by Neil Gaiman
The young man finished, sweating, and started to thrust the spade back in the earth when the old man said:
‘Take it. Cemetery dirt, cemetery spade, like takes to like.’
‘I’ll bring it back tomorrow.’ The young man tossed the spade into the mounded truck.
‘No. You got the dirt, so keep the spade. Just don’t bring that free dirt back.’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘Just don’t,’ said the old man, but did not move as the young man climbed in his truck to start the engine.
He sat listening to the dirt mound tremble and whisper in the flatbed.
‘What’re you waiting for?’ asked the old man.
The flimsy half-truck ran towards the last of the twilight, pursued by the ever-encroaching dark. Clouds raced overhead, perturbed by the invisible. Back on the horizon, thunder sounded. A few drops of rain fell on the windshield, causing the young man to ram his foot on the gas and swerve into his home street even as the sun truly died, the wind rose, and the trees around his cottage bent and beckoned.
Climbing out, he stared at the sky and then his house and then the empty garden. A few drops of cold rain on his cheeks decided him; he drove the rattling half-truck into the empty garden, unlatched the metal back flap, opened it just an inch so as to allow a proper flow, and then began motoring back and forth across the garden, letting the dark stuffs whisper down, letting the strange midnight earth shift and murmur, until, at last, the truck was empty and stood in the blowing night, watching the wind stir the black soil.
Then he locked the truck in the garage and went to stand on the back porch thinking, I won’t need water. The storm will soak the ground.
He stood for a long while simply staring at the graveyard mulch waiting for rain until he thought, What am I waiting for? Jesus! And went in.
At ten o’clock, a light rain tapped on the windows and sifted over the dark garden. At eleven, it rained so steadily that the gutter drains swallowed and rattled. At midnight, the rain grew heavy. He looked to see if it was eroding the new dark earth, but only saw the black muck drinking the downpour, like a great black sponge, lit by distant flares of lightning.
Then, at one in the morning, the greatest Niagara of all shuddered the house, rinsed the windows to blindness, and shook the lights.
And then, abruptly, the downpour ceased, followed by one great downfall blow of lightning, which ploughed and pinioned the dark earth close by, near, outside, with explosions of light as if ten thousand flashbulbs had been fired off. Then darkness fell in curtains of thunder, cracking the heart, breaking the bones.
In bed, wishing for the merest dog to hold, for lack of human company, hugging the sheets, burying his head, then rising full to the silent air, the dark air, the storm gone, the rain shut, and a silence spread in whispers as the last drench melted into the trembling soil. He shuddered and then shivered and then hugged himself to stop the shivering of his cold flesh, and he was thirsty, but could not make himself move to find the kitchen and drink water, milk, leftover wine, anything. He lay back, dry-mouthed, with unreasonable tears filling his eyes.
Free dirt, he thought. My God what a damn fool night.
Free dirt!
At two o’clock he heard his wristwatch ticking softly.
At two-thirty he felt his pulse in his wrists and ankles and neck and then in his temples and inside his head.
The entire house leaned in the wind, listening.
Outside in the still night, the wind failed and the yard lay soaking and waiting.
And at last … yes. He opened his eyes and turned his head towards the window.
He held his breath. What? Yes? What?
Beyond the window, beyond the wall, beyond the house, outside somewhere, a whisper, a murmur, growing louder and louder. Grass growing? Blossoms opening? Soil shifting, crumbling?
A great whisper, a mix of shadows and shades. Something rising. Something moving.
Ice froze beneath his skin. His heart ceased.
Outside in the dark, in the yard. Autumn had arrived.
October was there.
His garden gave him …
A harvest.
Ray Bradbury was, without any doubt, our most distinguished and influential fantasy writer. Cutting his literary teeth in the memorable pages of Weird Tales in the 1940s, his early stories from that pulp magazine were reprinted in the Arkham House collection Dark Carnival, published in 1947. Known principally for his short fiction, he sold his work to all the major magazines in the intervening sixty-five years, until his death in 2012. His many tales of science fiction, fantasy and horror have been widely collected, and The Martian Chronicles, The illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, The October Country, A Medicine for Melancholy, I Sing the Body Electric and Long After Midnight are just some of the evocative titles that hint at the equally atmospheric prose to be found in the author’s timeless fiction. He was also the author of several classic novels, including Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, The Halloween Tree, Death is a Lonely Business and A Graveyard for Lunatics. ‘I took a couple of years off, and did sixty-five teleplays for my TV series, plus a couple of screenplays,’ recalled Bradbury. ‘But I wanted to get back to my root system – because I started as a short story writer when I was twelve. I had a lot of ideas put away, just old scribbled notes I started going through.’ The result was a number of new short stories, including ‘Free Dirt’, which were eventually collected in Quicker Than the Eye.
Self-Made Man
POPPY Z. BRITE
JUSTIN HAD READ Dandelion Wine seventeen times now, but he still hated to see it end. He always hated endings.
He turned the last page of the book and sat for several minutes in the shadows of his bedroom, cradling the old thumbed paperback by Ray Bradbury, marvelling at the world he held in his hands. The hot sprawl of the city outside was forgotten; he was still lost in the cool green Byzantium of 1928.
Within these tattered covers, dawning realisation of his own mortality might turn a boy into a poet, not a dark machine of destruction. People only died after saying to each other all the things that needed to be said, and the summer never truly ended so long as those bottles gleamed down the cellar, full of the distillate of memory.
For Justin, the distillate of memory was a bitter vintage. The summer of 1928 seemed impossibly long ago, beyond imagining, forty years before blasted sperm met cursed egg to make him. When he put the book aside and looked at the dried blood under his fingernails, it seemed even longer.
An artist who doesn’t read is no artist at all, he had scribbled in a notebook he once tried to keep, but abandoned after a few weeks, sick of his own thoughts. Books are the key to other minds, sure as bodies are the key to other souls. Reading a good book is a lot like sinking your fingers up to the second knuckle in someone’s brain.
In the world of the story, no one left before it was time. Characters in a book never went away; all you had to do was open the book again and there they’d be, right where you left them. He wished live people were so easy to hold onto.
You could hold onto parts of them, of course; you could even make them part of yourself. That was easy. But to keep a whole person with you forever, to stop just one person from leaving or gradually disintegrating as they always did … to just hold someone. All of someone.
There might be ways. There had to be ways.
Even in Byzantium, a Lonely One stalked and preyed.
Justin was curled up against the headboard of his bed, a bloodstained comforter bunched around his bare legs. This was his favourite reading spot. He glanced at the nightstand, which held a Black & Decker electric drill, a pair of scissors, a roll of paper towels, and a syringe full of chlorine bleach. The drill wasn’t plugged in yet. He closed his eyes and allowed a small slow shudder to run through his body, part dread, part desire.
There were screams carved on the air of his room, vital fluids dried deep within his mattress, who
le lives sewn into the lining of his pillow, to be taken out and savoured later. There was always time, so long as you didn’t let your memories get away. He had kept most of his. In fact, he’d kept seventeen; all but the first two, and those he didn’t want.
Justin’s father had barely seen him out of the womb before disappearing into the seamy nightside of Los Angeles. His mother raised him on the continent’s faulty rim, in an edging-toward-poor neighbourhood of a city that considered its poor a kind of toxic waste: ceaselessly and unavoidably churned out by progress, hard to store or dispose of, foul-smelling and ugly and dangerous. Their little stucco house was at the edge of a vast slum, and Justin’s dreams were peppered with gunfire, his play permeated with the smell of piss and garbage. He was often beaten bloody just for being a scrawny white boy carrying a book. His mother never noticed his hands scraped raw on concrete, or the thin crust of blood that often formed between his oozing nose and mouth by the time he got home.
She had married again and moved to Reno as soon as Justin turned eighteen, as soon as she could turn her painfully awkward son out of the house. You could be a nice-looking young man if you cleaned yourself up. You’re smart, you could get a good job and make money. You could have girlfriends, as if looks and money and girlfriends were the sweetest things he could ever dream of.
Her new husband had been a career Army man who looked at Justin the way he looked at their ragged old sofa, as leftover trash from her former life. Now they were both ten years dead, their bones mummified or scattered by animals somewhere in the Nevada desert, in those beautiful blasted lands. Only Justin knew where.
He’d shot his stepfather first, once in the back of the head with his own Army service pistol, just to see the surprise on his mother’s face as brain and bone exploded across the glass top of her brand-new dinner table, as her husband’s blood dripped into the mashed potatoes and the meat loaf, rained into her sweating glass of tea. He thought briefly that this surprise was the strongest emotion he had ever seen there. The sweetest, too. Then he pointed the gun at it and watched it blossom into chaos.
Justin remembered clearing the table, noticing that one of his mother’s eyes had landed in her plate, afloat on a thin patina of blood and grease. He tilted the plate a little and the glistening orb rolled onto the floor. It made a small satisfying squelch beneath the heel of his shoe, a sound he felt more than heard.
No one ever knew he had been out of California. He drove their gas-guzzling luxury sedan into the desert, dumped them and the gun. He returned to L.A. by night, by Greyhound bus, drinking bitter coffee and reading at rest stops, watching the country unspool past his window, the starlit desert and highway and small sleeping towns, the whole wide-open landscape folding around him like an envelope or a concealing hand. He was safe among other human flotsam. No one ever remembered his face. No one considered him capable of anything at all, let alone murder.
After that he worked and read and drank compulsively, did little else for a whole year. He never forgot that he was capable of murder, but he thought he had buried the urge. Then one morning he woke up with a boy strewn across his bed, face and chest battered in, abdomen torn wide open. Justin’s hands were still tangled in the glistening purple stew of intestines. From the stains on his skin he could see that he had rubbed them all over his body, maybe rolled in them.
He didn’t remember meeting the boy, didn’t know how he had killed him or opened his body like a big wet Christmas present, or why. But he kept the body until it started to smell, and then he cut off the head, boiled it until the flesh was gone, and kept the skull. After that it never stopped again. They had all been boys, all young, thin, and pretty: everything the way Justin liked it. Weapons were too easy, too impersonal, so he drugged them and strangled them. Like Willy Wonka in the Technicolor bowels of his chocolate factory, he was the music maker, and he was the dreamer of dreams.
It was a dark and lonely revelry, to be sure. But so was writing; so was painting or learning music. So, he supposed, was all art when you penetrated to its molten core. He didn’t know if killing was art, but it was the only creative thing he had ever done.
He got up, slid Dandelion Wine back into its place on his crowded bookshelf, and left the bedroom. He put his favourite CD on shuffle and crossed his small apartment to the kitchenette. A window beside the refrigerator looked out on a brick wall. Frank Sinatra was singing ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’.
Justin opened the refrigerator and took out a package wrapped in foil. Inside was a ragged cut of meat as large as a dinner plate, deep red, tough and fibrous. He selected a knife from the jumble of filthy dishes in the sink and sliced off a piece of meat the size of his palm. He wasn’t very hungry, but he needed something in his stomach to soak up the liquor he’d be drinking soon.
Justin heated oil in a skillet, sprinkled the meat with salt, laid it in the sizzling fat and cooked it until both sides were brown and the bottom of the pan was awash with fragrant juices. He slid the meat onto a saucer, found a clean fork in the silverware drawer, and began to eat his dinner standing at the counter.
The meat was rather tough, but it tasted wonderful, oily and salty with a slight undertone of musk. He felt it breaking down in the acids of his saliva and his stomach, felt its proteins joining with his cells and becoming part of him. That was fine. But after tonight he would have something better. A person who lived and stayed with him, whose mind belonged to him. A homemade zombie. Justin knew it was possible, if only he could destroy the right parts of the brain. If a drill and a syringeful of bleach didn’t work, he would try something else next time.
The night drew like a curtain across the window, stealing his wall view brick by brick. Sinatra’s voice was as smooth and sweet as cream. Got you … deep in the heart of me … Justin nodded reflectively. The meat left a delicately metallic flavour on his tongue, one of the myriad tastes of love. Soon it would be time to go out.
Apart from the trip to Reno and the delicious wallow in the desert, Justin had never left Los Angeles. He longed to drive out into the desert, to find again the ghost towns and nuclear moonscapes he had so loved in Nevada. But he never had. You needed a car to get out there. If you didn’t have a car in L.A., you might as well curl up and die. Los Angeles was a city with an enormous central nervous system, but no brain.
Since being fired from his job at an orange juice plant for chronic absenteeism – too many bodies demanding his time, requiring that he cut them up, preserve them, consume them – Justin wasn’t even sure how much longer he would be able to afford the apartment. But he didn’t see how he could move out with things the way they were in here. The place was a terrible mess. His neighbours had started complaining about the smell.
Justin decided not to think about all that now. He still had a little money saved, and a city bus would get him from his Silver Lake apartment to the garish carnival of West Hollywood; that much he knew. It had done so countless times.
If he was lucky, he’d be bringing home company.
Suko ran fingers the colour of sandalwood through haphazardly cut black hair, painted his eyes with stolen drugstore kohl, and grinned at himself in the cracked mirror over the sink. He fastened a string of thrift-shop beads round his neck, studied the effect of the black plastic against torn black cotton and smooth brown skin, then added a clay amulet of the Buddha and a tiny wooden penis, both strung on leather thongs.
These he had purchased among the dim stalls at Wat Rajanada, the amulet market near Klong Saensaep in Bangkok. The amulet was to protect him against accidents and malevolent ghosts. The penis was to increase his potency, to make sure whoever he met up with tonight would have a good time. It was supposed to be worn on a string around his waist, but the first few times he’d done that, his American lovers gave him strange looks.
The amulets were the last thing Suko bought with Thai money before boarding a California-bound jet and bidding farewell to his sodden homeland, most likely forever. He’d had to travel a long way
from Patpong Road to get them, but he didn’t know whether one could buy magical amulets in America. Apparently one could: attached to his beads had once been a round medallion stamped with an exaggerated Negro face and the word ZULU. He’d lost the medallion on a night of drunken revelry, which was as it should be. Mai pen rai. No problem.
Suko was nineteen. His full name was unpronounceable by American tongues, but he didn’t care. American tongues could do all sorts of other things for him. This he had learned at fourteen, after hitching a midnight ride out of his home village, a place so small and so poor that it appeared on no map foreign eyes would ever see.
His family had always referred to the city by its true name, Krung Thep, the Great City of Angels. Suko had never known it by any other name until he arrived there. Krung Thep was only an abbreviation for the true name, which was more than thirty syllables long. For some reason, farangs had never gotten used to this. They all called it Bangkok, a name like two sharp handclaps.
In the streets, the harsh reek of exhaust fumes was tinged with a million subtler perfumes: jasmine, raw sewage, grasshoppers frying in peppered oil, the odour of ripe durian fruit that was like rotting flesh steeped in thick sweet cream. The very air seemed spritzed with alcohol, soaked with neon and the juices of sex.
He found his calling on Patpong 3, a block-long strip of gay bars and nightclubs in Bangkok’s famous sleaze district. In the village, Suko and his seven brothers and sisters had gutted fish for a few baht a day. Here he was paid thirty times as much to drink and dance with farangs who told him fascinating stories, to make his face prettier with makeup, to be fondled and flattered, to have his cock sucked as often as he could stand it. If he had to suck a few in return, how bad could that be? It was far from the worst thing he had ever put in his mouth. He rather liked the taste of sperm, if not the odd little tickle it left in the back of his throat.