New York Fantastic Read online

  ALSO EDITED BY PAULA GURAN

  Embraces

  Best New Paranormal Romance

  Best New Romantic Fantasy 2

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2010

  Zombies: The Recent Dead

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  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2011

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  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2013

  Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre

  Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales

  Magic City: Recent Spells

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2014

  Zombies: More Recent Dead

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  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015

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  Ex Libris: Stories of Librarians, Libraries, and Lore

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2017

  NEW YORK FANTASTIC

  FANTASY STORIES FROM

  THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS

  Edited by Paula Guran

  Copyright © 2017 by Paula Guran

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing LLC, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

  Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.

  Visit our website at www.nightshadebooks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Guran, Paula editor.

  Title: New York fantastic : fantasy stories from the city that never sleeps /

  edited by Paula Guran.

  Description: New York : Night Shade Books , 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017023269 | ISBN 9781597809313 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: New York (N.Y.)--Fiction. | Short stories, American. |

  American fiction--20th century. | American fiction--21st century.

  Classification: LCC PS648.N39 F36 2017 | DDC 813/.010897471--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023269

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-931-3

  eISBN: 978-1-59780-636-7

  Cover design by Jason Snair

  Please see page 403 for an extension of this copyright page.

  Printed in the United States of America

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: A Place Apart – Paula Guran

  How the Pooka Came to New York City – Delia Sherman

  … And the Angel with Television Eyes – John Shirley

  Priced to Sell – Naomi Novik

  The Horrid Glory of Its Wings – Elizabeth Bear

  The Tallest Doll in New York City – Maria Dahvana Headley

  Blood Yesterday, Blood Tomorrow – Richard Bowes

  Pork Pie Hat – Peter Straub

  Grand Central Park – Delia Sherman

  The Land of Heart’s Desire – Holly Black

  The City Born Great – N.K. Jemisin

  La Peau Verte – Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Cryptic Coloration – Elizabeth Bear

  Caisson – Karl Bunker

  Red as Snow – Seanan McGuire

  A Huntsman Passing By – Richard Bowes

  Painted Birds and Shivered Bones – Kat Howard

  Salsa Nocturna – Daniel José Older

  The Rock in the Park – Peter S. Beagle

  Weston Walks – Kit Reed

  Shell Games – George R. R. Martin

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  INTRODUCTION: A PLACE APART

  “As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.”

  —Pearl S. Buck

  New York City is a very real place, but no one can deny it is also somewhere magic occurs and all sorts of fantastical things happen. The metropolis is the epitome of urban action, romance, and excitement. It has no shortage of wonders: mysterious portals to other times and locations, magical hidden sites, and enchantments galore. Fascinating folks can be found just about anywhere and there are more exotic beasts than one might expect. Myths are born in its five boroughs. For countless people, New York has long been a city of dreams, the only destination that can truly fulfill all their hopes and desires.

  The city that never sleeps—perhaps because of that famous wakefulness—has its dark side too, of course, and gives birth to nightmares as well as dreams. But there’s no likelier place to find help, heroes, or the special power needed to overcome the nefarious than New York.

  It has been called the Center of the Universe. Anything can happen in New York—and when it does, it is accepted as part of the everyday and sometimes never noticed at all!

  If that is the reality, then is it any wonder that New York has inspired imaginative writers, from Washington Irving to any number of contemporary authors to combine fantasy with the tangible?

  Welcome to a volume of twenty fantastic tales that may never have happened … but if they ever did, they could only happen in New York City!

  Written on the eighty-sixth anniversary of the dedication of the Empire State Building.

  Paula Guran

  NEW YORK FANTASTIC

  We’ll start with a story set in the past, when many Irish immigrants came to New York to find a new life. But humans weren’t the only creatures to leave Eire and cross the Atlantic.

  HOW THE POOKA CAME TO NEW YORK CITY

  DELIA SHERMAN

  Early one morning in the spring of 1855, the passengers from the Irish Maid out of Dublin Bay trudged down the gangway of the steam lighter Washington. Each of them carried baggage: clothes and boots, tools and household needments, leprechauns and hobs, fleas, and the occasional ghost trailing behind like a soiled veil. Liam O’Casey, late of Ballynoe in County Down, brought a tin whistle and the collected poetry of J. J. Callanan, two shirts and three handkerchiefs rolled into a knapsack, a small leather purse containing his savings, and a great black hound he called Madra, which is nothing more remarkable than “dog” in Irish.

  Liam O’Casey was a horse trainer by trade, a big, handsome man with a wealth of greasy black curls that clustered around his neat, small ears and his broad, fair temples. His eyes were blue, his shoulders wide, and he had a smile to charm a holy sister out of her cloister. He’d the look of a rogue, a scalawag, faster with a blow than a quip, with an eye to the ladies and an unquenchable thirst for strong drink.

  Looks can be misleading.
Liam had an artist’s soul in his breast and a musician’s skill in his fingers. One night in the hold of the Irish Maid, with the seas running high and everyone groaning and spewing out their guts, he pulled out his tin whistle to send “Molly’s Lament” sighing sweetly through the fetid air. All through that long night he played, and if his music had no power to soothe the seas, it soothed the terror of those who heard it and quieted the sobbing of more than one small child.

  After, the passengers of steerage were constantly at Liam to pull out his tin whistle for a slip jig or a reel. Liam was most willing to oblige, and might have been the best-loved man on board were it not for his great black dog.

  Madra was a mystery. As a general rule, livestock and pets were not welcome on the tall ships that sailed between the old world and the new. They made more mouths to feed, more filth to clean up. Birds in cages were tolerated, but a tall hound black as the fabled Black Dog, with long sharp teeth and eyes yellow as piss? It was the wonder of the world he’d been let aboard. And once aboard, it was a wonder he survived the journey.

  “A dog, seasick?” Liam’s neighbor, a man from Cork, pulled his blanket up around his nose as Madra retched and whined. “Are you sure it’s nothing catching?”

  Liam stroked Madra’s trembling flank. “He’s a land-loving dog, I fear. I’d have left him behind if he’d have stood for being left. Perhaps he’ll be easier in my hammock.”

  Which proved to be the case, much to the amusement of the man from Cork.

  “The boy’s soft, is what it is,” he told his card-playing cronies.

  “Leave him be,” one of them said. “Fluters and fiddlers are not like you and me.”

  When the Irish Maid sailed into New York Harbor, New York Bay was wide as an inland sea to Liam’s eyes, the early morning sun pouring its honey over forested hills and warehouses and riverside mansions and a myriad of ships. Islands slid past the Washington on both sides, some wild and bare, some bristling with buildings and docks and boats. The last of these, only a stone’s throw from Manhattan itself, was occupied by a round and solid edifice, like a reservoir or a fort, that swarmed with laborers like ants on a stony hill.

  The Cork man broke the awestruck silence. “Holy Mother of God,” he said. “And what do you think of Dublin Bay after that?”

  With all of America spread out before him like a meal on a platter and the sea birds welcoming him into port, Liam had no wish to think of Dublin Bay at all. He’d come to America to change his life, and he intended to do it thoroughly. Country bred, he was determined to live in a city, surrounded by people whose families he did not know. He’d live in a house with more than one floor, none of them dirt, and burn coal in a stove that vented through a pipe.

  He’d eat meat once a week.

  As the lighter slowed, the hound at his feet reared himself, with some effort, to plant his forepaws on the Washington’s rail and panted into the wind that blew from the shore. After a moment, he sneezed and shook his head irritably.

  The Cork man laughed. “Seems your dog doesn’t think much of the new world, Liam O’Casey. Better, perhaps, you should have left him in the old.”

  Madra bared his fangs at that, for all the world, the Cork man said, as though he spoke Gaelic like a Christian. Liam stroked the poor animal’s ears while the lighter docked and the steerage passengers of the Irish Maid began to gather their bundles and their boxes, their ghosts and their memories and staggered down the gangway. On the pier, customs officials herded them to a shed where uniformed clerks checked their baggage and their names against the ship’s manifest. These formalities concluded, the new immigrants were free to start their new lives where and when they pleased.

  The lucky ones, the provident ones, embraced their families or greeted friends who had come to meet them, and moved off, chattering. A group of the less well prepared, including Liam and the man from Cork, lingered on the dock, uncertain where their next steps should take them.

  With a sinking heart, Liam looked about at the piled boxes, the coils of rope, the wagons, the nets and baskets of fish, thinking he might as well have been on a wharf in Dublin. There was the same garbage and mud underfoot, the same air thick with the stink of rotting fish and salt and coal fires, the same dirty, raw-handed men loading and unloading wagons and boats and shouting to each other in a babel of strange tongues.

  “That’ll be you in a week or so,” the Cork man said, slapping Liam on the shoulder hard enough to raise dust. “I’m for the Far West, where landlords are as rare as hen’s teeth and the streams run with gold.”

  A new voice joined the conversation—in Irish, happily, since his audience had only a dozen English words between them. “You’ll be needing a place to sleep the night, I’m thinking. Come along of me, and I’ll have you suited in a fine, clean, economical boardinghouse before the cat can lick her ear.”

  The newcomer was better fed than the dockworkers, his frock coat only a little threadbare and his linen next door to clean. He had half a pound of pomade on his hair and a smile that would shame the sun. But when the boardinghouse runner saw Madra, his sun went behind a cloud and he kicked the dog square in the ribs.

  “Hoy!” Liam roared, shocked out of his usual good humor. “What ails you to be kicking my dog?”

  “Dogs are dirty creatures, as all the world knows, as thick with fleas as hairs.”

  “A good deal thicker,” the man from Cork said, and everyone snickered, for Madra’s coat after five weeks on shipboard was patchy and dull, with great sores on his flank and belly.

  The boardinghouse runner grinned, flashing a golden tooth. “Just so. Mistress O’Leary’d not be thanking me for bringing such a litany of miseries and stinks into her good clean house. A doorway’s good enough for the pair of you.” And then he turned and herded his catch away inland.

  Liam sat himself down on a crate, his knapsack and his mangy dog at his feet, and wondered where he might find a glass and a bite in this great city and how much they’d cost him.

  “Yon was the villain of the world,” Madra remarked. “Stinking of greed and goose fat. You’re well shut of him.”

  “The goose fat I smelled for myself,” Liam answered. “The greed I took for granted. Still, a bed for the night and a guide through the city might have been useful. Are you feeling any better, at all, now we’ve come to shore?”

  Madra growled impatiently. “I’m well enough to have kept my ears to the wind and my nose to the ground for news of where we may find a welcome warmer than yon gold-toothed cony-catcher’s.”

  “And where would that be, Madra? In Dublin, perhaps? Or back home in Ballynoe, where I wish to heaven I’d never left?”

  The hound sighed. “Don’t be wishing things you don’t want, not in front of me. Had I my full strength, you’d be back in Ballynoe before you’d taken another breath, and sorry enough to be there after all the trouble you were put to leaving in the first place.” He heaved himself wearily to his feet. “There’s a public house north of here, run by the kind of folk who won’t turn away a fellow countryman and his faithful hound.”

  “You’re not my hound,” Liam said, shouldering his pack. “I told you back in Ballynoe. I did only what I’d do for any living creature. You owe me nothing.”

  “I owe you my life.” Madra lifted his nose to sniff the air. “That way.” Moving as though his joints hurt him, Madra stalked away from the water with Liam strolling behind, gawking left and right at the great brick warehouses of the seaport of New York.

  The Pooka was not happy. His eyes ran, his lungs burned, his skin galled him as if he’d been stung by a thousand bees, and the pads of his paws felt as though he’d walked across an unbanked fire. He was sick of his dog shape, sick of this mortal man he was tied to, sick of cramped quarters with no space to run and the stink of death that clung to mortals like a second skin. Most of all, he was sick, almost to dissolution, of the constant presence of cold iron.

  He’d thought traveling with Liam O’Casey was bad, with
the nails in his shoes and the knife in his pack, but Dublin had been worse. The weeks aboard the Irish Maid had been a protracted torture, which he’d survived only because Liam had given over his hammock to him. This new city was worst of all, as hostile to the Fair Folk as the most pious priest who’d ever sung a mass.

  Yet in this same city, on this poisonous dock, the Pooka had just met a selkie in his man shape, hauling boxes that stank of iron as strongly as the air stank of dead fish.

  The Pooka had smelled the selkie—sea air with an animal undertang of fur and musk—and followed his nose to a group of longshoremen loading crates onto a dray. As he sniffed curiously about their feet, one of them grabbed the Pooka by the slack of his neck and hauled him off behind a stack of barrels as though he’d been a puppy.

  “What the devil kind of thing are you?” asked the selkie in the broadest of Scots.

  “I’m a Pooka,” he said, with dignity. “From County Down.”

  “Fresh off the boat and rotten with the iron-sickness, no doubt. Well, you’re a lucky wee doggie to have found me, and that’s a fact.”

  The Pooka’s ears pricked. “You have a cure for iron-sickness?”

  “Not I,” the selkie said. “There’s a Sidhe woman runs a lager saloon in Five Points. All the Gaelic folk who land here must go to her. It’s that or die.” The selkie pulled a little wooden box from his pocket and opened it. “Take a snort.”

  The Pooka filled his nose with a scent of thin beer, sawdust, and faerie magic. “One last question, of your kindness,” he said. “Would a mortal be welcome at this Sidhe woman’s saloon at all?”

  The selkie replaced the box. “Maybe he will and maybe he won’t. What’s it to you?”

  “We’re by way of being companions,” said the Pooka.

  “Dinna tell me he knows you for what you are?” The selkie whistled.

  “That’d be a tale worth the hearing. Tell it me, and we’ll call my help well paid.”

  The Pooka knew very well that his tale was a small enough price for such valuable information, but it was a price he was reluctant to pay. Stories in which he was the hero and the mortal his endlessly stupid dupe—those he told with pleasure to whoever would hear them. A story in which the stupidity had been his own was a different pair of shoes entirely. Still, a favor must be repaid.