Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (28 page)

David J. Schwartz

The somnambulist brakes at the intersection of two suburban streets — Ivy Something Lane, Something Creek Road. Her headlights illuminate the 2 A.M. silence. She leans over to open the passenger side door, and her husband, in the body of a grey squirrel, jumps in. He’s been gone twelve days, in a double-door trap, in a coma, trekking across astral space and chemically treated lawns. Earlier today his human body died. The somnambulist cried herself to sleep; salt tracks have dried upon her face.

She pulls the door shut and sits up. The squirrel-husband hops over to her, his tail arcing after him like an echo. He climbs the arm of her teddy bear pajamas and perches upon her shoulder.

The somnambulist — her name is Judy when she’s awake — has been married for ten years. Her husband calls himself a trader, and this is perhaps the best description of what he does, but he has been called other things: magician, sorcerer, devil. Within the profession these terms have little meaning. He traffics in power, which is more or less what Judy has always believed.

“The hospital,” says the squirrel-husband. At least, she hears a voice, and the squirrel is the source. The somnambulist turns towards the highway.

•

Judy believes that her husband — his name is Donald when she’s awake — is a sweet but dull man who compensates by taking her on trips all over the world. She knows nothing of the role she plays in his work, of how he relies upon her. She doesn’t know that he is not dead and only she can save him.

When they met, Judy had a job where she worked with a phone and not with her hands. The age difference had bothered her at first — she was in her twenties, and Donald was in his forties. But she was fascinated by his casual knowledge of baseball and fairy-tales, disarmed by his unabashed interest in her. Her sleep-walking didn’t bother him; he hardly remarked upon it, although it had been worsening for some time.

Judy worried that he didn’t have enough friends, but it wasn’t long before she had moved into his small world. Her sister didn’t approve. “It’s like you’re turning into him,” she said the last time they spoke.

Judy had planned to keep her job for a while after they married, but he had money, and he wanted her to travel with him. They went to Morocco and Thailand and Portugal and Ecuador and Patagonia. She had the most exhausting dreams when she traveled. She dreamed that she carried a fire-tipped lance astride an eight-legged horse, that she excavated bones from the floors of ancient cathedrals, that she climbed the inner walls of ruined fortresses long since given over to tourists and pulled amulets from behind loose bricks. Sometimes she killed faceless things that crawled through wind or flew upon currents of sand. She developed calluses on her hands, woke up sore after sleeping on silk sheets. Her nails never needed to be clipped.

Doctors could not diagnose her fatigue. At home she spent days in bed, and Donald made frequent trips up from his basement office to feed her comfort foods: tuna melts, spaghetti with gooey slices of mozzarella, macaroni and powdered cheese. He worried for her so.

She ate while he told stories where an enemy transformed the hero into a beast and sent him far away from his beloved. To return he must travel through the kingdoms of rival beasts, across rivers and mountains. The beloved always wore a diamond on a pendant the hero had given her. She kept it close to her heart. (Donald never gave her a pendant like this, though she always expected he would.) There were always ladders in the stories, which no one ever climbed. In the end the hero and the beloved lived happily ever after.

The stories were all true, all but the last part. Sometimes Donald shed tears when he told them. She believed that this was because he was so caught up in the telling, and she found it both endearing and off-putting.

•

She drives better in her sleep. She does many things better in her sleep — speak Urdu, play the harp,
krav maga
. She moves in sacred space, the dimension behind the frontal lobe where she speaks the language of beasts and climbs to heaven to drink with the gods. Sometimes she feels like a walking blade; on planes her body sings out like a tuning fork, sending her teeth chattering.

The squirrel-husband, the trader, is explaining where he has been. His trade is in scraps of life and power. The exchanges are done in astral space, souls buying and selling radiance. He offers near-dead idols for sale, sacrificial skins with the faintest stains of blood, and his rivals fear Death too much to pass them up. They pay in secrets and maps, things they cannot expect to live to profit by. The trader uses this information to find the hidden reserves of power. With sleeping Judy as his aide and assassin, he takes all he can, selling the dregs for more. The others hate him.

The trader fears Death as much as any of them. More, perhaps. He was the first to cheat Death, has known Death since before the rift opened between earth and heaven. Once he feasted with Death and all the gods, but now the sins and fears of his stolen years weigh upon him. He tells himself that he will climb to face the gods when he is strong enough. But it is too soon.

Twelve days ago he lay in a trance, trading radiance in the ether, when a consortium of his enemies had slid through the shadows of his defenses and severed the silver cord which tethered him to the physical plane. His body lay dying, his heart stranded.

Panicked, he had thrust his soul into the first displaced creature he found. The squirrel was in shock — a neighbor had trapped it in his attic, and its soul was already in confusion. With a flick of his mind the trader set it adrift and moved in. Even so, he hardly knew what form he had taken before he was released in a riverside park, territory unknown both to him and to the memories of his new body.

Beasts know borders humans cannot see, and the squirrel-husband had become an interloper. For twelve days he fought and fled his way through hostile lands, beset by warrior-kings fierce in the defense of their treetop kingdoms. More than once on his journey he encountered the avatars of death. Rabid hounds and infected raptors have pursued him. He bears wounds behind his ear and upon his belly, and his breath is ragged above the hurtling of his heart.

He stands on her shoulder, one tiny forepaw resting on the side of her head, the other tucked behind her earlobe. Her long, dark hair brushes against his tail. Her scent is strong in his new nose; its effect is almost narcotic. He inhales the dried salt of her grief, shuts his tiny eyes and nuzzles up against her ear.

At the hospital the somnambulist parks in an empty corner of the lot. Still bearing the squirrel-husband on her shoulder, she picks the lock on a side entrance and descends to the basement. She unbuttons her pajama top, slips it off her left shoulder, and draws a five-foot sword from her collarbone.

She pads barefoot down the hall.

The death of the medical examiners is unfortunate. Even the squirrel-husband feels this, more so in fact than his wife, who is only having a dream she expects to forget soon. She is as he has built her, her bones imbued with alloy, her muscles trained for his needs. But she is not just a Swiss Army knife of useful skills — bodyguard, mechanic, dragon slayer. He has to love her for any of this to work, because love is pain is change is magic.

There are two men working in the morgue, and sleeping Judy kills them before they can wake her. The sword cuts them, but there is no blood.

The squirrel-husband senses where Donald’s body is kept. He whispers to sleeping Judy, who opens the cooler and slides out the drawer to reveal him, shriveled and naked and cold and all but empty.

•

Once, on a trip to Colorado, they went to the Cliff Palace of the Anasazi. The guide took them inside a ceremonial chamber accessible only by descending a ladder. Donald had made it down without any problem, but when it came time to climb out he panicked. They eventually had to lift him out with ropes and a harness.

Judy had asked him if he had a fear of ladders. A phobia, perhaps. She told him she was terrified of lizards, but for some reason that made him laugh. It was just a panic attack, he said. But she’d never known him to have a panic attack before.

Once, in Arizona, she’d dreamed that she was dancing around a rope which hung taut from thundering clouds. Her husband was shouting into the night sky, first angry, then pleading. Death’s face had appeared in the clouds. It was not a terrible face, she had thought, but her husband was afraid.

When they fucked (she never thought of it as making love, although there was love all around it) Donald walked his fingers slowly up the notches of her spine, and sometimes incredible heat followed his path, rising towards her skull until she thought her brain would boil.

•

The somnambulist sheathes the sword inside herself and picks up a small rotary saw. She cuts through Donald’s scalp and directly into his skull, all the way around, until a cap of bone can be pulled away to reveal his brain.

The squirrel-husband still clings to her shoulder. He is still telling her secrets, not because she needs to know but because he doesn’t know how to say goodbye.

“My heart is not my heart,” he says. “My heart is a diamond. I took it ten thousand years ago, when the gods were neighbors.”

Sleeping Judy sets the cap of bone on the steel table. She flexes her fingers and pries open the folds of Donald’s brain.

“My heart loves perfectly, and its clarity is unmatched.” The squirrel-husband, the trader, looks down at Donald and remembers loving him. He has never been able to decide whether keeping the stolen bodies, being able to look into a mirror and see the faces of the ones he has loved, is a solace or a penance.

The contours of Donald’s frozen thoughts ooze under Judy’s fingers and cause them to slide away from their target. The inside of her own skull hums, resonance of sword and sight. She believes this is a nightmare. She is only a few steps from waking in terror.

The body of the squirrel clings to her lapels; his vision fuzzes at the edges. He has accomplished the transfer under worse conditions, but he cannot know until the last moment whether it will succeed. The fate of his heart lies within hers.

The somnambulist’s fingers grasp something small and hard and round. She pulls it from the ruins of his old house, the roof-hole through which he fears to climb alone.

“Swallow it,” he tells her.

She sets the diamond, frosted with gore, on her tongue. It burns away the barriers between sleep and waking. Its clarity is a lamp shining through her eyes, and in the light she sees a ladder rising through the cage of her dead husband’s chest, rungs like ribs. The ladder extends through a hole in the ceiling of the morgue.

“Swallow it,” he says again.

It is always a gamble at the end. For more than ten years he has worked toward this moment. Every gift, every touch, every indulgence of her passion for cheese — all intended to capture her love and cage it, so that she will put him ahead of her at this moment when she is privy to all his secrets, when she is Judy and the somnambulist both, capable of either saving or destroying him.

She does not love him.

She doesn’t understand the implications of this in the moment she realizes it, but she does not do as he commands. She holds the diamond in her mouth and looks down at the ruined body of her husband. She mourns him, but she will not be a vessel for his heart. She takes hold of the ladder, illuminated by the diamond light, and begins to climb.

The squirrel drops from her shoulder, shrieking. The desperate, scratching sound reverberates through the steel and diamond inside Judy, and for a moment she is stunned. She recalls other things her husband cooked for her, broccoli and cheddar casserole, omelets sloppy with Swiss. She recalls lazy mornings spent curled naked together. But instead of affection she feels anger. She left so many things behind to be with him: her job, her family, her independence. And to him she is only a suit of armor. She resumes her climb.

He is so proud of her. She has the quality that all somnambulists share — she thinks herself incapable of all she does for him when she dreams. And yet she is doing what he fears to do, climbing the ladder.

But all his work, every lumen of power he has profited, has gone into preparing her to become his vessel. He abandons the squirrel and becomes a pillar of wind and lightning. He pummels her as she climbs with hammers of air, fists of current. Her hair lifts like a halo, and her skeleton glows blue through her skin.

The ladder is longer than it appears. If Judy falls she will die. Perhaps he hopes he will be able to jolt her into swallowing his heart, her last breath becoming his first. But she grips the rungs with the steel cage of her bones and climbs. Judy accumulates time as she ascends, gathers divinity. It settles on her like dust and she takes it into her bones. Eons: the wear of mountains, the appetite of rivers. The diamond rattles against her teeth like an earthquake.

From here she can see heaven. Heaven is the back deck of a chocolate-brown lake cabin that needs repainting. Death sits with the other gods, drinking beer and listening to a baseball game. The lake is endless. On the lawn between its banks and the deck, squirrels journey up and down the trees.

The trader — life-thief, storm-husband — howls at her ears,
dontyoulovemedontyouloveme
as he tries to send her plummeting to the hard floor below. She doesn’t. She pities him — but she is as he has built her: more than human, and too strong for him.

At the top of the ladder she takes the diamond between her teeth and bites down with jaws as old as creation. The trader’s heart trickles from her mouth like ash, and this, at last, is judgment.

•

Anna Tambour