Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

words out between clenched teeth.

The priest turns the key, and hidden tumblers and pins respond accordingly.

“Dora, you go scare up an orderly,” Charlie McNamara says. “Hell, scare up two, just in case.”

The cell door opens, and as Jeremiah Ogilvy steps across the threshold the woman inside keeps her black eyes fixed upon him, but she makes no move to attempt an escape. She stays crouched on the floor in the southeast corner and makes no move whatsoever. Immediately, the door bangs shut again, and the priest relocks it.

“Just so there’s no doubt on the matter,” Charlie McNamara shouts from the hallway, “you’re a goddamn fool,” and now the woman in the cell smiles. Jeremiah Ogilvy stands very still for a moment, taking in all the details of her and her cramped quarters. There is a mattress and a chamber pot, but no other manner of furnishings or facilities. If he held his arms out to either side, they would touch the walls. If he took only one step backward, or only half a step, he’d collide with the locked door.

“Good morning,” he says, and the woman blinks her eyes. They remind Jeremiah of twin pools of crude oil, spewed fresh from the well and poured into her face. There appear to be no irises, no sclera, no pupils, unless these eyes are composed entirely of pupil. She blinks, and the orbs shimmer slick in the dim light of the hospital cell.

“Good morning,” he says to her again, though more quietly than before and with markedly less enthusiasm. “Is it true, that you do not speak? Are you a mute, then? Are you deaf as well as dumb?”

She blinks again, and then the woman from Shaft Seven cocks her head to one side, as though carefully considering his question. Her hair is very long and straight, reaching almost down to the floor. It seems greasy and is so very black it might well have been spun from the sky of a moonless night. And yet her skin is far darker, so much so that her hair almost glows in comparison. There’s no word in any human language for a blackness so complete, so inviolate, and he thinks, What can you be? Eyes spun from a midnight with neither moon nor stars nor gas jets nor even the paltry flicker of tallow candles, and your skin carved from ebony planks. And then Jeremiah chides himself for entertaining such silly, florid notions, for falling prey to such unscientific fancies, and he takes another step toward the woman huddled on the floor.

“So it is true,” he says softly. “You are, indeed, without a voice.”

And at that, her smile grows wider, her lips parting to reveal teeth like finely polished pegs shaped from chromite ore, and she laughs. If her laugh differs in any significant way from that of any other woman, the difference is not immediately apparent to Jeremiah Ogilvy.

“I am with voice,” she says then. “For any who wish to hear me, I am with voice.”

Jeremiah is silent, and he glances over his left shoulder at the door. Charlie McNamara is staring in at him through the bars.

“I am with voice,” she says a third time.

Jeremiah turns back to the naked woman. “But you did not see fit to speak with the doctors, nor the sisters, nor to the men who transported you here from the mines?”

“They did not wish to hear, not truly. I am with voice, yet I will not squander it, not on ears that do not yearn to listen. We are quite entirely unalike in this respect, you and I.”

“And, I think, in many others,” he tells her, and the woman’s smile grows wider still. “Those two men who died, tell me, madam, did they yearn to listen?”

“Are you the one who has been chosen to serve as my judge?” she asks, rather than providing him with an answer.

“Certainly not,” Jeremiah replies, and he clears his throat. He has begun to detect a peculiar odor in the cell. Not the noisomeness he would have expected from such a room as this, but another sort of smell. Kerosene, he thinks, and then, ice, though he’s never noticed that ice has an odor, and if it does, it hardly seems it would much resemble that of kerosene. “I was asked to … see you.”

“And you have,” the woman says. “You have seen me. You have heard me. But do you know why, Professor?”

“Quite honestly, no. I have to confess, that’s one of several points that presently have me stumped. So, I shall ask, do you know why?”

The woman’s smile fades a bit, though not enough that he can’t still see those chromite teeth or the ink- black gums that hold them. She closes her eyes, and Jeremiah discovers that he’s relieved that they are no longer watching him, that he is no longer gazing into them.

“You are here, before me, because you revere time,” she says. “You stand in awe before it but do not insult it with worship. You revere time, though that reverence has cost you dearly, prying away from your heart much that you regret having lost. You understand time, Professor, when so few of your race do. The man and woman who brought you here, they sense this in you, and they are frightened and would seek an answer to alleviate their fears.”

“Can they hear you?” he asks, and the woman crouched on the floor shakes her head.

“Not yet,” she says. “That may change, of course. All things change, with time.” And then she opens her eyes again, and, if anything, they seem oilier than before, and they coruscate and swim with restless rainbow hues.

“You killed those two miners?”

The woman sits up straighter and licks her black lips with a blacker tongue. Jeremiah tries not to let his eyes linger on her small, firm breasts, those nipples like onyx shards. “This matters to you, their deaths?” she asks him, and he finds that he’s at a loss for an honest answer, an answer that he would have either Charlie or Dora or the priest overhear.

“I was only sleeping,” the woman says.

“You caused their deaths by sleeping?”

“No, Professor. I don’t think so. They caused their deaths by waking me.” And she stands, then, though it appears more as though he is seeing her unfold. The kerosene and ice smell grows suddenly stronger, and she flares her small nostrils and stares down at her hands. From her expression, equal parts curiosity and bemusement, Jeremiah wonders if she has ever noticed them before.

“They gave you this shape?” he asks her. “The two miners you killed?”

She lets her arms fall to her sides and smiles again.

“A terror of the formless,” she says. “Of that which cannot be discerned. An inherent need to draw order from chaos. Even you harbor this weakness, despite your reverence for time. You divide indivisible time into hours and minutes and seconds. You dissect time and fashion all these ages of the Earth and give them names, that you will not dread the abyss, which is the true face of time. You are not so unlike them.” She motions toward the door. “They erect their cities, because the unbounded wilderness offends them. They set the night on fire, that they might forever blind themselves to the stars and to the relentless sea of the void, in which those stars dance and spin, are born and wink out.”

And now Jeremiah Ogilvy realizes that the woman has closed the space separating them, though he cannot recall her having taken even the first step toward him. She has raised a hand to his right cheek, and her gentle fingers are as smooth and sharp as obsidian. He does not pull away, though it burns, her touch. He does not pull away, though he has now begun to glimpse what manner of thing lies coiled behind those oily, shimmering eyes.

“Ten million years from now,” she says, “there will be no more remaining of the sprawling clockwork cities of men, nor of their tireless enterprise, nor all their marvelous works, no more than a few feet of stone shot through with lumps of steel and glass and concrete. But you know that, Professor Ogilvy, even though you chafe at the knowledge. And this is another reason they have brought you here to me. You see ahead as well as behind.”

“I do not fear you,” he whispers.

“No,” she says. “You don’t. Because you don’t fear time, and there is little else remaining now of me.”

It is not so very different than his dream of the cast-iron plesiosaur and the burning dirigible, the shadows pressing in now from all sides. They flow from the bituminous pores of her body and wrap him in silken folds and bear away the weight of the illusion of the present. The extinct beasts and birds and slithering leviathans of bygone