Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of seven novels, including the award-winning Threshold and, most recently, Daughter of Hounds and The Red Tree. Her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; A Is for Alien; and The Ammonite Violin & Others. Her erotica has been collected in two volumes—Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. She is currently beginning work on her eighth novel, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and a science fiction novella, The Dinosaurs of Mars. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

1

It is not an ostentatious museum. Rather, it is only the sort of museum that best suits this modern, industrious city at the edge of the high Colorado plains. This city, with its sooty days and dusty, crowded streets and night skies that glow an angry orange from the dragon’s breath of half a hundred Bessemer converters. The museum is a dignified yet humble assemblage of geological wonders, intended as much for the delight and edification of miners and millworkers, blacksmiths and butchers, as it is for the parvenu and old-money families of Capitol Hill. Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy, both founder and curator of this Colectanea rerum memorabilium, has always considered himself a progressive sort, and he has gone so far as to set aside one day each and every month when the city’s negroes, coolies, and red Indians are permitted access to his cabinet, free of charge. Professor Ogilvy would—and frequently has—referred to his museum as a most modest endeavor, one whose principal mission is to reveal, to all the populace of Cherry Creek, the long-buried mysteries of those fantastic, vanished cycles of the globe. Too few suspect the marvels that lie just beneath their feet or entombed in the ridges and peaks of the snowcapped Chippewan Mountains bordering the city to the west. Cherry Creek looks always to the problems of its present day, and to the riches and prosperity that may await those who reach its future, but with hardly a thought to spare for the past, and this is the sad oversight addressed by the Ogilvy Gallery of Natural Antiquities.

Before Professor Ogilvy leased the enormous redbrick building on Kipling Street (erected during the waning days of the silver boom of 1879), it served as a warehouse for a firm specializing in the import of exotic dry goods, mainly spices from Africa and the East Indies. And to this day, it retains a distinctive, piquant redolence. Indeed, at times the odor is so strong that a sobriquet has been bestowed upon the museum—Ogilvy’s Pepper Pot. It is not unusual to see visitors of either gender covering their noses with handkerchiefs and sleeves, and oftentimes the solemnity of the halls is shattered by hacking coughs and sudden fits of sneezing. Regardless, the professor has insisted time and again that the structure is perfectly matched to his particular needs, and how the curiosity of man is not to be deterred by so small an inconvenience as the stubborn ghosts of turmeric and curry powder, coriander and mustard seed. Besides, the apparently indelible odor helps to insure that his rents will stay reasonable.

On this June afternoon, the air in the building seems a bit fresher than usual, despite the oppressive heat that comes with the season. In the main hall, Jeremiah Ogilvy has been occupied for almost a full hour now, lecturing the ladies of the Cherry Creek chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Mrs. Belford and her companions sit on folding chairs, fanning themselves and diligently listening while this slight, earnest, and bespectacled man describes for them the reconstructed fossil skeleton displayed behind him.

“The great anatomist, Baron Cuvier, wrote of the Plesiosaurus, ‘it presents the most monstrous assemblage of characteristics that has been met with among the races of the ancient world.’ Now, I would have you know it isn’t necessary to take this expression literally. There are no monsters in nature, as the Laws of Organization are never so positively infringed.”

“Well, it looks like a monster to me,” mutters Mrs. Larimer, seated near the front. “I would certainly hate to come upon such a thing slithering toward me along a riverbank. I should think I’d likely perish of fright, if nothing else.”

There’s a subdued titter of laughter from the group, and Mrs. Belford frowns. The professor forces a ragged smile and repositions his spectacles on the bridge of his nose.

“Indeed,” he sighs, and glances away from his audience, looking over his shoulder at the skillful marriage of plaster and stone and welded-steel armature.

“However,” he continues, “be that as it may, it is more accordant with the general perfection of Creation to see in an organization so special as this”—and, with his ashplant, he points once more to the plesiosaur—“to recognize in a structure which differs so notably from that of animals of our days—the simple augmentation of type, and sometimes also the beginning and successive perfecting of these beings. Therefore, let us dismiss this idea of monstrosity, my good Mrs. Larimer, a concept which can only mislead us, and only cause us to consider these antediluvian beasts as digressions. Instead, let us look upon them, not with disgust. Let us learn, on the contrary, to perceive in the plan traced for their organization, the handiwork of the Creator of all things, as well as the general plan of Creation.”

“How very inspirational.” Mrs. Belford beams, and when she softly claps her gloved hands, the others follow her example. Professor Ogilvy takes this as his cue that the ladies of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union have heard all they wish to hear this afternoon on the subject of the giant plesiosaur, recently excavated in Kansas from the chalky banks of the Smoky Hill River. As one of the newer additions to his menagerie, it now frequently forms the centerpiece of the professor’s daily presentations.

When the women have stopped clapping, Mrs. Larimer dabs at her nose with a swatch of perfumed silk and loudly clears her throat.

“Yes, Mrs. Larimer? A question?” Professor Ogilvy asks, turning back to the women. Mr. Larimer—an executive with the Front Range offices of the German airship company Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Luftschiffahrt—has donated a sizable sum to the museum’s coffers, and it’s no secret that his wife believes her husband’s charity would be best placed elsewhere.

“I mean no disrespect, professor, but it strikes me that perhaps you have gone and mistaken the provenance of that beast’s design. For my part, it’s far easier to imagine such a fiend being more at home in the sulfurous tributaries of Hell than the waters of any earthly ocean. Perhaps, my good doctor, it may be that you are merely mistaken about the demon’s having ever been buried. Possibly, to the contrary, it is something which clawed its way up from the Pit.”

Jeremiah Ogilvy stares at her a moment, aware that it’s surely wisest to humor this disagreeable woman. To nod and smile and make no direct reply to such absurd remarks. But he has always been loathe to suffer fools, and has never been renowned as the most politic of men, often to his detriment. He makes a steeple of his hands and rests his chin upon his fingertips as he replies.

“And yet,” he says, “oddly, you’ll note that on both its fore and hind limbs, each fashioned into paddles, this underworld fiend of yours entirely lacks claws. Don’t you think, Mrs. Larimer, that we might fairly expect such modifications, something not unlike the prominent ungula of a mole, perhaps? Or the robust nails of a Cape anteater? I mean, that’s a terrible lot of digging to do, all the way from Perdition to the prairies of Gove County.”

There’s more laughter, an uneasy smattering that echoes beneath the high ceiling beams, and it elicits another scowl from an embarrassed Mrs. Belford. But the professor has cast his lot, as it were, for better or worse, and he keeps his eyes fixed upon Mrs. Charles W. Larimer. She looks more chagrined than angry, and any trace of her former bluster has faded away.

“As you say, professor.” She manages to make the last three syllables sound like a badge of wickedness.

“Very well, then,” Professor Ogilvy says, turning to Mrs. Belford. “Perhaps I could interest you gentlewomen in the celebrated automatic mastodon, a bona fide masterpiece of clockwork engineering and steam power—so realistic in movement and appearance you might well mistake it for the living thing, newly resurrected from some boggy Pleistocene quagmire.”

“Oh, yes. I think that would be fascinating,” Mrs. Belford replies, and soon the women are being led from the main gallery up a steep flight of stairs to the mezzanine, where the automatic mastodon and the many engines and hydraulic hoses that control it have been installed. It stands alongside a finely preserved skeleton of Mammut americanum unearthed by prospectors in the Yukon and shipped to the gallery at some considerable expense.

“Why, it’s nothing but a great hairy elephant,” Mrs. Larimer protests, but this time none of the others appear to pay her much mind. Professor Ogilvy’s fingers move over the switches and dials on the brass control panel, and soon the automaton is stomping its massive feet and flapping its ears and filling the hot, pepper-scented air with the trumpeting of extinct Pachydermata.

2

When the ladies of the Temperance Union have gone, and after Jeremiah Ogilvy has seen to the arrival of five heavy crates of saurian bones from one of his collectors working out of Monterey, and, then, after he has spoken with his chief preparator about an overdue shipment of blond Kushmi shellac, ammonia, and sodium borate, he checks his pocket watch and locks the doors of the museum. Though there has been nothing excessively trying about the day—not even the disputatious Mrs. Larimer caused him more than a passing annoyance—Professor Ogilvy finds he’s somewhat more weary than usual and is looking forward to his bed with an especial zeal. All the others have gone, his small staff of technicians, sculptors, and naturalists, and he retires to his office and puts the kettle on to boil. He has a fresh tin of Formosa oolong and decides that this evening he’ll take his tea up on the roof.

Most nights, there’s a fine view from the gallery roof, and he can watch the majestic airships docking at the Arapahoe Station dirigible terminal or just shut his eyes and take in the commingled din of human voices and buckboards, the heavy clop of horses’ hooves and the comforting pandemonium made by the locomotives passing through the city along the Colorado and Northern Kansas Railway.

He hangs the tea egg over the rim of his favorite mug and is preparing to pour the hot water, when the office doorknob rattles and neglected hinges creak like inconvenienced rodents. Jeremiah looks up, not so much alarmed as taken by surprise, and is greeted by the familiar—but certainly unexpected—face and pale blue eyes of Dora Bolshaw. She holds up her key, tied securely on a frayed length of calico ribbon, to remind him that he never took it back and to remove any question as to how she gained entry to the locked museum after hours. Dora Bolshaw is an engine mechanic for the Rocky Mountain Reconsolidated Fuel Company, and because of this and her habit of dressing always in men’s clothes, and the fact that her hands and face are only rarely anything approaching clean, she is widely and mistakenly believed to be an inveterate sapphist. Dora is, of course, shunned by more proper women—such as, for instance, Mrs. Charles W. Larimer—who blanche at the thought of dames et lesbiennes walking free and unfettered in their midst. Dora has often mused that, despite her obvious preference for men, she is surely the most renowned bull dyke west of the Mississippi.

“Slipping in like a common sneak thief,” Jeremiah sighs, reaching for a second cup. “I trust you recollect the combination to the strongbox, along with the whereabouts of that one loose floorboard.”

“I most assuredly do,” she replies. “Like they were the finest details of the back of my hand. Like it was only yesterday you went and divulged those confidences.”

“Very good, Miss Bolshaw. Then, I trust this means we can forgo the messy gunplay and knives and whatnot?”

She steps into the office and pulls the door shut behind her, returning the key to a pocket of her waistcoat. “If that’s your fancy, professor. If it’s only a peaceable sort of evening you’re after.”

Filling his mug from the steaming kettle, submerging the mesh ball of the tea egg and the finely ground leaves, Jeremiah shrugs and nods at a chair near his desk.

“Do you still take two lumps?” he asks her.

“Provided you got nothing stronger,” she says, and only hesitates a moment before crossing the room to the chair.

“No,” Jeremiah tells her. “Nothing stronger. If I recall, we had an agreement, you and I?”

“You want your key back?”

Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy pours hot water into a teacup, adds a second tea egg, and very nearly asks if she imagines that his feelings have changed since the last time they spoke. It’s been almost six months since the snowy January night when he asked her to marry him. Dora laughed, thinking it only a poor joke at first. But when pressed, she admitted she was not the least bit interested in marriage and, what’s more, confessed she was even less amenable to giving up her work at the mines to bear and raise children. When she suggested that he board up his museum, instead, and for a family take in one or two of the starving guttersnipes who haunt Colliers’ Row, there was an argument. Before it was done, he said spiteful things, cruel jibes aimed at all the tender spots she’d revealed to him over the years of their courtship. And he knew, even as he spoke the words, that there would be no taking them back. The betrayal of Dora’s trust came too easily, the turning of her confidences against her, and she is not a particularly forgiving woman. So, tonight, he only almost asks, then thinks better of the question and holds his tongue.

“It’s your key,” he says. “Keep it. You may have need of it again one day.”

“Fine,” Dora replies, letting the chair rock back on two legs. “It’s your funeral, Jeremiah.”

“Can I ask why you’re here? That is, to what do I owe this unheralded pleasure?”

“You may,” she says, staring now at a fossil ammonite lying in a cradle of excelsior on his desk. “It’s bound to come out, sooner or later. But if you’re thinking maybe I come looking for old times or a quick poke—”

“I wasn’t,” he lies, interrupting her.

“Well, good. Because I ain’t.”

“Which begs the question. And it’s been a rather tedious day, Miss Bolshaw, so if we can dispense with any further niceties…”

Dora coughs and leans forward, the front legs of her chair bumping loudly against the floor. Jeremiah keeps his eyes on the two cups of tea, each one turned as dark now as a sluggish, tannin-stained bayou.

“I’m guessing that you still haven’t seen anyone about that cough,” he says. “And that it hasn’t improved.”

Dora coughs again before answering him, then wipes at her mouth with an oil-stained handkerchief. “Good to see time hasn’t dulled your mental faculties,” she mutters hoarsely, breathlessly, then clears her throat and wipes her mouth again.

“It doesn’t sound good, Dora, that’s all. You spend too much time in the tunnels. Plenty enough people die from anthracosis without ever having lifted a pickax or loaded a mine car, as I’m sure you’re well aware.”

“I also didn’t come here to discuss my health,” she tells him, stuffing the handkerchief back into a trouser pocket. “It’s the stink of this place, gets me wheezing, that’s all. I swear, Jeremiah, the air in this dump, it’s like trying to breathe inside a goddamn burr grinder that’s been used to mill capsicum and black powder.”

“No argument there,” he says, and takes the tea eggs from the cups and sets them aside on a dish towel. “But I still don’t know why you’re here.”

“Been some odd goings-on down in Shaft Number Seven, ever since they started back in working on the Molly Gray vein.”

“I thought Shaft Seven flooded in October,” Jeremiah says, and he adds two sugar cubes to Dora’s cup. The professor has never taken his tea sweetened, nor with lemon, cream, or whiskey, for that matter. When he drinks tea, it’s the tea he wants to taste.

“They pumped it out a while back, got the operation up and running again. Anyway, one of the foremen knew we were acquainted and asked if I’d mind. Paying you a call, I mean.”

“Do you?” he asks, carrying the cups to the desk.

“Do I what?”

“Do you mind, Miss Bolshaw?”

She glares at him a moment, then takes her cup and lets her eyes wander back to the ammonite on the desk.

“So, these odd goings-on. Can you be more specific?”

“I can, if you’ll give me a chance. You ever heard of anyone finding living creatures sealed up inside solid rock, two thousand feet below ground?”

He watches her a moment, to be sure this isn’t a jest.

“You’re saying this has happened, in Shaft Seven?”

She sips at her tea, then sets the cup on the edge of the desk and picks up the ammonite. The fossilized mother-of-pearl glints iridescent shades of blue-green and scarlet and gold in the dim gaslight of the office.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. And I seen most of them for myself, so I know it’s not just miners spinning tall tales.”

“Most of them? So it’s happened more than once?”

Dora ignores the questions, turning the ammonite over and over in her hands.

“I admit,” she says, “I was more than a little skeptical at first. There’s a shale bed just below the Molly Gray seam, and it’s chock-full of siderite nodules. Lots of them have fossils inside. Matter of fact, I think I brought a couple of boxes over to you last summer, before the shaft started taking water.”

“You did. There were some especially nice seed ferns in them, as I recall.”

“Right. Well, anyhow, a few days back I started hearing these wild stories, that someone had cracked open a nodule and found a live frog trapped inside. And then a spider. And then worms, and so on. When I asked around about it, I was directed to the geologist’s shack, and sure as hell, there were all these things lined up in jars, things that come out of the nodules. Mostly, they were dead. Most of them died right after they came out of the rocks, or so I’m told.”

Dora stops talking and returns the ammonite shell to its box. Then she glances at Jeremiah and takes another sip of her tea.

“And you know it’s not a hoax?” he asks her. “I mean, you know it’s not tomfoolery, just some of the miners taking these things down with them from the surface, then claiming to have found them in the rocks? Maybe having a few laughs at the expense of their supervisors?”

“Now, that was my first thought.”

“But then you saw something that changed your mind,” Jeremiah says. “And that’s why you’re here tonight.”

Dora Bolshaw takes a deep breath, and Jeremiah thinks she’s about to start coughing again. Instead, she nods and exhales slowly. He notices beads of sweat standing out on her upper lip and wonders if she’s running a fever.

“I’m here tonight, Professor Ogilvy, because two men are dead. But, yeah, since you asked, I’ve seen sufficient evidence to convince me this ain’t just some jackass thinks he’s funny. When I voiced my doubts, Charlie McNamara split one of those nodules open right there in front of me. Concretion big around as my fist,” and she holds up her left hand for emphasis. “He took up a hammer and gave it a smart tap on one side so it cleaved in two, pretty as you please. And out crawled a fat red scorpion. You ever seen a red scorpion, Jeremiah?”

And Professor Ogilvy thinks a moment, sipping his tea that’s come all the way from Taipei City, Taiwan. “I’ve seen plenty of reddish brown scorpions,” he says. “For example, Diplocentrus lindo, from the Chihuahuan Desert and parts of Texas. The carapace is, in fact, a dark reddish brown.”

“I didn’t say reddish brown. What I said was red. Red as berries on a holly bush, or a ripe apple. Red as blood, if you want to go get morbid about it.”

“Charlie cracked open a rock from Shaft Number Seven, and a bright red scorpion crawled out. That’s what you’re telling me?”

“I am.” Dora nods. “Bastard had a stinger on him big around as my thumb, and then some.” And now she holds out her thumb.

“And two men at the mines have died because of these scorpions?” Jeremiah Ogilvy asks.

“No. Weren’t scorpions killed them,” she says, and laughs nervously. “But it was something come out those rocks.” And then she frowns down at her teacup and asks the professor if he’s absolutely sure that he doesn’t have anything stronger. And this time, he opens a bottom desk drawer and digs out the pint bottle of rye he keeps there, and he offers it to her. Dora Bolshaw pulls out the cork and pours a generous shot into her teacup, but then she’s coughing again, worse than before, and he watches her and waits for it to pass.

3

What she told him is not without precedent. Over the years, Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy has encountered any number of seemingly inexplicable reports of living inclusions discovered in stones and often inside lumps of coal. Living fossils, after a fashion. He has never once given them credence, but rather looked upon these anecdotes as fine examples of the general gullibility of men, not unlike the taxidermied “jackalopes” he’s seen in shop windows, or tales of ghostly hauntings, or of angels, or the antics of spiritual mediums. They are all quite amusing, these phantasma, until someone insists that they’re true.

For starters, he could point to an 1818 lecture by Dr. Edward Daniel Clarke, the first professor of mineralogy at Cambridge University. Clarke claimed to have been collecting Cretaceous sea urchins when he happened across three newts entombed in the chalk. To his amazement, the amphibians showed signs of life, and though two quickly expired after being exposed to air, the third was so lively that it escaped when he placed it in a nearby pond to aid in its rejuvenation. Or, a case from the summer of 1851, when well diggers in Blois, France, were supposed to have discovered a live toad inside a piece of flint. Indeed, batrachians figure more prominently in these accounts than any other creature, and the professor might also have brought to Dora Bolshaw’s attention yet another toad, said to have been freed from a lump of iron ore the very next year, this time somewhere in the East Midlands of England.

The list goes on and on, reaching back centuries. On May 8, 1733, the Swedish architect Johan Gråberg supposedly witnessed the release of a frog from a block of sandstone. So horrified was Gråberg at the sight that he is said to have beaten the beast to death with a shovel. An account of the incident was summarily published by Gråberg in the Transactions of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, a report which was eventually translated into Dutch, Latin, German, and French.

Too, there is the account from 1575 by the surgeon Ambroise Paré, who claimed a live toad was found inside a stone in his vineyards in Meudon. In 1686, Professor Robert Plot, the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, claimed knowledge of three cases of the “toad-in-the-hole” phenomenon from Britain alone. Hoaxes, perhaps, or only the gullible yarns of a prescientific age, when even learned men were somewhat more disposed to believing the unbelievable.

But Jeremiah Ogilvy mentioned none of these tales. Instead, he sat and sipped his tea and listened while she talked, never once interrupting to give voice to his mounting incredulity. However, her cough forced Dora Bolshaw to stop several times, and, despite the rye whiskey, toward the end of her story she was hoarse and had grown alarmingly pale; her hands were shaking so badly that she had trouble holding her cup steady. And then, when she was done and he was trying to organize his thoughts, she glanced anxiously at the clock and said that she should be going. So he walked her downstairs, past the celebrated automatic mastodon and petrified titanothere skulls and his prized plesiosaur skeleton. Standing on the walkway outside the museum, the night air seemed sweet after the Pepper Pot, despite the soot from the furnaces and the reek from the open ditches lining either side of Kipling Street. He offered to see her home, because the thoroughfares of Cherry Creek have an unsavory reputation after dark, but she laughed at him, and he didn’t offer a second time. He watched until she was out of sight, then went back to his office.

And now it’s almost midnight, and Jeremiah Ogilvy’s teacups sit empty and forgotten while he thinks about toads and stones and considers finishing off the pint of rye. After she told him of the most recent and bizarre and, indeed, entirely impossible discovery from Shaft Seven, the thing that was now being blamed for the deaths of two miners, he agreed to look at it.

“Not it. Her,” Dora said, folding and unfolding her handkerchief. “She came out of the rocks, Jeremiah. Just like that damned red scorpion, she came out of the rocks.”

4

“Then I am dreaming,” he says, relieved, and she smiles, not unkindly. He’s holding her hand, this woman who is by turns Dora Bolshaw and a wispy, nervous girl named Katharine Herschel, whom he courted briefly before leaving New Haven and the comforts of Connecticut for the clamorous frontier metropolis of Cherry Creek. They stand together on some windswept aerie of steel and concrete, looking down upon the night-shrouded city. And Jeremiah holds up an index finger and traces the delicate network of avenues illumined by gas streetlamps. And there, at his fingertip, are the massive hangers and the mooring masts of the Arapahoe Terminal. A dirigible is approaching from the south, parting the omnipresent pall of clouds, and the ship begins a slow, stately turn to starboard. To his eyes, it seems more like some majestic organism than any human fabrication. A heretofore unclassified order of volant Cnidaria, perhaps, titan jellyfish that have forsaken the brine and the “vasty deep” and adapted to a life in the clouds. Watching the dirigible, he imagines translucent, stinging tentacles half a mile long, hanging down from its gondola to snare unwary flocks of birds. The underside of the dirigible blushes yellow-orange as the lacquered cotton of its outer skin catches and reflects the molten light spilling up from all the various ironworks and the copper and silver foundries scattered throughout Cherry Creek. The bones of the world exhumed and smelted to drive the tireless progress of man. He’s filled with pride, gazing out across the city and knowing the small part he has played in birthing this civilization from a desolate wilderness fit for little more than prairie dogs, rattlesnakes, and heathen savages.

“Maybe the world don’t exactly see it that way,” Dora says. “I been thinking lately, maybe she don’t see it that way at all.”

Jeremiah isn’t surprised when tendrils of blue lightning flick down from the coal-smoke sky, and crackling electric streams trickle across rooftops and down the rainspouts of the high buildings.

“Maybe,” Dora continues, “the world has different plans. Maybe she’s had them all along. Maybe, professor, we’ve finally gone and dug too deep in these old mountains.”

But Jeremiah makes a derisive, scoffing noise and shakes his head. And then he recites scripture while the sky rains ultramarine and the shingles and cobblestones sizzle. “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’”

“I don’t recall it saying nothing about whatever creepeth under the earth,” Dora mutters, though now she looks a little more like Katharine Herschel, her blue eyes turning brown, and her trousers traded for a petticoat. “Besides, you’re starting to sound like that idiotic Larimer woman. Didn’t you hear a single, solitary word I said to you?”

Jeremiah raises his hand still higher, as though with only a little more effort he might reach the lightning or the shiny belly of the approaching dirigible or even the face of the Creator, peering down at them through the smoldering haze.

“Is it not fair wondrous?” he asks Dora. But it’s Katharine who answers him, and she only trades him one question for another, repeating Dora’s words.

“Didn’t you hear a single, solitary word I said?”

And they are no longer standing high atop the aerie, but have been grounded again, grounded now. He’s seated with Dora and Charlie McNamara in the cluttered nook that passes for Dora’s office, which is hardly more than a closet, situated at one end of the Rocky Mountain Reconsolidated Fuel Company’s primary machine shop. The room is littered with a rummage of dismembered engines—every tabletop and much of the floor concealed beneath cast-off gears, gauges, sprockets, and flywheels, rusted-out boilers and condensers, warped piston rods and dials with bent needles and cracked faces. There’s a profusion of blueprints and schematics, some tacked to the wall and others rolled up tight and stacked one atop the other like Egyptian papyri or scrolls from the lost Library of Alexandria. Everywhere are empty and half-empty oil cans, and there are any number of tools for which Jeremiah doesn’t know the names.

“Time being, operations have been suspended,” Charlie McNamara says, and then he goes back to using the blade of his pocketknife to dig at the grime beneath his fingernails. “Well, at least that’s the company line. Between you, me, and Miss Bolshaw here, I think Chicago’s having a good long think about sealing off the shaft permanently.”

“Permanently,” Jeremiah whispers, sorry that he can no longer see the skyline or the docking dirigible. “I would imagine that’s going to mean quite a hefty loss, after all the money and work and time required to get the shaft dry and producing again.”

“Be that as it damn may be,” Dora says brusquely, “there’s more at stake here than coal and pit quotas and quarterly profits.”

“Yes, well,” Jeremiah says, staring at the scuffed toes of his boots now. “Then let’s get to it, yes? If I can manage to keep my blasted claustrophobia in check, I’m quite sure we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

No one laughs at the pun, because it isn’t funny, and Jeremiah rubs his aching eyes and wishes again that he were still perched high on the aerie, the night wind roaring in his ears.

“Ain’t she told you?” the company geologist asks, glancing over at Dora. “What I need you to look at, it ain’t in the hole no more. What you need to see, well…” And here he trails off. “It’s locked up in a cell at St. Joseph’s.”

“Locked up?” Jeremiah asks, and the geologist nods.

“Jail would have done her better,” Dora mutters. “You put sick folks in the hospital. Killers you put in jails, or you put a bullet in the skull and be done with it.”

Charlie McNamara tells Dora to please shut the hell up and try not to make things worse than they already are.

Jeremiah shifts uneasily in his chair. “How did the men die? I mean, how exactly?”

“Lungs plumb full up with coal dust,” Charlie says. “Lungs and throat and mouth all stuffed damn near to busting. Doctor, he even found the shit clogging up their stomachs and intestines.”

“Some of the men,” Dora adds, “they say they’ve heard singing down there. Said it was beautiful, the most beautiful music they’ve ever heard.”

“Jesus in a steam wagon, Dora. Ain’t you got an off switch or something? Singing ain’t never killed no one yet, and it sure as hell wasn’t what got that poor pair of bastards.”

And even as the geologist is speaking, the scene shifts again, another unprefaced revolution in this dreaming kaleidoscope reality, and now the halls and exhibits of the Ogilvy Gallery of Natural Antiquities are spread out around him. On Jeremiah’s right, the celebrated automatic mastodon rolls glass eyes, and its gigantic tusks are garnished with a dripping, muculent snarl of vegetation. On his left, the serpentine neck of the Gove County plesiosaur rises gracefully as any swan’s, though he sees that all the fossil bones and the plaster of Paris have been transmutated through some alchemy into cast iron. The metal is marred by a very slight patina of rust, and it occurs to him that, considering the beast’s ferrous metamorphosis, he should remind his staff that they’d best keep the monstrous reptile from swimming or wandering about the rainy streets.

“I cried the day you went away,” Katharine says, because, for the moment, it is Katharine with him again, not Dora. “I wrote a letter, but never sent it. I keep it in a dresser drawer.”

“There was too much work to do,” he tells her, still admiring the skeleton. “And much too little of it could be done from New Haven.”

Behind the plesiosaur, the brick and mortar of the gallery walls have dissolved utterly away, revealing the trunks of mighty scale trees and innumerable scouring rushes tall as California redwoods. Here is a dark Carboniferous forest, the likes of which has not taken root since the Mary Gray vein at the bottom of Shaft Seven was only slime and rotting detritus. And below these alien boughs, a menagerie of primeval beings has gathered to peer out across the aeons. So, it is not merely a hole knocked in his wall, but a hole bored through the very fabric of time.

“She came out of the rocks, Jeremiah,” Katharine says, even though the voice is plainly Dora Bolshaw’s. “Just like that damned red scorpion, she came out of the rocks.”

“You’re beginning to put me in mind of a Greek chorus,” he replies, keeping his eyes on the scene unfolding behind the plesiosaur. Great hulking forms have begun to shift impatiently in the shadows there, the armored hide of a dozen species of Dinosauria and the tangled manes of giant ground sloths and Irish elk, the leathery wings of a whole flock of pterodactyls spreading wide.

“Maybe they worshipped her, before there ever were men,” Dora says, but then she’s coughing again, the dry, hacking cough of someone suffering from advanced anthracosis. Katharine has to finish the thought for her. “Maybe they built temples to her, and whispered prayers in the guttural tongues of animals, and maybe they made offerings, after a fashion.”

Overhead, there’s a cacophonous, rolling sound that Jeremiah Ogilvy first mistakes for thunder. But then he realizes that it’s merely the hungry blue lightning at last locating the flammable guncotton epidermis of the airship.

“Some of the men,” Katharine whispers, “they say they’ve heard singing down there. Singing like church hymns, they said. Said it was beautiful, the most beautiful music they’ve ever heard. We come so late to this procession, and yet we presume to know so much.”

From behind the iron plesiosaur, that anachronistic menagerie gathers itself like a breathing wave of sinew and bone and fur, cresting, racing toward the shingle.

Jeremiah Ogilvy turns away, no longer wanting to see.

“Maybe, in their own way, they prayed,” Dora whispers, breathlessly.

And the tall, thin man standing before him, the collier in his overalls and hard hat who wasn’t there just a moment before, hefts his pick and brings it down smartly against the floorboards, which, in the instant steel strikes wood, become the black stone floor of a mine. All light has been extinguished from the gallery now, save that shining dimly from the collier’s carbide lantern. The head of the pick strikes rock, and there’s a spark, and then the ancient shale begins to bleed. And soon thereafter, the dream comes apart, and the professor lies awake and sweating, waiting for sunrise and trying desperately to think about anything but what he’s been told has happened at the bottom of Shaft Seven.

5

After his usual modest breakfast of black coffee with blueberry preserves and biscuits, and after he’s given his staff their instructions for the day and canceled a lecture that he was scheduled to deliver to a league of amateur mineralogists, Jeremiah Ogilvy leaves the museum. He walks north along Kipling to the intersection with West Twentieth Avenue, where he’s arranged to meet Dora Bolshaw. He says good morning, and that he hopes she’s feeling well. But Dora’s far more taciturn than usual, and few obligatory pleasantries are exchanged. Together they take one of the clanking, kidney-jarring public omnibuses south and east to St. Joseph’s Hospital for the Bodily and Mentally Infirm, established only two decades earlier by a group of the Sisters of Charity sent to Cherry Creek from Leavenworth.

Charlie McNamara is waiting for them in the lobby, his long canvas duster so stained with mud and soot that it’s hard to imagine it was ever anything but this variegated riot of black and gray. He’s a small mountain of a man, all beard and muscle, just starting to go soft about the middle. Jeremiah has thought, on more than one occasion, this is what men would look like had they descended not from apes but from grizzly bears.

“Thank you for coming,” Charlie says. “I know that you’re a busy man.” But Jeremiah tells him to think nothing of it, that he’s glad to be of whatever service he can—if, indeed, he can be of service. Charlie and Dora nod to one another then and swap nervous salutations. Jeremiah sees, or only thinks he sees, something wordless pass between them as well, something anxious and wary, spoken with the eyes and not the lips.

“You told him?” Charlie asks, and Dora shrugs.

“I told him the most of it. I told him what murdered them two men.”

“Mulawski and Backstrom,” Charlie says.

Dora shrugs again. “I didn’t recollect their names. But I don’t suppose that much matters.”

Charlie McNamara frowns and tugs at a corner of his mustache. “No.” He nods. “I don’t suppose it does.”

“I hope you’ll understand my skepticism,” Jeremiah says, looking up, speaking to Charlie but watching Dora. “What’s been related to me, regarding the deaths of these two men, and what you’ve brought me here to see, I’d be generous if I were to say it strikes me as a fairy tale. Or perhaps something from the dime novels. It was Hume—David Hume—who said, ‘No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.’”

Dora glares back at him. “You always did have such a goddamn pretty way of calling a girl a liar,” she says.

“Hell,” Charlie sighs, still tugging at his mustache. “I’d be concerned, Dora, if he weren’t dubious. I’ve always thought myself a rational man. That’s been a source of pride to me, out here among the barbarians and them that’s just plain ignorant and don’t know no better. But now, after this business—”

“Yeah, well, so how about we stop the clucking and get to it,” Dora cuts in, and Charlie McNamara frowns at her. But then he stops fussing with his whiskers and nods again.

“Yeah,” he says. “Guess I’m just stalling. Doesn’t precisely fill me with joy, the thought of seeing her again. If you’ll just follow me, Jeremiah, they got her stashed away up on the second floor.” He points to the stairs. “The sisters ain’t none too pleased about her being here. I think they’re of the general notion that there’s more proper places than hospitals for demons.”

“Demons,” Jeremiah says, and Dora Bolshaw laughs a dry, humorless laugh.

“That’s what they’re calling her,” Dora tells him. “The nuns, I mean. You might as well know that. Got a priest from Annunciation sitting vigil outside the cell, reading Latin and whatnot. There’s talk of an exorcism.”

At this pronouncement, Charlie McNamara makes a gruff dismissive noise and motions more forcefully toward the stairwell. He mutters something rude about popery and superstition and lady engine jockeys who can’t keep their damn pieholes shut.

“Charlie, you know I’m not saying anything that isn’t true,” Dora protests, but Jeremiah Ogilvy thinks he’s already heard far too much and seen far too little. He steps past them, walking quickly and with purpose to the stairs, and the geologist and the mechanic follow close on his heels.

6

“I would like to speak with her,” he says. “I would like to speak with her alone.” And Jeremiah takes his face away from the tiny barred window set into the door of the cell where they’ve confined the woman from the bottom of Shaft Seven. For a moment, he stares at the company geologist, and then his eyes drift toward Dora.

“Maybe you didn’t hear me right,” Charlie McNamara says, and furrows his shaggy eyebrows. “She don’t talk. Leastways, not near as anyone can tell.”

“You’re wasting your breath arguing with him,” Dora mumbles, and glances at the priest, who’s standing not far away, eyeing the locked door and clutching his Bible. “Might as well try to tell the good father here that the Queen of Heaven got herself knocked up by a stable hand.”

Jeremiah turns back to the window, his face gone indignant and bordering now on choleric. “Charlie, I’m neither a physician nor an alienist, but you’ve brought me here to see this woman. Having looked upon her, the reason why continues to escape me. However, that said, if I am to examine her, I cannot possibly hope do so properly from behind a locked door.”

“It’s not safe,” the priest says very softly. “You must know that, Professor Ogilvy. It isn’t safe at all.”

Peering in past the steel bars, Jeremiah shakes his head and sighs. “She’s naked, Father. She’s naked, and can’t weigh more than eighty pounds. What possible threat might she pose to me? And, while we’re at it, why, precisely, is she naked?”

“Oh, they gave her clothes,” Dora chimes in. “Well, what passes for clothes in a place like this. But she tears them off. Won’t have none of it, them white gowns and what have you.”

“She is brazen,” the priest all but whispers.

“Has anyone even tried to bathe her?” Jeremiah asks, and Charlie coughs.

“That ain’t coal dust and mud you’re seeing,” he says. “Near as anyone can tell, that there’s her skin.”

“This is ludicrous, all of it,” Jeremiah grumbles. “This is not the Middle Ages, and you do not have some infernal siren or succubus locked up in there. Whatever else you may believe, she’s a woman, Charlie, and, having sacrificed my very busy day to come all the way out here, I would like now to speak with her.”

“I was only explaining, Jeremiah, how I ain’t of the notion it’s such a good idea, that’s all,” Charlie says, then looks at the priest. “You got the keys, Father?”

The priest nods reluctantly, and then he produces a single tarnished brass key from his cassock. Jeremiah steps aside while he unlocks the door.

“I’m going in with you,” Dora says.

“No, you’re not,” Jeremiah tells her. “I need to speak with this woman alone.”

“But she don’t talk,” Dora says again, beginning to sound exasperated, forcing the words out between clenched teeth.

The priest turns the key, and hidden tumblers and pins respond accordingly.

“Dora, you go scare up an orderly,” Charlie McNamara says. “Hell, scare up two, just in case.”

The cell door opens, and as Jeremiah Ogilvy steps across the threshold the woman inside keeps her black eyes fixed upon him, but she makes no move to attempt an escape. She stays crouched on the floor in the southeast corner and makes no move whatsoever. Immediately, the door bangs shut again, and the priest relocks it.

“Just so there’s no doubt on the matter,” Charlie McNamara shouts from the hallway, “you’re a goddamn fool,” and now the woman in the cell smiles. Jeremiah Ogilvy stands very still for a moment, taking in all the details of her and her cramped quarters. There is a mattress and a chamber pot, but no other manner of furnishings or facilities. If he held his arms out to either side, they would touch the walls. If he took only one step backward, or only half a step, he’d collide with the locked door.

“Good morning,” he says, and the woman blinks her eyes. They remind Jeremiah of twin pools of crude oil, spewed fresh from the well and poured into her face. There appear to be no irises, no sclera, no pupils, unless these eyes are composed entirely of pupil. She blinks, and the orbs shimmer slick in the dim light of the hospital cell.

“Good morning,” he says to her again, though more quietly than before and with markedly less enthusiasm. “Is it true, that you do not speak? Are you a mute, then? Are you deaf as well as dumb?”

She blinks again, and then the woman from Shaft Seven cocks her head to one side, as though carefully considering his question. Her hair is very long and straight, reaching almost down to the floor. It seems greasy and is so very black it might well have been spun from the sky of a moonless night. And yet her skin is far darker, so much so that her hair almost glows in comparison. There’s no word in any human language for a blackness so complete, so inviolate, and he thinks, What can you be? Eyes spun from a midnight with neither moon nor stars nor gas jets nor even the paltry flicker of tallow candles, and your skin carved from ebony planks. And then Jeremiah chides himself for entertaining such silly, florid notions, for falling prey to such unscientific fancies, and he takes another step toward the woman huddled on the floor.

“So it is true,” he says softly. “You are, indeed, without a voice.”

And at that, her smile grows wider, her lips parting to reveal teeth like finely polished pegs shaped from chromite ore, and she laughs. If her laugh differs in any significant way from that of any other woman, the difference is not immediately apparent to Jeremiah Ogilvy.

“I am with voice,” she says then. “For any who wish to hear me, I am with voice.”

Jeremiah is silent, and he glances over his left shoulder at the door. Charlie McNamara is staring in at him through the bars.

“I am with voice,” she says a third time.

Jeremiah turns back to the naked woman. “But you did not see fit to speak with the doctors, nor the sisters, nor to the men who transported you here from the mines?”

“They did not wish to hear, not truly. I am with voice, yet I will not squander it, not on ears that do not yearn to listen. We are quite entirely unalike in this respect, you and I.”

“And, I think, in many others,” he tells her, and the woman’s smile grows wider still. “Those two men who died, tell me, madam, did they yearn to listen?”

“Are you the one who has been chosen to serve as my judge?” she asks, rather than providing him with an answer.

“Certainly not,” Jeremiah replies, and he clears his throat. He has begun to detect a peculiar odor in the cell. Not the noisomeness he would have expected from such a room as this, but another sort of smell. Kerosene, he thinks, and then, ice, though he’s never noticed that ice has an odor, and if it does, it hardly seems it would much resemble that of kerosene. “I was asked to … see you.”

“And you have,” the woman says. “You have seen me. You have heard me. But do you know why, Professor?”

“Quite honestly, no. I have to confess, that’s one of several points that presently have me stumped. So, I shall ask, do you know why?”

The woman’s smile fades a bit, though not enough that he can’t still see those chromite teeth or the ink-black gums that hold them. She closes her eyes, and Jeremiah discovers that he’s relieved that they are no longer watching him, that he is no longer gazing into them.

“You are here, before me, because you revere time,” she says. “You stand in awe before it but do not insult it with worship. You revere time, though that reverence has cost you dearly, prying away from your heart much that you regret having lost. You understand time, Professor, when so few of your race do. The man and woman who brought you here, they sense this in you, and they are frightened and would seek an answer to alleviate their fears.”

“Can they hear you?” he asks, and the woman crouched on the floor shakes her head.

“Not yet,” she says. “That may change, of course. All things change, with time.” And then she opens her eyes again, and, if anything, they seem oilier than before, and they coruscate and swim with restless rainbow hues.

“You killed those two miners?”

The woman sits up straighter and licks her black lips with a blacker tongue. Jeremiah tries not to let his eyes linger on her small, firm breasts, those nipples like onyx shards. “This matters to you, their deaths?” she asks him, and he finds that he’s at a loss for an honest answer, an answer that he would have either Charlie or Dora or the priest overhear.

“I was only sleeping,” the woman says.

“You caused their deaths by sleeping?”

“No, Professor. I don’t think so. They caused their deaths by waking me.” And she stands, then, though it appears more as though he is seeing her unfold. The kerosene and ice smell grows suddenly stronger, and she flares her small nostrils and stares down at her hands. From her expression, equal parts curiosity and bemusement, Jeremiah wonders if she has ever noticed them before.

“They gave you this shape?” he asks her. “The two miners you killed?”

She lets her arms fall to her sides and smiles again.

“A terror of the formless,” she says. “Of that which cannot be discerned. An inherent need to draw order from chaos. Even you harbor this weakness, despite your reverence for time. You divide indivisible time into hours and minutes and seconds. You dissect time and fashion all these ages of the Earth and give them names, that you will not dread the abyss, which is the true face of time. You are not so unlike them.” She motions toward the door. “They erect their cities, because the unbounded wilderness offends them. They set the night on fire, that they might forever blind themselves to the stars and to the relentless sea of the void, in which those stars dance and spin, are born and wink out.”

And now Jeremiah Ogilvy realizes that the woman has closed the space separating them, though he cannot recall her having taken even the first step toward him. She has raised a hand to his right cheek, and her gentle fingers are as smooth and sharp as obsidian. He does not pull away, though it burns, her touch. He does not pull away, though he has now begun to glimpse what manner of thing lies coiled behind those oily, shimmering eyes.

“Ten million years from now,” she says, “there will be no more remaining of the sprawling clockwork cities of men, nor of their tireless enterprise, nor all their marvelous works, no more than a few feet of stone shot through with lumps of steel and glass and concrete. But you know that, Professor Ogilvy, even though you chafe at the knowledge. And this is another reason they have brought you here to me. You see ahead as well as behind.”

“I do not fear you,” he whispers.

“No,” she says. “You don’t. Because you don’t fear time, and there is little else remaining now of me.”

It is not so very different than his dream of the cast-iron plesiosaur and the burning dirigible, the shadows pressing in now from all sides. They flow from the bituminous pores of her body and wrap him in silken folds and bear away the weight of the illusion of the present. The extinct beasts and birds and slithering leviathans of bygone eras and eras yet to come peer out at him, and he hears the first wave breaking upon the first shore. And he hears the last. And Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy doesn’t look away from the woman.

“They have not yet guessed,” she says, “the true reason they’ve brought you here. Perhaps they will not, until it is done. Likely they will never comprehend.”

“I know you,” he says. “I have always known you.”

“Yes,” she says, and the shadows have grown so thick and rank now that he can barely breathe, and he feels her seeping into him.

Lungs plumb full up with coal dust. Lungs and throat and mouth all stuffed damn near to busting.

You ever seen a red scorpion, Jeremiah?

“Release me,” she says, her voice become a hurricane squall blowing across warm Liassic seas, and the fiery cacophony of meteorites slamming into an azoic Earth still raw and molten, and, too, the calving of immense glaciers only a scant few millennia before this day. “There are none others here who may,” she says. “It is the greatest agony, being bound in this instant and in this form.”

And, without beginning to fathom the how of it, the unknowable mechanics of his actions, he does as she’s bidden him to do. The woman from the bottom of Shaft Seven comes apart, and suddenly the air in the cell is filled with a mad whirl of coal dust. Behind him, the priest’s brass key is rattling loudly inside the padlock, and there are voices shouting—merely human voices—and then Dora is calling his name and dragging him backward, into now, and out into the stark light of the hospital corridor.

7

The summer wears on, June becoming July, and by slow degrees Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy’s strength returns to him and his eyes grow clear again. His sleep is increasingly less troubled by dreams of the pitch-colored woman who was no woman, and the fevers are increasingly infrequent. As all men do, even those who revere time, he begins to forget, and in forgetting, his mind and body can heal. A young anatomist from Lawrence was retained as an assistant curator to deliver his lectures and to oversee the staff and the day-to-day affairs of the museum. As Charlie McNamara predicted, the Chicago offices of the Rocky Mountain Reconsolidated Fuel Company permanently closed Shaft Seven, and, what’s more, pumped more than twenty thousand cubic yards of Portland cement into the abandoned mine.

In the evenings, when her duties at the shop are finished, Dora Bolshaw comes to his bedroom. She sits with him there in that modest chamber above the Hall of Cenozoic Life and the mezzanine housing the celebrated automatic mastodon. She keeps him company, and they talk, when her cough is not so bad; she reads to him, and they discuss everything from the teleological aspects of the theories of Alfred Russel Wallace to which alloys and displacement lubricators make for the most durable steam engines. Now and then, they discuss other, less-cerebral matters, and there have been apologies from both sides for that snowy night in January. Sometimes their discussions stray into the wee hours, and sometimes Dora falls asleep in his arms and is late for work the next day. The subject of matrimony has not come up again, but Jeremiah Ogilvy has trouble recalling why it ever seemed an issue of such consequence.

“What did she say to you?” Dora finally asks him one night so very late in July that it’s almost August. “The woman from the mine, I mean.”

“So, you couldn’t hear her,” he says.

“We heard you—me and Charlie and the priest—and that’s all we heard.”

He tells her what he remembers, which isn’t much. And afterward, she asks for what seems the hundredth time if he knows what the woman was. And he tells her no, that he really has no idea whatsoever.

“Something lost and unfathomable that came before,” he says. “Something old and weariful that only wanted to lie down and go back to sleep.”

“She killed those men.”

Sitting up in his bed, two feather pillows supporting him, Jeremiah watches her for almost a full minute (by the clock on the mantle) before he replies. And then he glances toward the window and the orange glow of the city sky beyond the pane of glass.

“I recollect, Dora, a tornado hitting a little town in Iowa, back in July, I think.” And she says yeah, she remembers that, too, and that the town in question was Pomeroy. “Lots of people were killed,” he continues. “Or, rather, an awful lot of people died during the storm. Now, tell me, do we hold the cyclone culpable for all those deaths? Or do we accept that the citizens of Pomeroy were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

Dora doesn’t answer but only sighs and twists a lock of her hair. Her face is less sooty than usual, and her nails less grimy, her hands almost clean, and Jeremiah considers the possibility that she’s discovered the efficacy of soap and water.

“Would you like to sit at the window awhile?” she asks him, and he tells her that yes, he would. So Dora helps Jeremiah into his wheelchair, but then lets him steer it around the foot of the bed and over to the window. She follows a step or two behind, and when he asks, she opens the window to let in the warm night breeze. He leans forward, resting his elbows against the sill while she massages a knot from his shoulders. It is not so late that there aren’t still people on the street, men in their top hats and bowlers, women in their bustles and bonnets. The evening resounds with the clop of horses’ hooves and the commotion made by the trundling, smoking, wood-burning contraption that sprays Kipling Street with water every other night to help keep the dust in check. Looking east, across the rooftops, he catches sight of a dirigible rising into the smog.

“We are of a moment,” he says, speaking hardly above a whisper, and Dora Bolshaw doesn’t ask him to repeat himself.