Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

The old man’s grating chuckle came to him. “That’s the good side, all right. That’s the way, that’s the way.” Richardson looked up. Cut’n-Shoot had pushed back the hood of his rain slicker, and was scratching his head through hair like furnace ashes. “But he likes lively a sight better. You get the chance, you remember.”

“Nothing’s happening,” Richardson started to say—and then something was.

One by one the fingers of the Troll’s right hand were coming free of the ground. Richardson realized that the whole forearm was lifting up, twisting from the elbow, dust and dirt sifting off as it rose. The giant hand turned with the motion, dead-gray fingers coming together with a sound of cracking bricks. Then—like a child grabbing for jacks before the ball comes down, and just as fast—the Troll’s hand swept up the two roasts in one great swinging motion and carried them to its suddenly open mouth. The ponderous jaw moved up and down three times before it settled back into place, and Richardson tried to imagine what could possibly be going on inside. A moment later the Troll’s hand and arm returned to their original position, fingers wriggling their way back into the soil and once more becoming motionless.

There was no moon, and no more cars went by, but the hubcap continued to twinkle with a brightly chilling malice, and even—so it seemed to Richardson—to wink. He was still staring at the Troll when Cut’n-Shoot finally clapped his palms together with satisfaction.

“Well! Old sumbitch settled right down. Think he liked that fancy talk. Know any more?”

“Sure.”

“My lucky day,” the old man said. “Now lemme show you what the wine’s for.”

* * *

Richardson woke the next morning hung over, stiff backed, and with a runny nose. He was late to class again; and that evening, when he returned to Fremont, he brought lamb chops.

* * *

From then on he never came to the bridge without bringing some tribute for the Troll. Most often it came in the form of slabs of raw meat; though now and again, this being Seattle, he would present the statue with a whole salmon, usually purchased down at the ferry dock from a fisherman’s wife. Once—only once—he tried offering a bag of fresh crab cakes, but Cut’n-Shoot informed him tersely, “Don’t give him none of that touristy shit,” and made him go back to the Fremont PCC for an entire Diestel Family turkey.

Richardson also read to the Troll most evenings, working his way up from obvious fare to selections from the Bland Tomtar och Troll series, voiced dramatically in his best stab at phonetic Swedish. He had no idea whether the Troll understood, but the expressions on his own face as he dealt with the unfamiliar orthography made Cut’n-Shoot howl.

It didn’t always go easily. By day the Troll was changeless, an eternally crude concrete figure with one dull aluminum eye, a vacantly malevolent expression, and bad hair. At night its temperament was as unpredictably irritable as a wasp’s. Richardson began to measure his visits on a scale marked in feet, yards, and furlongs, assessing the difference between this Tuesday and that Saturday by precisely how far the Troll stirred from its den. In that way he came to understand—as Cut’n-Shoot never bothered to explain—that the old man’s task wasn’t to feed the Troll at all, but rather to distract it, to confuse it, to short-circuit its unfocused instinct to go off unimpeded about its trollish business, whatever that might be. Food was a means to that end; as now was Richardson’s cheerfully garbled Swedish. Even so there were nights when it would not yield, and lumbered half a mile or more before they could tempt and coax it—like two Pekingese herding a mastiff—back under the bridge. On those nights, nothing would do but “the lively,” usually in the form of a writhing rat or pigeon. Cut’n-Shoot never told Richardson how—or with what—he caught them.

The months passed, and the weather turned relatively mild and notably dry. On campus this was generally spoken of as a function of global warming and greeted with definite anxiety. Richardson paid little attention to climate crises, having his own worries. His temporary tenure at the university was coming to an end with the summer quarter, and thoughts of the department chair’s vague early promises moved in his heart like schooling fish: Instead of calling up job listings and sending out inquiries, he found himself manufacturing excuses to go by Aussie’s office or sit near him in the faculty dining hall, hoping that mere proximity might make the man offer him work he couldn’t possibly ask for.

He also began to drink, at first in pretended sociability with Cut’n-Shoot, but later with the devotion of a convert. It was not an area in which he had any sort of previous expertise. He could neither tell good champagne from bad nor upper-shelf vodka from potato-peel swill; only that in each case the latter was distinctly cheaper. It all invariably left him with a hammering headache the next morning, which seemed to be how you could tell you were doing it right.

Having no one to drink with in comfort and understanding, he came to spend the early part of many evenings drinking with the gray cat, for whom he had conceived an increasing dislike. Not only did it smell bad, it had taken to urinating on the floor outside its box and knocking down the clothes hamper to tear and scratch at Richardson’s dirty clothes. Richardson, who had never hated an animal in his life, no more than he had ever loved one, brooded increasingly and extensively about the gray cat.

Nothing would probably have come of this growing fixation had he not already been drunk on the evening he discovered that the cat had peed in his only pair of carpet slippers. Having noticed a pet-transport cage in one of the closets, he pounced on the unwary animal and forced it into the cage, threw on his coat, and stalked down the hill toward Fremont, muttering in counterpoint to the cat’s furious wails, as the cage banged against the side of his left knee. “Lively. Right, lively it is. Lively it bloody is.”

Cut’n-Shoot said nothing when Richardson set the cage down facing the Troll, shouted “Lively!” and walked quickly away, paying no heed to the cat’s redoubled howling. He did look back once, but cage and bridge were both out of sight by then.

In the morning, between the expected headache and the forgotten pre-finals lecture summarizing works intended for children from A.D. 1000 to 1850, he remembered the cat only as he was locking the apartment door. There was no time to check on the cage just then; but all day long he could concentrate on almost nothing else. Along with trying to invent something to tell the cat’s owner, he became obsessed with the notion that the Humane Society would be waiting for him at the bridge with a charge of felony animal abuse—and quite possibly littering.

That evening he found the remains of the empty cage between two of the Troll’s huge fingers. The door had been ripped clean away, as had most of the front of the cage, and the rest of it had been pounded almost shapeless, as though by a hammer or a great fist. There was fur.

Richardson just made it to the bushes before he was very sick. It took him a long time to empty his stomach, and he was shaking and coughing when he was done, barely able to stand erect. His throat and mouth tasted of chewed tinfoil.

When he finally forced himself to turn back toward the statue, he saw Cut’n-Shoot grinning derisively at him from the shadow of the bridge. “One thing when I do it, another when you do, hah?”

“You could have stopped it. You had other food there. I saw it. You could have let the cat out of that thing, let it go.” His stomach contracted, and he thought he was going to be sick again, but there was nothing left to vomit.

“Waste not, want not,” Cut’n-Shoot chuckled. “’Sides, now you really do know trolls.”

* * *

With a mean cunning that he would not have suspected himself of possessing, Richardson designed an advertisement for a lost gray cat—even including the name he had never once called it—had a hundred copies xeroxed, and mounted them in sheltered places up and down Queen Anne Hill. Thus, when the owner returned from that enviable, enviable sabbatical in England, he would see that Richardson had done everything possible to track down his unfortunately vanished cat. Would have died soon anyway, old and incontinent as it was. He surely wouldn’t have wanted the poor thing peeing all over his nice condo.

The next morning he went to a pet shop in the Wallingford district, and bought two carrier cages, the first identical to the one he had found in the apartment. The second was a bit larger, since one never knew. With the latter in his hand, he continued his nightly routine, the only differences being that his rounds were now somewhat