by Neil Gaiman
So I left Madame Ezekiel turning over her cards, one by one, staring at them as if that would make the pictures return; and I went downstairs and walked back down Marsh Street until I reached the bar.
The place was empty now; the barman was smoking a cigarette, which he stubbed out as I came in.
“Where are the chess fiends?”
“It’s a big night for them tonight. They’ll be down at the bay. Let’s see. You’re a Jack Daniel’s? Right?”
“Sounds good.”
He poured it for me. I recognized the thumbprint from the last time I had the glass. I picked up the volume of Tennyson poems from the bar top.
“Good book?”
The fox-haired barman took his book from me, opened it, and read:
“Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth . . .”
I’d finished my drink. “So? What’s your point?”
He walked around the bar, took me over to the window. “See? Out there?”
He pointed toward the west of the town, toward the cliffs. As I stared a bonfire was kindled on the cliff tops; it flared and began to burn with a copper-green flame.
“They’re going to wake the Deep Ones,” said the barman. “The stars and the planets and the moon are all in the right places. It’s time. The dry lands will sink, and the seas shall rise . . .”
“ ‘For the world shall be cleansed with ice and floods, and I’ll thank you to keep to your own shelf in the refrigerator,’ ” I said.
“Sorry?”
“Nothing. What’s the quickest way to get up to those cliffs?”
“Back up Marsh Street. Hang a left at the Church of Dagon till you reach Manuxet Way, then just keep on going.” He pulled a coat off the back of the door and put it on. “C’mon. I’ll walk you up there. I’d hate to miss any of the fun.”
“You sure?”
“No one in town’s going to be drinking tonight.” We stepped out, and he locked the door to the bar behind us.
It was chilly in the street, and fallen snow blew about the ground like white mists. From street level, I could no longer tell if Madame Ezekiel was in her den above her neon sign or if my guests were still waiting for me in my office.
We put our heads down against the wind, and we walked.
Over the noise of the wind I heard the barman talking to himself:
“Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green,” he was saying.
“There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise . . .”
He stopped there, and we walked on together in silence with blown snow stinging our faces.
And on the surface die, I thought, but said nothing out loud.
Twenty minutes’ walking and we were out of Innsmouth. Manuxet Way stopped when we left the town, and it became a narrow dirt path, partly covered with snow and ice, and we slipped and slid our way up it in the darkness.
The moon was not yet up, but the stars had already begun to come out. There were so many of them. They were sprinkled like diamond dust and crushed sapphires across the night sky. You can see so many stars from the seashore, more than you could ever see back in the city.
At the top of the cliff, behind the bonfire, two people were waiting—one huge and fat, one much smaller. The barman left my side and walked over to stand beside them, facing me.
“Behold,” he said, “the sacrificial wolf.” There was now an oddly familiar quality to his voice.
I didn’t say anything. The fire was burning with green flames, and it lit the three of them from below: classic spook lighting.
“Do you know why I brought you up here?” asked the barman, and I knew then why his voice was familiar: it was the voice of the man who had attempted to sell me aluminum siding.
“To stop the world ending?”
He laughed at me then.
The second figure was the fat man I had found asleep in my office chair. “Well, if you’re going to get eschatalogical about it . . .” he murmured in a voice deep enough to rattle walls. His eyes were closed. He was fast asleep.
The third figure was shrouded in dark silks and smelled of patchouli oil. It held a knife. It said nothing.
“This night,” said the barman, “the moon is the moon of the Deep Ones. This night are the stars configured in the shapes and patterns of the dark old times. This night, if we call them, they will come. If our sacrifice is worthy. If our cries are heard.”
The moon rose, huge and amber and heavy, on the other side of the bay, and a chorus of low croaking rose with it from the ocean far beneath us.
Moonlight on snow and ice is not daylight, but it will do. And my eyes were getting sharper with the moon: in the cold waters men like frogs were surfacing and submerging in a slow water dance. Men like frogs, and women, too: it seemed to me that I could see my landlady down there, writhing and croaking in the bay with the rest of them.
It was too soon for another change; I was still exhausted from the night before; but I felt strange under that amber moon.
“Poor wolf-man,” came a whisper from the silks. “All his dreams have come to this: a lonely death upon a distant cliff.”
I will dream if I want to, I said, and my death is my own affair. But I was unsure if I had said it out loud.
Senses heighten in the moon’s light; I heard the roar of the ocean still, but now, overlaid on top of it, I could hear each wave rise and crash; I heard the splash of the frog people; I heard the drowned whispers of the dead in the bay; I heard the creak of green wrecks far beneath the ocean.
Smell improves, too. The aluminum siding man was human, while the fat man had other blood in him.
And the figure in the silks . . .
I had smelled her perfume when I wore man-shape. Now I could smell something else, less heady, beneath it. A smell of decay, of putrefying meat and rotten flesh.
The silks fluttered. She was moving toward me. She held the knife.
“Madame Ezekiel?” My voice was roughening and coarsening. Soon I would lose it all. I didn’t understand what was happening, but the moon was rising higher and higher, losing its amber color and filling my mind with its pale light.
“Madame Ezekiel?”
“You deserve to die,” she said, her voice cold and low. “If only for what you did to my cards. They were old.”
“I don’t die,” I told her. “ ‘Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night.’ Remember?”
“It’s bullshit,” she said. “You know what the oldest way to end the curse of the werewolf is?”
“No.”
The bonfire burned brighter now; burned with the green of the world beneath the sea, the green of algae and of slowly drifting weed; burned with the color of emeralds.
“You simply wait till they’re in human shape, a whole month away from another change; then you take the sacrificial knife and you kill them. That’s all.”
I turned to run, but the barman was behind me, pulling my arms, twisting my wrists up into the small of my back. The knife glinted pale silver in the moonlight. Madame Ezekiel smiled.
She sliced across my throat.
Blood began to gush and then to flow. And then it slowed and stopped . . .
—The pounding in the front of my head, the pressure in the back. All a roiling change a how-wow-row-now change a red wall coming toward me from the night
—I tasted stars dissolved in brine, fizzy and distant and salt
—my fingers prickled with pins and my skin was lashed with tongues of flame my eyes were topaz I could taste the night
My breath steamed and billowed in the icy air.
I growled involuntarily, low in my throat. My forepaws were touch
ing the snow.
I pulled back, tensed, and sprang at her.
There was a sense of corruption that hung in the air, like a mist, surrounding me. High in my leap, I seemed to pause, and something burst like a soap bubble . . .
I was deep, deep in the darkness under the sea, standing on all fours on a slimy rock floor at the entrance of some kind of citadel built of enormous rough-hewn stones. The stones gave off a pale glow-in-the-dark light; a ghostly luminescence, like the hands of a watch.
A cloud of black blood trickled from my neck.
She was standing in the doorway in front of me. She was now six, maybe seven feet high. There was flesh on her skeletal bones, pitted and gnawed, but the silks were weeds, drifting in the cold water, down there in the dreamless deeps. They hid her face like a slow green veil.
There were limpets growing on the upper surfaces of her arms and on the flesh that hung from her ribcage.
I felt like I was being crushed. I couldn’t think anymore.
She moved toward me. The weed that surrounded her head shifted. She had a face like the stuff you don’t want to eat in a sushi counter, all suckers and spines and drifting anemone fronds; and somewhere in all that I knew she was smiling.
I pushed with my hind legs. We met there, in the deep, and we struggled. It was so cold, so dark. I closed my jaws on her face and felt something rend and tear.
It was almost a kiss, down there in the abysmal deep . . .
I LANDED SOFTLY on the snow, a silk scarf locked between my jaws. The other scarves were fluttering to the ground. Madame Ezekiel was nowhere to be seen.
The silver knife lay on the ground in the snow. I waited on all fours in the moonlight, soaking wet. I shook myself, spraying the brine about. I heard it hiss and spit when it hit the fire.
I was dizzy and weak. I pulled the air deep into my lungs. Down, far below, in the bay, I could see the frog people hanging on the surface of the sea like dead things; for a handful of seconds, they drifted back and forth on the tide, then they twisted and leapt, and each by each they plop-plopped down into the bay and vanished beneath the sea.
There was a scream. It was the fox-haired bartender, the pop-eyed aluminum siding salesman, and he was staring at the night sky, at the clouds that were drifting in, covering the stars, and he was screaming. There was rage and there was frustration in that cry, and it scared me.
He picked up the knife from the ground, wiped the snow from the handle with his fingers, wiped the blood from the blade with his coat. Then he looked across at me. He was crying. “You bastard,” he said. “What did you do to her?”
I would have told him I didn’t do anything to her, that she was still on guard far beneath the ocean, but I couldn’t talk anymore, only growl and whine and howl.
He was crying. He stank of insanity and of disappointment. He raised the knife and ran at me, and I moved to one side.
Some people just can’t adjust even to tiny changes. The barman stumbled past me, off the cliff, into nothing.
In the moonlight blood is black, not red, and the marks he left on the cliff side as he fell and bounced and fell were smudges of black and dark gray. Then, finally, he lay still on the icy rocks at the base of the cliff until an arm reached out from the sea and dragged him, with a slowness that was almost painful to watch, under the dark water.
A hand scratched the back of my head. It felt good.
“What was she? Just an avatar of the Deep Ones, sir. An eidolon, a manifestation, if you will, sent up to us from the uttermost deeps to bring about the end of the world.”
I bristled.
“No, it’s over—for now. You disrupted her, sir. And the ritual is most specific. Three of us must stand together and call the sacred names while innocent blood pools and pulses at our feet.”
I looked up at the fat man and whined a query. He patted me on the back of the neck sleepily.
“Of course she doesn’t love you, boy. She hardly even exists on this plane in any material sense.”
The snow began to fall once more. The bonfire was going out.
“Your change tonight, incidentally, I would opine, is a direct result of the selfsame celestial configurations and lunar forces that made tonight such a perfect night to bring back my old friends from Underneath . . .”
He continued talking in his deep voice, and perhaps he was telling me important things. I’ll never know, for the appetite was growing inside me, and his words had lost all but the shadow of any meaning; I had no further interest in the sea or the cliff-top or the fat man.
There were deer running in the woods beyond the meadow: I could smell them on the winter’s night’s air.
And I was, above all things, hungry.
I WAS NAKED when I came to myself again, early the next morning, a half-eaten deer next to me in the snow. A fly crawled across its eye, and its tongue lolled out of its dead mouth, making it look comical and pathetic, like an animal in a newspaper cartoon.
The snow was stained a fluorescent crimson where the deer’s belly had been torn out.
My face and chest were sticky and red with the stuff. My throat was scabbed and scarred, and it stung; by the next full moon, it would be whole once more.
The sun was a long way away, small and yellow, but the sky was blue and cloudless, and there was no breeze. I could hear the roar of the sea some distance away.
I was cold and naked and bloody and alone. Ah well, I thought, it happens to all of us in the beginning. I just get it once a month.
I was painfully exhausted, but I would hold out until I found a deserted barn or a cave; and then I was going to sleep for a couple of weeks.
A hawk flew low over the snow toward me with something dangling from its talons. It hovered above me for a heartbeat, then dropped a small gray squid in the snow at my feet and flew upward. The flaccid thing lay there, still and silent and tentacled in the bloody snow.
I took it as an omen, but whether good or bad I couldn’t say and I didn’t really care anymore; I turned my back to the sea, and on the shadowy town of Innsmouth, and began to make my way toward the city.
Don’t Ask Jack
1995
NOBODY KNEW WHERE the toy had come from, which great-grandparent or distant aunt had owned it before it was given to the nursery.
It was a box, carved and painted in gold and red. It was undoubtedly attractive and, or so the grown-ups maintained, quite valuable—perhaps even an antique. The latch, unfortunately, was rusted shut, and the key had been lost, so the Jack could not be released from his box. Still, it was a remarkable box, heavy and carved and gilt.
The children did not play with it. It sat at the bottom of the old wooden toy box, which was the same size and age as a pirate’s treasure chest, or so the children thought. The Jack-in-the-Box was buried beneath dolls and trains, clowns and paper stars and old conjuring tricks, and crippled marionettes with their strings irrevocably tangled, with dressing-up clothes (here the tatters of a long-ago wedding dress, there a black silk hat, crusted with age and time) and costume jewelry, broken hoops and tops and hobbyhorses. Under them all was Jack’s box.
The children did not play with it. They whispered among themselves, alone in the attic nursery. On gray days when the wind howled about the house and rain rattled the slates and pattered down the eaves, they told each other stories about Jack, although they had never seen him. One claimed that Jack was an evil wizard, placed in the box as punishment for crimes too awful to describe; another (I am certain that it must have been one of the girls) maintained that Jack’s box was Pandora’s Box and he had been placed in the box as guardian to prevent the bad things inside it from coming out once more. They would not even touch the box, if they could help it, although when, as happened from time to time, an adult would comment on the absence of that sweet old Jack-in-the-Box, and retrieve it from the chest, and place it in a position of honor on the mantelpiece, then the children would pluck up their courage and, later, hide it away once more in the dar
kness.
The children did not play with the Jack-in-the-Box. And when they grew up and left the great house, the attic nursery was closed up and almost forgotten.
Almost, but not entirely. For each of the children, separately, remembered walking alone in the moon’s blue light, on his or her own bare feet, up to the nursery. It was almost like sleepwalking, feet soundless on the wood of the stairs, on the threadbare nursery carpet. Remembered opening the treasure chest, pawing through the dolls and the clothes and pulling out the box.
And then the child would touch the catch, and the lid would open, slow as a sunset, and the music would begin to play, and Jack came out. Not with a pop and a bounce: he was no spring-heeled Jack. But deliberately, intently, he would rise from the box and motion to the child to come closer, closer, and smile.
And there in the moonlight, he told them each things they could never quite remember, things they were never able entirely to forget.
The oldest boy died in the Great War. The youngest, after their parents died, inherited the house, although it was taken from him when he was found in the cellar one night with cloths and paraffin and matches, trying to burn the great house to the ground. They took him to the madhouse, and perhaps he is there still.
The other children, who had once been girls and now were women, declined, each and every one, to return to the house in which they had grown up; and the windows of the house were boarded up, and the doors were all locked with huge iron keys, and the sisters visited it as often as they visited their eldest brother’s grave, or the sad thing that had once been their younger brother, which is to say, never.
Years have passed, and the girls are old women, and owls and bats have made their homes in the old attic nursery, rats build their nests among the forgotten toys. The creatures gaze uncuriously at the faded prints on the wall, and stain the remnants of the carpet with their droppings.
And deep within the box within the box, Jack waits and smiles, holding his secrets. He is waiting for the children. He can wait forever.
Excerpt from Neverwhere
1996