The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  “And the money?” asked Shadow.

  “They’ll sort that out. Half at the beginning, half at the end. Anything else you want to know?”

  The waitress stood at the edge of the room, watching them, making no move to approach. “Yeah. What do I have to do to get some food around here?”

  “What do you want? I recommend the lamb chops. The lamb’s local.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Gaskell said loudly, “Excuse me, Maura. Sorry to trouble you, but could we both have the lamb chops?”

  She pursed her lips, and went back to the kitchen.

  “Thanks,” said Shadow.

  “Don’t mention it. Anything else I can help you with?”

  “Yeah. These folk coming in for the party. Why don’t they hire their own security? Why hire me?”

  “They’ll be doing that too, I have no doubt,” said Gaskell. “Bringing in their own people. But it’s good to have local talent.”

  “Even if the local talent is a foreign tourist?”

  “Just so.”

  Maura brought two bowls of soup, put them down in front of Shadow and the doctor. “They come with the meal,” she said. The soup was too hot, and it tasted faintly of reconstituted tomatoes and vinegar. Shadow was hungry enough that he’d finished most of the bowl off before he realized that he did not like it.

  “You said I was a monster,” said Shadow to the steel-gray man.

  “I did?”

  “You did.”

  “Well, there’s a lot of monsters in this part of the world.” He tipped his head toward the couple in the corner. The little woman had picked up her napkin, dipped it into her water glass, and was dabbing vigorously with it at the spots of crimson soup on her son’s mouth and chin. He looked embarrassed. “It’s remote. We don’t get into the news unless a hiker or a climber gets lost, or starves to death. Most people forget we’re here.”

  The lamb chops arrived, on a plate with overboiled potatoes, underboiled carrots, and something brown and wet that Shadow thought might have started life as spinach. He started to cut at the chops with his knife. The doctor picked his up in his fingers, and began to chew.

  “You’ve been inside,” said the doctor.

  “Inside?”

  “Prison. You’ve been in prison.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes.”

  “So you know how to fight. You could hurt someone, if you had to.”

  Shadow said, “If you need someone to hurt people, I’m probably not the guy you’re looking for.”

  The little man grinned, with greasy gray lips. “I’m sure you are. I was just asking. You can’t give a man a hard time for asking. Anyway. He’s a monster,” he said, gesturing across the room with a mostly chewed lamb chop. The bald man was eating some kind of white pudding with a spoon. “So’s his mother.”

  “They don’t look like monsters to me,” said Shadow.

  “I’m teasing you, I’m afraid. Local sense of humor. They should warn you about mine when you enter the village. Warning, loony old doctor at work. Talking about monsters. Forgive an old man. You mustn’t listen to a word I say.” A flash of tobacco-stained teeth. He wiped his hands and mouth on his napkin. “Maura, we’ll be needing the bill over here. The young man’s dinner is on me.”

  “Yes, Doctor Gaskell.”

  “Remember,” said the doctor to Shadow. “Eight fifteen tomorrow morning, be in the lobby. No later. They’re busy people. If you aren’t there, they’ll just move on, and you’ll have missed out on fifteen hundred pounds, for a weekend’s work. A bonus, if they’re happy.”

  Shadow decided to have his after-dinner coffee in the bar. There was a log fire there, after all. He hoped it would take the chill from his bones.

  Gordon from reception was working behind the bar. “Jennie’s night off?” asked Shadow.

  “What? No, she was just helping out. She’ll do it if we’re busy, sometimes.”

  “Mind if I put another log on the fire?”

  “Help yourself.”

  If this is how the Scots treat their summers, thought Shadow, remembering something Oscar Wilde had once said, they don’t deserve to have any.

  The bald young man came in. He nodded a nervous greeting to Shadow. Shadow nodded back. The man had no hair that Shadow could see: no eyebrows, no eyelashes. It made him look babyish, and unformed. Shadow wondered if it was a disease, or if it was perhaps a side effect of chemotherapy. He smelled of damp.

  “I heard what he said,” stammered the bald man. “He said I was a monster. He said my ma was a monster too. I’ve got good ears on me. I don’t miss much.”

  He did have good ears on him. They were a translucent pink, and they stuck out from the sides of his head like the fins of some huge fish.

  “You’ve got great ears,” said Shadow.

  “You taking the mickey?” The bald man’s tone was aggrieved. He looked like he was ready to fight. He was only a little shorter than Shadow, and Shadow was a big man.

  “If that means what I think it does, not at all.”

  The bald man nodded. “That’s good,” he said. He swallowed, and hesitated. Shadow wondered if he should say something conciliatory, but the bald man continued, “It’s not my fault. Making all that noise. I mean, people come up here to get away from the noise. And the people. Too many damned people up here anyway. Why don’t you just go back to where you came from and stop making all that bluidy noise?”

  The man’s mother appeared in the doorway. She smiled nervously at Shadow, then walked hurriedly over to her son. She pulled at his sleeve. “Now then,” she said. “Don’t you get yourself all worked up over nothing. Everything’s all right.” She looked up at Shadow, birdlike, placatory. “I’m sorry. I’m sure he didn’t mean it.” She had a length of toilet paper sticking to the bottom of her shoe, and she hadn’t noticed yet.

  “Everything’s all right,” said Shadow. “It’s good to meet people.”

  She nodded. “That’s all right then,” she said. Her son looked relieved. He’s scared of her, thought Shadow.

  “Come on pet,” said the woman to her son. She pulled at his sleeve, and he followed her to the door.

  Then he stopped, obstinately, and turned. “You tell them,” said the bald young man, “not to make so much noise.”

  “I’ll tell them,” said Shadow.

  “It’s just that I can hear everything.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Shadow.

  “He really is a good boy,” said the bald young man’s mother, and she led her son by the sleeve, into the corridor and away, trailing a tag of toilet paper.

  Shadow walked out into the hall. “Excuse me,” he said. They turned, the man and his mother.

  “You’ve got something on your shoe,” said Shadow.

  She looked down. Then she stepped on the strip of paper with her other shoe, and lifted her foot, freeing it. She nodded at Shadow, approvingly, and walked away.

  Shadow went to the reception desk. “Gordon, have you got a good local map?”

  “Like an Ordnance Survey? Absolutely. I’ll bring it into the lounge for you.”

  Shadow went back into the bar and finished his coffee. Gordon brought in a map. Shadow was impressed by the detail: it seemed to show every goat-track. He inspected it closely, tracing his walk. He found the hill where he had stopped and eaten his lunch. He ran his finger southwest.

  “There aren’t any castles around here, are there?”

  “I’m afraid not. There are some to the east. I’ve got a guide to the castles of Scotland I could let you look at—”

  “No, no. That’s fine. Are there any big houses in this area? The kind people would call castles? Or big estates?”

  “Well, there’s the Cape Wrath Hotel, just over here,” and he pointed to it on the map. “But it’s a fairly empty area. Technically, for human occupation, what do they call it, for population density, it’s a desert up here. Not even any interesting ruins, I’m afraid. Not tha
t you could walk to.”

  Shadow thanked him, then asked him for an early-morning alarm call. He wished he had been able to find the house he had seen from the hill on the map, but perhaps he had been looking in the wrong place. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  The couple in the room next door were fighting, or making love. Shadow could not tell, but each time he began to drift off to sleep raised voices or cries would jerk him awake.

  Later, he was never certain if it had really happened, if she had really come to him, or if it had been the first of that night’s dreams: but in truth or in dreams, shortly before midnight by the bedside clock radio, there was a knock on his bedroom door. He got up. Called, “Who is it?”

  “Jennie.”

  He opened the door, winced at the light in the hall.

  She was wrapped in her brown coat, and she looked up at him hesitantly.

  “Yes?” said Shadow.

  “You’ll be going to the house tomorrow,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought I should say good-bye,” she said. “In case I don’t get a chance to see you again. And if you don’t come back to the hotel. And you just go on somewhere. And I never see you.”

  “Well, good-bye, then,” said Shadow.

  She looked him up and down, examining the T-shirt and the boxers he slept in, at his bare feet, then up at his face. She seemed worried. “You know where I live,” she said, at last. “Call me if you need me.”

  She reached her index finger out and touched it gently to his lips. Her finger was very cold. Then she took a step back into the corridor and just stood there, facing him, making no move to go.

  Shadow closed the hotel room door, and he heard her footsteps walking away down the corridor. He climbed back into bed.

  He was sure that the next dream was a dream, though. It was his life, jumbled and twisted: one moment he was in prison, teaching himself coin tricks and telling himself that his love for his wife would get him through this. Then Laura was dead, and he was out of prison; he was working as a bodyguard to an old grifter who had told Shadow to call him Wednesday. And then his dream was filled with gods: old, forgotten gods, unloved and abandoned, and new gods, transient scared things, duped and confused. It was a tangle of improbabilities, a cat’s cradle which became a web which became a net which became a skein as big as a world. . . .

  In his dream he died on the tree.

  In his dream he came back from the dead.

  And after that there was darkness.

  IV.

  THE TELEPHONE BESIDE THE bed shrilled at seven. He showered, shaved, dressed, packed his world into his backpack. Then he went down to the restaurant for breakfast: salty porridge, limp bacon, and oily fried eggs. The coffee, though, was surprisingly good.

  At ten past eight he was in the lobby, waiting.

  At fourteen minutes past eight, a man came in, wearing a sheepskin coat. He was sucking on a hand-rolled cigarette. The man stuck out his hand, cheerfully. “You’ll be Mister Moon,” he said. “My name’s Smith. I’m your lift out to the big house.” The man’s grip was firm. “You are a big feller, aren’t you?”

  Unspoken was, “But I could take you,” although Shadow knew that it was there.

  Shadow said, “So they tell me. You aren’t Scottish.”

  “Not me, matey. Just up for the week to make sure that everything runs like it’s s’posed to. I’m a London boy.” A flash of teeth in a hatchet-blade face. Shadow guessed that the man was in his midforties. “Come on out to the car. I can bring you up to speed on the way. Is that your bag?”

  Shadow carried his backpack out to the car, a muddy Land Rover, its engine still running. He dropped it in the back, climbed into the passenger seat. Smith pulled one final drag on his cigarette, now little more than a rolled stub of white paper, and threw it out of the open driver’s-side window into the road.

  They drove out of the village.

  “So how do I pronounce your name?” asked Smith. “Bal-der or Borl-der, or something else? Like Cholmondely is actually pronounced Chumley.”

  “Shadow,” said Shadow. “People call me Shadow.”

  “Right.”

  Silence.

  “So,” said Smith. “Shadow. I don’t know how much old Gaskell told you about the party this weekend.”

  “A little.”

  “Right, well, the most important thing to know is this. Anything that happens, you keep shtum about. Right? Whatever you see, people having a little bit of fun, you don’t say nothing to anybody, even if you recognize them, if you take my meaning.”

  “I don’t recognize people,” said Shadow.

  “That’s the spirit. We’re just here to make sure that everyone has a good time without being disturbed. They’ve come a long way for a nice weekend.”

  “Got it,” said Shadow.

  They reached the ferry to the cape. Smith parked the Land Rover beside the road, took their bags, and locked the car.

  On the other side of the ferry crossing, an identical Land Rover waited. Smith unlocked it, threw their bags in the back, and started along the dirt track.

  They turned off before they reached the lighthouse, drove for a while in silence down a dirt road that rapidly turned into a sheep track. Several times Shadow had to get out and open gates; he waited while the Land Rover drove through, closed the gates behind it.

  There were ravens in the fields and on the low stone walls, huge black birds that stared at Shadow with implacable eyes.

  “So you were in the nick?” said Smith, suddenly.

  “Sorry?”

  “Prison. Pokey. Porridge. Other words beginning with a P, indicating poor food, no nightlife, inadequate toilet facilities, and limited opportunities for travel.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re not very chatty, are you?”

  “I thought that was a virtue.”

  “Point taken. Just conversation. The silence was getting on my nerves. You like it up here?”

  “I guess. I’ve only been here for a few days.”

  “Gives me the fucking willies. Too remote. I’ve been to parts of Siberia that felt more welcoming. You been to London yet? No? When you come down south I’ll show you around. Great pubs. Real food. And there’s all that tourist stuff you Americans like. Traffic’s hell, though. At least up here, we can drive. No bloody traffic lights. There’s this traffic light at the bottom of Regent Street, I swear, you sit there for five minutes on a red light, then you get about ten seconds on a green light. Two cars max. Sodding ridiculous. They say it’s the price we pay for progress. Right?”

  “Yeah,” said Shadow. “I guess.”

  They were well off-road now, thumping and bumping along a scrubby valley between two high hills. “Your party guests,” said Shadow. “Are they coming in by Land Rover?”

  “Nah. We’ve got helicopters. They’ll be in in time for dinner tonight. Choppers in, then choppers out on Monday morning.”

  “Like living on an island.”

  “I wish we were living on an island. Wouldn’t get loony locals causing problems, would we? Nobody complains about the noise coming from the island next door.”

  “You make a lot of noise at your party?”

  “It’s not my party, chum. I’m just a facilitator. Making sure that everything runs smoothly. But yes. I understand that they can make a lot of noise when they put their minds to it.”

  The grassy valley became a sheep path, the sheep path became a driveway running almost straight up a hill. A bend in the road, a sudden turn, and they were driving toward a house that Shadow recognized. Jennie had pointed to it yesterday, at lunch.

  The house was old. He could see that at a glance. Parts of it seemed older than others: there was a wall on one wing of the building built out of gray rocks and stones, heavy and hard. That wall jutted into another, built of brown bricks. The roof, which covered the whole building, both wings, was a dark gray slate. The house looked out onto a gravel drive and then down
the hill onto the loch. Shadow climbed out of the Land Rover. He looked at the house and felt small. He felt as though he were coming home, and it was not a good feeling.

  There were several other four-wheel-drive vehicles parked on the gravel. “The keys to the cars are hanging in the pantry, in case you need to take one out. I’ll show you as we go past.”

  Through a large wooden door, and now they were in a central courtyard, partly paved. There was a small fountain in the middle of the courtyard, and a plot of grass, a ragged green viperous swath bounded by gray flagstones.

  “This is where the Saturday-night action will be,” said Smith. “I’ll show you where you’ll be staying.”

  Into the smaller wing through an unimposing door, past a room hung with keys on hooks, each key marked with a paper tag, and another room filled with empty shelves. Down a dingy hall, and up some stairs. There was no carpeting on the stairs, nothing but whitewash on the walls. (“Well, this is the servants’ quarters, innit? They never spent any money on it.”) It was cold, in a way that Shadow was starting to become familiar with: colder inside the building than out. He wondered how they did that, if it was a British building secret.

  Smith led Shadow to the top of the house and showed him into a dark room containing an antique wardrobe, an iron-framed single bed that Shadow could see at a glance would be smaller than he was, an ancient washstand, and a small window which looked out onto the inner courtyard.

  “There’s a loo at the end of the hall,” said Smith. “The servants’ bathroom’s on the next floor down. Two baths, one for men, one for women, no showers. The supplies of hot water on this wing of the house are distinctly limited, I’m afraid. Your monkey suit’s hanging in the wardrobe. Try it on now, see if it all fits, then leave it off until this evening, when the guests come in. Limited dry-cleaning facilities. We might as well be on Mars. I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me. It’s not as cold down there, if the Aga’s working. Bottom of the stairs and left, then right, then yell if you’re lost. Don’t go into the other wing unless you’re told to.”

  He left Shadow alone.

  Shadow tried on the black tuxedo jacket, the white dress shirt, the black tie. There were highly polished black shoes, as well. It all fitted, as if it had been tailored for him. He hung everything back in the wardrobe.