Dark Cities

by Christopher Golden

  She held her phone up and grinned. “Me. Whatcha want me to check?”

  “Um… do you think I could speak with your friend?”

  Her grin returned to a frown. “Sure. Her name’s Trisha Yates. You want me to email it to you?”

  “Please.” Even though she was still skittish about her office, Elliott returned and closed her door. There was no need in Lesley overhearing this particular conversation.

  Out of habit, she glanced to the office across the way to see her “friend.”

  Her heart stopped beating.

  He was hanging from the ceiling, swinging in front of his desk.

  No! It wasn’t possible. She closed her eyes and covered them with her hands. It’s not real. It’s not real…

  But it was. As soon as she opened her eyes, she saw him across the way. Medics were swarming his office, cutting him down.

  He was dead. Her unknown partner across the way was gone.

  All of a sudden, both of her phones started ringing. Gasping, she jumped. She grabbed her cell phone. “Hello?”

  No one was there.

  Same for the office phone. All she heard was a dial tone.

  “It doesn’t hurt, you know.”

  She spun at the sound of a male voice behind her. It was the ghostly image of the man from the other building. “W-w-what doesn’t hurt?” It was like someone else had control of her body. She was strangely calm and yet inwardly she was freaking out.

  “Death. We all die.” He walked through her.

  Breathless, scared and shaking, she watched as he continued past her, to the wall. He went through it and walked back to his cubicle in the other building.

  No… No…

  No!

  As soon as the ghost was over there, the corpse which was now lying on the floor turned its head toward her and smiled.

  She stumbled back into the door. Terrified, she spun around and clawed at the handle until she was able to open it.

  Lesley met her on the other side. “Okay, you are seriously starting to freak me out. What’s going on?”

  I’m locked in a horror movie.

  She didn’t dare say that out loud. Les would never understand.

  Without a word, she headed for the bathroom with her phone. She pulled up the email and then dialed the number.

  “Hello?”

  Wow, the exorcist sounded remarkably normal. Even friendly. “Is this Trisha?”

  “Yes. You are…” She paused as if searching the cosmos for an answer. “Elliott Lawson.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I’m psychic, sweetie. I know many things.”

  Elliott wasn’t so sure she liked the sound of that. But before she could comment, the phone went dead. She growled in frustration as she tried to dial it again.

  Nothing went through.

  Instead, her email filled up with more postings from Helga…

  And other authors, too—some of whom she hadn’t worked with for several years.

  “Why did you refuse to renew my contract?”

  Elliott shrieked at the mousy voice that came out of a stall near her. A woman in her mid-thirties came out. Her skin had a grayish cast to it and her eyes were dark and soulless.

  “Emily? What are you doing here?” Emily had been one of her first authors she’d bought as a new hire. They’d had a good ten-book run before Elliott had made the decision to cut her from their schedule. While Emily’s numbers had held steady, they hadn’t grown. Every editor was held accountable for their bottom line and Emily had been hurting her chances for advancement. So Elliott had decided to move on to another author.

  “Why did you do it? I was in the middle of a series. I had fans and was growing. I don’t understand.”

  “It was business.”

  Emily shook her head. “It wasn’t business. I can count off three dozen other authors who don’t sell as well as I did who you’ve kept on all these years.”

  “Not true.” She always cut anyone who couldn’t pull their weight.

  Emily looked down at her arms, then held them up for Elliott to see. “I killed myself over it. After five years of us talking on the phone and working together, you didn’t even send over a card for my funeral. Not one stinking, lousy card.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You didn’t care.”

  Elliott struggled to dial her phone. “You’re not dead. This is a nightmare.”

  “I’m dead. Damned to hell for my suicide because of you!” Her eyes turned a bright, evil red as the skin on her face evaporated to that of a leather-fleshed ghoul. She rushed at Elliott.

  Screaming, Elliott ran for the door.

  The handle was no longer there. She was trapped inside.

  With Emily.

  Terrified and shaking, she pounded on the door with her fist. “Help me! Please! Someone help me!”

  Emily grabbed her from behind and yanked on her hair. “That’s what I begged for. Night, after night, after night. But no one answered my pleas either. I spent two years trying to get another contract and no one would touch me because of the lies you told about me. All I ever dreamed about was being an author. I didn’t want much. Just enough to live on. Two books a year. But you couldn’t allow me to have that, could you? You ruined me.”

  “I’m sorry, Emily.”

  “It’s too late for sorry.” Emily slung her through the door.

  Elliott pulled up short as she found herself back in her office. Only it was hot in here. Unbearable. She went to the window to open it.

  She couldn’t.

  When she tried to turn the furnace down, it burned her hand. It whined before it spewed steam all over her.

  She turned to run only to find more hateful notes from Helga.

  Suddenly laughter rang out. It filled the room and echoed in her ears.

  She spun around, doing her best to locate the source. At first there was no one there. No one until Lesley appeared in the corner.

  Elliott ran to her and grabbed her close, holding on to her like a lifeline. “I need to go home, Les. Right now.”

  “You are home, Elliott. This is where you spend all of your time. This is what you love. It’s all you love.” Lesley pulled out her chair and held it for her. “Go ahead. Reject those books. Crush more writers’ dreams. You’re famous for not pulling punches. For telling it like it is. Go on. I know how much you relish giving your honest, unvarnished opinion.”

  A thousand crying voices rang out in a harsh, cacophonous symphony.

  Your writing is amateurish and pedestrian. Do not waste my time with any further submissions. I only give one per customer and your number is up.

  If you can’t take my criticism, then you’ve no business being a writer. Trust me. I’m a lot kinder than your readers, if you ever have any, will be.

  While I found the idea intriguing, your writing was such that I couldn’t get past the second page. I suggest you learn a modicum of grammar or better yet, stick to blog posts and Twitter feeds for your creative outlet.

  Over and over, she was inundated with rejections and comments she’d written to authors.

  And for once, she realized just how harsh they were.

  Elliott shook her head, trying to clear it. “Helga! Why are you haunting me? Why can’t you leave me in peace?”

  Lesley tsked at her. “Oh, honey, Helga isn’t haunting you.”

  “Yes, she is. I know I should have gone to her funeral, but—”

  “Elliott, Helga didn’t die.” Lesley gestured toward her computer monitor. Her email vanished to show an image of Helga happily at work in her office. “You did.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Laughing, Lesley transformed into the image of a red demon with glowing yellow eyes. “Welcome to hell, my dear. From this day forward and throughout all eternity, you will get to be Helga’s editor. Oh and I should mention, she’s now doing a book a week.”

  GRAFFITI OF THE LOST AND DYING PLACES

&nbs
p; by

  SEANAN MCGUIRE

  The Financial District was a corpse in the twilight. The streets lay empty, gutters choked with trash from the dearly departed workday. Sidewalks that had been crowded and vital only a few hours before seemed cracked and long-deserted, like no one had walked them in a hundred years. The faint smell of decaying food, human urine, and despair hung over everything like a shroud.

  A few stores at the district’s edge were still illuminated, flickering neon signs hanging in their windows to lure weary travelers and overtime wage slaves into the comfortingly stale air inside. The shelves in those stores were always too close together, forcing all but the slimmest consumers to walk awkwardly sideways, eyes scanning the array of stale crackers and aging chocolate until they found something that looked, if not nutritious, at least palatable; some small morsel of fat and empty carbohydrates to get them home.

  Lindy drooped at the counter of one such nameless convenience store, chin propped on her hand and her eyes fixed on the security monitor. It was split into four quadrants, one for each of the two aisles, one for the register, and one for the street outside. Nothing had moved on any of them for over an hour, not since she’d watched the last businessman run for the subway entrance, coat flapping behind him like the wings of some great and bewildered moth. She hoped, in a vague way, that he’d managed to catch his train home. This was no place to be stranded.

  She glanced at the clock. She was only going to be stranded for another four hours and twenty-six minutes.

  “Piece of cake,” she mumbled, letting her head fall forward until it hit the counter with a gentle “bonk.” She left it there. The wood was cool against her forehead, and besides, she hadn’t had a customer since before the businessman ran by. She was alone. She could take a breather.

  The bell over the door chimed gently, and was still.

  Lindy sat upright, suddenly so stiff that her shoulders felt as if they’d been wrenched back by an invisible hand. She scanned the aisles, and when that didn’t reveal a customer, she looked to the monitor, searching for signs of movement. Nothing moved. Nothing failed to move, either: there were no strange shadows or unexplained silhouettes reported by her cameras. She was as alone now as she’d been since the start of her shift, when Zack had fled for the door with a quickly muttered “the bathroom’s out of order again” and a wave as perfunctory as it was insincere. For the most part, she didn’t mind the fact that her interactions with her coworkers never amounted to anything of substance. It hurt less that way.

  This store had been standing for sixty years, successful in the beginning, when the neighborhood around it had thrived, then aging and becoming more run-down as the neighborhood around it fell into decline. Now, with the Financial District doing so much better than those little Mom-and-Pop businesses that used to fill the streets, with its tall towers lighting up the sky every time the sun rose, with its well-groomed worshippers flooding the sidewalks every morning on their way to their sweet and soulless church, it would have made sense for the store’s business to boom. It didn’t. It was dying, an inch at a time, snubbed by those same worshippers, who saw neon signs and cluttered shelves as signs of shabbiness, and not proof that this was a place that knew the city better than any of their workplaces, which still smelled faintly of sawdust and fresh paint.

  Lindy had been nine years old the first time she heard the word “gentrification,” still ten years out from her job at the edge of the Financial District, but she’d recognized it for the venomous thing it was the moment its syllables were loosed into the air. Gentrification slithered and struck, sapping the good things from the places it hunted until all that remained was an empty shell that had once been a healthy community. Gentrification raised prices until the folks who’d lived and died in a neighborhood couldn’t even afford to haunt it anymore.

  It had started small here. A new high-rise in a vacant lot, the sort of thing no one could object to: the space had been going wanting, after all, and didn’t that tower sparkle pretty in the sun? The people who came to work there shopped at the local stores and ate at the local restaurants, and it wasn’t a bad thing, no, not at all. It brought money to the neighborhood. Everyone liked money.

  Especially the landlords, who’d seen the potential for more money and started raising rents at a rate no one could keep up with. Half the little stores the new businesspeople had been shopping at were closed within the year, soaped-up windows looking in on empty, dusty rooms. Only a few of them found new tenants. The rest were sold, demolished, replaced with more high-rises, this time with built-in retail space at their foundations, perfect little boxes waiting for perfect little franchise locations with familiar logos and comforting designs. Some people objected. Some people always objected. The rest said look, isn’t this just capitalism in action? The businesses that closed were old, tired, ready to be replaced by something new and vital and capable of contributing to the neighborhood. It was still mostly the same as it had ever been, right? Let change come. Let revitalization happen.

  Change came. Revitalization happened, if revitalization meant new money and more money and all the old neighbors leaving and all the old stores closing, until it was just the Financial District, nothing more; until the history was fading, a footnote in the story of the city. Until the whole neighborhood became a vampire in reverse, dying when the sun went down, springing back to life every morning.

  It was only a matter of time before the Financial District got hungry again, before the landlord who owned this building heard the siren song of revitalization and raised the rent past what the owners could afford. When that happened, Lindy would be out of a job, and would go looking for something else to keep body and soul together. And odds were that she’d find it at the blasted outer edge of the revitalization zone, where the people with any prospects at all had already seen the writing on the wall and moved on.

  Sometimes she envied them for having that kind of foresight, for being flexible enough to trade no-name Mom-and-Pop convenience stores for the security of 7-11 or Quiznos or whatever the hot new thing to cram into prefab retail space was these days. Lindy couldn’t do it. She loved the weird little hole-in-the-wall places that paid her rent, loved the uniqueness of each one, the way they all had their own characters and personalities. Buildings could be people: she’d decided that a long time ago. So could businesses. These little stores lived, in their way, until gentrification and revitalization came along and drained them dry.

  She couldn’t save them. She couldn’t even save herself. But she could stand witness as they died, and maybe that wasn’t enough, but it was more than most people seemed willing to do.

  The bell above the door jingled again. Lindy looked up. The monitors were empty.

  “Fucking earthquakes,” she muttered, and went back to her long, quiet vigil, while the Financial District slept outside, and the last living pieces of the great beast that had been the old neighborhood trembled, waiting for their hour to come.

  * * *

  Her shift ended when it was supposed to end: no surprises there, not tonight, not tomorrow, not the next night, or the night after, as her tenure as clerk for this inconvenience store inched toward its close. She counted out the register, put the night’s proceeds—such as they were—into the safe, made the little notes that made the owners happy, and locked the door. They used to be open twenty-four hours a day. Now they closed at midnight. There was a hand-written apology taped to the inside of the door, explaining to their long-time customers—the five or six who remained—that this was a cost-cutting measure and would only last until business improved. Business wasn’t going to improve. Lindy knew it; the owners knew it; the customers knew it. This was last call. Chairs on the tables, please clean up behind yourself on the way out the door.

  She had run into one of their regulars a week ago, when some imp of the perverse had driven her into the 7-11 down the block to buy a gallon of milk. She felt bad about being unfaithful to the ghost of the old neighborh
ood, but she also worked for minimum wage, and she felt good about paying two bucks less for her dairy. Carl had been standing at the counter, waiting to pay for his coffee. He hadn’t been by the store in almost a month, and he’d reddened when he saw her, like she’d caught him cheating. In a way, perhaps she had. But then, in a way, she was cheating too, so she’d simply given him a genial nod and gone about her business. By the time she’d reached the counter with her milk, he’d been gone.

  She locked the door, shoved her hands into her pockets for warmth, and turned her back on the silent, pristine monstrosity that was the Financial District. She’d be miles away when it shambled back to life, in the room she was subletting on the other side of the city, in a neighborhood that wasn’t her own, that would never be home. The apartment building she’d grown up in had been right at the heart of the gentrification. It was still there, unlike so many others, rebuilt and improved and turned into live/work spaces for people who thought it was just so great to live in the city where so many things had happened, where now they could start happening. She’d managed to hold out through three rent increases, but like so many others, in the end, she just couldn’t hold on.

  No one could, when money came to town.

  The further Lindy walked from the Financial District, the more the gangrene of gentrification appeared around her. There was always graffiti in the city—she knew some of the artists personally, admired their work, loved the way they could make a political statement in freehand spray paint—but the graffiti here was crude, angry, more swear words, more enormous painted genitalia, none of the finesse or subtlety she’d seen in the murals that still sprang up in healthier neighborhoods. FUCK THE RICH said one wall, and THEY’VE ALREADY FUCKED US said another, and she didn’t disagree.

  The stores here were still small, still varied: no chains or outlets, not yet. Give it time, she thought. The tendrils of the Financial District were ever-reaching and ever-hungry, searching for their next victim even as they twined around their current one. Money would come here, as it had come everywhere else, and these sickening streets would succumb to an infection they didn’t even know they had.