The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  “If you have read the compact,” said a deep voice from beyond the door, “then you know what we need, Hubert Earnshawe’s daughter.”

  “Brides,” she said, simply.

  “The brides!” came the whisper from beyond the door, and it redoubled and resounded until it seemed to her that the very house itself throbbed and echoed to the beat of those words—two syllables invested with longing, and with love, and with hunger.

  Amelia bit her lip. “Aye. The brides. I will bring thee brides. I shall bring brides for all.”

  She spoke quietly, but they heard her, for there was only silence, a deep and velvet silence, on the other side of the door.

  And then one ghoul voice hissed, “Yes, and do you think we could get her to throw in a side order of those little bread roll things?”

  VII.

  HOT TEARS STUNG THE young man’s eyes. He pushed the papers from him and flung the quill pen across the room. It spattered its inky load over the bust of his great-great-great-grandfather, the brown ink soiling the patient white marble. The occupant of the bust, a large and mournful raven, startled, nearly fell off, and only kept its place by dint of flapping its wings several times. It turned, then, in an awkward step and hop, to stare with one black bead eye at the young man.

  “Oh, this is intolerable!” exclaimed the young man. He was pale and trembling. “I cannot do it, and I shall never do it. I swear now, by . . .” and he hesitated, casting his mind around for a suitable curse from the extensive family archives.

  The raven looked unimpressed. “Before you start cursing, and probably dragging peacefully dead and respectable ancestors back from their well-earned graves, just answer me one question.” The voice of the bird was like stone striking against stone.

  The young man said nothing, at first. It is not unknown for ravens to talk, but this one had not done so before, and he had not been expecting it to. “Certainly. Ask your question.”

  The raven tipped its head to one side. “Do you like writing that stuff?”

  “Like?”

  “That life-as-it-is stuff you do. I’ve looked over your shoulder sometimes. I’ve even read a little here and there. Do you enjoy writing it?”

  The young man looked down at the bird. “It’s literature,” he explained, as if to a child. “Real literature. Real life. The real world. It’s an artist’s job to show people the world they live in. We hold up mirrors.”

  Outside the room lightning clove the sky. The young man glanced out of the window: a jagged streak of blinding fire created warped and ominous silhouettes from the bony trees and the ruined abbey on the hill.

  The raven cleared its throat. “I said, do you enjoy it?”

  The young man looked at the bird, then he looked away and, wordlessly, he shook his head.

  “That’s why you keep trying to pull it apart,” said the bird. “It’s not the satirist in you that makes you lampoon the commonplace and the humdrum. Merely boredom with the way things are. D’you see?” It paused to preen a stray wing-feather back into place with its beak. Then it looked up at him once more. “Have you ever thought of writing fantasy?” it asked.

  The young man laughed. “Fantasy? Listen, I write literature. Fantasy isn’t life. Esoteric dreams, written by a minority for a minority, it’s—”

  “What you’d be writing if you knew what was good for you.”

  “I’m a classicist,” said the young man. He reached out his hand to a shelf of the classics—Udolpho, The Castle of Otranto, The Saragossa Manuscript, The Monk, and the rest of them. “It’s literature.”

  “Nevermore,” said the raven. It was the last word the young man ever heard it speak. It hopped from the bust, spread its wings, and glided out of the study door into the waiting darkness.

  The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers . . .

  “It is escapism, true,” he said, aloud. “But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?” The young man returned to his desk, and he gathered together the pages of his unfinished novel and dropped them, unceremoniously, in the bottom drawer, amongst the yellowing maps and cryptic testaments and the documents signed in blood. The dust, disturbed, made him cough.

  He took up a fresh quill; sliced at its tip with his pen-knife. In five deft strokes and cuts he had a pen. He dipped the tip of it into the glass inkwell. Once more he began to write:

  VIII.

  AMELIA EARNSHAWE PLACED THE slices of whole-wheat bread into the toaster and pushed it down. She set the timer to dark brown, just as George liked it. Amelia preferred her toast barely singed. She liked white bread as well, even if it didn’t have the vitamins. She hadn’t eaten white bread for a decade now.

  At the breakfast table, George read his paper. He did not look up. He never looked up.

  I hate him, she thought, and simply putting the emotion into words surprised her. She said it again in her head. I hate him. It was like a song. I hate him for his toast, and for his bald head, and for the way he chases the office crumpet—girls barely out of school who laugh at him behind his back, and for the way he ignores me whenever he doesn’t want to be bothered with me, and for the way he says “What, love?” when I ask him a simple question, as if he’s long ago forgotten my name. As if he’s forgotten that I even have a name.

  “Scrambled or boiled?” she said aloud.

  “What, love?”

  George Earnshawe regarded his wife with fond affection, and would have found her hatred of him astonishing. He thought of her in the same way, and with the same emotions, that he thought of anything which had been in the house for ten years and still worked well. The television, for example. Or the lawnmower. He thought it was love. “You know, we ought to go on one of those marches,” he said, tapping the newspaper’s editorial. “Show we’re committed. Eh, love?”

  The toaster made a noise to show that it was done. Only one dark brown slice had popped up. She took a knife and fished out the torn second slice with it. The toaster had been a wedding present from her uncle John. Soon she’d have to buy another, or start cooking toast under the grill, the way her mother had done.

  “George? Do you want your eggs scrambled or boiled?” she asked, very quietly, and there was something in her voice that made him look up.

  “Any way you like it, love,” he said amiably, and could not for the life of him, as he told everyone in the office later that morning, understand why she simply stood there holding her slice of toast or why she started to cry.

  IX.

  THE QUILL PEN WENT scritch scritch across the paper, and the young man was engrossed in what he was doing. His face was strangely content, and a smile flickered between his eyes and his lips.

  He was rapt.

  Things scratched and scuttled in the wainscot but he hardly heard them.

  High in her attic room Aunt Agatha howled and yowled and rattled her chains. A weird cachinnation came from the ruined abbey: it rent the night air, ascending into a peal of manic glee. In the dark woods beyond the great house, shapeless figures shuffled and loped, and raven-locked young women fled from them in fear.

  “Swear!” said Toombes the butler, down in the butler’s pantry, to the brave girl who was passing herself off as chambermaid. “Swear to me, Ethel, on your life, that you’ll never reveal a word of what I tell you to a living soul . . .”

  There were faces at the windows and words written in blood; deep in the crypt a lonely ghoul crunched on something that might once have been alive; forked lightnings slashed the ebony night; the faceless were walking; all was right with the world.

  The Monarch of the Glen

  2004

  She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is
very frightening.

  ANGELA CARTER,

  “THE LADY OF THE HOUSE OF LOVE”

  I.

  “IF YOU ASK ME,” said the little man to Shadow, “you’re something of a monster. Am I right?”

  They were the only two people, apart from the barmaid, in the bar of a hotel in a town on the north coast of Scotland. Shadow had been sitting there on his own, drinking a lager, when the man came over and sat at his table. It was late summer, and it seemed to Shadow that everything was cold and small and damp. He had a small book of Pleasant Local Walks in front of him, and was studying the walk he planned to do tomorrow, along the coast, toward Cape Wrath.

  He closed the book.

  “I’m American,” said Shadow, “if that’s what you mean.”

  The little man cocked his head to one side, and he winked, theatrically. He had steel-gray hair, and a gray face, and a gray coat, and he looked like a small-town lawyer. “Well, perhaps that is what I mean, at that,” he said. Shadow had had problems understanding Scottish accents in his short time in the country, all rich burrs and strange words and trills, but he had no trouble understanding this man. Everything the little man said was small and crisp, each word so perfectly enunciated that it made Shadow feel like he himself was talking with a mouthful of oatmeal.

  The little man sipped his drink and said, “So you’re American. Oversexed, overpaid, and over here. Eh? D’you work on the rigs?”

  “Sorry?”

  “An oilman? Out on the big metal platforms. We get oil people up here, from time to time.”

  “No. I’m not from the rigs.”

  The little man took out a pipe from his pocket, and a small penknife, and began to remove the dottle from the bowl. Then he tapped it out into the ashtray. “They have oil in Texas, you know,” he said, after a while, as if he were confiding a great secret. “That’s in America.”

  “Yes,” said Shadow.

  He thought about saying something about Texans believing that Texas was actually in Texas, but he suspected that he’d have to start explaining what he meant, so he said nothing.

  Shadow had been away from America for the better part of two years. He had been away when the towers fell. He told himself sometimes that he did not care if he ever went back, and sometimes he almost came close to believing himself. He had reached the Scottish mainland two days ago, landed in Thurso on the ferry from Orkney, and had traveled to the town he was staying in by bus.

  The little man was talking. “So there’s a Texas oilman, down in Aberdeen, he’s talking to an old fellow he meets in a pub, much like you and me meeting actually, and they get talking, and the Texan, he says, Back in Texas I get up in the morning, I get into my car—I won’t try to do the accent, if you don’t mind—I’ll turn the key in the ignition, and put my foot down on the accelerator, what you call the, the—”

  “Gas pedal,” said Shadow, helpfully.

  “Right. Put my foot down on the gas pedal at breakfast, and by lunchtime I still won’t have reached the edge of my property. And the canny old Scot, he just nods and says, Aye, well, I used to have a car like that myself.”

  The little man laughed raucously, to show that the joke was done. Shadow smiled and nodded to show that he knew it was a joke.

  “What are you drinking? Lager? Same again over here, Jennie love. Mine’s a Lagavulin.” The little man tamped tobacco from a pouch into his pipe. “Did you know that Scotland’s bigger than America?”

  There had been no one in the hotel bar when Shadow came downstairs that evening, just the thin barmaid reading a newspaper and smoking her cigarette. He’d come down to sit by the open fire, as his bedroom was cold, and the metal radiators on the bedroom wall were colder than the room. He hadn’t expected company.

  “No,” said Shadow, always willing to play straight man. “I didn’t. How’d you reckon that?”

  “It’s all fractal,” said the little man. “The smaller you look, the more things unpack. It could take you as long to drive across America as it would to drive across Scotland, if you did it the right way. It’s like, you look on a map, and the coastlines are solid lines. But when you walk them, they’re all over the place. I saw a whole program on it on the telly the other night. Great stuff.”

  “Okay,” said Shadow.

  The little man’s pipe lighter flamed, and he sucked and puffed and sucked and puffed until he was satisfied that the pipe was burning well, then he put the lighter, the pouch, and the penknife back into his coat pocket.

  “Anyway, anyway,” said the little man. “I believe you’re planning on staying here through the weekend.”

  “Yes,” said Shadow. “Do you . . . are you with the hotel?”

  “No, no. Truth to tell, I was standing in the hall when you arrived. I heard you talking to Gordon on the reception desk.”

  Shadow nodded. He had thought that he had been alone in the reception hall when he had registered, but it was possible that the little man had passed through. But still . . . there was a wrongness to this conversation. There was a wrongness to everything.

  Jennie the barmaid put their drinks onto the bar. “Five pounds twenty,” she said. She picked up her newspaper, and started to read once more. The little man went to the bar, paid, and brought back the drinks.

  “So how long are you in Scotland?” asked the little man.

  Shadow shrugged. “I wanted to see what it was like. Take some walks. See the sights. Maybe a week. Maybe a month.”

  Jennie put down her newspaper. “It’s the arse-end of nowhere up here,” she said, cheerfully. “You should go somewhere interesting.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” said the little man. “It’s only the arse-end of nowhere if you look at it wrong. See that map, laddie?” He pointed to a fly-specked map of Northern Scotland on the opposite wall of the bar. “You know what’s wrong with it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s upside down!” the man said, triumphantly. “North’s at the top. It’s saying to the world that this is where things stop. Go no further. The world ends here. But you see, that’s not how it was. This wasn’t the north of Scotland. This was the southernmost tip of the Viking world. You know what the second most northern county in Scotland is called?”

  Shadow glanced at the map, but it was too far away to read. He shook his head.

  “Sutherland!” said the little man. He showed his teeth. “The South Land. Not to anyone else in the world it wasn’t, but it was to the Vikings.”

  Jennie the barmaid walked over to them. “I won’t be gone long,” she said. “Call the front desk if you need anything before I get back.” She put a log on the fire, then she went out into the hall.

  “Are you a historian?” Shadow asked.

  “Good one,” said the little man. “You may be a monster, but you’re funny. I’ll give you that.”

  “I’m not a monster,” said Shadow.

  “Aye, that’s what monsters always say,” said the little man. “I was a specialist once. In St. Andrews. Now I’m in general practice. Well, I was. I’m semiretired. Go in to the surgery a couple of days a week, just to keep my hand in.”

  “Why do you say I’m a monster?” asked Shadow.

  “Because,” said the little man, lifting his whisky glass with the air of one making an irrefutable point, “I am something of a monster myself. Like calls to like. We are all monsters, are we not? Glorious monsters, shambling through the swamps of unreason. “ He sipped his whisky, then said, “Tell me, a big man like you, have you ever been a bouncer? ‘Sorry mate, I’m afraid you can’t come in here tonight, private function going on, sling your hook and get on out of it,’ all that?”

  “No,” said Shadow.

  “But you must have done something like that?”

  “Yes,” said Shadow, who had been a bodyguard once, to an old god; but that was in another country.

  “You, uh, you’ll pardon me for asking, don’t take this the wrong way, but do you need money?”

&nb
sp; “Everyone needs money. But I’m okay.” This was not entirely true; but it was a truth that, when Shadow needed money, the world seemed to go out of its way to provide it.

  “Would you like to make a wee bit of spending money? Being a bouncer? It’s a piece of piss. Money for old rope.”

  “At a disco?”

  “Not exactly. A private party. They rent a big old house near here, come in from all over at the end of the summer. So last year, everybody’s having a grand old time, champagne out of doors, all that, and there was some trouble. A bad lot. Out to ruin everybody’s weekend.”

  “These were locals?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Was it political?” asked Shadow. He did not want to be drawn into local politics.

  “Not a bit of it. Yobs and hairies and idiots. Anyway. They probably won’t come back this year. Probably off in the wilds of nowhere demonstrating against international capitalism. But just to be on the safe side, the folk up at the house’ve asked me to look out for someone who could do a spot of intimidating. You’re a big lad, and that’s what they want.”

  “How much?” asked Shadow.

  “Can you handle yourself in a fight, if it came down to it?” asked the man.

  Shadow didn’t say anything. The little man looked him up and down, and then he grinned again, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Fifteen hundred pounds, for a long weekend’s work. That’s good money. And it’s cash. Nothing you’d ever need to report to the tax man.”

  “This weekend coming?” said Shadow.

  “Starting Friday morning. It’s a big old house. Part of it used to be a castle. West of Cape Wrath.”

  “I don’t know,” said Shadow.

  “If you do it,” said the little gray man, “you’ll get a fantastic weekend in a historical house, and I can guarantee you’ll get to meet all kinds of interesting people. Perfect holiday job. I just wish I was younger. And, uh, a great deal taller, actually.”