New York Fantastic: Fantasy Stories from the City that Never Sleeps
Paula Guran
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.”