The Necromancer's House (8 page)

An older man on a wide-screened television is speaking in a broad New England dialect that recalls the unhurried pace of a dray horse. The man's head is long and horselike, handsome even though he is in his late sixties. He looks down at a paper, then up at the viewer.

Up at Andrew.

But he doesn't see the younger man.

Not yet.

It's still just a tape.

“. . . His life actually
depends
on obedience to spiritual principles. If he deviates too far, the penalty is sure and swift . . .”

The man drops his eyes to the paper.

“Bill.”

“He sickens and finally dies.”

Andrew knows the man will look up at the camera before speaking again.

“Bill Wilson. It's Andrew Blankenship.”

“Andrew Blank . . . ?”

Recognition steals across the older man's face.

The trapdoor is open.

The dead man in the grainy color home movie becomes a little blurrier. But now he is awake, aware. He pokes his horn-rimmed glasses up on his nose and squints at Andrew through the television. He is off-script now. His surroundings are frozen. The tape stops turning in its machine.

The lights in the media room are warm and reassuring, not bright, but neither dim. Andrew doesn't know what he looks like through the television, from
there
. Neither does he know if he is communing with a soul or if he is somehow snatching conversation with the man in his own time.

What he does know is that the dead souls, or the encapsulated intelligences, or the shades in Hades, or whatever they are, remember him when he finds them again.

There is continuity.

“Where are you?” Bill says, squinting.

“I'm at home.”

“That's right. You do this from your basement, right?”

“Yes.”

Bill chuckles agreeably. He is an old man in this 1964 clip Andrew got on eBay and converted to VHS from eight-millimeter. He is speaking at a meeting in a private home in Philadelphia. He largely reads from the work of the “first hundred drunks” in this piece, and Andrew has found that this point, where he talks about death, is the easiest point at which to interrupt him. The visible half of a stainless steel water pitcher gleams below Bill, but it gleams like a still photograph.

He knows the man could touch the pitcher and the condensation would bead again; a droplet would run down the side. He could wake the pitcher up. But he would
see
the pitcher only if Andrew told him it was there. If he asked the dead man what was around him, he would say it was blurry, or foggy, and then, very probably, cognitive dissonance would rear its head and the dead man would start to get upset. When speaking with the dead through film, it is best to keep their attention on you.

They've already been through this.

Bill knows he's dead in 2012.

Andrew told him.

Bill knows, too, that Andrew is a sorcerer, but he doesn't hold that against him. Nor does he seem to mind Andrew's long hair and odd clothes. Bill is perhaps the least judgmental dead person with whom Andrew has spoken.

“The last time we spoke,” Bill says, “you told me you were sponsoring a young lady from Wisconsin.”

“Her father's from Wisconsin.”

“That's right. How's she doing?”

“She's got six months now. And her slips aren't so bad, so she's been effectively sober for eight years. Although I don't think she's really hit bottom.”

“How long ago did we speak?”

“It's been . . . months.”

Bill wipes his eyes under his glasses like he's tired.

“Seems like five minutes ago. Time doesn't make any sense here.”

He begins to look around.

Begins to look agitated.

“Bill.”

Bill looks at Andrew again.

“Yeah, sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. I was just wondering if you're still comfortable being my sponsor. This is a . . .”

Andrew trails off.

“Highly unusual situation, I know,” Bill finishes for him, “but, sure. I'll keep meeting with you. What else have I got to do with myself, after all? And I say that without asperity.”

“Great.”

“So what's on your mind?”

“I . . . wonder if giving up magic and giving up drinking are similar things.”

“Sure they are. Thinking about going back to church?”

Bill is in earnest when he says this. Andrew suppresses a laugh but acknowledges that it would have been a sorry, yellow little laugh anyway.

“No.”

“That's up to you, of course.”

And where did church get you, old man? Is that heaven? Is that even you?

“Yeah. I just wonder if I could give it up now. If I wanted to.”

“Not alone, certainly.”

What exactly is my higher power, anyway?

“I'm sorry. It just. It feels good to talk to you.”

“Lost your dad young, did you?”

“I did.”

“It's a hard thing not to have your dad. You look for what you're not getting from him in other people. And that's okay. Love is always A-OK.”

Andrew nods.

Tears are close.

He fights them back.

And here sits the magus in a dim room, using dirty tricks to disturb a dead man's rest, crying because he wants his daddy and his mommy.

Boo fucking hoo.

“We have sponsors in the world of magic, too. Mentors.”

Bill just listens.

“Mine lived in Ohio.”

1977.

Near Xenia, Ohio.

The last warm day of the year.

“I'm not queer,” the driver says.

“That's not my business,” Andrew Randolph Blankenship says, although he
has
just begun to wonder why a bald, bearded man with his shirt unbuttoned to show his potbelly might slow his big, blue Impala to a crawl next to a teenaged boy walking his bicycle.

“You always walk your bike past this house.”

The man points at a lopsided 1890s two-story with peeling blue paint and a sun-faded
FOR SALE
sign.

Andrew doesn't say anything. He just furrows his brow as he often does when he is processing a lot of information.

Watching me? Is this guy dangerous? Does he know why I walk my bike here? Does he see her too?

“You know there's a ghost in that house, don't you?”

Andrew feels his heart thudding in his chest.

There is a ghost and it scares the shit out of me.

I walk my bike because I've wrecked twice knowing it was looking at me.

“Yes, sir.”

“Don't
sir
me.”

“Okay.”

Andrew scratches at one of the sideburns he has begun to grow in emulation of his older brother. Although Charles will soon shave his because they look too “hippy-dippy.”

But this dude.

Who is this dude?

“She swells up like a balloon when you ride your bike past it because she has a crush on you. She was seventeen when she died. Your age now, if I'm correct?”

“Yes s— Yes.”

Andrew peers into the car, which is closer now. He is relieved to see that the driver is wearing pants. Dungarees, to be precise.

“Do you know why you can see her?”

Andrew shakes his head.

A car horn blares because the older man has let his Impala wander into the other lane. He looks at the road again and corrects his path as a mud-colored flatbed pickup truck stacked with pumpkins goes by, losing a pumpkin, its driver half-unfurling an arthritic bird-finger.

“Do you want a ride past the house? I'll take you the rest of the way to Enon.”

Andrew does want a ride.

He doesn't want to see the floating girl in the window leering at him, her head as big as a head on a parade float.

And he doesn't want to spend forty minutes pedaling when those forty minutes might be spent napping. He got almost no sleep last night and the girl he made love to in the cornfield got grounded.

It was worth it.

The lovemaking, quick and earnest, was after they tampered with the letters on the Xenia Baptist Church marquee so that
REPENT, MY PEOPLE, YOUR TIME TO SIN GROWETH SHORT
now said
GO SIT ON PETERS HOT POLE
.

Now a pale yellow station wagon underbellied with rust the color of Chef Boyardee spaghetti sauce swings around the Impala, the driver barking some hostile syllable through his open window.

The bald man's eyes stay fixed on Andrew.

“And I'll tell you why you and I can see the dead girl and that guy can't.”

The boy stops.

A turkey buzzard kites lazily overhead.

“Is there room for my bike?”

“There is.”

Now the man who will teach Andrew his first spell pulls his car over in front of the boy. He opens the huge trunk so the Impala looks like a whale opening its mouth.

Its mouth is very black.

Its tongue a spare tire.

Andrew feeds the whale his Schwinn and prepares to go to Nineveh.

“Is he still living?”

“No.”

Silence.

“He taught you what you're doing now? With me?”

“Yes,” Andrew says.

“I'm sure it occurred to you to try this with him.”

“He asked me not to.”

“Why's that?”

“He didn't say.”

And yet I do it to you.

Bill nods inscrutably. Then says, “There's something else, isn't there? You're not just lonely. You're scared.”

“Yes.”

“And this fear's got you missing John Barleycorn.”

“More like Gilbert Grape for me, but yes.”

He won't know that reference.

“I'm glad you sought me out.”

“Are you really?”

“I am.”

“Are you really
you
, Bill?”

“I don't know how to answer that.”

Bill wipes his eyes again.

How many alcoholics would like to be able to do this? Would give anything for this chance? To talk to HIM. Thank HIM personally. Why is it fair that I get to have this to myself? And if I let Anneke see him, what is that? Showing off? I should let him go. Burn this tape.

“Andy.”

Only he gets to call me Andy.

“Yeah.”

“Don't send me back yet.”

Andrew raises his eyebrows in place of asking
Why?

Bill W. says, “The next time I'm awake . . . talking . . . I'll be talking to you. I'm always the same, but you . . . I'm a little concerned about what you'll have to tell me when I see you again. There's a cloud over you.”

“A cloud?”

“I don't know how else to put it. Just . . . sit with me here for a minute. Is there music there?”

“Music?”

“You know, a phonograph?”

“There's music.”

“Play me something. Please.”

Andrew goes to his stereo.

Turns on satellite radio.

Turns on the forties channel, turns it up good and loud.

Betty Hutton's “Blue Skies” pours from the speakers in no great hurry.

Bill W. closes his eyes, leans toward the screen.

Moves his head in time to the music, subtly, reminding Andrew of a cobra coming out of its basket for a snake charmer.

Now Andrew cries.

“There it comes,” Bill says, eyes still closed.

And then he says, opening his eyes suddenly, fiercely,

“You're the one who needed the music. It's a shoehorn for your feelings, like the booze used to be. Shut me down when you want to, son. Everything's A-OK.”

Early evening.

The barn behind Andrew's house.

Anneke belches and excuses herself, moves away from the warm pocket of garlicky air she has just made. The ghost of the penne, spicy sausage, and basil Andrew sautéed for them earlier can't overpower the stronger odor of hot, raw walleye.

“How lonely and deranged do you have to be to want to blow-dry a fish, anyway?”

He touches the yellow pike's side with the back of his hand, decides it wants another blast. He flicks the on switch and wands hot air back and forth over the fish. Wrinkles his nose as he detects her belch and aims the dryer at it, making her laugh.

“Better than hot fish. It smells like your dead mermaid friend in here,” she says, raising her voice over the dryer's petulant whine.

Andrew smiles.

“It makes the skin thirsty so it drinks pigment,” he says.

“I'm not five. I know why you do it. I'm just saying it stinks.”

She sips her diet soda.

Now Andrew brushes a brownish, mustardy shade of yellow on the fish, which sits almost flush in the fish-shaped niche Andrew cut into a silvery panel of insulation foam.

“I thought you said you wanted to watch me do this.”

“I do. I'll be good.”

Andrew grunts skeptically, begins swabbing rusty orange ink onto the fins he pinned in place against the foam. She looks up and around, taking in the twenty-odd fish prints he has framed and hung out here. Sturgeons, carp, black bass, coho salmon, in many colors, some naturalistic, some fantastical, all swimming north, as though toward the lake they were pulled from.

One Prussian blue octopus from a trip to Florida drifts amid the school as though lost.

“Gyotaku?”

“Gyotaku,” he corrects, but she can't hear the difference.

Now he takes a piece of rice paper and lays it over the walleye, tucking it under and around the fish, massaging the color up into the paper. He details the fins with a plastic spoon.

“Okay, I like this. I'm not saying I want to learn. But I like it.”

He grunts again, his barely blinking eyes fixed on his work.

He pulls the paper off.

“Nice!” she says.

“I'll let this dry for a bit and then I'll do the eyes. I'm not much of an artist, but I can handle fish eyes.”

He clothespins the paper to a line, then sits down on the moth-eaten Goodwill couch next to the dorm-sized fridge he used to keep stocked with German and British brown ales.

He pulls a fizzy water out instead.

They both just sit for a long while.

The sun goes down and moths wheel and flutter around the bare bulb overhead.

“Are you nervous?” she asks.

“No,” he lies.