Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

by Neil Gaiman

  Smith smiled affably. “Look, son. There’s people coming to this do who’re worth more than you or I will ever see in a lifetime. They need to be sure they’ll be looked after. Kidnappings happen. People have enemies. Lots of things happen. Only with those lads around, they won’t. But having them deal with grumpy locals, it’s like setting a landmine to stop trespassers. Yeah?”

  “Right,” said Shadow. He went back to the chopper picked up another box marked baby aubergines and filled with small, black eggplants, put it on top of a crate of cabbages and carried them both to the kitchen, certain now that he was being lied to. Smith’s reply was reasonable. It was even convincing. It simply wasn’t true. There was no reason for him to be there, or if there was it wasn’t the reason he’d been given.

  He chewed it over, trying to figure out why he was in that house, and hoped that he was showing nothing on the surface. Shadow kept it all on the inside. It was safer there.

  V

  More helicopters came down in the early evening, as the sky was turning pink, and a score or more of smart people clambered out. Several of them were smiling and laughing. Most of them were in their thirties and forties. Shadow recognized none of them.

  Smith moved casually but smoothly from person to person, greeting them confidently. “Right, now you go through there and turn left, and wait in the main hall. Lovely big log fire there. Someone’ll come and take you up to your room. Your luggage should be waiting for you there. You call me if it’s not, but it will be. ’Ullo your ladyship, you do look a treat—shall I ’ave someone carry your ’andbag? Looking forward to termorrer? Aren’t we all.”

  Shadow watched, fascinated, as Smith dealt with each of the guests, his manner an expert mixture of familiarity and deference, of amiability and Cockney charm: aitches, consonants, and vowel sounds came and went and transformed according to who he was talking to.

  A woman with short dark hair, very pretty, smiled at Shadow as he carried her bags inside. “Posh totty,” muttered Smith, as he went past. “Hands off.”

  A portly man who Shadow estimated to be in his early sixties was the last person off the chopper. He walked over to Smith, leaned on a cheap wooden walking stick, said something in a low voice. Smith replied in the same fashion.

  He’s in charge, thought Shadow. It was there in the body language. Smith was no longer smiling, no longer cajoling. He was reporting, efficiently and quietly, telling the old man everything he should know.

  Smith crooked a finger at Shadow, who walked quickly over to them.

  “Shadow,” said Smith. “This is Mister Alice.”

  Mr. Alice put out his hand, shook Shadow’s big, dark hand with his pink, pudgy one. “Great pleasure to meet you,” he said. “Heard good things about you.”

  “Good to meet you,” said Shadow.

  “Well,” said Mr. Alice, “carry on.”

  Smith nodded at Shadow, a gesture of dismissal.

  “If it’s okay by you,” said Shadow to Smith, “I’d like to take a look around while there’s still some light. Get a sense of where the locals could come from.”

  “Don’t go too far,” said Smith. He picked up Mr. Alice’s briefcase, and led the older man into the building.

  Shadow walked the outside perimeter of the house. He had been set up. He did not know why, but he knew he was right. There was too much that didn’t add up. Why hire a drifter to do security, while bringing in real security guards? It made no sense, no more than Smith introducing him to Mr. Alice, after two dozen other people had treated Shadow as no more human than a decorative ornament.

  There was a low stone wall in front of the house. Behind the house, a hill that was almost a small mountain, in front of it a gentle slope down to the loch. Off to the side was the track by which he had arrived that morning. He walked to the far side of the house and found what seemed to be a kitchen garden, with a high stone wall and wilderness beyond. He took a step down into the kitchen garden, and walked over to inspect the wall.

  “You doing a recce, then?” said one of the security guards, in his black tuxedo. Shadow had not seen him there, which meant, he supposed, that he was very good at his job. Like most of the servants, his accent was Scottish.

  “Just having a look around.”

  “Get the lay of the land, very wise. Don’t you worry about this side of the house. A hundred yards that way there’s a river leads down to the loch, and beyond that just wet rocks for a hundred feet or so, straight down. Absolutely treacherous.”

  “Oh. So the locals, the ones who come and complain, where do they come from?”

  “I wouldnae have a clue.”

  “I should head on over there and take a look at it,” said Shadow. “See if I can figure out the ways in and out.”

  “I wouldnae do that,” said the guard. “Not if I were you. It’s really treacherous. You go poking around over there, one slip, you’ll be crashing down the rocks into the loch. They’ll never find your body, if you head out that way.”

  “I see,” said Shadow, who did.

  He kept walking around the house. He spotted five other security guards, now that he was looking for them. He was sure there were others that he had missed.

  In the main wing of the house he could see, through the french windows, a huge, wood-paneled dining room, and the guests seated around a table, talking and laughing.

  He walked back into the servants’ wing. As each course was done with, the serving plates were put out on a sideboard, and the staff helped themselves, piling food high on paper plates. Smith was sitting at the wooden kitchen table, tucking into a plate of salad and rare beef.

  “There’s caviar over there,” he said to Shadow. “It’s Golden Osetra, top quality, very special. What the party officials used to keep for themselves in the old days. I’ve never been a fan of the stuff, but help yourself.”

  Shadow put a little of the caviar on the side of his plate, to be polite. He took some tiny boiled eggs, some pasta, and some chicken. He sat next to Smith and started to eat.

  “I don’t see where your locals are going to come from,” he said. “Your men have the drive sealed off. Anyone who wants to come here would have to come over the loch.”

  “You had a good poke around, then?”

  “Yes,” said Shadow.

  “You met some of my boys?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I wouldn’t want to mess with them.”

  Smith smirked. “Big fellow like you? You could take care of yourself.”

  “They’re killers,” said Shadow, simply.

  “Only when they need to be,” said Smith. He was no longer smiling. “Why don’t you stay up in your room? I’ll give you a shout when I need you.”

  “Sure,” said Shadow. “And if you don’t need me, this is going to be a very easy weekend.”

  Smith stared at him. “You’ll earn your money,” he said.

  Shadow went up the back stairs to the long corridor at the top of the house. He went into his room. He could hear party noises, and looked out of the small window. The french windows opposite were wide open, and the partygoers, now wearing coats and gloves, holding their glasses of wine, had spilled out into the inner courtyard. He could hear fragments of conversations that transformed and reshaped themselves; the noises were clear but the words and the sense were lost. An occasional phrase would break free of the susurrus. A man said, “I told him, judges like you, I don’t own, I sell….” Shadow heard a woman say, “It’s a monster, darling. An absolute monster. Well, what can you do?” and another woman saying, “Well, if only I could say the same about my boyfriend’s!” and a bray of laughter.

  He had two alternatives. He could stay, or he could try to go.

  “I’ll stay,” he said, aloud.

  VI

  It was a night of dangerous dreams.

  In Shadow’s first dream he was back in America, standing beneath a streetlight. He walked up some steps, pushed through a gl
ass door, and stepped into a diner, the kind that had once been a dining car on a train. He could hear an old man singing, in a deep gravelly voice, to the tune of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,”

  “My grandpa sells condoms to sailors

  He punctures the tips with a pin

  My grandma does back-street abortions

  My God how the money rolls in.”

  Shadow walked along the length of the dining car. At a table at the end of the car, a grizzled man was sitting, holding a beer bottle, and singing, “Rolls in, rolls in, my God how the money rolls in.” When he caught sight of Shadow his face split into a huge monkey grin, and he gestured with the beer bottle. “Sit down, sit down,” he said.

  Shadow sat down opposite the man he had known as Wednesday.

  “So what’s the trouble?” asked Wednesday, dead for almost two years, or as dead as his kind of creature was going to get. “I’d offer you a beer, but the service here stinks.”

  Shadow said that was okay. He didn’t want a beer.

  “Well?” asked Wednesday, scratching his beard.

  “I’m in a big house in Scotland with a shitload of really rich folks, and they have an agenda. I’m in trouble, and I don’t know what kind of trouble I’m in. But I think it’s pretty bad trouble.”

  Wednesday took a swig of his beer. “The rich are different, m’boy,” he said, after a while.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Well,” said Wednesday. “For a start, most of them are probably mortal. Not something you have to worry about.”

  “Don’t give me that shit.”

  “But you aren’t mortal,” said Wednesday. “You died on the tree, Shadow. You died and you came back.”

  “So? I don’t even remember how I did that. If they kill me this time, I’ll still be dead.”

  Wednesday finished his beer. Then he waved his beer bottle around, as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra with it, and sang another verse:

  “My brother’s a missionary worker,

  He saves fallen women from sin

  For five bucks he’ll save you a redhead,

  My God how the money rolls in.”

  “You aren’t helping,” said Shadow. The diner was a train carriage now, rattling through a snowy night.

  Wednesday put down his beer bottle, and he fixed Shadow with his real eye, the one that wasn’t glass. “It’s patterns,” he said. “If they think you’re a hero, they’re wrong. After you die, you don’t get to be Beowulf or Perseus or Rama any more. Whole different set of rules. Chess, not checkers. Go, not chess. You understand?”

  “Not even a little,” said Shadow, frustrated.

  People, in the corridor of the big house, moving loudly and drunkenly, shushing each other as they stumbled and giggled their way down the hall.

  Shadow wondered if they were servants, or if they were strays from the other wing, slumming. And the dreams took him once again….

  Now he was back in the bothy where he had sheltered from the rain, the day before. There was a body on the floor: a boy, no more than five years old. Naked, on his back, limbs spread. There was a flash of intense light, and someone pushed through Shadow as if he was not there and rearranged the position of the boy’s arms. Another flash of light.

  Shadow knew the man taking the photographs. It was Dr. Gaskell, the little steel-haired man from the hotel bar.

  Gaskell took a white paper bag from his pocket, and fished about in it for something that he popped into his mouth.

  “Dolly mixtures,” he said to the child on the stone floor. “Yum yum. Your favorites.”

  He smiled and crouched down, and took another photograph of the dead boy.

  Shadow pushed through the stone wall of the cottage, flowing through the cracks in the stones like the wind. He flowed down to the seashore. The waves crashed on the rocks and Shadow kept moving across the water, through gray seas, up the swells and down again, toward the ship made of dead men’s nails.

  The ship was far away, out at sea, and Shadow passed across the surface of the water like the shadow of a cloud.

  The ship was huge. He had not understood before how huge it was. A hand reached down and grasped his arm, pulled him up from the sea onto the deck.

  “Bring us back,” said a voice as loud as the crashing of the sea, urgent and fierce. “Bring us back, or let us go.” Only one eye burned in that bearded face.

  “I’m not keeping you here.”

  They were giants, on that ship, huge men made of shadows and frozen sea-spray, creatures of dream and foam.

  One of them, huger than all the rest, red-bearded, stepped forward. “We cannot land,” he boomed. “We cannot leave.”

  “Go home,” said Shadow.

  “We came with our people to this southern country,” said the one-eyed man. “But they left us. They sought other, tamer gods, and they renounced us in their hearts, and gave us over.”

  “Go home,” repeated Shadow.

  “Too much time has passed,” said the red-bearded man. By the hammer at his side, Shadow knew him. “Too much blood has been spilled. You are of our blood, Baldur. Set us free.”

  And Shadow wanted to say that he was not theirs, was not anybody’s, but the thin blanket had slipped from the bed, and his feet stuck out at the bottom, and thin moonlight filled the attic room.

  There was silence, now, in that huge house. Something howled in the hills, and Shadow shivered.

  He lay in a bed that was too small for him, and imagined time as something that pooled and puddled, wondered if there were places where time hung heavy, places where it was heaped and held—cities, he thought, must be filled with time: all the places where people congregated, where they came and brought time with them. And if that were true, Shadow mused, then there could be other places, where the people were thin on the ground, and the land waited, bitter and granite, and a thousand years was an eyeblink to the hills—a scudding of clouds, a wavering of rushes and nothing more, in the places where time was as thin on the ground as the people….

  “They are going to kill you,” whispered Jennie, the barmaid.

  Shadow sat beside her now, on the hill, in the moonlight. “Why would they want to do that?” he asked. “I don’t matter.”

  “It’s what they do to monsters,” she said. “It’s what they have to do. It’s what they’ve always done.”

  He reached out to touch her, but she turned away from him. From behind, she was empty and hollow. She turned again, so she was facing him. “Come away,” she whispered.

  “You can come to me,” he said.

  “I can’t,” she said. “There are things in the way. The path there is hard, and it is guarded. But you can call. If you call me, I’ll come.”

  Then dawn came, and with it a cloud of midges from the boggy land at the foot of the hill. Jennie flicked at them with her tail, but it was no use; they descended on Shadow like a cloud, until he was breathing midges, his nose and mouth filling with the tiny, crawling stinging things, and he was choking on the darkness….

  He wrenched himself back into his bed and his body and his life, into wakefulness, his heart pounding in his chest, gulping for breath.

  VII

  Breakfast was kippers, grilled tomatoes, scrambled eggs, toast, two stubby, thumblike sausages, and slices of something dark and round and flat that Shadow didn’t recognize.

  “What’s this?” asked Shadow.

  “Black pudden’,” said the man sitting next to him. He was one of the security guards, and was reading a copy of yesterday’s Sun as he ate. “Blood and herbs. They cook the blood until it congeals into a sort of a dark, herby scab.” He forked some eggs onto his toast, ate it with his fingers. “I don’t know. What is it they say, you should never see anyone making sausages or the law? Something like that.”

  Shadow ate the rest of the breakfast, but he left the black pudding alone.

  There was a pot of real coffee now, and he drank a mug of it, hot and blac
k, to wake him up and to clear his head.

  Smith walked in. “Shadow-man. Can I borrow you for five minutes?”

  “You’re paying,” said Shadow. They walked out into the corridor.

  “It’s Mr. Alice,” said Smith. “He wants a quick word.” They crossed from the dismal whitewashed servants’ wing into the wood-paneled vastness of the old house. They walked up the huge wooden staircase and into a vast library. No one was there.

  “He’ll just be a minute,” said Smith. “I’ll make sure he knows you’re waiting.”

  The books in the library were protected from mice and dust and people by locked doors of glass and wire mesh. There was a painting of a stag on the wall, and Shadow walked over to look at it. The stag was haughty and superior: behind it, a valley filled with mist.

  “The Monarch of the Glen,” said Mr. Alice, walking in slowly, leaning on his stick. “The most reproduced picture of Victorian times. That’s not the original, but it was done by Landseer in the late 1850s as a copy of his own painting. I love it, although I’m sure I shouldn’t. He did the lions in Trafalgar Square, Landseer. Same bloke.”

  He walked over to the bay window, and Shadow walked with him. Below them in the courtyard, servants were putting out chairs and tables. By the pond in the center of the courtyard other people, party guests, were building bonfires out of logs and wood.

  “Why don’t they have the servants build the fires?” asked Shadow.

  “Why should they have the fun?” said Mr. Alice. “It’d be like sending your man out into the rough some afternoon to shoot pheasants for you. There’s something about building a bonfire, when you’ve hauled over the wood, and put it down in the perfect place, that’s special. Or so they tell me. I’ve not done it myself.” He turned away from the window. “Take a seat,” he said. “I’ll get a crick in my neck looking up at you.”

  Shadow sat down.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” said Mr. Alice. “Been wanting to meet you for a while. They said you were a smart young man who was going places. That’s what they said.”