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Christopher Buehlman

THE NECROMANCER’S HOUSE

^{A NOVEL}

Prologue

The old man walks from the cabin to the porch behind, palming his whiskey glass from the bottom and swirling the ice in it. A drop of water falls from his knuckle, falling on the head of the beagle mix snaking near his feet. This distracts the dog so that it halts long enough to get underfoot, almost tripping the old man, who swears viciously in Russian that Khrushchev might have barked, then apologizes in Pushkin’s honeyed tones. The dog wags halfheartedly but steers starboard in case his master kicks at him. The kicks are infrequent and never hard, so the evasion is lazy, and the kick never comes. An observer would note how balletic the interaction is, how practiced each is at his part.

But no one is watching them.

Not yet.

The man lips at his glass and sits facing the sunset.

The dog curls at his feet and begins a snorting, chewing hunt for a flea that has disgraced him near the base of his tail.

“Kill that fucker,” the man says in a jovial Slavic growl, scratching under his left tit in sympathy.

The sun has already performed its nightly slow-motion dive into Lake Ontario; it has slipped behind its blue veil like a bulb of molten glass, so beautifully that a man on Fair Haven Beach, one town west, spontaneously proposed marriage to his girlfriend of less than six months, and a group of actors on the McIntyre Bluffs, near the bird sanctuary not a mile away, silenced their chatter about the day’s rehearsals and broke into applause. Now the aftershow is wrapping up; the surface of the lake has turned an iridescent color reminiscent of mother-of-pearl, a hue that has proven irreproducible in watercolor; an ephemeral purplish-silver that even the great Eastman Kodak an hour and change away in ashy Rochester has never brought to shore alive.

The old Russian’s nearest neighbor, a former comparative religions professor in a nearly identical summer cabin a hundred yards down the ridge, once told him, “These sunsets have been rated the second-best sunsets in the world. ”

“Rated?” the Russian had said. “Who rates a sunset?”

“The photographers of National Geographic. ”

“Oh,” he had said, pushing his lower lip out and nodding. The professor, who is renting long-term and working on some atheistic magnum opus, loves sharing that piece of trivia with other visitors just to see them first reject and then accept the idea that sunsets might be rankable. He had been disappointed that the Russian did not ask the usual follow-up question, so he had answered it unbidden.

“The best sunsets are over the Sea of Japan, looking toward Russia. ”

Now the lake spreads squid’s-ink black beneath a sky like a luminous bruise. The Russian wants a cigarette, but it is a mild want that only comes with inebriation and goes away when ignored. He looks at the dog, at the white in his face that stands out from his black-and-tan body like a cheap plastic ghost mask.

“Go get us a pack of Marlboros, Caspar. Caspar the son-of-a-bitch ghost. ”