The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  A week later, I bought a salmon from a man I met in the pub: I collected it from a cooler in the back of his ancient green van. It was for a birthday dinner. When I cut the salmon open, my mother’s lion ring tumbled out.

  The third time I lost it, I was reading and sunbathing in the back garden. It was August. The ring was on the towel beside me, along with my dark glasses and some suntan lotion, when a large bird (I suspect it was a magpie or a jackdaw, but I may be wrong. It was definitely a corvid of some kind) flew down, and flapped away with my mother’s ring in its beak.

  The ring was returned the following night by a scarecrow, awkwardly animated. He gave me quite a start as he stood there, unmoving under the back door light, and then he lurched off into the darkness once again as soon as I had taken the ring from his straw-stuffed glove hand.

  “Some things aren’t meant to be kept,” I told myself.

  The next morning, I put the ring into the glove compartment of my old car. I drove the car to a wrecker, and I watched, satisfied, as the car was crushed into a cube of metal the size of an old television set, and then put in a container to be shipped to Romania, where it would be processed into useful things.

  In early September I cleared out my bank account. I moved to Brazil, where I took a job as a web designer under an assumed name.

  So far there’s been no sign of Mother’s ring. But sometimes I wake from a deep sleep with my heart pounding, soaked in sweat, wondering how she’s going to give it back to me next time.

  October Tale

  “THAT FEELS GOOD,” I said, and I stretched my neck to get out the last of the cramp.

  It didn’t just feel good, it felt great, actually. I’d been squashed up inside that lamp for so long. You start to think that nobody’s ever going to rub it again.

  “You’re a genie,” said the young lady with the polishing cloth in her hand.

  “I am. You’re a smart girl, toots. What gave me away?”

  “The appearing in a puff of smoke,” she said. “And you look like a genie. You’ve got the turban and the pointy shoes.”

  I folded my arms and blinked. Now I was wearing blue jeans, gray sneakers, and a faded gray sweater: the male uniform of this time and this place. I raised a hand to my forehead, and I bowed deeply.

  “I am the genie of the lamp,” I told her. “Rejoice, O fortunate one. I have it in my power to grant you three wishes. And don’t try the ‘I wish for more wishes’ thing—I won’t play and you’ll lose a wish. Right. Go for it.”

  I folded my arms again.

  “No,” she said. “I mean thanks and all that, but it’s fine. I’m good.”

  “Honey,” I said. “Toots. Sweetie. Perhaps you misheard me. I’m a genie. And the three wishes? We’re talking anything you want. You ever dreamed of flying? I can give you wings. You want to be wealthy, richer than Croesus? You want power? Just say it. Three wishes. Whatever you want.”

  “Like I said,” she said, “thanks. I’m fine. Would you like something to drink? You must be parched after spending so much time in that lamp. Wine? Water? Tea?”

  “Uh . . .” Actually, now she came to mention it, I was thirsty. “Do you have any mint tea?”

  She made me some mint tea in a teapot that was almost a twin to the lamp in which I’d spent the greater part of the last thousand years.

  “Thank you for the tea.”

  “No problem.”

  “But I don’t get it. Everyone I’ve ever met, they start asking for things. A fancy house. A harem of gorgeous women—not that you’d want that, of course . . .”

  “I might,” she said. “You can’t just make assumptions about people. Oh, and don’t call me toots, or sweetie, or any of those things. My name’s Hazel.”

  “Ah!” I understood. “You want a beautiful woman then? My apologies. You have but to wish.” I folded my arms.

  “No,” she said. “I’m good. No wishes. How’s the tea?”

  I told her that the mint tea was the finest I had ever tasted.

  She asked me when I had started feeling a need to grant people’s wishes, and whether I felt a desperate need to please. She asked about my mother, and I told her that she could not judge me as she would judge mortals, for I was a djinn, powerful and wise, magical and mysterious.

  She asked me if I liked hummus, and when I said that I did, she toasted a pita bread, and sliced it up, for me to dip into the hummus. I dipped my bread slices into the hummus, and ate it with delight. The hummus gave me an idea.

  “Just make a wish,” I said, helpfully, “and I could have a meal fit for a sultan brought in to you. Each dish would be finer than the one before, and all served upon golden plates. And you could keep the plates afterwards.”

  “It’s good,” she said, with a smile. “Would you like to go for a walk?”

  We walked together through the town. It felt good to stretch my legs after so many years in the lamp. We wound up in a public park, sitting on a bench by a lake. It was warm, but gusty, and the autumn leaves fell in flurries each time the wind blew.

  I told Hazel about my youth as a djinn, of how we used to eavesdrop on the angels and how they would throw comets at us if they spied us listening. I told her of the bad days of the djinn-wars, and how King Suleiman had imprisoned us inside hollow objects: bottles, lamps, clay pots, that kind of thing.

  She told me of her parents, who were both killed in the same plane crash, and who had left her the house. She told me of her job, illustrating children’s books, a job she had backed into, accidentally, at the point she realized she would never be a really competent medical illustrator, and of how happy she became whenever she was sent a new book to illustrate. She told me she taught life drawing to adults at the local community college one evening a week.

  I saw no obvious flaw in her life, no hole that she could fill by wishing, save one.

  “Your life is good,” I told her. “But you have no one to share it with. Wish, and I will bring you the perfect man. Or woman. A film star. A rich . . . person . . .”

  “No need. I’m good,” she said.

  We walked back to her house, past houses dressed for Hallowe’en.

  “This is not right,” I told her. “People always want things.”

  “Not me. I’ve got everything I need.”

  “Then what do I do?”

  She thought for a moment. Then she pointed at her front yard. “Can you rake the leaves?”

  “Is that your wish?”

  “Nope. Just something you could do while I’m getting our dinner ready.”

  I raked the leaves into a heap by the hedge, to stop the wind from blowing it apart. After dinner, I washed up the dishes. I spent the night in Hazel’s spare bedroom.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want help. She let me help. I ran errands for her, picked up art supplies and groceries. On days she had been painting for a long time, she let me rub her neck and shoulders. I have good, firm hands.

  Shortly before Thanksgiving I moved out of the spare bedroom, across the hall, into the main bedroom, and Hazel’s bed.

  I watched her face this morning as she slept. I stared at the shapes her lips make when she sleeps. The creeping sunlight touched her face, and she opened her eyes and stared at me, and she smiled.

  “You know what I never asked,” she said, “is what about you? What would you wish for if I asked what your three wishes were?”

  I thought for a moment. I put my arm around her, and she snuggled her head into my shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I’m good.”

  November Tale

  THE BRAZIER WAS SMALL and square and made of an aged and fire-blackened metal that might have been copper or brass. It had caught Eloise’s eye at the garage sale because it was twined with animals that might have been dragons and might have been sea-snakes. One of them was missing its head.

  It was only a dollar, and Eloise bought it, along with a red hat with a feather on the side. She began to regret buying the hat e
ven before she got home, and thought perhaps she would give it to someone as a gift. But the letter from the hospital had been waiting for her when she got home, and she put the brazier in the back garden and the hat in the closet as you went into the house, and had not thought of either of them again.

  The months had passed, and so had the desire to leave the house. Every day made her weaker, and each day took more from her. She moved her bed to the room downstairs, because it hurt to walk, because she was too exhausted to climb the stairs, because it was simpler.

  November came, and with it the knowledge that she would never see Christmas.

  There are things you cannot throw away, things you cannot leave for your loved ones to find when you are gone. Things you have to burn.

  She took a black cardboard folder filled with papers and letters and old photographs out into the garden. She filled the brazier with fallen twigs and brown paper shopping bags, and she lit it with a barbecue lighter. Only when it was burning did she open the folder.

  She started with the letters, particularly the ones she would not want other people to see. When she had been at university there had been a professor and a relationship, if you could call it that, which had gone very dark and very wrong very fast. She had all his letters paperclipped together, and she dropped them, one by one, into the flames. There was a photograph of the two of them together, and she dropped it into the brazier last of all, and watched it curl and blacken.

  She was reaching for the next thing in the cardboard folder when she realized that she could not remember the professor’s name, or what he taught, or why the relationship had hurt her as it did, left her almost suicidal for the following year.

  The next thing was a photograph of her old dog, Lassie, on her back beside the oak tree in the backyard. Lassie was dead these seven years, but the tree was still there, leafless now in the November chill. She tossed the photograph into the brazier. She had loved that dog.

  She glanced over to the tree, remembering . . .

  There was no tree in the backyard.

  There wasn’t even a tree stump; only a faded November lawn, strewn with fallen leaves from the trees next door.

  Eloise saw it, and she did not worry that she had gone mad. She got up stiffly and walked into the house. Her reflection in the mirror shocked her, as it always did these days. Her hair so thin, so sparse, her face so gaunt.

  She picked up the papers from the table beside her makeshift bed: a letter from her oncologist was on the top, beneath it a dozen pages of numbers and words. There were more papers beneath it, all with the hospital logo on the top of the first page. She picked them up and, for good measure, she picked up the hospital bills as well. Insurance covered so much of it, but not all.

  She walked back outside, pausing in the kitchen to catch her breath.

  The brazier waited, and she threw her medical information into the flames. She watched them brown and blacken and turn to ash on the November wind.

  Eloise got up, when the last of the medical records had burned away, and she walked inside. The mirror in the hall showed her an Eloise both familiar and new: she had thick brown hair, and she smiled at herself from the looking glass as if she loved life and trailed comfort in her wake.

  Eloise went to the hall closet. There was a red hat on the shelf she could barely remember, but she put it on, worried that the red might make her face look washed out and sallow. She looked in the mirror. She appeared just fine. She tipped the hat at a jauntier angle.

  Outside the last of the smoke from the black snake-wound brazier drifted on the chilly November air.

  December Tale

  SUMMER ON THE STREETS is hard, but you can sleep in a park in the summer without dying from the cold. Winter is different. Winter can be lethal. And even if it isn’t, the cold still takes you as its special homeless friend, and it insinuates itself into every part of your life.

  Donna had learned from the old hands. The trick, they told her, is to sleep wherever you can during the day—the Circle line is good, buy a ticket and ride all day, snoozing in the carriage, and so are the kinds of cheap cafés where they don’t mind an eighteen-year-old girl spending fifty pence on a cup of tea and then dozing off in a corner for an hour or three, as long as she looks more or less respectable—but to keep moving at night, when the temperatures plummet, and the warm places close their doors, and lock them, and turn off the lights.

  It was nine at night and Donna was walking. She kept to well-lit areas, and she wasn’t ashamed to ask for money. Not anymore. People could always say no, and mostly they did.

  There was nothing familiar about the woman on the street corner. If there had been, Donna wouldn’t have approached her. It was her nightmare, someone from Biddenden seeing her like this: the shame, and the fear that they’d tell her mum (who never said much, who only said “good riddance” when she heard Gran had died) and then her mum would tell her dad, and he might just come down here and look for her, and try to bring her home. And that would break her. She didn’t ever want to see him again.

  The woman on the corner had stopped, puzzled, and was looking around as if she was lost. Lost people were sometimes good for change, if you could tell them the way to where they wanted to go.

  Donna stepped closer, and said, “Spare any change?”

  The woman looked down at her. And then the expression on her face changed and she looked like . . . Donna understood the cliché then, understood why people would say She looked like she had seen a ghost. She did. The woman said, “You?”

  “Me?” said Donna. If she had recognized the woman she might have backed away, she might even have run off, but she didn’t know her. The woman looked a little like Donna’s mum, but kinder, softer, plump where Donna’s mum was pinched. It was hard to see what she really looked like because she was wearing thick black winter clothes, and a thick woolen bobble cap, but her hair beneath the cap was as orange as Donna’s own.

  The woman said, “Donna.” Donna would have run then, but she didn’t, she stayed where she was because it was just too crazy, too unlikely, too ridiculous for words.

  The woman said, “Oh god. Donna. You are you, aren’t you? I remember.” Then she stopped. She seemed to be blinking back tears.

  Donna looked at the woman, as an unlikely, ridiculous idea filled her head, and she said, “Are you who I think you are?”

  The woman nodded. “I’m you,” she said. “Or I will be. One day. I was walking this way remembering what it was like back when I . . . when you . . .” Again she stopped. “Listen. It won’t be like this for you forever. Or even for very long. Just don’t do anything stupid. And don’t do anything permanent. I promise it will be all right. Like the YouTube videos, you know? It Gets Better.”

  “What’s a you tube?” asked Donna.

  “Oh, lovey,” said the woman. And she put her arms around Donna and pulled her close and held her tight.

  “Will you take me home with you?” asked Donna.

  “I can’t,” said the woman. “Home isn’t there for you yet. You haven’t met any of the people who are going to help you get off the street, or help you get a job. You haven’t met the person who’s going to turn out to be your partner. And you’ll both make a place that’s safe, for each other and for your children. Somewhere warm.”

  Donna felt the anger rising inside her. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

  “So you know it gets better. To give you hope.”

  Donna stepped back. “I don’t want hope,” she said. “I want somewhere warm. I want a home. I want it now. Not in twenty years.”

  A hurt expression on the placid face. “It’s sooner than twen—”

  “I don’t care! It’s not tonight. I don’t have anywhere to go. And I’m cold. Have you got any change?”

  The woman nodded. “Here,” she said. She opened her purse and took out a twenty-pound note. Donna took it, but the money didn’t look like any currency she was familiar with. She looked back at the wom
an to ask her something, but she was gone, and when Donna looked back at her hand, so was the money.

  She stood there shivering. The money was gone, if it had ever been there. But she had kept one thing: she knew it would all work out someday. In the end. And she knew that she didn’t need to do anything stupid. She didn’t have to buy one last Underground ticket just to be able to jump down onto the tracks when she saw a train coming, too close to stop.

  The winter wind was bitter, and it bit her and it cut her to the bone, but still, she spotted something blown up against a shop doorway, and she reached down and picked it up: a five-pound note. Perhaps tomorrow would be easier. She didn’t have to do any of the things she had imagined herself doing.

  December could be lethal, when you were out on the streets. But not this year. Not tonight.

  Nothing O’Clock

  2013

  I.

  THE TIME LORDS BUILT a prison. They built it in a time and place that are equally as unimaginable to any entity who has never left the solar system in which it was spawned, or who has only experienced the journey into the future one second at a time, and that going forward. It was built solely for the Kin. It was impregnable: a complex of small, nicely appointed rooms (for they were not monsters, the Time Lords. They could be merciful, when it suited them), out of temporal phase with the rest of the Universe.

  There were, in that place, only those rooms: the gulf between microseconds was one that could not be crossed. In effect, those rooms became a Universe in themselves, one that borrowed light and heat and gravity from the rest of creation, always a fraction of a moment away.

  The Kin prowled its rooms, patient and deathless, and always waiting.

  It was waiting for a question. It could wait until the end of time. (But even then, when Time Ended, the Kin would never perceive it, imprisoned in the micro-moment away from time.)

  The Time Lords maintained the prison with huge engines they built in the hearts of black holes, unreachable: no one would be able to get to the engines, save the Time Lords themselves. The multiple engines were a fail-safe. Nothing could ever go wrong.