Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (22 page)

He muttered “you people” once more, like a curse, and moved away. The other soldiers followed him in the now-silent street. Claudia was left with her lifeless grandmama, the smells of her cooking spices fading, replaced by the coppery scent of blood.

When she touched her grandmama again, the old woman’s flesh was colder than the bite of the ocean in February.

•

Outside of Bessie’s heated interior, the icy air hit Claudia’s face like a slap. The streetlight gave off a weak light tinged with brown and black smudges, as if the light itself in this area had been corrupted by the evil in the air. She inhaled a metallic smell of guns and something burnt.

And then the wind relented, and Claudia caught a whiff of what smelled like cloves, mixed with fresh basil and her grandmama’s favorite: thyme. The memory gave her the courage to enter the darkened alley.

Crouching next to a dumpster, the big man waited for her.

This time, Claudia could see the white line of paint on his cheek in this shadowy alley.

“Go back home,” Claudia said, her voice cracking.

“You t’ink it that easy, girl?”

His voice was deep as the night before, filled with the same bemused confidence she remembered from their first meeting. Wearing old jeans and a green army jacket, he looked much older now. He was quivering like a junkie, full of unhealthy need.

“Wasn’t my grandmama enough for you?” She moved closer, anger and indignation growing with each step.

“We all have to eat,” he said, rising to his full height. “I just come to where the eating is…richer. Easier.”

As he did, Claudia lifted the piece of chalk she’d kept with her from that day in Haiti. She held it in her drawing hand, the same hand stained from last night’s painting. In spite of the reek of the garbage, Claudia could still smell a trace of her grandmama’s spices. She wanted to take a turpentine-soaked rag to the man’s cheek, scrubbing away the mark she’d left on him years ago.

“There always has to be a victim,” he said in a chiding tone, as if talking to a child. “Look at the killer here, in your neighborhood. Taking
your people
.”

“Killer?” Claudia almost lost her grip on the chalk. “
You’re
the killer.”

“Nah.” The man shook his head so hard he rattled the dumpster again. “I just follow after her, get what I need when she’s done.”

Without taking her gaze off him, Claudia went to one knee. She wiped snow from the alley floor and looked down long enough to draw a long white line that separated her from him. The rumble of Bessie’s engine at the end of the alley calmed her and kept her hand from wavering. The chalked line became a cross.

“Girl,” he said. “You doing more art? Don’t you know better, now?”

She continued drawing, his words encouraging her. She thought she heard him flinch back when she finished drawing the first symbol of power her Grandmama had taught her.

“That’s
enough
, girl.”

Claudia continued drawing. She wondered if he remembered what she had chalked into the street that day in Haiti, even if she hadn’t believed it herself then. She knew better now.

As she drew, Claudia thought about her home, her true home. She wondered if there had been so much suffering in Haiti these days that a death there just wasn’t special enough for this creature. So he’d come here, hungry for a new kind of death.

The next symbol became a pentagram. The connection made all those years ago in Port-Au-Prince had to be broken.

“Y-You not doing that right,” the man began.

“I didn’t ask for an opinion,” Claudia snapped. “What I need from you is to take care of whoever’s killing our people. Feed on the
killer’s
suffering instead of feeding on us.”

“Stop,” he hissed, dropping to both knees.

“Do what I ask, and I’ll release you. If not — ” Claudia moved her hand over the chalked symbols. “If not, I erase you.”

“Do you think…it…that easy?” the man whispered.

A sudden flow of warm air scented with her grandmama’s spices touched Claudia, and she closed her eyes to make sure she caught every last hint of cloves and basil and thyme. When she opened her eyes, the big man was gone.

“Yes,
Malpwòpte
,” she said. “It
is
that easy.”

Somewhere in the cold night, as close as a few blocks away, she thought she heard a scream filled with surprised betrayal. The magic practiced by her grandmama was potent, nothing to toy with as she’d done all those years ago, and it worked quickly. The black man, the feeder of the dead, had taken care of the killer stalking her friends here in downtown Raleigh.

I
comprehend
, Grandmama, she thought as she wiped away the chalk symbols as fast as she could, erasing the feeder from existence now that he’d caught the killer. And I miss you.

•

From the safe confines of Bessie’s still-warm interior, Claudia looked up from where she’d been staring at the empty patch of skin on the back of her right hand as the sun rose. She couldn’t even see the slightest trace of paint there, not even a sliver of dried red or dark blue stuck to her.

She hoped Big Ed’s restaurant opened soon — she was looking forward to a big breakfast and a mug of strong coffee more than anything else, even if it would never compare to a meal prepared for her by her grandmama.

And after she took her own sweet time eating her meal and drinking her coffee, Claudia would sketch out her next painting, something that would use the colors in her palette that she’d been ignoring for far too long.

•

Ben Peek

It was the weight that woke Linette. Her weight. The weight of herself.

The flat red sky above Issuer was waiting when she opened her eyes. Five hours before, when she had closed her eyes, it had been a dark, ugly brown-red: the middle of the night. Now it was the clear early morning red, and a thick, muggy warmth was seeping through her open window with the new light. There would be no rain today. Just the heat. Just the sweat. Just that uncomfortable, hot awareness of herself that both brought. The worse was Linette’s short, dark hair, dirty with sweat and ash. The ash that had come through the open window during the night. It had streaked her face and settled in her mouth and she could taste it, dry, burnt and unappealing in her gums. Her left arm, with its thick, straight scars across the forearm, felt heavy and ached; but it always ached. It was a dull, lazy ache in the heat, and a sharp, pointed pain in the cold, as if, with the latter, the brittle weather was digging into her fractured bone to snap it. Her feet, tangled at the bottom of her coarse, ash stained brown sheets, sweated uncomfortably, and her long, straight back could feel the sweaty outline of the bronze frame beneath the thin mattress that she lay on. There was no end to herself, Linette thought, and she would never be able to sleep again, so aware of it was she.

Her dreams had not been a sanctuary, however. In them, Linette had lived under a different part of the red sun, wrapped in heavy brown clothes, wearing pieces of light bronze armour, and holding a short, wide-nosed gun. Around her, clouds of black ash spewed from the back of bronze, grey and silver coloured machines. Cages of crows peppered the ground and, inside, the black birds sat silently, waiting. They were not real, she knew. They never had been. The ground the fake birds lay on was mud and ash and the waste of brown and red trees that had been torn down to make the circular camp she lived in. The wastage clung to her boots, leaving a trail to its centre behind her. There was a man beside her, but she couldn’t make him out. He had been asking her when she planned to read the letter, but she had responded by telling him to be quiet. Two men had escaped, she said. They could be anywhere. They could be watching —

They were, but she had awoken before that.

It didn’t matter: she knew the outcome, had lived it, didn’t need to experience it again.

The letter, however, was not part of the memory. The letter was part of the muggy heat and her life in Issuer. It was sitting in her tiny kitchen, leaning against an old bronze kettle: thin, straight, pristine and white. A perfect set of teeth to speak with. Her name was printed in messy letters on the front, and though a young, clean skinned man she didn’t know had delivered it, she knew the author.

Slowly, Linette pushed herself up with her good arm. Her left was a dead weight in her lap. It would take a shower and exercise for it to gain full movement. Two months out of the hospital, out of the army, and a month living in Issuer and her arm had only just begun to improve to the point that she could use it properly. But it took time, still. She slid across the bed that was big enough for two, but held only one, and placed her feet down on the cool stone floor of a room so bare that a visitor would have thought no one lived in it.

The room’s possessions lay in the hallway in a disorganised jumble. Linette had thrown them there last night. The large, bronze framed mirror that had, once, sat on the far wall to give the room size now leant against the wall with cracks around the top. Near it lay a brass clock, and next to that a stocky bronze fan with bent blades, followed by a dozen tiny mechanical devices that she had been unable to stomach the thought of having near her as she slept. The way that each simulated a natural event, or imposed an artificial meaning…she had been disgusted by them, just as she had been by the way she had treated each with easy familiarity at one stage in her life. In anger, she had thrown them from the room and opened the window so that the muggy, ash stained breeze could enter.

She had not yet opened the letter.

•

My Dear Linette —

I do not know how to begin, but I do know is that there is little time left for me to write. In half an hour, the operation will begin. I am apprehensive. My hand trembles. I have always prided myself on clean, simple letters, but look at them now. They cross lines. They mix against each other. They slope one way, then another. They fall outside the neat order that I have cherished so much. I suppose, given what is about to happen, that is the way things should be. Nothing in life is neat and contained.

•

She tried to eat, but the taste of ash lingered in her mouth, even after she had rinsed.

From her chair at the kitchen table, Linette swallowed her half-chewed piece of apple, then tossed the remaining half into the bin next to her sink. The apple was small, brown, and made an unpleasant, soggy slap as it hit the brass bottom of the bin. Silence followed. The tall woman, now wearing black pants and a long sleeved black, buttoned shirt, had not allowed a sound to escape her mouth since waking up. She had left the bedroom rubbing the scars on her arm, disgusted by the way sweat gathered around the thick, puckered flesh. She had stepped around the mess in the hall, entered the toilet, pissed, showered, scrubbed herself with hard movements, worked her arm until it moved like the other, then dressed and picked up the apple. The only noise had been her feet on the slowly warming concrete floor.

Not so long ago, the mornings had been filled with sound: men and women she knew in smoky, hazy camps, talking about bad food, about operations, about people back home, and those they knew now. Before she had left, and when she had lived in Ledornn, there had been conversations about what kind of toast she would prefer, and who would come up with dinner. Insignificant, shallow, domestic conversations…

Linette gazed through the dirty window of the kitchen. The tall, dark shadows of windmills lined Issuer’s morning skyline, a few turning slowly, but most that she could see were still. The empty red of sky hung above them regardless, still and oppressive.

She did not think consciously for the half an hour that she sat at the table, her fingernails clicking on the bronze top every now and then. Her mind had drifted and, in a mix of fragments from conversation, bits of song, parts from books, and even scenes from plays that she had seen, her mind turned itself over until, finally, she began to focus on a man. He was blond, slim, and his teeth were crooked, and he had been an unlikely lover for her as much as she had for him. She did not want to think of him, and when her arm began to throb again, either with real or symbolic pain, she knew that she had to stop before her thoughts turned into a morbidity that crumbled her resolve for the day.

Quietly, Linette entered the small, pale grey painted living room. There was a long brown couch in the middle, while a slim bronze table and brass and silver lined radio sat on top of it in the far corner. A box of outside opinions pushed aside. On the floor, however, were a pair of old, scuffed black boots, which Linette picked up. Holding them, she sat down upon the couch, and there, paused again.

In the kitchen, the letter sat, still, against the kettle.

“I have been to too many funerals,” she said, as if it could reply to her.

It could not, of course, but the fact that she had spoken to it both frustrated and upset her. With hard yanks, she tightly wound the frayed black laces of her boots up. On the right boot she missed a hole, and on the left, two. She ground her teeth together harshly both times, but retied carefully, wiping her hands free of sweat.

Finished, she rose and crossed the tiny kitchen, to the back door. Her strides were quick and purposeful: the walk of a woman who had an unpleasant task ahead of her, but who would meet it without flinching.

•

Are you angry?

That day when I first met you, you were angry. Nearly two years and that is what I remember about you most. It is not your beauty, not your smile, not your habits…No, for over the years, I have realised that these do not define you. They are secondary to your anger — that brilliant, burning anger that exists because the world is not right. The anger that exists because you must fix it, somehow. The first time I saw you was from afar, standing beneath a bronze parasol, while you stood at the front of the Anti-War rally in Ledornn, and it was there that I saw that anger. You demanded to know why Aajnn mattered so much to the Shibtri Isles? Why the Queen and her Children were such a threat?

You told us that they lived in cramped cities beneath the earth, away from our red sun, and with the bones of crows around their necks to catch their souls when they died. They were full of superstition that made the men and women who had Morticians tattoo their life into their skin for God seem at the forefront of science and logic.

What impressed me most (and everyone else, I imagine) was that you were not a person off the street, but a career soldier. You stood in front of us in the straight, light brown pants and suit of the army, your medals and rank displayed for all. You were proud of who you were. You were proud of what you had done for the Isles. You were proud to be in service.

But now, you were angry, and that anger would not allow you to be silent, no matter the consequences. It was an anger to fear and, I am afraid to say, I did — and do — fear it.

•

The pear shaped Ovens of Issuer dominated the city’s horizon, though they were easily an hour away by carriage.

Lately, the twin ovens had a tendency to blur around the edges for Linette, but even with the beginning of her deteriorating eyesight due to her thirty-eighth year, the immense girth and height of the creations meant that they were unable to be passed over when she looked at Issuer’s skyline. In contrast, the hundreds of long, bronze windmills that rose out of the city could — and did — fade from her awareness. The Ovens, however, lurked on the horizon like a pair of dark, hunched watchers outside the city, covered in a layer of soot as a disguise. If you managed to forget them (and Linette doubted she ever could), then you would be reminded each Friday when they belched tart smelling ash, and plumes rose out of each to signal the burning of the weekly dead.

Outside of her house, Linette spent a moment in morbid contemplation of the Ovens. It was where she would finish her mortal journey, she knew: a friend, a family member, perhaps even a Mortician, would take her body wrapped in white sheets up to the silent monks who lived beneath the ovens. There, she would be bathed, cleaned, and finally, placed in the giant pits that never fully cooled, and which would ignite at the end of the week, consuming her. There was nowhere else where she would prefer to end. She would not be buried in the ground, not given — or sold or stolen — to a Surgeon’s workshop…what was left of her would be burnt away. She would be given freedom.

Her small house sat at the end of Issuer, surrounded by other small, cheap, red brick houses. Packed dirt worked as a road around them, but within minutes, she had stepped onto the paved streets of Issuer proper. There, the tall windmills turned at a variety of paces, powered by electricity that was strung from house to house. Issuer had never been big: it was a transient’s city, organised in an ordered grid, with street names that indicated purpose. Everything in it was designed to make it easy for the visitor, of which Issuer saw many. It was a city — more a town, really — where men and women arrived for a few days, a week, and after they had seen the Ovens burn and their duty was done to family and loved ones, they left.

The windows to the private houses Linette passed were shut, the boards pulled closed. Inside, bronze fans circulated the air, but the impression of personal lives being closed off was not an illusion. The people who lived in Issuer kept to themselves for the most part, and it was only when you entered the middle of the city, where the public stores, hotels, and other places of business were, that an openness existed. There, windows were open. There, fans sat on the streets, blowing, while larger windmills — the largest in the city — turned above them. There, men and women, mostly young, presented the smiling, happy face of Issuer to visitors. Everywhere — and everyone — else, Linette believed, looked like a coffin: closed in, quiet, and still.

Death was the commodity of Issuer. Alan Pierre, a black man who had come to the Isles as a child and made a fortune as a body snatcher, had founded it. When age had finally driven him into looking for a way to settle, he had looked at the makeshift tent city that had existed outside the Ovens and sunk his considerable, ill-gained fortune into turning it into something more lasting. It wasn’t long until hotels were built, Surgeons and Morticians arrived, as did the other trades that had attached themselves to the industry of death. The people, like Linette, who drifted into the town, drawn by their own morbid frame of mind and the internal struggles that each had, had always been part of it.

Linette herself did not know, exactly, what it was that drew her to Issuer. Her pension provided enough for rent and food, but very little else. In another city, she might find work, and earn more, but while her life was mean, she did not dislike it. The heat bothered her, but it was not as bad as the cold. She was lonely, but —

No.

No, that was wrong: she was not lonely.

She had not been lonely since she moved here and had been able to gaze upon the Ovens daily.

•

I am not a soldier, and I do not pretend to know what you went through, or why, indeed, Issuer allows you to sleep more calmly than you did in Ledornn; but I like to think I have been supportive of all your needs. That I have tried, as much as I possibly can, to be supportive of you.