The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  When you were an undergraduate you worked as a cook, and your fingertips are covered with the scar-marks of a thousand tiny knife-cuts.

  I love you, and it is my love for you that drives me to know all about you. The more I know the closer I am to you. You were to come to my country with a young man, but he broke your heart, and still you came here to spite him, and still you smiled. I close my eyes and I can see you smiling. I close my eyes and I see you striding across the town square in a clatter of pigeons. The women of this country do not stride. They move diffidently, unless they are dancers. And when you sleep your eyelashes flutter. The way your cheek touches the pillow. The way you dream.

  I dream of dragons. When I was a small child, at the home, they told me that there was a dragon beneath the old city. I pictured the dragon wreathing like black smoke beneath the buildings, inhabiting the cracks between the cellars, insubstantial and yet always present. That is how I think of the dragon, and how I think of the past, now. A black dragon made of smoke. When I perform I have been eaten by the dragon and have become part of the past. I am, truly, seven hundred years old. Kings come and kings go. Armies arrive and are absorbed or return home again, leaving only damaged buildings, widows and bastard children behind them, but the statues remain, and the dragon of smoke, and the past.

  I say this, although the statue that I emulate is not from this town at all. It stands in front of a church in southern Italy, where it is believed to represent either the sister of John the Baptist, or a local lord who endowed the church to celebrate that he had not died of the plague, or the angel of death.

  I had imagined you perfectly pure, my love, pure as I am, yet one time I found that the red lace panties were pushed to the bottom of your laundry hamper, and upon close examination I was able to assure myself that you had, unquestionably, been unchaste the previous evening. Only you know who with, for you did not talk of the incident in your letters home, or allude to it in your online journal.

  A small girl looked up at me once, and turned to her mother, and said, “Why is she so unhappy?” (I translate into English for you, obviously. The girl was referring to me as a statue and thus she used the feminine ending.)

  “Why do you believe her to be unhappy?”

  “Why else would people make themselves into statues?”

  Her mother smiled. “Perhaps she is unhappy in love,” she said.

  I was not unhappy in love. I was prepared to wait until everything was right, something very different.

  There is time. There is always time. It is the gift I took from being a statue—one of the gifts, I should say.

  You have walked past me and looked at me and smiled, and you have walked past me and other times you barely noticed me as anything other than an object. Truly, it is remarkable how little regard you, or any human, gives to something that remains completely motionless. You have woken in the night, got up, walked to the little toilet, micturated, walked back to your bed, slept once more, peacefully. You would not notice something perfectly still, would you? Something in the shadows?

  If I could I would have made the paper for this letter for you out of my body. I thought about mixing in with the ink my blood or spittle, but no. There is such a thing as overstatement, yet great loves demand grand gestures, yes? I am unused to grand gestures. I am more practiced in the tiny gestures. I made a small boy scream once, simply by smiling at him when he had convinced himself that I was made of marble. It is the smallest of gestures that will never be forgotten.

  I love you, I want you, I need you. I am yours just as you are mine. There. I have declared my love for you.

  Soon, I hope, you will know this for yourself. And then we will never part. It will be time, in a moment, to turn around, put down the letter. I am with you, even now, in these old apartments with the Iranian carpets on the walls.

  You have walked past me too many times.

  No more.

  I am here with you. I am here now.

  When you put down this letter. When you turn and look across this old room, your eyes sweeping it with relief or with joy or even with terror . . .

  Then I will move. Move, just a fraction. And, finally, you will see me.

  Orange

  2008

  (Third Subject’s Responses to Investigator’s Written Questionnaire.)

  Eyes Only.

  Jemima Glorfindel Petula Ramsey.

  Seventeen on June the ninth.

  The last five years. Before that we lived in Glasgow (Scotland). Before that, Cardiff (Wales).

  I don’t know. I think he’s in magazine publishing now. He doesn’t talk to us anymore. The divorce was pretty bad and Mum wound up paying him a lot of money. Which seems sort of wrong to me. But maybe it was worth it just to get shot of him.

  An inventor and entrepreneur. She invented the Stuffed Muffin™, and started the Stuffed Muffin chain. I used to like them when I was a kid, but you can get kind of sick of stuffed muffins for every meal, especially because Mum used us as guinea pigs. The Complete Turkey Dinner Christmas Stuffed Muffin was the worst. But she sold out her interest in the Stuffed Muffin chain about five years ago, to start work on My Mum’s Colored Bubbles (not actually ™ yet).

  Two. My sister, Nerys, who was just fifteen, and my brother, Pryderi, twelve.

  Several times a day.

  No.

  Through the Internet. Probably on eBay.

  She’s been buying colors and dyes from all over the world ever since she decided that the world was crying out for brightly colored Day-Glo bubbles. The kind you can blow, with bubble mixture.

  It’s not really a laboratory. I mean, she calls it that, but really it’s just the garage. Only she took some of the Stuffed Muffins™ money and converted it, so it has sinks and bathtubs and Bunsen burners and things, and tiles on the walls and the floor to make it easier to clean.

  I don’t know. Nerys used to be pretty normal. When she turned thirteen she started reading these magazines and putting pictures of these strange bimbo women up on her wall like Britney Spears and so on. Sorry if anyone reading this is a Britney fan ;) but I just don’t get it. The whole orange thing didn’t start until last year.

  Artificial tanning creams. You couldn’t go near her for hours after she put it on. And she’d never give it time to dry after she smeared it on her skin, so it would come off on her sheets and on the fridge door and in the shower, leaving smears of orange everywhere. Her friends would wear it too, but they never put it on like she did. I mean, she’d slather on the cream, with no attempt to look even human-colored, and she thought she looked great. She did the tanning salon thing once, but I don’t think she liked it, because she never went back.

  Tangerine Girl. The Oompa-Loompa. Carrot-top. GoMango. Orangina.

  Not very well. But she didn’t seem to care, really. I mean, this is a girl who said that she couldn’t see the point of science or maths because she was going to be a pole dancer as soon as she left school. I said, nobody’s going to pay to see you in the altogether, and she said how do you know? and I told her that I saw the little QuickTime films she’d made of herself dancing nuddy and left in the camera and she screamed and said give me that, and I told her I’d wiped them. But honestly, I don’t think she was ever going to be the next Bettie Page or whoever. She’s a sort of squarish shape, for a start.

  German measles, mumps, and I think Pryderi had chicken pox when he was staying in Melbourne with the grandparents.

  In a small pot. It looked a bit like a jam jar, I suppose.

  I don’t think so. Nothing that looked like a warning label anyway. But there was a return address. It came from abroad, and the return address was in some kind of foreign lettering.

  You have to understand that Mum had been buying colors and dyes from all over the world for five years. The thing with the Day-Glo bubbles is not that someone can blow glowing colored bubbles, it’s that they don’t pop and leave splashes of dye all over everything. Mum says that would be a lawsuit wait
ing to happen. So, no.

  There was some kind of shouting match between Nerys and Mum to begin with, because Mum had come back from the shops and not bought anything from Nerys’s shopping list except the shampoo. Mum said she couldn’t find the tanning cream at the supermarket but I think she just forgot. So Nerys stormed off and slammed the door and went into her bedroom and played something that was probably Britney Spears really loudly. I was out the back, feeding the three cats, the chinchilla, and a guinea pig named Roland who looks like a hairy cushion, and I missed it all.

  On the kitchen table.

  When I found the empty jam jar in the back garden the next morning. It was underneath Nerys’s window. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.

  Honestly, I couldn’t be bothered. I figured it would just be more yelling, you know? And Mum would work it out soon enough.

  Yes, it was stupid. But it wasn’t uniquely stupid, if you see what I mean. Which is to say, it was par-for-the-course-for-Nerys stupid.

  That she was glowing.

  A sort of pulsating orange.

  When she started telling us that she was going to be worshipped like a god, as she was in the dawn times.

  Pryderi said she was floating about an inch above the ground. But I didn’t actually see this. I thought he was just playing along with her newfound weirdness.

  She didn’t answer to “Nerys” anymore. She described herself mostly as either My Immanence, or the Vehicle. (“It is time to feed the Vehicle.”)

  Dark chocolate. Which was weird because in the old days I was the only one in the house who even sort of liked it. But Pryderi had to go out and buy her bars and bars of it.

  No. Mum and me just thought it was more Nerys. Just a bit more imaginatively weirdo Nerys than usual.

  That night, when it started to get dark. You could see the orange pulsing under the door. Like a glowworm or something. Or a light show. The weirdest thing was that I could still see it with my eyes closed.

  The next morning. All of us.

  It was pretty obvious by this point. She didn’t really even look like Nerys any longer. She looked sort of smudged. Like an afterimage. I thought about it, and it’s . . . Okay. Suppose you were staring at something really bright, that was a blue color. Then you closed your eyes, and you’d see this glowing yellowy-orange afterimage in your eyes? That was what she looked like.

  They didn’t work either.

  She let Pryderi leave to get her more chocolate. Mum and I weren’t allowed to leave the house anymore.

  Mostly I just sat in the back garden and read a book. There wasn’t very much else I really could do. I started wearing dark glasses, so did Mum, because the orange light hurt our eyes. Other than that, nothing.

  Only when we tried to leave or call anybody. There was food in the house, though. And Stuffed Muffins™ in the freezer.

  “If you’d just stopped her wearing that stupid tanning cream a year ago we wouldn’t be in this mess!” But it was unfair, and I apologized afterwards.

  When Pryderi came back with the dark chocolate bars. He said he’d gone up to a traffic warden and told him that his sister had turned into a giant orange glow and was controlling our minds. He said the man was extremely rude to him.

  I don’t have a boyfriend. I did, but we broke up after he went to a Rolling Stones concert with the evil bottle-blonde former friend whose name I do not mention. Also, I mean, the Rolling Stones? These little old goatmen hopping around the stage pretending to be all rock-and-roll? Please. So, no.

  I’d quite like to be a vet. But then I think about having to put animals down, and I don’t know. I want to travel for a bit before I make any decisions.

  The garden hose. We turned it on full, while she was eating her chocolate bars, and distracted, and we sprayed it at her.

  Just orange steam, really. Mum said that she had solvents and things in the laboratory, if we could get in there, but by now Her Immanence was hissing mad (literally) and she sort of fixed us to the floor. I can’t explain it. I mean, I wasn’t stuck, but I couldn’t leave or move my legs. I was just where she left me.

  About half a meter above the carpet. She’d sink down a bit to go through doors, so she didn’t bump her head. And after the hose incident she didn’t go back to her room, just stayed in the main room and floated about grumpily, the color of a luminous carrot.

  Complete world domination.

  I wrote it down on a piece of paper and gave it to Pryderi.

  He had to carry it back. I don’t think Her Immanence really understood money.

  I don’t know. It was Mum’s idea more than mine. I think she hoped that the solvent might remove the orange. And at that point, it couldn’t hurt. Nothing could have made things worse.

  It didn’t even upset her, like the hose-water did. I’m pretty sure she liked it. I think I saw her dipping her chocolate bars into it, before she ate them, although I had to sort of squint up my eyes to see anything where she was. It was all a sort of a great orange glow.

  That we were all going to die. Mum told Pryderi that if the Great Oompa-Loompa let him out to buy chocolate again, he just shouldn’t bother coming back. And I was getting really upset about the animals—I hadn’t fed the chinchilla or Roland the guinea pig for two days, because I couldn’t go into the back garden. I couldn’t go anywhere. Except the loo, and then I had to ask.

  I suppose because they thought the house was on fire. All the orange light. I mean, it was a natural mistake.

  We were glad she hadn’t done that to us. Mum said it proved that Nerys was still in there somewhere, because if she had the power to turn us into goo, like she did the firefighters, she would have done. I said that maybe she just wasn’t powerful enough to turn us into goo at the beginning and now she couldn’t be bothered.

  You couldn’t even see a person in there anymore. It was a bright orange pulsing light, and sometimes it talked straight into your head.

  When the spaceship landed.

  I don’t know. I mean, it was bigger than the whole block, but it didn’t crush anything. It sort of materialized around us, so that our whole house was inside it. And the whole street was inside it too.

  No. But what else could it have been?

  A sort of pale blue. They didn’t pulse, either. They twinkled.

  More than six, less than twenty. It’s not that easy to tell if this is the same intelligent blue light you were just speaking to five minutes ago.

  Three things. First of all, a promise that Nerys wouldn’t be hurt or harmed. Second, that if they were ever able to return her to the way she was, they’d let us know, and bring her back. Thirdly, a recipe for fluorescent bubble mixture. (I can only assume they were reading Mum’s mind, because she didn’t say anything. It’s possible that Her Immanence told them, though. She definitely had access to some of “the Vehicle’s” memories.) Also, they gave Pryderi a thing like a glass skateboard.

  A sort of a liquid sound. Then everything became transparent. I was crying, and so was Mum. And Pryderi said, “Cool beans,” and I started to giggle while crying, and then it was just our house again.

  We went out into the back garden and looked up. There was something blinking blue and orange, very high, getting smaller and smaller, and we watched it until it was out of sight.

  Because I didn’t want to.

  I fed the remaining animals. Roland was in a state. The cats just seemed happy that someone was feeding them again. I don’t know how the chinchilla got out.

  Sometimes. I mean, you have to bear in mind that she was the single most irritating person on the planet, even before the whole Her Immanence thing. But yes, I guess so. If I’m honest.

  Sitting outside at night, staring up at the sky, wondering what she’s doing now.

  He wants his glass skateboard back. He says that it’s his, and the government has no right to keep it. (You are the government, aren’t you?) Mum seems happy to share the patent for the Colored Bubbles recipe with the government though
. The man said that it might be the basis of a whole new branch of molecular something or other. Nobody gave me anything, so I don’t have to worry.

  Once, in the back garden, looking up at the night sky. I think it was only an orangeyish star, actually. It could have been Mars, I know they call it the red planet. Although once in a while I think that maybe she’s back to herself again, and dancing, up there, wherever she is, and all the aliens love her pole dancing because they just don’t know any better, and they think it’s a whole new art form, and they don’t even mind that she’s sort of square.

  I don’t know. Sitting in the back garden talking to the cats, maybe. Or blowing silly-colored bubbles.

  Until the day that I die.

  I ATTEST THAT this is a true statement of events.

  Jemima Glorfindel Petula Ramsey

  Mythical Creatures

  2008

  Giants

  If it were not for the giants, Britain would look very different.

  In the dawn days they feefifofummed across the land, picking up rocks and throwing them at other giants in friendly rivalry, or alone they would break mountains, crush rocks into causeways, leave henges and stone seats to mark their passing.

  The giants were big, but not bright. They were outsmarted by clever boys named Jack and fell from beanstalks or were tricked to death. They died but not all of them are dead.

  The remaining giants sleep, lost in deep slow dreams, covered in earth and trees and wild grass. Some have clouds on their shoulders or long men carved in their sides. We see them from the windows of cars and tell each other that from some angles they look almost like people.

  Even giants can only sleep for so long. Do not make too much noise the next time you walk in the hills.

  Pixies

  They’ll help you, folk say, unless you thank them: if you leave them gifts or payment they’ll be off into the night, never again to sweep your floor or sew your shoes or stack your CDs into alphabetical order.