by Neil Gaiman
Or maybe, he thought, as his vision clouded over, and the darkness swallowed the last of Simon Powers, it caught me.
Soon after that Simon got up, and washed, and inspected himself carefully in front of the bathroom mirror. Then he smiled, as if he liked what he saw.
§ § §
Benham smiled. “I’m pleased to tell you,” he said, “that I can give you a clean bill of health.”
Simon Powers stretched in his seat, lazily, and nodded. “I feel terrific,” he said.
He did look well, Benham thought. Glowing with health. He seemed taller as well. A very attractive young man, decided the doctor. “So, uh, no more of those feelings?”
“Feelings?”
“Those feelings you were telling me about. That your body didn’t belong to you any more.”
Simon waved a hand, gently, fanning his face. The cold weather had broken, and London was stewing in a sudden heatwave; it didn’t feel like England any more.
Simon seemed amused.
“All of this body belongs to me, Doctor. I’m certain of that.”
Simon Powers (90/00666.L SINGLE. MALE.) grinned like the world belonged to him as well.
The doctor watched him as he walked out of the surgery. He looked stronger, now; less fragile.
The next patient on Jeremy Benham’s appointment card was a twenty-two-year-old boy. Benham was going to have to tell him he was HIV positive. I hate this job, he thought. I need a holiday.
He walked down the corridor to call the boy in, and pushed past Simon Powers, talking animatedly to a pretty young Australian Nurse. “. . . it must be a lovely place,” he was telling her. “I want to see it. I want to go everywhere. I want to meet everyone.” He was resting a hand on her arm, and she was making no move to free herself from it.
Dr Benham stopped beside them. He touched Simon on the shoulder. “Young man,” he said. “Don’t let me see you back here.”
Simon Powers grinned. “You won’t see me here again, Doctor,” he said. “Not as such, anyway. I’ve packed in my job. I’m going around the world.”
They shook hands. Powers’ hand was warm and comfortable and dry.
Benham walked away, but could not avoid hearing Simon Powers, still talking to the nurse.
“It’s going to be so great,” he was saying to her. Benham wondered if he was talking about sex, or world travel, or possibly, in some way, both.
“I’m going to have such fun,” said Simon. “I’m loving it already.”
COLD COLOURS
I.
Woken at nine o’clock by the postman
Who turns out not to be the postman but an itinerant seller of pigeons crying,
“Fat pigeons, pure pigeons, dove-white, slate grey,
living breathing pigeons
none of your reanimated muck here, sir.”
I have pigeons and to spare and I tell him so.
He tells me he’s new in this business,
used to be part of a moderately successful
financial securities analysis company
but was laid off, replaced by a computer RS232’d to a quartz sphere.
“Still, mustn’t grumble, one door opens another one slams
got to keep up with the times sir, got to keep up with the times.”
He thrusts me a free pigeon
(to attract new custom, sir, once you’ve tried one of our pigeons you’ll never look at another)
and struts down the stairs singing
“Pigeons alive-oh, alive alive-oh.”
Ten o’clock after I’ve bathed and shaved
(unguents of eternal youth and of certain sexual attraction applied from plastic vessels)
I take the pigeon into my study;
I refresh the chalk circle around my old Dell 310,
hang wards at each corner of the monitor,
and do what is needful with the pigeon.
Then I turn the computer to on: it chugs and hums,
inside it fans blow like stormwinds on old oceans
ready to drown poor merchantmen,
Autoexec complete it bleeps:
I’ll do, I’ll do, I’ll do . . .
II.
Two o’clock and walking through familiar London
—Or what was familiar London before the cursor deleted certain certainties—
I watch a suit and tie man giving suck
to the Psion Organiser lodged in his breast pocket
its serial interface like a cool mouth hunting his chest for sustenance,
familiar feeling, and I’m watching my breath steam in the air.
Cold as a witch’s tit these days is London,
you’d never think it was November,
and from underground the sounds of trains rumble.
Mysterious: tube trains are almost legendary in these times,
stopping only for virgins and the pure of heart,
first stop Avalon, Lyonesse, or the Isles of the Blessed. Maybe you get a post
card and maybe you don’t.
Anyway, looking down any chasm demonstrates conclusively
there is no room under London for subways;
I warm my hands at a pit.
Flames lick upward.
Far below a smiling demon spots me, waves, mouths carefully,
as one does to the deaf, or distant, or to foreigners:
its sales performance is spotless: it mimes a Dwarrow Clone,
mimes software beyond my wildest,
Albertus Magnus ARChived on three floppies,
Claviculae Solomon for VGA, CGA, four-colour or monochrome,
mimes
and mimes
and mimes.
The tourists lean over the riftways to Hell
staring at the damned
(perhaps the worst part of damnation;
eternal torture is bearable in noble silence, alone
but an audience, eating crisps and chips and chestnuts,
an audience who aren’t even really that interested . . .
They must feel like something at the zoo,
the damned).
Pigeons flutter around hell, dancing on the updrafts,
race memory perhaps telling them
that somewhere around here there should be four lions,
unfrozen water, one stone man above;
the tourists cluster around.
One does a deal with the demon: a ten-pack of blank floppies for his soul.
One has recognised a relative in the flames and is waving:
Coooee! Coooeee! Uncle Joseph! Look, Nerissa, it’s your Great-Uncle Joe
that died before you was born,
that’s him down there, in the Slough, up to his eyes in boiling scum
with the worms crawling in and out of his face.
Such a lovely man.
We all cried at his funeral.
Wave to your uncle, Nerissa, wave to your uncle.
The pigeon man lays limed twigs on the cracked paving stones, then sprinkles breadcrumbs and waits.
He raises his cap to me.
“This morning’s pigeon, sir, I trust it was satisfactory?”
I allow that it was, and toss him a golden shilling,
(which he touches surreptitiously to the iron of his gauntlet,
checking for fairy gold, then palms).
Tuesdays, I tell him. Come on Tuesdays.
III.
Birdlegged cottages and huts crowd the London streets,
stepping spindly over the taxis, shitting embers over cyclists,
queuing in the streets behind the busses,
chuckchuckchuckchuckchuurck, they murmur.
Old women with iron teeth gaze out of the windows
then return to their magic mirrors,
or to their housework,
Hoovering through fog and filthy air.
IV.
Four o’clock in Old Soho,
rapidly becoming a backwater of lost technology.
/> The ratcheting grate of charms being wound up
with clockwork silver keys
grinds out from every backstreet Watchmaker’s,
Abortionist’s, Philtre & Tobacconist’s.
It’s raining.
Bulletin board kids drive pimpmobiles in floppy hats,
modem panders
anoracked kid-kings of signal to noise;
and all their neon-lit stippled stable flirting and turning under the lights,
succubi and incubi with sell-by dates and Smart Card eyes,
all yours, if you’ve got your number,
know your expiry date, all that.
One of them winks at me
(flashes on, on-off, off-off-on),
noise swallows signal in fumbled fellatio.
(I cross two fingers,
a binary precaution against hex,
effective as superconductor or simple superstition.)
Two poltergeists share a take-away. Old Soho always makes me
nervous.
Brewer Street. A hiss from an alley: Mephistopheles opens his brown coat,
flashes me the lining (databased old invocations,
Magians lay ghosts—with diagrams), curses, and begins:
—Blight an enemy?
Wither a harvest?
Barren a consort?
Debase an innocent?
Ruin a party . . . ?
For you, sir? No, sir? Reconsider I beg you. Just a little of your blood smudged on this printout
and you can be the proud possessor of a new voice-synthesiser, listen—
He stands a Zenith portable on a table he makes from a modest suitcase,
attracting a small audience in the process, plugs in the voicebox,
types at the
C> prompt: GO
and it recites in voice exact and fine—
orientis princeps Beelzebub, inferni irredentista menarche et demigorgon,
propitiamus vows—
I hurry onwards, hurry down the street
while paper ghosts, old printouts, dog my heels,
and hear him patter like a market man:
—Not twenty
Not eighteen
Not fifteen,
Cost me twelve lady so help me Satan but to you?
Because I like your pretty face
Because I want to raise your spirits
Five.
That’s right.
Five.
Sold to the lady with the lovely eyes . . .
V.
The Archbishop hunches glaucous blind in the darkness on the edge of St Pauls,
small, birdlike, luminous, humming I/O, I/O, I/O.
It’s almost six and the rush hour traffic in stolen dreams
and expanded memory hustles the pavement below us.
I hand the man my jug.
He takes it, carefully, and shuffles back into the waiting cathedral shadows.
When he returns the jug is full once more.
I josh, “Guaranteed holy?”
He traces one word in the frozen dirt: WYSIWYG,
and does not smile back.
(Wheezy wig. Whisky whig.)
He coughs grey, milk-phlegm,
spits onto the steps.
What I see in the jug: it looks holy enough, but you can’t know for sure,
not unless you are yourself a siren or a fetch,
coagulating out of a telecom mouthpiece, riding the bleep,
an invocation, some really Wrong Number; then you can tell
from holy.
I’ve dumped telephones in buckets of the stuff before now,
watched things begin to form
then bubble and hiss as the water gets to them:
lustrated and asperged, the Final Sanction.
One afternoon
there was a queue of them, trapped on the tape of my ansaphone:
I copied it to floppy and filed it away.
You want it?
Listen, everything’s for sale.
The priest needs shaving, and he’s got the shakes.
His wine-stained vestments do little to keep him warm.
I give him money.
(Not much. After all,
it’s just water, some creatures are so stupid
they’ll do you a Savini gunk-dissolve
if you sprinkle them with Perrier
for chrissakes, whining the whole time
All my evil, my beautiful evil.)
The old priest pockets the coin, gives me
a bag of crumbs as a bonus,
sits on his steps hugging himself.
I feel the need to say something before I leave.
Look, I tell him, it’s not your fault.
It’s just a multi-user system.
You weren’t to know.
If prayers could be networked,
if saintware were up and running,
if you could make your side as reliable as they’ve made theirs. . . .
“What You See,” he mutters desolately,
“What You See Is What You Get.” He crumbles a communion wafer
throws it down for the pigeons,
makes no attempt to catch even the slowest bird.
Cold wars produce bad losers.
I go home.
VI.
News at Ten. And here is Abel Drugger reading it:
VII.
The corners of my eyes catch hasty, bloodless motion—
a mouse?
Well, certainly a peripheral of some kind.
VIII.
It’s bed-time. I feed the pigeons,
then undress.
Contemplate downloading a succubus from a board,
maybe just call up a sidekick,
(there’s public domain stuff, bawds and bauds,
shareware, no need to pay a fortune,
even copy-protected stuff can be copied, passed about,
everything has a price, any of us).
Dryware, wetware, hardware, software,
blackware, darkware,
nightware, nightmare . . .
The modem sits inviting beside the phone,
red eyes.
I let it rest—
you can’t trust anybody these days.
You download, hell, you don’t know where what came from anymore,
who had it last.
Well, aren’t you? Aren’t you scared of viruses?
Even the better protected files corrupt,
and the best protected corrupt absolutely.
In the kitchen I hear the pigeons billing and queuing,
dreaming of left-handed knives,
of athanors and mirrors.
Pigeon blood stains the floor of my study.
Alone, I sleep. And all alone I dream.
IX.
Perhaps I wake in the night, suddenly comprehending something,
reach out,
scribble on the back of an old bill
my revelation, my newfound understanding,
knowing that morning will render it prosaic,
knowing that magic is a night-time thing,
then remembering when it still was . . .
Revelation retreats to cliché, listen:
Things seemed simpler before we kept computers.
X.
Waking or dreaming from outside I hear
wild sabbats, screaming winds, tape hum, metal machine music;
witches astride ghetto blasters crowd the moon,
then land on the heath their naked flanks aglisten.
No-one pays anything to attend the meet, each has it taken care of in advance,
baby bones with fat still clinging to them;
these things are direct debit, standing order,
and I see
or think I see
a face I recognise and all of them queue up to kiss his arse,
let’s rim the Devil, boys, cold seed,
and in the dark he turns and
looks at me:
—One door opens another one slams,
I trust that everything is satisfactory?
We do what we can, everybody’s got the right to turn an honest penny:
we’re all bankrupt, sir,
we’re all redundant,
but we make the best of it, whistle through the Blitz,
that’s the business. Fair trade is no robbery.
Tuesday morning, then, sir, with the pigeons?
I nod and draw the curtains. Junk mail is everywhere.
They’ll get to you,
one way or another they’ll get to you; some day
I’ll find my tube train underground, I’ll pay no fare,
just “this is hell, and I want out of it,”
and then things will be simple once again.
It will come for me like a dragon down a dark tunnel.
LUTHER’S VILLANELLE
I get the feeling I’ve been here before
(Which is of course unlikely to be true)
But in these times it’s so hard to be sure . . .
Consider the cold bastions of law
The clunk of padlock, muttered curse of screw—
I get the feeling I’ve been here before.
A thousand worlds and every world’s a door.
The lights go out; I think I think of you,
But in these times it’s so hard to be sure.
There’s black blood slowly clotting on the floor,
Adhering to the bottom of my shoe.
I get the feeling I’ve been here before.
I’ve never been intentionally obscure,
I’ve never been intentionally taboo,
But in these times it’s so hard to be sure.
There is no crime, though somewhere there’s a clue.
Not far away the game begins anew . . .
But in these times it’s so hard to be sure:
I get the feeling I’ve been here before.
MOUSE
THEY HAD a number of devices that would kill the mouse fast, others that would kill it more slowly. There were a dozen variants on the traditional mousetrap, the one Regan tended to think of as a Tom & Jerry trap: a metal spring trap that would slam down at a touch, breaking the mouse’s back; there were other gadgets on the shelves—ones that suffocated the mouse, others that electrocuted it, or even drowned it, each safe in its multicoloured cardboard package.
“These weren’t quite what I was looking for,” said Regan.
“Well, that’s all we got in the way of traps,” said the woman, who wore a large plastic name-tag that said her name was BECKY and that she Loves Working FOR YOU at MacRea’s Animal Feed and Specialty Store. “Now, over here—”