Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

so I’m told.”

Dora stops talking and returns the ammonite shell to its box. Then she glances at Jeremiah and takes another sip of her tea.

“And you know it’s not a hoax?” he asks her. “I mean, you know it’s not tomfoolery, just some of the miners taking these things down with them from the surface, then claiming to have found them in the rocks? Maybe having a few laughs at the expense of their supervisors?”

“Now, that was my first thought.”

“But then you saw something that changed your mind,” Jeremiah says. “And that’s why you’re here tonight.”

Dora Bolshaw takes a deep breath, and Jeremiah thinks she’s about to start coughing again. Instead, she nods and exhales slowly. He notices beads of sweat standing out on her upper lip and wonders if she’s running a fever.

“I’m here tonight, Professor Ogilvy, because two men are dead. But, yeah, since you asked, I’ve seen sufficient evidence to convince me this ain’t just some jackass thinks he’s funny. When I voiced my doubts, Charlie McNamara split one of those nodules open right there in front of me. Concretion big around as my fist,” and she holds up her left hand for emphasis. “He took up a hammer and gave it a smart tap on one side so it cleaved in two, pretty as you please. And out crawled a fat red scorpion. You ever seen a red scorpion, Jeremiah?”

And Professor Ogilvy thinks a moment, sipping his tea that’s come all the way from Taipei City, Taiwan. “I’ve seen plenty of reddish brown scorpions,” he says. “For example, Diplocentrus lindo, from the Chihuahuan Desert and parts of Texas. The carapace is, in fact, a dark reddish brown.”

“I didn’t say reddish brown. What I said was red. Red as berries on a holly bush, or a ripe apple. Red as blood, if you want to go get morbid about it.”

“Charlie cracked open a rock from Shaft Number Seven, and a bright red scorpion crawled out. That’s what you’re telling me?”

“I am.” Dora nods. “Bastard had a stinger on him big around as my thumb, and then some.” And now she holds out her thumb.

“And two men at the mines have died because of these scorpions?” Jeremiah Ogilvy asks.

“No. Weren’t scorpions killed them,” she says, and laughs nervously. “But it was something come out those rocks.” And then she frowns down at her teacup and asks the professor if he’s absolutely sure that he doesn’t have anything stronger. And this time, he opens a bottom desk drawer and digs out the pint bottle of rye he keeps there, and he offers it to her. Dora Bolshaw pulls out the cork and pours a generous shot into her teacup, but then she’s coughing again, worse than before, and he watches her and waits for it to pass.

3

What she told him is not without precedent. Over the years, Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy has encountered any number of seemingly inexplicable reports of living inclusions discovered in stones and often inside lumps of coal. Living fossils, after a fashion. He has never once given them credence, but rather looked upon these anecdotes as fine examples of the general gullibility of men, not unlike the taxidermied “jackalopes” he’s seen in shop windows, or tales of ghostly hauntings, or of angels, or the antics of spiritual mediums. They are all quite amusing, these phantasma, until someone insists that they’re true.

For starters, he could point to an 1818 lecture by Dr. Edward Daniel Clarke, the first professor of mineralogy at Cambridge University. Clarke claimed to have been collecting Cretaceous sea urchins when he happened across three newts entombed in the chalk. To his amazement, the amphibians showed signs of life, and though two quickly expired after being exposed to air, the third was so lively that it escaped when he placed it in a nearby pond to aid in its rejuvenation. Or, a case from the summer of 1851, when well diggers in Blois, France, were supposed to have discovered a live toad inside a piece of flint. Indeed, batrachians figure more prominently in these accounts than any other creature, and the professor might also have brought to Dora Bolshaw’s attention yet another toad, said to have been freed from a lump of iron ore the very next year, this time somewhere in the East Midlands of England.

The list goes on and on, reaching back centuries. On May 8, 1733, the Swedish architect Johan Gråberg supposedly witnessed the release of a frog from a block of sandstone. So horrified was Gråberg at the sight that he is said to have beaten the beast to death with a shovel. An account of the incident was summarily published by Gråberg in the Transactions of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, a report which was eventually translated into Dutch, Latin, German, and French.

Too, there is the account from 1575 by the surgeon Ambroise Paré, who claimed a live toad was found inside a stone in his vineyards in Meudon. In 1686, Professor Robert Plot, the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, claimed knowledge of three cases of the “toad-in-the-hole” phenomenon from Britain alone. Hoaxes, perhaps, or only the gullible yarns of a prescientific age, when even learned men were somewhat more disposed to believing the unbelievable.

But Jeremiah Ogilvy mentioned none of these tales. Instead, he sat and sipped his tea and listened while she talked, never once interrupting to give voice to his mounting incredulity. However, her cough forced Dora Bolshaw to stop several times, and, despite the rye whiskey, toward the end of her story she was hoarse and had grown alarmingly pale; her hands were shaking so badly that she had trouble holding her cup steady. And then, when she was done and he was trying to organize his thoughts, she glanced anxiously at the clock and said that she should be going. So he walked her downstairs, past the celebrated automatic mastodon and petrified titanothere skulls and his prized plesiosaur skeleton. Standing on the walkway outside the museum, the night air seemed sweet after the Pepper Pot, despite the soot from the furnaces and the reek from the open ditches lining either side of Kipling Street. He offered to see her home, because the thoroughfares of Cherry Creek have an unsavory reputation after dark, but she laughed at him, and he didn’t offer a second time. He watched until she was out of sight, then went back to his office.

And now it’s almost midnight, and Jeremiah Ogilvy’s teacups sit empty and forgotten while he thinks about toads and stones and considers finishing off the pint of rye. After she told him of the most recent and bizarre and, indeed, entirely impossible discovery from Shaft Seven, the thing that was now being blamed for the deaths of two miners, he agreed to look at it.

“Not it. Her,” Dora said, folding and unfolding her handkerchief. “She came out of the rocks, Jeremiah. Just like that damned red scorpion, she came out of the rocks.”

4

“Then I am dreaming,” he says, relieved, and she smiles, not unkindly. He’s holding her hand, this woman who is by turns Dora Bolshaw and a wispy, nervous girl named Katharine Herschel, whom he courted briefly before leaving New Haven and the comforts of Connecticut for the clamorous frontier metropolis of Cherry Creek. They stand together on some windswept aerie of steel and concrete, looking down upon the night-shrouded city. And Jeremiah holds up an index finger and traces the delicate network of avenues illumined by gas streetlamps. And there, at his fingertip, are the massive hangers and the mooring masts of the Arapahoe Terminal. A dirigible is approaching from the south, parting the omnipresent pall of clouds, and the ship begins a slow, stately turn to starboard. To his eyes, it seems more like some majestic organism than any human fabrication. A heretofore unclassified order of volant Cnidaria, perhaps, titan jellyfish that have forsaken the brine and the “vasty deep” and adapted to a life in the clouds. Watching the dirigible, he imagines translucent, stinging tentacles half a mile long, hanging down from its gondola to snare unwary flocks of birds. The underside of the dirigible blushes yellow-orange as the lacquered cotton of its outer skin catches and reflects the molten light