Fragile Things
Page 33
“The hardest thing about being a hulder,” said Jennie, “even a hulder very far from home, is that, if you don’t want to be lonely, you have to love a man.”
“So love me. Stay with me,” said Shadow. “Please.”
“You,” she said, sadly and finally, “are not a man.”
She stood up.
“Still,” she said, “everything’s changing. Maybe I can go home again now. After a thousand years I don’t even know if I remember any Norsk.”
She took his hands in her small hands, that could bend iron bars, that could crush rocks to sand, and she squeezed his fingers very gently. And she was gone.
He stayed another day in that hotel, and then he caught the bus to Thurso, and the train from Thurso to Inverness.
He dozed on the train, although he did not dream.
When he woke, there was a man on the seat next to him. A hatchet-faced man, reading a paperback book. He closed the book when he saw that Shadow was awake. Shadow looked down at the cover: Jean Cocteau’s The Difficulty of Being.
“Good book?” asked Shadow.
“Yeah, all right,” said Smith. “It’s all essays. They’re meant to be personal, but you feel that every time he looks up innocently and says ‘This is me,’ it’s some kind of double-bluff. I liked Belle et la Bête, though. I felt closer to him watching that than through any of these essays.”
“It’s all on the cover,” said Shadow.
“How d’you mean?”
“The difficulty of being Jean Cocteau.”
Smith scratched his nose.
“Here,” he said. He passed Shadow a copy of the Scotsman. “Page nine.”
At the bottom of page nine was a small story: retired doctor kills himself. Gaskell’s body had been found in his car, parked in a picnic spot on the coast road. He had swallowed quite a cocktail of painkillers, washed down with most of a bottle of Lagavulin.
“Mr. Alice hates being lied to,” said Smith. “Especially by the hired help.”
“Is there anything in there about the fire?” asked Shadow.
“What fire?”
“Oh. Right.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me if there wasn’t a terrible run of luck for the great and the good over the next couple of months, though. Car crashes. Train crash. Maybe a plane’ll go down. Grieving widows and orphans and boyfriends. Very sad.”
Shadow nodded.
“You know,” said Smith, “Mr. Alice is very concerned about your health. He worries. I worry, too.”
“Yeah?” said Shadow.
“Absolutely. I mean, if something happens to you while you’re in the country. Maybe you look the wrong way crossing the road. Flash a wad of cash in the wrong pub. I dunno. The point is, if you got hurt, then whatsername, Grendel’s mum, might take it the wrong way.”
“So?”
“So we think you should leave the U.K. Be safer for everyone, wouldn’t it?”
Shadow said nothing for a while. The train began to slow.
“Okay,” said Shadow.
“This is my stop,” said Smith. “I’m getting out here. We’ll arrange the ticket, first class of course, to anywhere you’re heading. One-way ticket. You just have to tell me where you want to go.”
Shadow rubbed the bruise on his cheek. There was something about the pain that was almost comforting.
The train came to a complete stop. It was a small station, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. There was a large black car parked by the station building, in the thin sunshine. The windows were tinted, and Shadow could not see inside.
Mr. Smith pushed down the train window, reached outside to open the carriage door, and he stepped out onto the platform. He looked back in at Shadow through the open window. “Well?”
“I think,” said Shadow, “that I’ll spend a couple of weeks looking around the U.K. And you’ll just have to pray that I look the right way when I cross your roads.”
“And then?”
Shadow knew it, then. Perhaps he had known it all along.
“Chicago,” he said to Smith, as the train gave a jerk, and began to move away from the station. He felt older, as he said it. But he could not put it off forever.
And then he said, so quietly that only he could have heard it, “I guess I’m going home.”
Soon afterward it began to rain: huge, pelting drops that rattled against the windows and blurred the world into grays and greens. Deep rumbles of thunder accompanied Shadow on his journey south: the storm grumbled, the wind howled, and the lightning made huge shadows across the sky, and in their company Shadow slowly began to feel less alone.
About the Author
NEIL GAIMAN is the critically acclaimed and award winning creator of the Sandman series of graphic novels, author of the novels Anansi Boys, American Gods, Coraline, Stardust, and Neverwhere, the short-fiction collection Smoke and Mirrors, and the bestselling children’s books The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls (both illustrated by Dave McKean). Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States.
www.neilgaiman.com
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Also by Neil Gaiman
FOR ADULTS
Anansi Boys
American Gods
Stardust
Smoke and Mirrors
Neverwhere
MirrorMask: The Illustrated Film Script
FOR YOUNG READERS
(illustrated by Dave McKean)
MirrorMask
The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish
The Wolves in the Walls
Coraline
Credits
Jacket design by Richard L. Aquan
Jacket images: butterfly by Jan Cobb; eggshell © by Paul &
Lindamarie Ambrose/Getty Images; snowflake by Floyd Dean/Getty Images;
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Some of the pieces appearing in this collection were first published elsewhere; permissions and copyright information as follows:
“Introduction” © 2006 by Neil Gaiman.
“A Study in Emerald” © 2003 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Shadows Over Baker Street.
“The Fairy Reel” © 2004 by Neil Gaiman. First published in The Faery Reel.
“October in the Chair” © 2002 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Conjunctions no. 39.
“The Hidden Chamber” © 2005 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Outsiders.
“Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire” © 2004 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Gothic!
“The Flints of Memory Lane” © 1997 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Dancing with the Dark.
“Closing Time” © 2002 by Neil Gaiman. First published in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Issue 10.
“Going Wodwo” © 2002 by Neil Gaiman. First published in The Green Man.
“Bitter Grounds” © 2003 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Mojo: Conjure Stories.
“Other People” © 2001 by Neil Gaiman. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 101, nos. 4 and 5.
“Keepsakes and Treasures” © 1999 by Neil Gaiman. First published in 999.
“Good Boys Deserve Favors” © 1995 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Overstreet’s Fan Magazine 1, no. 5.
“The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch” © 1998 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Frank Frazetta Fantasy Illustrated #3.
“Strange Little Girls” © 2001 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Tori Amos’s Strange Little Girls tour book.
“Harlequin Valentine” © 1999 by Neil Gaiman. First published in the World Horror Convention Book, 1999.
“Lock
s” © 1999 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Silver Birch, Blood Moon.
“The Problem of Susan” © 2004 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Flights.
“Instructions” © 2000 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Wolf at the Door.
“How Do You Think It Feels?” © 1998 by Neil Gaiman. First published in In the Shadow of the Gargoyle.
“My Life” © 2002 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Sock Monkeys: 200 out of 1,863.
“Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot” © 1998 by Neil Gaiman. First published in The Art of the Vampire.
“Feeders and Eaters” © 1990 by Neil Gaiman. First published as a comic book in Revolver Horror Special. First published in this form in Keep Out the Night (2002).
“Diseasemaker’s Croup” © 2002 by Neil Gaiman. First published in The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases.
“In the End” © 1996 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Strange Kaddish.
“Goliath” by Neil Gaiman. Copyright © 1999 by Warner Bros. Studios, a division of Time Warner. First published online at www.whatisthematrix.com. Based on concepts by Larry and Andy Wachowski. Inspired by the motion picture The Matrix, written by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski.
“Pages Found in a Shoebox Left in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky” © 2002 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Tori Amos’s Scarlet’s Walk tour book.
“How to Talk to Girls at Parties” © 2006. First publication.
“The Day the Saucers Came” © 2006. First published in the eZine SpiderWords 1, no. 2 (www.spiderwords.com).
“Sunbird” © 2005 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cell-phones, Creatures from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn’t Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out.
“Inventing Aladdin” © by Neil Gaiman. First published in Swan Sister.
“The Monarch of the Glen” © 2004 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Legends II.
Frontispiece illustration: A panel from the comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland” by Winsor McCay, the New York Herald, September 29, 1907.
FRAGILE THINGS. Copyright © 2006 by Neil Gaiman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Microsoft Reader October 2006 ISBN 0-06-120722-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gaiman, Neil.
Fragile things : short fictions and wonders / Neil Gaiman.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-051522-5
ISBN-10: 0-06-051522-8
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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