The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  “A stray lamb,” said one of the escorts. “And his predator. Also his flockmate.”

  The room was large, and hung with oil paintings: landscapes, mostly, stained with age and smoke and dust. “Why?” said the man, sitting at a desk in the back of the room. He did not turn around. “Why do you bother me with this nonsense?”

  “Because,” said a voice, and the Marquis recognized it as that of his would-be kidnapper, “you gave orders that if ever I were to be apprehended within the bounds of the Shepherd’s Bush, I was to be brought to you to dispose of personally.”

  The man pushed his chair back and got up. He walked towards them, stepping into the light. There was a wooden crook propped against the wall, and he picked it up as he passed. For several long moments he looked at them.

  “Peregrine?” he said, at last, and the Marquis thrilled at his voice. “I had heard that you had gone into retirement. Become a monk or something. I never dreamed you’d dare to come back.”

  (Something very big was filling the Marquis’s head. Something was filling his heart and his mind. It was something enormous, something he could almost touch.)

  The shepherd reached out a hand and ripped the tape from the Marquis’s mouth. The Marquis knew he should have been overjoyed by this, should have been thrilled to get attention from this man.

  “And now I see . . . who would have thought it?” The shepherd’s voice was deep and resonant. “He is here already. And already one of ours? The Marquis de Carabas. You know, Peregrine, I had been looking forward to ripping out your tongue, to grinding your fingers away while you watched, but think how much more delightful it would be if the last thing you ever saw was your own brother, one of our flock, as the instrument of your doom.”

  (An enormous thing filled the Marquis’s head.)

  The shepherd was plump, well-fed, and was excellently dressed. He had sandy-gray-colored hair and a harassed expression. He wore a remarkable coat, even if it was somewhat tight on him. The coat was the color of a wet street at midnight.

  The enormous thing filling his head, the Marquis realized, was rage. It was rage, and it burned through the Marquis like a forest fire, devouring everything in its path with a red flame.

  The coat. It was elegant. It was beautiful. It was so close that he could have reached out and touched it.

  And it was unquestionably his.

  The Marquis de Carabas did nothing to indicate that he had woken up. That would have been a mistake. He thought, and he thought fast, and what he thought had nothing to do with the room he was in. The Marquis had only one advantage over the shepherd and his dogs: he knew he was awake and in control of his thoughts, and they did not.

  He hypothesized. He tested his hypothesis in his head. And then, he acted. “Excuse me,” he said, blandly. “But I’m afraid I do need to be getting along. Can we hurry this up? I’m late for something that’s frightfully important.”

  The shepherd leaned on his crook. He did not appear to be concerned by this. He said only, “You’ve left the flock, de Carabas.”

  “It would appear so,” said the Marquis. “Hello, Peregrine. Wonderful to see you looking so sprightly. And the Elephant. How delightful. The gang’s all here.” He turned his attention back to the shepherd. “Wonderful meeting you, delightful to spend a modicum of time as one of your little band of serious thinkers. But I really must be tootling off now. Important diplomatic mission. Letter to deliver. You know how it is.”

  Peregrine said, “My brother, I’m not sure that you understand the gravity of the situation here . . .”

  The Marquis, who understood the gravity of the situation perfectly, said, “I’m sure these nice people”—he gestured to the shepherd and to the three fur-clad, sharp-faced sheepdog people who were standing about them—“will let me head out of here, leaving you behind. It’s you they want, not me. And I have something extremely important to deliver.”

  Peregrine said, “I can handle this.”

  “You have to be quiet now,” said the shepherd. He took the strip of tape he had removed from the Marquis’s mouth and pressed it down over Peregrine’s.

  The shepherd was shorter than the Marquis, and fatter, and the magnificent coat looked faintly ridiculous on him. “Something important to deliver?” asked the shepherd, brushing dust from his fingers. “What exactly are we talking about here?”

  “I am afraid I cannot possibly tell you that,” said the Marquis. “You are, after all, not the intended recipient of this particular diplomatic communiqué.”

  “Why not? What’s it say? Who’s it for?”

  The Marquis shrugged. His coat was so close that he could have reached out and stroked it. “Only the threat of death could force me even to show it to you,” he said reluctantly.

  “Well, that’s easy. I threaten you with death. That’s in addition to the death sentence you’re already under as an apostate member of the flock. And as for laughing boy here”—the shepherd gestured with his crook towards Peregrine, who was not laughing—“he’s tried to steal a member of the flock. That’s a death sentence too, in addition to everything else we’re planning to do to him.”

  The shepherd looked at the Elephant. “And, I know I should have asked before, but what in the Auld Witch’s name is this?”

  “I am a loyal member of the flock,” said the Elephant, humbly, in his deep voice, and the Marquis wondered if he had himself sounded so soulless and flat when he had been part of the flock. “I have remained loyal and in step even when this one did not.”

  “And the flock is grateful for all your hard work,” said the shepherd. He reached out a hand and touched the sharp tip of one Elephantine tusk, experimentally. “I’ve never seen anything like you before, and if I never see another one again it’ll be too soon. Probably best if you die too.”

  The Elephant’s ears twitched. “But I am of the flock . . .”

  The shepherd looked up into the Elephant’s huge face. “Better safe than sorry,” he said. Then, to the Marquis: “Well? Where is this important letter?”

  The Marquis de Carabas said, “It is inside my shirt. I must repeat that it is the most significant document that I have ever been charged to deliver. I must ask you not to look at it. For your own safety.”

  The shepherd tugged at the front of the Marquis’s shirt. The buttons flew, and rattled off the walls onto the floor. The letter, in its sandwich bag, was in the pocket inside the shirt.

  “This is most unfortunate. I trust you will read it aloud to us before we die,” said the Marquis. “But whether or not you read it to us, I can promise that Peregrine and I will be holding our breath. Won’t we, Peregrine?”

  The shepherd opened the sandwich bag, then he looked at the envelope. He ripped it open and pulled a sheet of discolored paper from inside it. Dust came from the envelope as the paper came out. The dust hung in the still air in that dim room.

  “ ‘My darling beautiful Drusilla,’ ” read the shepherd, aloud. “ ‘While I know that you do not presently feel about me as I feel about you . . . ’ What is this nonsense?”

  The Marquis said nothing. He did not even smile. He was, as he had stated, holding his breath; he was hoping that Peregrine had listened to him; and he was counting, because at that moment counting seemed like the best possible thing that he could do to distract himself from needing to breathe. He would soon need to breathe.

  Thirty-five . . . thirty-six . . . thirty-seven . . .

  He wondered how long mushroom spores remained in the air.

  Forty-three . . . forty-four . . . forty-five . . . forty-six . . .

  The shepherd had stopped speaking.

  The Marquis took a step backward, fearing a knife in his ribs or teeth in his throat from the rough-furred guard-dog men, but there was nothing. He walked backward, away from the dog-men, and the Elephant.

  He saw that Peregrine was also walking backward.

  His lungs hurt. His heart was pounding in his temples, pounding almost loudly enough to dro
wn out the thin ringing noise in his ears.

  Only when the Marquis’s back was against a bookcase on the wall and he was as far as he could possibly get from the envelope did he allow himself to take a deep breath. He heard Peregrine breathe in too.

  There was a stretching noise. Peregrine opened his mouth wide, and the tape dropped to the ground. “What,” asked Peregrine, “was all that about?”

  “Our way out of this room, and our way out of Shepherd’s Bush, if I am not mistaken,” said de Carabas. “As I so rarely am. Would you mind unbinding my wrists?”

  He felt Peregrine’s hands on his bound hands, and then the bindings fell away. There was a low rumbling. “I’m going to kill somebody,” said the Elephant. “As soon as I figure out who.”

  “Whoa, dear heart,” said the Marquis, rubbing his hands together. “You mean whom.” The shepherd and the sheepdogs were taking awkward, experimental steps towards the door. “And I can assure you that you aren’t going to kill anybody, not as long as you want to get home to the Castle safely.”

  The Elephant’s trunk swished irritably. “I’m definitely going to kill you.”

  The Marquis grinned. “You are going to force me to say pshaw,” he said. “Or fiddlesticks. Until this moment I have never had the slightest yearning to say fiddlesticks. But I can feel it right now welling up inside me—”

  “What, by the Temple and the Arch, has got into you?” asked the Elephant.

  “Wrong question. But I shall ask the right question on your behalf. The question is actually, what hasn’t got into the three of us? It hasn’t got into Peregrine and me because we were holding our breath. It hasn’t got into you because, I don’t know, probably because you’re an elephant, with nice thick skin, more likely because you were breathing through your trunk, which is down at ground level—and what did get into our captors? And the answer is, what hasn’t got into us are the selfsame spores that have got into our portly shepherd and his pseudocanine companions.”

  “Spores of the Mushroom?” asked Peregrine. “The Mushroom People’s the Mushroom?”

  “Indeed. That selfsame Mushroom,” agreed the Marquis.

  “Blimming heck,” said the Elephant.

  “Which is why,” de Carabas told the Elephant, “if you attempt to kill me, or to kill Peregrine, you will not only fail but you will doom us all. Whereas if you shut up and we all do our best to look as if we are still part of the flock, then we have a chance. The spores will be threading their way into their brains now. And any moment now the Mushroom will begin calling them home.”

  A SHEPHERD WALKED, implacably. He held a wooden crook. Three men followed him. One of those men had the head of an elephant; one was tall and ridiculously handsome; and the last of the flock wore a most magnificent coat. It fit him perfectly, and it was the color of a wet street at night.

  The flock were followed by guard dogs, who moved as if they were ready to walk through fire to get wherever they believed that they were going.

  It was not unusual in Shepherd’s Bush to see a shepherd and part of his flock moving from place to place, accompanied by several of the fiercest sheepdogs (who were human, or had been, once). So when they saw a shepherd and three sheepdogs apparently leading three members of the flock away from Shepherd’s Bush, none of the greater flock paid them any mind. The members of the flock who saw them simply did the same things they had always done, as members of the flock, and if they were aware that the influence of the shepherds had waned a little, then they patiently waited for another shepherd to come and to take care of them and to keep them safe from predators and from the world. It was a scary thing to be alone, after all.

  Nobody noticed as they crossed the bounds of Shepherd’s Bush, and still they kept on walking.

  The seven of them reached the banks of the Kilburn, where they stopped, and the former shepherd and the three shaggy dog-men strode out into the water.

  There was, the Marquis knew, nothing in the four men’s heads at that moment but a need to get to the Mushroom, to taste its flesh once more, to let it live inside them, to serve it, and to serve it well. In exchange, the Mushroom would fix all the things about themselves that they hated: it would make their interior lives much happier and more interesting.

  “Should’ve let me kill ’em,” said the Elephant as the former shepherd and sheepdogs waded away.

  “No point,” said the Marquis. “Not even for revenge. The people who captured us don’t exist any longer.”

  The Elephant flapped his ears hard, then scratched them vigorously. “Talking about revenge, who the hell did you steal my diary for anyway?” he asked.

  “Victoria,” admitted de Carabas.

  “Not actually on my list of potential thieves. She’s a deep one,” said the Elephant, after a moment.

  “I’ll not argue with that,” said the Marquis. “Also, she failed to pay me the entire amount agreed. I wound up obtaining my own lagniappe to make up the deficit.”

  He reached a dark hand into the inside of his coat. His fingers found the obvious pockets, and the less obvious, and then, to his surprise, the least obvious of all. He reached inside it, and pulled out a magnifying glass on a chain. “It was Victoria’s,” he said. “I believe you can use it to see through solid things. Perhaps this could be considered a small payment against my debt to you . . . ?”

  The Elephant took something out of its own pocket—the Marquis could not see what it was—and squinted at it through the magnifying glass. Then the Elephant made a noise halfway between a delighted snort and a trumpet of satisfaction. “Oh fine, very fine,” it said. It pocketed both of the objects. Then it said, “I suppose that saving my life outranks stealing my diary. And while I wouldn’t have needed saving if I hadn’t followed you down the drain, further recriminations are pointless. Consider your life your own once more.”

  “I look forward to visiting you in the Castle someday,” said the Marquis.

  “Don’t push your luck, mate,” said the Elephant, with an irritable swish of his trunk.

  “I won’t,” said the Marquis, resisting the urge to point out that pushing his luck was the only way he had made it this far. He looked around and realized that Peregrine had slipped mysteriously and irritatingly away into the shadows, once more, without so much as a good-bye.

  The Marquis hated it when people did that.

  He made a small, courtly bow to the Elephant, and the Marquis’s coat, his glorious coat, caught the bow, amplified it, made it perfect, and made it the kind of bow that only the Marquis de Carabas could ever possibly make. Whoever he was.

  THE NEXT FLOATING Market was being held in Derry and Tom’s Roof Garden. There had been no Derry and Tom’s since 1973, but time and space and London Below had their own uncomfortable agreement, and the roof garden was younger and more innocent than it is today. The folk from London Above (they were young, and in an intense discussion, and they had stacked heels and paisley tops and bell-bottom flares, the men and the women) ignored the folk from London Below entirely.

  The Marquis de Carabas strode through the roof garden as if he owned the place, walking swiftly until he reached the food court. He passed a tiny woman selling curling cheese sandwiches from a wheelbarrow piled high with the things, a curry stall, a short man with a huge glass bowl of pale white blind fish and a toasting fork, until, finally, he reached the stall that was selling the Mushroom.

  “Slice of the Mushroom, well grilled, please,” said the Marquis de Carabas.

  The man who took his order was shorter than he was, and still somewhat stouter. He had sandy, receding hair and a harried expression.

  “Coming right up,” said the man. “Anything else?”

  “No, that’s all.” And then, curiously, the Marquis asked, “Do you remember me?”

  “I am afraid not,” said the Mushroom man. “But I must say, that is a most beautiful coat.”

  “Thank you,” said the Marquis de Carabas. He looked around. “Where is the young fellow who used
to work here?”

  “Ah. That is a most curious story, sir,” said the man. He did not yet smell of damp, although there was a small encrustation of mushrooms on the side of his neck. “I am informed that somebody told the fair Drusilla, of the Court of the Raven, that our Vince had designs upon her, and had—you may not credit it, but I am assured that it is so—apparently sent her a letter filled with spores with the intention of making her his bride in the Mushroom.”

  The Marquis raised an eyebrow quizzically, although he found none of this surprising. He had, after all, told Drusilla himself, and had even shown her the original letter. “Did she take well to the news?”

  “I do not believe that she did, sir. I do not believe that she did. She and several of her sisters were waiting for Vince, and they all caught up with us on our way to the Market. She told him they had matters to discuss, of an intimate nature. He seemed delighted by this news, and went off with her, to find out what these matters were. I have been waiting for him to arrive at the Market and come and work all evening, but I no longer believe he will be coming.” Then the man said, a little wistfully, “That is a very fine coat. It seems to me that I might have had one like it, in a former life.”

  “I do not doubt it,” said the Marquis de Carabas, satisfied with what he had heard, cutting into his grilled slice of the Mushroom, “but this particular coat is most definitely mine.”

  As he made his way out of the Market, he passed a clump of people descending the stairs and he paused and nodded at a young woman of uncommon grace. She had the long orange hair and the flattened profile of a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, and there was a birthmark in the shape of a five-pointed star on the back of one hand. Her other hand was stroking the head of a large, rumpled owl, which glared uncomfortably out at the world with eyes that were, unusually for such a bird, of an intense, pale blue.

  The Marquis nodded at her, and she glanced awkwardly at him, then she looked away in the manner of someone who had just begun to realize that she owed the Marquis a favor.

  He nodded at her, amiably, and continued to descend.