Free The Necromancer's House by Christopher Buehlman Page A

“Ohhh, it’s twue, it’s twue!”
    â€”As you wish.
    â€”All right. I’ll keep poking. We’ll see if comrade witchiepoo Dragomirov has hackers or slackers in her kennel.

23
    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