Naked City, Tales of Urban Fantasy (Edited by Ellen Datlow) by Jim Butcher

Author:Jim Butcher [Butcher, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Projected Girl

BY LAVIE TIDHAR

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the linked-story collection HebrewPunk, the steampunk novels The Bookman and Camera Obscura, the literary novel Osama, the SF novel Martian Sands, and, with Nir Yaniv, the short novel The Tel Aviv Dossier. He has lived on three continents and one island-nation, and was last seen in Southeast Asia.

NOTE: DAVID TIDHAR (1897–1970) WAS AN ISRAELI DETECTIVE, AUTHOR, AND HERO OF THE TWENTY-EIGHT DAVID TIDHAR BALASH (“DETECTIVE”) NOVELS.

On Danny’s tenth birthday Uncle Arik gave him a conjuring set. Uncle Arik had just come back from a spell in England. He’d stayed, he’d said, in a five-star hotel in a place called Brixton; apparently he’d stayed there for the whole year and three months of his absence. “A bed to lie on, a roof over your head, and three meals a day,” Uncle Arik told Danny, “—what is there to go out for?” When he’d finally left the hotel, however, and before boarding the El Al flight back home, Uncle Arik had stopped in a shop called Davenports, and there, remembering his favorite (and only) nephew’s rapidly approaching birthday, he purchased the conjuring set. “It’s a shop set underground,” he told Danny in confidence. “Below the great train station of Charing Cross. Unless you know it’s there, you will never find it. ’Course, it’s a magic shop.”

It was Danny’s conviction that his Uncle Arik was a Mossad agent. His mysterious job was seldom referred to, yet it took him to many exotic places, often for great lengths of time. He had once heard his father say, when he thought Danny couldn’t hear him, that Uncle Arik’s work involved “things falling off the back of trucks.” For a while, therefore, Danny thought Uncle Arik was a truck driver, or perhaps a mechanic: yet he had never seen him driving a truck, nor were there ever signs of grease on his immaculately ironed shirt or trousers. “A conjuring set?” Danny’s father said to his brother when he saw the present. “I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.”

“It’s a great idea,” Uncle Arik said. “It’s what every kid wants.”

“And how would you know?” Danny’s father said.

“I was a kid once,” Uncle Arik said. “I always wished Mum had bought one of those for me.”

Mention of their mother merely brought a head shake from Danny’s father. But the present was given, and it stayed. “Go on, open it,” Uncle Arik said. “Remember, the magic you learn—you’ve got to keep it secret.” And he put his pointing finger over his lips, and Danny mimicked his gesture, and they both laughed. “I tell you,” Uncle Arik said, sitting down in the armchair favored by Danny’s father, wiping sweat from his bushy eyebrows, and opening the top button on his checkered short-sleeved shirt, “I’ve been to a lot of cities in my time, Ben. I’ve seen the sights of Paris and Rome, Tokyo and New York and London—”

“I guess you had a lot of time looking out of windows,” his brother said.

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