Street Magicks Read online

  STREET MAGICKS

  Edited by Paula Guran

  Copyright © 2016 by Paula Guran.

  Cover art by Scott Grimando.

  Cover design by Stephen H. Segal.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors,

  and used here with their permission.

  An extension of this copyright page can be found here.

  Prime Books

  Germantown, MD

  www.prime-books.com

  Publisher’s Note: No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books:

  [email protected]

  Print ISBN: 978-1-60701-469-0

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60701-475-1

  Contents

  Introduction: Practices and Paved Paths • Paula Guran

  Freewheeling • Charles de Lint

  A Year and a Day in Old Theradane • Scott Lynch

  Caligo Lane • Ellen Klages

  Socks • Delia Sherman

  Painted Birds and Shivered Bones • Kat Howard

  The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories • Neil Gaiman

  One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King • Elizabeth Bear

  Street Worm • Nisi Shawl

  A Water Matter • Jay Lake

  Last Call • Jim Butcher

  Bridle • Caitlín R. Kiernan

  The Last Triangle • Jeffrey Ford

  Working for the God of the Love of Money • Kaaron Warren

  Hello, Moto • Nnedi Okorafor

  The Spirit of the Thing: A Nightside Story • Simon R. Green

  A Night in Electric Squidland • Sarah Monette

  Speechless in Seattle • Lisa Silverthorne

  Palimpsest • Catherynne M. Valente

  Ash • John Shirley

  In Our Block • R. A. Lafferty

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction:

  Practices and Paved Paths

  Paula Guran

  “The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.”

  —Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

  Magicks? Just a way to convey the stories collected herein all feature some variety of magic. Not just an overall atmosphere of the supernatural or the paranormal, but an act or example of the existence of "real" magic in the world of the author’s making.

  As for street . . .

  A street is, generally, a public thoroughfare (usually paved) with buildings on one or both sides of it. It might be a road, but roads exist for transportation and aren't defined by the edifices lining them. A street does more than provide a path: it is a shared space that facilitates social interaction. Streets are urban. “The street” also means the people who live, work, and gather in streets: the common people who are a repository of public attitudes, knowledge, and opinion.

  Streets are places of celebration. We still honor our heroes and celebrate holidays with street parades. Religious processions are not as common as they once were, but many still exist. (And though it is often forgotten, Mardi Gras and Carnival are religious celebrations taken to the streets.) We still have funeral processions as well as street fairs and festivals.

  These and other communal outpourings have long served to relieve the tensions of the people dwelling closely together and city life.

  Until the early nineteenth century, streets were the primary stages available for music, drama, puppet shows, jugglers, and all forms of common entertainment. And, since the sixteenth century, streetwalker has meant a prostitute who solicits on the pavement.

  Street peddlers were once common. Since they conducted business without stationary shops, mobility meant one’s wares might include the less than legally acceptable or material of interest only to the lower echelons of society. Popular media like the penny dreadfuls and Bibliothèque bleue could be easily distributed by street hawkers, as could seditious and inflammatory pamphlets.

  Town criers and bellman (so-called because they rang a hand bell to gain attention) once walked the streets as the only means of conveying legal proclamations, bylaws, and notices of market and other special days to mostly illiterate urban dwellers.

  Even after the masses learned to read, current events were carried to the streets by newsboys who hawked newspapers by shouting out the most sensational headlines of the day. From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, these “newsies” were the primary distributors of newspapers to the general public.

  Streets have, historically, provided forums for political discourse and even confrontations involving varying degrees of violence—including the taking up arms. Since the French Revolution, the streets have played a role in the downfall of authority. Not that revolutionaries or dedicated demonstrators were the only ones to use the streets as a public arena, so did those in power: martial might on parade can draw the common folk together in shared patriotic pride or frighten a regime’s foes.

  In current usage, “street” can have dichotomous meanings.

  The Street, in the U.S., is used to allude to the financial and securities industry of the America. (From Wall Street, the eight-block stretch of Lower Manhattan that has been a hub for commerce and trade since the late eighteenth century.) The Street belongs to the wealthy.

  However, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, being on/in the street has meant being homeless. Since 1967, and probably before, street people has meant those who are poor, often homeless, who live in urban environments. The street is a place of last resort for with no wealth.

  On one hand, the street is a source of style, chic, hipness: the perspective and creations of the urban young who are seen as constituting a fashionable, trend-setting subculture.

  On the other, the streets can be viewed as disadvantaged area of a city; an environment of poverty, dereliction, violence, and crime so pervasive that an oppositional culture—with values often intentionally antithetical to those of mainstream society—has evolved.

  I suppose I could have simply said: street has many meanings; it can be an attitude as well as a location. But, then again, I could have gone on and on . . .

  This score of stories all involve magic and streets in one way or another. They vary from the lighthearted to the somber, from the near realistic to the exotically fantastic, from the poetic to the vernacular. The incredible imaginations of the authors included have been inspired by hard-boiled detectives, genius loci, visual art, Scots and other folklore, the vicissitudes of Hollywood, the Holocaust, high adventure, noir, epic fantasy, nightlife, mysteries, runaway kids, the mythic, technology, human and inhuman nature, dreams, nightmares, and more. Some stories are fairly lengthy, others quite short, most somewhere in between.

  There also seems to be a disproportionate number of bars and taverns in these twenty tales. I suppose streets have to lead somewhere.

  I truly hope you enjoy this anthology. It has been fun finding the magicks and mapping the streets.

  Paula Guran

  Tu Bishvat

  15 Shevat 5776

  To paraphrase the author, Newford could be any contemporary North American city . . . except that magic lurks in its music, in its art, in the shadows of its grittiest streets, and enchantment can be found in the spaces between its people. Those people are like you and me, each looking for a bit of magic to shape their lives and transform their fate. Except, in Newford, they often find it.

  Freewheeling

  Charles de Lint

  “There is apparently nothing that cannot happen.”

  —Attributed to Mark Twain

  “There are three kinds of people: those wh
o make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder, ‘What happened?’ ”

  —Message found inside a Christmas cracker

  1

  He stood on the rain-slick street, a pale fire burning behind his eyes. Nerve ends tingling, he watched them go—a slow parade of riderless bicycles.

  Ten-speeds and mountain bikes. Domesticated, urban. So inbred that all they were was spoked wheels and emaciated frames, mere skeletons of what their genetic ancestors had been. They had never known freedom, never known joy; only the weight of serious riders in slick, leather-seated shorts, pedaling determinedly with their cycling shoes strapped to the pedals, heads encased in crash helmets, fingerless gloves on the hands gripping the handles tightly.

  He smiled and watched them go. Down the wet street, wheels throwing up arcs of fine spray, metal frames glistening in the streetlights, reflector lights winking red.

  The rain had plastered his hair slick against his head, his clothes were sodden, but he paid no attention to personal discomfort. He thought instead of that fat-wheeled aboriginal one-speed that led them now. The maverick who’d come from who-knows-where to pilot his domesticated brothers and sisters away.

  For a night’s freedom. Perhaps for always.

  The last of them were rounding the corner now. He lifted his right hand to wave goodbye. His left hand hung down by his leg, still holding the heavy-duty wire cutters by one handle, the black rubber grip making a ribbed pattern on the palm of his hand. By fences and on porches, up and down the street, locks had been cut, chains lay discarded, bicycles ran free.

  He heard a siren approaching. Lifting his head, he licked the raindrops from his lips. Water got in his eyes, gathering in their corners. He squinted, enamored by the kaleidoscoping spray of lights this caused to appear behind his eyelids. There were omens in lights, he knew. And in the night sky, with its scattershot sweep of stars. So many lights . . . There were secrets waiting to unfold there, mysteries that required a voice to be freed.

  Like the bicycles were freed by their maverick brother.

  He could be that voice, if he only knew what to sing.

  He was still watching the sky for signs when the police finally arrived.

  “Let me go, boys, let me go . . . ”

  The Pogues album If I Should Fall from Grace with God was on the turntable. The title cut leaked from the sound system’s speakers, one of which sat on a crate crowded with half-used paint tubes and tins of turpentine, the other perched on the windowsill, commanding a view of rainswept Yoors Street one floor below. The song was jauntier than one might expect from its subject matter, while Shane MacGowan’s voice was as rough as ever, chewing the words and spitting them out, rather than singing them.

  It was an angry voice, Jilly decided as she hummed softly along with the chorus. Even when it sang a tender song. But what could you expect from a group that had originally named itself Pogue Mahone—Irish Gaelic for “Kiss my ass”?

  Angry and brash and vulgar. The band was all of that. But they were honest, too—painfully so, at times—and that was what brought Jilly back to their music, time and again. Because sometimes things just had to be said.

  “I don’t get this stuff,” Sue remarked.

  She’d been frowning over the lyrics that were printed on the album’s inner sleeve. Leaning her head against the patched backrest of one of Jilly’s two old sofas, she set the sleeve aside.

  “I mean, music’s supposed to make you feel good, isn’t it?” she went on.

  Jilly shook her head. “It’s supposed to make you feel something—happy, sad, angry, whatever—just so long as it doesn’t leave you brain-dead the way most Top Forty does. For me, music needs meaning to be worth my time—preferably something more than ‘I want your body, babe,’ if you know what I mean.”

  “You’re beginning to develop a snooty attitude, Jilly.”

  “Me? To laugh, dahling.”

  Susan Ashworth was Jilly’s uptown friend. As a pair, the two women made a perfect study in contrasts.

  Sue’s blond hair was straight, hanging to just below her shoulders, where Jilly’s was a riot of brown curls, made manageable tonight only by a clip that drew it all up to the top of her head before letting it fall free in the shape of something that resembled nothing so much as a disenchanted Mohawk. They were both in their twenties, slender and blue-eyed—the latter expected in a blond; the electric blue of Jilly’s eyes gave her, with her darker skin, a look of continual startlement. Where Sue wore just the right amount of makeup, Jilly could usually be counted on having a smudge of charcoal somewhere on her face and dried oil paint under her nails.

  Sue worked for the city as an architect; she lived uptown and her parents were from the Beaches where it seemed you needed a permit just to be out on the sidewalks after eight in the evening—or at least that was the impression that the police patrols left when they stopped strangers to check their ID. She always had that upscale look of one who was just about to step out to a restaurant for cocktails and dinner.

  Jilly’s first love was art of a freer style than designing municipal necessities, but she usually paid her rent by waitressing and other odd jobs. She tended to wear baggy clothes—like the oversized white T-shirt and blue poplin laced-front pants she had on tonight—and always had a sketchbook close at hand.

  Tonight it was on her lap as she sat propped up on her Murphy bed, toes in their ballet slippers tapping against one another in time to the music. The Pogues were playing an instrumental now—“Metropolis”—which sounded like a cross between a Celtic fiddle tune and the old Dragnet theme.

  “They’re really not for me,” Sue went on. “I mean if the guy could sing, maybe, but—”

  “It’s the feeling that he puts into his voice that’s important,” Jilly said. “But this is an instrumental. He’s not even—”

  “Supposed to be singing. I know. Only—”

  “If you’d just—”

  The jangling of the phone sliced through their discussion. Because she was closer—and knew that Jilly would claim some old war wound or any excuse not to get up, now that she was lying down—Sue answered it. She listened for a long moment, an odd expression on her face, then slowly cradled the receiver.

  “Wrong number?”

  Sue shook her head. “No. It was someone named . . . uh, Zinc? He said that he’s been captured by two Elvis Presleys disguised as police officers and would you please come and explain to them that he wasn’t stealing bikes, he was just setting them free. Then he just hung up.”

  “Oh, shit!” Jilly stuffed her sketchbook into her shoulderbag and got up.

  “This makes sense to you?”

  “He’s one of the street kids.”

  Sue rolled her eyes, but she got up as well. “Want me to bring my checkbook?”

  “What for?

  “Bail. It’s what you have to put up to spring somebody from jail. Don’t you ever watch TV?”

  Jilly shook her head. “What? And let the aliens monitor my brainwaves?”

  “What scares me,” Sue muttered as they left the loft and started down the stairs, “is that sometimes I don’t think you’re kidding.”

  “Maybe I’m not,” Jilly said.

  Sue shook her head. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

  Jilly knew people from all over the city, in all walks of life. Socialites and bag ladies. Street kids and university profs. Nobody was too poor, or, conversely, too rich for her to strike up a conversation with, no matter where they happened to meet, or under what circumstances. Detective Lou Fucceri, of the Crowsea Precinct’s General Investigations squad, she met when he was still a patrolman, walking the Stanton Street Combat Zone beat. Jilly was there, taking reference photos for a painting she was planning. When she had asked Lou to pose for a couple of shots, he tried to run her in on a soliciting charge.

  “Is it true?” Sue wanted to know as soon as the desk sergeant showed them into Lou’s office. “The way you guys
met?”

  “You mean UFO-spotting in Butler U. Park?” he replied.

  Sue sighed. “I should’ve known. I must be the only person who’s maintained her sanity after meeting Jilly.”

  She sat down on one of the two wooden chairs that faced Lou’s desk in the small cubicle that passed for his office. There was room for a bookcase behind him, crowded with law books and file folders, and a brass coat rack from which hung a lightweight sports jacket. Lou sat at the desk, white shirt sleeves rolled halfway up to his elbows, collar open, black tie hanging loose.

  His Italian heritage was very much present in the Mediterranean cast to his complexion, his dark brooding eyes and darker hair. As Jilly sat down in the chair Sue had left for her, he shook a cigarette free from a crumpled pack that he dug out from under the litter of files on his desk. He offered them around, tossing the pack back down on the desk and lighting his own when there were no takers.

  Jilly pulled her chair closer to the desk. “What did he do, Lou? Sue took the call, but I don’t know if she got the message right.”

  “I can take a message,” Sue began, but Jilly waved a hand in her direction.

  She wasn’t in the mood for banter just now.

  Lou blew a stream of blue-gray smoke towards the ceiling. “We’ve been having a lot of trouble with a bicycle theft ring operating in the city,” he said. “They’ve hit the Beaches, which was bad enough, though with all the Mercedes and BMWs out there, I doubt they’re going to miss their bikes a lot. But rich people like to complain, and now the gang’s moved their operations into Crowsea.”

  Jilly nodded. “Where for a lot of people, a bicycle’s the only way they can get around.”

  “You got it.”

  “So what does that have to do with Zinc?”

  “The patrol car that picked him up found him standing in the middle of the street with a pair of heavy-duty wire cutters in his hand. The street’d been cleaned right out, Jilly. There wasn’t a bike left on the block—just the cut locks and chains left behind.”

  “So where are the bikes?”