“Extremely so.”
“Older woman?”
“Among dragons, a few centuries this way or that are not so important. But she, too, has other admirers and seems attracted by the more brash variety.”
“Uh-huh. I begin to get the drift. You gave me some advice once. I’ll return the favor. Some things are more important than hoards.”
“Name one.”
“My life. If I were to threaten her she might do me in all by herself, before you could come to her rescue.”
“No, she’s a demure little thing. Anyway, it’s all a matter of timing. I’ll perch on a hilltop nearby—I’ll show you where—and signal you when to begin your approach. Now, this time I have to win, of course. Here’s how we’ll work it…”
*~*~*~*
George sat on the white charger and divided his attention between the distant cave mouth and the crest of a high hill off to his left. After a time, a shining winged form flashed through the air and settled upon the hill. Moments later, it raised one bright wing.
He lowered his visor, couched his lance and started forward. When he came within hailing distance of the cave he cried out:
“I know you’re in there, Megtag! I’ve come to destroy you and make off with your hoard! You godless beast! Eater of children! This is your last day on earth!”
An enormous burnished head with cold green eyes emerged from the cave. Twenty feet of flame shot from its huge mouth and scorched the rock before it. George halted hastily. The beast looked twice the size of Dart and did not seem in the least retiring. Its scales rattled like metal as it began to move forward.
“Perhaps I exaggerated…” George began, and he heard the frantic flapping of giant vanes overhead.
As the creature advanced, he felt himself seized by the shoulders. He was borne aloft so rapidly that the scene below him dwindled to toy size in a matter of moments. He saw his new steed bolt and flee rapidly back along the route they had followed.
“What the hell happened?” he cried.
“I hadn’t been around for a while,” Dart replied. “Didn’t know one of the others had moved in with her. You’re lucky I’m fast. That’s Pelladon. He’s a mean one.”
“Great. Don’t you think you should have checked first?”
“Sorry. I thought she’d take decades to make up her mind—without prompting. Oh, what a hoard! You should have seen it!”
“Follow that horse. I want him back.”
*~*~*~*
They sat before Dart’s cave, drinking.
“Where’d you ever get a whole barrel of wine?”
“Lifted it from a barge, up the river. I do that every now and then. I keep a pretty good cellar, if I do say.”
“Indeed. Well, we’re none the poorer, really. We can drink to that.”
“True, but I’ve been thinking again. You know, you’re a very good actor.”
“Thanks. You’re not so bad yourself.”
“Now supposing—just supposing—you were to travel about. Good distances from here each time. Scout out villages, on the continent and in the isles. Find out which ones are well off and lacking in local heroes…”
“Yes?”
“…And let them see that dragon-slaying certificate of yours. Brag a bit. Then come back with a list of towns. Maps, too.”
“Go ahead.”
“Find the best spots for a little harmless predation and choose a good battle site—”
“Refill?”
“Please.”
“Here.”
“Thanks. Then you show up, and for a fee—”
“Sixty-forty.”
“That’s what I was thinking, but I’ll bet you’ve got the figures transposed.”
“Maybe fifty-five and forty-five then.”
“Down the middle, and let’s drink on it.”
“Fair enough. Why haggle?”
“Now I know why I dreamed of fighting a great number of knights, all of them looking like you. You’re going to make a name for yourself, George.”
Part III:
The Paranormal
NEIL GAIMAN is one of the most beloved authors working today. He is the internationally bestselling author of Neverwhere, Coraline, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), American Gods, Stardust and, most recently, the highly successful The Ocean at the End of the Lane. He has won every major award in the field of science fiction, fantasy, horror and children’s literature, including the Hugo, the Nebula, the Stoker and the Locus. He is the creator of the hugely popular Sandman comics, and has written two episodes for the television series Doctor Who.
For more details see his official site: www.neilgaiman.com
Only the End of the World Again
Neil Gaiman
It was a bad day: I woke up naked in the bed, with a cramp in my stomach, feeling more or less like hell. Something about the quality of the light, stretched and metallic, like the colour of a migraine, told me it was afternoon.
The room was freezing—literally: there was a thin crust of ice on the inside of the windows. The sheets on the bed around me were ripped and clawed, and there was animal hair in the bed. It itched.
I was thinking about staying in bed for the next week—I’m always tired after a change—but a wave of nausea forced me to disentangle myself from the bedding, and to stumble, hurriedly, into the apartment’s tiny bathroom.
The cramps hit me again as I got to the bathroom door. I held on to the door-frame and I started to sweat. Maybe it was a fever; I hoped I wasn’t coming down with something.
The cramping was sharp in my guts. My head felt swimmy. I crumpled to the floor, and, before I could manage to raise my head enough to find the toilet bowl, I began to spew.
I vomited a foul-smelling thin yellow liquid; in it was a dog’s paw—my guess was a Doberman’s, but I’m not really a dog person; a tomato peel; some diced carrots and sweet corn; some lumps of half-chewed meat, raw; and some fingers. They were fairly small, pale fingers, obviously a child’s.
“Shit.”
The cramps eased up, and the nausea subsided. I lay on the floor, with stinking drool coming out of my mouth and nose, with the tears you cry when you’re being sick drying on my cheeks.
When I felt a little better I picked up the paw and the fingers from the pool of spew and threw them into the toilet bowl, flushed them away.
I turned on the tap, rinsed out my mouth with the briny Innsmouth water, and spat it into the sink. I mopped up the rest of the sick as best I could with washcloth and toilet paper. Then I turned on the shower, and stood in the bathtub like a zombie as the hot water sluiced over me.
I soaped myself down, body and hair. The meagre lather turned grey; I must have been filthy. My hair was matted with something that felt like dried blood, and I worked at it with the bar of soap until it was gone. Then I stood under the shower until the water turned icy.
There was a note under the door from my landlady. It said that I owed her for two weeks’ rent. It said that all the answers were in the Book of Revelations. It said that I made a lot of noise coming home in the early hours of this morning, and she’d thank me to be quieter in future. It said that when the Elder Gods rose up from the ocean, all the scum of the Earth, all the non-believers, all the human garbage and the wastrels and deadbeats would be swept away, and the world would be cleansed by ice and deep water. It said that she felt she ought to remind me that she had assigned me a shelf in the refrigerator when I arrived and she’d thank me if in the future I’d keep to it.
I crumpled the note, dropped it on the floor, where it lay alongside the Big Mac cartons and the empty pizza cartons, and the long-dead dried slices of pizza.
It was time to go to work.
I’d been in Innsmouth for two weeks, and I disliked it. It smelled fishy. It was a claustrophobic little town: marshland to the east, cliffs to the west, and, in the centre, a harbour that held a few rotting fishing boats, and was not even scenic at sunset. The yuppies had come to Innsmouth in the Eighties anyw
ay, bought their picturesque fisherman’s cottages overlooking the harbour. The yuppies had been gone for some years, now, and the cottages by the bay were crumbling, abandoned.
The inhabitants of Innsmouth lived here and there in and around the town, and in the trailer parks that ringed it, filled with dank mobile homes that were never going anywhere.
I got dressed, pulled on my boots and put on my coat and left my room. My landlady was nowhere to be seen. She was a short, pop-eyed woman, who spoke little, although she left extensive notes for me pinned to doors and placed where I might see them; she kept the house filled with the smell of boiling seafood: huge pots were always simmering on the kitchen stove, filled with things with too many legs and other things with no legs at all.
There were other rooms in the house, but no-one else rented them. No-one in their right mind would come to Innsmouth in winter.
Outside the house it didn’t smell much better. It was colder, though, and my breath steamed in the sea air. The snow on the streets was crusty and filthy; the clouds promised more snow.
A cold, salty wind came up off the bay. The gulls were screaming miserably. I felt shitty. My office would be freezing, too. On the corner of Marsh Street and Leng Avenue was a bar, ‘The Opener’, a squat building with small, dark windows that I’d passed two dozen times in the last couple of weeks. I hadn’t been in before, but I really needed a drink, and besides, it might be warmer in there. I pushed open the door.
The bar was indeed warm. I stamped the snow off my boots and went inside. It was almost empty and smelled of old ashtrays and stale beer. A couple of elderly men were playing chess by the bar. The barman was reading a battered old gilt-and-green-leather edition of the poetical works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
“Hey. How about a Jack Daniels straight up?”
“Sure thing. You’re new in town,” he told me, putting his book face down on the bar, pouring the drink into a glass.
“Does it show?”
He smiled, passed me the Jack Daniels. The glass was filthy, with a greasy thumb-print on the side, and I shrugged and knocked back the drink anyway. I could barely taste it.
“Hair of the dog?” he said.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“There is a belief,” said the barman, whose fox-red hair was tightly greased back, “that the lykanthropoi can be returned to their natural forms by thanking them, while they’re in wolf form, or by calling them by their given names.”
“Yeah? Well, thanks.”
He poured another shot for me, unasked. He looked a little like Peter Lorre, but then, most of the folk in Innsmouth look a little like Peter Lorre, including my landlady.
I sank the Jack Daniels, this time felt it burning down into my stomach, the way it should.
“It’s what they say. I never said I believed it.”
“What do you believe?”
“Burn the girdle.”
“Pardon?”
“The lykanthropoi have girdles of human skin, given to them at their first transformation, by their masters in hell. Burn the girdle.”
One of the old chess-players turned to me then, his eyes huge and blind and protruding. “If you drink rain-water out of warg-wolf’s paw-print, that’ll make a wolf of you, when the moon is full,” he said. “The only cure is to hunt down the wolf that made the print in the first place and cut off its head with a knife forged of virgin silver.”
“Virgin, huh?” I smiled.
His chess partner, bald and wrinkled, shook his head and croaked a single sad sound. Then he moved his queen, and croaked again.
There are people like him all over Innsmouth.
I paid for the drinks, and left a dollar tip on the bar. The barman was reading his book once more, and ignored it.
Outside the bar big wet kissy flakes of snow had begun to fall, settling in my hair and eyelashes. I hate snow. I hate New England. I hate Innsmouth: it’s no place to be alone, but if there’s a good place to be alone I’ve not found it yet. Still, business has kept me on the move for more moons than I like to think about. Business, and other things.
I walked a couple of blocks down Marsh Street—like most of Innsmouth, an unattractive mixture of eighteenth century American Gothic houses, late nineteenth century stunted brownstones, and late twentieth prefab grey-brick boxes—until I got to a boarded-up fried chicken joint, and I went up the stone steps next to the store and unlocked the rusting metal security door.
There was a liquor store across the street; a palmist was operating on the second floor.
Someone had scrawled graffiti in black marker on the metal: just die, it said. Like it was easy.
The stairs were bare wood; the plaster was stained and peeling. My one-room office was at the top of the stairs.
I don’t stay anywhere long enough to bother with my name in gilt on glass. It was handwritten in block letters on a piece of ripped cardboard that I’d thumbtacked to the door.
LAWRENCE TALBOT.
ADJUSTOR.
I unlocked the door to my office and went in.
I inspected my office, while adjectives like seedy and rancid and squalid wandered through my head, then gave up, outclassed. It was fairly unprepossessing—a desk, an office chair, an empty filing cabinet; a window, which gave you a terrific view of the liquor store and the empty palmist’s. The smell of old cooking grease permeated from the store below. I wondered how long the fried chicken joint had been boarded up; I imagined a multitude of black cockroaches swarming over every surface in the darkness beneath me.
“That’s the shape of the world that you’re thinking of there,” said a deep, dark voice, deep enough that I felt it in the pit of my stomach.
There was an old armchair in one corner of the office. The remains of a pattern showed through the patina of age and grease the years had given it. It was the colour of dust.
The fat man sitting in the armchair, his eyes still tightly closed, continued, “We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm.”
His head was lolled back on the armchair, and the tip of his tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth.
“You read my mind?”
The man in the armchair took a slow deep breath that rattled in the back of his throat. He really was immensely fat, with stubby fingers like discoloured sausages. He wore a thick old coat, once black, now an indeterminate grey. The snow on his boots had not entirely melted.
“Perhaps. The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck.
“Ah well. It’s too late now: the Elder Gods have chosen their vessels. When the moon rises…”
A thin trickle of drool came from one corner of his mouth, trickled down in a thread of silver to his collar. Something scuttled down into the shadows of his coat.
“Yeah? What happens when the moon rises?”
The man in the armchair stirred, opened two little eyes, red and swollen, and blinked them in waking.
“I dreamed I had many mouths,” he said, his new voice oddly small and breathy for such a huge man. “I dreamed every mouth was opening and closing independently. Some mouths were talking, some whispering, some eating, some waiting in silence.”
He looked around, wiped the spittle from the corner of his mouth, sat back in the chair, blinking puzzledly. “Who are you?”
“I’m the guy that rents this office,” I told him.
He belched suddenly, loudly. “I’m sorry,” he said, in his breathy voice, and lifted himself heavily from the armchair. He was shorter than I was, when he was standing. He looked me up and down blearily. “Silver bullets,” he pronounced, after a short pause. “Old-fashioned remedy.”
“Yeah,” I told him. “That’s so obvious—must
be why I didn’t think of it. Gee, I could just kick myself. I really could.”
“You’re making fun of an old man,” he told me.
“Not really. I’m sorry. Now, out of here. Some of us have work to do.”
He shambled out. I sat down in the swivel chair at the desk by the window, and discovered, after some minutes, through trial and error, that if I swiveled the chair to the left it fell off its base.
So I sat still and waited for the dusty black telephone on my desk to ring, while the light slowly leaked away from the winter sky.
Ring.
A man’s voice: Had I thought about aluminum siding? I put down the phone.
There was no heating in the office. I wondered how long the fat man had been asleep in the armchair.
Twenty minutes later the phone rang again. A crying woman implored me to help her find her five-year-old daughter, missing since last night, stolen from her bed. The family dog had vanished too.
I don’t do missing children, I told her. I’m sorry: too many bad memories. I put down the telephone, feeling sick again.
It was getting dark now, and, for the first time since I had been in Innsmouth, the neon sign across the street flicked on. It told me that Madame Ezekiel performed Tarot Readings and Palmistry. Red neon stained the falling snow the colour of new blood.
Armageddon is averted by small actions. That’s the way it was. That’s the way it always has to be.
The phone rang a third time. I recognized the voice; it was the aluminum-siding man again. “You know,” he said, chattily, “transformation from man to animal and back being, by definition, impossible, we need to look for other solutions. Depersonalization, obviously, and likewise some form of projection. Brain damage? Perhaps. Pseudoneurotic schizophrenia? Laughably so. Some cases have been treated with intravenous thioridazine hydrochloride.”
“Successfully?”
He chuckled. “That’s what I like. A man with a sense of humour. I’m sure we can do business.”
“I told you already. I don’t need aluminum siding.”
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