Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (20 page)

Wherever they were going, they would arrive there in style.

•

"Alex and the Toyceivers" is the opening chapter in a novel which continues, pulls together and completes a cycle of stories which tell of the struggle between the Firmament Surgeons and the Autoscopes, warring supernatural beings who want to maintain and perfect Creation on the one hand and destroy it through entropy and despair on the other. The stories "Black Static," "Don’t Touch the Blackouts," "Dying in the Arms of Jean Harlow," and "Islington Crocodiles" contain the characters and developments which lead into this story of Alex and his first confrontation with the Autoscopes’ malign beasts, the
Toyceivers.

•

Vylar Kaftan

It’s a jungle in the office here, with all the administrators in heat. They’re mating with the photocopiers and producing children born for office work. Dull, duplicate grayfaces attached to each other — they know the horrors of office work, but they were bred to it. Their fathers raised them suckling on espresso in plastic-nippled bottles. Softly the photocopiers whisper a legend: Espresso Nipples are a popular drink at the strip club. You pay a stripper twenty bucks and she shoots espresso from her nipples into your mouth.

This is how Jared starts his day, in a taxi’s back seat. He takes a stripper to work and drinks from her nipples each day. She fake-moans at his touch, but he’s thinking of the photocopier he’ll fuck later. There’s been a territorial fight lately with the photocopiers at stake. The Director wants to fuck Jared’s favorite photocopier, but Jared won’t let him. Jared’s risking his job. But his photocopier is special. She’s the mother of his first hundred duplicates, and only one of them is smudged. She’s good for breeding and he likes that about her.

Today’s stripper in the taxi is the color of espresso. Ivy grows from her head — a genetic alteration, or perhaps her mother was an office plant. Green vines flow over the seats, lengthening as he watches. She stares up at him from his lap, her nipples exposed to his thirst. She’d make a nice photocopier, Jared thinks, but she’s merely a stripper. He calculates the formulas needed to become CEO. He must have X years of experience, Y degrees of beauty in his wife, and Z number of kids. XYZ = CEO. Jared’s XYZ increases every time he touches his photocopier.

The stripper covers herself with her hair. Jared flicks the ivy away with a finger. “Hey. I want more espresso.”

“You’re cut off. I’m tired.”

“I’m paying.”

“Whatever.”

Jared pauses. The taxi lurches sideways. She’s watching him — a Lady Godiva in leaves. He’ll call her Godivy. Underneath the leaves is espresso, and Jared wants more. “I’ll pay triple the usual.”

“Don’t need the money.”

“You’re a stripper.”

“I’m a mermaid.” She stretches on the vomit-scented taxi seat. Jared looks at her legs. Two feet poke out from the leaves like an unearthed corpse. She has no toenails — only ten green scales. Godivy says, “I know, you’re wondering where my tail is. Well, I don’t have one.”

“All mermaids have tails,” says Jared. “Otherwise they’d just be women.”

“Not black mermaids. Betcha didn’t know we existed.”

“I’ve never seen one.”

“Blame the artists. No one painted us in the nineteenth century because they said we weren’t even people. Not that mermaids were people anyway — just mouths, with tits. A sailor’s dream. To take without giving.”

Jared shrugs, thinking of his photocopier. She’s gray and boxy, and her children resemble her more than himself. He wonders how he’ll stave off the Director’s advances. It’ll be a careful black-and-white chess game. There’s no room for an ivy-haired stripper. But Godivy watches him with ocean-blue eyes. He asks, “Why aren’t you in the water?”

“I’ve got a mission.”

“Which is?”

“Nothing you’ve paid for.”

Jared loses interest. She’s just a stripper, but his enemy is a Director. His XYZ is at stake. The taxi docks outside the building, and he pays with a handswipe over a panel.

“You’re dismissed,” he tells Godivy, extending his hand. He expects her to shake it and complete the transaction.

“Don’t you want more espresso?” she asks. She lifts just enough ivy to reveal one perfect nipple.

Jared is captivated. “I thought you said I was cut off,” he says, thirsting.

“Take me upstairs. I’ll give you something.”

“No. I can’t take you inside.”

She smiles. “You were interested in taking me anywhere you could have me. Something’s changed. Are you ashamed? Worried about what I’ll want in return? Or just afraid I smell like fish?”

He scowls. “Get out of here.”

Godivy gathers her hair and lifts it out of the taxi. She steps into her green heels and walks away without a word. Jared watches her smooth brown hips as she disappears around the corner. No fish can walk like that. She’s a liar, like the thieving Director.

He banishes her from his mind and concentrates on the game at hand. He must checkmate the Director today and save his photocopier. He’s a rook sweeping through the front door, a bishop angling up the stairs. Jared the king steps into his throne office. The paneled walls prove his XYZ to the identical office cubes. The grayfaces bow at his arrival, and drift away on their business.

His photocopier stands in its corner. He strokes its open lid with the back of his hand. The photocopier whirs and beeps red, three times. “I’ll protect you,” he says softly. He unzips his pants. The photocopier spits out page after page: a plant, a plant, a plant. Jared looks at his photocopier’s smooth face. Someone has left a ceramic pot on the glass. Inside is a tiny plant.

Jared suspects a plot by the Director. He throws the pot out the window and hears it shatter three stories below. Ivy bursts from the shards. Green vines explode towards Jared and tangle through the window. He tries to run, but the ivy wraps his wrists. A leafy ocean sweeps him to the floor.

Someone laughs. Jared turns his head. The Director stands there, tall and skinny and brown. Jared has never noticed his green hair before. The Director is motionless, his twig fingers extended toward Jared’s photocopier. Godivy stands behind the Director.

“Who — what — are you?” asks Jared. The vines resist his struggles and tighten their grip.

Godivy steps forward. “I told you. I’m a mermaid on a mission. And this — ” She gestures towards the Director. “This is a plant that I left here.”

“Don’t take my photocopier,” Jared cries.

“Too late. She’s not yours anymore.” Godivy places two fingers in her mouth and whistles. It sounds like the ocean in a shell. The photocopier quivers and stretches itself. A long green tail grows from its paper tray. The tail reaches four feet long, then splits to form fins. Jared’s office smells like the beach.

Godivy leaps out the window, and the photocopier swims through the air after her. Jared strains against his bonds. He hears splashing from the other offices. More photocopiers swim through the air, their tails flashing green as they escape out the window. They dive down the ivy waterfall and vanish. Jared’s bonds melt into seaweed sludge. He lies on his office floor, next to the rubber tree he knew as the Director, his face gray and empty. The nearby cubes are silent. The photocopiers swim towards the open sea, their buttons flickering green in the sunlight.

•

Michael Jasper

In spite of the tinny sound of the alarm blaring in her cramped room for the past ten minutes, Claudia kept on working, thinking: just one more dab of color here, one more brush stroke there, just a bit more shadow in the background. She needed a little bit more, of everything: time, colors, inspiration.

Maybe one of these nights she’d give up a shift and just paint all night and sleep the next day until noon, and eat a huge breakfast just up the road at Big Ed’s. Pancakes, grits, country ham, and all the coffee she could pour down her throat. But she knew that would never happen. Money. She needed the money, and so did her family back home.

“
Malpwòpte
,” she muttered, glaring at her cheap alarm clock and then at her painting. With a sigh that turned into a laugh, she realized she wasn’t sure which one she was labeling a piece of shit. Probably both, she figured, turning off the alarm clock with a bit more force than was necessary.

On her canvas, something was finally taking shape there in the dark-hued lines of her oil-based cityscape after almost three hours of painting and scraping and repainting the yellow streetlights, shadowy alleyways, and chain-link fences overrun with weeds. She’d been close to giving up on this one, and she couldn’t afford to waste paint. Not with rent due on Friday for her room here, in a house ten blocks from the Capitol Building.

Repeating the Creole curse word, savoring each spitting syllable, Claudia pulled off her old flannel shirt and scrubbed her paint-spattered hands with it. Dark red, deep blue, and black paint smeared onto her brown skin.

As she stared at the swirling tattoo of tacky oils on the back of her right hand, she felt her eyes unfocus. The shape reminded her of something she’d seen late the other night at work. Something glimpsed from the corner of her eye as her speeding taxi zipped down a one-way street downtown. A blurred figure wearing a black hat and a dark blue jacket, disappearing down a red-bricked alley. Moving fast, chasing someone down or running away from someone, she couldn’t tell.

With one last glance at her current painting — “broken” was the word that came to mind when she looked at it — she pulled on a faded NC State sweatshirt, dropped her short-handled baseball bat into the pocket of her winter coat, and locked the door to her rented room.

The hallway creaked as she hurried down it, betraying her to the whims of Ferdie, her next-door neighbor. Ferdie was from the Balkans and was a writer, which meant he looked for any excuse to leave his room and socialize.

“Claudette!” he called. “Going to the work?”

A real master of the obvious, Claudia thought, though the guy never got my name right.

“I’m
late
for work,” she said, trying to detour around him, but Ferdie slide-stepped to his right to block her. He knew his rugby moves.

“But you must listen to this story,” he said, pulling a crumpled page of
The Raleigh News & Observer
from his brown bathrobe he wore over his dress shirt and black jeans.

“Really late, Ferdie.” Claudia considered ways around the thick-armed Serbian, but reconsidered. When Ferdie was into a story, it was best to let him run his course. Her boss at the taxi company had an understanding about tardiness, but Claudia didn’t want to stretch that feeling of goodwill too thin.

“Only take a minute. I find this buried on the back of the Metro section, just two paragraphs. Listen: ‘Raleigh police are investigating a series of petty crimes taking place in the Oakwood neighborhood of downtown Raleigh. Drug paraphernalia was found in an abandoned home along with material for arson. In addition, three cars have been vandalized, and an undisclosed number of homeless people have apparently been the victims of assaults.’”

Claudia forgot about being late and listened to Ferdie’s booming voice. He smelled like sausage and typewriters.

“And you notice,” Ferdie said as he paced up and down the hall in frustration, “you notice that the talk about our people comes
last
, after they talk of the property being vandalized. As if houses and cars are more important than humans!”

Ferdie was shouting, and Claudia was now twelve minutes late for work. She rested a hand on the big man’s shoulder. He stopped pacing and took a deep breath.

“Letter to the editor?” she said, eyebrows raised.

“Yes!” Ferdie grabbed her and kissed her cheek, scratching her skin with his whiskers. “You are genius, my friend. Always knowing the right thing to do. I know just the tone to use…” Ferdie continued muttering even after he’d rushed back to his small wooden desk and fed a new page of paper into his ancient typewriter.

Jogging down the steps and out into in the snowy, late-February darkness, Claudia kept her right hand tight on the handle to her bat and tried not to think about Ferdie’s story. Driving a taxi was hard enough, being a woman as well as an immigrant. She didn’t need the added worry of becoming a victim of violence. She wouldn’t be another statistic; that was why she’d left Port-au-Prince over a decade ago.

The Raleigh Taxi Company was tucked away in an alley off of Blount Street, next to a five-story parking deck and a closed Irish pub. The sign out front was covered in fresh snow, so Claudia gave the piece of metal a good pop on her way past, and most of the snow fell to the ground. She regretted it immediately — her hand stung and was covered in cold wetness dropping from the sign.

She was about to wipe her bare hand on her coat and pulled up short when she saw that the smudge of paint had returned to the back of her hand. Claudia had thought the paint had all flaked off. Now the smudge was mostly black and brown, like a healing bruise, almost hidden against her dark chocolate skin.

Looking at the smudge, Claudia thought of her grandmama again, and wondered what the old lady from the Haitian capital would make of this. Surely she’d think it was some sort of sign. Claudia simply shrugged and walked inside the relative warmth of the dispatch office, fifteen minutes late.

Lenny Akinebosoom, a Nigerian man with skin so black it shone, was waiting for her inside. With his wireless headset strapped to his bald head, he spoke rapid-fire into the mouthpiece. Lenny gave her surly look, pointed at the clock, and handed her a fare box and a list of customers, all while talking into his headset, reassuring the fare that their ride would be there in less than a minute.

Claudia’s first fare was due at the Raleigh-Durham International airport at 7:00 p.m., a twenty-minute drive from downtown, probably closer to thirty if one of the city’s few snowplows hadn’t cleared the interstate.

“Better hope the plane’s runnin’ late ‘cause of the snow ‘n’ all,” Lenny said, his hand on the mouthpiece of his headset. “Claudia,” he added, his voice softening, “be safe tonight. People been actin’
crazy
in this area.”

Claudia gave him a nod and began pulling out air fresheners for the taxi she was inheriting from big Jake, who always left her with a cab reeking of body odor.

After ten minutes, with two more rides now backed up behind Claudia’s pickup at the airport, Lenny gave up trying to hail Jake on the radio. Cursing in his native language, he dug out a blue plastic key fob in the shape of a number one and tossed Claudia the key to Bessie.

Yes
, Claudia thought. My luck’s changing tonight.

She loved driving Bessie. She always thought of Bessie as a yellow tank topped off with a dusty yellow Duty sign. She skipped across the stained concrete of the garage into the last stall where Bessie sat, collecting dust and cobwebs. As always, the twenty-year-old Crown Vic started on the first try, and with a roar forward, Bessie turned the dispatch office into a blurred shadow in her rearview.

Zipping past the few cars on the road, dodging the occasional parked car on either side of the narrow street, Claudia pointed Bessie in the direction of the airport. Snow was falling again, dotting the wide expanse of the cracked windshield. With the cold wind and dropping temperatures, not even the crazy drivers were out testing themselves on the unfamiliar snow and black ice. Heat had finally started to sputter from the vents when Claudia saw the red lights a block away on her right.

Just keep going, she thought at first. But Claudia knew this neighborhood, just half a mile from the interstate. She had friends living in the row houses here, had dropped off riders here almost every shift, people too poor to afford car payments. Something about the way the red lights of the cop car ahead of her played with the shadows made her think of the blurred shadow she’d seen off of Bloodworth the other night, a figure that had worked its way into her dreams every night since.

She turned right and touched the brake with a glance at the stubborn smudge of paint on the back of her hand. Something flickered in that mix of red and blue and mostly black paint, catching the lights of the Wake County police car parked in front of the yellow Raleigh Taxi resting on its side.

“Jake,” she whispered, killing Bessie’s engine. She stepped outside and lost her breath immediately in the wind.

The cop stood hunched over the taxi, looking through the spider-webbed windshield with his flashlight. The cop’s radio screeched something, mixing with the howl of the wind. She could smell the sickly stink of something harsh, like burning oil. Underneath it was a familiar whiff of body odor.

And then she heard Jake’s voice, screaming.

“Get him out — ” she started to yell at the cop, her anger taking her back over a dozen years, to Port-au-Prince, shouting at the rebels and then hiding from them, and then later yelling at the U.S. Marines with their guns and their agendas.

Claudia never finished her sentence. The cop straightened up in one fluid movement from next to the overturned taxi. Claudia’s gaze went from the cop to the fat white hand pressed against the inside of the ruined windshield.

“Move ‘long,” the cop said. “Nothin’ to see here, miss.”

She had to force her gaze away from that hand to look at the cop. He was easily six and a half feet tall, and his black face flickered in the red lights of his sedan. Something about the man’s face was familiar, a tiny detail she couldn’t make out in the darkness. She stumbled back to Bessie, numb with cold.

What made her punch the gas pedal hard was the sound of the cop’s voice. It had carried easily over the wind, touching her ears like a freshly remembered nightmare.

He’d had a Creole accent.

•

The soldiers arrived just a week shy of Claudia’s twentieth birthday, heavily armed, but the neighborhood leaders had a plan to keep everyone safe. At first she balked at the ludicrousness of the concept, but once she saw the death-black guns cradled in the arms of the Haitian men and then the Marines, Claudia had been more than happy to spread the rumor that there was a mad witch in their building. She told anyone who listened, including the men with guns, that the witch sat on a stockpile of magic powders in her apartment, and she was burning tiny effigies of American soldiers in her bathtub.

The myth was ridiculous, of course, just as silly as her grandmama’s fervent belief in voodoo, yet the horror stories helped keep away the Haitian men on their way to Aristides’ stronghold, as well as the U.S. Marines following them.

But one of the Marines wasn’t buying the story.

His skin was deep black, much darker than Claudia’s, and he wore a helmet and body armor like the other soldiers. His helmet looked like a child’s play toy on his big head, and his flat belly was left exposed under his too-short vest. He walked straight up to her as if he’d smelled her deception instantly.

In spite of the series of tiny earthquakes going on inside her chest, Claudia did her best to ignore him and turned back to the occult design she was chalking on the sidewalk.

“Cross shouldn’ have such a long base. An’ your pentagram’s all outta pr’portion.”

She looked up from the doggerel she was chalking on the sidewalk, symbols grandmama had recommended to her (though Claudia knew she was mangling them in her shaking hands). She felt a curse on her lips, fighting the urge to swing a fist at the man. But the soldier had already moved on. She never forgot that deep voice with its Haitian accent and its tone of knowing disdain.

After the soldiers left, she’d continued scratching more symbols onto the asphalt and concrete, her head swimming with anger at the soldier’s contempt and shame at her own inability to draw the magic symbols properly.

Claudia vowed not to tell her grandmama about any of this.

•

After a couple hours of sleep under three layers of her heaviest blankets, Claudia was back out in the wintry cold, on her way to the shelter with her brushes and paints in her backpack. Her sleep-fuzzed mind kept going over the events of that night, from seeing the cop and the wrecked taxi to when Lenny finally reached her to tell her about Jake’s accident.

“The guy was always drivin’ too fast. He hit some black ice and flipped,” Lenny said in a careful monotone. “Cops said he died immediately.” He sighed. “Careful, Claudia. Be careful out there. You can come in if you want.”

Claudia’s tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth as she forced out the word “No,” feeling like she was sliding on ice herself, even though Bessie was stopped at a red light.

The cops, she thought as she crunched through the snow. Accent. What did they know? What do the men with guns ever know?

Half a dozen of her students were waiting for her in the small second-floor workspace above the homeless shelter on Fayetteville Street Mall. Claudia unloaded her paints and chatted about the snow with Briana and Derron. Teaching here kept her in paint and canvas; Marlene, the program director, looked the other way when Claudia occasionally took home extra materials for her own painting.

Within a minute of her arrival, her students had turned to their canvases, dabbing at them uncertainly as if afraid to waste the tiniest bit of paint. Claudia was just about to give a talk about perspective when Marlene popped into the room, the small white woman’s face pinched with concern. She beckoned Claudia outside.