The Necromancer's House by Christopher Buehlman

he senses that the man is American, has trained himself to do that. He moves a white pawn, consults a book, then moves a black pawn. He lifts a glass of wine to his lips, a rubyish droplet spilling down his beard, then disappearing within it.
    Now the glow is over land, but farther away, heading toward Rochester. It moved fast when he wasn’t watching.
    Or there are more than one of them.
    That’s your fear talking. There’s only one. It doesn’t see you, doesn’t want you.
    He flies again, moving left, back toward the water.
    To his right, a dark cabin, wooden stairs leading sharply down from its back deck.
    Beneath him dry sand becomes wet sand becomes rocks, here and there punctuated with driftwood or seaweed. He pelicans over the water again, and then he sees it.
    It sees him.
    A ghost.
    Under the water.
    A bloated older man’s ghost floats under the surface of the lake, its form luminous gray-green, like algae, its eyes two holes of starlight, locked on Andrew.
    It surfaces.
    Oh shit, it’s time to go.
    The tether jerks.
    A luminous hand rises from the water, grabs something.
    Grabs the invisible umbilicus anchoring him to his body.
    Shakes it savagely.
    NO!
    Shakes it harder.
    PLEASE!
    The puffy phosphorescent head of the dead man comes out of the lake and bites at the air with black teeth. Andrew feels something like pain where his belly should be.
    Now it is pain, excruciating pain.
    The tether is down to threads, but the last threads are tough and the thing can’t quite sever them.
    Cold I’m cold!
    Andrew tries to move away, but he is pulled down
by his tether
until a fatty dead arm loops around his neck, pulls him under the surface of the water.
    How do I have a neck? Oh fuck my soul is almost all here now, I’m about to die. Help! HELP! PLEASE!
    The dead face leers at him.
    No bubbles.
    It doesn’t breathe.
    But it speaks.
    In Russian.
    â€œIt is an unpleasant thing to drown.”
    The eyes are not starlight anymore, just milky white lamps, like the lamps deepwater fish use to lure prey.
    Panicked, Andrew tries to think of what to do. He cannot escape the half headlock he is in, the soft but insistent mass of it somehow handling his nonmass, nor is his tether strong enough to snap him back.
    â€œWith your permission, I would like to show you my new home.”
    Dragomirov!
    And now they dive.
    Down and down.
    Past a school of fish, just dark, blunt shapes moving around and through the diving souls.
    A ship comes into view on the bottom, lit only by the witch-light given off by the ghost.
    â€œIsn’t it pretty?”
    Andrew is shoved now, pushed through a tear in the hull.
    He sees a quintet of skeletons through the murk and detritus, all sitting at a table with plates and cups near them, the remains of their clothes around them.
    The rusalka had been busy.
    Maybe only one drowning a year, if all of them were here, but since this had started before 1930, she had brought a lot of lives to their end.
    She is a one-woman disaster, played out in slow motion.
    She is a monster.
    Now Andrew is held by the nape, brought face-to-face with a skeleton sitting in the corner.
    â€œLook. This one is me. You can see my clothes are in better repair, and those fucking mussels haven’t had time to grow on me like the forgotten ones in the engine room. She tends us, you know, the recent ones. Keeps us clean, like dolls in a dollhouse. I bought those jeans at the Nordstrom, International Mall, Tampa. One hundred fifty dollars. And now, look. Look at the dental work I had done in Mexico, such art, these crowns, art by Dr. Hernan Rodriguez of Leon, and for what? For your pretty bitch to drown me for a joke in a cold lake.”
    I’m sorry.
    â€œThe devil take your sorry.”
    The fatty thing holding him shudders violently, begins to come apart, bits of its not-flesh drifting off it. Andrew can see through parts of it now, but also its witch-light is fading. It is