Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

spilling up from all the various ironworks and the copper and silver foundries scattered throughout Cherry Creek. The bones of the world exhumed and smelted to drive the tireless progress of man. He’s filled with pride, gazing out across the city and knowing the small part he has played in birthing this civilization from a desolate wilderness fit for little more than prairie dogs, rattlesnakes, and heathen savages.

“Maybe the world don’t exactly see it that way,” Dora says. “I been thinking lately, maybe she don’t see it that way at all.”

Jeremiah isn’t surprised when tendrils of blue lightning flick down from the coal-smoke sky, and crackling electric streams trickle across rooftops and down the rainspouts of the high buildings.

“Maybe,” Dora continues, “the world has different plans. Maybe she’s had them all along. Maybe, professor, we’ve finally gone and dug too deep in these old mountains.”

But Jeremiah makes a derisive, scoffing noise and shakes his head. And then he recites scripture while the sky rains ultramarine and the shingles and cobblestones sizzle. “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’”

“I don’t recall it saying nothing about whatever creepeth under the earth,” Dora mutters, though now she looks a little more like Katharine Herschel, her blue eyes turning brown, and her trousers traded for a petticoat. “Besides, you’re starting to sound like that idiotic Larimer woman. Didn’t you hear a single, solitary word I said to you?”

Jeremiah raises his hand still higher, as though with only a little more effort he might reach the lightning or the shiny belly of the approaching dirigible or even the face of the Creator, peering down at them through the smoldering haze.

“Is it not fair wondrous?” he asks Dora. But it’s Katharine who answers him, and she only trades him one question for another, repeating Dora’s words.

“Didn’t you hear a single, solitary word I said?”

And they are no longer standing high atop the aerie, but have been grounded again, grounded now. He’s seated with Dora and Charlie McNamara in the cluttered nook that passes for Dora’s office, which is hardly more than a closet, situated at one end of the Rocky Mountain Reconsolidated Fuel Company’s primary machine shop. The room is littered with a rummage of dismembered engines—every tabletop and much of the floor concealed beneath cast-off gears, gauges, sprockets, and flywheels, rusted-out boilers and condensers, warped piston rods and dials with bent needles and cracked faces. There’s a profusion of blueprints and schematics, some tacked to the wall and others rolled up tight and stacked one atop the other like Egyptian papyri or scrolls from the lost Library of Alexandria. Everywhere are empty and half-empty oil cans, and there are any number of tools for which Jeremiah doesn’t know the names.

“Time being, operations have been suspended,” Charlie McNamara says, and then he goes back to using the blade of his pocketknife to dig at the grime beneath his fingernails. “Well, at least that’s the company line. Between you, me, and Miss Bolshaw here, I think Chicago’s having a good long think about sealing off the shaft permanently.”

“Permanently,” Jeremiah whispers, sorry that he can no longer see the skyline or the docking dirigible. “I would imagine that’s going to mean quite a hefty loss, after all the money and work and time required to get the shaft dry and producing again.”

“Be that as it damn may be,” Dora says brusquely, “there’s more at stake here than coal and pit quotas and quarterly profits.”

“Yes, well,” Jeremiah says, staring at the scuffed toes of his boots now. “Then let’s get to it, yes? If I can manage to keep my blasted claustrophobia in check, I’m quite sure we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

No one laughs at the pun, because it isn’t funny, and Jeremiah rubs his aching eyes and wishes again that he were still perched high on the aerie, the night wind roaring in his ears.

“Ain’t she told you?” the company geologist asks, glancing over at Dora. “What I need you to look at, it ain’t in the hole no more. What you need to see, well…” And here he trails off. “It’s locked up in a cell at St. Joseph’s.”

“Locked up?” Jeremiah asks, and the geologist nods.

“Jail would have done her better,” Dora mutters. “You put sick folks in the hospital. Killers you put in jails, or you put a bullet in the skull and be done with it.”

Charlie McNamara tells Dora to please shut the hell up and try not to make things worse than they already are.

Jeremiah shifts uneasily in his chair. “How did the men die? I mean, how exactly?”

“Lungs plumb full up with coal dust,” Charlie says. “Lungs and throat and mouth all stuffed damn near to busting. Doctor, he even found the shit clogging up their stomachs and intestines.”

“Some of the men,” Dora adds, “they say they’ve heard singing down there. Said it was beautiful, the most beautiful music they’ve ever heard.”

“Jesus in a steam wagon, Dora. Ain’t you got an off switch or something? Singing ain’t never killed no one yet, and it sure as hell wasn’t what got that poor pair of bastards.”

And even as the geologist is speaking, the scene shifts again, another unprefaced revolution in this dreaming kaleidoscope reality, and now the halls and exhibits of the Ogilvy Gallery of Natural Antiquities are spread out around him. On Jeremiah’s right, the celebrated automatic mastodon rolls glass eyes, and its gigantic tusks are garnished with a dripping, muculent snarl of vegetation. On his left, the serpentine neck of the Gove County plesiosaur rises gracefully as any swan’s, though he sees that all the fossil bones and the plaster of Paris have been transmutated through some alchemy into cast iron. The metal is marred by a very slight patina of rust, and it occurs to him that, considering the beast’s ferrous metamorphosis, he should remind his staff that they’d best keep the monstrous reptile from swimming or wandering about the rainy streets.

“I cried the day you went away,” Katharine says, because, for the moment, it is Katharine with him again, not Dora. “I wrote a letter, but never sent it. I keep it in a dresser drawer.”

“There was too much work to do,” he tells her, still admiring the skeleton. “And much too little of it could be done from New Haven.”

Behind the plesiosaur, the brick and mortar of the gallery walls have dissolved utterly away, revealing the trunks of mighty scale trees and innumerable scouring rushes tall as California redwoods. Here is a dark Carboniferous forest, the likes of which has not taken root since the Mary Gray vein at the bottom of Shaft Seven was only slime and rotting detritus. And below these alien boughs, a menagerie of primeval beings has gathered to peer out across the aeons. So, it is not merely a hole knocked in his wall, but a hole bored through the very fabric of time.

“She came out of the rocks, Jeremiah,” Katharine says, even though the voice is plainly Dora Bolshaw’s. “Just like that damned red scorpion, she came out of the rocks.”

“You’re beginning to put me in mind of a Greek chorus,” he replies, keeping his eyes on the scene unfolding behind the plesiosaur. Great hulking forms have begun to shift impatiently in the shadows there, the armored hide of a dozen species of Dinosauria and the tangled manes of giant ground sloths and Irish elk, the leathery wings of a whole flock of pterodactyls spreading wide.

“Maybe they worshipped her, before there ever were men,” Dora says, but then she’s coughing again, the dry, hacking cough of someone suffering from advanced anthracosis. Katharine has to finish the thought for her. “Maybe they built temples to her, and whispered prayers in the guttural tongues of animals, and maybe they made offerings, after a fashion.”

Overhead, there’s a cacophonous, rolling sound that Jeremiah Ogilvy first mistakes for thunder. But then he realizes that it’s merely the hungry blue lightning at last locating the flammable guncotton epidermis of the airship.

“Some of the men,” Katharine whispers, “they say they’ve heard singing down there. Singing like church hymns, they said. Said it was beautiful, the most beautiful music they’ve ever heard. We come so late to this procession, and yet we presume to know so much.”

From behind the iron plesiosaur, that anachronistic menagerie gathers itself like a breathing wave of sinew and bone and fur, cresting, racing toward the shingle.

Jeremiah Ogilvy turns away, no longer wanting to see.