” he says.

She understands.

She touches the leaf to the rest of the tree, watches the green catch, spread. She blows on it as one would blow kindling, watches it move from leaf to leaf, revivifying the sapling until at last it trembles in the breeze again, at last the sapling winks back into life. Exists again. It wasn’t there, and then it was. As her father had been there, and then gone, in the length of a breath.

75

The beautiful girl furrows her brow, looking at her phone. The handsome man sitting across from her at the hip Lincoln Square sushi restaurant says, “Everything okay?” She nods, still looking into her palm, but the furrow remains. She pockets the phone.

“Sorry. I know that’s rude,” she says, still not looking at him, but she’s said it before, and still keeps checking her phone. When she does this, he doesn’t know where to rest his own eyes. Sometimes on her cleavage, sometimes on the restaurant’s expensive-looking water feature. He knew she would be high maintenance; she looked high maintenance strolling down Clark Street with a bag full of shoe boxes and mustard-yellow pumps, but he took a sheet from his sketch pad, drew a flower on it, wrote down his information, and left it under her windshield wiper anyway because she also looked smart. Girls who aren’t that smart can be fun, but they’re not impressive. This might be the most impressive girl he’s ever brought to Fugu Sushi.

He’s brought seventeen girls to Fugu Sushi.

He calls ahead to get the window seat. Figures everybody wins because he gets a nice view, the restaurant looks hip because he looks hip, and the server always gets twenty-five percent. Twenty percent makes a server happy, twenty-five gets you remembered. The staff remembers him.

Not the way he thinks, though.

They call him manwhore, as in “I’m cut for the night, you’ve got manwhore.”

Always a two-top.

Always by the window.

Staff sympathies turned decidedly against him when, on companion number eight, he left his website and e-mail address for the waitress, along with a pen-and-ink sketch of an octopus (he had dined on tako that night), which he had prepared in advance. He managed to do it while helping that evening’s date put her coat on, did it with the skill of a cardsharp.

The waitress showed everyone the octopus, and now an octopus-like wave of the fingers means manwhore. Thus, pointing at oneself and waving the fingers, with a gently repulsed lip curl, means “I’ll take manwhore.” The bartender’s in on it, too. Finger wave followed by cup-to-lips uptilt gesture means, “What are manwhore and the young lady drinking?”

The exotic-looking number seventeen, sipping Bride of the Fox sake, would have already figured out manwhore’s deal except that she has been too distracted by computer problems to vet him pre-date, and, tonight, so distracted by her phone that she’s not plumbing his charmingly self-deprecating monologues for sincerity or spontaneity.

“If there’s a problem and you need to call it an early night, I understand,” he says. He knows that’s what he’s supposed to say, but he doesn’t want an early night—he wants to get her back to his loft, put on Portishead and send a finger up under that orange suede skirt to test his theory that small-boned women are tighter and full-lipped women are wetter.

The phone hasn’t been in her pocket a minute when it buzzes again.

She decides to let him in on the problem.

“Somebody’s sending me odd texts.”

“Why don’t you turn it off?”

“Good idea,” she says, and starts to, then doesn’t. “Only I’m intrigued.”

“By what?”

She considers him; he only just clears her threshold for minor confidences.

“What do you see?” she says, showing him her phone.

“A horse.”

“Yeah. A horse.”

She scrolls down.

“More horses,” he says. “Are you an equestrian?”

She shakes her head no.

He sees them.

That’s something.

Now she knows the texted photos are not themselves magical, though she’s picking up magic around them, and the sender’s number is blocked. She’s sure that if she saw it, it would be international, originating in Ukraine. It’s the middle of the night over there. She turns the phone back to herself, scrolls down the photos, all twenty-something of them showing different horses: bays, roans, and blacks; Arabs, quarter horses, and Belgians.

This is an attack.

This is how wizards fight; they begin by psyching out their opponent.

It’s not going to work on me.

Horses?

My hacker must be a man, and a very silly man.

“May I try your sake?” her date says.

She looks at him as if only just realizing he’s there.

She gets a tickle in her ear, telling her there’s a conversation she may wish to eavesdrop on. She swivels a sort of invisible cat’s ear toward the kitchen.

… way too hot for that creeper, I don’t know how he even gets them here.

Well he’s hot, hot’s not his problem. Kinda looks like a watered-down Johnny Depp. He’s just clueless. Wonder what he drew for this one.

Do you think they sleep with him?

Some, I’m sure, or he wouldn’t keep dropping Benjamins. Must be a trust fund kid. Told me once he’s an actor, his Visa has three first names like an actor, Michael Oliver Scott or something, but they don’t make that kind of money, not in Chicago. Unless it’s commercials.

She listens for another moment, making eye contact with Michael Anthony Scott.

She smiles at him.

He’s still waiting for an answer about the sake, wondering what game she’s playing.

As he’ll find out in less than a minute, she’s playing the “finish her sake and leave her date at the restaurant” game.

She’s also playing the “steal his wallet with a spell” game.

She’s also just about to play the “what’s in its pocketses?” game.

When he fishes for his wallet, he’ll find a piece of paper with a child’s crayon drawing of a crying man getting arrested outside FUGU SOOSHI. When he shows it to the manager as evidence that somebody must be playing a prank on him, the manager will not see the child’s drawing. What he will see will be a newspaper blurb about local actor Michael Scott’s dine-and-dash arrest at a Ravenswood pizza parlor, complete with mug shot.

Radha, sitting on the zebra-skin seat of her idling Mini Cooper, dictates the nature of the drawing, the photo and text of the article, and where she wants these articles placed into her phone, into an app she made for herself, clicks Preview, giggles, then presses Cast.

She drives off toward home.

As she turns onto Damen, she sees a homeless man sitting on cardboard, two dusty-looking heeler dogs napping near him.

She rolls down her window.

Throws the wallet.

It skids to a stop between his legs.

“Do as thou wilt,” she says.

He grins, gives her a thumbs-up.

Plays a peppy version of “Blue Skies” on his kazoo.

76

Later.

Radha sits before her computer.

She wears her Muppet Show onesie, a footed onesie with Animal on each foot.

Her roommate, a flamingly, fabulously gay dancer, a Michael who spells his name with a Y and has no idea she’s a witch, won’t be home from rehearsal until well past midnight; Equus opens in less than a week. She designed the poster graphic, three dancers in horse masks frozen in synchronicitous movement against a pear-green backdrop. The masks have a dystopian look, something H. R. Giger might have designed, and they appear off-balance, about to topple. She’s really proud of this graphic.

She is less proud about the persistent low-grade infection her computer seems to have. No amount of flushing, warding, or spell encryption seems able to do more than keep it busy. It has interfered with her ability to track the Ukrainian, it won’t let her corner it, and it finds and infects any other devices she tries to use the web from.

I’m the vector.

It hides in me somehow.

This is masterclass cybermagic.

How’s he doing this?

She’s working on a spell to create a sort of antibody for the system, and she’s pretty sure it will work, but writing the intruder-specific code takes time; and she has to get the blood of a watchdog. She has the dog picked out, a German shepherd that has barked at her from behind the white wrought-iron gates of a house two blocks from her complex, on the way to the chocolate shop. She can make the pooch take a nap with a spell, but she’s not good with animal magic and it will cost her juice she needs to find the computer bug.

She’ll go no-frills on the tranquilizer, get it from a vet.

But she really hates needles.

Maybe she’ll charm or pay a phlebotomist to come with her.

And once the infection is flushed, she’ll be able to take the offensive. She found a really ugly Brazilian spell that liquefies bones, and she’s already practiced on a lamb shank. The poor thing actually danced a spastic little dance and smoked from its holes before it balloonishly collapsed; she’s more than ready to try it on her Slavic friend.

She’s never been in a duel with another user before, and, if she’s a little scared, she’s even more excited. Americans have the best computer magic, and she’s one of the best in America. It’s a game for young witches. Maybe only sealiongod@me.com is better, but he’s out in San Francisco.

All right.

A Greek yogurt with almonds and honey.

A glass of Gewürztraminer.

An hour of code.

Then another glass of Gewürztraminer while Mykel rubs his calves with tiger balm and bitches about the director’s choices.

When she comes back from the kitchen, something’s wrong.

The screen saver with the three horse-men has turned into a GIF; the figures now move in a loop, executing a plié and scoop over and over again.

Fuck! He’s through!

She spits the yogurt-covered spoon out of her mouth.

One of the horse heads now noses against the screen, bulbs it out like soft plastic, pokes through.

It happens slowly, then fast, as if someone sped a film up.

A real horse’s head, a real man’s body, and the monster births itself through her computer, knocking over her chair.

The other two simply appear behind it, piggybacking on its magical entry.

She’s about to use her Brazilian spell when it occurs to her she’s not sure what these things are made of, if they even have bones.

Now the first one lunges for her, grabs her shoulders, drives her back against the wall.

The violence shocks her—nobody manhandles her.

So strong, so fast.

I’m really in trouble.

No.

I AM trouble.

The first rule of magical combat is Be the most dangerous thing in the fight.

Believe it and it’s true.

She relaxes as best she can, feels the tingle of magic waking up in her, but before she can pronounce a spell, the horse-man’s hand is in and on her mouth. She bites, but it doesn’t seem to care. It begins to choke her. The second one ducks under its fellow’s arm and bites her.

Bit my fucking nipple off!!!

She can’t even scream.

Tears of pain well in her eyes, blurring the image of the thing killing her, the third one behind it picking up the baseball bat she keeps by her bed.

They have bones

Mistake not to use the spell

Dying

She remembers another spell.

Imagines her left footie ripping, and it rips, exposing her bare foot. She probes for the outlet, but it’s too far.

So she stretches her leg out magically, the length of two legs, finds the outlet, lays the sole of her foot against it.

Imagines herself made of copper.

Becomes a conduit.

The second one has started biting her ear off.

Bad timing.

To touch her just then.

She dumps so much electricity into the horse-men that they scream horse-screams, hop on their flexed man-feet, convulsing.

She smells equine hair burning.

They drop.

Her windpipe is damaged, but not crushed.

She sucks air.

Coughs.

The third one is almost on her now, bat upraised, a second and a half away from staving in her skull.

It doesn’t get that long.

She cables out her forearm, slamming her palm into its muzzle, grabbing.

She hears a pop! And watches an almost comical plume of smoke ascend from its head as it, too, jerks stiff, then drops and twitches.

Now she’s angry.

She looks at the computer, sees an eye in the corner of the screen.

It blinks twice and vanishes, but too late.

Radha runs at the computer.

Sees her reflection in the black screen, dim, getting larger, blood from her insulted breast blotching the onesie.

She leaps.

Yuri has prepared this spell for a week.

He made the horse-head men in 3-D using the woman’s art as a model. He taught them to kill, taught them not to let her speak.

Now it is time.

He must succeed.

His veiling spell can’t hold much longer, burns too much fuel, and if she finds him, she will destroy him. He knows he’s not as strong as she is. Knows he’s only strong because Baba made him strong, dumped magic into him that she stole from others.

One chance only.

He watches the monsters come to life, sends them through the screen, thinks he has Chicagohoney85. Thinks she needs her computer, like him, that she will be weak without it, like him. Such creatures would have torn him apart with little difficulty.

But she is not weak.

The spell with the outlet is superlative.

Genius!

“Xhm,” he says, watching it all like a video game that has taken an unfortunate turn. He realizes, intellectually, that he will be in danger now, but he doesn’t feel it in his gut until he sees her notice him, see the eye, feels her lock on to him.

He clicks the camera off, but it is too late.

She pushes a hand through the screen.

He clicks the camera back on, leans away from the grasping hand.

He senses the electricity stored in her, knows she’ll fry him like a herring if she touches him.

He squeals, rolls his chair away.

Now her head is pushing through.

Slowly, as if through clear taffy.

She sees him!

Behind her, one of the horse-men, the one that bit her, is on its knees, puking, barely alive.

But alive enough.

“Plug!” Yuri says in Russian.

It shambles that way.

Radha’s head is halfway through.

He senses powerful magic, knows he’ll die if she speaks.

Now her mouth is through.

Behind her, the monster in her room disappears as it crawls under her computer desk, whinnying in pain.

She hears the whinny.

Hears it crawling, hitting its head on the desk.

Knows what’s about to happen.

No time to reverse direction.

She fucked up.

Instead of saying the Brazilian word that would have made the small man die horribly, she says “No.”

Just says it.

Like a disappointed child.

The monster pulls the plug.

Most of her head and one hand, neatly shorn, fall onto Yuri’s keyboard, the head continuing on to the floor.

Yuri watches the head empty itself on his linoleum, a pool spreading, the girl’s pretty, terrified eyes looking up at the ceiling, seeing it, then not seeing it.

The cat comes to investigate, then skitters away, its one wet paw leaving prints on the floor.

Yuri passes out.

Back in her room, the body, missing one hand, cropped above a severe diagonal line starting at her chin and continuing up through her ears, falls onto the horse-headed man, releasing its stored charge. Both bodies burst into flames. The one that shouldn’t have existed disappears, as do the other two like it.

The police will say Radha Rostami died in a freak power surge.

Her roommate will tell his boyfriend it was spontaneous human combustion.

He will never sleep in that apartment again.

77

Andrew finds this on his Facebook events page.

Andrew can’t raise Radha by computer or by telephone.

He doesn’t know if this was a lie, meant to off-balance him, but he suspects it’s not.

This makes him blearily angry where he should be sad.

It puts him in a very bad mood.

He calls Chancho.

Chancho drills him hard, makes him knee the kicking pad in his yard until he feels like he can’t lift his leg again.

Makes him work on “the plum,” wrestling your opponent’s head forward in the A-shaped trap of your arms so you can knee the face and head.

Chancho leaves.

The coin that turns bullets arrives by UPS.

The driver honks cheerily as the brown truck lumbers off.

Morning.

Andrew stands before his brass mirror, surveying himself. His bruising has mostly gone greeny-yellow or faded out. He heals quickly with the youth magic running. He’s about to amp that up, ink in the runners of gray that he allowed in.

Then he remembers a sound.

The sound of glass breaking.

The glass that he charmed not to be broken.

This is what’s draining the magic.

My vanity.

He knows that youth spells burn a lot of fuel; he’s had to finesse his apparent age up a bit—looking twenty-five burns almost everything you’ve got when you’re over fifty, but thirty-five is doable.

Was doable.

It gets exponentially harder every year.

I wonder if you’re too pretty to fight?

He lets a little more gray in.

Feels the house get stronger around him.

It had weakened by degrees, so slowly he hadn’t even noticed.

Only things he used stayed strong, like the gate in the tub.

Would the things in the attic still work?

The vacuum-cockatrice?

The doll’s house?

And now he is going to need offensive magic.

As much as he can muster.

Where else could he economize?

The hiding spells.

I spent months on those!

They’ll be so hard to raise again.

But you know good and goddamned well she’s the one you’re hiding from.

She already knows where the house is.

Fine.

Fine.

I’ll make the house visible.

I’ll shut down the youth spells.

What you see is what you get.

He lets himself get older.

Feels his body stoop just a little.

Feels his muscles thin, develops a pain in his knee.

He sees the fifty-two-year-old smoker with the long hair looking back at him, bruised and hollow in the jaws.

He wants to pin his gray, dry hair up with his cherrywood fork, samurai-style, but sees this as vanity, too. Hair is an antenna for magic; Indians knew this.

Wizards know it.

He leaves his hair down, fans it over his shoulders.

I’m older than my dad ever got.

I’m an old man.

But I’m strong now.

Stronger than ever.

I’m not a fucking user.

I’m a warlock.

He spends the next three hours unweaving the spell he cast to hide the house. The neighbors could already see it, but now passing motorists and kids on bikes would see it, too. Anyone can find it now without first being told or shown.

But if they have bad intentions toward Andrew Ranulf Blankenship, they might wish they hadn’t.

It’s high time to make war magic.

78

1978.

Yellow Springs, Ohio.

October.

The wizard with the potbelly and the bald head has his shirt open even though the leaves in Glen Helen have yellowed. He and the boy and the girl can all see their breaths.

Andrew’s in sweatpants, wearing a terry cloth headband.

“Try again,” the older man says.

Andrew doesn’t want to try again.

A big, dirty smudge on his left buttock and thigh evidence the outcome of his last try.

He steels himself, runs at his mentor again.

Runs like his brother used to run at tackle dummies.

When he leaps, he leaps at waist height just to the right of the shorter, stockier man, seemingly at nothing, his face scrunched up for impact.

He makes impact in midair, and the world around the three jerks with the characteristic bad-splice jerk that happens whenever reality and illusion collide. The man winks out from where he was, winks in again falling with Andrew, going “Whooof!” but it looks like he was always in Andrew’s path.

The mind smooths things out.

The instructor’s false teeth come out.

He puts them back in, untroubled.

He also picks up three quarters that fell into the grass.

Leaves the penny because it’s tails up.

Stands up.

“That’s it!” he says, claps his meaty hands twice. “Well done!”

Addresses the girl as Andrew brushes himself off.

“How do you think he did it?”

“Listened for sound? I’d say watched your breath, but your breath was coming out of your mouth. I mean, where your mouth seemed to be.”

“Was it sound, Blankenship?”

He shakes his head, pulls a twig out of his hair.

“I watched the leaves. You crunched leaves under your actual feet.”

“Good,” he says. “Can’t argue with results.”

They wait.

“Displacement works nicely against human, nonmagical attackers, and it’s a cheap spell. Not much gas. You should be able to run a couple of other things at the same time, once you practice.”

He lisps a little.

Adjusts his false teeth.

They wait.

Cats before a can opener.

“Now,” he says. “If you should chance to tangle with another user, what’s rule number one?”

“Don’t,” they both say quickly, as they’ve been taught. Not because they mean it, but because they want to get to the good stuff.

“Right. Don’t. And why not?”

“Both are likely to die,” they say in stereo.

“Yes,” he says. “Fighting another evenly matched user with magic is like driving head-on into another car. You might come out a little better, but, unless you get lucky, you won’t come out well.”

“And if you’re not evenly matched?” Andrew asks.

“Then it’s either stupid or unsportsman-like, and I disapprove of both qualities. Sometimes, however, stupid and unsportsman-like conditions arise. And so, your third lesson to date on black magic. To the pine grove with you, and find the most swordlike stick you feel you can levitate nimbly. We’re going to do some fencing.”

79

Dog Neck Harbor, New York.

Today.

Andrew jabs his index finger with a pub dart, old-school, wooden handle. He bleeds twelve drops into a hole he cut into an apple. He sings “The British Grenadiers” as well as he can, trying to really boom out the With a TO-RO-RO-RO-RO. Any pub song would work, but he rather likes that one.

He eats the apple.

Andrew goes to a farm on 104A, a farm where he knows he can buy a live chicken. Butchers it. The farmhand asks if it’s for eating, and when he says “yes,” the kid offers to butcher it for him.

“Prefer to do it myself,” he says.

Something about the way he says it makes the kid look at him funny.

He takes the hen home, cores her eye out. Pronounces a spell in Russian, the words of which he has to rememorize from a book. Burns the eye on a sliver of wood taken from a lightning-struck tree, mixes the ash with rainwater and magic oil, smears the grimy black balm on each of his eyelids. The spell calls for the eye of an eagle, owl, or hawk. Bald eagles nest near the bluffs, but he just can’t bring himself to do that to an eagle.

“Ethical wizards get their ass kicked,” he tells Salvador, pulling chicken feathers. But he thinks a chicken will do.

Range might suffer, but this is a fuck-all mighty spell.

He bakes the chicken.

Salvador remembers the smell of roast fowl, wiggles his hips the whole time.

He used to get the gizzards.

Evening.

Andrew takes the walking stick down from over the fireplace.

Oak with an iron tip and an ovoid iron knob on the end, a knob that fits smoothly into the hand, but which is obviously a perfect shape for thumping. A silver collar sits under the knob, inscribed with Gaelic words reading, Think while your skull is sound. Drink while your mouth is whole. Shake this man’s hand while he offers it.

He rubs it with walnut oil.

Kisses it.

Takes it out back to the fire pit, puts the iron tip into the embers, says words in Gaelic that make it glow red-hot. Walks it over to the turtle shell he found—it was no easy thing finding a dead turtle with a whole shell by the side of the road—and punches the cane’s tip through, loading the trigger word.

Buckler.

Andrew goes to the thrift store.

Buys a set of six yellow glass tumblers.

Not enough.

Drives to the Pier 1 just north of Syracuse.

Buys a dozen yellow wineglasses.

Makes a whole vase full of fireglass stones.

Puts it in the attic.

Fishes a trumpet out of an attic tub.

The next one’s his favorite.

His mentor invented it.

He rubs six pennies with magical oil, puts them heads up on a tree stump, arranged like a tiny audience.

Plays the trumpet loudly (and poorly) down at the sextet of Abe Lincolns for better than an hour.

Puts the pennies in a leather pouch he hangs around his neck.

80

Nadia courses under the water, following the Jaybird Sally. She has been tailing the boat since it left the Oswego Marina around noon, partly because she likes the boat’s name, partly because one of the two men who periodically fishes from the stern is handsome in a craggy way; his short beard covers the kind of chin one mostly finds on soldiers and athletes.

She’s very good at going unseen; dull people will see her as driftwood or a fish unless she wants their attention. For the sake of sharper ones, she knows how to stay in a boat’s shadow, she knows how to use chop and murk and to anticipate a glance in her direction, how to submerge before it comes.

When the boat stops, she catches pieces of the conversation between the two men as she floats, her ear overlapped by waves.

“Going to Rochester tomorrow… that three-bedroom house we got at auction. I’ll be… flip it the week after, put some new carpet… stripped copper… else it needs.”

“It burns my ass that… things like that… plumbing and mark up… out of spite because… get their shit together. No class.”

“None.”

The men talk business and switch to women and Nadia begins to regret eavesdropping; it was better when she didn’t know how ordinary the handsome one was, when she could pretend he was a cavalry officer with a bright saber and a wool coat, not a house-flipper with a motel mistress and an unobservant wife. She’s about to swim off in a state of helpless ennui when the men reel in their lines and the motor starts up. Another race! But it isn’t much of a race. She follows the boat, easily keeping up with its drowsy chug, swimming serpentine beneath it.

Then it happens.

A glass bottle hits the water, bobs there.

She doesn’t know if anybody on the boat sees her white hand reach up and pluck the bottle under, but she doesn’t care.

She’s pissed.

She didn’t spend all morning breaking those disgusting zebra mussels off her shipwreck just to let these inconsiderate swindlers pollute her lake. So bourgeois. She knows that’s a Bolshevik word and she hates Bolsheviks, but bourgeois, with its suggestion of new money and bad manners, best describes the specimens on the Jaybird Sally.

“Sam Adams,” she says, looking at the little brown-vested colonial on the blue label, air escaping from her mouth in a wash of small bubbles. Stale air. She uses her lungs only to smoke and to speak.

When the Jaybird Sally stops again, she sees the hooked bait-fish plop into the water, watches a gorgeous chinook salmon swim toward it. She waves it off, still holding the beer bottle.

No fish for you, bourgeois!

But that’s not enough.

She bangs the bottom of the boat with her fist, hard.

Not hard enough.

She gets some distance, swims into the hull.

Likes the way that feels.

Attacks several more times, battering the Jaybird Sally with her shoulders and head; two of the blows open gashes below the waterline.

Especially the last head butt.

That hole is serious.

About the size of three strips of bacon laid end-to-end.

The lake starts pouring in.

She peeks through the hole, sees the startled captain see her.

He takes the Lord’s name in vain.

The alarm sounds ringing as the first float switch is tripped and the pump starts.

She puts her lips to the hole now and says, “Don’t litter,” swims off.

Realizes she was so mad she said it in Russian, swims back and says it in English now, adding, “Bourgeois assholes” for good measure.

The handsome one, still on deck, gripping the rail in anticipation of another collision, sees the rusalka’s pale, slender arm throw the bottle, watches it spin, watches it land amidships with a clunk.

He’ll forget he saw this by the time the others come up and the captain starts barking “Mayday” on VHF 16.

By the time the deck of the Jaybird Sally starts to tilt, he’ll put on his life vest, text wife and girlfriend, put his cell phone in a baggie.

“Don’t worry,” the captain says. “We’re not going in the drink.”

He points.

They would have already heard the helicopter but for the alarm.

The helicopter from Canada is coming with a P250 that will flush a thousand gallons a minute out of the ship.

Of course the rusalka could put her fingers in the gash and yank it so large that even the Canadians’ pump won’t help.

Or she could roll the boat; this would be hard, but not impossible.

No.

Not for one bottle.

But if so much as a cigarette butt hits the water.

When the Jaybird Sally finds suitable, safe mooring, she will put in for repairs. The diver will pull several long, coarse red hairs from the gash in the hull.

The boat will not be lost today.

The man who flips houses will fish again.

But, without remembering exactly why, he will never again toss litter overboard.

Skinning below the water like the dangerous thing she is, Nadia passes the Coast Guard ship coming to escort the listing Sally in.

Salutes it.

Later.

Nadia snatches down a placid seagull who stopped to float on the lake, so smoothly its fellows don’t even fly away.

She feeds violently at first, blood and feathers everywhere, then delicately, picking meat from bones like a girl on a picnic. She means to swim back to the wreck, and police it one more time before heading in to grow her legs back and spend the night protecting her magus.

She’s looking forward to growing her vagina back.

She hopes he’ll be ready for sex.

Drowning all those lumpy miscarriages of Andrew Blankenship really turned her on.

So much, in fact, she decides not to wait.

Swims down to the Niagara Mohawk nuclear plant, turns girl, and floats in the warm discharge current.

Pleasures herself.

Cries so loudly a custodian at the plant scans the water.

Sees only driftwood.

When she gets near her wreck, the sun is going down, throwing lavender and pink all over the sky, the water reflecting it on its gently rippling skin.

A silhouette in black stands out.

A boat.

Very small this time.

A rowboat, the kind you can rent at Fair Haven Beach State Park.

Whoever brought it here must have rowed for hours.

She makes out one shape.

A man.

She dives and swims under the water, comes up near.

He’s playing the guitar now, playing well.

He sings a song in Russian.

Improvised, perhaps, no rhymes, but sung in a gravelly voice full of pain and sweetness.

The man in the boat is young.

Not much light left in the sky, but her eyes are quite good in the dark. She sees he’s bearded, like boys back home were bearded. What is that accent? Someplace rural. Is it a boy? White hairs mix with black on his head, but, yes, a boy. Twenty or so.

He sees her.

“What are you doing so far away?” he asks.

“From shore? I might ask the same of you.”

She doesn’t mean to sound flirtatious but knows she does.

“Not from shore.”

A pelican glides to a landing nearby, nothing but a black shape, as much heard as seen. It positions a fish in the pouch below its beak, setting it up to be swallowed.

“From home,” he says.

“Home.”

He smiles at her.

It is a good smile.

“Are you Russian?” she says.

“So Russian I’m practically made of snow.”

“From what village?”

He raises an eyebrow.

“Why do you say village? Do you think I am a farmer?”

A planet, she’s not sure which one, shines dimly in the freshly minted night.

“City, then. What city?”

“Your city.”

“You are not from St. Petersburg.”

“But I am!” he declares in his rural accent. “And not a farmer.”

“What then? Besides a liar?”

She is smiling when she says this.

“A soldier.”

It is easy to picture him on a horse with a wool coat and a saber, fine boots showing off his fine ankles. It is easy to picture him kissing her, coming underwater with her, down to the ship. She knows just where she will put him.

“I like soldiers,” she says.

“Then come closer!”

She does.

“I want to kiss you!” he says suddenly, like a boy saying it for the first time.

She flicks her tail, moves closer.

No.

Not yet.

They should enjoy this part… the other is so brief!

She stays just out of arm’s reach, smiling, her dreadlocks trailing in the water.

“Will you tease me now? Is that your game?”

“You can’t begin to guess my game, boy-who’s-not-from-St.- Petersburg.”

So dark.

Can he even see me?

“You have a beautiful smile.”

She laughs.

“You are from a village of blind men! My smile is the worst part of me.”

“And you smell like Samarkand.”

“If Samarkand had a fish market perhaps. Are you being cruel? Is that your game?”

He just smiles at her.

You can’t begin to guess my game.

She thinks it is time.

She moves to the side of the boat, wiggles come hither with her finger.

He leans down.

Tickles her nose with his beard.

She giggles.

Stars behind him now.

The planet faintly red, must be Mars.

The moon past half full.

He puts his lips to hers.

Cold.

Colder than hers.

She withdraws, looking at him.

“Who are you?” she says. “You do seem familiar.”

“I am your lover,” he says.

“You’re not Nikolai. You’re not the boy I jumped for.”

“No. I am your new lover.”

“Are you dead?” she says.

“Very much alive.”

“Your name?”

“Moroz.”

Frost?

He shows her his index finger.

Looks at her with great significance and solemnity as he slips his finger into the water.

As if consummating their marriage.

Taking her hymen.

It stings, but not down there.

Her skin stings with cold where the water has frozen in a block around her.

She is the core of a small iceberg.

She cannot move.

She begins to speak, but he puts his finger to his lips.

“Shhhhhh,” he says, and a gentle snow falls, as fine as ice shavings, only over them, coming from no cloud.

Mars still glinting above him.

The pelican takes flight nearby; she hears it but cannot turn her head.

It lands on the boat with the man, its feet squeaking on the wet wood.

Still has the fish in its mouth, now spits it out.

Not a fish.

It lands with a metallic clunk.

A knife.

The stars all seem to blur at once, and then, when they become sharp again, the pelican is a woman.

Naked.

Holding the knife.

Pretty, with a mole.

Like old nobility.

She levels the knife at the rusalka’s eyes so the point seems to disappear. Nadia senses this is not a normal knife.

“No, it is not a normal knife,” the woman says.

She knew my thoughts!

“And such simple thoughts. What a shame that such a crude thing as yourself could kill my Misha. Do you remember doing that? The man in the cabin?”

Nodding is difficult, but the rusalka nods.

“Good,” she says. “Tonight will pay for half.”

She draws the edge of the knife across Nadia’s cheeks and nose, cutting her. Her blood is thick, barely runs, as if it can’t remember how to.

It hurts.

When did I last feel pain?

She gasps.

How did she cut me?

“I told you, rusalka. This is no ordinary knife. It is the Knife of St. Olga of Kiev. It drinks magic. It turns fantastical creatures ordinary. It has turned a basilisk into a snake, a cockatrice into a chicken, and a vampire into an effeminate man who did not enjoy the sun. You,” she says, licking the knife, “are already becoming a young girl again. So you may have the pleasure of dying a second death.”

Nadia remembers her first death. The rocks looming up at her, the breeze on her tear-wet cheeks, pressure and a smell like pumpernickel when she hit. The sensation of everything emptying and wrecking like a basket of spilled eggs. It seems closer than it did, more vivid.

“No, you will not be so lucky as to break your neck. And you will not freeze. Freezing is easy. You will die exactly like my Misha died. Drowning. There are far worse things than drowning, but this seems just. You will go to hell more wet than cold.”

So saying, she waves her hand over the water as if over a pot of soup, says, “Warm her heart and bones” in medieval Russian. The ice around her relents, turns slushy, dissolves.

Her lungs fill with fresh air, they need air again.

She slips under the water, sputtering.

She is not a strong swimmer now.

Manages to break the surface of the water.

Hears pieces of what the woman says.

She is not talking to Nadia anymore.

“… will not rob you of your revenge… down to the ship… where she put you. Do it… be free.”

Nadia goes under.

When she comes up, a pelican has taken flight.

She hears its wings.

Something brushes against her foot.

A lamprey?

How harmless they were before, but now she has living blood again.

For a moment.

I’m miles from shore.

A boat full of dead men lies under me.

I put them there in a dream I had.

A long, long dream.

The boy in the rowboat is rowing away, humming a song.

“Wait!” she says. “Please.”

The oars dip, the humming recedes.

She kicks desperately.

Her human eyes can’t see in this darkness, even with the lamp of the moon.

She is alone.

She is already beginning to tire.

At that moment a strong hand grabs her foot.

81

The girl stole a big gulp of air before Misha yanked her down.

But now he is losing his grip on her—it is hard for him to make himself real enough to touch things, but he has been working on it. He has longed for the moment he might do this, grab the unnatural thing and break her. Even as he practiced picking up rocks or moving seaweed, he knew it would never be so. The rusalka was so strong she could dissolve him and the three other ghosts in the wreck just by looking at them crossly, scatter them like schools of small fish.

But this is not a rusalka anymore.

He feels no anger now.

It was very good for him to berate the wizard.

It felt just, he has just grievances.

But to let this girl drown?

He looks into her frightened eyes, sees no recognition, only the eyes of a young woman afraid to die.

Afraid of him.

How young she is.

Twenty-one?

She should be at university, kissing a boy, not dying over a boat full of corpses.

How horrible he must look to her, as horrible as the others look to him. The Canadian who has been here since 1960 has no lower jaw, gestures frantically to make himself understood. The rock-and-roll singer from 1989 has the long hair in the back and short on top that people now call a mullet; it has stayed doggedly attached to his wormy skull, still platinum blond with dark roots. His SUNY Oswego sweatshirt flutters like a ragged flag when he swims, tiny fish in his wake.

It is dark but Misha glows just enough for the girl to see his eyes.

His hand fades out and she kicks to the surface, coughs, tries to yell help but only sputters lake water.

She will die.

And what then?

Turn back into the thing she was?

He does not think so.

Become a ghost, like them?

He shudders.

Nothing is quite so perverse and lonely as a ghost condemned to haunt a lake.

She slips under again.

He can almost hear his Baba upbraiding him for weakness.

Let her die! The bitch killed you. This death is too merciful for her.

He remembers her at his window near the Volga.

The crone his mama pretended not to see.

The woman from the forest he was not allowed to look at.

She only spoke to him through the curtain, just a shape.

Your father is coming. Do you think he wants to see what a weak son he has? Do you know what fathers do to weak sons? That boy who bullies you, I was going to hang him from a tree, but that will not teach you. Your father would tell you to punch him, but that is not enough. You bite his nose, Misha. Not off, they will commit you if you bite it off. But bite it hard enough to scar him. If you punch him, he will work up his courage and hit you again. Or come back with friends. But if you bite his nose, you will surprise him, hurt him, make him afraid of you because he will never know what you might do. He will look at the ground when you pass.

But he is not like her.

He did not bite that boy, only hit him.

And it was enough.

They fought; the larger boy beat Misha badly but got a black eye doing it.

He moved on to easier prey.

Misha knew the boy beat smaller children because his stepfather burned him with cigarettes.

That was long ago.

Now.

The girl is dying.

Her red hair floats about her in a cloud, no longer knotted into ugly tails. Her cruel muscles and scars are gone.

Her tail is gone, replaced by legs.

Let her die!

But that is not his voice, it is the woman behind the curtain.

The woman at night, in the trees.

He grows a shoulder.

Butts into the girl’s ass and thigh, forces her up.

Her head breaks the surface and she gasps air in, shuddering.

He yells at her in English.

“Swim!”

She does not swim.

Begins to sink again.

He nudges her up.

Yells at her in Russian.

“Swim, goddammit!”

She swims.

The couple on the sailing ship scarcely believe what they’re seeing.

A retired astronomer and his wife who come out from Fair Haven on calm nights and anchor deep to stargaze.

A naked girl is climbing up over the rail, sprawling out on the deck, throwing up lake water.

The wife dumps her glass of Riesling on the deck, her boat shoes squeaking.

The astronomer sits agog.

“Don’t just sit there, Harry, get her a blanket! And call the Coast Guard! A boat might have gone down.”

The girl is barely conscious.

Warm hands have her.

A blanket.

English coming down at her.

“Do you know your name? Is anybody else with you? Can you hear me?”

She understands, but she is too tired to speak English.

“Nadia. My name is Nadia. I am from St. Petersburg. My father is a professor. My brother is in the cavalry. We know the tsar.”

She says this in exquisite Russian.

The older couple doesn’t understand, but they are kind.

They’ll see her home.

She turns her head away from them, looks at the white head bobbing in the black lake.

The old dead man.

She met him before he was dead but can’t remember how.

In the shower?

With a dog?

Was I dead with him?

He howls at her playfully.

Owwwwwooooooooooo.

He smiles for the first time in months.

She smiles back.

Weakly, but sincerely.

She moves her fingers in the echo of a wave.

He sinks.

The light is under the water.

A second moon.

The best thing he has ever seen.

He swims down.

A school of silvery fish he does not recognize parts for him.

He swims into the moon.

The warm, yellow moon.

Saffron made light.

Misha laughs deeply.

A woman he has not seen for several years laughs, too.

Mikhail Yevgenievich Dragomirov dissolves.

Really and gladly and finally dissolves.

Your father is coming.

82

The man who used to be Professor Coyne tries not to tremble while assembling the little plastic tank. The kit came in the mail two days ago, a Tamiya 1/35 scale T-34 tank. He is to paint it in winter white, with forest netting made from moss and birch twigs. The moss is hard, but the model itself was harder. His eyes aren’t so good and he shakes. When he trembles, he makes mistakes, and she has no tolerance for mistakes.

He has cut himself twice with his X-Acto knife. He looked for ten minutes on his hands and knees for a track wheel that rolled away.

These were minor mistakes.

He puts his hood on when she comes to check his work; she is just a shape to him.

When he makes minor mistakes, the Cold Man burns his skin with cold.

Yesterday he made a huge mistake.

He took a sandwich bag from the kitchen drawer, squirted a generous dollop of modeling glue into it and bagged it over his nose and mouth. He breathed it in and opened up dangerous, pleasant windows in his head. He had been without wine since they adopted him. They only gave him meat and moldy bread to eat, and he knew it was wrong to eat the meat.

He needed something.

The high was good.

It made him brave.

And foolish.

He tried to run.

Because of Jim Wilson.

It wasn’t so bad, picking up the large box from the airport.

The Cold Man had waited in the back of the rental van.

He knew if he tried to run, the Cold Man would catch him, would go find his wife.

He had gone to the American Eagle desk at the Syracuse Hancock International Airport, identified himself as the man who was here to pick up Jim Wilson.

Jim Wilson was the airline’s euphemism for human remains.

He signed the papers, drove the van around to where the box could be loaded.

Took the cardboard box and air tray from around the dirty, old pine coffin.

Drove back, gave her the coffin.

She had done things to it that night, after she got back from the lake.

She raised the dead man up.

He had seen the dead man doing exercises, a short dead man almost all bones, brown bones with just a little skin. Military uniform hanging off him, too big now, medals on his chest. Embalmed all those years ago. Now doing slow exercises, learning to walk again, holding her shoulder. More spells. More exercises. His flesh was coming back, starting to, at least. She tossed him a child’s ball in the yard, improving his reflexes.

It was too much.

They told the professor to build the model, and he had built models as a child.

But when the dead man with the coat of medals came to watch him, instruct him, it was too much.

The horsefly had been bad.

She made him sit shirtless in the woods until one came, and she caught it. Spoke to it in her cupped hands. Put it in his ear.

It flew into his brain.

Now when someone spoke Russian to him, the fly told him what they said in English. Spoke it directly to his brain.

The dead man thought in Russian, raspy, awful Russian.

The fly buzzed the dead man’s thoughts into his head.

“We painted brown in with the green like branches. Here. And here.”

The dead finger pointed at parts of the turret.

It was too much.

So when the dead man left to learn to balance on a beam, the Man Who Would Not Look At Her huffed glue.

It was the best he had felt since it got cold.

He saw it clearly.

That he could run and get to other people.

Drive his wife away somewhere warm.

But it was the dead man who caught him.

On the road, near the cornfield.

A car drove by, the driver looking at it, how the dead man tackled him around the knees, flipped him over, straddled his chest with his awful old stink pouring off him.

The driver just drove away, never stopped.

Perhaps never saw.

The dead man held his jaw in the bony, brown hand,

I am making friends with death!

grinned his awful grin down at him.

Waggled his finger as if at a naughty child.

Dragged him back by the heel.

He was just another exercise.

She knew he would run, wanted the dead man to catch him.

Now the tank is almost done, and it looks good.

He will help her make the button-men next.

She is building a tiny army to punish the Thief.

To show American witches what a Russian witch looks like.

Then she will go back home.

Perhaps.

She likes it here.

83

Anneke opens up her A-frame house, goes in. Everything looks smaller now, since her apprenticeship in the quarry. She thrums with magic fuel, feels like she can see inside rocks, mugs, even metal. The drive home was difficult; everything distracted and amazed her: brick houses, rocky hillocks, even a rusted-out iron grill next to a Sharpied FREE sign by the roadside. Without entirely meaning to, she made the grill jump, knocked the sign over. Almost ran her Subaru into the metal pole of a SNOWPLOW TURN sign. Then a second spell launched out of her by reflex—she displaced the signpost with magic so violent a sharp metal PANG! rang out at the same time as a whip-crack Pop! sounded, the sign relocating faster than the speed of sound, the yellow diamond quivering on the wrong side of a farmer’s fence.

That’s going to be hard to explain.

What had really been distracting her, however, was her basement.

The things in her basement, more precisely.

Things she had never told Andrew about.

She walks into her house thinking about those things, one in particular, and she thinks about it as she sits in her smoking chair, burning through three Winstons in a row, the lake’s blue all but invisible to her unfocused eyes, the Nag Champa incense stick wreathing the little statue of Andrew in smoke. She stubs the last cigarette out in the camel-bone ashtray, takes the small key from under the statue, gets up and unlocks the padlock to the trapdoor that leads down.

Almost descends but doesn’t.

Leaves the padlock lying open next to the hasp.

Puts the key away.

Opens up her bottle of Maker’s Mark.

Paces the floor, swigging.

Remembers Michael’s words.

All new users get a surge sometime after they uncork their power. It might take a day, it might take three months, but it’ll come. It might last an hour, it might last a week. It’s like opening a can of soda that’s been shaken; all that stored-up potential comes gushing out. This is actually pretty dangerous; when it comes, you sit on your hands. You let it pass. Watch TV. Read a book. Do that Sudoku. Keep your mind busy. You don’t know how to control magic yet, and you could do something bad. It’ll be tempting; it’ll take you years to get that strong again. Trying to run spells while you’re surging would be like trying to drive a car when you’re five years old. I’m tempted to keep you here, but there’s no telling when it’ll hit. Besides, you probably shouldn’t be around the kind of big statues I have here; you animate one while I’m not watching and it could kill you, or decide to go to town and play Godzilla. And you might not be able to stop it.

It’s happening now.

She’s surging.

Moving the snowplow sign out of the way, that was the beginning of it.

She wasn’t even tired after it was done.

She loves the double buzz of whiskey and magic.

Sit on your hands.

Her mentor said that, and a mentor’s instructions were law.

At least, according to her mentor.

He said something else, too, but she doesn’t want to remember it.

She tries but fails to chase that thought away with a mouthful of strong, sour warmth.

And for God’s sake don’t drink.

84

The entrance to the cave is easy to miss, situated as it is between two large rocks mostly hidden by maple saplings. Three P.M. Andrew wants to make sure he has plenty of daylight left for this; visiting Ichabod is among the creepiest things he ever does.

He casts a minor light spell, brings a marble-sized amber sphere about twice as bright as a candle into existence, sends it into the cave ahead of him. Ichabod could extinguish that if he wanted to, so he brings backup—a sturdy black flashlight that would also make a fine blunt instrument.

Not that hitting Ichabod would be effective, wise, or useful.

Despite recent shenanigans, he’s pretty sure it still has to obey him, as long as the command is simple and makes sense.

“Ichabod.”

His voice echoes slightly.

The cave is not huge, about the size of a smallish high school cafeteria, but its darkness makes it seem vast. He glances up, sees a cluster of bats hanging directly above him.

“Here, sir,” a voice like a bored teenaged barista’s sounds.

Movement to his right.

This will be one of the thing’s mannequins.

It likes the weight of a body, moves around in mannequins.

“You wanted to see me?” Andrew says.

Waking up to see

COME TO THE CAVE, PLEASE!

spelled out in wine corks on his ceiling had been disconcerting.

They had all fallen as soon as he read them.

Not on him, though; that would have been rude.

He has no idea where the thing got them.

I don’t want to go to the cave.

He thought about summoning it to the house, but fears now to give it commands, not knowing how much leash he still has on it.

I’m going to the cave.

“I most certainly did want to see you,” it says.

A female mannequin strides into the circle of light, a feather boa around its neck, its painted-on eyes staring blindly. “This may well be the last time before you die. In fact, I’m quite certain it will be unless you accept my offer. Come and sit down.”

“I prefer to stand.”

“If you insist, of course. But I feel like such a poor host. Won’t you come in?”

“This is far enough, thanks. I like being able to see the entrance.”

The entity now affects a Southern belle’s drawl.

“I have failed to put you at ease. My life is not worth living.”

The mannequin’s wrist goes to its head.

It collapses into a heap.

He hears steps.

Another mannequin comes into view, this one male, wearing only underwear, well endowed in that strangely sexless underwear mannequin way, carrying a chair. It sets the chair down, gestures at it.

Andrew sighs.

Sits.

Now the mannequin steps behind the magus, picks up the chair with him in it, and carries him effortlessly before it.

The light-casting marble follows.

A table comes into view, a cheap folding table.

Mannequins and dummies, male and female, of several varieties and hues, sit around the table, as if in at a meeting. Empty glass and plastic bottles crowd the table, each with exactly one dead bee, wasp, or june bug in it.

The one carrying him sets him down.

Collapses.

Now the one directly across from him, a flesh-colored, featureless crash-test dummy with black-and-yellow pinwheels on either side of its head, jerks to life, leans forward on its elbows, rests its chin on its hands.

An old British man’s voice comes through it.

“May I interest you in a libation?”

“Ichabod, please just tell me what you want.”

“I want to be a good host, sir. Please allow me that honor.”

Now the crash-test dummy slumps on the table as if it fell asleep studying.

Another mannequin, this one male and somewhat Asian-looking, wakes at its chair, produces a bottle and a glass from the darkness at its feet, and sets these on the table. Both slide forward to Andrew. Andrew’s flashlight unpockets itself, turns on, illuminates the bottle’s label.

“Croatian,” the British voice says, “truly robust, sediment on the bottom like the gravel in an angel’s viscera.”

“I’m sure it’s delightful.”

The foil top removes itself as if cut by an invisible knife, and then the cork spins, squeaking, from the bottle’s mouth.

“Ichabod, I really can’t.”

The bottle upends itself, spilling a splash into the wineglass before Andrew. The wineglass moves on the table as if a practiced sommelier were swirling the wine therein.

The glass slides closer.

It smells like sex and ink and stained moonlight; it smells like the afterlife of sainted grapes, the elect of grapes.

“No.”

At this refusal, the insects in their diverse bottles flutter and buzz, one moth too well stuck in some syrupy residue to do more than quiver pathetically.

They stop.

“New world manners,” the British voice says.

The bottle and glass slide to one side.

The Asian mannequin falls.

The crash-test dummy sits upright, points at Andrew.

“You.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Me what?”

“Need.”

“I need you to stop fucking around.”

“Is that a command, Father?”

“No. But this is. Tell me what your purpose was in summoning me to your cave.”

“Me. You need me.”

“Go on.”

“To help you.”

Andrew raises his eyebrows at it.

“With her,” it says.

Andrew narrows his eyes.

“Her. Yes. But who is she?”

“An old friend.”

“How old?”

Now the crash-test dummy slumps.

Another automaton, a female mannequin with a huge underwire bra and eyeglasses held to its head by a nail between the eyes, gets up and approaches an old-style school overhead projector. Clicks it on. The fan inside the projector whirrs. An image lights up the cave’s wall.

A beautiful woman with a mole.

Walking through the airport.

Marina.

Andrew’s heart beats fast.

“Her daughter?”

The machine cuts off.

“She came over under the name Marina Yaganishna. I suppose that name carries some freight for you.”

“She helped me against her mother.”

“She’s not here to help you now.”

“The rusalka killed her half brother. Is that why?”

“You haven’t got time to worry about why.”

Andrew breathes in and out, calming himself.

“Tell me what you want.”

“What would you want in my place?”

Andrew looks around him.

“Insulation.”

All of the mannequins stand up at once.

It startles the magus.

They all point at him.

A chorus of voices, men, women, and children, now says, “I need you to stop fucking around.”

Now they all fall as though dead.

Andrew’s light goes out.

It’s dark.

The projector clicks on again—the image on the cave wall changes from Marina Yaganishna to an image of a demon. Andrew recognizes it as the cheesy black-and-white demon on the train tracks from the 1957 film Night of the Demon. Only it doesn’t look so cheesy in a dark cave full of animated mannequins.

“Stop trying to frighten me. You’re not a demon.”

The still image on the wall now moves, becomes the scene from the film. The creature smokes and moves forward as the sound of a train is heard.

“Trying? Do you think I don’t know how fast your heart is beating? Now tell me what you would want in my place.”

Andrew opens his mouth.

Closes it again.

Finds himself in the film.

He is the chubby man with the bad beard, running on the train tracks, trying to reach the piece of paper blown before him by the wind before it burns away to nothing, damning him.

He looks at his hands, his suit.

Black and white.

The demon is coming.

A train comes from the other direction.

The paper blows.

He lunges for it, the train’s lamp in his face.

In the film, the man was too late, but Andrew-as-the-man grabs the parchment.

Opens it.

One word typewritten.

He finds himself sitting back in his chair, just watching the movie.

He says the word freedom as the train now flattens the fat man and the train’s whistle cries.

The projector goes off.

Full dark.

Except for the flashlight on the table, its feeble cone of light illuminating only the table and the crash-test dummy.

Ichabod’s voice, now Andrew’s father’s voice, says, from nowhere in particular, “If you promise to free me when it’s done, I’ll help you against her.”

“I’d be delighted to free you. Except that I don’t want you hanging around if I have no control over you. I mean, would you want that? If you were me?”

It considers.

“Yes,” it says. Now it uses Andrew’s own voice. “But I know my motives. They’re a lot more benign than you might imagine. You have no idea how much I protect you.”

“Against what?”

“Yourself.”

Water drips.

“Explain.”

Water drips.

“Ichabod.”

“Yes, yes. I’m just considering the consequences of my words. Something more of us should do more often, don’t you agree?”

Drip.

Now the crash-test dummy wakes up, leans forward, lit by the flashlight as if undergoing some low-tech interrogation.

“Do you know why you called me in the first place?”

Drip.

“Yes. It was an academic exercise. I did it… just to see if I could.”

Drip.

Drip.

“Do you know what I’d have done to you if that were true? If you had bound me to your will for something so petty and egoic as a test of your own power? No, Andrew. The fleshed call those of my rank for a very few reasons. All of those reasons are only subcategories of two motivators. Extreme love. Or extreme hate. Which do you think yours was?”

Something very unpleasant moves in Andrew’s subconscious.

Sarah.

The entity continues.

“What happened after you wrecked your car?”

He concentrates.

Nothing comes.

“I was drinking a lot then.”

“I’ll say.”

“I have holes in my memory. Like Swiss cheese.”

“You hurt yourself. Quite badly. Do you remember wearing a cast? Summoning some magical nurse-witch to knit your bones? Conventional physical therapy would have been quite memorable, from what I understand of such things. Where was Sarah that night?”

“She was…”

Nothing comes.

“She was home?”

“That was a question, not a statement.”

Drip.

The unpleasant something in Andrew’s mind kicks like a baby. It positively squirms. He breathes hard and his heart races.

I want you in the library tonight

I want you to fuck me in that leather chair

“I think I know where you’re going with this, and she died later. She died of an aneurysm.”

“Yes,” Ichabod says. “Although it’s not how she was meant to die.”

“Shut up,” Andrew says.

“We can’t stop death. Only delay it.”

“Shut. UP.”

“Is that a command, sir?”

“Yes,” Andrew says. Barely audible.

“Protocol, sir.”

“I, Andrew… I…”

“Yes. Well. While you compose yourself, I wish to show you something. After which you’ll be in no shape to negotiate. Please understand that unless you agree to free me, you have no chance whatever against the being known as Baba Yaga.”

Andrew fishes a bottle of Klonopin out of his pocket.

Swallows one.

“Panic attack? Yes, extreme stress and guilt can bring those on. Nasty things. Hardly the sort of stable platform a warlock needs when he’s about to wage war.”

“Please, Ichabod.”

“Agree to free me or I’ll show you something you don’t wish to see.”

“Please.”

“Oh, another thing. The stakes are higher than you might think. You know where she lives now, yes? An irradiated exclusion zone is perfect for someone who wants solitude, lawlessness, and the feudal loyalty of simple, superstitious people who live off the land. And yet, boredom, as you well know, is a constant companion of those who have mastered most of Maslow’s little pyramid. Perhaps she wishes to see if she can recreate her wilderness here.”

The nuclear plant?

“She didn’t cause the meltdown of reactor number four at the Chernobyl plant, of course; she’s oddly sentimental about her Slavs. I assure you she has no such reservations about America.”

“You’re making this up.”

“I suppose you can’t know whether I am or not. But it’s time for you to remember something I made you forget.”

85

The badly injured man limps by the side of the road, carrying his cowboy boot because he couldn’t fit his broken foot back into it. He doesn’t feel it. He is drunk, but that’s not why. He can’t feel his foot because he has the focus of a man in a life-or-death situation. His lover is dead in the woods. Thrown clear of the wreck into a stand of trees.

His fault.

All his fault.

He had flipped the lights off for a joke, doing fifty.

She had said “Andrew” in admonition, her last intelligible word.

He can’t save her.

But he knows something that can.

He sticks his thumb out and the big Swede in the pickup truck stops.

“I’m taking you to the hospital,” the man insists.

“You’re taking me home,” Andrew tells him, charming him hard. Too hard.

“Sure!” the man says, his cheek twitching with a brand-new tic that may or may not be permanent. He drives the crazed, injured drunk home.

“See you later!” the Swede says, pulling out and waving, his face a-twitch.

Poor bastard just wanted to help but I can’t think about him Sarah Sarah Sarah.

All folded around her tree.

Salvador barks, jumps up on him, tries to lick the tears and snot and blood from his cheeks. Spins in glad circles.

“Not now, Sal,” the magus says.

He goes to the library.

Kneels before a trunk.

Opens it by telling it his name.

The trunk contains a Russian cavalry officer’s revolver, one bullet, and a shaving razor. He loads the bullet, spins the cylinder.

Puts the barrel in his mouth.

Sarah.

Pulls the trigger.

Click.

A book appears.

He puts the gun down.

Cracked blue leather. Engraved in circles of gold and silver.

Hair soaked in long-dried blood laid into sixteenth-century Russian letters:

BOOK OF SORROWS.

He cuts his thumb, bleeds several drops into the hair.

He thinks about what he wants.

The book opens to a page near the end.

Handwritten letters, ink, not blood, tell him what to do.

He does the first part correctly, despite his inebriation.

He is not in his library anymore.

“Going to California” plays on the radio of his wrecked car.

It stands there.

Black, its blackness seeming to stick to everything around it.

Not magic, but a weird, dead feeling antithetical to magic.

A headless, hulking form that’s about to need arms and legs, so it forms those. No head yet.

The headless horseman.

Ichabod Crane.

Its name sounded like Ichabod.

“Ichabod will do just fine,” it says.

It unfolds the dead woman from her awful nest of sticks and greenery.

It picks her up.

Its size reminds him of Frankenstein’s monster, and now it leaches the image from his mind and turns into that, a black-and-white version. Like Karloff’s monster but not quite. Karloff’s version filtered through Andrew’s mind, corrupted a bit with a graphic novel version he once saw, and just a whiff of Herman Munster. It winks at him, holding the broken girl, who already looks a little less broken. It passes its palm over Andrew’s face.

“Forget,” it says. “For now.”

He is already forgetting it as it lopes off home.

He knows he will find her safe and well in their bed.

He follows behind it, much more slowly.

He stops to pour blood out of his boot.

A pickup truck pulls over.

Sarah lives another year and a day.

The length of a handfasting.

She has her aneurysm at Darien Lake.

After the roller coaster.

Sits down.

Falls over.

And that’s all.

The following year, Salvador chases a doe into the road.

The big Swede in the pickup truck misses the doe.

Not the dog.

Andrew drinks for two more years.

Thinks that’s when he calls Ichabod.

Thinks that’s when he botches the spell to send him back.

Thinks it’s time to stop drinking.

When really it’s long past time.

86

The cave near the railroad tracks.

Now.

“Will you destroy her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Silence.

“Why not, Ichabod?”

The sound of water dripping.

“I can’t.”

87

A moment later.

Andrew has just left the cave.

The sun is going down.

He was in there for six hours somehow.

He turns back and looks at the mouth of the cave.

All the bats fly out around him into the new night.

Hunting.