by Neil Gaiman
“When I was a young copper, bloke asked me for a book, I went and found him the book I’d been reading. J. T. Edson, it was, or maybe Louis L’Amour. He only went and blocked up his toilet with it, didn’t he? Won’t catch me doing that again in a hurry.”
Then he went out and locked the door, with Fat Charlie on the inside and himself on the outside.
THE ODDEST THING, THOUGH GRAHAME COATS, WHO WAS not given to self-inspection, was how normal and chipper and generally good he felt.
The captain told them to fasten their safety belts, and mentioned that they would be landing soon on Saint Andrews. Saint Andrews was a small Caribbean island which, on declaring independence in 1962, had elected to demonstrate its freedom from colonial rule in a number of ways, including the creation of its own judiciary and a singular lack of extradition treaties with the rest of the world.
The plane landed. Grahame Coats got off and walked across the sunny tarmac dragging his wheeled bag behind him. He produced the appropriate passport—Basil Finnegan’s—and had it stamped, collected the rest of his luggage from the carousel, and walked out through an unattended customs hall into the tiny airport and from there into the glorious sunshine. He wore a T-shirt and shorts and sandals and looked like a British Holidaymaker Abroad.
His groundskeeper was waiting for him outside the airport, and Grahame Coats sat himself in the back of the black Mercedes and said “Home, please.” On the road out of Williamstown, the road to his clifftop estate, he stared out at the island with a satisfied and proprietorial smile on his face.
It occurred to him that before he left England he had left a woman for dead. He wondered if she was still alive; he rather doubted it. It did not bother him to have killed. It felt instead immensely satisfying, like something he had needed to do to feel complete. He wondered if he would ever get to do it again.
He wondered if it would be soon.
CHAPTER TEN
IN WHICH FAT CHARLIE SEES THE WORLD AND MAEVE LIVINGSTONE IS DISSATISFIED
FAT CHARLIE SAT ON THE BLANKET ON THE METAL BED AND waited for something to happen, but it didn’t. What felt like several months passed, extremely slowly. He tried to go to sleep but he couldn’t remember how.
He banged on the door.
Someone shouted, “Shut up!” but he couldn’t tell whether it was an officer or a fellow inmate.
He walked around the cell for what, at a conservative estimate, he felt must have been two or three years. Then he sat down and let eternity wash over him. Daylight was visible through the thick glass block at the top of the wall that did duty as a window, by all appearances the same daylight that had been visible when the door was locked behind him that morning.
Fat Charlie tried to remember what people did in prison to pass the time, but all he could come up with was keeping secret diaries and hiding things in their bottoms. He had nothing to write on, and felt that a definite measure of how well one was getting on in life was not having to hide things in one’s bottom.
Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbott and Costello meet the Wolfman…
When the door was unlocked, Fat Charlie nearly cheered.
“Right. Exercise yard. You can have a cigarette if you need one.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Filthy habit anyway.”
The exercise yard was an open space in the middle of the police station surrounded by walls on all sides and topped by wire mesh, which Fat Charlie walked around while deciding that, if there was one thing he didn’t like being in, it was police custody. Fat Charlie had had no real liking for the police, but until now, he had still managed to cling to a fundamental trust in the natural order of things, a conviction that there was some kind of power—a Victorian might have thought of it as Providence—that ensured that the guilty would be punished while the innocent would be set free. This faith had collapsed in the face of recent events and had been replaced by the suspicion that he would spend the rest of his life pleading his innocence to a variety of implacable judges and tormenters, many of whom would look like Daisy, and that he would in all probability wake up in cell six the following morning to find that he had been transformed into an enormous cockroach. He had definitely been transported to the kind of maleficent universe that transformed people into cockroaches…
Something dropped out of the sky above him onto the wire mesh. Fat Charlie looked up. A blackbird stared down at him with lofty disinterest. There was more fluttering, and the blackbird was joined by several sparrows and by something that Fat Charlie thought was probably a thrush.
They stared at him; he stared back at them.
More birds came.
It would have been hard for Fat Charlie to say exactly when the accumulation of birds on the wire mesh moved from interesting to terrifying. It was somewhere in the first hundred or so, anyway. And it was in the way they didn’t coo, or caw, or trill, or sing. They simply landed on the wire, and they watched him.
“Go away,” said Fat Charlie.
As one bird, they didn’t. Instead, they spoke. They said his name.
Fat Charlie went over to the door in the corner. He banged on it. He said, “Excuse me,” a few times, and then he started shouting, “Help!”
A clunk. The door was opened, and a heavy-lidded member of Her Majesty’s constabulary said, “This had better be good.”
Fat Charlie pointed upward. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. The constabular mouth dropped open peculiarly wide, and it hung there slackly. Fat Charlie’s mother would have told the man to shut his mouth or something would fly into it.
The mesh sagged under the weight of thousands of birds. Tiny avian eyes stared down, unblinkingly.
“Christ on a bike,” said the policeman, and he ushered Fat Charlie back into the cellblock without saying another word.
MAEVE LIVINGSTONE WAS IN PAIN. SHE WAS SPRAWLED ON the floor. She woke, and her hair and face were wet and warm, and then she slept, and when next she woke her hair and face were sticky and cold. She dreamed and woke and dreamed again, woke enough to be conscious of the hurt at the back of her head, and then, because it was easier to sleep, and because when she slept it did not hurt, she allowed sleep to embrace her like a comfortable blanket.
In her dreams she was walking through a television studio, looking for Morris. Occasionally she would catch glimpses of him on the monitors. He always looked concerned. She tried to find her way out, but all ways led her back to the studio floor.
“I’m so cold,” she thought, and knew that she was awake once more. The pain, though, had subsided. All things considered, thought Maeve, she felt pretty good.
There was something she was upset about, but she was not entirely sure what it was. Perhaps it had been another part of her dream.
It was dark, wherever she was. She seemed to be in some kind of broom closet, and she put out her arms to avoid bumping into anything in the darkness. She took a few nervous steps with her arms outstretched and her eyes closed, then she opened her eyes. Now she was in a room she knew. It was an office.
Grahame Coats’s office.
She remembered then. The just-awake grogginess was still there—she wasn’t yet thinking clearly, knew she wouldn’t be properly all there until she had had her morning cup of coffee—but still, it came to her: Grahame Coats’s perfidiousness, his treachery, his criminality, his…
Why, she thought, he assaulted me. He hit me. And then she thought, The police. I should call the police.
She reached down for the phone on the table and picked it up, or tried to, but the phone seemed very heavy, or slippery, or both, and she was unable to grasp it properly. It felt wrong for her fingers.
I must be weaker than I thought, Maeve decided. I had better ask them to send a doctor as well.
In the pocket of her jacket was a small silver phone which played “Greensleeves” when it rang. She was relieved to find the p
hone still here, and that she had no problems at all in holding it. She dialed the emergency services. As she waited for someone to answer she wondered why they still called it dialing when there weren’t dials on telephones, not since she was much younger, and then after the phones with dials came the trim-phones with buttons on them and a particularly annoying ring. She had, as a teenager, had a boyfriend who could and continually did imitate the breep of a trimphone, an ability that was, Maeve decided, looking back, his only real achievement. She wondered what had happened to him. She wondered how a man who could imitate a trimphone coped in a world in which telephones could and did sound like anything…
“We apologize for the delay in placing your call,” said a mechanical voice. “Please hold the line.”
Maeve felt oddly calm, as if nothing bad could ever happen to her again.
A man’s voice came on the line. “Hello?” it said. It sounded extremely efficient.
“I need the police,” said Maeve.
“You do not need the police,” said the voice. “All crimes will be dealt with by the appropriate and inevitable authorities.”
“You know,” said Maeve, “I think I may have dialed the wrong number.”
“Likewise,” said the voice, “all numbers are, ultimately, correct. They are simply numbers and cannot thus be right or wrong.”
“That’s all very well for you to say,” said Maeve. “But I do need to speak to the police. I may also need an ambulance. And I have obviously called a wrong number.” She ended the call. Perhaps, she thought, 999 didn’t work from a cell phone. She pulled up her onscreen address book and called her sister’s number. The phone rang once, and a familiar voice said. “Let me clarify: I am not saying that you dialed a wrong number on purpose. What I trust that I am saying is that all numbers are by their nature correct. Well, except for Pi, of course. I can’t be doing with Pi. Gives me a headache just thinking about it, going on and on and on and on and on…”
Maeve pressed the red button and ended the call. She dialed her bank manager.
The voice that answered said, “But here am I, wittering on about the correctness of numbers, and you’re undoubtedly thinking that there’s a time and a place for everything…”
Click. Called her best friend.
“—and right now what we should be discussing is your ultimate disposition. I’m afraid traffic is extremely heavy this afternoon, so if you wouldn’t mind waiting where you are for a little while, you will be collected…” It was a reassuring voice, the voice of a radio vicar in the process of telling you his thought for the day.
If Maeve had not felt so placid, she would have panicked then. Instead, she pondered. Seeing that her phone had been—what would they call it, hacked?—then she would simply have to go down to the street and find a police officer and make a formal complaint. Nothing happened when Maeve pressed the button for the lift, so she walked down the stairs, thinking that there was probably never a police officer about when you wanted one anyway, they were always zooming about in those cars, the ones that went neenorneenor. The police, Maeve thought, should be strolling around in pairs telling people the time or waiting at the bottom of drainpipes as burglars with bags of swag over their shoulder make their descent…
At the very bottom of the stairs, in the hallway, were two police officers, a man and a woman. They were out of uniform, but they were police all right. There was no mistaking them. The man was stout and red-faced, the woman was small and dark and might, in other circumstances, have been extremely pretty. “We know she came this far,” the woman was saying. “The receptionist remembered her coming in, just before lunchtime. When she got back from lunch, they’d both gone.”
“You think they ran off together?” asked the stout man.
“Um, excuse me,” said Maeve Livingstone, politely.
“It’s possible. There’s got to be some kind of simple explanation. The disappearance of Grahame Coats. The disappearance of Maeve Livingstone. At least we’ve got Nancy in custody.”
“We certainly did not run off together,” said Maeve, but they ignored her.
The two police officers got into the lift and slammed the doors behind them. Maeve watched them judder up and away, toward the top floor.
She was still holding her cell phone. It vibrated in her hand now and then began to play “Greensleeves.” She glanced down at it. Morris’s photograph filled the screen. Nervously, she answered the phone. “Yes?”
“‘Ullo love. How’s tricks?”
She said, “Fine thank you.” Then she said, “Morris?” And then, “No, it’s not fine. It’s all awful, actually.”
“Aye,” said Morris. “I thought it might be. Still, nothing that can be done about that now. Time to move on.”
“Morris? Where are you calling from?”
“It’s a bit complicated,” he said. “I mean, I’m not actually on the phone. Just really wanted to help you along.”
“Grahame Coats,” she said. “He was a crook.”
“Yes, love,” said Morris. “But it’s time to let all that go. Put it behind you.”
“He hit me on the back of the head,” she told him. “And he’s been stealing our money.”
“It’s only material things, love,” said Morris, reassuringly. “Now you’re beyond the vale…”
“Morris,” said Maeve. “That pestilent little worm attempted to murder your wife. I do think you should try to show a little more concern.”
“Don’t be like that, love. I’m just trying to explain…”
“I have to tell you, Morris, that if you’re going to take that kind of attitude, I’ll simply deal with this myself. I’m certainly not going to forget about it. It’s all right for you, you’re dead. You don’t have to worry about these things.”
“You’re dead, too, love.”
“That is quite beside the point,” she said. Then, “I’m what?” And then, before he could say anything, Maeve said, “Morris, I said that he attempted to murder me. Not that he succeeded.”
“Erm,” the late Morris Livingstone sounded lost for words. “Maeve. Love. I know this may come as a bit of a shock to you, but the truth of the matter is that—”
The telephone made a “plibble” noise, and the image of an empty battery appeared on the screen.
“I’m afraid I didn’t get that, Morris,” she told him. “I think the telephone battery is going.”
“You don’t have a phone battery,” he told her. “You don’t have a phone. All is illusion. I keep trying to tell you, you’ve now transcended the vale of oojamaflip, and now you’re becoming, oh heck, it’s like worms and butterflies, love. You know.”
“Caterpillars,” said Maeve. “I think you mean caterpillars and butterflies.”
“Er, that sounds right,” said Morris’s voice over the telephone. “Caterpillars. That was what I meant. So what do worms turn into, then?”
“They don’t turn into anything, Morris,” said Maeve, a little testily. “They’re just worms.” The silver phone emitted a small noise, like an electronic burp, showed the picture of an empty battery again, and turned itself off.
Maeve closed it and put it back into her pocket. She walked over to the nearest wall and, experimentally, pushed a finger against it. The wall felt clammy and gelatinous to the touch. She exerted a little more pressure, and her whole hand went into it. Then it went through it.
“Oh dear,” she said, and felt herself, not for the first time in her existence, wishing that she had listened to Morris, who after all, she admitted to herself, by now probably knew rather more about being dead than she did. Ah well, she thought. Being dead is probably just like everything else in life: you pick some of it up as you go along, and you just make up the rest.
She walked out the front door, and found herself coming through the wall at the back of the hall, into the building. She tried again, with the same result. Then she walked into the travel agency that occupied the bottom floor of the building, and tried pushing t
hrough the wall on the west of the building.
She went through it, and came out in the front hall again, entering from the east. It was like being in a TV set and trying to walk off the screen. Topographically speaking, the office building seemed to have become her universe.
She went back upstairs to see what the detectives were doing. They were staring at the desk, at the debris that Grahame Coats had left when he was packing.
“You know,” said Maeve helpfully, “I’m in a room behind the bookcase. I’m in there.”
They ignored her.
The woman crouched down and rummaged in the bin. “Bingo,” she said, and pulled out a man’s white shirt, spattered with dried blood. She placed it into a plastic bag. The stout man pulled out his phone.
“I want Forensic down here,” he said.
FAT CHARLIE NOW FOUND HIMSELF VIEWING HIS CELL AS A refuge rather than as a prison. Cells were deep inside the building, for a start, far from the haunts of even the most adventurous birds. And his brother was nowhere to be seen. He no longer minded that nothing ever happened in cell six. Nothing was infinitely preferable to most of the somethings he found himself coming up with. Even a world populated exclusively with castles and cockroaches and people named K was preferable to a world filled with malignant birds that whispered his name in chorus.
The door opened.
“Don’t you knock?” asked Fat Charlie.
“No,” said the policeman. “We don’t, actually. Your solicitor’s finally here.”
“Mister Merryman?” said Fat Charlie, and then he stopped. Leonard Merryman was a rotund gentleman with small gold spectacles, and the man behind the cop most definitely wasn’t.
“Everything’s fine,” said the man who wasn’t his solicitor. “You can leave us here.”
“Buzz when you’re done,” said the policeman, and he closed the door.
Spider took Fat Charlie by the hand. He said, “I’m busting you out of here.”
“But I don’t want to be busted out of here. I didn’t do anything.”