The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  “I don’t think so, given all the trouble I’ve been through to make this happen,” said the other. He had the head of a greenish-gray elephant. His tusks were sharp and stained reddish brown at the tips. “You know, I swore when I found out what you had done that I would make you scream and beg for mercy. And I swore I’d say no, to giving you mercy, when you begged for it.”

  “You could say yes, instead,” said the Marquis.

  “I couldn’t say yes. Hospitality abused,” said the Elephant. “I never forget.”

  The Marquis had been commissioned to bring Victoria the Elephant’s diary, when he and the world had been much younger. The Elephant ran his fiefdom arrogantly, sometimes viciously and with no tenderness or humor, and the Marquis had thought that the Elephant was stupid. He had even believed that there was no way that the Elephant would correctly identify his role in the disappearance of the diary. It had been a long time ago, though, when the Marquis was young and foolish.

  “This whole spending years training up a guide to betray me just on the off chance I’d come along and hire her,” said the Marquis. “Isn’t that a bit of an overreaction?”

  “Not if you know me,” said the Elephant. “If you know me, it’s pretty mild. I did lots of other things to find you too.”

  The Marquis tried to sit up. The Elephant pushed him back to the floor, with one bare foot. “Beg for mercy,” said the Elephant.

  That one was easy. “Mercy!” said the Marquis. “I beg! I plead! Show me mercy—the finest of all gifts. It befits you, mighty Elephant, as lord of your own demesne, to be merciful to one who is not even fit to wipe the dust from your excellent toes . . .”

  “Did you know,” said the Elephant, “that everything you say sounds sarcastic?”

  “I didn’t. I apologize. I meant every single word of it.”

  “Scream,” said the Elephant.

  The Marquis de Carabas screamed very loudly and very long. It is hard to scream when your throat has been recently cut, but he screamed as hard and piteously as he could.

  “You even scream sarcastically,” said the Elephant.

  There was a large black cast-iron pipe jutting out from the wall. A wheel in the side of the pipe allowed whatever came out of the pipe to be turned on and turned off. The Elephant hauled on it with powerful arms, and a trickle of dark sludge came out, followed by a spurt of water.

  “Drainage overflow,” said the Elephant. “Now. Thing is, I do my homework. You keep your life well hidden, de Carabas. You have done all these years, since you and I first crossed paths. No point in even trying anything as long as you had your life elsewhere. I’ve had people all over London Below—people you’ve eaten with, people you’ve slept with or laughed with or wound up naked in the clock tower of Big Ben with—but there was never any point in taking it further, not as long as your life was still carefully tucked out of harm’s way. Until last week, when the word under the street was that your life was out of its box. And that was when I put the word out, that I’d give the freedom of the Castle to the first person to let me see—”

  “See me scream for mercy,” said de Carabas. “You said.”

  “You interrupted me,” said the Elephant, mildly. “I was going to say, I was going to give the freedom of the Castle to the first person to let me see your dead body.”

  He pulled the wheel the rest of the way and the spurt of water became a gush.

  “I ought to warn you. There is,” said de Carabas, “a curse on the hand of anyone who kills me.”

  “I’ll take the curse,” said the Elephant. “Although you’re probably making it up. You’ll like the next bit. The room fills with water, and then you drown. Then I let the water out, and I come in, and I laugh a lot.” He made a trumpeting noise that might, de Carabas reflected, have been a laugh, if you were an elephant.

  The Elephant stepped out of de Carabas’s line of sight.

  The Marquis heard a door bang. He was lying in a puddle. He writhed and wriggled, then got to his feet. He looked down: there was a metal cuff around his ankle, which was chained to a metal pole in the center of the room.

  He wished he were wearing his coat: there were blades in his coat; there were picklocks; there were buttons that were nowhere nearly as innocent and buttonlike as they appeared to be. He rubbed the rope that bound his wrists against the metal pole, hoping to make it fray, feeling the skin of his wrists and palms rubbing off even as the rope absorbed the water and tightened about him. The water level continued to rise; already it was up to his waist.

  De Carabas looked about the circular chamber. All he had to do was free himself from the bonds that tied his wrists—obviously by loosening the pole to which he was bound—and then he would open the cuff around his ankle, turn off the water, get out of the room, avoid a revenge-driven Elephant and any of his assorted thugs, and get away.

  He tugged on the pole. It didn’t move. He tugged on it harder. It didn’t move some more.

  He slumped against the pole, and he thought about death, a true, final death, and he thought about his coat.

  A voice whispered in his ear. It said, “Quiet!”

  Something tugged at his wrists, and his bonds fell away. It was only as life came back into his wrists that he realized how tightly he had been bound. He turned around.

  He said, “What?”

  The face that met his was as familiar as his own. The smile was devastating, the eyes were guileless and adventuresome.

  “Ankle,” said the man, with a new smile that was even more devastating than the previous one.

  The Marquis de Carabas was not devastated. He raised his leg, and the man reached down, did something with a piece of wire, and removed the leg cuff.

  “I heard you were having a spot of bother,” said the man. His skin was as dark as the Marquis’s own. He was less than an inch taller than de Carabas, but he held himself as if he were easily taller than anyone he was ever likely to meet.

  “No. No bother. I’m fine,” said the Marquis. “You aren’t. I just rescued you.”

  De Carabas ignored this. “Where’s the Elephant?”

  “On the other side of that door, with a number of the people working for him. The doors lock automatically when the hall is filled with water. He needed to be certain that he wouldn’t be trapped in here with you. It was what I was counting on.”

  “Counting on?”

  “Of course. I’d been following them for several hours. Ever since I heard that you’d gone off with one of the Elephant’s plants. I thought, Bad move, I thought. He’ll be needing a hand with that.”

  “You heard . . . ?”

  “Look,” said the man, who looked a little like the Marquis de Carabas, only he was taller, and perhaps some people—not the Marquis, obviously—might have thought him just a hair more attractive, “you don’t think I was going to let anything happen to my little brother, did you?”

  They were up to their waists in water. “I was fine,” said de Carabas. “I had it all under control.”

  The man walked over to the far end of the room. He knelt down, fumbled in the water, then, from his backpack, he produced something that looked like a short crowbar. He pushed one end of it beneath the surface of the water. “Get ready,” he said. “I think this should be our quickest way out of here.”

  The Marquis was still flexing his pins-and-needles cramping fingers, trying to rub life back into them. “What is it?” he said, trying to sound unimpressed.

  The man said, “There we go,” and pulled up a large square of metal. “It’s the drain.” De Carabas did not have a chance to protest, as his brother picked him up and dropped him down a hole in the floor.

  Probably, thought de Carabas, there are rides like this at funfairs. He could imagine them. Upworlders might pay good money to take this ride, if they were certain they would survive it.

  He crashed through pipes, swept along by the flow of water, always heading down and deeper. He was not certain he was going to survive the ride
, and he was not having fun.

  The Marquis’s body was bruised and battered as he rode the water down the pipe. He tumbled out, facedown, onto a large metal grate, which seemed scarcely able to hold his weight. He crawled off the grate onto the rock floor beside it, and he shivered.

  There was an unlikely sort of a noise, and it was immediately followed by his brother, who shot out of the pipe and landed on his feet, as if he’d been practicing. He smiled. “Fun, eh?”

  “Not really,” said the Marquis de Carabas. And then he had to ask. “Were you just going ‘Whee!’?”

  “Of course! Weren’t you?” asked his brother.

  De Carabas got to his feet, unsteadily. He said only, “What are you calling yourself these days?”

  “Still the same. I don’t change.”

  “It’s not your real name, Peregrine,” said de Carabas.

  “It’ll do. It marks my territory and my intentions. You’re still calling yourself a Marquis, then?” said Peregrine.

  “I am, because I say I am,” said the Marquis. He looked, he was sure, like a drowned thing, and sounded, he was certain, unconvincing. He felt small and foolish.

  “Your choice. Anyway, I’m off. You don’t need me anymore. Stay out of trouble. You don’t actually have to thank me.” His brother meant it, of course. That was what stung the hardest.

  The Marquis de Carabas hated himself. He hadn’t wanted to say it, but now it had to be said. “Thank you, Peregrine.”

  “Oh!” said Peregrine. “Your coat. Word on the street is, it wound up in Shepherd’s Bush. That’s all I know. So. Advice. Mean this most sincerely. I know you don’t like advice. But, the coat? Let it go. Forget about it. Just get a new coat. Honest.”

  “Well then,” said the Marquis.

  “Well,” said Peregrine, and he grinned, and shook himself like a dog, spraying water everywhere, before he slipped into the shadows and was gone.

  The Marquis de Carabas stood and dripped balefully.

  He had a little time before the Elephant discovered the lack of water in the room, and the lack of a body, and came looking for him.

  He checked his shirt pocket: the sandwich bag was there, and the envelope appeared safe and dry inside it.

  He wondered, for a moment, about something that had bothered him since the Market. Why would the Mushroom lad use him, de Carabas, to send a letter to the fair Drusilla? And what kind of letter could persuade a member of the Raven’s Court, and one with a star on her hand at that, to give up her life at the court, and love one of the Mushroom folk?

  A suspicion occurred to him. It was not a comfortable idea, nor a charitable one, but it was swept aside by more immediate problems.

  He could hide: lie low, for a while. All this would pass. But there was the coat to think about. He had been rescued—rescued!—by his brother, something that would never have happened under normal circumstances. He could get a new coat. Of course he could. But it would not be his coat.

  A shepherd had his coat.

  The Marquis de Carabas always had a plan, and he always had a fallback plan; and beneath these plans he always had a real plan, one that he would not even let himself know about, for when the original plan and the fallback plan had both gone south.

  Now, it pained him to admit to himself, he had no plan. He did not even have a normal, boring, obvious plan that he could abandon as soon as things got tricky. He just had a want, and it drove him as their need for food or love or safety drove those the Marquis considered lesser men.

  He was planless. He just wanted his coat back.

  The Marquis de Carabas began walking. He had an envelope containing a love poem in his pocket, he was wrapped in a damp blanket, and he hated his brother for rescuing him.

  When you create yourself from scratch you need a model of some kind, something to aim towards or head away from—all the things you want to be, or intentionally want not to be.

  The Marquis had known whom he had wanted not to be, when he was a boy. He had definitely not wanted to be like Peregrine. He had not wanted to be like anyone at all. He had, instead, wanted to be elegant, elusive, brilliant, and, above all things, he had wanted to be unique.

  Just like Peregrine.

  THE THING WAS, he had been told, by a former shepherd, on the run, whom he had helped across the Tyburn River, to freedom, and to a short but happy life as a camp entertainer for the Roman Legion who waited there, beside the river, for orders that would never come, that the shepherds never made you do anything. They just took your natural impulses and desires and they pushed them, reinforced them, so you acted quite naturally, only you acted in the ways that they wanted.

  He remembered that, and then he forgot it, because he was scared of being alone.

  The Marquis had not known until just this moment quite how scared he was of being alone, and was surprised by how happy he was to see several other people walking in the same direction as he was.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” one of them called.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” called another.

  “I’m glad I’m here too,” said de Carabas. Where was he going? Where were they going? So good that they were all traveling the same way together. There was safety in numbers.

  “It’s good to be together,” said a thin white woman, with a happy sort of a sigh. And it was.

  “It’s good to be together,” said the Marquis.

  “Indeed it is. It’s good to be together,” said his neighbor on the other side. There was something familiar about this person. He had huge ears, like fans, and a nose like a thick, gray-green snake. The Marquis began to wonder if he had ever met this person before, and was trying to remember exactly where, when he was tapped gently on the shoulder by a man holding a large stick with a curved end.

  “We never want to fall out of step, do we?” said the man, reasonably, and the Marquis thought, Of course we don’t, and he sped up a little, so he was back in step once more.

  “That’s good. Out of step is out of mind,” said the man with the stick, and he moved on.

  “Out of step is out of mind,” said the Marquis, aloud, wondering how he could have missed knowing something so obvious, so basic. There was a tiny part of him, somewhere distant, that wondered what that actually meant.

  They reached the place they were going, and it was good to be among friends.

  Time passed strangely in that place, but soon enough the Marquis and his friend with the gray-green face and the long nose were given a job to do, a real job, and it was this: they disposed of those members of the flock who could no longer move or serve, once anything that might be of use had been removed and reused. They removed the last of what was left, hair and tallow fat and all, then they dragged them to the pit, and dropped the remnants in. The shifts were long and tiring, and the work was messy, but the two of them did it together and they stayed in step.

  They had been working proudly together for several days when the Marquis noticed an irritant. Someone appeared to be trying to attract his attention. “I followed you,” whispered the stranger. “I know you didn’t want me to. But, well, needs must.”

  The Marquis did not know what the stranger was talking about.

  “I’ve got an escape plan, as soon as I can wake you up,” said the stranger. “Please wake up.”

  The Marquis was awake. Again, he found he did not know what the stranger was talking about. Why did the man think he was asleep? The Marquis would have said something, but he had to work. He pondered this, while dismembering the next former member of the flock, until he decided there was something he could say, to explain why the stranger was irritating him. He said it aloud. “It’s good to work,” said the Marquis.

  His friend, with the long, flexible nose, and the huge ears, nodded his head at this.

  They worked. After a while his friend hauled what was left of some former members of the flock over to the pit, and pushed them in. The pit went down a long way.

  The Marquis tried to ig
nore the stranger, who was now standing behind him. He was quite put out when he felt something slapped over his mouth, and his hands being bound together behind his back. He was not certain what he was meant to do. It made him feel quite out of step with the flock, and he would have complained, would have called out to his friend, but his lips were now stuck together and he was unable to do more than make ineffectual noises.

  “It’s me,” whispered the voice from behind him, urgently. “Peregrine. Your brother. You’ve been captured by the shepherds. We have to get you out of here.” And then, “Uh-oh.”

  A noise in the air, like something barking. It came closer: a high yip-yipping that turned suddenly into a triumphant howl, and was answered by matching howls from around them.

  A voice barked, “Where’s your flockmate?”

  A low, elephantine voice rumbled, “He went over there. With the other one.”

  “Other one?”

  The Marquis hoped they would come and find him and sort this all out. There was obviously some sort of mistake going on. He wanted to be in step with the flock, and now he was out of step, an unwilling victim. He wanted to work.

  “Lud’s gate!” muttered Peregrine. And then they were surrounded by the shapes of people who were not exactly people: they were sharp of face, and dressed in furs. They spoke excitedly to each other.

  The people untied the Marquis’s hands, although they left the tape on his face. He did not mind. He had nothing to say.

  The Marquis was relieved it was all over and looked forward to getting back to work, but, to his slight puzzlement, he, his kidnapper, and his friend with the huge long flexible nose were walked away from the pit, along a causeway, and, eventually, into a honeycomb of little rooms, each room filled with people toiling away in step.

  Up some narrow stairs. One of their escorts, dressed in rough furs, scratched at a door. A voice called, “Enter!” and the Marquis felt a thrill that was almost sexual. That voice. That was the voice of someone the Marquis had spent his whole life wanting to please. (His whole life went back, what? A week? Two weeks?)