Darker Terrors

by Neil Gaiman

  It has been months since I’ve been out here – we use the garage for storage, not for our old Nova – and I’ve forgotten how heavy the salt-saturated wooden door is. It comes up with a creak, slides over my head and rocks unsteadily in its runners. How, I’m thinking, did I first realise that the presence in my room was my first, unborn child? The smell, I guess, like an unripe lemon, fresh and sour all at once. Lizzie’s smell. Or maybe it was the song springing unbidden, over and over, to my lips. ‘When I awoke dear. I was mistaken.’ Those things, and the fact that now, these last times, they both seem to be there.

  The first thing I see once my eyes adjust is my grandfather glaring out of his portrait at me, his hair thread-thin and wild on his head like a spider-web swinging free, his lips flat, crushed together, his ridiculous lumpy potato of a body under his perpetually half-zipped judges’ robes. And there are his eyes, one blue, one green, which he once told me allowed him to see 3-D, before I knew that everyone could. A children’s rights activist before there was a name for such things, a three-time candidate for a state bench seat and three-time loser, he’d made an enemy of his daughter, my mother, by wanting a son so badly. And he’d made a disciple out of me by saving Lizzie’s life. Turning her father in to the cops, then making sure that he got thrown in jail, then forcing both him and his whole family into counselling, getting him work when he got out, checking in on him every single night, no matter what, for six years, until Lizzie was away and free. Until eight months ago, on the day Dr Seger confirmed that we were pregnant for the third time, his portrait hung beside the Pinocchio clock on the living room wall. Now it lives here. One more casualty.

  ‘Your namesake,’ I say to the air, my two ghosts. But I can’t take my eyes off my grandfather. Tonight is the end for him, too, I realise. The real end, where the ripples his life created in the world glide silently to stillness. Could you have seen them, I want to ask, with those 3-D eyes that saw so much? Could you have saved them? Could you have thought of another, better way? Because mine is going to hurt. ‘His name was Nathan, really. But he called us ‘Sam’. Your mother and me, we were both ‘Sam’. That’s why …’

  That’s why Lizzie let me win that argument, I realise. Not because she’d let go of the idea that the first one had to have a name, was a specific, living creature, a child of ours. But because she’d rationalised. Sam was to be the name, male or female. So whatever the first child had been, the second would be the other. Would have been. You see, Lizzie, I think to the air, wanting to punch the walls of the garage, scream to the cliffs, break down in tears. You think I don’t know. But I do.

  If we survive this night, and our baby is still with us in the morning, and we get to meet him someday soon, he will not be named Sam. He won’t be Nathan, either. My grandfather would have wanted Sam.

  ‘Goodbye, Grandpa,’ I whisper, and force myself toward the back of the garage. There’s no point in drawing this out, surely. Nothing to be gained. But at the door to the meat freezer, where the game hunter who rented our place before us used to store waxed-paper packets of venison and elk, I suddenly stop.

  I can feel them. They’re still here. They have not gone back to Lizzie. They are not hunched near her navel, whispering their terrible, soundless whispers. That’s how I imagine it happening, only it doesn’t feel like imagining. And it isn’t all terrible. I swear I heard it happen to the second Sam. The first Sam would wait, watching me, hovering near the new life in Lizzie like a hummingbird near nectar, then darting forward when I was through singing, or in between breaths, and singing a different sort of song, of a whole other world, parallel to ours, free of terrors or at least this terror, the one that just plain living breeds in everything alive. Maybe that world we’re all born dreaming really does exist, but the only way to it is through a trapdoor in the womb. Maybe it’s better where my children are. God, I want it to be better.

  ‘You’re by the notebooks,’ I say, and I almost smile, and my hand slides volitionlessly from the handle of the freezer door and I stagger toward the boxes stacked up, haphazard, along the back wall. The top one on the nearest stack is open slightly, its cardboard damp and reeking when I peel the flaps all the way back.

  There they are. The plain, perfect-bound school-composition notebooks Lizzie bought as diaries, to chronicle the lives of her first two children in the 280 or so days before we were to know them. ‘I can’t look in those,’ I say aloud, but I can’t help myself. I lift the top one from the box, place it on my lap, and sit down. It’s my imagination, surely, that weight on my knees, as though something else has just slid down against me. Like a child, to look at a photo album. Tell me, Daddy, about the world without me in it. Suddenly, I’m embarrassed. I want to explain. That first notebook, the other one, is almost half my writing, not just Lizzie’s. But this one … I was away, Sam, on a selling trip, for almost a month. And when I came back … I couldn’t. Not right away. I couldn’t even watch your mom doing it. And two weeks later…

  ‘The day you were born,’ I murmur, as if it were a lullaby, ‘we went to the redwoods, with the Giraffes.’ Whatever it is, that weight on me, shifts a little. Settles. ‘That isn’t really their name, Sam. Their name is Girard. Giraffe is what you would have called them, though. They would have made you. They’re so tall. So funny. They would have put you on their shoulders to touch EXIT signs and ceiling tiles. They would have dropped you upside down from way up high and made you scream.’

  ‘This was December, freezing cold, but the sun was out. We stopped at a gas station on our way to the woods, and I went to get Bugles, because that’s what Giraffes eat. The ones we know, anyway. Your mom went to the restroom. She was in there a long time. And when she came out, she just looked at me. And I knew.’

  My fingers have pushed open the notebook, pulled apart the pages. They’re damp, too. Half of them are ruined, the words in multi-coloured inks like pressed flowers on the pages, smeared out of shape, though their meaning remains clear.

  ‘I waited. I stared at your mother. She stared at me. Joseph – Mr Giraffe – came in to see what was taking so long. Your mom just kept on staring. So I said, ‘Couldn’t find the Bugles.’ Then I grabbed two bags of them, turned away, and paid. And your mom got in the van beside me, and the Giraffes put on their bouncy, happy, Giraffe music, and we kept going.

  ‘When we got to the woods, we found them practically empty, and there was this smell, even though the trees were dead. It wasn’t like spring. You couldn’t smell pollen or see buds, there was just the sunlight and bare branches and this mist floating up, catching in the trees and forming shapes like the ghosts of leaves. I tried to hold your mother’s hand, and she let me at first. And then she didn’t. She disappeared into the mist. The Giraffes had to go find her in the end, when it was time to go home. It was almost dark as we got in the van, and none of us were speaking. I was the last one in. And all I could think, as I took my last breath of that air, was, Can you see this? Did you see the trees, my sweet son, daughter or son, on your way out of the world?

  Helpless, now, I drop my head, bury it in the wet air as though there were a child’s hair there, and my mouth is moving, chanting the words in the notebook on my lap. I only read them once, on the night Lizzie wrote them, when she finally rolled over, with no tantrum, no more tears, nothing left, closed the book against her chest, and went to sleep. But I remember them, still. There’s a sketch, first, what looks like an acorn with a dent in the top. Next to it Lizzie has scrawled, You. Little rice-bean. On the day before it died. Then there’s the list, like a rosary: I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I don’t get to know you. I’m so sorry for wishing this was over, now, for wanting the bleeding to stop. I’m so sorry that I will never have the chance to be your mother. I’m so sorry you will never have the chance to be in our family. I’m so sorry that you are gone.

  I recite the next page, too, without even turning to it. The I-don’t-wants: a D & C; a phone call from someone who doesn’t know, to ask how I’m feeling; a
phone call from someone who does, to ask how I am; to forget this, ever; to forget you.

  And then, at the bottom of the page: I love fog. I love seals. I love the ghosts of Sutro Heights. I love my mother, even though. I love Jake. I love having known you. I love having known you. I love having known you.

  With one, long shuddering breath, as though I’m trying to slip out from under a sleeping cat, I straighten my legs, lay the notebook to sleep in its box, tuck the flaps around it, and stand. It’s time. Not past time, just time. I return to the freezer, flip the heavy white lid.

  The thing is, even after I looked in here, the same day I brought my grandfather out and wound up poking around the garage, lifting box-tops, touching old, unused bicycles and cross-country skis, I would never have realised. If she’d done the wrapping in waxed paper, laid it in the bottom of the freezer, I would have assumed it was meat, and I would have left it there. But Lizzie is Lizzie, and instead of waxed paper, she’d used red and blue construction paper from her classroom, folded the paper into perfect squares with perfect corners, and put a single star on each of them. So I lifted them out, just as I’m doing now.

  They’re so cold cradled against me. The red package. The blue one. So light. The most astounding thing about the wrapping, really, is that she managed it all. How do you get paper and tape around nothing and get it to hold its shape? From another nearby box, I lift a gold and green blanket. I had it on my bottom bunk when I was a kid. The first time Lizzie lay on my bed – without me in it, she was just lying there – she wrapped herself in this. I spread it now on the cold, cement floor, and gently lay the packages down.

  In Hebrew, the word for miscarriage translates, literally, as something dropped. It’s no more accurate a term than any of the others humans have generated for the whole, apparently incomprehensible process of reproduction, right down to conception. Is that what we do? Conceive? Do we literally dream our children? Is it possible that miscarriage, finally, is just waking up to the reality of the world a few months too soon?

  Gently, with the tip of my thumbnail, I slit the top of the red package, fold it open. It comes apart like origami, so perfect, arching back against the blanket. I slit the blue package, pull back its flaps, widening the opening. One last parody of birth.

  How did she do it, I wonder? The first time, we were home, she was in the bathroom. She had me bring Ziploc baggies and ice. For testing, she’d said. They’ll need it for testing. But they’d taken it for testing. How had she gotten it back? And the second one had happened – finished happening – in a gas-station bathroom somewhere between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Muir Woods. And she’d said nothing, asked for nothing.

  ‘Where did she keep you?’ I murmur, staring down at the formless red and grey spatters, the bunched-up tissue that might have been tendon one day, skin one day. Sam, one day. In the red package, there is more, a hump of frozen something with strings of red spiralling out from it, sticking to the paper, like the rays of an imploding sun. In the blue package, there are some red dots, a few strands of filament. Virtually nothing.

  The song comes, and the tears with them. You’ll never know. Dear. How much I love you. Please don’t take. Please don’t take. I think of my wife upstairs in our life, sleeping with her arms around her child. The one that won’t be Sam, but just might live.

  The matches slide from my pocket. Pulling one out of the little book is like ripping a blade of grass from the ground. I scrape it to life, and its tiny light warms my hand, floods the room, flickering as it sucks the oxygen out of the damp. Will this work? How do I know? For all I know, I am imagining it all. The miscarriages were bad luck, hormone deficiencies, a virus in the blood, and the grief that got in me was at least as awful as what got in Lizzie, it just lay dormant longer. And now it has made me crazy.

  But if it is better where you are, my Sams. And if you’re here to tell the new one about it, to call him away …

  ‘The other night, dear,’ I find myself saying, and then I’m singing it, like a Shabbat blessing, a Hanukkah song, something you offer to the emptiness of a darkened house to keep the dark and emptiness back one more week, one more day. ‘As I lay sleeping. I dreamed I held you. In my arms.’

  I lower the match to the red paper, then the blue, and as my children melt, become dream once more, I swear I hear them sing to me.

  Glen Hirshberg’s novels include The Snowman’s Children, The Book of Bunk and Motherless Child. Good Girls, the sequel to Motherless Child, was recently published by Tor Books. He is also the author of three widely praised story collections: The Two Sams (a Publishers’ Weekly Best Book of 2003), American Morons and The Janus Tree. In 2008, he won the Shirley Jackson Award for the novelette, ‘The Janus Tree’. He is a five-time World Fantasy Award finalist and a three-time International Horror Guild Award Winner. With Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison, Hirshberg co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, an annual reading/live music/performance event that tours the west coast of the United States every autumn and has also made international appearances. About ‘The Two Sams’, he admits: ‘This is probably the most personal story I have put to paper, and therefore, hopefully, the most self-explanatory. Most of my ghost stories were originally conceived to be told to my students, but I have only tried reading this aloud once. Never again …’

  The Prospect Cards

  DON TUMASONIS

  Dear Mr Cathcart,

  We are happy to provide, enclosed with this letter, our complete description of item no. 839 from our recent catalogue Twixt Hammam and Minaret: 19th and Some Early 20th Century Travel in the Middle East, Anatolia, Nubia, etc., as requested by yourself.

  You are lucky in that our former cataloguer, Mr Mokley, had, in what he thought were his spare moments, worked to achieve an extremely full description of this interest­ing group of what are probably unique items. Certainly no others to whom we have shown these have seen any similar, nor have been able to provide any clew as to their ultimate provenance.

  They were purchased by one of our buyers on a trip to Paris, where, unusually - since everyone thinks the bou­qinistes were mined out long ago - they were found in a stall on the Left Bank. Once having examined his buy later that evening, he determined to return the following day to the vendor in search of any related items. Alas, there were no others, and the grizzled old veteran running the boxes had no memory of when or where he purc­hased these, saying only that he had them for years, perhaps since the days of Marmier, actually having forgotten their existence until they were unearthed through the diligence of our employee. Given the circumstance of their discovery (covered with dust, stuffed in a sealed envelope tucked away in a far corner of a green tin box clamped onto a quay of the Seine, with volumes of grimy tomes in front concealing their being), we are lucky to have even these.

  Bear in mind, that as an old and valued customer, you may have this lot at 10% off the catalogue price, post-free, with insurance additional, if desired.

  Remaining, with very best wishes indeed,

  Yours most faithfully,

  Basil Barnet

  BARNET AND KORT,

  ANTIQUARIAN TRAVEL BOOKS AND EPHEMERA

  No. 839

  Postal view cards, commercially produced, various manufacturers, together with a few photographs mounted on card, comprising a group of 74. Mostly sepia and black-and-white, with a few contem­porary tinted, showing scenes from either Balkans, or Near or Middle East, ca. 1920-30. The untranslated captions, when they occur, are bilingual, with one script resembling Kyrillic, but not in Russian or Bulgarian; the other using the Arabic alphabet, in some language perhaps related to Turco-Uighuric.

  Unusual views of as yet unidentified places and situations, with public and private buildings, baths, squares, harbours, minarets, markets, etc. Many of the prospects show crowds and individuals in the performance of divers actions and work, sometimes exotic. Several of the cards contain scenes of an erotic or disturbing nature. A number are typical touristic souvenir cards,
generic products picturing exhibits from some obscure museum or collec­tion. In spite of much expended effort, we have been unable to identify the locales shown.

  Entirely unfranked, and without address, about a third of these have on their verso a holographic ink text, in a fine hand by an unidentified individual, evidently a travel diary or journal (non-continuous, with many evident lacunæ). Expert analysis would seem to indicate 1930 or slightly later as the date of writing.

  Those cards with handwriting have been arranged in rough order by us, based on internal evidence, although the chronology is often unclear and the order therefore arbitrary. Only these cards – with a single exception – are described, each with a following transcription of the verso holograph text; the others, about 50 cards blank on verso, show similar scenes and objects. Our hypothetical reconstruction of the original sequence is in­dicated through lightly pencilled numbers at the upper right verso corner of each card.

  Condition: Waterstain across top edges, obscuring all of the few details of date and place of composition. Wear along edges and particularly at corners. A couple of cards rubbed; the others, aside from the faults already noted, mostly quite fresh and untouched.

  Very Rare. In our considered opinion, the cards in themselves are likely to be unique, no others having been recorded to now; together with the unusual document they contain, they are cer­tainly so.

  Price: £1,650

  Card No. 1

  Description: A dock, in some Levantine port. A number of men and animals, mostly mules, are congregated around a moored boat with sails, from which large tonnes, evidently containing wine, labelled as such in Greek, are being either loaded or unshipped.

  Text: not sculling, but rather rowing, the Regatta of ’12, for which his brother coxswained. Those credentials were good enough for Harrison and myself, our credulity seen in retrospect as being somewhat naïve, and ourselves as rather gullible; such, however, is all hindsight. For the time being, we were very happy at having met fellow countrymen – of the right sort, mind you ­in this godforsaken backwater at a time when our fortunes, bluntly put, had taken a turn for much the worse. When Forsythe, looking to his partner Calquon, asked ‘George, we need the extra hands – what say I tell Jack and Charles about our plans?’ To that Calquon only raised an eyebrow, as if to say it’s your show, go and do as you think fit. Forsythe, taking that as approval, ordered