The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  Shadow assured him that he didn’t think that at all.

  VI. The Riddle

  MOIRA WAS WAITING FOR him when he came out of the police station. She was standing with a woman in her early sixties, who looked comfortable and reassuring, the sort of person you would want at your side in a crisis.

  “Shadow, this is Doreen. My sister.”

  Doreen shook hands, explaining she was sorry she hadn’t been able to be there during the last week, but she had been moving house.

  “Doreen’s a county court judge,” explained Moira.

  Shadow could not easily imagine this woman as a judge.

  “They are waiting for Ollie to come around,” said Moira. “Then they are going to charge him with murder.” She said it thoughtfully, but in the same way she would have asked Shadow where he thought she ought to plant some snapdragons.

  “And what are you going to do?”

  She scratched her nose. “I’m in shock. I have no idea what I’m doing anymore. I keep thinking about the last few years. Poor, poor Cassie. She never thought there was any malice in him.”

  “I never liked him,” said Doreen, and she sniffed. “Too full of facts for my liking, and he never knew when to stop talking. Just kept wittering on. Like he was trying to cover something up.”

  “Your backpack and your laundry are in Doreen’s car,” said Moira. “I thought we could give you a lift somewhere, if you needed one. Or if you want to get back to rambling, you can walk.”

  “Thank you,” said Shadow. He knew he would never be welcome in Moira’s little house, not anymore.

  Moira said, urgently, angrily, as if it was all she wanted to know, “You said you saw Cassie. You told us, yesterday. That was what sent Ollie off the deep end. It hurt me so much. Why did you say you’d seen her, if she was dead? You couldn’t have seen her.”

  Shadow had been wondering about that, while he had been giving his police statement. “Beats me,” he said. “I don’t believe in ghosts. Probably a local, playing some kind of game with the Yankee tourist.”

  Moira looked at him with fierce hazel eyes, as if she was trying to believe him but was unable to make the final leap of faith. Her sister reached down and held her hand. “More things in heaven and earth, Horatio. I think we should just leave it at that.”

  Moira looked at Shadow, unbelieving, angered, for a long time, before she took a deep breath and said, “Yes. Yes, I suppose we should.”

  There was silence in the car. Shadow wanted to apologize to Moira, to say something that would make things better.

  They drove past the gibbet tree.

  “There were ten tongues within one head,” recited Doreen, in a voice slightly higher and more formal than the one in which she had previously spoken. “And one went out to fetch some bread, to feed the living and the dead. That was a riddle written about this corner, and that tree.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “A wren made a nest inside the skull of a gibbeted corpse, flying in and out of the jaw to feed its young. In the midst of death, as it were, life just keeps on happening.”

  Shadow thought about the matter for a little while, and told her that he guessed that it probably did.

  October 2014

  Florida/New York/Paris

  Monkey and the Lady

  2018

  MONKEY WAS IN the plum tree. He had only made the universe that morning, and he had been admiring it, particularly the moon, which was visible in the daytime sky, from the top of the tree. He had made the winds and the stars, the ocean waves and the towering cliffs. He had made fruit to eat, and he had been enthusiastically picking and eating fruit all day, and trees to climb and from which he could observe the world he had made. Now he was covered in sticky red juice. He laughed with delight, because it was a good world, and the plums were sweet and tart and sunwarmed, and it was good to be Monkey.

  Something was walking, beneath the tree, something he did not remember having created. It was walking in a stately fashion, looking at the flowers and the plants.

  Monkey dropped a half-eaten plum onto it, to see what it would do. It picked the plum from its shoulder and flicked the fruit uneaten into the bushes.

  Monkey dropped to the ground. “Hello,” said Monkey.

  “You must be Monkey,” said the person. She wore a high-collared blouse, and her gray skirts were full, and went almost to the ground. She even wore a hat, with a rose of a dusty orange color tucked into the hatband.

  “Yes,” said Monkey, and he scratched himself with his left foot. “I made all this.”

  “I am the Lady,” said the woman. “I believe we are going to have to learn to live together.”

  “I don’t remember making you,” said Monkey, puzzled. “I made fruit and trees and ponds and sticks and—”

  “You certainly didn’t make me,” said the woman.

  Monkey scratched himself thoughtfully, this time with his right foot. Then he picked up a plum from the ground, and devoured it with relish, throwing the plum-stone down when he was done. He picked at the mushy remains of plum from the fur on the back of his arm, and sucked at the fruit he retrieved.

  “Is that?” asked the Lady, “really acceptable behavior?”

  “I’m Monkey,” said Monkey. “I do whatever I want to.”

  “I am sure you do,” said the Lady. “But not if you wish to be with me.”

  Monkey pondered.

  “Do I wish to be with you?” he asked.

  The Lady looked at Monkey gravely, then she smiled. It was the smile that did it. Somewhere between the beginning of the smile and the end of it, Monkey decided that spending time in this person’s company would be a fine thing.

  Monkey nodded.

  “In which case,” she said, “you will need clothes. And you will need manners. And you will need not to do that.”

  “What?”

  “The thing you are doing with your hands.”

  Monkey looked at his hands, guiltily. He was not quite certain what they had been doing. Monkey’s hands were part of him, he knew, but when he was not actually thinking about them they did whatever hands did when you were not watching them. They scratched and they investigated and they poked and they touched. They picked insects from crevices and pulled nuts from bushes.

  Behave yourselves, Monkey thought at his hands. In reply one of the hands began to pick at the fingernails of the other.

  This would not be easy, he decided. Not even a little. Making stars and trees and volcanoes and thunderclouds was easier. But it would be worth it.

  He was almost certain it would be worth it.

  Monkey had created everything, so he intuited immediately what clothes were: cloth coverings that people would wear. In order for clothes to exist, he needed to make people to wear them, to exchange them and to sell them.

  He created a nearby village, in which there would be clothes, and he filled it with people. He created a little street market, and people who would sell things in the market. He created food stalls, where people made food that sizzled and smelled enticing, and stalls that sold strings of shells and beads.

  Monkey saw some clothes on a market stall. They were colorful and strange, and Monkey liked the look of them immediately. He waited until the stallholder’s back was turned, then he swung down and seized the clothes, and ran through the market while people shouted at him in anger or in amusement.

  He put the clothes on, just as the humans wore them, and then, awkwardly, he went and found the Lady. She was in a small cafe, near the market.

  “It’s me,” said Monkey.

  The Lady examined him without approaching. Then she sighed. “It is you,” she said. “And you are wearing clothes. They are very gaudy. But they are clothes.”

  “Shall we live together now?” asked Monkey.

  In response, the Lady passed Monkey a plate with a cucumber sandwich on it. Monkey took a bite of the sandwich, broke the plate experimentally on a rock, cut himself on a section of broke
n plate, then peeled apart the sandwich, picked the cucumber from it with bloody fingers and threw the remaining bread onto the cafe floor.

  “You will need to do a better impersonation of a person than that,” said the Lady, and she walked away in her gray-leather shoes with buttons up the side.

  I created all the people, thought Monkey. I created them as gray dull land-bound things, to make Monkey seem wiser and funnier and freer and more alive. Why should I now pretend to be one?

  But he said nothing. He spent the next day, and the day after that, watching people and following them on the earth, almost never climbing walls or trees or flinging himself upwards or across spaces only to catch himself before he fell.

  He pretended that he was not Monkey. He decided not to answer to “Monkey” anymore, when anything spoke to him. From now on, he told them, he was “Man.”

  He moved awkwardly on the earth. He only managed to conquer the urge to climb everything once he stole shoes and forced them onto his feet, which were not made for shoes. He hid his tail inside his trousers, and now he could only touch the world and move it or change it with his hands or his teeth. Monkey’s hands were better behaved too—more responsible, now that his tail and his feet were hidden, less likely to poke or pry, to rip or to rub.

  The Lady was drinking tea in a small cafe near the market, and he sat beside her.

  “Sit on the chair,” said the Lady. “Not the table.”

  Monkey was not sure he would always be able to tell the difference, but he did as she requested.

  “Well?” said Monkey.

  “You’re getting there,” said the Lady. “Now you just need a job.”

  Monkey frowned and chittered. “A job?” He knew what a job was, of course, because Monkey had created jobs when he had created everything else, rainbows and nebulae and plums and all the things in the oceans, but he had barely paid attention to them even as he created them. They were a joke, something for Monkey and his friends to laugh at.

  “A job,” repeated Monkey. “You want me to stop eating whatever I wish, and living where I wish, and sleeping where I wish, and instead to go to work in the mornings and come home tired in the evening, earning money enough to buy food to eat, and a place to live and to sleep . . . ? ”

  “A job,” said the Lady. “Now you are getting the idea.”

  Monkey went into the village he had made, but there were no jobs there to be had, and the people laughed at him when he asked them to employ him.

  He went into a town nearby, and found himself a job, sitting at a desk and writing lists of names into a huge ledger, bigger than he was. He did not enjoy sitting at the desk, and writing names made his hands hurt, and whenever he sucked absentmindedly on his pen and thought of the forests the blue ink tasted foul and it left ink stains on his face and his fingers.

  On the last day of the week, Monkey took his pay and walked from the town back to the village where he had last seen the Lady. His shoes were dusty and they hurt his feet.

  He put one foot in front of the other on the path.

  Monkey went to the cafe, but it was empty. He asked if anyone there had seen the Lady. The owner shrugged her shoulders, but said that, on reflection, she thought she had seen the Lady in the rose gardens on the edge of the village the previous day, and perhaps Monkey should look there . . .

  “Man,” corrected Monkey. “Not Monkey.”

  But his heart was not in it. Monkey went to the rose gardens, but he did not see the Lady.

  He was slouching along the path that would have taken him back to the cafe when he noticed something on the dry earth. It was a gray hat with a dusty orange rose in the hatband.

  Monkey walked towards the hat, and picked it up, and examined it to see if, perhaps, the Lady was underneath it. She was not. But Monkey noticed something else, a minute’s walk away. He hurried over to it. It was a gray shoe, with buttons up the side.

  He walked on in the same direction and there, on the ground, was a second shoe, almost the twin of the first.

  Monkey kept going, now. Soon, crumpled on the side of the road, he found a woman’s jacket, and then he found a blouse. He found a skirt, abandoned on the edge of the village.

  Outside the village he found more gray clothes, thin and unlikely, like the shed skins of some scanty reptile, hanging now from branches. The sun would soon be setting, and the moon was already high in the eastern sky.

  Something about the branches the clothes were hanging on felt familiar. He walked further into the grove of trees.

  Something hit Monkey on the shoulder: it was a half-eaten plum. Monkey looked up.

  She was far above him, naked and hairy-arsed, her face and her breasts stained and sticky with red juice, sitting and laughing in the plum tree.

  “Come and look at the moon, my love,” she said, with delight. “Come and look at the moon.”

  Honors List

  This volume contains selections that have received or were nominated for various literary prizes, as follows.

  “TROLL BRIDGE” (1993)

  Nominee for the World Fantasy Award

  “SNOW, GLASS, APPLES” (1994)

  Winner of the Bram Stoker Award

  Nominee for the Seiun Award (Japan)

  NEVERWHERE (1996)

  Nominee for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award

  STARDUST (1999)

  Winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award

  Winner of the ALA (American Library Association) Alex Award

  Winner of the Geffen Award (Israel)

  Finalist for the Locus Award

  Nominee for the Deutsche Phantastik Preis (Germany)

  AMERICAN GODS (2001)

  Winner of the Hugo Award

  Winner of the Locus Award

  Winner of the Bram Stoker Award

  Winner of the Geffen Award (Israel)

  Nominee for the World Fantasy Award

  Nominee for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award

  Nominee for the British Fantasy Society/August Derleth Award

  Nominee for the British Science Fiction Association Award

  Nominee for the International Horror Guild Award

  Nominee for the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France)

  Nominee for the Deutsche Phantastik Preis (Germany)

  Nominee for the Italia Award (Italy)

  “OCTOBER IN THE CHAIR” (2002)

  Winner of the Locus Award

  Nominee for the World Fantasy Award

  “CLOSING TIME” (2002)

  Winner of the Locus Award

  “A STUDY IN EMERALD” (2003)

  Winner of the Hugo Award

  Winner of the Locus Award

  Winner of the Seiun Award (Japan)

  “BITTER GROUNDS” (2003)

  Finalist for the Locus Award

  Nominee for the SLF Fountain Award

  “THE PROBLEM OF SUSAN” (2004)

  Nominee for the British Fantasy Award

  “FORBIDDEN BRIDES OF THE FACELESS SLAVES IN THE SECRET HOUSE OF THE NIGHT OF DREAD DESIRE” (2004)

  Winner of the Locus Award

  “THE MONARCH OF THE GLEN” (2004)

  Finalist for the Locus Award

  ANANSI BOYS (2005)

  Winner of the Locus Award

  Winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award

  Winner of the British Fantasy Society/August Derleth Award

  Winner of the Geffen Award (Israel)

  Nominee for the ALA (American Library Association) Alex Award

  “SUNBIRD” (2005)

  Winner of the Locus Award

  “HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES” (2006)

  Winner of the Locus Award

  Nominee for the Hugo Award

  “THE TRUTH IS A CAVE IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS” (2010)

  Winner of the Locus Award

  Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award

  “THE THING ABOUT CASSANDRA” (2010)

  Winner of the Locus Award

  “THE CASE OF DEATH AND HONEY
” (2011)

  Winner of the Locus Award

  Nominee for an Edgar Award

  THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE (2013 novel)

  Winner of the Locus Award

  Winner of the British National Book Award for Book of the Year

  Winner of the Deutsche Phantastik Preis (Germany)

  Winner of the Geffen Award (Israel)

  Nominee for the World Fantasy Award

  Nominee for the Nebula Award

  Nominee for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award

  Nominee for the British Fantasy Award

  “THE SLEEPER AND THE SPINDLE” (2013)

  Winner of the Locus Award

  “BLACK DOG” (2015)

  Winner of the Locus Award

  Most of the stories in this volume come from three previously published collections: Smoke and Mirrors, Fragile Things, and Trigger Warning. Those collections received or were nominated for various literary prizes, as follows.

  SMOKE AND MIRRORS: SHORT FICTIONS AND ILLUSIONS (1998)

  Winner of the Geffen Award (Israel)

  Finalist for the Locus Award

  Nominee for the Bram Stoker Award

  Nominee for the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France)

  FRAGILE THINGS: SHORT FICTIONS AND WONDERS (2006)

  Winner of the Locus Award

  Winner of the British Fantasy Award

  Winner of the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France)

  TRIGGER WARNING: SHORT FICTIONS AND DISTURBANCES (2015)

  Winner of the Locus Award

  Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fantasy

  Credits

  We Can Get Them for You Wholesale © 1984 by Neil Gaiman

  “I, Cthulhu” © by Neil Gaiman

  Nicholas Was . . . © 1989 by Neil Gaiman