The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  The queen said nothing.

  “Love me,” said the girl. “All will love me, and you, who woke me, you must love me most of all.”

  The queen felt something stirring in her heart. She remembered her stepmother then. Her stepmother had liked to be adored. Learning how to be strong, to feel her own emotions and not another’s, had been hard; but once you learned the trick of it, you did not forget. And she did not wish to rule continents.

  The girl smiled at her with eyes the color of the morning sky.

  The queen did not smile. She reached out her hand. “Here,” she said. “This is not mine.”

  She passed the spindle to the old woman beside her. The old woman hefted it, thoughtfully. She began to unwrap the yarn from the spindle with arthritic fingers. “This was my life,” she said. “This thread was my life . . .”

  “It was your life. You gave it to me,” said the sleeper, irritably. “And it has gone on much too long.”

  The tip of the spindle was still sharp after so many decades.

  The old woman, who had once been a princess, held the yarn tightly in her hand, and she thrust the point of the spindle at the golden-haired girl’s breast.

  The girl looked down as a trickle of red blood ran down her breast and stained her white dress crimson.

  “No weapon can harm me,” she said, and her girlish voice was petulant. “Not anymore. Look. It’s only a scratch.”

  “It’s not a weapon,” said the queen, who understood what had happened. “It’s your own magic. And a scratch is all that was needed.”

  The girl’s blood soaked into the thread that had once been wrapped about the spindle, the thread that ran from the spindle to the raw wool in the old woman’s hand.

  The girl looked down at the blood staining her dress, and at the blood on the thread, and she said only, “It was just a prick of the skin, nothing more.” She seemed confused.

  The noise on the stairs was getting louder. A slow, irregular shuffling, as if a hundred sleepwalkers were coming up a stone spiral staircase with their eyes closed.

  The room was small, and there was nowhere to hide, and the room’s window was a narrow slit in the stones.

  The old woman, who had not slept in so many decades, she who had once been a princess, said, “You took my dreams. You took my sleep. Now, that’s enough of all that.” She was a very old woman: her fingers were gnarled, like the roots of a hawthorn bush. Her nose was long, and her eyelids drooped, but there was a look in her eyes in that moment that was the look of someone young.

  She swayed, and then she staggered, and she would have fallen to the floor if the queen had not caught her first.

  The queen carried the old woman to the bed, marveling at how little she weighed, and placed her on the crimson counterpane. The old woman’s chest rose and fell.

  The noise on the stairs was louder now. Then a silence, followed, suddenly, by a hubbub, as if a hundred people were talking at once, all surprised and angry and confused.

  The beautiful girl said, “But—” and now there was nothing girlish or beautiful about her. Her face fell, and became less shapely. She reached down to the smallest dwarf, pulled his hand-axe from his belt. She fumbled with the axe, held it up threateningly, with hands all wrinkled and worn.

  The queen drew her sword (the blade-edge was notched and damaged from the thorns) but instead of striking, she took a step backwards.

  “Listen! They are waking up,” she said. “They are all waking up. Tell me again about the youth you stole from them. Tell me again about your beauty and your power. Tell me again how clever you were, Your Darkness.”

  When the people reached the tower room, they saw an old woman asleep on a bed, and they saw the queen, standing tall, and beside her, the dwarfs, who were shaking their heads, or scratching them.

  They saw something else on the floor also: a tumble of bones, a hank of hair as fine and as white as fresh-spun cobwebs, a tracery of gray rags across it, and over all of it, an oily dust.

  “Take care of her,” said the queen, pointing with the dark wooden spindle at the old woman on the bed. “She saved your lives.”

  She left, then, with the dwarfs. None of the people in that room or on the steps dared to stop them or would ever understand what had happened.

  A MILE OR SO from the castle, in a clearing in the Forest of Acaire, the queen and the dwarfs lit a fire of dry twigs, and in it they burned the thread and the fiber. The smallest dwarf chopped the spindle into fragments of black wood with his axe, and they burned them too. The wood chips gave off a noxious smoke as they burned, which made the queen cough, and the smell of old magic was heavy in the air.

  Afterwards, they buried the charred wooden fragments beneath a rowan tree.

  By evening they were on the outskirts of the forest, and had reached a cleared track. They could see a village across the hill, and smoke rising from the village chimneys.

  “So,” said the dwarf with the beard. “If we head due west, we can be at the mountains by the end of the week, and we’ll have you back in your palace in Kanselaire within ten days.”

  “Yes,” said the queen.

  “And your wedding will be late, but it will happen soon after your return, and the people will celebrate, and there will be joy unbounded through the kingdom.”

  “Yes,” said the queen. She said nothing, but sat on the moss beneath an oak tree and tasted the stillness, heartbeat by heartbeat.

  There are choices, she thought, when she had sat long enough. There are always choices.

  She made her choice.

  The queen began to walk, and the dwarfs followed her.

  “You do know we’re heading east, don’t you?” said one of the dwarfs.

  “Oh yes,” said the queen.

  “Well, that’s all right then,” said the dwarf.

  They walked to the east, all four of them, away from the sunset and the lands they knew, and into the night.

  A Calendar of Tales

  2013

  January Tale

  WHAP!

  “Is it always like this?” The kid seemed disoriented. He was glancing around the room, unfocused. That would get him killed, if he wasn’t careful.

  Twelve tapped him on the arm. “Nope. Not always. If there’s any trouble, it’ll come from up there.”

  He pointed to an attic door, in the ceiling above them. The door was askew, and the darkness waited behind it like an eye.

  The kid nodded. Then he said, “How long have we got?”

  “Together? Maybe another ten minutes.”

  “One thing I kept asking them at Base, they wouldn’t answer. They said I’d see for myself. Who are they?”

  Twelve didn’t answer. Something had changed, ever so slightly, in the darkness of the attic above them. He touched his finger to his lips, then raised his weapon, and indicated for the kid to do likewise.

  They came tumbling down from the attic-hole: brick-gray and mold-green, sharp-toothed and fast, so fast. The kid was still fumbling at the trigger when Twelve started shooting, and he took them out, all five of them, before the kid could fire a shot.

  He glanced to his left. The kid was shaking.

  “There you go,” he said.

  “I guess I mean, what are they?”

  “What or who. Same thing. They’re the enemy. Slipping in at the edges of time. Right now, at handover, they’re going to be coming out in force.”

  They walked down the stairs together. They were in a small, suburban house. A woman and a man sat in the kitchen, at a table with a bottle of champagne upon it. They did not appear to notice the two men in uniform who walked through the room. The woman was pouring the champagne.

  The kid’s uniform was crisp and dark blue and looked unworn. His yearglass hung on his belt, full of pale sand. Twelve’s uniform was frayed and faded to a bluish gray, patched up where it had been sliced into, or ripped, or burned. They reached the kitchen door and—

  Whap!

  The
y were outside, in a forest, somewhere very cold indeed.

  “DOWN!” called Twelve.

  The sharp thing went over their heads and crashed into a tree behind them.

  The kid said, “I thought you said it wasn’t always like this.”

  Twelve shrugged.

  “Where are they coming from?”

  “Time,” said Twelve. “They’re hiding behind the seconds, trying to get in.”

  In the forest close to them something went whumpf, and a tall fir tree began to burn with a flickering copper-green flame.

  “Where are they?”

  “Above us, again. They’re normally above you or beneath you.” They came down like sparks from a sparkler, beautiful and white and possibly slightly dangerous.

  The kid was getting the hang of it. This time the two of them fired together.

  “Did they brief you?” asked Twelve. As they landed, the sparks looked less beautiful and much more dangerous.

  “Not really. They just told me that it was only for a year.”

  Twelve barely paused to reload. He was grizzled and scarred. The kid looked barely old enough to pick up a weapon. “Did they tell you that a year would be a lifetime?”

  The kid shook his head. Twelve remembered when he was a kid like this, his uniform clean and unburned. Had he ever been so fresh-faced? So innocent?

  He dealt with five of the spark-demons. The kid took care of the remaining three.

  “So it’s a year of fighting,” said the kid.

  “Second by second,” said Twelve.

  Whap!

  The waves crashed on the beach. It was hot here, a Southern Hemisphere January. It was still night, though. Above them fireworks hung in the sky, unmoving. Twelve checked his yearglass: there were only a couple of grains left. He was almost done.

  He scanned the beach, the waves, the rocks.

  “I don’t see it,” he said.

  “I do,” said the kid.

  It rose from the sea as he pointed, something huge beyond the mind’s holding, all bulk and malevolent vastness, all tentacles and claws, and it roared as it rose.

  Twelve had the rocket launcher off his back and over his shoulder. He fired it, and watched as flame blossomed on the creature’s body.

  “Biggest I’ve seen yet,” he said. “Maybe they save the best for last.”

  “Hey,” said the kid, “I’m only at the beginning.”

  It came for them then, crab-claws flailing and snapping, tentacles lashing, maw opening and vainly closing. They sprinted up the sandy ridge.

  The kid was faster than Twelve: he was young, but sometimes that’s an advantage. Twelve’s hip ached, and he stumbled. His final grain of sand was falling through the yearglass when something—a tentacle, he figured—wrapped itself around his leg, and he fell.

  He looked up.

  The kid was standing on the ridge, feet planted like they teach you in boot camp, holding a rocket launcher of unfamiliar design—something after Twelve’s time, he assumed. He began mentally to say his good-byes as he was hauled down the beach, sand scraping his face, and then a dull bang and the tentacle was whipped from his leg as the creature was blown backwards, into the sea.

  He was tumbling through the air as the final grain fell and Midnight took him.

  Twelve opened his eyes in the place the old years go. Fourteen helped him down from the dais.

  “How’d it go?” asked Nineteen Fourteen. She wore a floor-length white skirt and long, white gloves.

  “They’re getting more dangerous every year,” said Twenty Twelve. “The seconds, and the things behind them. But I like the new kid. I think he’s going to do fine.”

  February Tale

  GRAY FEBRUARY SKIES, MISTY white sands, black rocks, and the sea seemed black too, like a monochrome photograph, with only the girl in the yellow raincoat adding any color to the world.

  Twenty years ago the old woman had walked the beach in all weathers, bowed over, staring at the sand, occasionally bending, laboriously, to lift a rock and look beneath it. When she had stopped coming down to the sands, a middle-aged woman, her daughter I assumed, came, and walked the beach with less enthusiasm than her mother. Now that woman had stopped coming, and in her place there was the girl.

  She came towards me. I was the only other person on the beach in that mist. I don’t look much older than her.

  “What are you looking for?” I called.

  She made a face. “What makes you think I’m looking for anything?”

  “You come down here every day. Before you it was the lady, before her the very old lady, with the umbrella.”

  “That was my grandmother,” said the girl in the yellow raincoat. “What did she lose?”

  “A pendant.”

  “It must be very valuable.”

  “Not really. It has sentimental value.”

  “Must be worth more than that, if your family has been looking for it for umpteen years.”

  “Yes.” She hesitated. Then she said, “Grandma said it would take her home again. She said she only came here to look around. She was curious. And then she got worried about having the pendant on her, so she hid it under a rock, so she’d be able to find it again, when she got back. And then, when she got back, she wasn’t sure which rock it was, not anymore. That was fifty years ago.”

  “Where was her home?”

  “She never told us.”

  The way the girl was talking made me ask the question that scared me. “Is she still alive? Your grandmother?”

  “Yes. Sort of. But she doesn’t talk to us these days. She just stares out at the sea. It must be horrible to be so old.”

  I shook my head. It isn’t. Then I put my hand into my coat pocket and held it out to her. “Was it anything like this? I found it on this beach a year ago. Under a rock.”

  The pendant was untarnished by sand or by salt water.

  The girl looked amazed, then she hugged me, and thanked me, and she took the pendant, and ran up the misty beach, in the direction of the little town.

  I watched her go: a splash of gold in a black-and-white world, carrying her grandmother’s pendant in her hand. It was a twin to the one I wore around my own neck.

  I wondered about her grandmother, my little sister, whether she would ever go home; whether she would forgive me for the joke I had played on her if she did. Perhaps she would elect to stay on the earth, and would send the girl home in her place. That might be fun.

  Only when my great-niece was gone and I was alone did I swim upward, letting the pendant pull me home, up into the vastness above us, where we wander with the lonely sky-whales and the skies and seas are one.

  March Tale

  . . . only this we know, that she was not executed.

  —CHARLES JOHNSON,

  A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates

  IT WAS TOO WARM in the great house, and so the two of them went out onto the porch. A spring storm was brewing far to the west. Already the flicker of lightning, and the unpredictable chilly gusts blew about them and cooled them. They sat decorously on the porch swing, the mother and the daughter, and they talked of when the woman’s husband would be home, for he had taken ship with a tobacco crop to faraway England.

  Mary, who was thirteen, so pretty, so easily startled, said, “I do declare. I am glad that all the pirates have gone to the gallows, and Father will come back to us safely.”

  Her mother’s smile was gentle, and it did not fade as she said, “I do not care to talk about pirates, Mary.”

  SHE WAS DRESSED as a boy when she was a girl, to cover up her father’s scandal. She did not wear a woman’s dress until she was on the ship with her father, and with her mother, his serving-girl mistress whom he would call wife in the New World, and they were on their way from Cork to the Carolinas.

  She fell in love for the first time, on that journey, enveloped in unfamiliar cloth, clumsy in her strange skirts. She was eleven, and it was no sailor
who took her heart but the ship itself: Anne would sit in the bows, watching the gray Atlantic roll beneath them, listening to the gulls scream, and feeling Ireland recede with each moment, taking with it all the old lies.

  She left her love when they landed, with regret, and even as her father prospered in the new land she dreamed of the creak and slap of the sails.

  Her father was a good man. He had been pleased when she had returned, and did not speak of her time away: the young man whom she had married, how he had taken her to Providence. She had returned to her family three years after, with a baby at her breast. Her husband had died, she said, and although tales and rumors abounded, even the sharpest of the gossiping tongues did not think to suggest that Annie Riley was the pirate-girl Anne Bonny, Red Rackham’s first mate.

  “If you had fought like a man, you would not have died like a dog.” Those had been Anne Bonny’s last words to the man who put the baby in her belly, or so they said.

  MRS. RILEY WATCHED the lightning play, and heard the first rumble of distant thunder. Her hair was graying now, and her skin just as fair as that of any local woman of property.

  “It sounds like cannon fire,” said Mary (Anne had named her for her own mother, and for her best friend in the years she was away from the great house).

  “Why would you say such things?” asked her mother, primly. “In this house, we do not speak of cannon fire.”

  The first of the March rain fell, then, and Mrs. Riley surprised her daughter by getting up from the porch swing and leaning into the rain, so it splashed her face like sea spray. It was quite out of character for a woman of such respectability.

  As the rain splashed her face she thought herself there: the captain of her own ship, the cannonade around them, the stench of the gunpowder smoke blowing on the salt breeze. Her ship’s deck would be painted red, to mask the blood in battle. The wind would fill her billowing canvas with a snap as loud as cannon’s roar, as they prepared to board the merchant ship, and take whatever they wished, jewels or coin—and burning kisses with her first mate when the madness was done . . .

  “Mother?” said Mary. “I do believe you must be thinking of a great secret. You have such a strange smile on your face.”