A City Dreaming (3 page)

“Arggghhhhhhh!” the sentinel shouted back at them.

“Argggggghhhh!” Sodomy and Rum added.

Having nothing to add to the conversation, M kept silent.

They floated beneath the bridge and then into some sort of subterranean chamber, which distantly resembled a sewer, the real city merging with the strange, piratical existence that Lash and the rest of his crew had collectively willed into being. They tied up at the quay a hundred or so yards into the cavern, sharing space with two-man rowboats and jury-rigged catamarans and Arabian dhows, as improbable and anachronistic a fleet as had ever been gathered in one place. The waiting mob of pirates offered M a distinctly unpleasant greeting, punctuated by the occasional buffet or elbow, as well as a running speculation as to the sanctity of his anus and how long he might be expected to maintain it.

If M felt nervous, you would have been hard-pressed to tell. They moved him past surplus East German army tents with barrels of grog sticking out of them, and piles of what looked like costume jewelry scattered about the
ground; past drunken wenches and severely inebriated catamites; past three monkeys and a one-eyed parrot reciting what M thought was a passage from Rimbaud. They came finally to a chair made of bone, atop which sat a man the size of several men, drinking from a goblet also made of bone. His beard was black as night, and slow-burning fuses had been set inside the braids. His eyes were brutal. His nose was hooked. He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, unarmed.

“Captain Grimdark welcomes you to the abode of the Pirates of Brown Water,” he said, leaning forward on the point of his cutlass. “Seems we're getting awful popular with you bright-siders.”

M found himself distracted by the tawny roots in the captain's beard—brunet leading into ebony—but he shook himself out of it. “Thanks,” he said. “Yeah, it's quite a place you've got down here. It's . . . real subtle.”

The captain rose up from his chair with a grace notable in such a big man, flung his arms wide, and went into easy oration: “For year upon year, we've lived beneath you, growing strong in the dark, learning the secrets of the city's waterways. From the coasts of Staten Island to Montauk, women weep when they see our colors above the mast, and mothers quiet their children by mentioning Grimdark's name! Our swords are sharp, our cannons primed, our . . .”

M's phone beeped, and he fished it surreptitiously from his pocket while the captain was involved in his melodrama, thinking it might be from Boy. But it wasn't.

“—meaner than Black Bart, prettier than Anne Bonny, Frencher than Francois l'Olonnais—”

“—taken more plunder in one day than Kidd did in his whole career—”

M's looked up to discover the tip of Captain Grimdark's cutlass a few inches from his throat. “We boring you, boy?”

“Sorry, sorry,” M said. “It's this girl I went home with last night. Tonight. Whatever. She thinks I stole her earrings.”

Apparently this bit of theoretical villainy was small potatoes for the captain. “What did you come here for? Answer fast or feel the tickle of my blade!”

“Oh.” M put his phone away. “Nothing, as it turns out. I was checking on a friend, but she'll be fine. This is a great setup, though. Looks just like a LEGO play set I once bought a girlfriend's nephew. Maybe you could just take me back to where you picked me up? Or, actually, is there a 3 train around here?”

“If ye think,” the captain began, swelling up like a snake bite, “you can stroll into the nest of the Pirates of Brown Water and stroll right out again, then you're madder than a drink-crazed Scotsman!” There was much affirmative hooting and hollering from the assembled crowd. “Mayhap there's someone up above who'd pay to have you ransomed? Or should we just make you a cabin boy? You can fetch me grog when you aren't taking your time in the barrel!” More laughter followed, as well as the firing of muskets.

“So no 3 train?” M said, taking a seat on one of the nearby crates. “Fair enough. She probably won't be very long.”

Rum scratched at his neck fat. The embers on the captain's beard burned down a tick. Water lapped against the beach. The one-eyed parrot began the first line of “Man From Nantucket,” but there was a thud and a squawk and it went quiet.

“What do you mean,” the captain asked finally, giving voice to the mob's nerves, “she probably won't be very long?”

“At some point Boy's going to work whatever party drug she's on out of her system, and then she's gonna wake up with a hangover and a keen instinct for mass murder. You ever see someone pick their teeth with a spinal cord? It's . . .”
M struggled to find the words, then gave up. “I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise.”

“Pig's guts!” the captain remarked after an awkward silence. The crowd mimicked his merry disregard. “You'll need more than a bluff and a prayer if you hope to win free of the Pirates of Brown Water!”

“I don't pray that much,” M admitted. “Honestly, when I got her text, I figured you guys were some sort of interspatial privateers, freebooters floating through space-time, not a bunch of extras from a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Boy will be cleaning viscera from beneath her fingernails before dawn, and I'll be wondering how to explain to my cleaner why there's brain on my sweater. Again.” M shook his head back and forth unhappily. “I knew I should have ignored that text.”

He got another one then.

“Who is your friend, exactly?” Lash asked.

Actually Lash had asked several times, but M had been busy with his phone and also wanted to build some anticipation. “Are you telling me you kidnapped the most dangerous human being within six or seven realities, and you don't even have any idea who she is? Boy the Infernal? Astarte's nemesis? The Doom of Atlantis? I suppose I can't entirely blame you. People who meet her have an unfortunate habit of not living all that long afterward. Actually . . .” M checked the time on his phone. Below his wrist was a tattoo of a choirboy kneeling. “You guys made it about what, three hours? That's not bad. You're beating par.”

“We caught her stumbling near a porthole,” said a scruffy man with an E-Street Band headscarf. “She said rude things about my parentage!”

“That sounds like Boy, all right. Sharp tongue, but you can get away with it if you've
got ichor in your veins, instead of blood. Can any of you claim divine heritage? No? Likely go quick then. Say, you didn't leave anyone to guard her, did you?”

The captain looked at Lash. “Just Tibault and Callahan.”

“Well, I hope no one liked Tibault or Callahan that much.” M's phone rang, and he answered it casually. “Hello? Yeah. Yeah? Great. The nightstand? Yeah. All right then, be well.” He put the phone back in his pocket. “Girls, man. What can you do?”

But the rest of the assemblage seemed not to suppose M's romantic difficulties the foremost issue at the moment.

“If your friend's so terrible,” the captain asked, “then how did we snatch her so easy?”

“I dunno. Maybe she was in a K-hole. Probably she didn't think there was anyone stupid enough to make trouble with her. You know, actually,” M said, again standing, “now that I think about it, she might decide to do all of you indiscriminately, with fire or acid or some sort of giant worm monster, and all things considered I'd rather not be around for that. When she gets death on her mind . . .” M sucked his teeth. “Not pretty. But you guys will be fine. Sure, I once saw her make a Great Old One weep, but you have, like, antiquated firearms and whatnot.”

“A Great Old One?”

“All those tentacled eyes bawling—let's just say there are some things humanity was never meant to see.”

“This whole thing was an accident!” the captain protested. “We meant no offense!”

“That's really how you're going to play it? You accidentally snatched her up and shoved her into a dungeon?” M shrugged. “Good luck. I ought to warn you, Boy's not really the forgiving sort.”

“There must be something we can do!”

“Suicide? Though she might decide to track you down in hell, so I can't guarantee it would do any good. Look, guys, this has been great and everything, but the longer I'm here, the more likely it is something gets done to me like what's inevitably going to get done to you, and I'd really rather not have that.” He waved at the crowd, and they parted obediently, like the waters
before Moses or preschoolers before a gym teacher. “I'm sure I can find my own way out. You'll probably be busy praying, or weeping quietly in corners.”

“Wait!” the captain said.

M stopped short. “Yeah?”

“Couldn't you talk to her?”

“Me?” M asked incredulously. “What could I do about it?”

“Explain the situation! No harm, no foul!”

“I don't know, guys. It's late, I'm tired. I'm already deeper into this whole thing than I had intended. Also, I took those cracks about my anal virginity a bit on the chin. I can't say I'm really in a favor-doing mood. But . . . maybe if you sweetened the pot?”

Captain Grimdark looked at Lash, who seemed to be his second-in-command. Lash looked at the rest of the mob. The mob looked generally elsewhere. Heavy is the head that wears the pirate hat.

Negotiations took some time because M didn't want to be paid in bales of silk or doubloons, the first being heavy and the second being difficult to exchange on the modern market. They settled on a small bag of loose diamonds, which to M's untrained eyes looked like about a year's rent. At the last moment, M, feeling that old instinct for trouble, demanded Grimdark's tricorne and watched angel-eyed as he took it, slowly and ignominiously, off his head.

“I'll do what I can, but if I were you, I'd make for the hills, or the nautical equivalent. When Boy gets hungover, she gets a little bit jittery.” M finished rolling a cigarette, then leaned over and lit it from one of the burning brands set into the captain's beard. “Your dye job is starting to run,” he added as a parting shot.

M followed the direction he had been given, down a long stone hallway indifferently lit by guttering torches, till he came to two men standing in front of a wooden door.

“Tibault,” M said. “Callahan. Good seeing the both of you.”

“Who the hell are you?” the taller one asked.

“I'm the new captain,” M said. “Can't you see the hat?”

“What happened to Grimdark?”

“We had a sword fight on a wooden plank suspended above a pool of
hammerhead sharks. It was super exciting. I'm sorry you missed it. The long and short is, I went Errol Flynn on his Basil Rathbone.”

“What?”

“Johnny Depp on his Geoffrey Rush.”

“Oh,” the shorter one said. “Shit.”

“Yeah, shit's right. Now open the door or I'll have to . . . wear your guts for suspenders. A fedora. Something old-fashioned sounding. It's very late,” he explained apologetically, though the guards didn't seem to mind, impressed with his hat and his general air of carelessness.

Inside the store room were rusted cannon and boarding pikes, empty bottles of Brooklyn Lager, crates of stockings, jars of parrot food, hard tack, salt pork, and a hundred and twenty pounds of punk rock devilry, long legs and no breasts and a pixie cut. M had not seen Boy for a long time, years and years, and she looked exactly the same—cruel and wild and nearly beautiful.

“The fuck took you so long? I texted like an hour ago.”

M put the pirate hat on her head. “You're welcome.”

“You sneak in here?”

“No, no, they were happy to let me take you off their hands once I explained to them the sort of person you are. I may have exaggerated one or two minor details.”

Boy looked at him a while. “Where you been?”

“I was out, it took me a little while to get down here.”

“I meant the past five years.”

“Ah.”

“You missed my birthday.”

“Five of them, apparently.”

“How long you been in town?”

“Not very long.”

“Didn't think to call me?”

“I figured you'd hear I was around. And I figured at some point you'd get in trouble and drop me a line. I didn't figure it would be this humiliating, though. How exactly did you manage to get captured by a Gilbert and Sullivan cast?”

“In a word: acid.”

“You have any left?”

“No.”

Which was just as well, as this was hardly the right time to drop acid. M would have done it anyway, of course, but still he had to admit this was objectively not the time.

“It's good to see you,” Boy said finally.

“It's good to see you too.”

Boy wobbled some as she stood up, but not badly, given that she was apparently on enough hallucinogens to get ejected from a Phish concert. “Come on,” she said. “I'll buy you breakfast.”