The Necromancer's House Read Online Free PDF

dry heat.”
    He’s looking at her with serious-Andrew face on.
    â€œIs she dangerous?”
    Andrew doesn’t say anything.

11
    â€œIt’s just that I was swimming and I heard Russian. I could not resist. I love to speak Russian,” Nadia says.
    The next day.
    Andrew’s house.
    â€œWhat did you do with him?”
    â€œI took him to the ship, of course, with the others.”
    The man rolls his long, dark hair into a bun and fixes it in place with a two-pronged little cherrywood fork, samurai-style.
    â€œI thought you agreed only to do that farther away.”
    She nods gravely, playing with the three-tiered necklace of shells, to which she has added the dog’s tag.
    Help me get home!
    â€œIt is June, you know,” she says. Andrew knows she’s referring to the festival of Rusal’naya, when her sisters dance in the fields and on the roads from Poland to the Urals, luring young men to watery deaths. “I cannot assist myself.”
    â€œ
Help myself
, you mean. And the Russian thing is no excuse. I speak Russian. You should speak it with me.”
    â€œNo,” she corrects, holding up a pale finger, “you read Russian. When you force it out from your mouth, it goes unwillingly. Stinking of Ohio.”
    He smiles at her Slavic palatalization of the
h
.
    â€œWhat do you know about Ohio?”
    â€œI know Geneva on the Lake. I know Erie.”
    â€œThat’s Pennsylvania.”
    â€œIs the same.”
    He gets up from his couch and goes to the window that gives on the lake, turning his back to her, his shoulders hard and angular as though the antique Japanese robe he wears were hung on a block of tilted wood. She can’t see his face but knows he is smiling at the darkness on the horizon. A storm is coming, and he likes storms, especially these nasty little June squalls that form so quickly they shame the weathermen. It will come ashore within the hour, bringing Canadian air with it, and he will put on his leather coat and go out to the balcony.
    The coat with the cigarettes in the pocket.
    â€œIs
not
the same,” he says, mocking her accent.
    â€œGive me a cigarette,” she says.
    â€œYou know where they are.”
    â€œI know. I just wanted to see if you had become a gentleman yet. But you are still from Ohio.”
    She gets up and feels around in the pocket of the leather bomber jacket hanging near the door, pulling his yellow packet of American Spirits out and tamping it against her hand to pack the tobacco. Never mind that he has already done this. She redoes everything he does to show that it might be done better. She pulls one out and lights it, frowning at it as though even she cannot believe that something living (or existing, if you prefer) at the bottom of a lake might need tobacco.
    â€œI feel your . . . disapproval,” she says. “You have something else to say?”
    â€œYou know what I would say.”
    â€œThat you hate it when I drown them.”
    â€œTo which you will reply that nothing makes you come as hard as drowning someone, and that you’ll come like that for a month afterward. Besides, it’s in your nature.”
    â€œAnd you will say go to Oswego to do that. Or Rochester. Or Canada.”
    â€œBut Canada is so faaaar to svim, and I vill miss you,” he says, imitating her again. He takes the cigarette from her mouth and puffs it, ignoring the fishy, dead taste, as he has learned so well to do in other situations. She takes the cigarette back and reaches for the spray bottle full of lake water, misting her dreadlocked auburn mane until it drips.
    â€œThen you will ask,” she continues, spearing each of the next words with the end of her cigarette as she enunciates them, “What. Did. You. Do. With. The. Dog?”
    â€œYou didn’t eat the poor thing.”
    â€œI wanted to. He was old, but plump and spoiled with good meat on his thighs. But I knew you would be