Magic City

by Paula Guran

  “ ’Neida, mean to say you aint forgot none a them games we played?!” Scornfully.

  The price had been paid.

  It was as if Oneida were swimming, completely underwater, and putting out her hand and touching Mercy, who swore up and down she was not wet. Who refused to admit that the Blue Lady was real, that she, at least, had seen her. When Oneida tried to show her some of what she’d learned, Mercy nodded once, then interrupted, asking if she had a smoke.

  Oneida got a cigarette from the cupboard where she kept her offerings.

  “So how long are you here for?” It sounded awful, what Mom would say to some distant relative she’d never met before.

  “Dunno. Emilio gonna be outta circulation—things in Miami different now. Here, too, hunh? Seem like we on the set a some monster movie.”

  Oneida would explain about that later. “What about your mom?” Even worse, the kind of question a parole officer might ask.

  Mercy snorted. “She aint wanna have nothin to do with him or me. For years.”

  “Mizz Nichols—” Oneida paused. Had Mercy heard?

  “Yeah, I know. Couldn make the funeral.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the bottom of her high-top, then rolled the butt between her right thumb and forefinger, straightening it. “Dunno why I even came here. Dumb. Probably the first place anybody look. If they wanna fine me.” Mercy glanced up, and her eyes were exactly the same, deep and sad. As the ocean. As the sky.

  “They won’t.” The shadow of a vine’s stray tendril caressed Mercy’s cheek. “They won’t.”

  Nisi Shawl’s collection Filter House was a 2009 Tiptree Award winner; her stories have been published at Strange Horizons, in Asimov’s, and in anthologies including both volumes of Dark Matter. She was WisCon 35’s Guest of Honor. She co-edited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler and co-authored Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. Shawl co-founded the Carl Brandon Society and serves on Clarion West’s board of directors. Her Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair features a character partially modeled on E. Nesbit, author of the original Magic City; it’s due out in 2015 from Tor. Her website is www.nisishawl.com.

  The City: Providence, Rhode Island.

  The Magic: Every tale must have its end, but when all else fails an author can always go to see fairies who advertize: “Endings Guaranteed.”

  -30-

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  It has too often occurred to you that there is no end to the incarnations that Hell may assume. Hell, or merely hell, or simply damnation. And that most of these incarnations are the product of your own doing, restraints, and limitations. You certainly do not need Dante Alighieri, Gustave Doré, Hieronymus Bosch, or Saint fucking Paul and his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians to paint the picture for you. You know it well enough without reference to the hells of others. You sit in the black chair in front of your desk, and it stares you in the face. Hell sits on that same desk, splashed across a glossy 17-inch LED screen framed in snow-white polycarbonate. Hell is the scant few inches between your eyes and that screen, the space between any given story’s climax and the fleeting moment of relief when you can finally type THE END and mean it. And know it’s true. Hell is the emptiness that prevents you from reaching the release that comes with those six letters. You have precious few wards against this Hell. Prayers are worse than useless. Barring intervention, solution will only come when it comes, when it’s good and ready, deadlines be damned (not unlike you).

  In interviews, you have played the braggart and spoken of the effortlessness of finding endings. You’ve said how you generally allow them to take care of themselves. You’ve also said that the only true endings are organic, an inevitable outcome dictated by the path of the story and cannot ever be things that may be determined a priori. Not things that should be known beforehand and then written towards. You once said, in a moment of inspired, self-congratulatory arrogance:

  No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the mind of man.

  Oh, how you smiled when you cobbled together that stately gem. Nabokov and Faulkner should have been half so clever, you thought at the time. Still and all. These proclamations will not now save you from Perdition. Sure, you’ve thirty-four fine-tuned pages of text trapped there in MS Word 11.2, but without those closing paragraphs— however organic and arbitrary they may prove to be—you have only thirty-four worthless pages.

  So, you sit and stare.

  Like fabled Jesus in olive-shrouded Gethsemane, you’d sweat blood, were that an option.

  For the better part of this week in January, you sit and stare at that deadly precipice which lies a third of the way down the aforementioned page thirty-four. Somewhere in there should lie the conclusion, which ought to be perfectly obvious. Which should, as you’ve said, follow from all the rest, no matter how arbitrary the final text may prove to be. It only has to tie everything up neat and pretty. You ask no more than that.

  You sit and stare.

  You read the last lines you wrote aloud, repeatedly, until they’ve been drained almost entirely of whatever meaning they might once have held. You recite your stalled-out, dead-end litany:

  Not like the dogs and rats. Not like us.

  You drink bitter black coffee, and chew your ragged nails, and prowl the internet, finding momentary solace in the distraction offered up by various sorts of pornography you manage to pretend are “research.” You answer email. You look over your shoulder at the calendar nailed to your wall, and you note all the days marked off and how few remain. You gaze out the window at the windows of other houses and stark, leafless trees, at shivering squirrels and sparrows. And nothing comes to you. And nothing comes. And nothing comes again.

  And on the seventh curs’d day of this rapidly accreting void, you bite down hard on the proverbial bullet. Being damned (as has been made clear), there remains within you hardly any fear of falling any farther into this or that flaming or glacial or shit-filled pit. You know your particular Hell, and you’ve been consigned there by your own inability, and you will be consigned there again, and again. If time permits, you admit defeat and hide failure in a computer file labeled simply, honestly, “Shelved.”

  But today time does not permit. You haven’t the luxury of surrender. Today requires a balm, and having reached the point of “at any cost whatsoever,” you bite your lip (like that bullet) and accept the steep price of that balm.

  You have a photocopied sheet of paper you found thumbtacked to a bulletin board of a coffeehouse you frequent when you can afford to do so, which isn’t all that often. You keep the flier inside a first-edition copy of Richard Adams’ Shardik (Allen Lane, 1974). There’s no significance to the book you chose; the selection was made at random. Random as ever random may be. You take out the photocopy, which is folded in half, and you smooth the creased paper flat against the peeling wood laminate of your desk. You light a cigarette (because this is the sort of day made for backsliding) and squint through smoke at the words printed on the page, the cryptic phrases that required many weeks to puzzle out, having been accompanied by no codex. You have three-times before resorted to this, this last resort (the white flag most assuredly isn’t a resort, unless you decide that homelessness is an option).

  When all else fails, you take out the flier. Across the top of the page are printed two words, spelled out in all caps and some unfamiliar boldface font: ENDINGS GUARANTEED. When all else fails, this is the parachute that might see you returned safely to terra firma, with nothing shattered but your dignity and another dab of sanity.

  When all else fails, you go to see the fairies.

  On your way out of the apartment you share with your girlfriend and three cats (two Siamese, one tortoise-shell mutt), you pause before a mirror. The woman who stares bac
k at you looks sick. Not flu sick or head-cold sick, but sick. Her eyes are bloodshot and puffy, the bags beneath them gone dark as ripening plums. Her complexion is only a few shades shy of jaundiced. At forty, she could easily pass for the rough end of fifty, or fifty-five. You grab your wool cap, your keys, and your threadbare coat. You forget your mittens. You think about leaving a note, then think better of it. Your sudden absences are not unexpected, and you’re not in the mood to write anything at all. A grocery list has more of a plot and considerably more subtext than you’re willing to undertake at the moment.

  You shut and lock the door, follow the stairs down to the lobby, and step out into the bright, freezing day. The sidewalks are slippery with ice, and the streets and gutters are filled with a slush of white-gray-black snow, a week old and still not completely melted away. There’s also sand in the slush, and salt, and all manner of trash—broken beer bottles, plastic soda bottles, torn bits of paper, cigarette butts, what looks too much like a soiled diaper to be anything else.

  The photocopied page is in your coat pocket now, and you absent-mindedly finger it as you walk to the bus stop. The thing about fairies, you think, is that they have an inordinate fondness for red tape, a sort of ritual fetish, a hard-on for ceremony, that amounts to nothing more than magical bureaucracy when all is said and done. You dutifully jump through the hoops if you want what they’re selling, and you inevitably pay them an arm and a leg for the fucking pleasure. Sometimes literally, or so you’ve heard. So far, you’ve been lucky in your dealings with the local Unseelie and haven’t lost any limbs, or very much of your mind. Just your dignity, which seems like a fair enough shake, since dignity is a commodity few writers can afford.

  You catch the bus on Westminster. It’s almost empty, and stinks of sweat and diesel fumes. The bus is too warm, overcompensating for the winter weather. You stare out at the ugly, slushy Providence streets. You pull the flier from a coat pocket and read it over again, though you’ve long since committed these weary Stations of the Cross to memory. Your fingers have worn the flier as smooth as rosary beads. You’ve looked for other copies, on other bulletin boards, or stapled to telephone poles, or duct-taped to the see-through Plexiglas walls of bus stops. But this is the only one you’ve ever seen. It might be the only one ever sent out into the world, and you might be the only sucker who’s taken the bait. But you seriously doubt it. More like you get one shot at the brass ring and one shot only. Pass it by, and the chance won’t ever come again. You’ve imagined all sorts of fliers like this one—not exactly the same, but the gist would be the same. Maybe fliers promising fertility to sterile would-be parents, riches to the destitute, houses for the homeless, sex changes to transsexuals, banquets for gluttons, true love for the lovelorn.

  You ride all the way through downtown, across the river, to College Hill. You get off when the bus stops on Wickenden Street. There’s a narrow alleyway between a Thai restaurant and a used record shop, a shop that sells actual vinyl records instead of CDs. You walk all the way to the back and stand beside a dumpster and empty cardboard boxes that once held Singha and Chang beer. The alley stinks of rotting food and urine and dirty snow, but at least you don’t have to wait very long. The goblin that lives beneath the pavement peeks its head out the fourth time you knock your wind-chapped knuckles against the dumpster. It recognizes you straightaway and smiles, showing off a mouthful of crooked brown teeth.

  “Oh,” it mutters and rubs its indigo eyes. “You again. The poet come lookin’ for a rhyme. The word beggar.” The goblin’s voice sounds the way the gutter slush looks.

  “I’m not a goddamn poet,” you tell the goblin, glancing back towards the entrance to the alley to be sure no one’s stopped to watch you talking to nothing they can see, because they don’t have a ticket, because they’ve never found a flier of their own.

  “Fine. The spinner of penny awfuls, then. The madame dyke of the story papers. What the fuck ever you wish.” The goblin stops smiling and begins chewing at one of its thick pea-green toenails. It seems to have forgotten you’re standing there.

  “Same as before,” you finally say when you’ve grown tired of waiting. The goblin stops gnawing at it’s foot and glares up at you. “I need to find Pigwidgeon again.”

  “Of course you do,” he snorts. “Color me surprised. Didn’t think you’d come for the time a day. So, what you got to trade? Ol’ Pigwidgeon, you know he don’t like being disturbed, so we ain’t talking trinkets and baubles. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah, I know that.”

  “Right. So, what you got to trade me, poet? What’s it you can bear to part with this lovely afternoon?” The goblin farts and goes back to chewing its toenails.

  “A memory,” you tell it. “The memory of my first good review in the Washington Post and how I celebrated the night after I read it. How’s that?”

  “A mite stingy,” the goblin mumbles around a mouthful of big toe. “What you think I want with the wistful reminiscences of a mid-list novelist?”

  “It’s better than last time,” you reply. “That’s what I’ve got. That’s all I’ve got for you today.”

  The goblin spits, then glares at you again. It’s indigo eyes swim with an iridescent sheen like motor oil on a mud puddle. “Well now,” it sneers, “look at who’s went and got herself all pertinacious. Look at who thinks she’s grown a backbone. You calling the shots now, poet? That how you got it figured?” and before you can answer, the goblin has begun to crawl back into it’s place beneath the asphalt.

  “No, no, no,” you say too quickly, all at once close to panic and silently cursing yourself for mouthing off, for trying to circumnavigate protocol. You shiver and glance towards the entrance to the alley again. “It means a lot to me. It really does. It’s not a bauble. It’s one of the most precious—”

  “Seems that way to you, sure,” the goblin interrupts. It’s crouched half under the blacktop, half out. It snickers and closes one eye. “Always the way with mortals. Your heads all full of junk seems precious, but what you think don’t necessarily go and make it so. So, sweeten the pot, or I’m going back down to finish my nap, which you so rudely disturbed, might I bloody well add.”

  And you want to tell this little green shit to fuck off. You want to turn and walk away, get back on the bus, go back to your apartment and the empty place where page thirty-four dried up. But you know yourself well enough to know better, and you’re too cold and tired to stand here haggling with the goblin all damn day. Easier to concede. Old habits die hard, and you’ve been conceding your whole life, so why get haughty and stop now?

  “That review and the memory of the celebration afterwards,” you say once more, then hastily add, before you can think better of it, “and the last hour of my life.”

  The goblin grins his dirty brown grin, and his ears perk up, and his oily blue-black eyes shimmer. “Now, that’s a whole lot more like it, poet. Got yourself a deal. In fact, you can keep the silly old review. Got no use for it. The hour’s ample fare.” And so he tells you where to find the elf named Pigwidgeon, the sulking, melancholy elf who never leaves his dusty attic, but whose dusty attic is never in the same place two days in a row.

  You feel something icy and sharp pass through your belly, colder times ten than the bitter January air, and for a second you think you might vomit. But it passes. The goblin has what he wants, and he gives you an address on Benevolent Street (the irony isn’t lost on you) before scurrying back beneath the alleyway. You want to run away and not look back, but you don’t dare. That’s one of the first lessons you learned about fairies: Never, ever run away. It inevitably makes them suspicious and apt to reconsider the terms of any bargain. So, you stand staring at the empty cardboard boxes for a little longer, smelling the reek from the dumpster, then you slowly turn and walk away, repeating the address over and over to yourself.

  As the sun slinks down towards dusk, trading late afternoon for the last dregs of the day, you follow the goblin’s directions and the
redbrick trail of Benefit Street. Hands stuffed into coat pockets, you walk quickly between stately rows of eighteenth and nineteenth century architecture, that procession of gambrel roofs, bay windows, and sensible Georgian masonry. You pass historical landmarks and the towering white steeple of the oldest Baptist church in America, the red clapboard saltbox where President Washington slept on more than one occasion.

  You turn right onto the steep incline of Benevolent Street, and here’s the address you’ve been given, just one block from the Brown University campus. You silently stare warily at the building for two or three minutes, because you’re pretty sure it wasn’t there the last time you passed this way. You’re pretty sure that the houses to the east and west of it once abutted one another, with hardly ten feet in between the two. But you know the routine well enough not to question the peculiarities and impossibilities that accompany this journey. Not to look too closely. You’ve entered a secret country. So you let it go, full in the knowledge that the house that wasn’t here a week before (though it looks at least two hundred years old) won’t be here the next time you happen by this spot.

  The front door isn’t locked, and the house is empty. No furniture. No evidence of occupants. No rugs or draperies or pictures hanging on the walls. You climb the stairs to the second floor, and then the third (never mind that when viewed from the street, there were clearly only two floors before the attic). At the end of a narrow hallway, you find the pull-down trapdoor set into the ceiling, and you tug at a jute rope, lowering a rickety set of steps that lead up into Pigwidgeon’s moveable garret.

  Even in the dead of winter, the attic is bathed in all the sharp and spicy aromas of autumn. There are tapestries covering the walls, hiding patches of the peeling wallpaper from view, and the elf sits in a tattered armchair in the center of the room. This is the garret’s single piece of furniture, the entire house’s single stick of furniture, so far as you can see. The chair is upholstered in satin the color of pomegranates. It looks like cats have used it as a scratching post.