Trigger Warning

by Neil Gaiman

She poured tea from the same china teapot she had poured it from all my life.

  “There were people after it. In the end, their ship blew up. In the valley. Because of those flappy things getting into their propellers.”

  “Flappy things?”

  She thought for a moment. “Pterodactyls, dear. With a P. That was what your father said they were. Of course, he said the people in the airship deserved all that was coming to them, after what they did to the Aztecs in 1942.”

  “Mummy, the Aztecs died out years ago. Long before 1942.”

  “Oh yes, dear. The ones in America. Not in that valley. These other people, the ones in the airship, well, your father said they weren’t really people. But they looked like people, even though they came from somewhere with such a funny name. Where was it?” She thought for a while. Then, “You should drink your tea, dear.”

  “Yes. No. Hang on. So what were these people? And pterodactyls have been extinct for fifty million years.”

  “If you say so, dear. Your father never really talked about it.” She paused. Then, “There was a girl. This was at least five years before your father and I started going out. He was very good-looking back then. Well, I always thought he was handsome. He met her in Germany. She was hiding from people who were looking for that statue. She was their queen or princess or wise woman or something. They kidnapped her, and he was with her, so they kidnapped him too. They weren’t actually aliens. They were more like, those people who turn into wolves on the television . . .”

  “Werewolves?”

  “I suppose so, dear.” She seemed doubtful. “The statue was an oracle, and if you owned it, even if you had it, you were the ruler of those people.” She stirred her tea. “What did your father say? The entrance to the valley was through a tiny footpath, and after the German girl, well, she wasn’t German, obviously, but they blew up the pathway with a . . . a ray machine, to cut off the way to the outside world. So your father had to make his own way home. He would have got into such a lot of trouble, but the man who escaped with him, Barry Anscome, he was in Military Intelligence, and—”

  “Hang on. Barry Anscome? Used to come and stay for the weekend, when I was a kid. Gave me fifty pence every time. Did bad coin tricks. Snored. Silly moustache.”

  “Yes, dear, Barry. He went to South America when he retired. Ecuador, I think. That was how they met. When your father was in the army.” My father had told me once that my mother had never liked Barry Anscome, that he was my dad’s friend.

  “And?”

  She poured me another cup of tea. “It was such a long time ago, dear. Your father told me all about it once. But he didn’t tell the story immediately. He only told me when we were married. He said I ought to know. We were on our honeymoon. We went to a little Spanish fishing village. These days it’s a big tourist town, but back then, nobody had ever heard of it. What was it called? Oh yes. Torremolinos.”

  “Can I see it again? The statue?”

  “No, dear.”

  “You put it away?”

  “I threw it away,” said my mother, coldly. Then, as if to stop me from rummaging in the rubbish, “The bin-men already came this morning.”

  We said nothing, then.

  She sipped her tea.

  “You’ll never guess who I met last week. Your old schoolteacher. Mrs. Brooks? We met in Safeway’s. She and I went off to have coffee in the Bookshop because I was hoping to talk to her about joining the town carnival committee. But it was closed. We had to go to the Olde Tea Shoppe instead. It was quite an adventure.”

  Orange

  (Third Subject’s Responses to Investigator’s Written Questionnaire.)

  EYES ONLY.

  1) Jemima Glorfindel Petula Ramsey.

  2) Seventeen on June the ninth.

  3) The last five years. Before that we lived in Glasgow (Scotland). Before that, Cardiff (Wales).

  4) I don’t know. I think he’s in magazine publishing now. He doesn’t talk to us anymore. The divorce was pretty bad and Mum wound up paying him a lot of money. Which seems sort of wrong to me. But maybe it was worth it just to get shot of him.

  5) An inventor and entrepreneur. She invented the Stuffed Muffin™, and started the Stuffed Muffin chain. I used to like them when I was a kid, but you can get kind of sick of stuffed muffins for every meal, especially because Mum used us as guinea pigs. The Complete Turkey Dinner Christmas Stuffed Muffin was the worst. But she sold out her interest in the Stuffed Muffin chain about five years ago, to start work on My Mum’s Colored Bubbles (not actually ™ yet).

  6) Two. My sister, Nerys, who was just fifteen, and my brother, Pryderi, twelve.

  7) Several times a day.

  8) No.

  9) Through the Internet. Probably on eBay.

  10) She’s been buying colors and dyes from all over the world ever since she decided that the world was crying out for brightly colored Day-Glo bubbles. The kind you can blow, with bubble mixture.

  11) It’s not really a laboratory. I mean, she calls it that, but really it’s just the garage. Only she took some of the Stuffed Muffins™ money and converted it, so it has sinks and bathtubs and Bunsen burners and things, and tiles on the walls and the floor to make it easier to clean.

  12) I don’t know. Nerys used to be pretty normal. When she turned thirteen she started reading these magazines and putting pictures of these strange bimbo women up on her wall like Britney Spears and so on. Sorry if anyone reading this is a Britney fan ;) but I just don’t get it. The whole orange thing didn’t start until last year.

  13) Artificial tanning creams. You couldn’t go near her for hours after she put it on. And she’d never give it time to dry after she smeared it on her skin, so it would come off on her sheets and on the fridge door and in the shower leaving smears of orange everywhere. Her friends would wear it too, but they never put it on like she did. I mean, she’d slather on the cream, with no attempt to look even human-colored, and she thought she looked great. She did the tanning salon thing once, but I don’t think she liked it, because she never went back.

  14) Tangerine Girl. The Oompa-Loompa. Carrot-top. Go-Mango. Orangina.

  15) Not very well. But she didn’t seem to care, really. I mean, this is a girl who said that she couldn’t see the point of science or maths because she was going to be a pole dancer as soon as she left school. I said, nobody’s going to pay to see you in the altogether, and she said how do you know? and I told her that I saw the little QuickTime films she’d made of herself dancing nuddy and left in the camera and she screamed and said give me that, and I told her I’d wiped them. But honestly, I don’t think she was ever going to be the next Bettie Page or whoever. She’s a sort of squarish shape, for a start.

  16) German measles, mumps, and I think Pryderi had chicken-pox when he was staying in Melbourne with the grandparents.

  17) In a small pot. It looked a bit like a jam jar, I suppose.

  18) I don’t think so. Nothing that looked like a warning label anyway. But there was a return address. It came from abroad, and the return address was in some kind of foreign lettering.

  19) You have to understand that Mum had been buying colors and dyes from all over the world for five years. The thing with the Day-Glo bubbles is not that someone can blow glowing colored bubbles, it’s that they don’t pop and leave splashes of dye all over everything. Mum says that would be a lawsuit waiting to happen. So, no.

  20) There was some kind of shouting match between Nerys and Mum to begin with, because Mum had come back from the shops and not bought anything from Nerys’s shopping list except the shampoo. Mum said she couldn’t find the tanning cream at the supermarket but I think she just forgot. So Nerys stormed off and slammed the door and went into her bedroom and played something that was probably Britney Spears really loudly. I was out the back, feeding the three cats, the chinchilla, and a guinea pig named Roland who looks like a hairy cushion, and I missed it all.

  21) On the kitchen table.

  22) Whe
n I found the empty jam jar in the back garden the next morning. It was underneath Nerys’s window. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.

  23) Honestly, I couldn’t be bothered. I figured it would just be more yelling, you know? And Mum would work it out soon enough.

  24) Yes, it was stupid. But it wasn’t uniquely stupid, if you see what I mean. Which is to say, it was par-for-the-course-for-Nerys stupid.

  25) That she was glowing.

  26) A sort of pulsating orange.

  27) When she started telling us that she was going to be worshipped like a god, as she was in the dawn times.

  28) Pryderi said she was floating about an inch above the ground. But I didn’t actually see this. I thought he was just playing along with her newfound weirdness.

  29) She didn’t answer to “Nerys” anymore. She described herself mostly as either My Immanence, or the Vehicle. (“It is time to feed the Vehicle.”)

  30) Dark chocolate. Which was weird because in the old days I was the only one in the house who even sort of liked it. But Pryderi had to go out and buy her bars and bars of it.

  31) No. Mum and me just thought it was more Nerys. Just a bit more imaginatively weirdo Nerys than usual.

  32) That night, when it started to get dark. You could see the orange pulsing under the door. Like a glowworm or something. Or a light show. The weirdest thing was that I could still see it with my eyes closed.

  33) The next morning. All of us.

  34) It was pretty obvious by this point. She didn’t really even look like Nerys any longer. She looked sort of smudged. Like an afterimage. I thought about it, and it’s . . . Okay. Suppose you were staring at something really bright, that was a blue color. Then you closed your eyes, and you’d see this glowing yellowy-orange afterimage in your eyes? That was what she looked like.

  35) They didn’t work either.

  36) She let Pryderi leave to get her more chocolate. Mum and I weren’t allowed to leave the house anymore.

  37) Mostly I just sat in the back garden and read a book. There wasn’t very much else I really could do. I started wearing dark glasses, so did Mum, because the orange light hurt our eyes. Other than that, nothing.

  38) Only when we tried to leave or call anybody. There was food in the house, though. And Stuffed Muffins™ in the freezer.

  39) “If you’d just stopped her wearing that stupid tanning cream a year ago we wouldn’t be in this mess!” But it was unfair, and I apologized afterwards.

  40) When Pryderi came back with the dark chocolate bars. He said he’d gone up to a traffic warden and told him that his sister had turned into a giant orange glow and was controlling our minds. He said the man was extremely rude to him.

  41) I don’t have a boyfriend. I did, but we broke up after he went to a Rolling Stones concert with the evil bottle-blond former friend whose name I do not mention. Also, I mean, the Rolling Stones? These little old goat-men hopping around the stage pretending to be all rock-and-roll? Please. So, no.

  42) I’d quite like to be a vet. But then I think about having to put animals down, and I don’t know. I want to travel for a bit before I make any decisions.

  43) The garden hose. We turned it on full, while she was eating her chocolate bars, and distracted, and we sprayed it at her.

  44) Just orange steam, really. Mum said that she had solvents and things in the laboratory, if we could get in there, but by now Her Immanence was hissing mad (literally) and she sort of fixed us to the floor. I can’t explain it. I mean, I wasn’t stuck, but I couldn’t leave or move my legs. I was just where she left me.

  45) About half a meter above the carpet. She’d sink down a bit to go through doors, so she didn’t bump her head. And after the hose incident she didn’t go back to her room, just stayed in the main room and floated about grumpily, the color of a luminous carrot.

  46) Complete world domination.

  47) I wrote it down on a piece of paper and gave it to Pryderi.

  48) He had to carry it back. I don’t think Her Immanence really understood money.

  49) I don’t know. It was Mum’s idea more than mine. I think she hoped that the solvent might remove the orange. And at that point, it couldn’t hurt. Nothing could have made things worse.

  50) It didn’t even upset her, like the hose-water did. I’m pretty sure she liked it. I think I saw her dipping her chocolate bars into it, before she ate them, although I had to sort of squint up my eyes to see anything where she was. It was all a sort of a great orange glow.

  51) That we were all going to die. Mum told Pryderi that if the Great Oompa-Loompa let him out to buy chocolate again, he just shouldn’t bother coming back. And I was getting really upset about the animals—I hadn’t fed the chinchilla or Roland the guinea pig for two days, because I couldn’t go into the back garden. I couldn’t go anywhere. Except the loo, and then I had to ask.

  52) I suppose because they thought the house was on fire. All the orange light. I mean, it was a natural mistake.

  53) We were glad she hadn’t done that to us. Mum said it proved that Nerys was still in there somewhere, because if she had the power to turn us into goo, like she did the firefighters, she would have done. I said that maybe she just wasn’t powerful enough to turn us into goo at the beginning and now she couldn’t be bothered.

  54) You couldn’t even see a person in there anymore. It was a bright orange pulsing light, and sometimes it talked straight into your head.

  55) When the spaceship landed.

  56) I don’t know. I mean, it was bigger than the whole block, but it didn’t crush anything. It sort of materialized around us, so that our whole house was inside it. And the whole street was inside it too.

  57) No. But what else could it have been?

  58) A sort of pale blue. They didn’t pulse, either. They twinkled.

  59) More than six, less than twenty. It’s not that easy to tell if this is the same intelligent blue light you were just speaking to five minutes ago.

  60) Three things. First of all, a promise that Nerys wouldn’t be hurt or harmed. Second, that if they were ever able to return her to the way she was, they’d let us know, and bring her back. Thirdly, a recipe for fluorescent bubble mixture. (I can only assume they were reading Mum’s mind, because she didn’t say anything. It’s possible that Her Immanence told them, though. She definitely had access to some of “the Vehicle’s” memories.) Also, they gave Pryderi a thing like a glass skateboard.

  61) A sort of a liquid sound. Then everything became transparent. I was crying, and so was Mum. And Pryderi said, “Cool beans,” and I started to giggle while crying, and then it was just our house again.

  62) We went out into the back garden and looked up. There was something blinking blue and orange, very high, getting smaller and smaller, and we watched it until it was out of sight.

  63) Because I didn’t want to.

  64) I fed the remaining animals. Roland was in a state. The cats just seemed happy that someone was feeding them again. I don’t know how the chinchilla got out.

  65) Sometimes. I mean, you have to bear in mind that she was the single most irritating person on the planet, even before the whole Her Immanence thing. But yes, I guess so. If I’m honest.

  66) Sitting outside at night, staring up at the sky, wondering what she’s doing now.

  67) He wants his glass skateboard back. He says that it’s his, and the government has no right to keep it. (You are the government, aren’t you?) Mum seems happy to share the patent for the Colored Bubbles recipe with the government though. The man said that it might be the basis of a whole new branch of molecular something or other. Nobody gave me anything, so I don’t have to worry.

  68) Once, in the back garden, looking up at the night sky. I think it was only an orangeyish star, actually. It could have been Mars, I know they call it the red planet. Although once in a while I think that maybe she’s back to herself again, and dancing, up there, wherever she is, and all the aliens love her pole da
ncing because they just don’t know any better, and they think it’s a whole new art form, and they don’t even mind that she’s sort of square.

  69) I don’t know. Sitting in the back garden talking to the cats, maybe. Or blowing silly-colored bubbles.

  70) Until the day that I die.

  I attest that this is a true statement of events.

  Jemima Glorfindel Petula Ramsey

  A Calendar of Tales

  January Tale

  WHAP!

  “Is it always like this?” The kid seemed disoriented. He was glancing around the room, unfocused. That would get him killed, if he wasn’t careful.

  Twelve tapped him on the arm. “Nope. Not always. If there’s any trouble, it’ll come from up there.”

  He pointed to an attic door, in the ceiling above them. The door was askew, and the darkness waited behind it like an eye.

  The kid nodded. Then he said, “How long have we got?”

  “Together? Maybe another ten minutes.”

  “One thing I kept asking them at Base, they wouldn’t answer. They said I’d see for myself. Who are they?”

  Twelve didn’t answer. Something had changed, ever so slightly, in the darkness of the attic above them. He touched his finger to his lips, then raised his weapon, and indicated for the kid to do likewise.

  They came tumbling down from the attic-hole: brick-gray and mold-green, sharp-toothed and fast, so fast. The kid was still fumbling at the trigger when Twelve started shooting, and he took them out, all five of them, before the kid could fire a shot.

  He glanced to his left. The kid was shaking.

  “There you go,” he said.

  “I guess I mean, what are they?”

  “What or who. Same thing. They’re the enemy. Slipping in at the edges of time. Right now, at handover, they’re going to be coming out in force.”

  They walked down the stairs together. They were in a small, suburban house. A woman and a man sat in the kitchen, at a table with a bottle of champagne upon it. They did not appear to notice the two men in uniform who walked through the room. The woman was pouring the champagne.