Read Online The Necromancer's House by Christopher Buehlman - Free Book Online

the freezer. It has chosen to be heavy—it depresses the bed.
    Andrew forces himself not to recoil.
    â€œGo back to the chair and remain there until I dismiss you.”
    It blinks its big cartoon eyes twice.
    Andrew draws a breath to begin the formal command, but Ichabod winks out and winks back in on the leather chair, sitting lotus-style.
    â€œWell?”
    â€œWell what?” it says in an incongruously masculine bass.
    â€œTell me why you’re here.”
    â€œCan’t I just visit? I get lonely in my lair. There’s not a great deal to do there.”
    â€œThen go back where you came from.”
    â€œAnd miss the rest of your life? I wouldn’t dream of it.”
    Andrew sighs anxiously.
    It speaks again, using its fallback voice, petulant intellectual.
    â€œI’m worried about you, Captain. Master. Master Andrew Commander.”
    â€œTell me why.”
    â€œYou know why.”
    â€œI don’t.”
    â€œIt’s time.”
    â€œI don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    â€œOnly because you don’t want to know. But you need to know.”
    â€œJust say what you have to say and go.”
    â€œYou might have let me destroy your rusalka. When I offered.”
    â€œI don’t want her destroyed.”
    â€œBut now it’s too late.”
    â€œFor what?”
    â€œThat Russian she drowned was an extraordinary specimen.”
    â€œFucking tell me.”
    At Andrew’s flash of anger, the cartoon child flushes red as though someone had poured blood into it and begins to flicker.
    Becomes a writhing squid for a split second, then reverts to Katzenjammer Kid.
    â€œSome people see God’s hand in coincidence. Are you one of these?”
    Andrew seethes.
    â€œJust . . .”
    It cuts him off.
    â€œAsk your rusalka for the dog’s collar.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œYou will want to research its owner.”

21
    â€œThere are two kinds of users,” Andrew tells Anneke. “Plodders and intuitives. Also called disciples and heirs.”
    Anneke is walking a penny around in the palm of her hand. Moving small objects is almost always how it starts; Andrew has told her she has to find something she can move and move it three times a day for at least ten minutes.
    She favors the penny.
    They are sitting in her inside studio, the one she uses when the weather won’t allow work al fresco. Today, through the sliding glass door, it rains in indecisive spits and sputters, bedewing the greenery outside, greenery all the more dazzling when overtopped by gray.
    All manner of pottery in various stages of completion crowds Anneke’s little workshop; ten whitish-gray mugs rest upside down on a board over a plastic tub of clay. Cedar Heights clay, to be exact, its yellow letters emblazoned on a stack of red sacks upon which a clay-bedabbed tower of DVD cases leans, as if eager to consummate, toward the DVD player and television on high. Everything leans and balances in here. Everything is smeared, dabbed, or stippled with clay, white or red.
    Her remote controls, one for TV, one for DVD player, have been wrapped in plastic, likewise clay-smudged and fingerprinted.
    More inverted mugs, and a smattering of coffee cups and saucers, congregate on a card table, along with a tall vase topped by a precarious-looking round wooden board. A
quarantaine
of rosettes dries atop this board, the same rosettes that, when fitted with brass pins and painted Tudor red, will adorn the vests and doublets of the acting cast of the Renaissance festival to distinguish them from unpaid costumed enthusiasts. That is to say, when a drunken
Landsknecht
in rather convincing armor barfs on your lady fair, the lack of said rosette upon his breast will mark this as an unsanctioned event and indemnify both the festival and the troupe of professional improvisers that animate its lanes.
    â€œWhich kind am I?” she says.
    Meaning plodder or