The attic is much less cluttered than Anneke expected.
A few cardboard boxes and several sealed plastic tubs sit against the walls, but those aren’t what draw the eye.
The owl stands out.
A great horned owl, glass-eyed, the kind that’s big enough to drive eagles off their nests, stands atop a long shelf also inhabited by a blue jay, two crows, and a hummingbird.
Both Anneke and the rusalka next notice a vaguely animal-shaped form sitting atop a huge, old steamer trunk, draped with a dusty sheet.
Whatever it is has a long, reptilian tail.
Andrew sees them looking, steps over to it, pulls the sheet back.
“What the fuck is that?”
“It’s a Tri-Star vintage rolling canister vacuum cleaner, of course. Slightly modified.”
“Slightly modified,” Nadia says, displaying her rotten teeth in an appreciative grin. The bulldoggish, triangular canister forms the base for a disturbing amalgamation of tools and taxidermied animal parts; the wheels that would normally support the larger rear of the appliance (now reversed to serve as the beast’s puffed-up chest) have been replaced by a chimpanzee’s arms, currently resting on their elbows, hands folded as if in prayer. An especially large alligator donated the tail snaking from the tapered end of the wedge, where the hose once attached. Said hose has been grafted to the larger end and pressed into service as the neck supporting the head, a sort of welded brass-and-metal rooster head with gogglish eyeglass lenses for eyes and the tips of kitchen knives for a crest. The beak looks fully capable of biting through a truck tire. For good measure, folded vulture’s wings perch on the slanted back.
“Does he have a name?” Anneke asks.
“Actually, she does. And I know it’s in the form of a rooster—I thought about calling it ‘Billy’ after the guy who welded it for me—but something about it strikes me as feminine.”
He whispers the name to her.
“Electra.”
Next the trio considers a sort of standing fish tank with a great mound of dirt coming halfway up. Crisscrossed coat hangers frame the top, and from this frame, supported by golden threads, hangs a scale model of the necromancer’s house, exact in every detail.
“What… ?” Anneke starts.
“Don’t ask about this one,” Andrew says. “Let’s move on.”
“The bedroom,” he says as neutrally as possible.
“Stand at the door,” he says to Anneke.
“Why always her?” the rusalka pouts. “When do I get to do something?”
“I’m not sure how this stuff will work on you.”
“Because. I’m not. A person,” she says, with more than a dash of hurt pride.
Unimpressed, Andrew says, “That’s. Exactly. Right.”
He lies down on his bed, stretches out.
“Come to the bed and sit down,” he tells Anneke.
She does so, looking around, wondering what the trick will be.
Nothing happens.
She just sits.
“Now go back and do it again, only this time think about hurting me.”
“Gladly,” she says, laughing.
Now she crosses the room at a slight crouch, her hand held up dramatically as if holding an invisible knife, ready to stab him Psycho-style.
When she gets halfway there, the door to the walk-in closet opens.
“Oh shit,” she says.
Takes another step.
Everything happens fast.
The telephone on Andrew’s nightstand rings.
Serpentine objects fly from Andrew’s closet, brown and black, four of them, whipping at high speed.
She tries to cover her face with her hands.
Not snakes.
Belts.
The leather stings when it hits her.
“Ow, fuck!”
Andrew swears in surprise and mild pain as well.
The belts wrap around Anneke’s hands and feet, bind them together, hog-tie her. A fifth belt loops around her neck, but only tightens enough to let her know it’s there.
The reason Andrew swore is that the belt he was wearing whipped off him, gave him a nasty burn on the side, dinged his hand good with the buckle as it shot itself at Anneke.
The phone rings again.
Levitates off the bed, floats over to her.
The speaker cozies up to her ear.
Andrew’s voice, prerecorded.
“Honi soit qui mal y pense! Try not to move too much, as the belts tighten when you struggle. Especially the one around your neck. I’ll be with you at my earliest convenience.”
The phone dies, thunks to the floor, lies still.
Nadia gently applauds, as if at the opera.
The magus helps Anneke off with the belts.
“Why did you waste a big one like that?”
“I’ll load it up again tomorrow. It’s not the only one in here.”
“What was the French?”
“Basically, Think good thoughts.”
37
“This is my bathroom. These silver fists you see holding the roll of toilet paper make the roll inexhaustible. Very popular with the ladies, as is the lid, which lowers itself when the room is vacated. Subtle magic, that. Less subtle is the claw-foot bathtub. If you dive into it headfirst, hard enough to break your neck,”
(Nadia winces at this)
“it will send you to a bathroom in whatever place you say and think about. If you say nothing, it will send you to the last place it gated to.”
Anneke thinks about this. It makes sense… bathrooms are private. One wouldn’t want to appear in the middle of a public fountain or even a kitchen. If Superman had been real, he would have changed in a toilet, not a phone booth. Maybe he uses a toilet now since phone booths are nearly extinct. Andrew might know—he seems dork enough to have a secret comic book habit.
“Do you get wet?”
“Only if the bathtub’s full. The water in the pipes conducts, it doesn’t immerse.”
“How do you get back?”
“Any fixture in the bathroom you got sent to will send you right back to this tub. Another tub is best; toilet works, too, though the idea is off-putting. The sink will stretch wide enough to accommodate you if you believe it will, though I once cracked a rib on the spigot when I wondered if I was going to clear the spigot. Belief is more than half of all magic.”
“What is the last place it gated to?” Anneke asks.
“I don’t remember,” he says. “Would you like to see for yourself?”
She gives him a you-must-have-forgotten-whom-you’re-daring look and dives. Nadia, startled (and a little impressed), swears in Russian, stepping back so as not to be clipped by Anneke’s foot.
38
Anneke finds herself in a bathroom, painted green from the waist down, white on the top half. She’s on the can, the lid of which is thankfully down. A startled young man with a sandy white-boy Afro was washing his hands at the sink. His mind can’t deal with the idea that she suddenly appeared, so it performs a kind of emergency rewrite.
“People knock, you know. I’ll be done in a minute.”
She’s in shock, too, though, so all she does is blink at him.
He wonders if she has a head injury.
“Are you all right?”
She nods.
The paper towels are out, so the young man wipes on his pants.
It doesn’t even occur to him that he has to draw the tiny bolt to open the door because nobody came in that way after him.
“Want it closed?” he asks.
Sweet kid.
She nods.
She stands up on shaky legs and locks the door again so she can gather herself. Sits back down. A water heater dominates the cramped bathroom, a yellow sticker warning her that gasoline should not be stored nearby as the pilot light will ignite the fumes. The walls are hung with memorabilia from a cable mafia show.