by Neil Gaiman
“You know what I am?” I said.
“I know nothing,” he said. “Only that I want to live.”
I thought. “I swear by these things,” I told him. “By shadows and by eagle feathers and by silence. I swear by green hills and standing stones. I will come back.”
“I would have killed you,” said the man in the hawthorn bush, and he said it with humour, as if it was the biggest joke that ever one man had told another. “I had planned to kill you, and take the gold back as my own.”
“I know.”
His hair framed his face like a wolf-grey halo. There was red blood on his cheek where he had scraped it in the fall. “You could come back with ropes,” he said. “My rope is still up there, by the cave mouth. But you’d need more than that.”
“Yes,” I said. “I will come back with ropes.” I looked up at the rock above us, examined it as best I could. Sometimes good eyes mean the difference between life and death, if you are a climber. I saw where I would need to be as I went, the shape of my journey up the face of the mountain. I thought I could see the ledge outside the cave, from which we had fallen as we fought. I would head for there. Yes.
I blew on my hands, to dry the sweat before I began to climb. “I will come back for you,” I said. “With ropes. I have sworn.”
“When?” he asked, and he closed his eyes.
“In a year,” I told him. “I will come here in a year.”
I began to climb. The man’s cries followed me as I stepped and crawled and squeezed and hauled myself up the side of that mountain, mingling with the cries of the great raptors; and they followed me back from the Misty Isle, with nothing to show for my pains and my time, and I will hear him screaming, at the edge of my mind, as I fall asleep or in the moments before I wake, until I die.
It did not rain, and the wind gusted and plucked at me but did not throw me down. I climbed, and I climbed in safety.
When I reached the ledge, the cave entrance seemed like a darker shadow in the noonday sun. I turned from it, turned my back on the mountain, and from the shadows that were already gathering in the cracks and the crevices and deep inside my skull, and I began my slow journey away from the Misty Isle. There were a hundred roads and a thousand paths that would take me back to my home in the lowlands, where my wife would be waiting.
UNBELIEF
Michael Marshall Smith
IT HAPPENED IN BRYANT PARK, a little after six o’clock in the evening. He was sitting by himself in lamp shadow amongst the trees, at one of the rickety green metal tables along the north side, close to where the Barnes & Noble library area is during the day. He was warmly dressed in nondescript, casual clothing and sipping from a Starbucks in a seasonally red cup, acquired from the outlet on the corner of Sixth, right opposite one of the entrances to the park. He queued, just like any normal person: watching through the window you’d have no idea of who he was, or the power he wielded over this and other neighbourhoods.
He had done exactly the same on the preceding two evenings. I’d followed him down from Times Square both times, watched him buy the same drink from the same place and then spend half an hour sitting in the same chair, or near enough, watching the world go by. Evidently, as I had been assured, it was what this man always did at this time of day and this time of year. Habit and ritual are some of our greatest comforts, but they’re a gift to people like me.
He might as well have tied himself up with a bow.
ON THE PREVIOUS OCCASIONS I had merely observed, logged his actions, and walked on by. The thing had been booked for a specific date, for reasons I neither knew nor cared about.
That day had come, and so I entered the park by the next entrance along, by the restrooms, strolling in casually and without evident intent.
I paused for a moment on the steps. He didn’t appear to be there with protection. There were other people sparsely spread over the park, perched at tables or walking in the very last of the twilight, but there was no indication they were anything more than standard-issue New Yorkers, taking a little time before battling the subway or bridges and tunnels or airports, heading home to their families or friends or real partners for the holidays. Grabbing a last few seconds’ blessed solitude, an unwitnessed cigarette, or an illicit kiss and a promise not to forget, before entering a day or two of enforced incarceration with the people who populated their real lives.
Their presence in the park did not concern me. They were either absorbed in their companions or in something within themselves, and none would notice me until it was too late. I have done harder jobs under more difficult conditions. I could have just taken the shot from twenty feet away, kept on walking, but I found I didn’t want it to happen like that. Not with this guy. He deserved less.
I watched him covertly as I approached his position. He appeared relaxed, at ease, as if savoring his own few private moments of peace before tackling some great enterprise. I knew what he thought that was going to be. I also knew it wasn’t going to happen.
There was an empty chair on the other side of his table. I sat down on it.
He ignored me for a couple minutes, peering in a vaguely benign way at the skeletal branches of the tall trees that stand all around the park’s central grassy area: at them, or perhaps at all the buildings around the square revealed by the season’s dearth of leaves. Being able to see these monoliths makes the park seem both bigger and yet more intimate, stripped.
Defenseless.
“Hello, Kane,” he said, finally.
I’d never actually seen him before—not in the flesh at least, only in pictures—so I have no idea how he’d managed to make me straightaway. I guess it’s his job to know things about people.
“You don’t seem surprised,” I said.
He glanced at me finally, then away again, seemingly to watch a young couple perched at a table twenty yards up the path. They were bundled up in thick coats and scarves and necking with cautious optimism. After a few minutes they separated, tentatively smiling, still with their arms around each other’s shoulders, and turned to look at the lights strung in the trees, to listen to the sound of cars honking, to savour being where they were. A recent liaison, the legacy of an office party, perhaps, destined to be a source of embarrassed silences in the office by Valentine’s Day. Either that, or pregnancy and marriage and all the silences after that.
“I knew it could happen,” the man said, taking the lid off his coffee and peering inside, as if gauging how long he had left. “I’m not surprised it’s you sitting there.”
“Why’s that?”
“Accepting a job for this evening? That’s cold. Takes a certain kind of person. Who else they going to call?”
“That supposed to be a compliment? You think if you butter me up then I won’t do it?”
The man looked calmly at me through the steam of what smelt like a gingerbread latte.
“Oh, you’ll do it. I have no doubt of that.”
I didn’t like his tone, and I felt the thing start to uncurl inside me. If you’ve ever tried to give up smoking, you’ll have felt something like it—the sudden, lurid desire to lay waste to the world and everything in it, starting right here, right now, and with the person physically closest to you.
I don’t know what this thing is. It doesn’t have a name. I just know it’s there, and I feel it when it wakes. It has always been a very light sleeper.
“No, really,” I said. “Just because I live in a big house these days, and I got a wife and a child, you think I can’t do what I do?”
“You’ve still got it. You’ll always have it.”
“Fucking right I will.”
“And that’s something to be proud of?” He shook his head. “Shame of it is, you were a good kid.”
“Isn’t everyone?”
“No. Some people come out of the womb broken. You can nurture all you want, sooner or later they’re going to pass the damage on. With you, it could have been different. That makes it worse, somehow.”
“Really? Everyone in the neighbourhood knows the kind of person your father was.”
My hands twitched, involuntarily.
“He had no faith in anything,” the man said. “He was a hater. And a hurter. I remember watching him when he was young, knowing how he’d grow up. Either dead inside, or affectionate in inappropriate ways. Maybe both. Am I right?”
“If you’d like this to play out in a civilised fashion,” I said, my voice tight, “you want to drop this line of discussion.”
“Forgive me. But you’ve come here to kill me, Kane. That’s pretty personal too, wouldn’t you say?”
I knew I should get on with it. But I was also aware that this was the biggest job of my career, and when it was done, it would be over.
I was also simply curious. “What the fuck makes you think you’re better than me?” I said. “What you do isn’t so different.”
“You really think so?”
“You put yourself in a position of power, made it so you get to choose who gets what. Who prospers, who gets nothing. And then you point the finger and lives get fucked up forever. Same as me.”
“I don’t see it that way.” He looked into his cup again. The habit was beginning to get on my nerves.
“Yeah, drink up,” I said. “Time’s running out.”
“One question.”
“How’d I find you?”
He nodded.
“People talk.”
“My people?”
I shook my head, irritably. The truth was, his own soldiers had held the line. I’d tracked down a couple of them (one slurping pho in a noodle bar under a bridge in Queens, the other sleeping in a tree deep in Central Park) and leaned on them hard—to the point where one of them would not be working for him, or anyone else, ever again. Both had merely looked up at me with their cold, strange eyes and waited for whatever I was going to do. It was not they who’d told me to go and stand in Times Square at the end of any December afternoon, and wait there until this man appeared, arriving there from directions unknown.
“So, who, then?”
“It’s too late for you to be taking names,” I said, with some satisfaction. “That’s all over now.”
He smiled again, but more coldly, and I saw something in his face that had not been there before—not on the surface, at least. The steady calm of a man who was used to making judgment calls, decisions upon which the lives of others had hung. A man who had measured, assayed, and who was now about to pay the price, at the behest of people who had fallen on the wrong side of the line he had believed it was his God-given right to draw.
“You think you’re this big, bountiful guy,” I said. “Everybody’s old man. But some understand the real truth. They realise it’s all bullshit.”
“Have I not made my rules clear? Have I not looked out for the people who deserved it?”
“Only to make them do what you want.”
“And what do you want? Why are you really here tonight, Kane?”
“Someone paid me to be. More than one, in fact. A syndicate. People saying that enough is enough. Getting back for what you did to them.”
“I know about that,” he interrupted, as if bored. “I can even guess who these people are. But I asked why you’re here.”
“For the money.”
“No. Otherwise you’d have done it from ten yards away and be on your way home by now.”
“So you tell me why, if you’re so fucking wise.”
“It’s personal,” he said. “And that’s a mistake. You’ve made a good living out of what you do, and have something of a life. On your terms. That’s because you’ve merely been for hire. But you want this one for yourself. Admit it. You hate me on your own account.”
This man was smart enough to know a lie when he heard it, so I said nothing.
“Why, Kane? Did something happen, some night, when there was snow on the ground outside and everything should have been carols and fairy lights? Did your presents come with conditions, or costs? Payments that came due in the middle of the night, when Mom was asleep?”
“That’s enough.”
“How many people have you killed, Kane? Can you even remember?”
“I remember,” I said, though I could not.
“When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You’re opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that?”
“I’d do it for free. For the bullshit you are, and have always been.”
“Disbelief is easy, Kane. It’s faith that takes courage, and character.”
“You’re out of time,” I said.
He sighed. Then he tipped the cup, drained the last of his coffee, and set it down on the table between us.
“I’m done,” he said.
In the fifteen minutes we’d been talking, nearly half the people had left the park. The necking couple had been amongst them, departing hand in hand. The nearest person was now about sixty yards away. I stood up, reached in my jacket.
“Anything you want to say?” I asked, looking down at his mild, rosy face. “People do, sometimes.”
“Not to you,” he said.
I pulled out the gun and placed the silenced end in the middle of his forehead. He didn’t try to move. I took hold of his right shoulder with my other hand, and pulled the trigger once.
With all the traffic around the square, I barely even heard the sound. His head jerked back.
I let go of his shoulder and he sagged slowly around the waist, until the weight of his big, barrel chest pulled his body down off the chair to slump heavily onto the path, nearly face-first.
A portion of the back of his head was gone, but his eyes were still open. His beard scratched against the pavement as he tried to say something. After a couple of times I realised it was not words he was forcing out, but a series of sounds. I put the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger again. A portion of the opposite temple splatted out onto the stones.
Yet still he was trying to push out those three short syllables, each the same.
I pulled the trigger a final time, and he was quiet. I bent down close to make sure, and to whisper in the remains of his ear.
“Check it twice, right, asshole?”
Then I walked out of the park. A few blocks away I found a cab, and started the long, slow journey home to New Jersey.
I WOKE EARLY THE next morning, like most fathers, to the sound of my son hurrying past our bedroom and down the stairs. On his way to the fireplace, no doubt.
Good luck with that, I thought, though I knew his stocking would be full nonetheless.
A few minutes later Lauren levered herself into a sitting position. She pulled on her robe and went to the window, yanking aside the drapes.
She smiled at something she saw out there, then turned and quickly left the room.
By the time I’d got my own robe on and gone down to the kitchen to make coffee, I knew what she’d seen through the window. It had snowed overnight, covering the yard and hanging off the trees. The whole nine yards of Winter Wonderland set dressing. Probably I would have to help build a snowman later, whether I felt like it or not.
In the living room my wife and child were sitting together Indian style in the middle of the floor, cooing over the stockings they’d already taken down from the fireplace. Candy, little gifts, pieces of junk that were supposed to mean something just because they’d been found in a sock. I noticed that the cookie left on the table near the hearth had a large bite taken out of it. Lauren has always been good with detail.
“Happy Christmas, guys,” I said, but neither of them seemed to hear.
I stepped around them and went to the fireplace. I took down the remaining stocking. I knew something was different before it was even in my hand.
It was empty.
“Lauren?”
She looked up at me. “Ho ho, ho,” she said. There was nothing in her face.
Then she smiled, briefly,
before going back to chattering with our son, watching for the third or fifth time as he excitedly repacked and then unpacked his stocking. Her smile went straight through me. But then they always have.
I left the stocking on the arm of one of the chairs and walked out into the kitchen.
I opened the back door, and went to stand outside in the snow.
It was very quiet, and it was nothing but cold.
THE STARS ARE FALLING
Joe R. Lansdale
BEFORE DEEL ARROWSMITH CAME BACK from the dead, he was crossing a field by late moonlight in search of his home. His surroundings were familiar, but at the same time different. It was as if he had left as a child and returned as an adult to examine old property only to find the tree swing gone, the apple tree cut down, the grass grown high, and an outhouse erected over the mound where his best dog was buried.
As he crossed, the dropping moon turned thin, like cheap candy licked too long, and the sun bled through the trees. There were spots of frost on the drooping green grass and on the taller weeds, yellow as ripe corn. In his mind’s eye he saw not the East Texas field before him or the dark rows of oaks and pines beyond it, or even the clay path that twisted across the field toward the trees like a ribbon of blood.
He saw a field in France where there was a long, deep trench, and in the trench were bloodied bodies, some of them missing limbs and with bits of brains scattered about like spilled oatmeal. The air filled with the stinging stench of rotting meat and wafting gun smoke, the residue of poison gas, and the buzz of flies. The back of his throat tasted of burning copper. His stomach was a knot. The trees were like the shadowy shades of soldiers charging toward him, and for a moment, he thought to meet their charge, even though he no longer carried a gun.
He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, shook his head. When he opened them the stench had passed and his nostrils filled with the nip of early morning. The last of the moon faded like a melting snowflake. Puffy white clouds sailed along the heavens and light tripped across the tops of the trees, fell between them, made shadows run low along the trunks and across the ground. The sky turned light blue and the frost dried off the drooping grass and it sprang to attention. Birds began to sing. Grasshoppers began to jump.