Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

eras and eras yet to come peer out at him, and he hears the first wave breaking upon the first shore. And he hears the last. And Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy doesn’t look away from the woman.

“They have not yet guessed,” she says, “the true reason they’ve brought you here. Perhaps they will not, until it is done. Likely they will never comprehend.”

“I know you,” he says. “I have always known you.”

“Yes,” she says, and the shadows have grown so thick and rank now that he can barely breathe, and he feels her seeping into him.

Lungs plumb full up with coal dust. Lungs and throat and mouth all stuffed damn near to busting.

You ever seen a red scorpion, Jeremiah?

“Release me,” she says, her voice become a hurricane squall blowing across warm Liassic seas, and the fiery cacophony of meteorites slamming into an azoic Earth still raw and molten, and, too, the calving of immense glaciers only a scant few millennia before this day. “There are none others here who may,” she says. “It is the greatest agony, being bound in this instant and in this form.”

And, without beginning to fathom the how of it, the unknowable mechanics of his actions, he does as she’s bidden him to do. The woman from the bottom of Shaft Seven comes apart, and suddenly the air in the cell is filled with a mad whirl of coal dust. Behind him, the priest’s brass key is rattling loudly inside the padlock, and there are voices shouting—merely human voices—and then Dora is calling his name and dragging him backward, into now, and out into the stark light of the hospital corridor.

7

The summer wears on, June becoming July, and by slow degrees Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy’s strength returns to him and his eyes grow clear again. His sleep is increasingly less troubled by dreams of the pitch-colored woman who was no woman, and the fevers are increasingly infrequent. As all men do, even those who revere time, he begins to forget, and in forgetting, his mind and body can heal. A young anatomist from Lawrence was retained as an assistant curator to deliver his lectures and to oversee the staff and the day-to-day affairs of the museum. As Charlie McNamara predicted, the Chicago offices of the Rocky Mountain Reconsolidated Fuel Company permanently closed Shaft Seven, and, what’s more, pumped more than twenty thousand cubic yards of Portland cement into the abandoned mine.

In the evenings, when her duties at the shop are finished, Dora Bolshaw comes to his bedroom. She sits with him there in that modest chamber above the Hall of Cenozoic Life and the mezzanine housing the celebrated automatic mastodon. She keeps him company, and they talk, when her cough is not so bad; she reads to him, and they discuss everything from the teleological aspects of the theories of Alfred Russel Wallace to which alloys and displacement lubricators make for the most durable steam engines. Now and then, they discuss other, less-cerebral matters, and there have been apologies from both sides for that snowy night in January. Sometimes their discussions stray into the wee hours, and sometimes Dora falls asleep in his arms and is late for work the next day. The subject of matrimony has not come up again, but Jeremiah Ogilvy has trouble recalling why it ever seemed an issue of such consequence.

“What did she say to you?” Dora finally asks him one night so very late in July that it’s almost August. “The woman from the mine, I mean.”

“So, you couldn’t hear her,” he says.

“We heard you—me and Charlie and the priest—and that’s all we heard.”

He tells her what he remembers, which isn’t much. And afterward, she asks for what seems the hundredth time if he knows what the woman was. And he tells her no, that he really has no idea whatsoever.

“Something lost and unfathomable that came before,” he says. “Something old and weariful that only wanted to lie down and go back to sleep.”

“She killed those men.”

Sitting up in his bed, two feather pillows supporting him, Jeremiah watches her for almost a full minute (by the clock on the mantle) before he replies. And then he glances toward the window and the orange glow of the city sky beyond the pane of glass.

“I recollect, Dora, a tornado hitting a little town in Iowa, back in July, I think.” And she says yeah, she remembers that, too, and that the town in question was Pomeroy. “Lots of people were killed,” he continues. “Or, rather, an awful lot of people died during the storm. Now, tell me, do we hold the cyclone culpable for all those deaths? Or do we accept that the citizens of Pomeroy were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

Dora doesn’t answer but only sighs and twists a lock of her hair. Her face is less sooty than usual, and her nails less grimy, her hands almost clean, and Jeremiah considers the possibility that she’s discovered the efficacy of soap and water.

“Would you like to sit at the window awhile?” she asks him, and he tells her that yes, he would. So Dora helps Jeremiah into his wheelchair, but then lets him steer it around the foot of the bed and over to the window. She follows a step or two behind, and when he asks, she opens the window to let in the warm night breeze. He leans forward, resting his elbows against the sill while she massages a knot from his shoulders. It is not so late that there aren’t still people on the street, men in their top hats and bowlers, women in their bustles and bonnets. The evening resounds with the clop of horses’ hooves and the commotion made by the trundling, smoking, wood-burning contraption that sprays Kipling Street with water every other night to help keep the dust in check. Looking east, across the rooftops, he catches sight of a dirigible rising into the smog.

“We are of a moment,” he says, speaking hardly above a whisper, and Dora Bolshaw doesn’t ask him to repeat himself.

King Pole, Gallows Pole, Bottle Tree BY ELIZABETH BEAR

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, and very nearly named after Peregrin Took. She is a recipient of the John W. Campbell, Locus, and Hugo awards, as well as a nominee for multiple British Science Fiction Association and Philip K. Dick awards. She currently lives in southern New England with a famous cat. Her hobbies include murdering inoffensive potted plants, ruining dinner, and falling off rock faces.

Her most recent books are a space opera, Chill, from Bantam Spectra, and a fantasy, The Sea Thy Mistress, from Tor.

* * *

The ghosts from the dam come in summer. The official count is ninety-six, but “industrial fatalities” does not include the men who died of carbon monoxide poisoning—they were told it was “pneumonia”—or rock dust in their lungs. I’ve met the dead, and there’s more than ninety-six. Several hundred, enough to fill a big school cafeteria. If you could get them to muster out, you could count.

One came for me on Sunday, as I sat by a black-painted wrought-iron café table—which is not such a great idea in August when the in-the-shade temperature is 118—protected from the worst of the sun by an umbrella and a chinaberry tree. A pint of pear cider rested by my hand; a nibbled ploughman’s lunch spread across a plate I’d pushed to the other side of the table. The Stilton was real, but the cheddar might as well have been Velveeta. Just like Vegas. Just like me, the genius loci of Las Vegas. It’s all this facade of the exotic over solid Topeka.

I had finished with the Sunday Review-Journal/Sun, and was using it as an underpinning for my heaps of poker chips. The top story was about Martin Powers, the grandson of the owner of the Babylon Casino, who was up on racketeering charges.

Viva Las Vegas.

I was interested in the poker chips.