New York Fantastic

by Paula Guran

  He stared up at her numbly. “You’re dead,” he said dully. “I was too late. I heard the shot, I had him by then but it was too late, I felt the gun recoil in his hand.”

  “Did you feel it jerk?” she asked him.

  “Jerk?”

  “A couple of inches, no more. Just as he fired. Just enough. I got some nasty powder burns, but the bullet went into the mattress a foot from my head.”

  “The Turtle,” Tach said hoarsely.

  She nodded. “He pushed aside the gun just as Bannister squeezed the trigger. And you made the son of a bitch throw away the revolver before he could get off a second shot.”

  “You got them,” Des said. “A couple of men escaped in the confusion, but the Turtle delivered three of them, including Bannister. Plus a suitcase packed with twenty pounds of pure heroin. And it turns out that warehouse is owned by the mafia.”

  “The mafia?” Tachyon said.

  “The mob,” Des explained. “Criminals, Doctor Tachyon.”

  “One of the men captured in the warehouse has already turned state’s evidence,” Angelface said. “He’ll testify to everything—the bribes, the drug operation, the murders at the Funhouse.”

  “Maybe we’ll even get some decent police in Jokertown,” Des added.

  The feelings that rushed through Tachyon went far beyond relief. He wanted to thank them, wanted to cry for them, but neither the tears nor the words would come. He was weak and happy. “I didn’t fail,” he managed at last.

  “No,” Angelface said. She looked at Des. “Would you wait outside?” When they were alone, she sat on the edge of the bed. “I want to show you something. Something I wish I’d shown you a long time ago.” She held it up in front of him. It was a gold locket. “Open it.”

  It was hard to do with only one hand, but he managed. Inside was a small round photograph of an elderly woman in bed. Her limbs were skeletal and withered, sticks draped in mottled flesh, and her face was horribly twisted. “What’s wrong with her?” Tach asked, afraid of the answer. Another joker, he thought, another victim of his failures.

  Angelface looked down at the twisted old woman, sighed, and closed the locket with a snap. “When she was four, in Little Italy, she was run over while playing in the street. A horse stepped on her face, and the wagon wheel crushed her spine. That was in, oh, 1886. She was completely paralyzed, but she lived. If you could call it living. That little girl spent the next sixty years in a bed, being fed, washed, and read to, with no company except the holy sisters. Sometimes all she wanted was to die. She dreamed about what it would be like to be beautiful, to be loved and desired, to be able to dance, to be able to feel things. Oh, how she wanted to feel things.” She smiled. “I should have said thank you long ago, Tacky, but it’s hard for me to show that picture to anyone. But I am grateful, and now I owe you doubly. You’ll never pay for a drink at the Funhouse.”

  He stared at her. “I don’t want a drink,” he said. “No more. That’s done.” And it was, he knew; if she could live with her pain, what excuse could he possibly have to waste his life and talents? “Angelface,” he said suddenly, “I can make you something better than heroin. I was … I am a biochemist, there are drugs on Takis, I can synthesize them, painkillers, nerve blocks. If you’ll let me run some tests on you, maybe I can tailor something to your metabolism. I’ll need a lab, of course. Setting things up will be expensive, but the drug could be made for pennies.”

  “I’ll have some money,” she said. “I’m selling the Funhouse to Des. But what you’re talking about is illegal.”

  “To hell with their stupid laws,” Tach blazed. “I won’t tell if you won’t.” Then words came tumbling out one after the other, a torrent: plans, dreams, hopes, all of the things he’d lost or drowned in cognac and Sterno, and Angelface was looking at him, astonished, smiling, and when the drugs they had given him finally began to wear off, and his arm began to throb again, Doctor Tachyon remembered the old disciplines and sent the pain away, and somehow it seemed as though part of his guilt and his grief went with it, and he was whole again, and alive.

  The headline said TURTLE, TACHYON SMASH HEROIN RING. Tom was gluing the article into the scrapbook when Joey returned with the beers. “They left out the Great and Powerful part,” Joey observed, setting down a bottle by Tom’s elbow.

  “At least I got first billing,” Tom said. He wiped thick white paste off his fingers with a napkin, and shoved the scrapbook aside. Underneath were some crude drawings he’d made of the shell. “Now,” he said, “where the fuck are we going to put the record player, huh?”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “The Rock in the Park” © 2010 Peter S. Beagle. First publication:Mirror Kingdom: The Best of Peter Beagle (Subterranean Press).

  “Cryptic Coloration” © 2007 Elizabeth Bear. First publication: Jim Baen’s Universe, June 2007.

  “The Horrid Glory of Its Wings” © 2010 Elizabeth Bear. First publication: Tor.com, 8 December 2009.

  “The Land of Heart’s Desire” © 2010 Holly Black. First publication:The Poison Eaters and Other Stories (Big Mouth House).

  “Blood Yesterday, Blood Tomorrow” © 2011 Richard Bowes. First publication: Blood and Other Cravings, ed. Ellen Datlow (Tor).

  “A Huntsman Passing By” © 1999 Richard Bowes. First publication: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1999.

  “Caisson” © 2015 Karl Bunker. First publication: Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 2015.

  “The Tallest Doll in New York City” © 2014 Maria Dahvana Headley. First publication: Tor.com, 14 February 2014.

  “Painted Birds and Shivered Bones” © 2013 Kat Howard. First publication: Subterranean, Spring 2013.

  “The City Born Great” © 2016 N. K. Jemisin. First publication: Tor.com, 28 September 2016.

  “Le Peau Verte” © 2005 Caitlín R. Kiernan. First publication: To Charles Fort, With Love (Subterranean Press).

  “Shell Games” © 1987 George R. R. Martin. First publication: Wild Cards, ed. George R. R. Martin (Bantam Spectra).

  “Red as Snow” © 2013 Seanan McGuire. First publication: Hex in the City, ed. Kerrie L. Hughes (Fiction River/WMG Publishing).

  “Priced to Sell” © 2011 Temeraire LLC. First publication: Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy, ed. Ellen Datlow (St. Martin’s Griffin).

  “Salsa Nocturna” © 2010 Daniel José Older. First publication: Strange Horizons, 20 December 2010.

  “Weston Walks” © 2011 Kit Reed. First publication: Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy, ed. Ellen Datlow (St. Martin’s Griffin).

  “Grand Central Park” © 2002 Delia Sherman. First publication: The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest, eds. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling (Viking).

  “How the Pooka Came to New York City” © 2011 Delia Sherman. First publication: Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy, ed. Ellen Datlow (St. Martin’s Griffin).

  “Pork Pie Hat” © 1994 Peter Straub. First publication: Pork Pie Hat (Orion).

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Peter S. Beagle was born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, but has lived in California for most of his life. He is the author of a number of works considered to be classics of modern fantasy, including The Last Unicorn and A Fine and Private Place. The animated film version of The Last Unicorn has become a cult classic. Beagle has also written short fiction—his 2005 novelette “Two Hearts” won both the Hugo and Nebula awards—nonfiction, screenplays, poetry, and song lyrics.

  Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award–winning author of twenty-seven novels (the most recent is The Stone in the Skull, the first of a new fantasy trilogy) and over a hundred short stories. She returns to science fiction with her novel Ancestral Night in 2018. Bear has never lived in New York, but grew up in Connecticut, which she notes is basically New York’s lawn. She now lives in Massachusetts with her husband, writer Scott Lynch.

  Holly Black
is the New York Times–bestselling author of contemporary fantasy books intended for kids and teens, but also loved by adults. Some of her titles include The Spiderwick Chronicles (with Tony DiTerlizzi), The Modern Faerie Tale series, the Curse Workers series, Doll Bones, and The Coldest Girl in Coldtown. Her most recent novel is The Silver Mask, fourth in the Magisterium series co-authored with Cassandra Clare. A new series by Black will launch early in 2018 with The Cruel Prince. She is the recipient of both an Andre Norton Award and a Newbery Honor. She lives in New England with her husband and son in a house with a secret door.

  Richard Bowes moved from Boston to Manhattan in 1965 and has lived there ever since. He has published six novels, four story collections, and over seventy short stories. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, and Lambda, Million Writer, and International Horror Guild Awards. His novel Dust Devil on a Quiet Street was on the World Fantasy and Lambda short lists. His novelette “Sleep Walking Now and Then” was on the Nebula short list. Recent appearances include: Tor.com, F&SF, Lightspeed, Interfictions, Uncanny, and the anthologies XIII, The Doll Collection, Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, and Best Gay Stories 2016.

  Karl Bunker’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, Interzone, Cosmos, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, and elsewhere. In the past Bunker has been a software developer, jeweler, musical instrument maker, sculptor, and mechanical technician. He currently lives in a small town north of Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife, sundry pets, and an assortment of wildlife.

  Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times–bestselling author of the young adult novels Magonia and Aerie, the dark fantasy/alt-history novel Queen of Kings, the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes, and The End of the Sentence, a novella co-written with Kat Howard. With Neil Gaiman, she is the New York Times–bestselling co-editor of the monster anthology Unnatural Creatures. Although she grew up in rural Idaho, she now lives in Brooklyn.

  Kat Howard lives and writes in New Hampshire. Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, performed on NPR, and anthologized in “year’s best” and “best of ” volumes. In the past, she’s been a competitive fencer, a lawyer, and a college professor. Her debut novel, Roses and Rot, was released by Saga Press in 2016. Another novel, An Unkindness of Magicians—a fantasy thriller featuring New York City’s magicians—was published in fall 2017. Her short fiction collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, will be released in 2018.

  N(ora). K. Jemisin lives and writes in Brooklyn. She won the Locus Award for her first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and her short fiction and novels have been nominated multiple times for Hugo, World Fantasy, Nebula, and RT Reviewers Choice awards, and shortlisted for the Crawford and the James Tiptree, Jr., awards. In 2016, she became the first black person to win the Best Novel Hugo for The Fifth Season, which was also a New York Times Notable Book of 2015. Her latest novel, The Stone Sky, is the final title in The Broken Earth trilogy. She currently writes a New York Times book review column covering the latest in science fiction and fantasy.

  World Fantasy Award–winning author Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of numerous comic books and thirteen novels, including Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree, and The Drowning Girl. She has authored more than 200 works of short fiction, much of which has been collected in fifteen volumes. Kiernan’s most recent long work is Agents of Dreamland. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she was raised and trained as a vertebrate paleontologist in the southeastern United States. She currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

  In the last seven years, New York Times–bestselling author Seanan McGuire (and her science-fiction thriller-writer pseudonym Mira Grant) has published more than two-dozen novels and over seventy-five short stories. The most recent novel is the eleventh book in her Hugo-nominated October Daye series, The Brightest Fell. Winner of the 2010 Campbell Award for Best New Writer, McGuire is a native Californian who now lives in Washington State. Her 2017 standalone urban fantasy/ghost story novella Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day (Tor. com Publishing) has been called “a spooky, atmospheric love letter to New York.”

  George R. R. Martin is best known for his international bestselling A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, which has been adapted into the HBO dramatic series Game of Thrones. Martin serves as Game of Thrones’ co-executive producer—for which he has received two Emmys—and has scripted four episodes of the series. Time named him one of the “2011 Time 100,” a list of the “most influential people in the world.” The winner of many other awards—including six Hugos and two Nebulas—he was given the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2012. Martin was born and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, and now resides with his wife, Parris, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  Naomi Novik’s first novel, His Majesty’s Dragon, was published in 2006 along with the next two novels of the Temeraire series: Throne of Jade and Black Powder War. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. The fourth volume of Temeraire, Empire of Ivory, was a New York Times bestseller, and was followed by bestsellers Victory of Eagles, Tongues of Serpents, Crucible of Gold, and Blood of Tyrants. The ninth and final volume of the series, League of Dragons, was published in 2016. Her novel Uprooted (2015) was nominated for a Hugo Award; all of Temeraire was nominated for the Hugo for Best Series in 2017. Novik lives in New York City with her husband and eight computers

  Daniel José Older is the Brooklyn-based writer, editor, composer, and New York Times–bestselling author of Salsa Nocturna, the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, and the Young Adult novel Shadowshaper, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, which won the International Latino Book Award and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers’ Literature, the Andre Norton Award, the Locus, the Mythopoeic Award, and named one of Esquire’s “80 Books Every Person Should Read.” His most recent novel is Shadowhouse Fall, sequel to Shadowshaper.

  Born into a Navy family, Kit Reed moved so often as a kid that she never settled down in one place. Author of sixteen novels, the most recent of which is Mormama, which unfolds in a deteriorating mansion on a once-distinguished street in Jacksonville, Florida. Other recent books include the collection The Story Until Now. A Guggenheim fellow, she is the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. A longtime member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she serves as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University and lives in Middletown, Connecticut.

  Delia Sherman was born in Tokyo and brought up in Manhattan. The author of numerous short stories, her adult novels include Through a Brazen Mirror and The Porcelain Dove (which won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award), and, with Ellen Kushner, The Fall of the Kings. Her novels for younger readers are Changeling, The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen, The Freedom Maze, and The Evil Wizard Smallbone. Sherman lives in New York City with her wife and sometime collaborator, Ellen Kushner, loves to travel, and writes in cafés wherever in the world she finds herself.

  Author, screenwriter, and musician John Shirley spent some of the eighties in New York City where, with his band, Obsession, he signed a record deal, made a record, and played at CBGB, the Pyramid, and other NYC venues. The city in the 1980s is the scene and inspiration for his terrifying cult classic novel Cellars. He is the author of more than forty novels and many of his numerous shorter works have been gathered in nine collections. He lived in California for many years and now resides in Washington State near Portland, Oregon.

  Peter Straub is the New York Times–bestselling author of nineteen novels. His shorter fiction has been gathered in five collections. Straub is the editor of numerous anthologies, including the two-volume The American Fantastic Tale from the Library of America. He was born in Wisconsin, eventually got an MA from Columbia, lived in Dublin and London, and in the early eighties moved with his family into a brownstone on the Upper West Side where they l
ived until recently. He and his wife, Susan, now live in Brooklyn.

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Paula Guran has never lived in New York City, but she loves to visit there. She’s the senior editor of Prime Books and has edited more than forty anthologies as well as more than eighty novels and collections. She is the mother of four, mother-in-law of two, and grandmother of three (so far) fabulous grandchildren. Guran resides in Akron, Ohio (not to confused with the village of 2,868 in Erie County, New York), in a house three years shy of being 100 years old.