The Necromancer's House

by Christopher Buehlman

If his father were here, he would call the Rochester escort and the Oswego hooker and send his mother out for cigarettes.

“Lakes have no whales,” he tells Caspar, pointing a nut-colored finger gravely at him. The dog doesn’t seem to understand, so he tells him in Russian, too.

His eyes trail down to her tight, alabaster navel, below which a scud of curly hair leads to the kind of prodigious bush one doesn’t see on young women these days except on specialty internet sites.

His mouth is too full of cold tongue for him to yell.

Karl Zautke is just a little too big for the wicker chair beneath him; Andrew has been watching it collapse in slow motion for a year and a half. Anneke would get him a new one except that she knows Karl finds half-collapsed things comfortable.

All the magic happens in Bob’s head-he stopped trying to change the world and just changed how he looks at it.

And just like that it is awake again. The big electric animal under his skin that doesn’t understand the word no.

Hello, officer? Yes, I’d like to report a suspicious locking, and a temperature anomaly.

“Whoever made me is a giant asshole!”