Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

kettle on to boil. He has a fresh tin of Formosa oolong and decides that this evening he’ll take his tea up on the roof.

Most nights, there’s a fine view from the gallery roof, and he can watch the majestic airships docking at the Arapahoe Station dirigible terminal or just shut his eyes and take in the commingled din of human voices and buckboards, the heavy clop of horses’ hooves and the comforting pandemonium made by the locomotives passing through the city along the Colorado and Northern Kansas Railway.

He hangs the tea egg over the rim of his favorite mug and is preparing to pour the hot water, when the office doorknob rattles and neglected hinges creak like inconvenienced rodents. Jeremiah looks up, not so much alarmed as taken by surprise, and is greeted by the familiar—but certainly unexpected—face and pale blue eyes of Dora Bolshaw. She holds up her key, tied securely on a frayed length of calico ribbon, to remind him that he never took it back and to remove any question as to how she gained entry to the locked museum after hours. Dora Bolshaw is an engine mechanic for the Rocky Mountain Reconsolidated Fuel Company, and because of this and her habit of dressing always in men’s clothes, and the fact that her hands and face are only rarely anything approaching clean, she is widely and mistakenly believed to be an inveterate sapphist. Dora is, of course, shunned by more proper women—such as, for instance, Mrs. Charles W. Larimer—who blanche at the thought of dames et lesbiennes walking free and unfettered in their midst. Dora has often mused that, despite her obvious preference for men, she is surely the most renowned bull dyke west of the Mississippi.

“Slipping in like a common sneak thief,” Jeremiah sighs, reaching for a second cup. “I trust you recollect the combination to the strongbox, along with the whereabouts of that one loose floorboard.”

“I most assuredly do,” she replies. “Like they were the finest details of the back of my hand. Like it was only yesterday you went and divulged those confidences.”

“Very good, Miss Bolshaw. Then, I trust this means we can forgo the messy gunplay and knives and whatnot?”

She steps into the office and pulls the door shut behind her, returning the key to a pocket of her waistcoat. “If that’s your fancy, professor. If it’s only a peaceable sort of evening you’re after.”

Filling his mug from the steaming kettle, submerging the mesh ball of the tea egg and the finely ground leaves, Jeremiah shrugs and nods at a chair near his desk.

“Do you still take two lumps?” he asks her.

“Provided you got nothing stronger,” she says, and only hesitates a moment before crossing the room to the chair.

“No,” Jeremiah tells her. “Nothing stronger. If I recall, we had an agreement, you and I?”

“You want your key back?”

Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy pours hot water into a teacup, adds a second tea egg, and very nearly asks if she imagines that his feelings have changed since the last time they spoke. It’s been almost six months since the snowy January night when he asked her to marry him. Dora laughed, thinking it only a poor joke at first. But when pressed, she admitted she was not the least bit interested in marriage and, what’s more, confessed she was even less amenable to giving up her work at the mines to bear and raise children. When she suggested that he board up his museum, instead, and for a family take in one or two of the starving guttersnipes who haunt Colliers’ Row, there was an argument. Before it was done, he said spiteful things, cruel jibes aimed at all the tender spots she’d revealed to him over the years of their courtship. And he knew, even as he spoke the words, that there would be no taking them back. The betrayal of Dora’s trust came too easily, the turning of her confidences against her, and she is not a particularly forgiving woman. So, tonight, he only almost asks, then thinks better of the question and holds his tongue.

“It’s your key,” he says. “Keep it. You may have need of it again one day.”

“Fine,” Dora replies, letting the chair rock back on two legs. “It’s your funeral, Jeremiah.”

“Can I ask why you’re here? That is, to what do I owe this unheralded pleasure?”

“You may,” she says, staring now at a fossil ammonite lying in a cradle of excelsior on his desk. “It’s bound to come out, sooner or later. But if you’re thinking maybe I come looking for old times or a quick poke—”

“I wasn’t,” he lies, interrupting her.

“Well, good. Because I ain’t.”

“Which begs the question. And it’s been a rather tedious day, Miss Bolshaw, so if we can dispense with any further niceties…”

Dora coughs and leans forward, the front legs of her chair bumping loudly against the floor. Jeremiah keeps his eyes on the two cups of tea, each one turned as dark now as a sluggish, tannin-stained bayou.

“I’m guessing that you still haven’t seen anyone about that cough,” he says. “And that it hasn’t improved.”

Dora coughs again before answering him, then wipes at her mouth with an oil-stained handkerchief. “Good to see time hasn’t dulled your mental faculties,” she mutters hoarsely, breathlessly, then clears her throat and wipes her mouth again.

“It doesn’t sound good, Dora, that’s all. You spend too much time in the tunnels. Plenty enough people die from anthracosis without ever having lifted a pickax or loaded a mine car, as I’m sure you’re well aware.”

“I also didn’t come here to discuss my health,” she tells him, stuffing the handkerchief back into a trouser pocket. “It’s the stink of this place, gets me wheezing, that’s all. I swear, Jeremiah, the air in this dump, it’s like trying to breathe inside a goddamn burr grinder that’s been used to mill capsicum and black powder.”

“No argument there,” he says, and takes the tea eggs from the cups and sets them aside on a dish towel. “But I still don’t know why you’re here.”

“Been some odd goings-on down in Shaft Number Seven, ever since they started back in working on the Molly Gray vein.”

“I thought Shaft Seven flooded in October,” Jeremiah says, and he adds two sugar cubes to Dora’s cup. The professor has never taken his tea sweetened, nor with lemon, cream, or whiskey, for that matter. When he drinks tea, it’s the tea he wants to taste.

“They pumped it out a while back, got the operation up and running again. Anyway, one of the foremen knew we were acquainted and asked if I’d mind. Paying you a call, I mean.”

“Do you?” he asks, carrying the cups to the desk.

“Do I what?”

“Do you mind, Miss Bolshaw?”

She glares at him a moment, then takes her cup and lets her eyes wander back to the ammonite on the desk.

“So, these odd goings-on. Can you be more specific?”

“I can, if you’ll give me a chance. You ever heard of anyone finding living creatures sealed up inside solid rock, two thousand feet below ground?”

He watches her a moment, to be sure this isn’t a jest.

“You’re saying this has happened, in Shaft Seven?”

She sips at her tea, then sets the cup on the edge of the desk and picks up the ammonite. The fossilized mother-of-pearl glints iridescent shades of blue-green and scarlet and gold in the dim gaslight of the office.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. And I seen most of them for myself, so I know it’s not just miners spinning tall tales.”

“Most of them? So it’s happened more than once?”

Dora ignores the questions, turning the ammonite over and over in her hands.

“I admit,” she says, “I was more than a little skeptical at first. There’s a shale bed just below the Molly Gray seam, and it’s chock-full of siderite nodules. Lots of them have fossils inside. Matter of fact, I think I brought a couple of boxes over to you last summer, before the shaft started taking water.”

“You did. There were some especially nice seed ferns in them, as I recall.”

“Right. Well, anyhow, a few days back I started hearing these wild stories, that someone had cracked open a nodule and found a live frog trapped inside. And then a spider. And then worms, and so on. When I asked around about it, I was directed to the geologist’s shack, and sure as hell, there were all these things lined up in jars, things that come out of the nodules. Mostly, they were dead. Most of them died right after they came out of the rocks, or