Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

along his scalp.

“But if you get rid of it, Mr. Beltrane, if you get rid of it, you have nothing left.” He pauses. “You just have a hole.”

Beltrane darts a glance at him. Davis is leaning over his desk, urgency scrawled across his face. He’s sweating too, and his eyes look sunken, as though someone has jerked them back into his head from behind. His appearance unnerves Beltrane, and he turns away.

“Emptiness. Silence. Is that really better? You need to think carefully about what you decide you can live without, Mr. Beltrane.” He pauses for a moment. When Beltrane stays silent, he leans even closer and asks, “What do you really think is going to happen when you make that call tomorrow?”

A cold pulse of fear flows through Beltrane’s body. But before he can think of a response, a sound reaches them through the closed door. People are entering the church from the street.

Davis smiles suddenly. It’s an artificial smile, manic, out of all proportion to any possible stimulus. “They’re here! Come on!”

He leads him into the large room with the lectern and the rows of chairs. Two people—a young slender Latina woman and an older obese white man—have just entered and are standing uncertainly by the door. Although they’re dressed in simple, cheap clothing, it’s immediately obvious that they’re not homeless. They both stare at Beltrane as he approaches behind the pastor.

“Come on, everybody,” Davis says, gesturing to the front row of chairs. “Let’s sit down.”

Davis arranges a chair to face them, and soon they are all sitting in a clumsy circle. “These are the people I wanted you to meet,” he says. “This is Maria and Evan. They’re haunted too.”

Maria tries to form a smile beneath eyes that are sunken and dark, like moon craters or like cigarette burns. She seems long out of practice. Evan is staring intently at the floor. He’s breathing heavily through his nose with a reedy, pistoning regularity. His forehead is glistening with sweat.

“I’m trying to start a little group here, you know? People with your sort of problem.”

“This is how we gonna get rid of it?” Beltrane asks.

Davis and Maria exchange glances.

“They don’t want to get rid of them,” Davis says. “That’s why they’re here.” He turns to the others. “Mr. Beltrane came here from New Orleans. He’s looking for his daughter.”

Maria gives him a crushed look. “Oh, pobrecito,” she says. The news seems to affect her deeply: Her face clouds over, and her eyes well up. Beltrane looks away, embarrassed for her, and ashamed at his own optimism.

“His ghost is a city.”

This seems to catch even Evan’s attention, who looks at him for the first time. “I’m the Ghost of Christmas Past,” Evan says, and barks a laugh. “My family died in a fire two days after Christmas. The fucking tree! It’s like a joke, right?”

Davis pats Evan on the knee. “We’ll get to it, my friend. We will. But first we have to help him understand.”

“Right, right. But it wants to come out. It wants to come out right now.”

“Mr. Beltrane thinks he lost his city in the flood,” Davis continues.

“I did lose it!” Beltrane shouts, feeling both scared and angry to be among these people. “After Katrina came, I lost everything! Craig moved away after his place flooded! Places I go to are all shut down. The people all gone. Ivy … Ivy, she … she was in this empty old house she used to crash in.…” His throat closes, and he stops there.

Davis waits a moment, then puts his hand on his shoulder. “But it’s not really gone, though, is it?” He touches Beltrane on the forehead and then on his chest. “Is it?”

Beltrane shakes his head.

“And if it ever does go away, well, God help you then. Because you will be all by yourself. You will be all alone.” He pauses. “You don’t want that. Nobody wants that.”

Evan makes a noise and puts a hand over his mouth.

“I had enough of this crazy shit,” Beltrane says, and stands. Davis opens his mouth, but before he can speak the room is filled with the scent of cloves and cinnamon. The effect is so jarring that Beltrane nearly loses his balance.

Evan doubles over in his seat, hands over his face, his big body shuddering with sobs. The smell pours from him. Smoke leaks from between his fingers, spreading in cobwebby wreaths over his head. Beltrane wants to run, but he’s never seen this kind of thing in anyone but himself before, and he’s transfixed.

“Oh, here it comes,” Davis says, not to the others but to himself, his eyes glassy and fixed, staring at Evan. “That’s all right, just let it out. You have to let it come out. You have to hold on to what’s left. Never let it go.” He looks at Maria. “Can you feel him, Maria? Can you?”

Maria nods. Her eyes are filled with tears. Her hands are clutching her stomach, and Beltrane watches as it grows beneath them, accompanied by a powerful, sickly odor that he does not recognize right away. When he does he feels a buckling inside, the turning over of some essential organ or element, and he is overwhelmed by a powerful need to flee.

“Will you get rid of this?” Davis is saying, his face so close to Maria’s they might be lovers. “Will you get rid of your child, Maria? Who could ask that of you? Who would dare?”

Beltrane backs up a step and falls over a chair, sprawling to the floor in a clatter of noise and his own flailing arms. There’s a sudden, spiking pain as his elbow takes the brunt of his weight. The air grows steadily colder; the appalling mix of cinnamon and desiccated flesh roots into his nose. Davis kneels between the others, one hand touching each body, and once again his features seem to be tugging inward, even his round stomach is drawing in, as though something empty, some starving need, is glutting itself on this weird energy; as though there’s a black hole inside him, filling its belly with light.

“Please, God, just let it come,” Davis says.

Beltrane tries to scramble to his feet and slips. A large, growing puddle of Mississippi River water surrounds him. It soaks his clothes. He tries again, making it to his feet this time, and staggers to the door. He pushes his way outside, into the warm, humid night, and without waiting to see if they’re following, he lurches farther down the street, away from the church, away from the shelter, until an alleyway opens like a throat and he turns gratefully into it. He manages to make it a few more feet before he collapses to his knees. He doesn’t know anymore if the pain he feels is coming from arthritis or from the ghost which has wrapped itself like a vine around his bones.

Across the alley, in the alcove of a delivery door, he sees a mound of clothing and a duffel bag: This is somebody’s roost. A shadow falls over him as a figure stops in the mouth of the alley. The city light makes a dark shape of it, a negative space. “What you doin’ here?” it says.

Beltrane closes his eyes—an act of surrender. “I just restin’, man,” he says, almost pleads. “I ain’t stayin’.”

“You don’t belong here.”

“Come on, man. Just let me rest a minute. I ain’t gonna stay. Can’t you see what’s happening to me?”

When he opens his eyes he is alone. He exhales, and it almost sounds like a sob. “I wanna go home,” he whispers. “I wanna go home.” He runs his hands through his hair, dislodging drowned corpses, which tumble into his lap.

* * *

Beltrane left the Avenue Pub behind, well and truly drunk, walking slowly and carefully as the ground lurched and spun beneath him. He summoned the presence of mind to listen for the streetcar, which came like a bullet at night; just last year it ran down a drunk coming from some bar farther up the road. “That’s some messy shit,” he announced, and laughed to himself. The United Cab offices were just a few blocks away. If he hurried he could beat the rain.

Halfway there he found Ivy, rooting lazily through a trash can.

She was a cute little thing who’d shown up in town last year after fleeing some private doom in Georgia; she was forty years younger than Beltrane, but hope lived large in him. They got along pretty well—she got along well with most men, really—and it was always nice to spend time with a pretty girl. He waved at her. “Ivy! Hey, girl!”

She looked up at him, her face empty. “’S’up, ’Trane. What you doin’?” She straightened and tossed a