The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  Shadow threw himself in front of it, shielding it with his body. The dark-haired woman who had smiled at him before now brought down her club on his shoulder, dispassionately, and another club, from a man this time, hit him a numbing blow in the leg, and a third struck him on his side.

  They’ll kill us both, he thought. Him first, then me. That’s what they do. That’s what they always do. And then, She said she would come. If I called her.

  Shadow whispered, “Jennie?”

  There was no reply. Everything was happening so slowly. Another club was coming down, this one aimed at his head. Shadow rolled out of the way awkwardly, watched the heavy wood smash into the turf.

  “Jennie,” he said, picturing her too-fair hair in his mind, her thin face, her smile. “I call you. Come now. Please.”

  A gust of cold wind.

  The dark-haired woman had raised her club high, and brought it down now, fast, hard, aiming for Shadow’s face.

  The blow never landed. A small hand caught the heavy stick as if it were a twig.

  Fair hair blew about her head, in the cold wind. He could not have told you what she was wearing.

  She looked at him. Shadow thought that she looked disappointed.

  One of the men aimed a cudgel blow at the back of her head. It never connected. She turned . . .

  A rending sound, as if something was tearing itself apart . . .

  And then the bonfires exploded. That was how it seemed. There was blazing wood all over the courtyard, even in the house. And the people were screaming in the bitter wind.

  Shadow staggered to his feet.

  The monster lay on the ground, bloodied and twisted. Shadow did not know if it was alive or not. He picked it up, hauled it over his shoulder, and staggered out of the courtyard with it.

  He stumbled out onto the gravel forecourt, as the massive wooden doors slammed closed behind them. Nobody else would be coming out. Shadow kept moving down the slope, one step at a time, down toward the loch.

  When he reached the water’s edge he stopped, and sank to his knees, and let the bald man down onto the grass as gently as he could.

  He heard something crash, and looked back up the hill.

  The house was burning.

  “How is he?” said a woman’s voice.

  Shadow turned. She was knee-deep in the water, the creature’s mother, wading toward the shore.

  “I don’t know,” said Shadow. “He’s hurt.”

  “You’re both hurt,” she said. “You’re all bluid and bruises.”

  “Yes,” said Shadow.

  “Still,” she said. “He’s not dead. And that makes a nice change.”

  She had reached the shore now. She sat on the bank, with her son’s head in her lap. She took a packet of tissues from her handbag, and spat on a tissue, and began fiercely to scrub at her son’s face with it, rubbing away the blood.

  The house on the hill was roaring now. Shadow had not imagined that a burning house would make so much noise.

  The old woman looked up at the sky. She made a noise in the back of her throat, a clucking noise, and then she shook her head. “You know,” she said, “you’ve let them in. They’d been bound for so long, and you’ve let them in.”

  “Is that a good thing?” asked Shadow.

  “I don’t know, love,” said the little woman, and she shook her head again. She crooned to her son as if he were still her baby, and dabbed at his wounds with her spit.

  Shadow was naked, at the edge of the loch, but the heat from the burning building kept him warm. He watched the reflected flames in the glassy water of the loch. A yellow moon was rising.

  He was starting to hurt. Tomorrow, he knew, he would hurt much worse.

  Footsteps on the grass behind him. He looked up.

  “Hello, Smithie,” said Shadow.

  Smith looked down at the three of them.

  “Shadow,” he said, shaking his head. “Shadow, Shadow, Shadow, Shadow, Shadow. This was not how things were meant to turn out.”

  “Sorry,” said Shadow.

  “This will cause real embarrassment to Mr. Alice,” said Smith. “Those people were his guests.”

  “They were animals,” said Shadow.

  “If they were,” said Smith, “they were rich and important animals. There’ll be widows and orphans and God knows what to take care of. Mr. Alice will not be pleased.” He said it like a judge pronouncing a death sentence.

  “Are you threatening him?” asked the old lady.

  “I don’t threaten,” said Smith, flatly.

  She smiled. “Ah,” she said. “Well, I do. And if you or that fat bastard you work for hurt this young man, it’ll be the worse for both of you.” She smiled then, with sharp teeth, and Shadow felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. “There’s worse things than dying,” she said. “And I know most of them. I’m not young, and I’m not one for idle talk. So if I were you,” she said, with a sniff, “I’d look after this lad.”

  She picked up her son with one arm, as if he were a child’s doll, and she clutched her handbag close to her with the other.

  Then she nodded to Shadow and walked away, into the glass-dark water, and soon she and her son were gone beneath the surface of the loch.

  “Fuck,” muttered Smith. Shadow didn’t say anything.

  Smith fumbled in his pocket. He pulled out the pouch of tobacco, and rolled himself a cigarette. Then he lit it. “Right,” he said.

  “Right?” said Shadow.

  “We better get you cleaned up, and find you some clothes. You’ll catch your death, otherwise. You heard what she said.”

  IX.

  THEY HAD THE BEST room waiting for Shadow, that night, back at the hotel. And, less than an hour after Shadow returned, Gordon on the front desk brought up a new backpack, a box of new clothes, even new boots. He asked no questions.

  There was a large envelope on top of the pile of clothes.

  Shadow ripped it open. It contained his passport, slightly scorched, his wallet, and money: several bundles of new fifty-pound notes, wrapped in rubber bands.

  My God, how the money rolls in, he thought, without pleasure, and tried, without success, to remember where he had heard that song before.

  He took a long bath, to soak away the pain.

  And then he slept.

  In the morning he dressed, and walked up the lane next to the hotel, that led up the hill and out of the village. There had been a cottage at the top of the hill, he was sure of it, with lavender in the garden, a stripped pine countertop, and a purple sofa, but no matter where he looked there was no cottage on the hill, nor any evidence that there ever had been anything there but grass and a hawthorn tree.

  He called her name, but there was no reply, only the wind coming in off the sea, bringing with it the first promises of winter.

  Still, she was waiting for him, when he got back to the hotel room. She was sitting on the bed, wearing her old brown coat, inspecting her fingernails. She did not look up when he unlocked the door and walked in.

  “Hello, Jennie,” he said.

  “Hello,” she said. Her voice was very quiet.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You saved my life.”

  “You called,” she said dully. “I came.”

  He said, “What’s wrong?”

  She looked at him, then. “I could have been yours,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes. “I thought you would love me. Perhaps. One day.”

  “Well,” he said, “maybe we could find out. We could take a walk tomorrow together, maybe. Not a long one, I’m afraid, I’m a bit of a mess physically.”

  She shook her head.

  The strangest thing, Shadow thought, was that she did not look human any longer: she now looked like what she was, a wild thing, a forest thing. Her tail twitched on the bed, under her coat. She was very beautiful, and, he realized, he wanted her, very badly.

  “The hardest thing about being a hulder,” said Jennie, “even a hulder very f
ar from home, is that, if you don’t want to be lonely, you have to love a man.”

  “So love me. Stay with me,” said Shadow. “Please.”

  “You,” she said, sadly and finally, “are not a man.”

  She stood up.

  “Still,” she said, “everything’s changing. Maybe I can go home again now. After a thousand years I don’t even know if I remember any Norsk.”

  She took his hands in her small hands, that could bend iron bars, that could crush rocks to sand, and she squeezed his fingers very gently. And she was gone.

  He stayed another day in that hotel, and then he caught the bus to Thurso, and the train from Thurso to Inverness.

  He dozed on the train, although he did not dream.

  When he woke, there was a man on the seat next to him. A hatchet-faced man, reading a paperback book. He closed the book when he saw that Shadow was awake. Shadow looked down at the cover: Jean Cocteau’s The Difficulty of Being.

  “Good book?” asked Shadow.

  “Yeah, all right,” said Smith. “It’s all essays. They’re meant to be personal, but you feel that every time he looks up innocently and says ‘This is me,’ it’s some kind of double bluff. I liked Belle et la Bête, though. I felt closer to him watching that than through any of these essays.”

  “It’s all on the cover,” said Shadow.

  “How d’you mean?”

  “The difficulty of being Jean Cocteau.”

  Smith scratched his nose.

  “Here,” he said. He passed Shadow a copy of the Scotsman. “Page nine.”

  At the bottom of page nine was a small story: retired doctor kills himself. Gaskell’s body had been found in his car, parked in a picnic spot on the coast road. He had swallowed quite a cocktail of painkillers, washed down with most of a bottle of Lagavulin.

  “Mr. Alice hates being lied to,” said Smith. “Especially by the hired help.”

  “Is there anything in there about the fire?” asked Shadow.

  “What fire?”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if there wasn’t a terrible run of luck for the great and the good over the next couple of months, though. Car crashes. Train crash. Maybe a plane’ll go down. Grieving widows and orphans and boyfriends. Very sad.”

  Shadow nodded.

  “You know,” said Smith, “Mr. Alice is very concerned about your health. He worries. I worry, too.”

  “Yeah?” said Shadow.

  “Absolutely. I mean, if something happens to you while you’re in the country. Maybe you look the wrong way crossing the road. Flash a wad of cash in the wrong pub. I dunno. The point is, if you got hurt, then whatsername, Grendel’s mum, might take it the wrong way.”

  “So?”

  “So we think you should leave the U.K. Be safer for everyone, wouldn’t it?”

  Shadow said nothing for a while. The train began to slow.

  “Okay,” said Shadow.

  “This is my stop,” said Smith. “I’m getting out here. We’ll arrange the ticket, first class of course, to anywhere you’re heading. One-way ticket. You just have to tell me where you want to go.”

  Shadow rubbed the bruise on his cheek. There was something about the pain that was almost comforting.

  The train came to a complete stop. It was a small station, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. There was a large black car parked by the station building, in the thin sunshine. The windows were tinted, and Shadow could not see inside.

  Mr. Smith pushed down the train window, reached outside to open the carriage door, and he stepped out onto the platform. He looked back in at Shadow through the open window. “Well?”

  “I think,” said Shadow, “that I’ll spend a couple of weeks looking around the U.K. And you’ll just have to pray that I look the right way when I cross your roads.”

  “And then?”

  Shadow knew it, then. Perhaps he had known it all along. “Chicago,” he said to Smith, as the train gave a jerk, and began to move away from the station. He felt older, as he said it. But he could not put it off forever.

  And then he said, so quietly that only he could have heard it, “I guess I’m going home.”

  Soon afterward it began to rain: huge, pelting drops that rattled against the windows and blurred the world into grays and greens. Deep rumbles of thunder accompanied Shadow on his journey south: the storm grumbled, the wind howled, and the lightning made huge shadows across the sky, and in their company Shadow slowly began to feel less alone.

  The Return of the Thin White Duke

  2004

  HE WAS THE monarch of all he surveyed, even when he stood out on the palace balcony at night listening to reports and he glanced up into the sky at the bitter twinkling clusters and whorls of stars. He ruled the worlds. He had tried for so long to rule wisely, and well, and to be a good monarch, but it is hard to rule, and wisdom can be painful. And it is impossible, he had found, if you rule, to do only good, for you cannot build anything without tearing something down, and even he could not care about every life, every dream, every population of every world.

  Bit by bit, moment by moment, death by little death, he ceased to care.

  He would not die, for only inferior people died, and he was the inferior of no one.

  Time passed. One day, in the deep dungeons, a man with blood on his face looked at the Duke and told him he had become a monster. The next moment, the man was no more; a footnote in a history book.

  The Duke gave this conversation much thought over the next several days, and eventually he nodded his head. “The traitor was right,” he said. “I have become a monster. Ah well. I wonder if any of us set out to be monsters?”

  Once, long ago, there had been lovers, but that had been in the dawn days of the Dukedom. Now, in the dusk of the world, with all pleasures available freely (but what we attain with no effort we cannot value), and with no need to deal with any issues of succession (for even the notion that another would one day succeed the Duke bordered upon blasphemy), there were no more lovers, just as there were no challenges. He felt as if he were asleep while his eyes were open and his lips spoke, but there was nothing to wake him.

  The day after it had occurred to the Duke that he was now a monster was the Day of Strange Blossoms, celebrated by the wearing of flowers brought to the Ducal Palace from every world and every plane. It was a day that all in the Ducal Palace, which covered a continent, were traditionally merry, and in which they cast off their cares and darknesses, but the Duke was not happy.

  “How can you be made happy?” asked the information beetle on his shoulder, there to relay his master’s whims and desires to a hundred hundred worlds. “Give the word, Your Grace, and empires will rise and fall to make you smile. Stars will flame novae for your entertainment.”

  “Perhaps I need a heart,” said the Duke.

  “I shall have a hundred hundred hearts immediately plucked, ripped, torn, incised, sliced and otherwise removed from the chests of ten thousand perfect specimens of humanity,” said the information beetle. “How do you wish them prepared? Shall I alert the chefs or the taxidermists, the surgeons or the sculptors?”

  “I need to care about something,” said the Duke. “I need to value life. I need to wake.”

  The beetle chittered and chirrupped on his shoulder; it could access the wisdom of ten thousand worlds, but it could not advise its master when he was in this mood, so it said nothing. It relayed its concern to its predecessors, the older information beetles and scarabs, now sleeping in ornate boxes on a hundred hundred worlds, and the scarabs consulted among themselves with regret, because, in the vastness of time, even this had happened before, and they were prepared to deal with it.

  A long-forgotten subroutine from the morning of the worlds was set into motion. The Duke was performing the final ritual of the Day of Strange Blossoms with no expression on his thin face, a man seeing his world as it was and valuing it not at all, when a small winged creature fluttered out from
the blossom in which she had been hiding.

  “Your Grace,” she whispered. “My mistress needs you. Please. You are her only hope.”

  “Your mistress?” asked the Duke.

  “The creature comes from Beyond,” clicked the beetle on his shoulder. “From one of the places that does not acknowledge the Ducal Overlordship, from the lands beyond life and death, between being and unbeing. It must have hidden itself inside an imported off-world orchid blossom. Its words are a trap, or a snare. I shall have it destroyed.”

  “No,” said the Duke. “Let it be.” He did something he had not done for many years, and stroked the beetle with a thin white finger. Its green eyes turned black and it chittered into perfect silence.

  He cupped the tiny thing in his hands, and walked back to his quarters, while she told him of her wise and noble Queen, and of the giants, each more beautiful than the last, and each more huge and dangerous and more monstrous, who kept her Queen a captive.

  And as she spoke, the Duke remembered the days when a lad from the stars had come to World to seek his fortune (for in those days there were fortunes everywhere, just waiting to be found); and in remembering he discovered that his youth was less distant than he had thought. His information beetle lay quiescent upon his shoulder.

  “Why did she send you to me?” he asked the little creature. But, her task accomplished, she would speak no more, and in moments she vanished, as instantly and as permanently as a star that had been extinguished upon Ducal order.

  He entered his private quarters, and placed the deactivated information beetle in its case beside his bed. In his study, he had his servants bring him a long black case. He opened it himself, and, with a touch, he activated his master advisor. It shook itself, then wriggled up and about his shoulders in viper form, its serpent tail forking into the neural plug at the base of his neck.

  The Duke told the serpent what he intended to do.

  “This is not wise,” said the master advisor, the intelligence and advice of every Ducal advisor in memory available to it, after a moment’s examination of precedent.

  “I seek adventure, not wisdom,” said the Duke. A ghost of a smile began to play at the edges of his lips; the first smile that his servants had seen in longer than they could remember.