by Neil Gaiman
Behind him, the unicorn screamed in pain.
Tristran ripped a lace from his jerkin and closed the wax around it.
“What is happening?” asked the star, who had crawled toward Tristran on her hands and knees.
“I don’t really know,” he admitted.
The witch-woman howled, then; the unicorn had speared her with its horn, through the shoulder. It lifted her off the ground, triumphantly, preparing to hurl her to the ground and then to dash her to death beneath its sharp hooves, when, impaled as she was, the witch-woman swung around and thrust the point of the longer of the rock-glass knives into the unicorn’s eye and far into its skull.
The beast dropped to the wooden floor of the inn, blood dripping from its side and from its eye and from its open mouth. First it fell to its knees, and then it collapsed, utterly, as the life fled. Its tongue was piebald, and it protruded most pathetically from the unicorn’s dead mouth.
The witch-queen pulled her body from the horn, and, one hand gripping her wounded shoulder, the other holding her cleaver, she staggered to her feet.
Her eyes scanned the room, alighting on Tristran and the star huddled by the fire. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, she lurched toward them, a cleaver in her hand and a smile upon her face.
“The burning golden heart of a star at peace is so much finer than the flickering heart of a little frightened star,” she told them, her voice oddly calm and detached, coming, as it was, from that blood-bespattered face. “But even the heart of a star who is afraid and scared is better by far than no heart at all.”
Tristran took the star’s hand in his right hand. “Stand up,” he told her.
“I cannot,” she said, simply.
“Stand, or we die now,” he told her, getting to his feet. The star nodded, and, awkwardly, resting her weight on him, she began to try to pull herself to her feet.
“Stand, or you die now?” echoed the witch-queen. “Oh, you die now, children, standing or sitting. It is all the same to me.” She took another step toward them.
“Now,” said Tristran, one hand gripping the star’s arm, the other holding his makeshift candle, “now, walk!”
And he thrust his left hand into the fire.
There was pain, and burning, such that he could have screamed, and the witch-queen stared at him as if he were madness personified.
Then his improvised wick caught and burned with a steady blue flame, and the world began to shimmer around them. “Please walk,” he begged the star. “Don’t let go of me.”
And she took an awkward step.
They left the inn behind them, the howls of the witch-queen ringing in their ears.
They were underground, and the candlelight flickered from the wet cave walls; and with their next halting step they were in a desert of white sand, in the moonlight; and with their third step they were high above the earth, looking down on the hills and trees and rivers far below them.
And it was then that the last of the wax ran molten over Tristran’s hand, and the burning became impossible for him to bear, and the last of the flame burned out forever.
Harlequin Valentine
1999
IT IS FEBRUARY the fourteenth, at that hour of the morning when all the children have been taken to school and all the husbands have driven themselves to work or been dropped, steambreathing and greatcoated, at the rail station at the edge of the town for the Great Commute, when I pin my heart to Missy’s front door. The heart is a deep dark red that is almost a brown, the color of liver. Then I knock on the door, sharply, rat-a-tat-tat!, and I grasp my wand, my stick, my oh-so-thrustable and beribboned lance and I vanish like cooling steam into the chilly air. . . .
Missy opens the door. She looks tired.
“My Columbine,” I breathe, but she hears not a word. She turns her head, so she takes in the view from one side of the street to the other, but nothing moves. A truck rumbles in the distance. She walks back into the kitchen, and I dance, silent as a breeze, as a mouse, as a dream, into the kitchen beside her.
Missy takes a plastic sandwich bag from a paper box in the kitchen drawer, and a bottle of cleaning spray from under the sink. She pulls off two sections of paper towel from the roll on the kitchen counter. Then she walks back to the front door. She pulls the pin from the painted wood—it was my hatpin, which I had stumbled across where? I turn the matter over in my head: in Gascony, perhaps? or Twickenham? or Prague?
The face on the end of the hatpin is that of a pale Pierrot.
She removes the pin from the heart, and puts the heart into the plastic sandwich bag. She wipes the blood from the door with a squirt of cleaning spray and a rub of paper towel, and she inserts the pin into her lapel, where the little white-faced August stares out at the cold world with his blind silver eyes and his grave silver lips. Naples. Now it comes back to me. I purchased the hatpin in Naples, from an old woman with one eye. She smoked a clay pipe. This was a long time ago.
Missy puts the cleaning utensils down on the kitchen table, then she thrusts her arms through the sleeves of her old blue coat, which was once her mother’s, does up the buttons, one, two, three, then she places the sandwich bag with the heart in it determinedly into her pocket and sets off down the street.
Secret, secret, quiet as a mouse I follow her, sometimes creeping, sometimes dancing, and she never sees me, not for a moment, just pulls her blue coat more tightly around her, and she walks through the little Kentucky town, and down the old road that leads past the cemetery.
The wind tugs at my hat, and I regret, for a moment, the loss of my hatpin. But I am in love, and this is Valentine’s Day. Sacrifices must be made.
Missy is remembering in her head the other times she has walked into the cemetery, through the tall iron cemetery gates: when her father died; and when they came here as kids at All Hallows’, the whole school mob and caboodle of them, partying and scaring each other; and when a secret lover was killed in a three-car pileup on the interstate, and she waited until the end of the funeral, when the day was all over and done with, and she came in the evening, just before sunset, and laid a white lily on the fresh grave.
Oh Missy, shall I sing the body and the blood of you, the lips and the eyes? A thousand hearts I would give you, as your valentine.
Proudly I wave my staff in the air and dance, singing silently of the gloriousness of me, as we skip together down Cemetery Road.
A low gray building, and Missy pushes open the door. She says Hi and How’s it going to the girl at the desk who makes no intelligible reply, fresh out of school and filling in a crossword from a periodical filled with nothing but crosswords, page after page of them, and the girl would be making private phone calls on company time if only she had somebody to call, which she doesn’t, and, I see, plain as elephants, she never will. Her face is a mass of blotchy acne pustules and acne scars and she thinks it matters, and talks to nobody. I see her life spread out before me: she will die, unmarried and unmolested, of breast cancer in fifteen years’ time, and will be planted under a stone with her name on it in the meadow by Cemetery Road, and the first hands to have touched her breasts will have been those of the pathologist as he cuts out the cauliflowerlike stinking growth and mutters “Jesus, look at the size of this thing, why didn’t she tell anyone?” which rather misses the point.
Gently, I kiss her on her spotty cheek, and whisper to her that she is beautiful. Then I tap her once, twice, thrice, on the head with my staff and wrap her with a ribbon.
She stirs and smiles. Perhaps tonight she will get drunk and dance and offer up her virginity upon Hymen’s altar, meet a young man who cares more for her breasts than for her face, and will one day, stroking those breasts and suckling and rubbing them say “Honey, you seen anybody about that lump?” and by then her spots will be long gone, rubbed and kissed and frottaged into oblivion. . . .
But now I have mislaid Missy, and I run and caper down a dun-carpeted corridor until I see that blue coat pushing into a room at the end of th
e hallway and I follow her into an unheated room tiled in bathroom green.
The stench is unbelievable, heavy and rancid and wretched on the air. The fat man in the stained lab coat wears disposable rubber gloves and has a thick layer of mentholatum on his upper lip and about his nostrils. A dead man is on the table in front of him. The man is a thin, old black man with callused fingertips. He has a thin mustache. The fat man has not noticed Missy yet. He has made an incision, and now he peels back the skin with a wet, sucking sound, and how dark the brown of it is on the outside, and how pink, pretty the pink of it is on the inside.
Classical music plays from a portable radio, very loudly. Missy turns the radio off, then she says, “Hello, Vernon.”
The fat man says, “Hello Missy. You come for your old job back?”
This is the Doctor, I decide, for he is too big, too round, too magnificently well-fed to be Pierrot, too unselfconscious to be Pantaloon. His face creases with delight to see Missy, and she smiles to see him, and I am jealous: I feel a stab of pain shoot through my heart (currently in a plastic sandwich bag in Missy’s coat pocket) sharper than I felt when I stabbed it with my hatpin and stuck it to her door.
And speaking of my heart, she has pulled it from her pocket, and is waving it at the pathologist, Vernon. “Do you know what this is?” she says.
“Heart,” he says. “Kidneys don’t have the ventricles, and brains are bigger and squishier. Where’d you get it?”
“I was hoping that you could tell me,” she says. “Doesn’t it come from here? Is it your idea of a Valentine’s card, Vernon? A human heart stuck to my front door?”
He shakes his head. “Don’t come from here,” he says. “You want I should call the police?”
She shakes her head. “With my luck,” she says, “they’ll decide I’m a serial killer and send me to the chair.”
The Doctor opens the sandwich bag and prods at the heart with stubby fingers in latex gloves. “Adult, in pretty good shape, took care of his heart,” he said. “Cut out by an expert.”
I smile proudly at this, and bend down to talk to the dead black man on the table, with his chest all open and his callused string-bass-picking fingers. “Go ’way Harlequin,” he mutters, quietly, not to offend Missy and his doctor. “Don’t you go causing trouble here.”
“Hush yourself. I will cause trouble wherever I wish,” I tell him. “It is my function.” But, for a moment, I feel a void about me: I am wistful, almost Pierrotish, which is a poor thing for a harlequin to be.
Oh Missy, I saw you yesterday in the street, and followed you into Al’s Super-Valu Foods and More, elation and joy rising within me. In you, I recognized someone who could transport me, take me from myself. In you I recognized my Valentine, my Columbine.
I did not sleep last night, and instead I turned the town topsy and turvy, befuddling the unfuddled. I caused three sober bankers to make fools of themselves with drag queens from Madame Zora’s Revue and Bar. I slid into the bedrooms of the sleeping, unseen and unimagined, slipping the evidence of mysterious and exotic trysts into pockets and under pillows and into crevices, able only to imagine the fun that would ignite the following day as soiled split-crotch fantasy panties would be found poorly hidden under sofa cushions and in the inner pockets of respectable suits. But my heart was not in it, and the only face I could see was Missy’s.
Oh, Harlequin in love is a sorry creature.
I wonder what she will do with my gift. Some girls spurn my heart; others touch it, kiss it, caress it, punish it with all manner of endearments before they return it to my keeping. Some never even see it.
Missy takes the heart back, puts it in the sandwich bag again, pushes the snap-shut top of it closed.
“Shall I incinerate it?” she asks.
“Might as well. You know where the incinerator is,” says the Doctor, returning to the dead musician on the table. “And I meant what I said about your old job. I need a good lab assistant.”
I imagine my heart trickling up to the sky as ashes and smoke, covering the world. I do not know what I think of this, but, her jaw set, she shakes her head and she bids good-bye to Vernon the pathologist. She has thrust my heart into her pocket and she is walking out of the building and up Cemetery Road and back into town.
I caper ahead of her. Interaction would be a fine thing, I decide, and fitting word to deed I disguise myself as a bent old woman on her way to the market, covering the red spangles of my costume with a tattered cloak, hiding my masked face with a voluminous hood, and at the top of Cemetery Road I step out and block her way.
Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous me, and I say to her, in the voice of the oldest of women, “Spare a copper coin for a bent old woman dearie and I’ll tell you a fortune will make your eyes spin with joy,” and Missy stops. She opens her purse and takes out a dollar bill.
“Here,” says Missy.
And I have it in my head to tell her all about the mysterious man she will meet, all dressed in red and yellow, with his domino mask, who will thrill her and love her and never, never leave her (for it is not a good thing to tell your Columbine the entire truth), but instead I find myself saying, in a cracked old voice, “Have you ever heard of Harlequin?”
Missy looks thoughtful. Then she nods. “Yes,” she says. “Character in the commedia dell’arte. Costume covered in little diamond shapes. Wore a mask. I think he was a clown of some sort, wasn’t he?”
I shake my head, beneath my hood. “No clown,” I tell her. “He was . . .”
And I find that I am about to tell her the truth, so I choke back the words and pretend that I am having the kind of coughing attack to which elderly women are particularly susceptible. I wonder if this could be the power of love. I do not remember it troubling me with other women I thought I had loved, other Columbines I have encountered over centuries now long gone.
I squint through old-woman eyes at Missy: she is in her early twenties, and she has lips like a mermaid’s, full and well-defined and certain, and gray eyes, and a certain intensity to her gaze.
“Are you all right?” she asks.
I cough and splutter and cough some more, and gasp, “Fine, my dearie-duck, I’m just fine, thank you kindly.”
“So,” she said, “I thought you were going to tell me my fortune.”
“Harlequin has given you his heart,” I hear myself saying. “You must discover its beat yourself.”
She stares at me, puzzled. I cannot change or vanish while her eyes are upon me, and I feel frozen, angry at my trickster tongue for betraying me. “Look,” I tell her, “a rabbit!” and she turns, follows my pointing finger and as she takes her eyes off me I disappear, pop!, like a rabbit down a hole, and when she looks back there’s not a trace of the old fortune-teller lady, which is to say me.
Missy walks on, and I caper after her, but there is no longer the spring in my step there was earlier in the morning.
Midday, and Missy has walked to Al’s Super-Valu Foods and More, where she buys a small block of cheese, a carton of unconcentrated orange juice, two avocados, and on to the County One Bank where she withdraws two hundred and seventy-nine dollars and twenty-two cents, which is the total amount of money in her savings account, and I creep after her sweet as sugar and quiet as the grave.
“Morning Missy,” says the owner of the Salt Shaker Café, when Missy enters. He has a trim beard, more pepper than salt, and my heart would have skipped a beat if it were not in the sandwich bag in Missy’s pocket, for this man obviously lusts after her and my confidence, which is legendary, droops and wilts. I am Harlequin, I tell myself, in my diamond-covered garments, and the world is my harlequinade. I am Harlequin, who rose from the dead to play his pranks upon the living. I am Harlequin, in my mask, with my wand. I whistle to myself, and my confidence rises, hard and full once more.
“Hey, Harve,” says Missy. “Give me a plate of hash browns and a bottle of ketchup.”
“That all?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says. “Th
at’ll be perfect. And a glass of water.”
I tell myself that the man Harve is Pantaloon, the foolish merchant that I must bamboozle, baffle, confusticate, and confuse. Perhaps there is a string of sausages in the kitchen. I resolve to bring delightful disarray to the world, and to bed luscious Missy before midnight: my Valentine’s present to myself. I imagine myself kissing her lips.
There is a handful of other diners. I amuse myself by swapping their plates while they are not looking, but I have difficulty finding the fun in it. The waitress is thin, and her hair hangs in sad ringlets about her face. She ignores Missy, whom she obviously considers entirely Harve’s preserve.
Missy sits at the table and pulls the sandwich bag from her pocket. She places it on the table in front of her.
Harve-the-Pantaloon struts over to Missy’s table, gives her a glass of water, a plate of hash-browned potatoes, and a bottle of Heinz 57 Varieties Tomato Ketchup. “And a steak knife,” she tells him.
I trip him up on the way back to the kitchen. He curses, and I feel better, more like the former me, and I goose the waitress as she passes the table of an old man who is reading USA Today while toying with his salad. She gives the old man a filthy look. I chuckle, and then I find I am feeling most peculiar. I sit down upon the floor, suddenly.
“What’s that, honey?” the waitress asks Missy.
“Health food, Charlene,” says Missy. “Builds up iron.” I peep over the tabletop. She is cutting up small slices of liver-colored meat on her plate, liberally doused in tomato sauce, and piling her fork high with hash browns. Then she chews.
I watch my heart disappearing into her rosebud mouth. My Valentine’s jest somehow seems less funny.
“You anemic?” asks the waitress, on her way past once more, with a pot of steaming coffee.
“Not anymore,” says Missy, popping another scrap of raw gristle cut small into her mouth, and chewing it, hard, before swallowing.
And as she finishes eating my heart, Missy looks down and sees me sprawled upon the floor. She nods. “Outside,” she says. “Now.” Then she gets up and leaves ten dollars beside her plate.