Don’t ask me how I survived in that world of dust and sun, where the men too crazy to beg sit in alleyways and point revolvers at their own heads, manically dry-firing on vacant chambers. Where a pawnbroker would sell you angel’s narcotics across the table made of a side-panel from the Arc of the Covenant.

It was a train took me away from here, and a train that brought me home if I can be so cheap as to steal a line from a storyteller far greater than I.

It may be the worst thing I have ever stolen.

When I returned, when is the proper word for this is not my New York City, this rolled-back place of horse-drawn carriages, gaslight and powder and ball. Worse still, everywhere I walked in my dust-blown clothes I saw the rips and rends in the fabric of reality. I could peer through like a naughty child at a keyhole and see that place of dust and sun rutting with itself in ecstasy, indecent and joyful.

I am an adaptable man, as it turns out.

This city’s law is in its fetal stage and there is a hunger for vice that runs rampant, amok. I partake no more, but I can make your heart a stone lion with the right blue vial, I can sell you a piece of a basalt carving to impress the little woman. You can say you discovered it… wherever. Doesn’t much matter.

I deal in mysteries now, smuggling them back in forth in shoe-bottoms, false suitcases and coat linings. Not because I have to, but because some things should just be done a certain way.

My discretion did not pay off. I am followed this time. Not some broken soul looking for the way back, but a hunter who hides in my back trail like a slowpoke shadow.

My cargo is heavy and I have to move fast to outpace him. I lose him in the initial confusion, and I can almost sympathize as he tries to navigate this version of New York. In order to follow me, he’ll have to do in an hour what took me weeks.

I have no doubt that he can, so I move faster.

Siren’s vocal chords. That’s the current cargo, thirteen of them preserved in moonshine, each in its own little jar. Hard to procure and this time I had to do all the hunting and heavy lifting myself.

There is a man here who builds the most amazing machines a toymaker if you will, and I’m not talking about that absent minded idiot in the tower whose mechanical birds keep slipping through his fingers and window sashes. A townhouse in the fifties deals to a very exclusive clientele a sort of automaton. I think I can leave the description at that. All I will add is that the man seems far too gentle for that sort of work. A few siren’s vocal chords in his lovely machines and he’ll own souls as well as wallets.

In that place of dust and sun, the sirens live on a mountain far into the desert. An embarrassment of resources carried me there and still I returned with only an inch of water in my canteen, one exhausted horse, one boot and thirteen jars.

Sirens are wily, vicious creatures. Their magical throats are made of something that looks like steel but is infinitely harder and so it was a nervous hunt with my ears plugged and an elephant gun. My shoulder still clicks.

The bullets won’t pierce their hides, but the brutal concussive shock can kill them.

The acetylene torch I used for harvesting lies spent on the mountain. The trader I got it from had no idea what it was and let it go for a felt bowler hat, laughing all the while. That’s fine. His head swam in the hat like a toothpick in a mixing bowl.

Now, running through these cold New York streets in terror, pursued by that shadowy man who has no doubt found resources and is blending in, I just want to sell these things off and get in the wind.

In the end it is a raven that tells me the truth.

The tenement is on the Lower East side and as I climb the stairs, fear climbs on my shoulders and hangs, riding me like the old man rode Sinbad.

I do not know why the toymaker’s agents are always men in dresses. This one shrieks and flounces and carries on about times and dates, I barely pay attention as I heave the case up onto the bed for him to check the merchandise and take delivery.

The raven on the fire escape is too big, its feathers are too shiny. They are black steel and its eye turns to me with a scary intelligence. So I rabbitted, shoved the he-she to the floor and dashed for the fire escape. Not a moment too soon, I can hear the door splinter behind me and I curse at its loss even as I hope that the suitcase slows his pursuit.

I do not know why he chases. With a wink from Lady Luck I shall never have to find out.