Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

by Neil Gaiman

  “So you didn’t just hire a tourist to keep the neighbors away from your party?”

  “Well, yes and no. We had a few other candidates, obviously. It’s just you were perfect for the job. And when I realized who you were. Well, a gift from the gods really, weren’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Was I?”

  “Absolutely. You see, this party goes back a very long way. Almost a thousand years, they’ve been having it. Never missed a single year. And every year there’s a fight, between our man and their man. And our man wins. This year, our man is you.”

  “Who…” said Shadow. “Who are they? And who are you?”

  “I am your host,” said Mr. Alice. “I suppose….” He stopped, for a moment, tapped his walking stick against the wooden floor. “They are the ones who lost, a long time ago. We won. We were the knights, and they were the dragons, we were the giant-killers, they were the ogres. We were the men and they were the monsters. And we won. They know their place now. And tonight is all about not letting them forget it. It’s humanity you’ll be fighting for, tonight. We can’t let them get the upper hand. Not even a little. Us versus them.”

  “Doctor Gaskell said that I was a monster,” said Shadow.

  “Doctor Gaskell?” said Mr. Alice. “Friend of yours?”

  “No,” said Shadow. “He works for you. Or for the people who work for you. I think he kills children and takes pictures of them.”

  Mr. Alice dropped his walking stick. He bent down, awkwardly, to pick it up. Then he said, “Well, I don’t think you’re a monster, Shadow. I think you’re a hero.”

  No, thought Shadow. You think I’m a monster. But you think I’m your monster.

  “Now, you do well tonight,” said Mr. Alice, “and I know you will—and you can name your price. You ever wondered why some people were film stars, or famous, or rich? Bet you think, He’s got no talent. What’s he got that I haven’t got? Well, sometimes the answer is, he’s got someone like me on his side.”

  “Are you a god?” asked Shadow.

  Mr. Alice laughed then, a deep, full-throated chuckle. “Nice one, Mister Moon. Not at all. I’m just a boy from Streatham who’s done well for himself.”

  “So who do I fight?” asked Shadow.

  “You’ll meet him tonight,” said Mr. Alice. “Now, there’s stuff needs to come down from the attic. Why don’t you lend Smithie a hand? Big lad like you, it’ll be a doddle.”

  The audience was over and, as if on cue, Smith walked in.

  “I was just saying,” said Mr. Alice, “that our boy here would help you bring the stuff down from the attic.”

  “Triffic,” said Smith. “Come on, Shadow. Let’s wend our way upwards.”

  They went up, through the house, up a dark wooden stairway, to a padlocked door, which Smith unlocked, into a dusty wooden attic, piled high with what looked like…

  “Drums?” said Shadow.

  “Drums,” said Smith. They were made of wood and of animal skins. Each drum was a different size. “Right, let’s take them down.”

  They carried the drums downstairs. Smith carried one at a time, holding it as if it was precious. Shadow carried two.

  “So what really happens tonight?” asked Shadow, on their third trip, or perhaps their fourth.

  “Well,” said Smith. “Most of it, as I understand, you’re best off figuring out on your own. As it happens.”

  “And you and Mr. Alice. What part do you play in this?”

  Smith gave him a sharp look. They put the drums down at the foot of the stairs, in the great hall. There were several men there, talking in front of the fire.

  When they were back up the stairs again, and out of earshot of the guests, Smith said, “Mr. Alice will be leaving us late this afternoon. I’ll stick around.”

  “He’s leaving? Isn’t he part of this?”

  Smith looked offended. “He’s the host,” he said. “But.” He stopped. Shadow understood. Smith didn’t talk about his employer. They carried more drums down the stairs. When they had brought down all the drums, they carried down heavy leather bags.

  “What’s in these?” asked Shadow.

  “Drumsticks,” said Smith.

  Smith continued, “They’re old families. That lot downstairs. Very old money. They know who’s boss, but that doesn’t make him one of them. See? They’re the only ones who’ll be at tonight’s party. They’d not want Mr. Alice. See?”

  And Shadow did see. He wished that Smith hadn’t spoken to him about Mr. Alice. He didn’t think Smith would have said anything to anyone he thought would live to talk about it.

  But all he said was, “Heavy drumsticks.”

  VIII

  A small helicopter took Mr. Alice away late that afternoon. Land Rovers took away the staff. Smith drove the last one. Only Shadow was left behind, and the guests, with their smart clothes and their smiles.

  They stared at Shadow as if he were a captive lion who had been brought for their amusement, but they did not talk to him.

  The dark-haired woman, the one who had smiled at Shadow as she had arrived, brought him food to eat: a steak, almost rare. She brought it to him on a plate, without cutlery, as if she expected him to eat it with his fingers and his teeth, and he was hungry, and he did.

  “I am not your hero,” he told them, but they would not meet his gaze. Nobody spoke to him, not directly. He felt like an animal.

  And then it was dusk. They led Shadow to the inner courtyard, by the rusty fountain, and they stripped him naked, at gunpoint, and the women smeared his body with some kind of thick yellow grease, rubbing it in.

  They put a knife on the grass in front of him. A gesture with a gun, and Shadow picked the knife up. The hilt was black metal, rough and easy to hold. The blade looked sharp.

  Then they threw open the great door, from the inner courtyard to the world outside, and two of the men lit the two high bonfires: they crackled and blazed.

  They opened the leather bags, and each of the guests took out a single carved black stick, like a cudgel, knobbly and heavy. Shadow found himself thinking of Sawney Beane’s children, swarming up from the darkness holding clubs made of human thigh-bones….

  Then the guests arranged themselves around the edge of the courtyard, and they began to beat the drums with the sticks.

  They started slow, and they started quietly, a deep, throbbing pounding, like a heartbeat. Then they began to crash and slam into strange rhythms, staccato beats that wove and wound, louder and louder, until they filled Shadow’s mind and his world. It seemed to him that the firelight flickered to the rhythms of the drums.

  And then, from outside the house, the howling began.

  There was pain in the howling, and anguish, and it echoed across the hills above the drumbeats, a wail of pain and loss and hate.

  The figure that stumbled through the doorway to the courtyard was clutching its head, covering its ears, as if to stop the pounding of the drumbeats.

  The firelight caught it.

  It was huge, now: bigger than Shadow, and naked. It was perfectly hairless, and dripping wet.

  It lowered its hands from its ears, and it stared around, its face twisted into a mad grimace. “Stop it!” it screamed. “Stop making all that noise!”

  And the people in their pretty clothes beat their drums harder, and faster, and the noise filled Shadow’s head and chest.

  The monster stepped into the center of the courtyard. It looked at Shadow. “You,” it said. “I told you. I told you about the noise,” and it howled, a deep throaty howl of hatred and challenge.

  The creature edged closer to Shadow. It saw the knife, and stopped. “Fight me!” it shouted. “Fight me fair! Not with cold iron! Fight me!”

  “I don’t want to fight you,” said Shadow. He dropped the knife on the grass, raised his hands to show them empty.

  “Too late,” said the bald thing that was not a man. “Too late for that.”

  And it launched itself at Shadow.

 
Later, when Shadow thought of that fight, he remembered only fragments: he remembered being slammed to the ground, and throwing himself out of the way. He remembered the pounding of the drums, and the expressions on the faces of the drummers as they stared, hungrily, between the bonfires, at the two men in the firelight.

  They fought, wrestling and pounding each other.

  Salt tears ran down the monster’s face as it wrestled with Shadow. They were equally matched, it seemed to Shadow.

  The monster slammed its arm into Shadow’s face, and Shadow could taste his own blood. He could feel his own anger beginning to rise, like a red wall of hate.

  He swung a leg out, hooking the monster behind the knee, and as it stumbled back Shadow’s fist crashed into its gut, making it cry out and roar with anger and pain.

  A glance at the guests: Shadow saw the bloodlust on the faces of the drummers.

  There was a cold wind, a sea wind, and it seemed to Shadow that there were huge shadows in the sky, vast figures that he had seen on a ship made of the fingernails of dead men, and that they were staring down at him, that this fight was what was keeping them frozen on their ship, unable to land, unable to leave.

  This fight was old, Shadow thought, older than even Mr. Alice knew, and he was thinking that even as the creature’s talons raked his chest. It was the fight of man against monster, and it was old as time: it was Theseus battling the Minotaur, it was Beowulf and Grendel, it was the fight of every hero who had ever stood between the firelight and the darkness and wiped the blood of something inhuman from his sword.

  The bonfires burned, and the drums pounded and throbbed and pulsed like the beating of a thousand hearts.

  Shadow slipped on the damp grass, as the monster came at him, and he was down. The creature’s fingers were around Shadow’s neck, and it was squeezing; Shadow could feel everything starting to thin, to become distant.

  He closed his hand around a patch of grass, and pulled at it, dug his fingers deep, grabbing a handful of grass and clammy earth, and he smashed the clod of dirt into the monster’s face, momentarily blinding it.

  He pushed up, and was on top of the creature, now. He rammed his knee hard into its groin, and it doubled into a fetal position, and howled, and sobbed.

  Shadow realized that the drumming had stopped, and he looked up.

  The guests had put down their drums.

  They were all approaching him, in a circle, men and women, still holding their drumsticks, but holding them like cudgels. They were not looking at Shadow, though: they were staring at the monster on the ground, and they raised their black sticks and moved toward it in the light of the twin fires.

  Shadow said, “Stop!”

  The first club blow came down on the creature’s head. It wailed and twisted, raising an arm to ward off the next blow.

  Shadow threw himself in front of it, shielding it with his body. The dark-haired woman who had smiled at him before now brought down her club on his shoulder, dispassionately, and another club, from a man this time, hit him a numbing blow in the leg, and a third struck him on his side.

  They’ll kill us both, he thought. Him first, then me. That’s what they do. That’s what they always do. And then, She said she would come. If I called her.

  Shadow whispered, “Jennie?”

  There was no reply. Everything was happening so slowly. Another club was coming down, this one aimed at his hand. Shadow rolled out of the way awkwardly, watched the heavy wood smash into the turf.

  “Jennie,” he said, picturing her too-fair hair in his mind, her thin face, her smile. “I call you. Come now. Please.”

  A gust of cold wind.

  The dark-haired woman had raised her club high, and brought it down now, fast, hard, aiming for Shadow’s face.

  The blow never landed. A small hand caught the heavy stick as if it were a twig.

  Fair hair blew about her head, in the cold wind. He could not have told you what she was wearing.

  She looked at him. Shadow thought that she looked disappointed.

  One of the men aimed a cudgel blow at the back of her head. It never connected. She turned…

  A rending sound, as if something was tearing itself apart…

  And then the bonfires exploded. That was how it seemed. There was blazing wood all over the courtyard, even in the house. And the people were screaming in the bitter wind.

  Shadow staggered to his feet.

  The monster lay on the ground, bloodied and twisted. Shadow did not know if it was alive or not. He picked it up, hauled it over his shoulder, and staggered out of the courtyard with it.

  He stumbled out onto the gravel forecourt, as the massive wooden doors slammed closed behind them. Nobody else would be coming out. Shadow kept moving down the slope, one step at a time, down toward the loch.

  When he reached the water’s edge he stopped, and sank to his knees, and let the bald man down onto the grass as gently as he could.

  He heard something crash, and looked back up the hill.

  The house was burning.

  “How is he?” said a woman’s voice.

  Shadow turned. She was knee-deep in the water, the creature’s mother, wading toward the shore.

  “I don’t know,” said Shadow. “He’s hurt.”

  “You’re both hurt,” she said. “You’re all bluid and bruises.”

  “Yes,” said Shadow.

  “Still,” she said. “He’s not dead. And that makes a nice change.”

  She had reached the shore now. She sat on the bank, with her son’s head in her lap. She took a packet of tissues from her handbag, and spat on a tissue, and began fiercely to scrub at her son’s face with it, rubbing away the blood.

  The house on the hill was roaring now. Shadow had not imagined that a burning house would make so much noise.

  The old woman looked up at the sky. She made a noise in the back of her throat, a clucking noise, and then she shook her head. “You know,” she said, “you’ve let them in. They’d been bound for so long, and you’ve let them in.”

  “Is that a good thing?” asked Shadow.

  “I don’t know, love,” said the little woman, and she shook her head again. She crooned to her son as if he were still her baby, and dabbed at his wounds with her spit.

  Shadow was naked, at the edge of the loch, but the heat from the burning building kept him warm. He watched the reflected flames in the glassy water of the loch. A yellow moon was rising.

  He was starting to hurt. Tomorrow, he knew, he would hurt much worse.

  Footsteps on the grass behind him. He looked up.

  “Hello Smithie,” said Shadow.

  Smith looked down at the three of them.

  “Shadow,” he said, shaking his head. “Shadow, Shadow, Shadow, Shadow, Shadow. This was not how things were meant to turn out.”

  “Sorry,” said Shadow.

  “This will cause real embarrassment to Mr. Alice,” said Smith. “Those people were his guests.”

  “They were animals,” said Shadow.

  “If they were,” said Smith, “they were rich and important animals. There’ll be widows and orphans and God knows what to take care of. Mr. Alice will not be pleased.” He said it like a judge pronouncing a death sentence.

  “Are you threatening him?” asked the old lady.

  “I don’t threaten,” said Smith, flatly.

  She smiled. “Ah,” she said. “Well, I do. And if you or that fat bastard you work for hurt this young man, it’ll be the worse for both of you.” She smiled then, with sharp teeth, and Shadow felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. “There’s worse things than dying,” she said. “And I know most of them. I’m not young, and I’m not one for idle talk. So if I were you,” she said, with a sniff, “I’d look after this lad.”

  She picked up her son with one arm, as if he were a child’s doll, and she clutched her handbag close to her with the other.

  Then she nodded to Shadow and walked away, into the glass-dark water,
and soon she and her son were gone beneath the surface of the loch.

  “Fuck,” muttered Smith.

  Shadow didn’t say anything.

  Smith fumbled in his pocket. He pulled out the pouch of tobacco, and rolled himself a cigarette. Then he lit it. “Right,” he said.

  “Right?” said Shadow.

  “We better get you cleaned up, and find you some clothes. You’ll catch your death, otherwise. You heard what she said.”

  IX

  They had the best room waiting for Shadow, that night, back at the hotel. And, less than an hour after Shadow returned, Gordon on the front desk brought up a new backpack, a box of new clothes, even new boots. He asked no questions.

  There was a large envelope on top of the pile of clothes.

  Shadow ripped it open. It contained his passport, slightly scorched, his wallet, and money: several bundles of new fifty-pound notes, wrapped in rubber bands.

  My God, how the money rolls in, he thought, without pleasure, and tried, without success, to remember where he had heard that song before.

  He took a long bath, to soak away the pain.

  And then he slept.

  In the morning he dressed, and walked up the lane next to the hotel, that led up the hill and out of the village. There had been a cottage at the top of the hill, he was sure of it, with lavender in the garden, a stripped pine countertop, and a purple sofa, but no matter where he looked there was no cottage on the hill, nor any evidence that there ever had been anything there but grass and a hawthorn tree.

  He called her name, but there was no reply, only the wind coming in off the sea, bringing with it the first promises of winter.

  Still, she was waiting for him, when he got back to the hotel room. She was sitting on the bed, wearing her old brown coat, inspecting her fingernails. She did not look up when he unlocked the door and walked in.

  “Hello Jennie,” he said.

  “Hello,” she said. Her voice was very quiet.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You saved my life.”

  “You called,” she said dully. “I came.”

  He said, “What’s wrong?”