by Neil Gaiman
ROSIE MADE IT TO THE TOP OF THE STEPS FIRST, AND SHE pushed open the wine cellar door. She stumbled into the house. She waited for her mother, then she slammed and bolted the cellar door. The power was out here, but the moon was high and nearly full, and, after the darkness, the pallid moonlight coming through the kitchen windows might as well have been floodlighting.
Boys and girls come out to play, thought Rosie. The moon does shine as bright as day…
“Phone the police,” said her mother.
“Where’s the phone?”
“How the hell should I know where the phone is? He’s still down there.”
“Right,” said Rosie, wondering whether she should find a phone to call the police or just get out of the house, but before she had reached a decision, it was too late.
There was a bang so loud it hurt her ears, and the door to the cellar crashed open.
The shadow came out of the cellar.
It was real. She knew it was real. She was looking at it. But it was impossible: it was the shadow of a great cat, shaggy and huge. Strangely, though, when the moonlight touched it, the shadow seemed darker. Rosie could not see its eyes, but she knew it was looking at her, and that it was hungry.
It was going to kill her. This was where it would end.
Her mother said, “It wants you, Rosie.”
“I know.”
Rosie picked up the nearest large object, a wooden block that had once held knives, and she threw it at the shadow as hard as she could, and then, without waiting to see if it made contact, she moved as fast as she could out of the kitchen, into the hallway. She knew where the front door was…
Something dark, something four-footed, moved faster: it bounded over her head, landing almost silently in front of her.
Rosie backed up against the wall. Her mouth was dry.
The beast was between them and the front door, and it was padding slowly toward Rosie, as if it had all the time in the world.
Her mother ran out of the kitchen then, then, ran past Rosie—tottered down the moonlit corridor toward the great shadow, her arms flailing. With her thin fists she punched the thing in the ribs. There was a pause, as if the world was holding its breath, and then it turned on her. A blur of motion and Rosie’s mother was down on the ground, while the shadow shook her like a dog with a rag doll between its teeth.
The doorbell rang.
Rosie wanted to call for help but instead she found she was screaming, loudly and insistently. Rosie, when confronted with an unexpected spider in a bathtub, was capable of screaming like a B-movie actress on her first encounter with a man in a rubber suit. Now she was in a dark house containing a shadowy tiger and a potential serial killer, and one, perhaps both, of those entities, had just attacked her mother. Her head thought of a couple of courses of action (the gun: the gun was down in the cellar. She ought to go down and get the gun. Or the door—she could try to get past her mother and the shadow and unlock the front door) but her lungs and her mouth would only scream.
Something banged at the front door. They’re trying to break in, she thought. They won’t get through that door. It’s solid.
Her mother lay on the floor in a patch of moonlight, and the shadow crouched above her, and it threw back its head and it roared, a deep rattling roar of fear and challenge and possession.
I’m hallucinating, thought Rosie with a wild certainty. I’ve been locked up in a cellar for two days and now I’m hallucinating. There is no tiger.
By the same token, she was certain that there was no pale woman in the moonlight, even though she could see her walking down the corridor, a woman with blonde hair and the long, long legs and narrow hips of a dancer. The woman stopped when she reached the shadow of the tiger. She said, “Hello, Grahame.”
The shadow-beast lifted its massive head and growled.
“Don’t think you can hide from me in that silly animal costume,” said the woman. She did not look pleased.
Rosie realized that she could see the window through the woman’s upper body, and she backed up until she was pressing hard against the wall.
The beast growled again, this time a little more uncertainly.
The woman said, “I don’t believe in ghosts, Grahame. I spent my life, my whole life, not believing in ghosts. And then I met you. You let Morris’s career run aground. You steal from us. You murder me. And finally, to add insult to injury, you force me to believe in ghosts.”
The shadowy big-cat-shape was whimpering now, and backing down the hall.
“Don’t think you can avoid me like that, you useless little man. You can pretend to be a tiger all you like. You aren’t a tiger. You’re a rat. No, that’s an insult to a noble and numerous species of rodent. You’re less than a rat. You’re a gerbil. You’re a stoat.”
Rosie ran down the hall. She ran past the shadow-beast, past her fallen mother. She ran through the pale woman, and it felt like she was passing through fog. She reached the front door, and began feeling for the bolts.
In her head or in the world Rosie could hear an argument. Someone was saying,
Pay no attention to her, idiot. She can’t touch you. It’s just a duppy. She’s barely real. Get the girl! Stop the girl!
And someone else was replying,
You certainly do have a valid point here. But I’m not convinced that you’ve taken all the circumstances into account, vis-à-vis, well, discretion, um, better part of valor, if you follow me…
I lead. You follow.
But…
“What I want to know,” said the pale woman, “is just how ghostly you currently are. I mean, I can’t touch people. I can’t really even touch things. I can touch ghosts.”
The pale woman aimed a serious kick at the beast’s face. The shadow-cat hissed and took a step back, and the foot missed it by less than an inch.
The next kick connected, and the beast yowled. Another kick, hard against the place the cat’s shadowy nose would be, and the beast made the noise of a cat being shampooed, a lonely wail of horror and outrage, of shame and defeat.
The corridor was filled with the sound of a dead woman laughing, a laugh of exultation and delight. “Stoat,” said the pale woman’s voice again. “Grahame Stoat.”
A cold wind blew through the house.
Rosie pulled the last of the bolts, and she turned the lock. The front door fell open. There were the beams of flashlights, blinding-bright. People. Cars. A woman’s voice said, “It’s one of the missing tourists.” And then she said, “My God.”
Rosie turned.
In the flashlight’s beam Rosie could see her mother, crumpled on the tiled floor and, beside her, shoeless and unconscious and unmistakably human, Grahame Coats. There was a red liquid splashed all around them, like crimson paint, and Rosie found herself, for a breath, unable to work out what it was.
A woman was talking to her. She was saying, “You’re Rosie Noah. My name’s Daisy. Let’s find somewhere for you to sit down. Would you like to sit down?”
Someone must have found the fuse box, for at that moment the lights went on all over the house.
A large man in a police uniform was bent over the bodies. He looked up and said, “It is definitely Mr Finnegan. He is not breathing.”
Rosie said, “Yes, please. I would like to sit down very much.”
CHARLIE SAT BESIDE SPIDER ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF, IN the moonlight, his legs dangling over the side.
“You know,” he said, “you used to be a part of me. When we were kids.”
Spider put his head on one side. “Really?”
“I think so.”
“Well, that would explain a few things.” He held out his hand: a seven-legged clay spider sat on the back of his fingers, tasting the air. “So what now? Are you going to take me back or something?”
Charlie’s brow crinkled. “I think you’ve turned out better than you would have done if you were part of me. And you’ve had a lot more fun.”
Spider said, “Rosie. Tiger know
s about Rosie. We have to do something.”
“Of course we do,” said Charlie. It was like bookkeeping, he thought: you put entries in one column, deduct them from another, and if you’ve done it correctly, everything should come out right at the bottom of the page. He took his brother’s hand.
They stood up and took a step forward, off the cliff—
—and everything was bright—
A cold wind blew between the worlds.
Charlie said, “You’re not the magical bit of me, you know.”
“I’m not?” Spider took another step. Stars were falling now by the dozen, streaking their way across the dark sky. Someone, somewhere, was playing high sweet music on a flute.
Another step, and now distant sirens were blaring. “No,” said Charlie. “You’re not. Mrs. Dunwiddy thought you were, I think. She split us apart, but she never really understood what she was doing. We’re more like two halves of a starfish. You grew up into a whole person. And so,” he said, realizing it was true as he said it, “did I.”
They stood on the cliff edge in the dawn. An ambulance was on its way up the hill, lights flashing, and another behind that. They parked by the side of the road, beside a cluster of police cars.
Daisy seemed to be telling everyone what to do.
“Not much that we can do here. Not now,” said Charlie. “Come on.” The last of the fireflies left him, and blinked its way to sleep.
They rode the first minibus of the morning back to Williamstown.
MAEVE LIVINGSTONE SAT UPSTAIRS IN THE LIBRARY OF Grahame Coats’s house, surrounded by Grahame Coats’s art and books and DVDs, and she stared out of the window. Down below the island’s emergency services were putting Rosie and her mother into one ambulance, Grahame Coats into another.
She had, she reflected, really enjoyed kicking the beast-thing that Grahame Coats had become. It was the most profoundly satisfying thing she had done since she had been killed—although if she were to be honest with herself, she would have to admit that dancing with Mr. Nancy came in an extremely close second. He had been remarkably spry, and nimble on his feet.
She was tired.
“Maeve?”
“Morris?” She looked around her, but the room was empty.
“I wouldn’t want to disturb you, if you were still busy, pet.”
“That’s very sweet of you,” she said. “But I think I’m done now.”
The walls of the library were beginning to fade. They were losing color and form. The world behind the walls was starting to show, and in its light she saw a small figure in a smart suit waiting for her.
Her hand crept into his. She said, “Where are we going now, Morris?”
He told her.
“Oh. Well, that will be a pleasant change,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”
And, hand in hand, they went.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WHICH COMES TO SEVERAL CONCLUSIONS
CHARLIE WOKE TO A BANGING ON A DOOR. DISORIENTED, HE looked around: he was in a hotel room; various unlikely events clustered inside his head like moths around a naked bulb, and while he tried to make sense of them he let his feet get up and walk him to the hotel room door. He blinked at the diagram on the back of the door which told him where to go in case of fire, trying to remember the events of the previous night. Then he unlocked the door and pulled it open.
Daisy looked up at him. She said, “Were you asleep in that hat?”
Charlie put his hand up and felt his head. There was definitely a hat on it. “Yes,” he said. “I think I must have been.”
“Bless,” she said. “Well, at least you took your shoes off. You know you missed all the excitement, last night?”
“I did?”
“Brush your teeth,” she said helpfully. “And change your shirt. Yes, you did. While you were…” and then she hesitated. It seemed quite improbable, on reflection, that he really had vanished in the middle of a séance. These things did not happen. Not in the real world. “While you weren’t there. I got the police chief to go up to Grahame Coats’s house. He had those tourists.”
“Tourists…?”
“It was what he said at dinner, something about us sending the two people in, the two at the house. It was your fiancée and her mother. He’d locked them up in his basement.”
“Are they okay?”
“They’re both in the hospital.”
“Oh.”
“Her mum’s in rough shape. I think your fiancée will be okay.”
“Will you stop calling her that? She’s not my fiancée. She ended the engagement.”
“Yes. But you didn’t, did you?”
“She’s not in love with me,” said Charlie. “Now, I’m going to brush my teeth and change my shirt, and I need a certain amount of privacy.”
“You should shower too,” she said. “And that hat smells like a cigar.”
“It’s a family heirloom,” he told her, and he went into the bathroom and locked the door behind him.
THE HOSPITAL WAS A TEN-MINUTE-WALK FROM THE HOTEL, and Spider was sitting in the waiting room, holding a dog-eared copy of Entertainment Weekly magazine as if he were actually reading it.
Charlie tapped him on the shoulder, and Spider jumped. He looked up warily and then, seeing his brother, he relaxed, but not much. “They said I had to wait out here,” Spider said. “Because I’m not a relation or anything.”
Charlie boggled. “Well, why didn’t you just tell them you were a relative? Or a doctor?”
Spider looked uncomfortable. “Well, it’s easy to do that stuff if you don’t care. If it doesn’t matter if I go in or I don’t, it’s easy to go in. But now it matters, and I’d hate to get in the way or do something wrong, and I mean, what if I tried and they said no, and then…what are you grinning about?”
“Nothing really,” said Charlie. “It just all sounds a bit familiar. Come on. Let’s go and find Rosie. You know,” he said to Daisy, as they set off down a random corridor, “there are two ways to walk through a hospital. Either you look like you belong there—here you go Spider. White coat on back of door, just your size. Put it on—or you should look so out of place that no one will complain that you’re there. They’ll just leave it for someone else to sort out.” He began to hum.
“What’s that song?” asked Daisy.
“It’s called ‘Yellow Bird,’” said Spider.
Charlie pushed his hat back on his head, and they walked into Rosie’s hospital room.
Rosie was sitting up in bed, reading a magazine, and looking worried. When she saw the three of them come in, she looked more worried. She looked from Spider to Charlie and back again.
“You’re both a long way from home,” was all she said.
“We all are,” said Charlie. “Now, you’ve met Spider. This is Daisy. She’s in the police.”
“I’m not sure that I am anymore,” said Daisy. “I’m probably in all kinds of hot water.”
“You’re the one who was there last night? The one who got the island police to come up to the house?” Rosie stopped. She said, “Any word on Grahame Coats?”
“He’s in intensive care, just like your mum.”
“Well, if she comes to before he does,” said Rosie, “I expect she’ll kill him.” Then she said, “They won’t talk to me about my mum’s condition. They just say that it’s very serious, and they’ll tell me as soon as there’s anything to tell.” She looked at Charlie with clear eyes. “She’s not as bad as you think she is, really. Not when you get time to know her. We had a lot of time to talk, locked up in the dark. She’s all right.”
She blew her nose. Then she said, “They don’t think she’s going to make it. They haven’t directly said that to me, but they sort of said it in a not-saying-it sort of way. It’s funny. I thought she’d live through anything.”
Charlie said, “Me too. I figured even if there was a nuclear war, it would still leave radioactive cockroaches and your mum.”
Daisy ste
pped on his foot. She said, “Do they know anything more about what hurt her?”
“I told them,” said Rosie. “There was some kind of animal in the house. Maybe it was just Grahame Coats. I mean it sort of was him, but it was sort of someone else. She distracted it from me, and it went for her…” She had explained it all as best she could to the island police that morning. She had decided not to talk about the blonde ghost-woman. Sometimes minds snap under pressure, and she thought it best if people did not know that hers had.
Rosie broke off. She was staring at Spider as if she had only just remembered who he was. She said, “I still hate you, you know.” Spider said nothing, but a miserable expression crept across his face, and he no longer looked like a doctor: now he looked like a man who had borrowed a white coat from behind a door and was worried that someone would notice. A dreamlike tone came into her voice. “Only,” she said, “only when I was in the dark, I thought that you were helping me. That you were keeping the animal away. What happened to your face? It’s all scratched.”
“It was an animal,” said Spider.
“You know,” she said, “Now I see you both at once, you don’t look anything alike at all.”
“I’m the good-looking one,” said Charlie, and Daisy’s foot pressed down on his toes for the second time.
“Bless,” said Daisy, quietly. And then, slightly louder, “Charlie? There’s something we need to talk about outside. Now.”
They went out into the hospital corridor, leaving Spider inside.
“What?” said Charlie.
“What what?” said Daisy.
“What have we got to talk about?”
“Nothing.”
“Then why are we out here? You heard her. She hates him. We shouldn’t have left them alone together. She’s probably killed him by now.”