Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Kaufmann threw a flurry of jabs to distract the arachnid, and the old woman lifted the leather club as high as she could. The locomotive entered the station but didn’t slow.

In the reflection of rushing windows, Daddy detected treachery. He spun in a blur, his mandibles severing Mrs. Frey’s neck with a swift clip, like cutting a rose. From the hole in his trousers, he shot a blast of web at Kaufmann. It happened so quickly that the inspector could only stand motionless as the strand of sticky thread wrapped twice around his neck. The web’s long tail was pulled in by the rush of the passing train and affixed itself to the handle on the back door of the caboose. Kaufmann was jerked off the platform by the neck, and flew behind the train. The last thing he saw in Grindly was the mosaic face of God. Mrs. Frey’s head hit the platform then and spat.

The next evening, in an abandoned warehouse by the docks, Daddy stood in total darkness, emitting high- pitched squeals that called all the natural spiders of Grindly to him. When he felt their delicate heaving presence surrounding him, he clicked and blzz’d out his plan. He gave instructions on rethreading the human brain. He spoke of the ear and the path to take, warning of cul de sacs. “A quarter pound of fly meat for every human restrung,” he promised. Spirits were high. Later, when they returned to him for payment, he crushed them beneath his slipper.

By the time he got done with Grindly, the city shone and ran like one of Tharshmon’s pocket watches. Everything moved as if to music. It became for Daddy a web of human thread. “Purpose without a point,” he often reminded his human electorate, and they tacitly nodded. He continued to feed at night, roaming the rooftops and alleyways, leaving old luggage indiscriminately in his wake. People showed him smiles during the day, but, still, no one wanted to meet him in the dark. The reconfiguration of their brain patterns didn’t eliminate terror, only their ability to react to it. “Fear and Industry” was Daddy’s motto, and it took him far.

After the train was again making scheduled stops at the station, Daddy boarded with a ticket to the capital one evening. He never returned to Grindly, but instead bit into the larger politics of the Realm and kept eating in a spiral pattern until he reached the center of everything. There, he made a nest for himself.

The Skinny Girl BY LUCIUS SHEPARD

Lucius Shepard was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida, and lives in Portland, Oregon. His short fiction has won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the National Magazine Award, the Locus Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

His latest books are a short novel, The Taborin Scale, and a short fiction collection, Viator Plus. Forthcoming are another short fiction collection, Five Autobiographies; two novels, tentatively titled The Piercefields and The End of Life as We Know It; and a short novel, The House of Everything and Nothing.

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During the twenty-six years in which he had supplied images of the dead to the city’s daily newspapers, Hugo Lis had photographed over thirty thousand corpses, the victims of strangulation and shooting, knifings, car crashes, decapitations, accidental electrocutions, and other more idiosyncratic instances of mayhem. A considerable number of those pictures, despite the anonymity of the victims, had been run on the front page above the fold, often in conjunction with the photograph of a half-naked starlet or singer. When asked to explain this apparent opposition, Hugo would suggest that in a place where life has little or no meaning, death tends to acquire a certain glamour. Mexico City had seventy-five thousand streets and death was a celebrity on every one. Hugo had visited homes in which his photograph of a family member’s bloody remains, snipped from a newspaper, now served as the centerpiece of a shrine. It was as if the violated flesh and its public exploitation were deemed truer emblems of a loved one’s memory than the sunny smile of a confirmation photo or the purposeful, forward-looking pose of a graduation shot. Or it may have been that the implicit passion and drama of a violent death lent the departed a Christ-like pathos, thereby engaging the Catholic sensibilities of the populace. Hugo’s attitudes toward the subject, albeit no less formalized, were not in the least circumscribed by faith or emotion. Death, to Hugo Lis, was simply a way of life.

As dean of the photographers whose pictures illustrated the notas rojas (“red news”), Hugo was occasionally approached by foreign journalists interested in doing a story on his life and profession. His hair and mustache colored to hide the gray, dressed in a black suit tailored to disguise his paunch; wearing lifts that added two inches to his diminutive stature, he would pose for pictures. After negotiating a fee (necessary, he claimed, to guarantee their safety from the gangs), he would guide them to one or another of the innumerable shrines devoted to Santa Muerte (“Saint Death”) in Barrio Tepito where, behind glass or within a confine of plastic panels, a human skeleton (often a real one) dressed in robes or a lace gown stood holding a scythe and a globe representing the earth, surrounded by offerings of flowers and fruit and cigars left by thugs, kidnappers, drug dealers, murderers, and the disenfranchised, whose patron saint she was.

“Death has become so prominent a character in our lives, we’ve transformed her into a movie star,” he would typically say, leading his interviewer among the stalls that transformed many of Tepito’s streets into crowded pedestrian aisles, pointing out the various representations of Santa Muerte available among fraudulent Swiss watches and knockoffs of designer clothing—statuettes and paintings of robed skeletal figures juxtaposed with T- shirts that depicted her as an emaciated yet beautiful young girl. “You find her image everywhere,” he would go on. “Soon there will be films celebrating her starring Mayrin Villanueva or Ninel Conde. People en Español will proclaim her to be the Sexiest Woman of the Year.”

As befitted his profession, Hugo was a widower; his wife, Fabiola, a thin, sallow girl, died in her teens as the result of sudden illness, which had originally seemed merely a summer cold. He could no longer call her face to mind and had come to view the marriage as an adolescent mistake; yet he had been dismasted by grief upon her death or, better said, he had embraced grief with the same childlike fervor that he had love, wearing it as an actor would wear a costume, using it to simulate authenticity. But no matter how deep his investment in the emotion, grief had rendered him glib and cynical and purged him of his juvenile ambitions: He no longer cared about creating art and thought of photography strictly as a means to an end. Ironically, his work since had been praised for its “raw purity” and “bizarre sensuality” and now formed part of the permanent collections of several important museums. When asked how he managed to make the dead so attractive, so vital even though charred or covered in blood, he replied, “I seek to do nothing. I shoot pictures for the newspapers. I don’t try to frame shots, I don’t enhance negatives. What you see is what I see, nothing more.”

He had never remarried, and lived in a one-bedroom condo close to Avenida Vincente Suarez in the colonia of La Condesa, a trendy section of the city that echoed the intellectual pretensions of Greenwich Village and the architecture of South Beach, yet lacked the cultural traditions of the one and the garish splendor of the other. Though he welcomed the attentions of women (mainly intellectual types, attracted by the numena they claimed to perceive in his photographs), he refused to adapt his routines to their needs, and they would leave after a few weeks or months, accusing him of being aloof and passionless except as related to his job. This accusation surprised him, for he considered himself a passionate sort. As for his job … well, he would admit to being a bit obsessive—that was his nature—but it was scarcely a passion. These women, he reasoned, must have been pampered in their previous relationships and thus demanded too much of him.

When not at home, his life was spent driving from point to point in the Distrito Federal, obeying the prompts of a police scanner, on the move for days at a time, eating and napping in his car. Traveling from crime scene to crime scene through snarls of clamorous traffic; from black nights fruited with neon to days that, whether rainy or bright, gave evidence of a polluted haze; from the Zona Rosa, where child prostitutes flocked the streets, to the sprawl of Cuautepec, the epicenter of poverty, to the Zocalo, the great central square hemmed in by gray fortresslike government buildings and the equally forbidding cathedral, the site of demonstrations and concerts and, in winter, improbably, an outdoor ice skating rink. Experienced this way, the city, for all its chaos and violence, had a calming, almost a narcotizing effect upon him, as though it generated a violent beatitude … or else, like a fish born in a cataract, he had grown inured to the crash and tumble of its rhythms.