The Necromancer's House

88

Home.

Andrew calls Haint for the first time since New Orleans.

He wants to arrange a drop-off of the Hand of Glory, the one that kills. That hand might serve him well against her, but then it might not, and he had promised it in payment to the scarred little man—the last thing he needs atop his other woes is to piss off a dangerous citizen like Haint.

Four rings.

Five.

He knows the message will play at six, anticipates this, but, to Andrew’s mild surprise, Haint picks up.

Goes to Facetime.

Andrew braces himself for a comment about how old he looks now.

Haint comes in, his face filling the screen.

“Salutations,” Andrew says.

Haint works his lips like he wants to speak, or perhaps to spit out some unpleasant thing from under his tongue, but then he just shakes his head.

“You all right?” Andrew says. “I owe you this,” he says, holding up the withered little hand, as light as a dried chili pepper.

The hoodoo man doesn’t even seem to see it.

He shakes his head harder, his eyes a little wide.

Bricks behind him—he’s in his mobile apartment.

“Haint, do you need help?”

Haint closes his eyes, keeps shaking his head, like a stubborn toddler shaking off a parental command.

Now he seems to be thinking very hard.

Gags.

Opens his mouth.

A snake pokes its head out of Haint’s mouth, not a large one, perhaps a garter snake, its tongue a-flick. Its head probes the air, turns to look at Haint’s eye. Haint squints. He snatches the snake’s head, winds it around his hand twice, pulling it entirely out. He wrings its neck, throws it.

Looks angrily at the screen.

Points.

The camera follows his finger.

In the corner of the apartment, behind a knocked-over chair, stands a knee-high heap of dead snakes, mostly small, a few less so.

Many of them bloody.

A knife stuck in the table nearby.

Vomit on the floor.

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Now Haint sets the camera down, returns with a piece of paper and a pen.

Writes, pressing hard with the pen.

“I don’t know,” Andrew says.

Several expressions pass across Haint’s face; anger, fear, and, finally, something like resignation.

He nods.

The nod says, I knew I was playing with fire.

Now I pay.

Writes.

He points at his chest.

Andrew shakes his head.

Haint looks incredulous, then angry.

Bares his chest, jabs violently at it with his thumb, points at the screen.

Fills the screen with his enraged eyes.

Writes.

“I can’t,” Andrew says.

He only just notices Haint is wearing a wool coat, doesn’t yet process this.

Radha might help me find a counterspell, but I think she got Radha.

Could go to New Orleans, but what would I do for him?

Miss Mathilda knows hoodoo and voodoo people, but none as strong as Haint.

He’s dead.

And maybe me next.

Haint’s eyes squint, fill with fresh water.

He retches awfully.

Pants like a dog.

Oh Christ I can see his breath it’s cold in there.

He claws at his throat, retches up another snake.

Colorful, like a small king snake.

Not a coral snake, that would be lethal.

He’s supposed to suffer.

Haint stamps on the snake.

Kicks it to the corner.

Andrew has just decided to use the hand to stop Haint’s heart when Haint spits on the camera.

A flash of pixilated nonsense as Haint throws the phone against his bricks.

Smashes it.

Call ended.

89

She’s getting to all of them.

She’s killing them like mice.

Anneke.

Should have told Michael to keep her there; she’s probably on her way home.

No sooner has Andrew thought this than his phone rings.

His heart goes chill, afraid it’s Haint again, never mind that Haint smashed his phone, just primally afraid of what he might see if it were Haint. Afraid Haint might decide to take Andrew with him.

God, I’m selfish.

It’s Anneke.

Drunk as hell.

“I did something.”

He’s still gathering himself from Haint.

She speaks again.

“Something bad.”

“What did you do, Anneke?”

Silence.

The unmistakable sound of swigging.

“Where are you?” he says.

“Home.”

Silence.

“I thought it would be like a leaf. The leaf, I mean. The tree-leaf. I told myself I would just turn it into wood, like a cool plant, and then back to stone later. But that’s not what I was thinking. Doing, I mean. Not what I was doing. I was remembering.”

“I don’t understand. Tell me what happened.”

Swig.

Cough.

A lighter lights, wet puffs.

“Don’t. Don’t tell Michael, right?”

“Just tell me. I can help.”

“Maybe only Michael can help but he won’t help, he’ll kill me and I don’t blame him.”

Andrew’s heart is beating fast.

“Anneke,” he says.

“Andrew.”

He hears a new sound.

Anneke crying.

She hangs up.

“Salvador! Lock the house down!”

Andrew fires up the Mustang.

90

Anneke goes outside, just wants fresh air on her face.

The thing is on her bed, waiting for her.

She told it to wait and it did.

It’s quite obedient.

She closes the door behind her, stumbles, only just keeps from falling.

Outside, the night is brilliant with moonlight.

She looks up, sees the moon blurry through her tears, wipes her eyes with her sleeves.

The hairs on the backs of her arms stand up just a little.

Am I cold?

No.

That’s magic.

She looks down the path leading away from her cottage, sees a figure. Because of the magic feeling, she expects it to be Michael Rudnick, but that’s wrong. She just left him in Vermont.

It’s a woman in a black silk robe. A mourning veil of sorts covers her face, but she looks to be quite beautiful.

She seems far away, but before Anneke knows it, she’s standing near her, like someone sped up the film, but that could just be the whiskey.

The veil comes up.

This is a beautiful woman, all cheekbones and tilted eyes, quite blue. The cutest mole ever near the corner of her mouth.

She’s charming me.

Okay.

I don’t care.

The woman’s gaze is as pure as the blue heart of a glacier.

She remembers Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen.

She wants to kiss me!

A lip brushes hers.

Warm, not cold.

She has breath like tea and mint and a hint of garlic.

Not unpleasant.

Far from it.

Anneke leans forward to kiss her again, but the woman pulls back.

Smiles.

“I want to give you something,” the woman says.

Russian accent.

“What?”

“A… what’s the word in English?… A torque.”

She produces

From where?

an iron circlet depicting a snake eating its tail. Like something from an archaeological dig. Something from a glass case in a museum.

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s old. Would you like to wear it?”

This is wrong.

She hears herself say, “Yes.”

This is Baba Yaga’s daughter.

Andrew told me about the mole.

But she helped him!

Helped him escape!

“Bow your head.”

Anneke fights out of the charm just enough to say, “I don’t do that.”

The woman tilts her head, still smiling.

“A pity. Now I think it will hurt.”

The woman steps back, tosses the circlet at Anneke.

It whips around her neck.

Now it begins dragging her backward down the path away from her house; she digs her fingers under it to keep it from crushing her windpipe.

As the torque drags her, she sees the woman walking after her, casually, unconcerned.

Anneke sees a loose stone, a stone the size of a small egg, but something. She uses magic, flings it at the woman. It flies with great force, but inaccurately. She hears it crashing in the woods.

The woman purses her lips and raises an eyebrow, gently claps.

“You should teach me to do that,” she says. “Don’t you Americans do that? Promise to teach students? You should be my professor.”

Keeps walking.

Slippers on her feet, embroidered.

This is the most beautiful and dangerous person I’ll ever see.

They pass a house, her second-nearest neighbor.

An old woman she never properly met.

The woman is taking the trash to the curb wearing a flannel gown bowed neatly at the waist.

Looks right at them, nods, says, “Good evening.”

“Good evening,” the witch says back.

“That’s a pretty dog,” the neighbor says, indicating Anneke. “What kind is it?”

“A borzoi.”

“Do you live around here?”

The witch says, “Staying with neighbors,” in English, then says, “You bore me,” in Russian.

The woman falls asleep next to her trash can, standing up.

The torque keeps dragging Anneke.

The woman keeps walking.

A pocket has ripped off Anneke’s jeans.

Now the circlet yanks her to her feet.

In the moon-shadow of something quite large.

Not fucking possible.

A cabin.

A summer cabin.

On very large chicken’s feet.

It turns its windows down to look at her.

Two rectangular eyes.

Inside, the gentle glow of coal fire, as if from an open stove.

“Izba, Izba, eat this woman.”

The chicken’s foot picks Anneke up around the waist, its force irresistible, tucks her into its open door.

The door shuts hard.

Anneke is not alone.

91

The Mustang eats the road.

The night air hums and breathes with the current not of magic but like the tickle magic makes—this is the hum of big things on the move, audible as if in the inner ear, spurring Andrew’s foot to grow heavier on the pedal, goosing his turquoise, or biryuzoviy (the Russian occurs to him for no obvious reason), Mustang up to eighty on the straightaways, back down to forty or fifty on the turns, depending on the angle.

Anneke’s in trouble.

Andrew has never been in the military, but he imagines that one of the comforts the lifestyle affords, for some at least, is the certainty of following orders. When the command comes, you obey, end of story. Love speaks in imperatives, too.

The phone was still warm from his hand when he got into his big steel beast, and now he roars west, knowing he’ll find his apprentice drunk, hoping that’s all.

He knows it’s not all.

That’s when he nearly hits the SUV.

92

Anneke breathes hard, trying to calm herself. The hut is on the move, swaying and pitching, making her want to throw up the thin gruel of whiskey sloshing around in her belly.

The man with the beard sits across from her, the bastard with the bald head who handcuffed and blindfolded her. She can hear him grunt from time to time, swear occasionally, though she doesn’t know exactly why; but it’s his koanlike chanting that really bugs her out. He sounds insane. He sounds like a woman who’s been in labor for a while, just running air over his vocal cords because he hasn’t got anything left. Something between a kid’s impression of a ghost and some Indian chant on a shitty 1960s western.

Hee-ee-ee-ee-uh-ee-ee-ee-EE-uh-ee-ee-ee-oh fuck oh fuck oh fuuuuck-unh uh-uh-ee-ee-ee.

She imagines this is what a guy sounds like just before he bangs his head into the wall ten or fifteen times.

If not for the greasy towel around her eyes, she would know he was frantically trying to finish sewing up the last of nine burlap dolls. All stuffed with rags and hair and iron shavings, their feet shod in canvas cut from army surplus boots and stapled on, their eyes twin buttons, seams sewn with blood. His blood. He pokes a finger or an arm and sews. The swaying of the hut doesn’t help, but he knows better than to disappoint her.

Anneke remembers the glimpse she got inside the hut; it used to be a cabin, the kind they rent out on the lake, but it had compacted in on itself, the whole thing just the size of the kitchen now, the walls crumpled together but still intact somehow, these walls discolored where the modern appliances had been removed. She only saw one appliance, a sort of old-timey antique shop stove. Glowing red.

And then the bearded man cuffed her to an iron loop in the wall, blindfolded her. She failed to notice, during their brief and lopsided struggle, that he, too, is chained to the wall by one ankle.

She’s upset with herself she didn’t fight harder sooner. She might have been a match for him were she not bewildered, terrified, and dragged halfway across the state—her shirt is torn, her ass and back are on fire, and dirt falls from her pockets when she moves.

Then there’s the torque.

The thing throbs like it has a pulse.

And it’s heavy.

She notices she gets sleepy and heavy-limbed when the hut moves faster.

It’s draining me.

93

Andrew reflexively pounds the horn, but only for a split second; he needs both hands, now, quick, swerves hard, the driver of the SUV visible in a flash, her mouth a classic O of panic.

She swerves, too.

She wasn’t going all that fast, fishtails anyway.

Top heavy.

Rolls.

Lands right-side up in corn.

Her air bag goes off.

Andrew pulls a U-turn, meaning to help the SUV driver.

Then he sees the tractor she was trying to go around.

Only it’s not a tractor.

Magic makes it look like a tractor, strong enough magic to fool even him, until he really looks at it.

His heart skips a beat.

Two beats.

He’s still got clonazepam in his system, or else he would likely go into a full-blown panic.

A hut on chicken legs.

Loping down the road away from me.

It’s HER.

Not the hut she had in the woods, but its modern sister.

He thinks the hut will stop, turn around, come for him.

It keeps going.

Toward my house!!!!!

Now he sits, breathing hard, trying to process.

Anneke.

House.

Shit, the other driver!

He drives up and looks at her.

Fortyish lady in short hair.

One drop of blood on her forehead.

“You okay?” he shouts.

“I think so,” she says, unbuckling, stepping out into the flattened corn.

She’s got her cell phone out, motions to him to pull over and park, dials.

Nick on her forehead.

Shit flies around in a crash.

She’s probably okay.

I don’t know, but probably.

Help’s coming either way.

But not for Anneke.

“Sorry,” he says, drives off, leaves her screaming, “HEY!” after him.

94

Anneke hears the accident.

Hears the horn.

Recognizes it as Andrew’s Mustang.

“HEY!” she screams with everything in her.

Even magic.

The torque drinks most of that down.

But not all of it.

Beard man hits Anneke.

It’s more of a hard, awkward heel-slap than a hit.

He never hit many people in his other life and has no talent for it now, even though desperation and insanity have made him stronger.

The blow hurts Anneke a little, but now she knows where he is.

She kicks the fuck out of him.

Just lies back on her skinned and burning ass and donkey-kicks him until he squeals and backs against the hut’s wall away from her, his glasses broken, blood in his beard.

“Uncool!” he says. “Help! Help!”

She almost laughs at this.

She tries to feel the metal in the handcuffs, wonders if she can pop them with the same energy she used to relocate the road sign.

Not with the damned torque on me.

Now she tunes in to the metal of the torque.

Imagines it wrenching open.

It doesn’t.

She pushes harder, trying to feel the most basic structure of the iron. It warms on her neck. It moves just a little, writhing in tiny motions, a snake waking up. She begins to force its tail away from its mouth. The torque squeals the fine squeal of agonized metal.

Something else is in the hut now.

She sees me.

Knows what I’m trying to do.

And just like that the hut goes away.

A woman squats beside a river, light snow dusting the ground, a birch forest mostly bare behind her. November? Late fall. A woman washes clothes in the water, an old woman in a colorful scarf, Slavic. Is that her? No. Baba Yaga is coming up behind her. Not the woman with the mole, but an old, sallow woman whose skin hangs from her jowls. But it’s her. Anneke wants to shout a warning to the washerwoman, but whatever part of Anneke sees this has no mouth. This is not today, and it is not yesterday. This is before trains. Now the woman at the river becomes aware of the other, reaches for a stick, magic tickles the air. A witch. She has the stick, but before she can point it at Baba, the older crone jabs a birch-broom at a birch tree. Something very like a snake ripples from the upper branches, down the trunk almost too fast to see in a shower of fallen brown leaves, rides up the old woman’s stick and arm, and coils around her neck. Its mouth fixes to her mouth. Baba Yaga breathes in even as the snake breathes in, drawing the washerwoman’s breath from her. The washerwoman struggles and dies, suffocating. The snake crawls from around the corpse’s neck, eats the stick the woman had been grasping, then slithers up around Baba’s neck. Gently. It breathes into her mouth. A wind shakes the last of the leaves from the trees by the river. Baba grows less sallow; her cheeks take on a rosy glow. Even the scarf around her head, sort of a faded red, glows more brightly, as if freshly dyed. Two old babushkas in headwraps and embroidered blouses. They should have been exchanging recipes or bitching about their children, but they were both witches and one has murdered the other with an iron snake. Baba Yaga gathers the clothes from the river, balances the basket on her hip, and leaves the dead woman there. Her broom stays behind, sweeps the beginnings of a grave it will roll the body into. At last, almost too far away to see, Baba turns and gathers her shawl about her, looks over her shoulder.

Looks at Anneke.

“Its name is Milk-witch,” she says in Russian that Anneke somehow understands. “And it serves me, not you.”

The old woman walks into the woods as ravens caw.

Anneke wakes up in the hut.

Her lips hurt from where the snake’s mouth was on hers, where it drew most of her breath out.

It has settled back around her neck now, cool iron.

The stove glows magma red.

The beardy man is leaking bloody drool from between his busted lips, but he is tying Anneke’s feet together, vocalizing incoherently, syllables that aren’t words. With strength something lent him, he pulls Anneke upside down, hangs her by her feet, her hands still cuffed to the wall. It’s a bit too far, but he stretches her anyway. She grits her teeth, grunts. Manages not to shout.

95

Michael Rudnick calls her again.

Anneke left her wallet behind.

She’s not the most organized person, so this seems typical.

And, since she only left him a few hours ago, it shouldn’t raise red flags that she isn’t answering.

But it does.

He calls Andrew.

96

Andrew hears her.

Barely.

More in his head than outside.

HEY!

It’s enough.

He knows where she is.

Turns around.

The longest three-point turn in the history of wheeled vehicles.

The magic is so strong on the goddamned thing that it has started to look like a tractor again. He unconsciously goes to pass it, and then it turns chicken-legs and one of those legs lashes down at him, hooks his bumper, wrenches it just a little loose, but the bumper hangs on.

“FUCK!” he yells.

Fishtails a little, not like the SUV, not top heavy.

One tire hits and spits gravel, but he gets back on the road.

Gets ahead of it, stops.

It’s coming.

Not all that fast, maybe twenty miles per hour?

He thinks about spinning a tree across its knobby knees, but the witch could boomerang it back at him. Without breaking a sweat. He’s not sure he could stop the return volley.

And Anneke’s in there.

“Fuck.”

It comes on, hopping a little now.

Can he fight it here?

Can he fight her here?

On 104A from the front seat of his car?

Not well.

“COME ON!” he says. “COME ON OVER TO MY HOUSE! LET’S PLAY A GAME!”

He punches the accelerator, squeals his tires, races home.

97

His phone buzzes in his pocket.

He senses it’s relevant, fishes it out, beaches it on the passenger seat.

Michael Rudnick’s name.

Michael Rudnick’s ringtone.

Queen’s “We Will Rock You.”

He answers.

“Yeah?”

“Everything okay?” the older man asks.

Andrew regrets answering.

Hates his choice, has to make it fast.

Protect Michael or protect Anneke.

Michael is not an easy man to lie to; the pause has already given it away.

And love speaks in imperatives.

“No. It’s not okay.”

98

The man who used to be Professor Coyle knows his duties.

Muster the troops, she had said. They will know what to do. You guard the little witch, keep her there, mind the hut.

He looks at the troops now.

Nine little burlap dolls.

A model tank.

Three plastic crew members, carefully painted.

On top of the tank, the smallest dead man he has ever seen, frozen behind the top hatch. She shrank him. On the side of the turret the Russian graffiti:

The hut has almost walked to the house of the Thief.

The professor looks out the front window, sees the road bounce beneath him in the glow of the streetlights. In those houses, blurry houses without glasses to correct his myopia and astigmatism, blurry people are eating blurry dinners and squinting at television and doing other things he used to do before. But before is all over for him. An unmeltable wall of ice separates him from before. When he was warm. He knows he is making noise but he can’t seem to stop, so he tries at least to do it rhythmically. He looks at the little witch. She looks up at him, like those lions Marlin Perkins used to dart on Wild Kingdom, able only to look at you, hate you, too drugged to move. She is like that, and that’s good. She kicks really hard. He wasn’t even mad when she broke his tooth and glasses, just frustrated she didn’t understand she was going to get both of them punished.

He gets frustrated with how blurry everything is, picks up one lens of his ruined glasses, holds it to his eye. Now the street is clear. He feels like a giant.

A cyclops.

The slave of a witch.

He says the witch’s words.

Badly, through busted lips.

He thinks his jaw may be broken, too.

But pain is different now, pain’s little cousin.

“Fu, fu, fu.”

99

Andrew has minutes before the hut comes.

Two? Six? Not ten.

He drives the Mustang up the steep drive, turns left in front of his garage, drives over his herb garden, leaves the car behind the house.

Goes to the kitchen door.

Says words that will undo the magic locks he knows Salvador will have set. Sal greets him, anxious, pelvis tilted forward as though he wished he had a tail to tuck.

The Etch-a-Sketch scrawls MICHAEL and the stick-man points upstairs. Andrew grabs his shillelagh from above the fireplace, takes the stairs in twos, goes into his master bathroom, and finds Michael Rudnick wet in the tub, blinking, dazed.

He’s wet because he jumped in the quarry to get here, grafted his escape tunnel to Andrew’s.

“I hate that goddamned thing,” he says. “I don’t have to leave that way, do I?”

“The tub’s the exception,” Andrew says. “You just can’t come in one door and go out the other.”

Michael gets a good look at him with his white hair fanned out across his shoulders.

“’Bout time,” he says. “You look good. You look like a grown-up.”

Rudnick steps out, dripping, sloshes a plastic trash bag onto the floor, tears it open to produce an oiled leather backpack.

Hefts it.

Andrew goes to his library.

Takes an object from a box he has to reach through an old-style metal fan to get into.

A monkeyish little hand.

Puts this in his jacket pocket.

“Is that—?”

“Yep.”

“Shit,” Michael says.

“Shit,” Andrew says, looking out the attic window.

“Yep,” Michael agrees.

Snowflakes have begun sticking to the window and melting.

An unoccupied tractor is puttering up the drive.

It turns sideways, seems to keep coming sideways, against the direction of the turning wheels, and then the illusion fails and the men see a cabin on chicken’s feet turning its way up the incline, the maples around it pulling back their branches or bending outright to let it pass.

Just as Michael warms up to try to petrify its legs, it ducks sideways, lopes across the lawn, disappears into the woods.

“Fuck,” Andrew says.

“Yep.”

100

“Wake up,” the bearded man says, in Russian.

He says it to a burlap doll with button eyes.

The doll grows human eyes that blink, man-sized eyes disproportionate to its small head. Now little fingers sprout from its tied-off arms and it grasps handfuls of the man’s sleeve, the sleeve stippled with blood from where he jabbed himself with sewing needles. The doll grows a mouth the size of an almond, black-lipped, its pink gums studded with vicious little teeth like a pike’s teeth.

That’s why I sprinkled fish scales on them.

The man winces in anticipation, vocalizes.

It takes a bite out of his arm.

An almond-sized bite.

Enough to make him whimper.

And bleed.

It spits out shirtsleeve.

It chews.

A tongue comes out of its head. He suffers it to lap at him; it clutches him almost tenderly, it is not unlike nursing. A thought from his days as a man occurs to him.

For thy desires are wolvish, bloody, starved and ravenous.

He makes a sound like laughing.

There is no time for one and one. Call them all.

She is not in the hut, at least not all of her.

Just her voice, the horsefly in his brain.

“Wake up, wake up, wake up,” he says, crying and laughing, gesturing like a mother calling children to come hear a story.

ALL!

He says it five more times.

Their outsized eyes blink in their burlap heads.

All looking at him.

The first one moves, then they all do.

They crawl to him, cover him.

He brays laughter to get through the pain.

His eyes watering and bugging.

This is hard, but he does it.

She will not punish him.

101

“There it is. I see it.”

Michael is looking through a brass naval telescope from 1888.

Andrew can see Michael’s breath.

“How far?”

“Hundred yards. Hundred and ten.”

“Too far?”

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

“Yes,” Andrew says.

Michael shakes his head a little.

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

“Whoooa Nelly,” Michael says.

“What?”

“Something’s coming out of the window.”

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

Michael counts.

“Two, three-four. Six.”

Andrew looks.

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

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

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

“Ah, right.”

He opens the window.

Snow wisps in.

The bird flies off, churring and buzzing.

A moment later.

Andrew sees through the bird’s eye.

It flies to the hut, peers through the window.

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

A torque on her neck.

I know that fucking thing.

I know what it’s doing to her.

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

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

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

Higher power, help me.

Now the hut moves off.

Have to see what came out of it.

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

Movement!

A man in military gear?

Soviet, 1940s.

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

The muzzle flashes.

“Ow FUCK I’m shot! I’m shot!”

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

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

“Let me see.”

The eye and face are whole.

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

Andrew does.

Looks at Michael, who raises both eyebrows at him.

“Soviet soldiers. World War Two.”

“Shit,” Michael says.

“Yep.”

102

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

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

So now he stands there, eyes wide.

He shuts the fridge door, kills the kitchen light.

Shakedown is barking in the yard.

Back and forth on his run.

Good boy!

Call the cops?

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

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

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

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

He scans the street.

Too dark to see much.

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

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

The light comes on.

He didn’t flip the switch.

Someone else.

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

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

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

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

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

Is that snow on their shoulders?

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

He’s never seen these guys.

The one with the rifle looks rough.

Like he hasn’t been eating so well.

And like he’s shot people.

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

Something catches his eye.

“Shto eta?” he says.

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

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

What’s this?

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

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

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

They do.

“Ti shto fashistskoe gavno?”

Dawes picks out the word fascist.

Correctly guesses the uncomplimentary nature of the second bit.

“Ti anti-semit?”

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

Some kind of fucking communists for real.

The snow on their helmets and coats has melted.

That was real snow what the fuck?

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

Two if by Tea!

From Tea to shining Tea!

Original sweet tea.

No help.

Shakedown keeps barking.

Far, far away.

Like the pistol he dropped.

Now walrus picks up John’s rifle.

John’s Nazi rifle.

Nods and looks up at John Dawes.

Grins.

John pisses his pants.

103

Another gunshot.

This one from the west side of the house.

The high chipping sound of a bullet hitting glass.

“Salvador! Get away from the window.”

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

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

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

“Go patch yourself.”

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

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

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

“We’ve got three on this side.”

Two muzzles flash in the darkness.

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

The Brazilian pendant around Andrew’s neck glows warm.

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

“Let’s wake up Buttercup.”

Michael nods.

“Take cover.”

Michael takes cover.

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

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

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

It sparks once with a loud P-TANG.

Michael says two paragraphs in the Greek of Archimedes.

Andrew says a sentence in old French.

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

The lenses rotate.

Shit, is it going to attack?

No, just looking at its master.

“Allez!”

It flaps harder.

Its vacuum motor runs.

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

Snow blows into the attic behind it.

It steers toward the shooter.

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

Screams.

The screaming stops.

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

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

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

Michael finishes another verse in Greek.

Andrew adds a verse in German to this.

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

Now the ground rumbles.

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

The magi have started a small earthquake.

Buttercup is waking up.

104

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

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

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

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

Kolya hated pissing precisely because he was terrified of snipers.

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

“What about the Germans?” Vanya had said.

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

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

She had nodded.

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

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

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

And now they are here, together.

Shooting up into a house.

Kolya shot a strange bird that was looking at them.

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

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

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

The ground rumbles.

Like an armored column passing, but harder.

“My God,” Vanya says.

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

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

Now the car’s hood becomes a mouth.

A steer’s iron mouth.

The soldier jumps back, startled.

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

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

This giant grows horns.

Bull’s horns.

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

Headlamps for eyes.

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

Raining dirt and small rocks.

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

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

The man still dangles from its mouth.

It spits him out.

It is as tall as the house.

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

No bigger than a cat.

Buttons for eyes.

105

“Jesus Christ,” Andrew says, the headlamps level with the attic, sweeping the attic with light. “It’s fucking Buttercup.”

“Yep,” Michael Rudnick says, grinning.

He stops grinning as they watch the Soviet soldier fall from the bull’s mouth, his neck on wrong.

I drove that car into a tree with Sarah in it.

Drunk I’m worthless I should die.

Stop it!

Focus!

You’re a warlock now.

Look what you made!

You have to stop the witch.

Save Anneke.

Andrew says, “Buttercup.”

It looks at him, robes him in light.

“Kill the soldiers. Break the hut’s legs.”

The lights sweep off, illuminating snowflakes as the minotaur heads for the tree line, the ground shaking at its steps.

106

Vanya shoots it, shoots one of its headlamps out, but it keeps coming. It bends for a log. It sees Kolya frozen in fear, quite near it. Squashes him with the log as easily as a man would kill a toad, squashes him down into the soil. Kolya is gone entirely. Vanya runs into thick forest, away from the giant.

Something trips him.

The tail of a dragon?

Attached to a vacuum cleaner?

Now a brass-and-metal beaked head turns to look at him, great black wings spreading.

He tries to point his rifle, but its eyes flash.

I’m burning!

The pain is immeasurable.

Then he isn’t burning.

He’s running through a field of sunflowers, running at a German artillery position.

A cacophony of noise around him, but he feels great relief.

It’s so good not to be burning that he laughs, still running.

Then he hears the whine.

An eighty-eight-millimeter shell drawing nearer.

It’s coming for me, right at me!

He flings himself to the ground.

Still the whine grows louder.

He knows it will land almost on him, seems to see the shadow of it growing on the spot exactly near his head where it will punch into soil and sunflowers and explode.

He will be mixed with sunflowers.

Time for one last thought.

Sunflowers. This isn’t so bad.

Kolya huddles, mad with fear, when the giant bull comes for him.

It raises its huge tree trunk.

It’s going to crush me! Help! Help!

But then he isn’t in a snowy yard outside a rich man’s house getting crushed by a giant bull-man.

Now he is standing, wiener in hand, urinating on a low stone wall near a collapsed farmhouse.

“Ah,” he says, relieved to feel his bladder emptying.

Relaxed.

Suddenly Kolya feels pressure in his head, massive pressure.

Can’t see anymore.

Hears the rifle’s crack.

Ow!

Sniper!

Kolya feels himself falling in a muted way, as if someone else is falling.

He hears his friends returning fire into the tree line.

A mile away and receding.

He manages to say one last sentence.

“This bitch lies.”

107

Andrew scoots to the other end of the attic, risks a peek.

The minotaur has crossed behind the house, drawing rifle fire from the soldiers on the west side. A grenade lands near it and goes off, blowing off part of one greave, causing it to bleed oil and limp. But it knocks down trees and bellows, flushing the soldier who threw the grenade so the vacuum-cockatrice flies down on him. Its fire magic is exhausted, but it grabs him with its chimp arms and flies him into a tree until his head caves in and he, too, reverts into a lifeless burlap doll.

Exhausted, Electra collapses next to the doll and lies still.

Now Buttercup sweeps its remaining headlight over the backyard again, letting its light fall on a tractor.

As soon as the beam hits it, the tractor changes into the hut on chicken legs.

The minotaur gives chase.

Back around to the front yard.

Andrew follows the action, peeking out the front window now, Michael Rudnick next to him, drawing one missed shot from the sniper’s roost at the Dawes house.

This starts Shakedown barking again.

“We need to take care of that,” Andrew says.

Michael nods.

“You have something?”

“I was saving it,” Andrew says, “but, yeah.”

He puts a finger down his throat.

Regurgitates a golf-ball-sized chicken’s eye onto the oak floorboards.

It floats up, hovers, blinks at Andrew.

Heads across the lawn toward the Dawes house.

108

Anneke wakes up from an awful dream about a snake on her mouth into an equally disturbing dream in which a teetering hut is being knocked down by a giant.

She is in the hut.

Hanging suspended, upside down.

Things slide across the floor, fly up, banging into her.

A bucket busts her lip.

Pain in her shoulder.

The hut has lurched, fallen sideways; she has careened with it, her cuffed arms and feet jerking her short.

The beardy man has fallen, too, yelping as coals from the stove scatter around the hut.

He grunts and puts these out with his hands.

109

Andrew sees Buttercup intercept the hut; the chase was almost comical.

But now he concentrates on the eye.

Eagle’s eye could have done it from here.

He guides it near, nearer.

Puts his own vision into it.

Sees them.

Two Russians, two rifles.

One in some kind of steel breast-gear.

Big mustache.

They lie side to side.

Close enough.

This spell is old Slavic forest magic.

He says “Strike!” in medieval Russian.

The men both look up at the eye, more in wonder than fear.

They have their helmets off, so he gets to see their hair stand up on end.

Bright flash!

Now his sight switches dizzyingly back into his own head; he sees the lightning bolt originate from the chicken’s eye, incinerating it, leaping down into the two soldiers, lighting Dawes’s curtains on fire.

Thunder cracks and booms.

He knows both men are dead.

He is blind in his right eye, as if it has stared at the sun.

Believes his sight will return, but isn’t sure.

110

In the yard, the hut has fallen.

The chicken’s legs scrabble ineffectually at the minotaur.

It grabs one, breaks it over its knee.

“Buttercup,” Andrew says.

It stops with the broken leg in its hands, like a woman interrupted in the business of dressing a hen for the oven.

“Get Anneke out safely. Bring her here.”

Now it peels part of the roof back.

Peers in.

Another flash.

Starting in the woods.

BANG!

The minotaur’s right shoulder explodes, the arm turning back into tree, rocks, car parts, raining down the steep driveway.

Buttercup falls on its huge ass, its weight causing the house to shudder.

It struggles to get to its feet, wanting to use the missing arm, falling heavily, getting back up to its knees.

The hut, too, tries to stand.

It manages.

Holds its broken leg up, hops to the tree line.

The minotaur is almost up.

BANG!

The shell catches it in the throat, blowing its head up and off.

The whole monstrosity turns back into cars and boulders, some of this airborne.

“Oh shit,” Andrew says.

He and Rudnick both drop, cover their heads with their hands.

The old Mustang, on fire, flips end over end, clips the top of the house off, exposing stars and sky and letting in cold air.

Debris rains down on them.

And snow.

Andrew looks back into the yard.

The T-34 tank grumbles out from behind a stand of maples, exhaust farting behind it.

“You okay?” Andrew says.

“Think so. You?”

“Yeah.”

Andrew finds the night-vision binoculars, looks at the tank.

Two figures ride its turret, shielded behind its round hatches.

A very dead man, grinning a skeletal smile.

And a woman wearing a Soviet general’s cap and wool coat.

His long-ago lover, Marina Yaganishna.

From that awful season in Russia.

From the witch’s hut.

Her smallest, most traumatized daughter.

The one who freed him.

She’s not here to help you now.

The turret swivels.

111

Michael Rudnick looks up into the sky through the new hole in the roof.

Parts of the roof burn, but these snuff themselves out quickly thanks to the fireproofing spells Andrew cornered the house with.

Michael has a very powerful spell bottled up, and thinks it’s time.

He fingers an oddly shaped piece of iron hanging around his neck by a leather thong.

He scans the sky, trying both to see and feel.

Feels several, mostly too small, one too big.

This has to be Goldilocks.

And he has to be fast.

And lucky.

Hears the tank fire again.

BAM!

Feels the house rock, start to sag, knows the living room was blown in, one load-bearing wall.

Interrupts the spell he was working on, now feels where the shell hit; he can’t help the lost furniture and electronics, but he opens his palms like a conductor, causes the blown-out bricks and wood to re-adhere—the house jolts and rights itself.

He sees a stuffed owl animate and fly out the window.

Good—Andrew’s up to something.

He glances at the other wizard, sees him fish a pill out of his shirt pocket, dry-swallow it.

He’s holding together.

Andrew has stronger magic than Michael—the minotaur was mostly him, mostly car-magic.

But weaker character.

They might win if Andrew doesn’t lose his shit.

The tank fires again, but Michael is ready for it: The house shudders, but the fragments from the shell don’t blow out two yards before the structure seems to inhale it all back in. Like an incendiary rose blooming and unblooming in the blink of an eye with an echo like rolling thunder. The fires started by the blast wink out in less than two seconds.

A woman swears viciously in Russian.

They know they can’t knock the house down.

Now they’ll shoot high.

At us.

If it hits the attic, we’re hamburger.

He looks at the sky again.

Snow falling, but no clouds.

Feels what he wants.

Exactly the one he wants, just the right size, as near as he can tell.

Oh, this will be dangerous.

This will be the hardest thing he’s ever done.

He did it once in the Arizona desert, but there weren’t houses nearby, precision wasn’t the issue.

He calls it.

Andrew sends the owl and pops a Klonopin.

Where is Sal? Is Sal okay?

The shelling is getting to him.

Two direct hits on the house.

They won’t survive a third.

Killing the tank is on Andrew.

His nerves are frazzled.

Everything is happening at once.

Marina is atop the tank, pointing at the attic.

The gun elevates.

Andrew says “Get down!” to Michael, who appears to be stargazing.

Michael keeps looking up, his mouth moving.

What the fuck is he doing?

Hurry, owl.

Andrew drops to the floor, covers his head, puts his eyesight in the owl.

Now he sees the yard, the tank.

The bird flies toward it, slowly, struggling to carry the vase.

The tank is going to fire.

I could look at the attic, watch myself die.

No, fly faster, fucking owl.

FASTER!

Then he sees it.

With his owl eyes.

It comes from the constellation of Cassiopeia. It tumbles slowly at first, seems to turn, then hurtles at great speed, fiery, smoking, almost too fast to see.

Throwing mad shadows.

It’s big, big enough to make it through the atmosphere.

Because it’s real, many see it.

It gets wished on by no less than four thousand people.

Let my mother’s surgery go well.

Let me get into Yale.

Keep my love safe in Kabul.

Please please please let Stargate listen to my demo.

Make him ask me to marry him.

Please don’t let this be malignant.

I wish for Stephanie Daley to kiss me back with tongue.

OH PLEASE CRUSH THE FUCK OUT OF THAT TANK!

(that one’s Andrew)

The witch atop the tank turns, sees the meteor coming, spreads a hand at it. Manages to split it so it falls not in one television-sized hunk, but in several the size of footballs and baseballs. Manages to slow them so they don’t vaporize the tank.

She’s awfully strong.

But she can’t stop it.

Them.

One piece hits the turret, stuns the dead gunner, the Soviet driver made from a plastic model-man.

Knocks the witch off.

Another piece knocks the left track and two roller wheels off the T-34.

One misses, fells a small tree.

The noise is ungodly.

The meteor doesn’t destroy the tank, but it does beat the holy hell out of it.

It does buy some time.

For the owl.

The huge horned owl wings toward the tank, clutching the vase in its talons. It barely makes it there; the vase is heavy and its talons aren’t made for carrying such things. It drops the vase whole, hears it pop, turns so Andrew can use its eyes to see the yellow glass stones the vase held glittering all over the hull.

Up in the attic, Andrew shouts the word.

“Bhastrika!”

WHUMP!

A fireball the size of a pasha’s tent mushrooms up over the tank, lighting parts of the woods on fire, lighting the owl on fire, illuminating the snow that has begun to collect in the yard.

Andrew comes back to himself, shakes the arm he thought was a wing on fire, collects himself, looks out the window with Michael.

The fire’s glow on the snow makes him think of Christmas lights, and then the thought goes as quickly as it came.

This is one fucked-up Christmas.

A blackened skeleton is crawling out of a burning tank in his front yard.

A blackened skeleton on fire.

Coming toward the house.

The remaining three Soviet soldiers forming up behind it.

Rushing the house!

Michael, still stunned from calling the meteor, braces himself against the wall, points down the attic ladder.

Andrew goes down to meet the attack.

112

Marina Yaganishna’s ears are ringing and her general’s cap lies in the snow. The tank is burning, illuminating the maple trunks and the light dusting of snow, vomiting gouts of oily black smoke skyward. A flash of misplaced nostalgia strikes her, but she shakes this off along with the snow on her back and shoulders.

Shooting now at the front of the house.

Pop pop-pop.

“Moroz,” she says.

He appears. Not a lovely, bearded boy anymore, but a man with snow-white hair and the bluish skin of the dead by freezing.

He has found a pair of red polyester track pants.

His bare feet are missing toes.

The Pac-Man shirt persists.

She looks into his white eyes, eyes that look cataracted but are not.

“He will kill the soldiers,” she says. “And then Misha will kill him. Or not. Either way, get into the house while he’s doing it.”

Moroz nods, turns to go.

“Wait. Is there a well?”

Moroz tilts his head like a dog.

“A well?”

Moroz considers.

Yes. Shall I freeze it?

“No! Show me where it is.”

Moroz points.

She turns and walks that way, saying, without looking back.

“Make it colder.”

113

Andrew comes down the stairs with his shillelagh pointed before him.

“Buckler,” he says, and now a concave circle of slightly blurred and bluish air moves before him, the size of a large shield.

They’re shooting through the door.

He crouches as he comes down, fitting himself behind the shield.

The shield sparks and hisses where bullets strike it, but this is different from the bullet-turning charm. He has to wield this. It has advantages, though. It stops more than bullets. Which is a good thing because one of them has thrown a grenade—the door blows in, spraying him with high-velocity oak splinters and just a few hooks of metal shrapnel. One of these clips his leg, which had been sticking out.

The buckler stops so much matter that it hisses like water in hot oil, smoke blurring his vision for an instant.

He takes three pennies from the pouch around his neck.

His hands trembling.

He wills them to stop.

One soldier shoots around the door while the burning, black skeleton and two other men charge through.

His shield lights up where bullets skid against it.

He squeezes himself as small as he can behind it.

Dragomirov!

Do you like jazz?

He throws the pennies.

Now all the trapped trumpet-sound comes out at once, blowing the skeleton apart and out the door, concussing one man up against the wall so hard he bites through his tongue, his back snaps, and he turns into a little burlap doll.

Andrew runs into the kitchen, pointing the walking stick behind him.

He shuts the door.

Follow, follow!

Ducks behind the island.

Looks back, making sure the side door behind him is locked and sound.

A boot kicks the other door down.

He pops up, projecting the unsolid shield half over the island, flicks a penny.

Sound erupts from it.

Not enough to kill, but it knocks the two men down and deafens the first, cracks the door frame, blows a still life of pears and a copper bowl off the wall.

(He liked that painting)

He swears.

A Russian swears.

The deafened man goes to his knees.

The other man stands, shoots, ineffectively.

Charges Andrew with bayonet.

A barrel-chested, hairy miner from the Caucasus, he stabs the shield and wrenches it aside.

This breaks the spell.

Fuck!

TO-RO-RO-RO-RO!

The Caucasian is winding up to bayonet Andrew’s chest when Andrew opens his mouth very wide and vomits a half dozen tavern darts into the soldier’s face at great velocity. Lethal velocity, in fact. Only the ends of the darts are visible, the one that went into the eye gone entirely, its point through the other side of his skull. The man jerks twice and falls, leaving only a darted doll with a smear of blood on the hardwood floor.

Fuckfuckfuck

The second man is coming, shaking his head but coming.

Worse; dead, smoldering, black Dragomirov lurches into view behind him.

Andrew turns and unbolts the side kitchen door.

The soldier and the revenant enter the kitchen.

Follow, follow!

The soldier begins to raise his gun.

No amulet, no shield.

“Manganese!” the magus yells.

His rolling drawers and several cabinets slam open.

The air blurs with flying metal.

Something wrenching and awful happens in Andrew’s mouth.

He does something between spitting, sneezing, and retching.

The sound of a weird, metallic collision just precedes the rifle shot,

SCRAAANG-BANG!

both painfully and loud in the closed space, but the shot goes high, smashing bowls in a cabinet.

The big miner comes apart, ruined utterly, ruined past description.

The kitchen is an abattoir.

Every knife, fork, cleaver, spoon, pan, pot, and other loose piece of metal in the kitchen shot at the two intruders as if from a cannon. Even a couple of door hinges. Even a faucet handle and a drain sieve.

Andrew tastes blood.

Three of his teeth lost their fillings, but one tooth, top left, preferred to detach from the gum, shot at the things also, tearing his lip on the way out.

There is no time even to spit.

Once-Dragomirov is still coming, still smoking from the tank fire, untroubled by the flea-market-table’s worth of implements and fixtures skewering him.

An eight-inch kitchen knife (J. A. Henckels, the flagship of Andrew’s cutlery drawer) has wedged in its mouth like a gossip’s bit. The wiry remains of a whisk and a mangled colander have married themselves to the architecture of Dragomirov’s spine. A paring knife juts rakishly from its skull. A pot removed most of its teeth and a cast-iron skillet relieved it of an arm, but the teeth are mustering again and the arm is already wobbling in the fruit bowl, preparing to reattach itself.

The dead man comes on.

An accident saves the wizard.

Otherwise Andrew would not have gotten the door open.

But he does.

Dragomirov slips on the soggy burlap doll the wrecked soldier morphed into.

Grabs a fistful of Andrew’s hair on the way down.

Andrew hits it with his shillelagh.

The magic in it makes it strike twice as hard as the wielder swings it. It busts the dead man’s jaw, frees the Henckel.

Andrew grabs this with his free hand.

Cuts the hair held by the skeletal fist.

Opens the door.

Snow flies in.

He runs out the door, blood-spattered, cane and kitchen knife ready.

The skeleton shakes itself like a dog, shedding metalware.

Already re-forming.

Andrew might have run, but he turns now to face it, where it stands silhouetted in the doorway like a Balinese puppet.

Follow.

It takes a decisive step toward Andrew.

“That is not the way you came in, sir,” Andrew pants.

This is my house, and you must exit the same way you entered.

The corpse falls, keeps falling, as if through a hole in the earth.

But there is no hole.

And there is no corpse.

Not here.

114

The attic.

Snow falling in.

Tracks in the snow from where Michael Rudnick left his post by the front window.

More about him in a moment.

The terrarium with the tiny model of the necromancer’s house shivers.

The side door, the kitchen door, opens.

A very small, charred skeletal figure falls from the door.

Falls on the mound of earth beneath the house.

Misha Dragomirov’s reanimated corpse stands, with difficulty.

Where did the Thief go?

His lover’s daughter woke him, told him to avenge his son.

He cranes his head up, a pair of kitchen scissors falling from his neck.

Is that the house up there?

Something moves near Dragomirov.

Coming across the loose soil.

The size of a dog, a big dog, but not a dog.

The light is poor, but it’s reddish.

Something moves over its head.

Antennae?

An insect.

An ant.

A big, big ant.

Something inside Dragomirov’s shell is almost afraid.

I am dead, big fucking ant, you cannot kill me!

The ant doesn’t seem to understand this.

It bites at him with its mandibles; it is very strong but so is he.

He digs his feet into the soil as best he can, laughing a raspy laugh, holding the mandibles like a bully stopping a boy on his bike.

It arches its abdomen; it wants to sting him.

But it can’t!

This is almost fun.

Then he sees the next one.

The imported fire ant.

Solenopsis invicta.

Common to the American South, accidentally brought up in the 1920s on fruit boats from its native South America, it doesn’t like cold. But this nest is doing all right in its climate-controlled attic terrarium, periodically fed crickets and moths and chanted over by a magus.

The first worker finds a strange, burnt bug it can’t quite get its jaws around or arch its abdomen up to envenom. Their struggles move soil, of course, so the others come. Several hundred others. They don’t know what laughter is, so the sound the bug makes as they swarm it means nothing to them. They don’t understand Russian, or insults, let alone Russian insults, so what it says about their mothers (not knowing they all have one mother, nor that her promiscuous egg-laying allows little time for the activities he suggests she enjoys) goes unappreciated. The venom has little effect on it, but they find themselves well able to rip it apart. Its pieces try to lurch away from them; they’ve never experienced that before, but eventually they get all of it down to the late-stage larvae who manage to digest it.

Not much meat on it.

In fact, “Not much meat on me, bastards!” is the last thing it says.

Just the head and a section of spine.

Then that is broken up, too.

And the magic in it sputters and dies.

115

Moroz goes to the west side of the house, where the two big windows of the family room overlook the woods.

The windows the Thief first saw him from.

Now another face peers at him through one of these.

An old man.

The stone warlock.

Powerful, but less so than the Thief.

He is not permitted to kill the Thief—that honor is for the witch—but this man is fair game.

Let’s see how strong you are!

Moroz walks up to the window, knowing how hideous he looks.

The old man just watches him.

Frost has formed on the windowpane.

Moroz writes on this with his finger.

Before he can write the rest, the old man puts a toothpick in his mouth—a toothpick!—and walks away from him. Just walks to the window on the other side of the fireplace.

Moroz becomes one with the snow from which he is made and appears in front of the other window.

he writes, but even as he dots the question mark, the old wizard disappears. Moroz senses something behind him, re-forms himself facing backward. The American boy-host he inhabited dies a little more every time he abuses the body like this, but his work here is nearly done.

It is not the old wizard that he sees.

Now he sees a little stop-motion figure popular in the Soviet Union.

A fuzzy little figure with large ears, supposedly an undocumented tropical forest creature fond of oranges.

How many times had he watched children’s television through the window and seen this little thing?

What was its name?

“Cheburashka!” it says in a childish voice, in Russian, eating an orange. “You made it very, very cold,” it says sadly, lowering its head. “But can you really freeze me to death?”

Moroz grins, and the stand of trees behind Cheburashka grows icicles. A squirrel tries to run from its knothole den and cracks as it freezes solid, falls from its branch.

“Very sad,” Cheburashka says. “But that was just a squirrel. You should try harder if you want to be my friend. Do you?” It offers Moroz its stop-motion orange.

Something about this strikes Moroz as familiar, but he never knows which memories are his and which are the street-boy’s.

Moroz breathes in.

Breathes out hard.

Frost, snow, and ice shavings blow from his mouth.

The trees get so cold they grow brittle.

Branches fall.

Animals crack and die.

“I guess we can’t be friends,” the little creature says sadly, dropping its orange. Now it produces a pipe, lights it with a finger. “This belongs to a crocodile. Gena. He is my friend, even if you are not.”

Moroz can’t freeze the beast.

But perhaps he can rend it.

First he must stop making the blizzard.

Cheburashka draws on his pipe, which glows an animated glow.

Moroz tries to shut his mouth and stop blowing frost but finds that he can’t.

His mouth is stuck open.

The little creature is drawing snow out of him!

As Cheburashka breathes in, the essence of Moroz begins to jet out.

He vomits snow, so much snow that he blankets the side yard.

Still the creature smokes, tittering just a little, quite cheerful.

Streetlights flicker on Willow Fork Road.

The snow falls and falls.

Moroz shudders, almost empty.

No longer blue.

His hair black again.

Mostly boy now, but enough of Moroz remains to hear.

Cheburashka points the stem of its pipe at him, cocking an eyebrow.

Its voice is different now.

It is Stalin’s voice.

“You and I are alike in that we both respect our boundaries. You can’t harm the wizard. I can’t harm the witch. But nobody said a thing about you.”

Moroz recognizes it now.

They have met before.

Moroz says its true name.

Cheburashka draws one more puff from the pipe.

Exhales.

The pipe glows bright and hot in the moppet’s mouth.

The shadow of a thrashing squid on the snow behind him.

Moroz is no more.

116

The caveman wakes up under his overpass.

He had a dream about a woman.

She gave him twenty dollars.

(Lying under the brick he uses to smash cans)

She took away his tinnitus.

(It’s still gone)

And then?

Blurry.

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

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

But he’s in Syracuse now.

At the end of summer.

A warm night.

It’s ten minutes ago.

He knows that somehow.

The Heat Miser gets to play with time.

Because he’s the Heat Miser.

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

He’s still a caveman.

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

Bled-out urban sky above the overpass.

He is sick of the city.

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

He sees one, though.

A falling star, quite bright.

He wishes on it.

My name is Victor.

117

Michael Rudnick collects himself at the window.

Nausea hit him seconds after he tugged the meteor down.

No time for this.

Get your shit together, Rudnick.

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

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

It was a big spell, maybe too big.

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

Rifle fire cracks loudly just downstairs.

Andrew.

He’s alone.

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

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

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

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

Hears something coming from the master bedroom.

The bathtub?

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

Manages to stand, but it’s hard.

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

I have to get in there.

Half of his body just isn’t taking orders.

And his head.

Christ, his head.

The telephone rings again.

Someone smashes the phone.

Below, another trumpet-scream that shakes the house.

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

My head!

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

Shooting.

Andrew!

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

The door opens on a woman in military gear.

Athena?

No.

Baba’s daughter.

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

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

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

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

And nobody can do it without paying a price.

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

They both understand at once.

Stroke.

I’ve had a stroke.

And not a small one.

I’m a dead man.

She smiles.

Not unkindly.

Pulls him firmly to the bathroom.

She works against his weak side.

He can’t fight her.

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

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

But the Thief.

She will settle things with the Thief.

She has Michael against the tub now.

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

He hears the name of the place.

He doesn’t want to go there.

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

He falls.

Looking at her all the way down.

118

What happens next isn’t very gratifying.

No climactic collision of shapeshifting witch and wizard.

It just happens.

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

A tank burns.

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

He wants to find the woman he loves.

The new witch.

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

Out of gas.

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

This distracts him.

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

Coming at him from his blinded right side.

The witch.

Grinning at him.

Unkindly.

Showing her teeth.

Coming at him with the saber upraised.

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

He vomits his last mouthful of darts at her.

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

The blade still comes.

He knows that saber.

It’s the one he used on her mother.

On her.

He understands in a flash.

Marina never showed her teeth when she smiled.

The smile is her mother’s smile.

Self-satisfied, superior, predatory.

A wolf’s snarl.

This is Baba Yaga.

She has taken her own daughter’s body.

As she always does.

As she always has.

His lover is long dead.

But her body is still strong.

The saber flashes in the streetlamp’s glow.

Strangely suburban light to fall on a cavalry saber.

Coming down at his neck.

He remembers his shillelagh.

Sketches the gesture of raising it.

Too late.

It hurts.

Then it doesn’t.

119

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

Andrew is sitting in his library

With what body?

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

Argyle socks at the ankles.

Ichabod.

What now?

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

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

Why?

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

He summoned you, too.

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

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

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

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

Ichabod. Go help Anneke.

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

Why not?

It looks at him as if at a disappointing student.

“Because you’re dead.”

The entity smiles a winning smile.

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

120

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

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

The Book of Sorrows.

Love Spells of the Magyars.

On Becoming Invisible.

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

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

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

He respected nothing. This is an American disease.

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

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

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

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

She will burn the professor in the hut.

She will burn the new witch, too.

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

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

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

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

The library is safe now.

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

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

But death is no obstacle to her.

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

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

Mostly it’s an easy thing.

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

Now she takes up the sack.

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

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

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

A pity.

She hoists her sack.

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

Up on the mantelpiece of the library’s fireplace.

Beneath a painting of an oak tree.

She sets the bag down.

Examines the box, a box of cedar and ivory.

She tries to open it but finds it locked.

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

A rabbit?

A stuffed rabbit.

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

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

What is this rabbit?

A relic?

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

She picks it up.

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

Breaks on the hardwood floor.

This triggers a memory in her, but too late.

“Here is the devil!” she says.

And then it happens.

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

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

He doesn’t give her time.

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

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

She tries to hold on.

If she gains purchase, he will lose.

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

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

And takes it for himself.

121

Baba Yaga, or her death, or her life essence, or her soul if you prefer, sees the body of Marina Yaganishna from the outside. Sees that it has clenched its muscles, sees that the warlock is breathing slowly out, keeping rigid. She rushes at him, tries to push, but it is an easier thing to defend a body than to take one, provided you know you are under attack.

She sees herself drop to her knees, clutch them against her chest.

The Thief has done his reading—if he tried to stand up in that new body, with all his strange muscles twitching and the matter of the brain rippling to accommodate the new thought patterns and the new thinker, he would be vulnerable, and she could push him right back out.

But he, or she now, drops to the ground and breathes.

Throws up the pork and apples she had for lunch—nausea is normal.

Keeps breathing, keeps her muscles tensed so she is aware of her perimeter, so she can inventory all her parts.

Baba sees this is fruitless.

She is being shut out.

For now.

And then.

Oh God.

It comes.

The light.

The warm and welcoming light.

Her son, sweet, weak Misha, went into the light already to play with kittens and sit on the lap of Jesus and play the balalaika or whatever people do there where all are equal.

To hell with that!

All are not equal.

The warm light waits just outside the wall of the library and she knows she could move right through that wall and into it, but then she would not be smarter or stronger than anyone else, and that sounds like hell to her.

She might even be judged, if the priests are right.

But she was there before the priests came to her land.

She was there when the dead were burned in huts on little hills with rings of poles all around.

She was still a girl when she asked the woman who talked to Chërt, the dark-god, to help her get rid of her mother’s new husband, the sneering one who preferred fucking her, fucked her whenever her mother went out. And he sent her out a lot. How she hated the sight of his teeth as he sneered and grunted over her, sweated down on her. Hated the sound of him standing and pissing outside the hut.

Mother Damp-Earth never answered her prayers, but dark-god did.

Her mother’s husband fell in a hole; his brothers saw hands grab him, saw a hand with a rock break his teeth out, saw another hand rip his cock off before the black earth stopped his screams and he was gone forever.

What was her own name then?

It was too long ago to remember. She used to write it down, but then she lost it and lost interest in finding it again.

She thinks she hears Misha’s voice coming from the light.

Baba. Come to me here. It’s good here.

Are you my father to tell me what to do? You come here.

I don’t want to.

How many sons and daughters and sisters and mothers do you think have tried to get me in there? You tell that light to eat shit and go away.

Good-bye, Baba.

Yes, yes. Enjoy the balalaika.

But this may just be her mind talking to itself.

Either way, the light stops tugging at her and fades away.

That’s when she hears

With what ears?

the front door open.

If she only had a mouth to smile with.

122

We have to go back a little now.

Back to the house of Anneke Zautke, and to the thing she woke up. The thing she told to stay on the bed. It did what it was told—things like that are remarkably compliant at first, that compliance coming from a deep desire to please the maker. But, as with a dog who was told to stay, the desire to be near its master soon overwhelms the memory of the command.

It hears the commotion outside when Anneke is dragged to the hut; it watches the hut take her. It hides from the witch when she looks back down the trail, then goes back into the house and cries.

After it cries all it can cry, it decides to follow Anneke.

Magic brought it to life, so it feels magic.

It knows where the hut went.

It follows, walking by the side of the road.

Barefoot.

White T-shirt with a red circle, Japanese characters reading Looking for a Japanese girlfriend.

No bra.

Holding its blue jeans up with one hand because they are Anneke’s jeans and Anneke is two sizes bigger.

Because it is a very attractive thing walking by the side of the road alone at night, a man with a port-wine nose and an orange Syracuse Windbreaker pulls his car over and asks it if he can have a date.

“I want a ride in your car,” it says.

“Where to?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll tell you when I get there.”

He says “I don’t know” is his favorite place.

He pulls over on a farm road near a cornfield and has sex with it.

It looks down the road where the magic went the whole time.

Shaking him and pointing.

He is taking a long time because the Zoloft delays orgasm.

Also because he is already composing the words he will use to describe this peccadillo to Father Maldonado on Sunday.

“Hurry!” it says, slapping his face, which sends him over.

“Was that even a little bit good for you?” he asks, putting his prophylactic in an empty soda cup, which he puts into an empty McDonald’s bag, which he puts into a plastic Pick & Save bag like the worst nesting doll ever.

“I don’t care,” it says. “Take me down that road now.”

“How much do I owe you?”

Frustrated, it punches his ear and points down the road.

His anger at the pain quickly morphs into guilt as he realizes he may have taken advantage of a deranged girl.

The girl-thing makes him drive slowly, pointing.

“Dog Neck Harbor, eh?” he says.

“Don’t talk anymore. I don’t like the way you talk.”

He turns on the radio.

When they get to Willow Fork Road, the feeling of magic gets strong.

It smiles, claps its hands a little, laughs.

“How much farther?” he asks, blowing his nose into a napkin from his Windbreaker.

Oily smoke from a burned war machine rises from a yard, but he can’t see it.

Snow falls on the windshield, but he thinks it’s rain.

His angle on the lower road doesn’t permit him to see the decapitated man or the ravens feeding on him.

“Here!” the girl-thing shrieks.

The man in the Windbreaker stops the car, fumbles for his wallet.

He slides two twenties from his wallet, also dragging out a saved fortune cookie slip like a small, white tongue.

She is already out of the car and running.

He reads the slip in his lap, its cheerful red letters proclaiming

BAD LUCK WILL MISS YOU IF YOU DRIVE AWAY!

He drives away.

Anneke’s creation doesn’t know where to go now.

Magic screams from the house, but also from the woods and from the burning machine. The magic here is much stronger than anything at Anneke’s house.

It feels her creator everywhere here; Anneke has saturated this place with her presence. But the magic is strongest in the house. The house with the blown-in doorway and the hole in the roof and the dimples where shells hit it and the house re-formed itself.

The pretty thing in the outsized clothes walks in the front door.

Hears a woman moaning in discomfort upstairs.

Barely notices the cold patch it walks through on its way up the stairs to the library.

The cold patch follows it.

Andrew-in-Marina moans, lying in a fetal position, when he (she) sees the lovely teenaged girl-thing walk into the library, looking confused.

It sees him (her).

“Pretty-mole-lady, where is Anneke?”

It has Anneke’s voice exactly.

Andrew (Marina) almost understands, would understand completely if he (she) were not busy breathing steadily and keeping muscles half-tensed.

Then the pretty girl jerks.

Its life essence is a fragile thing, an entirely new creation, flapping like a pillowcase on a clothesline. The wind that whips it away is a strong, cold wind indeed.

There is no fight at all.

The fledgling spirit dissolves as if it never were.

Unplugged, the girl’s body crumples, hits its head on the floor with a dull thump.

The girl’s Italianate blue eyes open again.

The eyes narrow.

The girl smiles a lupine smile, the upper lip curling a bit too much.

She vomits abundantly—the pasta shells and white cheese a staple in Anneke’s pantry.

That is Anneke’s T-shirt.

It stinks of Winstons.

Andrew-in-Marina almost understands what the girl was. Knows all too well what the girl is now. Stops breathing and clenching—the old witch has found her host.

That is Anneke’s T-shirt.

Andrew-in-Marina understands in a flash.

Tries to say, “Ah!”

It sounds more like, “Gah!”

123

Anneke has just returned from Michael Rudnick’s quarry, surging, full of power. Knows she has a limited window of opportunity to do this awful thing, knows each time she resists the temptation to do it that she eventually will, that she has to.

In the basement.

Seven statues of her teenaged lover, Shelly Bertolucci.

Most are small.

The best one is life-sized.

She knows she will have to teach it to be an actual person, not just stone turned into dying meat.

She improvises.

Burns pictures of the actual Shelly and rubs the ashes all over it.

Takes the lock of Shelly’s hair that she had saved, lays this on the statue’s head.

Burns a letter of Shelly’s, puts the ashes on the statue’s lips.

Touches her own moist sex and moistens Shelly’s.

Kisses the stone lips, leaves her own saliva on the ash.

Dabs milk on her breast, touches that to Shelly’s.

Cuts her left middle finger, touches that to Shelly’s.

When she is ready, she turns a red maple leaf to stone.

Quickens it again, blows life’s fire from the leaf to the statue, which turns maple-red at first, then to stone again.

On the third attempt, the red stone glows coal-red, driving Anneke from the basement with its heat, making her fear fire, then cools, softens, goes pink, turns flesh-colored, then turns flesh.

It breathes in a hitching breath.

Breathes out.

It sobs.

It moves its fingers.

Its eyes.

Puts its warm arms around Anneke.

Says Thank you.

Anneke laughs and cries.

Says, “Oh, fuck.”

124

Oh, fuck, Andrew-in-Marina thinks.

This is happening.

There’s no other way.

Shelly’s double and Marina both begin to stand, shakily, twitching, muscles misfiring.

Two foals in new bodies.

About to fight to the death.

125

Anneke wakes up still attached at wrists and ankles, hanging like a hammock in a sinking ship. The hut is on the ground, cracked open, snow falling in. The bearded madman holds his knees, looks out the window, then looks out the window again.

“She got him,” he says.

He keeps repeating “she got him” and looking out the window as if he is stuck in some sort of loop.

She got who?

Andrew, who else?

This guy’s bugshit, he’s like Renfield, don’t listen.

Anneke takes inventory.

Her shoulder really hurts; must have gotten yanked when the hut went down.

The snake torque around her neck is no longer draining her.

Just cold iron.

She has enough magic in her to will it off her, making it groan and twist and finally fall dead to the floor, which is actually the wall now. She breaks the loop holding her feet; they clunk down. Now her hands; she sharpens the inside of the metal loop, uses it to cut her rope.

Renfield sees her struggling free, comes over, tries to hold her down, but he doesn’t mean it. All he manages to do is bleed and cry on her. She stomps him in the chest, crawls out the window, and dumps herself in the snow.

Snow?

It’s fucking August!

Ravens form a loud bully-ring around something to her left.

I don’t want to know what that is, not yet, it’s a deer, just a deer.

She sees the burning T-34, the strange black rocks around it, sees the scattered debris of the wrecked cars and boulders.

Steps on a doll with button eyes and it bleeds into the snow.

Senses she needs to get inside.

Upstairs.

Fast.

She runs.

Ignores the splinters and glass and blood.

Tromps upstairs in her heavy Docs, tracking snow.

Goes to the library.

126

Anneke enters the library.

Shelly Bertolucci struggles and grunts, locked in combat with the witch who put Anneke in the hut. A bloody saber lies on the floor near them. The witch has scratches near her eyes. Shelly has a broken nose. Books, a broken drill, an overturned table, and other debris litter the floor near the combatants.

Both of them move like they’re drunk.

Anneke stands transfixed.

She looks again at the saber.

Dives for it, her shoulder screaming in protest.

Holds it.

The women fight.

Both of them have seen Anneke take up the weapon; each seems intent on keeping the other from speaking.

The witch lashes out with a vicious elbow, catches Shelly in the ear.

Anneke steps forward, cocks the saber for a thrust.

Marina speaks.

“Anneke Zautke! I’m Andrew! In the wrong body!”

Anneke stops the thrust, which would have taken Marina Yaganishna through the ribs.

A trick. Fuck this Russian whore.

She cocks the weapon back.

Inspired, Marina speaks again.

“Let’s watch Papillon!”

Now Shelly swats Marina across the jaw, catches her hard, if gracelessly, with the heel of her hand.

Shuts her up.

Earns a second to speak.

“What are you doing? Don’t let her hurt me!”

A simulated lover’s simulated plea.

Russian accent?

Anneke squints.

“Hurry!” barks Shelly.

Palatalized H.

Sounds like xhoory!

“Funny,” Anneke says.

Shelly sees Marina about to speak again, catches her with a weak but painful punch in the throat, drives her back.

Marina puts her hands to her neck, falls back into Andrew’s prized leather reading chair.

Shelly is clear now.

Shelly with the Russian accent.

Anneke, in shock, white-faced.

Decides.

Pushes through her instinct not to harm Shelly, uses that momentum to strike.

Hard.

NOW!

Stabs the curved point overhand, down at the red Japanese sun on the younger woman’s T-shirt.

The saber halts for a microsecond at the sternum, pushes through sickeningly, comes out the other side, tenting the cotton there before piercing it.

Shelly’s look of fury turns to pain and disbelief.

She puts her hands on the saber.

And turns back to stone.

Around the steel saber.

Wearing a bloody T-shirt and oversized jeans.

Anneke makes a primal noise something like a wail.

“She’ll try to take your body!” the witch in the chair squeaks through her bruised windpipe. “Tense your muscles… breathe deliberately, fast and shallow.”

Anneke does.

127

Baba Yaga finds herself bodyless again.

The warlock in her last body is not vulnerable.

Panting in the leather chair like a whelping bitch.

The new witch is shutting her out, too.

She has never felt so weak.

If I don’t find a body soon… Even if I do, I’m not sure I’ll have the strength to take someone.

But I think so.

One more.

That’s when she sees the warm, red light.

Police car?

A policewoman would make a fine host. She would be tempted to walk back in here and shoot these two, but her strength is so low she might not be able to jump back out of the new one without preparing certain potions, using Milk-witch to drain some luminous boy or girl to fuel her. No good. To end her days in an American prison wouldn’t be a very funny joke.

No, wherever she goes next, she’ll need time to gather her strength.

She goes outside, through the ruined front door.

The light glows through the trees.

Down in the road below?

She moves past the tank, past the dead warlock.

The stick-man with the portrait head is slapping pathetically at ravens, trying to get them to stop eating his master.

Good luck, sobaka.

When she gets to the road, she sees no police car.

The red glow is coming from above.

That is incorrect.

She cranes up

with what neck?

and looks

with what eyes?

to see it.

A huge red cloud of whirling lights (eyes?), a cloud as big as a zeppelin, some of its size obscured by the oily smoke and the fog left by the snow and then the absence of snow.

She knows what this thing is.

A collector.

A cleaner.

It comes for recalcitrant spirits.

In a body you can’t see it and it can’t see you.

Ghosts hide from it, but eventually, in ten years or three hundred, it gets them.

I’m a ghost!

She flees, goes into the house across the street.

A dog with three legs barks at her.

She goes into the house, nobody downstairs, upstairs only a dead man and two burnt dolls.

Burnt curtains.

An angry-looking ghost stands near them.

Get out of my house! it yells at her.

She sees his life in an instant.

A weak, angry man.

Go shave your balls, she says.

The dog barks.

The dog then! I’ll hide in the dog!

Would she even live long enough in a dog to gather the strength to push a person out?

Would enough of her be left to have language?

She could be stuck in a cripple dog for years.

Forever, even.

The house fills with red light.

A sort of eye looks in.

Better a dog than in that fucking thing.

The eye sees the angry man fuming.

A sort of hand reaches into the window.

NO! NO! NO! the man says, but it takes him anyway.

Dissolves him utterly, or so it seems.

So ends the shortest haunting in New York State history.

Baba flees downstairs.

Tries to get into the dog, but it runs back and forth on its run, barking at her.

Too tense, too fast.

How does a dog with three legs move so fast?

Now the huge red thing is done with the angry man.

She moves off into the woods.

Considers going back to the Thief’s house and taking a raven.

Too small.

The woods go red.

Not ME!

You won’t get ME!

Wait… what is that?

In the hollow of a log.

Something cowers.

Just big enough, she thinks.

Then she recognizes it.

The indignity of the situation galls her.

A skunk?

Worse than that.

A pregnant skunk?

A sort of eye looks down at her through a crown of maple leaves.

Here is the devil!

Fearful, the skunk shows her its teeth.

It has good reason to be afraid.

Baba Yaga pushes.

The skunk squeals.

The red light goes away.

128

When the police come, Marina Yaganishna tells them what happened standing twenty yards from Andrew’s corpse.

They see what she wants them to see.

They believe what she tells them.

129

From the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus:

MAYFIELD

PHILANTHROPIST

DIES

NEAR

CHERNOBYL

Montpelier, VT

—Michael Rudnick, local sculptor and philanthropist, has been found dead in the abandoned Ukrainian town of Pripyat of what appears to have been a massive stroke.

Rudnick, 71, is known for a variety of charitable acts. In 2005 he donated building materials for the new prenatal wing at the Mayfield Memorial Hospital; in 2009 he gave a life-sized sculpture of a charging bear to the Northern Vermont Museum of Natural History, and children from Mayfield to Montpelier know the white-bearded Rudnick as Father Christmas for his appearances at local parks on a reindeer-pulled sled.

A State Department official described Rudnick’s presence in Pripyat, part of the exclusion zone exposed to radiation in the 1986 explosion of reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, as “highly irregular,” but declined to elaborate. Rudnick served in the U.S. Army infantry in 1968 and attended the University of Vermont on the G.I. Bill. He is survived by a sister, Michelle, and a brother, Paul.

Asked about her brother’s tragic journey to Ukraine, Michelle Rudnick-Osborne said, “Michael was always full of surprises, always turning up where you didn’t expect him. But he always had your back. There’s nobody else like him, and we’ll miss him very much.”

From the Syracuse Post-Standard:

METEOR

STRIKE

KILLS 1, INJURES 1

Dog Neck Harbor, NY

—A Cayuga County man is dead and a Cornell professor is injured following a rare meteor strike in west-central New York.

The deceased, John Dawes, 46, appears to have been struck in the neck by flying metal from the destruction of a car owned by neighbor Andrew Blankenship, whose house was also damaged in the freak event. Blankenship was away at the time.

Blankenship’s houseguest, Marina Yaganishna, reported hearing a “rushing sound followed by a chain of god-awful bangs. The house was hit so hard I was afraid it would fall.”

James Coyle, Ph.D., is reported in stable condition with lacerations and head trauma. He has no memory of how he got to Dog Neck Harbor from his summer cabin in nearby Sterling, New York.

The phenomenon occurred at about 9:45 P.M. at Willow Fork Road on the east side of town.

A tractor of unknown provenance was also struck, its gas tank igniting and the resulting fire burning a section of woods.

130

Andrew-in-Marina walks with Anneke to the feasting crows. Anneke already got Salvador to go inside.

“Don’t look,” Marina tells Anneke, looking. Her accent is pure midwestern American.

“Me don’t look? How about you don’t look?” Anneke says, looking.

“I’ll only get to see this once,” Marina says.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Marina takes a lock of Andrew’s hair.

It will be necessary for the spells Marina will cast to make herself look like him, sound like him.

This won’t be easy, but she won’t have to do it long; just long enough to tie things up legally, make the property Marina’s.

A search of the hut yielded her passport, driver’s license, credit cards.

Near dawn, Marina and Anneke burn Andrew’s remains, making the flames crematorium-hot with the last of the fireglass.

“Andrew Blankenship is dead,” Marina says.

“Long live Marina Yaganishna,” Anneke says, offering Marina a cigarette.

She almost reaches for one, then shakes her head.

“I think I just quit.”

Anneke spends the night.

The two of them spoon, each holding the other as if she were as fragile as a kite.

Sleep comes only in teaspoons.

The one time both of them sleep, one cries out, wakes the other.

Neither is sure who.

131

In the morning Chancho comes by for a training session Andrew had forgotten about.

Anneke tells Chancho what happened.

“No effin’ way.”

Chancho looks Marina up and down.

He looks at her in silence for a good minute and a half.

“Hey, bruja,” he says at last, addressing Marina. “Name three people who beat the Iceman.”

“KO or decision?” the woman says.

“Your choice.”

“Rashad Evans. Rampage Jackson. What’s-his-face Jardine. The Dean of Mean. Keith?”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t no knockout.”

“You said, ‘your choice.’”

Chancho nods, very slowly.

“What about Ortiz?”

Marina wrinkles her mouth at Chancho.

“Ortiz never beat Liddel. Ortiz is a pendejo.”

Chancho corrects her pronunciation.

132

Andrew looks like Andrew thanks to a very powerful, very temporary spell.

He goes to see his lawyer, signs everything over to Marina Yaganishna, whom he describes as a cousin.

“Cousin, eh? Is that what they’re calling Russian Internet brides these days? What are you doing, Andrew?”

“Just trust me.”

“Tax stuff? You hiding assets?”

“Just do it, please.”

Andrew has until sunset to look, smell, and sound like himself.

He calls Salvador.

Sal waggles his hips for the first time since Andrew’s body died.

“Sal, I have to ask you a question.”

The framed portrait of Dalí nods.

“Sal, are you happy?”

Salvador doesn’t respond for some time.

Then it turns the knobs on the Etch-a-Sketch.

I

SERVE

“That’s not an answer. I want to know if you’re happy. Now. Like this.”

One of the automaton’s hands moves toward the knobs to reply.

Then it lies still.

There it is, then.

“I’m going to ask you another question, Sal. It’s a question that means more than it seems to mean, so I want you to think about your answer, okay?”

The portrait nods.

“Do you want to stay inside with me? Or do you want to go outside?”

Salvador bows his head.

Then points at the Etch-a-Sketch.

I

SERVE.

Andrew shakes his head.

“Tell me really. Tell me what you want.”

The automaton squirms.

Then writes.

OUTSIDE

Sal shakes the screen clear and turns the knobs again.

YOU OUTSIDE

WITH SAL LATER

Andrew laughs, feels a tear start in one eye, knuckles it away.

“It’s a date,” he says.

First, Andrew watches the tape with Sal and Sarah a dozen or thirteen times, never opening the trapdoor. Just watching. Then he pops the tape out, takes it upstairs.

The microwave is destroyed, so Andrew uses the stove to thaw a piece of filet he had been saving in the freezer, a big red bastard wrapped in applewood-smoked bacon.

That done, he turns Salvador back into a border collie, using the last of the alarm magic woven into his wicker limbs.

This will last only twenty minutes at most.

He gives Sal the filet.

Watches the greedy, beautiful dog gobble it down.

All ten ounces of it.

He takes Sal outside, throws a Frisbee for him.

Laughs as Sal plucks the orange disc from the air once, twice, then gets distracted and chases a raven, probably one of those that ate Andrew’s face not so long ago.

Then they just run together.

The dog is big-legging it through the last warm day of the year, his tongue hanging behind him for what seems like half a mile, barking and jumping.

Then they fall into a tumble of scratches and playful bites and cheek-licking, a dance as old as man and dog and meat and fire. At last they rest, Sal’s head on his lap.

Andrew smells the dog’s good smells, from the waxy scent of the fur near his ears to the grassy, leathery black pads of his feet, even his steaky, hot breath.

A squirrel chirrs from a tree and Sal raises his head, pricks his ears up, but doesn’t chase it.

Just wags.

Happy as he’s ever been with the smells of squirrel and fresh air and dead raccoons in the air and the sun on his coat, his master’s hand in his fur, his master’s voice in his ear and smell in his nose.

For the last time.

It has to be here.

It has to be now.

The dog begins to blur.

Stands up and yawns, curling his tongue.

Andrew stands, too.

The dog blurs and stays blurry.

Rises from four feet to stand on two.

Now Sal is an automaton again.

Before he can lose his nerve, Andrew pulls the lid off the basket at the center of the wicker man, yanks out the dog’s salted heart.

Not unlike pulling a plug.

The wicker man collapses, falls into an almost fetal position with Dalí looking up at the sky.

The portrait will hang in the library.

The prosthetic legs will go to the VA, where some bewildered young man or woman home from a hot country may be glad for them.

The wicker man and the dog’s heart go in the fire.

As does the VHS tape.

Sal and Sarah.

Outside.

Later.

It’s a date.

Andrew Blankenship watches the sun go down, sitting by the fire in his Japanese robe.

Marina Yaganishna gets up, ties the robe tighter.

Hears the cell phone ringing.

Picks it up.

It’s Anneke.

133

This is what Marina Yaganishna does at the AA meeting.

She introduces herself to everyone.

Tries to act like she doesn’t know anything at all about bottle-red-haired-child-spoiling-Mom Cathy, or beauty-queen-for-Jesus Laura, or toilet-plungered-Art-Garfunkel Jim, Lexus-lawyer Jim, Saint Bob, or any of them.

She eats half a doughnut, gives Anneke the other half, watches Anneke eat two more.

Anneke has put on a little weight, but she carries it well.

Anneke is happy.

When Chancho speaks, Marina dims the good Presbyterian fluorescents above their yellowing Presbyterian screens, then brightens them again, stopping before they pop. He cuts his eyes to her, but she just looks back at him with those calm, tilted blue icon eyes of hers.

Chancho speaks.

“I used to be in a lotta bad stuff, down in Texas, Mexico. Since I was a kid, drinkin’ beer and raicilla, which is made from agaves but not like the stuff they give the tourist but the stuff somebody made at home. Always in trouble. Most of the boys in my family, they went to guns and drugs, and I did too, at first. Bad stuff, bad stuff. You see it on the news now, how bad it’s got, but it’s never been good. I got out of Matamoros, went up to Houston, still got mixed up too much, drinkin’ Shiner was okay but cocaine and tequila and whiskey, I ruin my boxing. Got arrested. Went to Austin and started getting clean, workin’ in a garage, but was still too close to it all. Met my wife, Consuela, married her, almost got happy but addiction don’t let nobody be happy. I hit her not one time but two times, and she shouldn’t’a stayed, but I thank God every day she did. Said she had people up north and why didn’t we come up here, get away from all that. I said okay. It was good. I got eight years sober now, and I know it don’t never go away. My family come up, some of them still in the life I was in, and it was hard to say no to some of the stuff they wanted me to do with them. But I did. I said ‘My food is your food, and stay as long as you want, but don’t you bring that in my house.’ So some of them got a hotel. Maybe I should have warned you if you was gonna stay in the Days Inn in Oswego not to tell nobody to turn the music down if you heard accordions or somebody singin’ about corazón. All Mexican songs got the word corazón. I think it’s a law. Anyway, the temptation was on me, ’specially around my cousin Julio, who got good shit, the best in Chihuahua, and he’s a fun dude, too. But I was drivin’ down 104 to the Days Inn thinkin’ maybe just this one time cause I ain’t seen these muchachos since back in the day, and Consuela won’t never know, you know how that song goes, and no sooner had I thought that than BAM! Out pops this dog, an I almos’ hit him, he glance off the tire. He’s a old dog, too, vet thinks he’s between eight and ten years old. Been on his own for a while, all dirty, got some mange and fleas, lotsa fleas. But I didn’t know about that yet. If I’d’a known how much he gonna cost me at the vet, I mighta not take him. So I pull over and pick this chingado dog up, take him to the hotel with me, and all the dudes were drinkin’ and smokin’ and snortin’ and effin’ with his ears, he look like a beagle, with a white smutch on his face like a máscara. And you can go ooooooo in his face an’ he’ll howl back at you, too. Anyway, I think God sent me that dog to remind me. So I kept him. My buddy An’… Marina. My friend Marina, you just met her tonight, she’s a friend’a Andrew’s, she said she thinks his name was Caspar because of that mask. But I want to call him Ocho because he remind me not to blow my eight years. But he answers to Caspar, guess she was right. But I call him both. His name is Caspar Ocho Morales. Good name for a fighter. Good name for a dog.”

134

“I don’t want to do this. But I have to. He’s dangerous, even without her, if he is without her. It’s not just revenge, although I suppose there is an element of that. I hate what he did. I miss Radha.”

Marina is sitting on her leather couch, her ash-blond hair up in a samurai bun, speared by a cherrywood fork. She wears a light gray wool sweater she just got at the mall. Anneke took her shopping. All her clothes are new, except the Japanese robe.

The hammering from the roof has stopped. The contractors are lunching in the yard, gobbling down subs from the Oswego sub shop. This was the first, best chance she had to Skype with the overweight but oddly handsome man in California.

San Francisco.

Sealiongod@me.com.

“I understand she was good,” the man says.

“She was. But she said you were better.”

“We’ll see.”

“You’ll help me?”

Sealiongod nods, smiling a little.

“I’m feeling patriotic. Let’s do this.”

He’s still young. He enjoys this shit.

Like Radha did.

Andrew-in-Marina just feels ill.

135

Yuri sits at his computer, the cat purring on his lap. The cat with the upside-down tail. Yuri nurses a glass of powdered cherry drink and vodka, his upper lip stained with a faint, reddish mustache.

“What’s this?” he says.

An e-mail from Marina Yaganishna.

He doesn’t want to read it—Baba Yaga has left him alone for months, and he fears this communication from her daughter might herald new demands, new threats, more bad dreams. But not opening it could be much, much worse.

Could it be spam?

An attachment titled Naughty boy gets stoned with Santa suggests it is.

And it’s only September.

Christmas already?

Maybe he won’t open that.

No, he decidedly will not open the attachment.

He reads the e-mail.

Yuri opens the attachment.

A video.

Marina sits before a television screen, wearing only a Japanese robe. The right-pointing delta of the start symbol goads him. He clicks it. The beautiful woman in the Japanese robe animates, speaks.

American-accented Russian?

“Yuri. Watch the screen. My friend in California put this together for me. I want to thank you for what you did in Chicago. To the witch Radha. Watch!”

Turn it off, Yuri.

But he can’t turn it off.

Baba will know if he doesn’t watch it.

He instinctively hides his teeth with his hand.

The television in the video comes on.

An old man with a short, white beard is sitting on a sled, behind reindeer. He wears the red hat and robes of Father Christmas, his hat garnished with holly and pine. He is preparing to read a story to a group of bouncy little children. Snow behind him.

This doesn’t look like California.

“Michael. Michael Rudnick,” Marina says.

The old man looks confused for a second, then looks at Marina.

Nods.

Closes the book.

The bouncy children have all gone still, frozen in place while the Santa-man continues to move.

A trapdoor?

Who is this old fucker?

“Michael, the man I want you to wish a Merry Christmas is in that camera.”

Father Christmas nods.

Smiles.

Looks at the camera.

Speaks English.

“Ho Ho Ho! You’ve been a very naughty boy, Yuri. It is Yuri, right?”

Turn the computer off!

The man’s eyes flash.

A loud CRACK fills Yuri’s apartment.

The cat is caught leaping, turns to heavy Vermont granite in midair.

Lands with a loud CRASH!

Breaks in half.

Yuri is frozen reaching for the mouse.

His momentum carries him forward, topples him into his computer, destroying and toppling that.

The man downstairs bangs against the floor in protest.

A woman next door shrieks at Yuri, her voice scarcely muffled by the plaster.

“I’m tired of your noises, Yuri! Go to bed! Go to bed! Go to bed!”