Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (16 page)

Regent closed his eyes momentarily, biting down hard on the inside of his cheek. It had been six weeks, and though the hamlet boy had not yet returned, the two men had done little else than work on the problem of this holy book. Regent had taken to brewing his poppy tea and cooking up his fen (his latest indulgence) here in the library between parses of the text.

“We’ll have to compare results. Is it possible to alphabetise them?”

Fenton grinned. “But of course.” He snatched Regent’s list, lined it up with his own, and clattered about on his typewriter for no more than ten minutes before pulling out a long, unbroken sheet of onionskin paper from the glossy machine. Regent was not entirely sure as to how he felt about this disturbing efficiency.

The two pored over the lists for several hours, aligning values and matching up vowel harmony and consonant mutation patterns. The sheet was soon marred with a mass of inky scrawlings and scratchings-out, and Regent found he was holding his breath as a glimmer of understanding danced tantalisingly before him before leaping away again.

Fenton, of course, beat him to it.

“They’re opposites, in every way. Our results. Mine contradict yours —” he jabbed at Regent’s seventh word, and scored at his own seventh last with a ragged fingernail “— but worse, mine contradict my own —” he slid his finger up to his own seventh word. “There is no harmony here. We’ve produced a ridiculous cacophony of random sounds, pathetic musings. If one takes a step away, looks less closely than we have been, one can see that these results are indeed related, but in such a way that they dance uselessly around some central notion that it is impossible to grasp. We cannot reach consensus, not even in ourselves, because there is no consensus to be found.”

Regent found that he was clutching one corner of the page so tightly that greasy fingertip-shaped pools of sweat were soaking through it. The bookshelves, heavy and musty with books swollen from years of student borrowing and water damage, seemed to be edging ever closer, and each breath he took seemed too shallow to be satisfying.

“I’ll return the book to the boy,” he said, his voice calm, but as brittle as a tenuous drawing of a bow across strings. He picked it up, gingerly, as though it were soft and helpless in his grasp—although he knew it was anything but. His taxonomy remained, dog-eared and smeared, on the desk at which he had been working. As Regent went to leave, Fenton caught at his shirt-cuff, pinching it sharply between fiendishly malnourished fingers. He said nothing, but his eyes were feverish, haunted, his thoughts clearly, finally, mirroring Regent’s.

Regent heard the sound of the paraffin lamps fading as he left, and he found himself wondering if there would be any library at all the next time he returned.

•

Regent’s fountain pen-scarred work desk was the kind that boasts myriad flamboyantly decorated drawers and crannies—many too small to be of any use whatsoever beyond holding a single eraser or pen nib. However, it did contain several large enough to hold some of the enormous cardboard folders in which he maintained photographii of each item the inherent name of which he had determined, and that name itself, carefully embossed in a sharp-edged font in the lower left hand of each photographia. His notes and calculations he kept in separate files again, and it was these he consulted now. He rifled through thousands of equations, deductions, and solutions, confirming that his methods had indeed been true to the rest of his work.

There were over sixteen thousand items categorised and named — an enormous amount even for a considerably established onomastician such as himself. Sixteen thousand items that he had painstakingly solved for and given a name, given a place in this world. Yet this book, this terrible tome, with its foul language that obfuscated and mocked, this book had no such thing. In its leather-bound simplicity, this book was the most threatening, terrifying thing across which he had yet come.

As Regent wrote out a telegram to the Mils department of religious affairs, he could take solace only in the fact that without a name, the book simply could not, did not, exist.

•

Mark Teppo

A haven for raconteurs and fabulists, the Alibi Room was a velvet-lined sanctuary where suggestion and persuasion were the watchwords and truth was such a devalued coin that it couldn’t purchase a condom from the dispenser in the men’s room. Once through the unassuming door and the voluminous coat check where racks of costumes, disguises, and false uniforms waited, the patrons redrafted their pasts and invented possible futures. The promise of altered company meant that everyone — the regulars slouched on the narrow stools at the mahogany bar, the graceful and discrete staff, the liars grouped around lacquered tables or sprawled on plush couches — everyone could pretend the world beyond the rust-colored brick and the old growth timber was the fantasy. The only reality that mattered was the invented one wrapped in velvet drapery and limned with orange light.

The Alibi, with its womb darkness and ambient embrace, held Colby tight. Whispering gently to him with the forgotten white noise susurration of his mother’s bloodstream, the Alibi cared. The accounting analysis he did for Emphir Financial Services had merit. His study on corporate paper waste was important; his solution, an aggressive recycling program coupled with a carefully calculated ratio of premium bond paper for external communications to recycled pulp for daily consumption. The savings to the company would never be significant — barely two-thirds the salary of one accountant — but the paper reclamation would save several hundred acres every year. That won’t be ignored, the Alibi said to him. Someone would notice, someone would call down to the Fifth floor where the bean counters and money handlers worked their precarious magic. Someone would —

“Hey, Colby. Your turn.”

Colby roused himself. “What?”

Jack waved at the waitress, a slender girl with short pigtails and a Celtic tattoo curling around her wrist. “Pay Jennie and tell us a story.”

Slowly extricating himself from the Alibi’s grip, Colby fumbled for his wallet. Thumbing through his cash like he was trying to separate blades of glass, he tried to think of a good lie. This was the way their game worked: buy a round, tell a story — the others would be a receptive audience, alternately fueling the liar’s tale or expressing mock outrage, false as everything else at the Alibi. Colby tried to compose something as he fumbled a twenty out of his wallet, but all that he could think of was dead trees.

Jennie smiled at him, an ivory gleam in the midnight of the room, and took his drunkenly offered bill. She spun around, her pigtails whipping against her lean neck, and smartly marched off to the infinitely distant bar.

He stared at his wallet, his thumb and forefinger rubbing the corner of a second twenty dollar bill. He couldn’t think of a decent story — other than the one whispering in his ear.
Your report will be a catalyst
. The voice was a lover’s mistral, a persuasive wind that cajoled and seduced, telling him what his yearning heart wanted to hear. Like an organic infection that spreads to each tree — transferred through root and branch — the impact of the document would spread throughout the entire system.
One branch, one nut, one sprout: eventually the whole forest is changed
.

Deeper in his body, somewhere in the region of his gall bladder and the poison collecting in his liver, a different story was taking hold. No one cares.
There was no short-term shareholder value in long-term ecological stewardship.

•

On the tourist maps, the rounded hillock at the center of Windward Park was labeled “Gloriana’s Uprising.” The name was an abandoned epitaph for a matriarch no one remembered, a truncated geological marker christened by a scientist who knew stone and rock but not history. Glory — as the name was abbreviated by the locals — was a rounded mound: verdantly carpeted with wildflowers in the spring, a naked dome with splintered bones of ragged stone poking through in the winter. Stone lion heads — half-buried, their mouths choked with long liana dotted with red flowers — ringed the base of the dome.

In the previous spring, something broke beneath the uprising. Prosaically, it was a ruptured pipe, one of the heavy conduits that ran water from the recirculation plants along the coast near Sweetlow to the downtown corridor and Ludtown to the south beyond the industrial flats of Harbor Island. But, at the Alibi Room, “prosaic” is unsustainable.

Ancient wells, capped centuries ago when the land was barren of hand-tooled stone and shaped steel, had broken open in the wake of the latest seismic tremors that periodically rattled the silverware and dishes. Artesian waters, freed, sought a way out of their earthen prison. That spring, said the whispers at the Alibi, the lions began to drool.

By mid-summer, the heads were vomiting. And the waters, long preserved beneath the scarred and tormented surface, were so pure they caused the plant life at the center of the park to eruct.

The floral eruption spawned such a cloud of pollen and miasma of rotting fruit that strange creatures were drawn to the wild park, lured out of their hidden demesnes and secret valleys by the redolent paradise’s scent. By the time creeping honeysuckle began to grip the paint-flecked sign of the old Rialto Theater at the corner of Glacier and 17th, anecdotal sightings were part of the pub-speak at the Alibi. Cats the size of huskies and as black as a starless night. Flying monkeys that clustered like ravens on the broken fire escape railings. Rabbits and gophers that walked upright. Hypnotic serpents, exothermic lizards, slick-skinned nereids, birds that molted gold leaf: the stories grew more fanciful with each passing week, just as the green crept further and further into the houses and streets ringing the traditional boundary of the park.

Winter froze the spread of the trees and vines, arresting their invasion of the brick and stone. The moon floated low over Glory during the cold months, its icy gaze layering rime and ice on the rounded hump. Pathways to the heart of the park became blocked and redirected, hiding the frozen paradise so that it became a sanctuary for the fantastic creatures that had been drawn to the city.

When the unicorn’s side was pricked, it fled back to the hidden heart of Glory. Bloody spatter, stark and black against the frosted ground, was the precious trail that led the hunters through the icy maze of Windward Park.

•

David knelt and touched the red smear on the whitened ground. His face knotted with disbelief and uncertainty, he showed his stained glove to the others. “It’s blood,” he said.

Jack grunted as he reset his crossbow. “I told you I winged it.” He fished another metal bolt out of the nylon pouch on his belt and slipped it into the groove of the stock.

“Winged what?” David asked. “There was nothing…” His voice faltered as he smeared the blood between two fingertips, feeling the sticky lubricant slide between his gloved fingers.

“It was standing right here,” Jack said, pointing at the ground. “Colby saw it too.”

Colby hunched his shoulders as David looked at him. “I saw something,” he muttered. “Looked like — ”

“A fucking unicorn,” Jack interrupted. “Come on. Say it. You saw it.” He mimed the presence of a protrusion from his forehead. “You saw the horn.”

“I don’t know what I saw, Jack,” Colby said. “I mean, you were shooting at it before I could really be sure what it was.”

“Oh, that’s such bullshit.” Jack scuffed the ground, throwing up a spray of ice slivers. He turned to the fourth man for support. “Did you see it, Hurley?”

Hurley, his gaze focused on the David’s stained gloves, swallowed heavily and shook his head. Colby noticed his hands were tight on the stock of his crossbow and his breathing was shallow and quick.

Jack shook his head. “I know what I saw. It was all white, and its mane was like glass. It was standing right here.”

Colby looked at his feet instead of meeting Jack’s fervent gaze. His eyes ached, and his tongue was thick and heavy. Words seemed like bricks, too unwieldy to shift with his fat tongue.

“You wanted this too, Colby.” Jack’s face had the feral gleam again, that focused rush of the adrenaline talking. He crouched beside David and swiped his fingers through the spray of blood. He smeared unicorn blood across his forehead and down his cheeks. “We could have come without you, but you’re the one that wanted something more than just a made-up story for the Alibi. You wanted something real.” He stalked away, following an irregular path of crimson dots that led deeper into the park.

David’s eyes followed Jack, and Colby saw him register the irregular spatter that Jack was following. “I didn’t see anything,” he said to Colby, his voice low enough that Jack couldn’t hear it. “Nothing but shadows.”

“Shadows don’t bleed,” Hurley said, stepping close to the other two as if engaging them in a conspiracy. “There was something there, wasn’t there Colby?”

Colby touched his throat, rubbed his gloved hand across the cold skin of his neck as if he was trying to massage out the stuck words.

“You did see something,” David said. “Just like Jack.”

Colby nodded, still reluctant to speak of what he had seen. The unicorn had been nearly invisible against the backdrop of frosted tree trunks. But once Colby had been able to distinguish the difference between unicorn horn and tree branch, once he realized the distinction between ice-bleached bark and sleek hide, he had been able to see the creature without any difficulty.

Jack’s crossbow bolt had caught it high on the right hip. Colby had watched it rear, moonlight twisting its pearlescent horn, and he had almost closed his eyes. As if such a denial would undo what he had witnessed.

•

Hurley arrived in time to pay for the next round of drinks. He gave a credit card to Jennie and then stared at the rocking motion of her backside as she walked away. “Man, it’s like clockwork,” he said, making a “tick-tock” noise with his mouth. “I never get tired of watching that.”

Jack and David laughed, an eager audience response to the “Laugh Now!” marquee powered by Hurley’s ego and wit. A gregarious salesman, he was well on his way to becoming a florid man; his ready smile and loosely hinged jaw spread his features toward his ears. His hands were large enough to stretch around the gravid circumference of his stomach, and his reach was like the open wingspan of a heron.

“You will not believe the day I’ve had,” Hurley started. When Colby, the designee to be vocally incredulous by virtue of being on Hurley’s right, said nothing, he spread his hands wide like he was reaching to hug the entire table. “It was pretty incredible.”

Jack dismissed Colby’s vacant stare. “Some report he turned in. Got him in a funk. Ignore him. Tell us.”

Hurley’s grin stretched as wide as his hands. “Okay, so there’s this Executive Assistant who works for the Vice-President of Sales. I hear she’s, like, nearly fifty or something. You’d never believe it. Toned, tight — must spend four hours a day at the gym. Just an amazing piece of ass.

“Anyway, we’re in the elevator today — coming back from some meeting on Four — just her and I, and she catches me sneaking a peek at her tits. Know what she says? She says — ”

“’Take me back to your office and fuck me’?” Colby surfaced from his reverie, revenant rising from an ancient tomb, drawn back to the table by Hurley’s story.

Hurley’s smile faltered, real-time erosion stripping away the edge of a cliff. “Hey, Colby, come on.”

“You always tell the same story.” Colby looked at the others, inspecting their faces for a sign that they, too, were aware of the persistent core of Hurley’s tales. “Aren’t you tired of it?”

“It’s not the same,” Hurley countered.

“Oh, what was last week’s?” Colby asked. “An intern in the copy center who wanted to get copies of your dick. Was that it? And the week before — something about a car wash?”

“Come on, Colby, we’re at the Alibi.” David put a hand on his arm. “Does it matter?”

Colby shoved his hand away, drunkenly missing his wrist and having to use his whole arm to push the other man away. “Yeah, maybe. Maybe if we’re going to lie to each other — to ourselves — we ought to be a little better at it.”

“Who pissed in his drink?” Hurley groused.

“No, damnit. I’m serious. Aren’t we getting too old for this? How long are we going to keep coming here and telling the same banal lies?”

“I thought that was the point.” Jack raised an eyebrow.

“What are we hiding from?” Colby countered.

Jack reached for his drink. “Well Colby, since you’re the one pissing in the stories, why don’t you tell us. What are we —
what are you
— hiding from?”

The room lurched beneath Colby as if Jack’s words were punctuated by a quake — tremors rumbling through the manmade bluff of the city’s edge, threatening to calve off the Alibi Room and throw it down into the bay. A muscle in Colby’s cheek twitched as if he had just been stung by a wasp. Does it matter?

Does any of it matter?
An existential black hole lurked in wait for him. The velvet womb of the Alibi tried to hide him from this pit, tried to keep him from spilling into the limitlessness of…

“Nothing,” he muttered.

“Then quit spoiling it for everyone else.”

•

“So, are you a virgin?” Hurley asked Colby as they walked along the path beneath the frozen branches.

“Excuse me?” Colby said.

Hurley stopped and put his hand on Colby’s arm to slow him down. “The unicorn can only be snared by those who are innocent of sin. You know the story: virginal maids sitting out under trees, waiting for the unicorn to come lay its head on their laps. Maybe that’s why they were bait; they could see the animal.” He shrugged. “Ergo: since you can see it, does that mean you’re a virgin?”

Colby looked at the ice-fused branches of the poplars and birch overhead. As a child, he had chased squirrels in the park, laughingly pursuing them into the thickets of trees until they darted up the knotted trunks. It had been a long time, but he remembered always seeing the sky: blue through the partially interlocked puzzles of the leaves. Now, winter linked the trees in the awkward embraces of estranged cousins at familial funerals. It was like being inside a cathedral, a sacred place where confessions were heard and one’s holy worth was considered.
Are you a virgin? Are you worthy of God’s embrace?