New York Fantastic

by Paula Guran

  “It’s my nature. I was hungry. When we’re bodied, we have to eat. I can’t eat those dead things in your refrigerator. And after some consideration I decided it would be best if I didn’t eat you … Now, let’s go to the meeting. And don’t say, ‘What meeting?’”

  “Okay. I won’t.”

  “Just take a fast cab to 862 Haven, apartment 17. I’ll meet you on their balcony … wait. Wait. I’m getting a send. They’re telling me— it’s a message for you.” It cocked its head to one side as if listening. “They tell me I must apologize for eating your fish. Apparently you have some unusual level of respect in their circle.” It bent its head. “I apologize. And they say you are to read a letter from ‘Carstairs.’ It’s been in your computer’s mail sorter for two weeks under personal and you keep neglecting to retrieve it. Read it. That’s the send … Well, then …” The griffin, fluttering its wings, hopped into the living room. The French doors opened for it as if slid back by some ghostly hand. It went to the balcony, crouched, then sprang into the air and soared away. He thought he heard it shout something over its shoulder at him: something about Prince Red Mark.

  It was a breezy morning, feeling like spring. The sun came and went.

  Max stood under the rain shelter in the gridcab station on the roof of his apartment building. The grid was a webwork of metal slats and signal contacts, braced by girders and upheld by the buildings that jutted through the finely woven net like mountaintops through a cloud field. Thousands of wedge-shaped cabs and private gridcars hummed along the grid in as many different directions.

  Impatiently, Max once more thumbed the green call button on the signal stanchion. An empty cab, cruising by on automatic pilot, was dispatched by the Uptown area’s traffic computer; it detached from the feverishly interlacing main traffic swarm and arced neatly into the pick-up bay under the rain shelter. Max climbed inside and inserted his Unicard into the cab’s creditor. The small terminal’s screen acknowledged his bank account and asked, “Where to?” Max tapped his destination into the keyboard: the cab’s computer, through the data-feed contacts threaded into the grid, gave the destination to the main computer, which maneuvered the cab from the bay and out onto the grid. You are to read a letter from Carstairs, the griffin had said.

  He’d met Carstairs at a convention of fantasy fans. Carstairs had hinted he was doing “some rather esoteric research” for Duke University’s parapsychology lab. Carstairs had made Max nervous—he could feel the man following him, watching him, wherever he went in the convention hotel. So he’d deliberately ignored the message. But he hadn’t gotten around to deleting it.

  As the cab flashed across the city, weaving in and out of the peaks of skyscrapers, over the narrow parks that had taken the place of the Avenue, Max punched a request to connect to his home computer. The cab charged his bank account again, tied him in, and he asked his system to print out a copy of the email from Carstairs. He scanned the message, focusing first on: “… when I saw you at the convention I knew the Hidden Race had chosen to favor you. They were there, standing at your elbow, invisible to you—invisible to me too, except in certain lights, and when I concentrate all my training on looking …” Max shivered, and thought: A maniac. But—the griffin had been real.

  He skipped ahead, to: “… You’ll remember, perhaps, back in the last century, people were talking about a ‘plasma body’ that existed within our own physiological bodies, an independently organized but interrelated skein of subatomic particles; this constituted, it was supposed, the so-called soul. It occurred to some of us that if this plasma body could exist in so cohesive a form within an organism, and could survive for transmigration after the death of that organism, then perhaps a race of creatures, creatures who seem to us to be ‘bodiless,’ could exist alongside the embodied creatures without humanity’s knowing it. This race does exist, Max. It accounts for those well-documented cases of ‘demonic’ possession and poltergeists. And for much in mythology. My organization has been studying the Hidden Race—some call them plasmagnomes—for fifteen years. We kept our research secret for a good reason …”

  Max was distracted by a peculiar noise. A scratching sound from the roof of the cab. He glanced out the window, saw nothing, and shrugged. Probably a news-sheet blown by the wind onto the car’s roof. He looked again at the letter. “… for a good reason. Some of the plasmagnomes are hostile … The Hidden Race is very orderly. It consists of about ten thousand plasmagnomes, who live for the most part in the world’s ‘barren’ places. Such places are not barren to them. The bulk of the plasmagnomes are a well-cared-for serf class, who labor in creating base plasma fields, packets of nonsentient energy to be consumed or used in etheric constructions. The upper classes govern, study the various universes, and most of all concern themselves with the designing and elaboration of their Ritual. But this monarchist hierarchy is factioned into two distinct opposition parties, the Protectionists and the Exploitationists: they gave us those terms as being the closest English equivalent. The Protectionists are sanctioned by the High Crown and the Tetrarchy of Lords. Lately the Exploitationists have increased their numbers, and they’ve become harder to police. They have gotten out of hand. For the first time since a Protectionist walked the Earth centuries ago as ‘Merlin’ and an Exploitationist as ‘Mordred,’ certain members of the Hidden Race have taken bodied form among us …”

  Max glanced up again.

  The scratching sound from the roof. Louder this time. He tried to ignore it; he wondered why his heart was pounding. He looked doggedly at the letter. “… The Exploitationists maintain that humanity is small-minded, destructive of the biosphere, too numerous, and in general suitable only for slavery and as sustenance. If they knew my organization studied them, they would kill me and my associates. Till recently, the Protectionists have prevented the opposition party from taking physical form. It’s more difficult for them to affect us when they’re unbodied, because our biologic magnetic fields keep them at a distance… . Centuries ago, they appeared to us as dragons, sorcerers, fairies, harpies, winged horses, griffins, angels, demons—”

  Max leaned back in his seat and slowly shook his head. Griffins. He took a deep breath. This could still be a hoax. The griffin could have been a machine.

  But he knew better. He’d known since he was a boy, really. Even then, certain Technicolor-vivid dreams—

  He tensed: the phantom scrabbling had come again from overhead. He glimpsed a dark fluttering from the corner of one eye; he turned, thought he saw a leathery wingtip withdraw from the upper edge of the window frame.

  “Oh God.” He decided it might be a good idea to read the rest of the letter. Now. Quickly. Best he learn all he could about them. Because the scratching on the roof was becoming a grating, scraping sound. Louder and harsher.

  He forced himself to read the last paragraph of the letter. “… in the old days they manifested as such creatures, because their appearance is affected by our expectation of them. They enter the visible plane only after filtering through our cultural psyche, the society’s collective electromagnetic mental field. And their shapes apparently have something to do with their inner psychological make-up—each one has a different self-image. When they become bodied, they manipulate the atoms of the atomic-physical world with plasma-field telekinesis, and shape it into what at least seem to be actually functioning organisms, or machines. Lately they take the form of machines—collaged with more ancient imagery—because ours is a machine-minded society. They’re myth robots, perhaps. They’re not magical creatures. They’re real, with their own subtle metabolism—and physical needs and ecological niche. They have a method of keeping records—in ‘closed-system plasma fields’—and even constructing housing. Their castles are vast and complex and invisible to us, untouchable and all but undetectable. We can pass through them and not disturb them. The Hidden Race has a radically different relationship to matter, energy—and death. That special relationship is what makes them seem magical to us … Well
, Mr. Whitman, we’re getting in touch with you to ask you to attend a meeting of those directly involved in plans for defense against the Exploitationists’ campaign to—”

  He got no further in his reading. He was distracted. Naked terror is a distracting thing.

  A squealing sound of ripped metal from just over his head made him cringe in his seat, look up to see claws of polished titanium, claws long as a man’s fingers and wickedly curved, slashing the cab’s thin roof. The claws peeled the metal back.

  Frantically, Max punched a message into the cab’s terminal: Change direction for nearest police station. Emergency priority. I take responsibility for traffic disruption.

  The cab swerved, the traffic parting for it, and took an exit from the grid to spiral down the off-ramp. It pulled up in the concrete cab stop at street level, across from a cop just getting out of a patrol car at a police station. Wide-eyed, the cop drew his gun and ran toward the cab.

  Claws snatched at Max’s shoulders. He opened the cab door, and flung himself out of the car, bolting for shelter.

  Something struck him between the shoulderblades. He staggered. There was an icy digging at his shoulders—he howled. Steel claws sank into his flesh and lifted him off his feet—he could feel the muscles of his shoulders straining, threatening to tear. The claws opened, released him, and he fell face down; he lay for a moment, gasping on his belly. He had a choppy impression of something blue-black flapping above and behind. He felt a tugging at his belt—and then he was lifted into the air, the clawed things carrying him by the belt as if it were a luggage handle.

  He was two, three, five meters above the concrete, and spiraling upward. He heard a gunshot, thought he glimpsed the cop fallen, a winged darkness descending on him.

  The city whirled into a gray blur. Max heard the regular beat of powerful wings just above. He thought: I’m too heavy. It’s not aerodynamically possible.

  But he was carried higher still, the flying things making creaking, whipping sounds with their pinions. Otherwise, they were unnervingly silent. Max stopped struggling to free himself. If he broke loose now, he’d fall ten stories to the street. He was slumped like a rabbit in a hawk’s claws, hanging limply, humiliated.

  He saw two of the flying things below, now, just climbing into his line of sight. They carried the policeman—a big bald man with a paunchy middle. They carried him between them; one had him by the ankles, the other by the throat. He looked lifeless. Judging by the loll of his head, his neck was broken.

  Except for the rush of wind past his face, the pain at his hips where the belt was cutting into him, Max felt numb, once more in a dream. He was afraid, deeply afraid, but the fear had somehow become one with the world, a background noise that one grows used to, like the constant banging from a neighborhood construction site. But when he looked at the things carrying him, he had a chilling sense of déjà vu. He remembered them from the dreams. Two mornings before, he’d awakened, mumbling, “The things that flew, the things with claws …”

  They were made of vinyl. Blue-black vinyl stretched over, he guessed, aluminum frames. They were bony, almost skeletal women, with little hard knobs for breasts, their arms merging into broad, scalloped imitation leather wings. They had the heads of women—with DayGlo wigs of green, stiff-plastic bristles—but instead of eyes there were the lenses of cameras, one in each socket; and when they opened their mouths he saw, instead of teeth, the blue-gray curves of razors following the line of the narrow jaws. Max thought: It’s a harpy. A vinyl harpy.

  One of the harpies, three meters away and a little below, turned its vinyl head, its camera lenses glittering, to look Max in the face; it opened its mouth and threw back its head like a dog about to howl and out came the sound of an air-raid warning: GO TO THE SHELTERS. GO IMMEDIATELY TO THE SHELTERS. DO NOT STOP TO GATHER POSSESSIONS. TAKE FAMILY TO THE SHELTERS. BRING NOTHING. FOOD AND WATER WILL BE PROVIDED. GO IMMEDIATELY—

  And two others took it up. GO IMMEDIATELY—in a sexless, emotionless tone of authority. TAKE FAMILY TO THE SHELTERS—

  And Max could tell that, for the harpies, the words had no meaning. It was their way of animal cawing, the territorial declaration of their kind.

  They couldn’t have been in the air more than ten minutes—flapping unevenly over rooftops, bits and pieces of the city churning by below—when they began to descend. They were going down beyond the automated zone. They entered Edgetown, what used to be the South Bronx. People still sometimes drove combustion cars here, on the pot-holed, cracked streets, when they could get contraband gasoline; here policemen were rarely seen; here the corner security cameras were always smashed, the sidewalks crusted with trash, and two-thirds of the buildings deserted.

  Max was carried down toward an old-fashioned tar rooftop; it was the roof of a five-story building, wedged in between three taller ones. All four looked derelict and empty; the building across the street showed a few signs of occupation: laundry in the airshaft, one small child on the roof. The child, a little black girl, watched without any sign of surprise. Max felt a little better, seeing her.

  Where the shadows of the three buildings intersected on the fourth, in the deepest pocket of darkness, there was a small outbuilding; it was the rooftop doorway into the building. The door hung brokenly to one side. A cherry-red light pulsed just inside the doorway, like hate in a nighted soul.

  Max lost sight of the red glow as the vinyl harpies turned, circling for a landing. The rooftop rushed up at him. There was a sickening moment of freefall when they let go. He fell three meters to the rooftop, struck on the balls of his feet, plunged forward, shoulder-rolled to a stop. He gasped, trying to get his breath back. His ankles and the soles of his feet ached.

  He took a deep breath and stood, swaying, blinking. He found he was staring into the open doorway. Within, framed by the dusty, dark entrance to the stairway, was a man made of red-hot steel. The heat-glow was concentrated in his torso and arms. He touched the wooden frame of the doorway—and it burst into flame. The harpies capered about the tar rooftop, leaping atop chimneys and down again, stretching their wings to flap, cawing, booming, GO IMMEDIATELY TO THE SHELTERS, GO IMMEDIATELY, GO GO GO …

  The man made of hot metal stepped onto the roof. The harpies quieted, cowed. They huddled together, behind him, cocking their heads and scratching under their wings with pointed chins. To one side lay the lifeless body of the policeman, its back toward Max; the corpse’s head had been twisted entirely around on its neck; one blue eye was open, staring lifelessly; the man’s tongue was caught between clamped teeth, half severed.

  For a moment all was quiet, but for the rustling of wings and crackling of the small fire on the outbuilding.

  The man of hot chrome wore no clothes at all. He was immense, nearly two-and-a-half meters tall, and smooth as the outer hull of a factory-new fighter-jet. He was seamless—except for the square gate on his chest, with the little metal turn-handle on it. The gate was precisely like the door of an old-fashioned incinerator; in the center of the gate was a small, thick pane of smoke-darkened glass, through which blue-white fires could be seen burning restlessly. Except for their bright metal finish, his arms and legs and stylized genitals looked quite human. His head was formed of barbed wire—a densely woven wire sculpture of a man’s head, cunningly formed to show grim, aristocratic features. There were simply holes for eyes, behind which red fires flickered in his hollow head; now and then flames darted from the eyeholes to play about his temples and then recede; his scalp was a crest of barbs; eyebrows and ears were shaped of barbs. Gray smoke gusted from his mouth when he spoke to the harpies: “Feed me.” The wire lips moved like a man’s; the wire jaw seemed to work smoothly. “Feed me, while I speak to this one.” He stepped closer Max, who cringed back from the heat. “I am Lord Thanatos.” A voice like metal rending.

  Max knew him.

  One of the harpies moved to the corpse of the policeman; it took hold of the arm, put one stunted foot on the cop’s back, and began to wre
nch and twist. It tore the corpse’s arm from its shoulder and dragged it to Thanatos, leaving a trail of red blood on black tar. The harpy reached out with its free hand and turned the handle on its lord’s chest. The door swung open; an unbearable brightness flared in the opening; ducking its head, turning its eyes from the rapacious light, the vinyl harpy stuffed the cop’s arm, replete with wrist-com and blue coat-sleeve, into the inferno, the bosom of Thanatos. Sizzlings and poppings and black smoke unfurling. And the smell of roasting flesh. Max’s stomach recoiled; he took another step backward. He watched, feeling half paralyzed, as the harpies scuttled back and forth between the corpse and Thanatos, slowly dismembering and disemboweling the dead policeman, feeding the pieces into the furnace that was their lord.

  And his fire burned more furiously; his glow increased.

  “This is how it will be,” said Thanatos. “You will serve me. You can look on me, Max Whitman, and upon my servants, and you do not go mad. You do not run howling away. Because you are one of those who has always known about us, in some way. We met on the dream-plane once, you and I, and I knew you for what you were then. You can serve me, and still live among men. You will be my emissary. You will be shielded from the cowards who would prevent my entry into your world. You will go to certain men, the few who control the many. The wealthy ones. You will tell them about a great source of power, Lord Thanatos. I will send fiends and visitations to beset their enemies. Their power will grow, and they will feed me, and my power will grow. This is how it will be.”

  As he finished speaking, another harpy flapped down from the sky, dropping a fresh corpse into the shadows. It was a young Hispanic man in a smudged white suit. Thanatos opened the wiry mouth of his hollow head and sighed; blue smoke smelling of munitions factories dirtied the air. “They always kill them, somehow, as they bring them to me. I cannot break them of it. They always kill the humans. Men are more pleasurable to consume when there is life left in them. My curse is this: I’m served by half-minds.”