Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

—Better catch up, old man. Even DVDs are old-school now. What are you going to do when it’s all computer streaming? Which it is.

—I guess you’ll take over.

—I can’t open trapdoors. I tried. Plenty.

—Then I guess you’ll have to go to a pawnshop and get a VCR.

—For Madeline? Ok. And send History of the World. I want to talk to her in that Roman get-up. “YES! No,no,no,no,no,no, YES!”

—Are you sure you don’t have a family member or friend you’d rather talk to?

—I’m young. All of my friends are alive. Only dead family were crabby old grayhairs. One nice Grandma on Brick Lane in London just died, but I’d rather talk to Madeline Kahn. “Ohhh, it’s twue, it’s twue!”

—As you wish.

—All right. I’ll keep poking. We’ll see if comrade witchiepoo Dragomirov has hackers or slackers in her kennel.

An apartment in Kiev.

Small and dirty, littered with decades-old Western kitsch.

An Eiffel tower perfume bottle, yellowed and empty, cat hair stuck to its sides, dominates a plastic white end table hash-marked at every edge with cigarette scars.

Next to the table, and taller, stands a Babel tower of books, at the top of which a dog-eared paperback presents a redhead with arched eyebrows, her conical, late-sixties breasts like small missiles all but poking through her bikini as she guns a motorcycle beneath the Czech title, Angels of Road and Beach .

Fake German steins made in Japan stand on the floor against a peeling once-avocado wall, like very small counterrevolutionaries awaiting their firing squad.

A curling old poster, its corners peppered with tack holes, features a leering and clearly unauthorized Mickey Mouse pointing a gloved finger back at the legend ORLANDO ; oranges spill from the first O , a dolphin jumps through the second. Behind the huge mouse, men and women in early-eighties hairdos, all of them soft around the edges like someone Captain Kirk is about to inseminate, laugh in a sort of twinkling, painted-in, promlike heaven. Mickey’s waist is cut off by a neobiblical invitation, Come and See, Come and See! in Russian and Ukrainian. Under this is the Sunny Skye travel agency logo atop a long-dead phone number. The top and bottom of the poster are torn and taped in the middle where the apartment dweller’s father ripped it from its thumbtacks, ripped it off of the wall of his illegal Donetsk business in 1986, just ahead of the arrival of the police.

An orange cat with white paws licks itself, ignoring the man hunched over the computer in a sun-bleached pinkish-yellow Izod polo shirt. If it could stand up and look over his shoulder, it would see him typing in English:

On ffriday, I was at the aunts farm and accidentally saw Huh, just call me, if you really want to join inserting hand up the horses butt, til elbow.

Hey, have you ever seen something like that?

Just take a close look at that pic:

http://… (etc.)

Tell me please, if you, pervert, want to join me next time I travel to the country side.

The man’s spine is curled like a question mark, not from an accident of birth, but from years of hunching before monitors. He leans away from the screen now, his back as close to straight as it will go, and regards his work. He is proud of the commas before and after pervert , something only an expert in English would know to do.

He smokes, still poring over his oeuvre, checking it for errors. He catches the double-effed friday , balances his cigarette on the table ledge, types jerkily, puffs and exhales. Soon he will sell “passage” on this spam to various clients, some in Ukraine, some in China, a few in Africa, who will pay him to insert their toxic URLs and launch them at Americans and Canadians by name. Like spells, but in the millions upon millions. Sperm, his sperm, racing for the ova of personal information. Credit cards will be stolen, e-mail addresses hijacked, spyware implanted, oh the lovely chaos! More importantly, oh the lovely dollars! Hard currency will appear in his several dozen false-front PayPal accounts; he will shunt this money to accounts he holds in Trinidad, St. Martin, and the Bahamas; and his retirement will grow.

He is thirty-four, means to retire at fifty.

He has been earning his own money since he was fifteen.

He will live until eighty-five, with the help of Western medicine and his retirement, thus spending thirty-five years working and thirty-five years doing whatever the fuck he wants . When he visualizes his savings, he sees a cartoon snowball of dollars growing as it rolls downhill, hitting a valley, then shrinking as it rolls uphill until it is gone, and a tiny pop is heard.

The pop of a .22 against his temple; he means to be so poor at the top of that second hill he has no choice but to shoot himself.

It must be a .22.

Small-caliber so the bullet goes in, but cannot exit, ricocheting around inside, making cabbage of his brains, destroying all feeling, all memory. Leaving just a small, bleeding hole. People who shoot themselves with powerful guns are selfish, vulgar.

Bourgeois.

Someone must clean their brains from the wall.

Cursing them and scrubbing.

The gun will be his first purchase upon retiring.

Until then, he cannot bring himself to spend any more than necessary. He is a miser of the first house, wearing everything out until it simply cannot be used, only buying things that cost so close to nothing they might as well be free.

But when he turns fifty…

… the next time I travel the countryside.

“Perfect, pervert,” he says in thickly accented English.

The cat yawns, showing fangs that are perhaps the only truly white things in the apartment, and stretches, walking the crooked back of the sofa before sitting imperiously on the arm.

Now the night breeze, cool for June even here, fingers its way beneath the window, blowing the fly-specked curtains up. The view en face consists of yet more ugly block apartments, the lights on in only a few windows, but now these rectangles of light shiver slightly, as though from heat fumes.

No heat here, though.

The room gets colder.

The cat almost hisses, remembers what happened to it the last time it did, and curls itself around its master’s feet, its tail flicking between those heels-up feet and the sooty footprints on the pink flip-flops beneath them.

Now the man turns in his chair and looks at the window.

She’s here.

He looks away quickly.

His palms grow moist.

He anticipates the sound just before he hears it.

The sound of an iron pot scraping against the cheap stucco below the sill, scraping like a rowboat against a pier.

Baba Yaga riding through the night skies of Kiev, sitting in an iron pot, pushing it with a broom.

Just like in bedtime fables.

But she really is outside.

Some part of her, anyway.

I’m nine stories up.

Yuri…

“Yes, little mother,” he manages, smoking again.

He is careful not to show his teeth when he speaks.

Put on your kerchief.

The cat shivers violently.

He pulls the sticking drawer out, pulls out a blue terry cloth hand towel. Is repulsed thinking about putting this over his eyes but does so anyway, tilting his head back, holding it in place because God help him if it falls off and he sees her.

The crunching sound as the iron pot crumbles stucco.

Is there really a pot, or do I hear one because I expect to?

A bare foot on his gritty linoleum floor.

She is in the apartment now, he knows.

Yuri, you bought the ticket?

“Yes. One ticket for Marina Yaganishna, first class. Nizhny to Moscow, Moscow to JFK, JFK to Syracuse.”