Darker Terrors

by Neil Gaiman

  So by the time they came to get me for the opening day’s dinner reception, I was pretty well goggle-eyed. Maybe that’s why I didn’t think what was happening was all that distressin’. What Shakespeare called ‘how strange or odd’. I had fourteen and a half hours on the flight back to mull it, an’ I can tell you now that it was indeed, oh my yes, it was indeed distressin’, strange, and odd.

  Now take it easy! I’ll skip all the local colour, what it’s like ridin’ over cobblestone streets, and the hoe-ren-duss cost of livin’ in Sweden – y’know how much it costs for a roll of Scotch Tape? About seven dollars, that’s what it costs, can you believe it – and I’ll cut right to the reception, and meeting Agnes. And Fuchs. And the sepulchre on Osterlanggatan. And the flame feather I brought home from Stockholm instead of the most beautiful woman who ever walked the face of the earth.

  We were sitting around at this big table at the reception, with a classical pianist named Baekkelund playing all sorts of twentieth-century Swedish compositions – Blomdahl, Carlid, Back, Lidholm, that whole ‘Monday Group’ – and Fuchs was sitting next to me, looking at me as if I might start blowing bubbles at any moment, and I thanked him again for runnin’ to get me a champagne refill, ’bout the third or fourth time he’d done it, like as if he wanted to come into my employ as a manservant, and he smiled at me with a little face full of nasty brown teeth, and he said, ‘I notice it is that you concern over my wearing of gloves.’

  I hadn’t realised I’d been oglin’ his li’l rubber mittens, but I was just bubbly-happy enough to smart him, ’stead of just answering polite. I said, ‘Well, Dr Foowks, it has attended my attention that the warm factor in this jammed ballroom is very possibly running towards ninety or so, and the rest of us are, how do they say it in Yiddish, we are all schvitzin’ like sows, whilst you are covered fingertip to neck-bone. Why do you think that is so, suh?’

  John-Henri looked uncomfortable. It was just the three of us had come to the reception – Evastina was home with the new baby, Fnork, who had reached the infant stage of catching and eating flies – and though there were others who’d come to sit at that big round table, it was more a matter of expediency in a jammed room with limited seating, than it was a desire to mingle with the three of us. (It had seemed to me, without too close an examination of the subject, that though a few people knew John-Henri, and greeted him saucily, not only did no one speak to Dr Fuchs, but there were several who seemed to veer clear when they espied him.)

  Dr Fuchs grew tolerably serious, and soft spoke, an’ he replied to what instantly became obvious to me had been an incredibly stupid, rude, and champagne-besotted remark: ‘I live with a bodily condition known as hyperhidrosis, Professor Stapylton. Abnormally excessive sweating. As you have said it, schvitzing. I perspire from hands, feet, my underarms. I must wear knitted shirts to absorb the moisture. Underarm dress shields, of a woman’s kind. I carry pocket towels, in the ungood event I must actually shake hands flesh on flesh with someone. Should I remove my latexwear, and place my palm upon this tablecloth, the material would be soaked in a widened pool in moments.’ He gave me a pathetic little smile that was meant to be courageous, and he concluded, ‘I see revulsion in people’s faces, Professor. So I wear the gloves, is it not?’

  I felt like thirty-one kinds of a blatherin’ damnfool, an’ I suppose it was because I had no way of extricatin’ my size 11M Florsheim from my mouth, that I was so susceptible when Fuchs humiliated me even more by introducin’ me to this utter vision of a woman who came blowin’ by the table.

  Without even a hesitation on his part, springs right off this ‘I make people sick ’cause I’m soakin’ wet all the time,’ right into, ‘Oh, Agnes! Come, my dear, come meet the famous American scholar and authority of mythic matters, Professor Gordon Stapylton of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a most brilliant colleague of our friend John-Henri.’

  We took one look at each other, and I knew what it was to endure hyperhidrosis. Every pore in my body turned Niagara. Even half stupored on good French champagne, I was sober enough to know I had, at last, finally, unbelievably, met the most beautiful woman in the world, the one woman I would marry and, failing that liaison, would never be able to settle for anyone else.

  Her hair was the colour of the embers when the fire has died down and the companions have snuggled into their sleeping bags and you cannot fall asleep and lie there looking into that moving breathing susurrating crimson at the bottom of the campfire. Her eyes were almond-shaped, and tilted, and green. Not murky, dirty green, but the shade of excellent Chinese jade pieces, Shang dynasty, Chou dynasty. Describing more, I’d sound even more the idiot than I do right now. I tried to tell y’all what she was like, when I called the next morning, remember? When I said I was bringing home the woman I loved, her name was Agnes? Well, I was tipsy with her, then … and I’m tipsy all over again now, just describin’ her, But the important part of all this, is that we took one look t’each other, an’ we couldn’t keep our hands off!

  Fuchs was tryin’ to tell me that Agnes Wahlstrom was, herself, a noted scholar, a student of mythology, and curator of the Magasinet for sällsamma väsen, some kind of a museum, but I wasn’t much listening by that time. We were swimming in each other’s eyes; and the next thing I knew, I’d gotten up and taken her hand – which had a wonderful strong independent kind of a grip – and we were outside the two hundred-year-old building with the reception up those marble staircases; and we were in a narrow service alley that ran back from the cobblestoned street into darkness alongside the hulking ugliness of the assembly hall; and I barely had an instant to speak her name before she bore me back against the alley wall, her lips on mine.

  She fumbled her dress up around her hips, and undid my belt, almost batting away my hands as I tried to undress her.

  And there, in that alley, Henry, there in the darkness I found what I’d never been able to locate in nearly forty years of believing it existed: I found utter and total passion, I-don’t­-give-a-damn lust, a joining and thrashing that must have made steam come off us, like a pair of rutting weasels. Look, I’m sorry to be embarrassin’ you, Henry, my old friend, but under this pleasant, gregarious, buttoned-down academic pose, I have been nothin’ but a lonely sonofabitch all my life. You know how it was between my parents, an’ you know how few relationships I’ve had with women who counted. So, now, you have got to understan’ that I was crazy with her, drunk with her, inside her and steam comin’ off us. Migawd, Henry, I think we banged against that alley wall for an hour, maybe more. I have no idea why some Swedish cop didn’t hear us growlin’ and pantin’ and yellin’ moremoremore, and come in there an’ arrest us. Oh, jeezus, lemme catch mah breath. Lawd, Henry, you are the colour of Chairman Mao’s Little Book! We never got back to the reception the Conference was hostin’.

  We spent the night at the Royal Viking, and the next morning she was as beautiful as the night before, except the sun loved touchin’ her, Henry; and we ate breakfast in the room, and her eyes were that green, and made love again for another hour or so. But then she said she had to go home and change because she had to be at the Museum, she was late already, but she’d find me at the Conference in the afternoon and we’d, well, we’d be together.

  Can you understand what that word meant to me? We’d be together. That was when I called you and told you I’d be bringin’ back the greatest mythic treasure ever. I had to share it with someone, Henry. That was four days ago, before the street signs changed.

  John-Henri is a decent man, and an absolutely great friend, so his chiding me on my behaviour was maximum softly-spoke; but I was given to understand that walkin’ off like Night of the Livin’ Dumbbells with some gorgeous museum curator, right in the middle of where I was supposed to be, was unacceptable. He also confided that he’d been stuck with Dr Fuchs all night, nearly, and he was not overwhelmin’ly thrilled by that, either. Turned out he was less acquainted with the man in the moist mittens than I’d thought. Out of nowhere, a few weeks bef
ore I was scheduled to fly in, he suddenly showed up, ingratiating, charming, knowledgeable about John-Henri’s background, very complimentary, workin’ ever so hard to become Evastina’s and John-Henri’s best new buddy-chum. Just so, just that way, out of nowhere, he suddenly appeared in the antechamber of the Conference Hall, right in the middle of John-Henri’s polite, with­-clenched-teeth admonition that I not pull a repeat of the previous evening’s gaucherie.

  Fuchs kept smilin’ at me with that scupperful of brown bicuspids, just smarmily enquiring, had I had a pleasant evening, but not gettin’ any closer to questions I’d’ve had to tell him were none of his damned business.

  But I couldn’t get rid of him. He dogged my every step.

  And I attended the sections I’d wanted to drop in on, and my mind wasn’t focused for a second on such arcane trivia. All I could think of was sliding my hands up between Agnes’s legs.

  Finally, about three in the afternoon, she arrived. Looking absolutely wonderful, wearing a summery dress and sandals, in defiance of the chill that was in the air. She found me at the rear of the auditorium, slid in beside me, and whispered, ‘I have nothing on under this’.

  We left not more than three heartbeats later.

  All right, Henry, I’ll skip all that. But now pay close attention. Five or six hours later, she seemed distracted, an’ I suggested we go get some dinner. I was goin’ to pop the question. Oh, yes, Henry, I see that expression. But the only reason you got it on you, is that you know somethin’ was amiss. But if you didn’t know that, then you wouldn’t think I was bein’ precipitous, you’d agree that once having been in the embrace of such a woman, a man would be a giant fool to let her slip away. So just pretend you’re as innocent as I was, at that moment, and go along with me on this.

  She said no, she wasn’t hungry, she’d had a big salad before she came to fetch me at the Conference, but would I be interested in seeing the Museum? Where she was curator. I said that would be charming. Or somesuch pseudo phrase so she wouldn’t suspect all I could think about was makin’ love to her endlessly. As if she weren’t smart enough to know all that; and she laughed, and I looked sheepish, and she kissed me, and we went to get the car in the hotel structure, and we drove out, about nine or so.

  It was a chilly night, and very dark. And she drove to the oldest section of Stockholm, blocky ribbed-stone buildings leaning over the narrow, winding streets, fog or mist trailing through the canyons, silvery and forlorn. It was, well, not to make a cliché of it … it was melancholy. Somehow sad and winsome at the same time. But I was on a cloud. I had found the grail, the crown, the sceptre, the very incarnation of True Love. And I would, very soon now, pop the question.

  She parked on a side-street, cobbled and lit fitfully by old electric brazier lamps, and suggested we should walk, it was invigorating. I worried about her in that thin dress. She said, ‘I am a sturdy Scandinavian woman, dear Gordon. Please.’ And the please was neither cajoling nor requesting. It was ‘Give me a break, I can outwalk you any day, son’. And so we strode off down the street.

  We turned a number of times, this side-street, that little alley, pausing every once in a while to grope each other, usually on my pretext that certain parts of her body needed to be warmed against the sturdy Scandinavian chill. And finally, we turned on to an absolutely shadow-gorged street down which I could not see a solitary thing. I glanced up at the street sign, and it read: Cyklopavenyn. Cyclops Avenue.

  Now isn’t that a remarkable, I thought.

  She took me by the hand, and led me into the deep shadow pool of the narrow, claustrophobic, fog-drenched Cyclops Avenue. We walked in silence, just the sound of our hollow footsteps repeating our progress.

  ‘Agnes,’ I said, ‘where the hell are we going? I thought you wanted me to see—’

  Invisible beside me, but her flesh warm as a beacon, she said, ‘Yes. Magasinet for sälsamma väsen.’

  I asked her if we were nearly there, and she said, with a small laugh, ‘I told you to tinkle before we left.’ But she didn’t say ‘tinkle’. She used the Swedish equivalent, which I won’t go into here, Henry, because I can see that you think I’m leading this story towards her giving me a vampire bite, or trying to steal my soul and sell it to flying saucer people … well, it wasn’t anything sick or demented, absolutely no blood at all, and as you can see I’m sittin’ right here in front’cher face, holdin’ up my glass for a splash more of Mr Jack Daniel’s.

  Thank’ya. So we keep walkin’, and I ask her to translate for me what Magasinet etcetera et-cet-era means, and she said, it’s hard to translate into English. But she tried, and she said Museum wasn’t quite the right word, more rightly something not quite like Sepulchre. I said that gave me chills, and she laughed and said I could call it The Gatherum of Extraordi­nary Existences – as we reached a brooding shadowy shape darker than the darkness filling Cyclops Avenue, a shape that rose above us like an escarpment of black rock, something hewn from obsidian, and she took a key from a pocket of the thin summery dress, and inserted it in the lock, and turned the key – or you could call it The Repository of Unimaginable Creatures – and she pushed open a door that was three times our height, and I’m six one, and Agnes is just under six feet – ­or the Cyklopstrasse Keep of Rare and Extinct Beasts – and as the door opened we were washed by pure golden light so intense I shielded my eyes. Where the door had snugged against the jamb and lintel so tightly there had been no leakage of illumination, now there was an enormous rectangle three times our height of blazing burning light. I could see nothing, not a smidge, but that light. And Agnes took me by the elbow, and walked me into the light, and I was inside the most breathtaking repository of treasures I’d ever seen.

  Greater than the Prado, more magnificent than the Louvre, dwarfing the Victoria and Albert, more puissant than the Hermitage, enfeebling the image of Rotterdam’s Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, it rose above us till the arching ceilings faded into misty oblivion. I could see room after room after channel after salon after gallery stretching away in a hundred different directions from the central atrium where we stood, mah mouth open and my wits havin’ fled.

  Because the Museum that my Agnes tended, the Sepulchre that my Agnes oversaw, the Gallery my Agnes captained … it was filled with the dead and mounted bodies of every creature I’d read about in the tomes of universal mythology.

  In niches and on pedestals, in crystal cases and suspended by invisible wires from the invisible ceilings, ranked in shallow conversation-pit-like depressions in the floor and mounted to the walls, in showcases and free-standing in the passageways:

  The Kurma tortoise that supported Mt Mandara on its back during the churning of the ocean by the Devas and Asuras. A matched set of unicorns, male and female, one with silver horn, the other with golden spike. The bone-eater from the Ani papyrus. Behemoth and Leviathan. Hanuman the five-headed of the Kalighat. A Griffin. And a Gryphon. Hippo­gryph and Hippocamp. The Kimura bird of Indian mythol­ogy, and the thousand-headed snake Kalinaga. Jinn and Harpy and Hydra; yeti and centaur and minotaur; the holy feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl and a winged horse and a Ryu dragon. Hundreds and thousands of beasts of all worlds and all nations, of all beliefs and all ages, of all peoples and of all dreams and nightmares. There, in the stunning Sepulchre on the Verg Cyklop, was amassed and arrayed and ranked all the impossible creatures that had never made it on to Noah’s leaky tub. I wandered gallery to gallery, astounded, impossible sights choking my throat and making me weep with amazement that it was all, all, all of it absolutely true. There was even a Boogeyman and his mate. They looked as if they had lived their lives under beds and in dark closets.

  ‘But how …?’ I could barely find words, at long last.

  ‘They are here, assembled all. And I am the one who caught them.’

  Of all I had seen, of all she might say, that was the most astonishin’. She had brought these beasts to heel. I could not believe it. But no, she insisted, she trekked out, and she stalked them,
and she caught them, and killed them, and brought them back here for display. ‘For whom?’ I asked. ‘Who comes to this place?’ And she smiled the sweetest smile, but did not reply. Who, I wondered, assaying the size of the rooms, the height of the ceilings, who did the tour of this repository of miracles?

  Hours later, she took me away, and we went back to the Royal Viking, and I was too aswirl in magic and impossibilities to drench myself in her scented skin. I could not fathom or contain what I had seen. Her naked body was muscular, but more feminine than Aphrodite and Helen of Troy and the Eternal Nymph all combined. She was gorgeous, but she was the hunter of them all. Of course she had had a strong grip. From holding machete, and crossbow, and Sharps rifle, and bolas, and gas-gun. She told me of the hunts, the kills, the scent of the track, the pursuits in far lands: Petra and Angkor, Teotihuacan and Tibet, Djinnistan and Meszria, Skull Island and Malta and Knossos.

  And then she said to me, ‘I am very much drawn to you, Gordon, but I know you’re going to ask me to come away with you, to live in America and be your wife. And I truly, deeply, am mad about even the thought of making love to you endlessly … but …’

  The next day, I went looking for Cyclops Avenue. I have a skunk-sniffin’ dog’s sense of direction, you know that, Henry; and I actual found the street again. I recognised all the twisty turns we’d made, even lookin’ different in the daylight. But I got there. And, of course, the street signs had changed. Cyclops Avenue was now Österlinggatan. The Museum was not there. Oh, it likely was there, but I didn’t have either the proper guide or a key taken from the pocket of a summery dress to help me find it. So I went away, and I came back here, and that’s my story. Except for a couple of loose ends …