Stories: All-New Tales ngss-1

by Neil Gaiman

  Slowly as if with effort the door opened. And there, in his wheelchair, as Edgar had imagined him, but not so ravaged as Edgar has imagined him, was his brother Edward whom he hadn’t seen in more than two decades: a shrunken individual of no obvious age with a narrow, pale, pinched yet unlined face, a boy’s face, and his hair threaded with gray like Edgar’s, and one bony shoulder higher than the other. Pale blue eyes filling with moisture he swiped at with the edges of both hands and in a scratchy voice that sounded as if it hadn’t been used in some time he said Eddie. Come in.

  …WHEN IT HAPPENED COULD never be determined precisely since the bodies were frozen and preserved from decay found together on a leather sofa made up as a bed pulled up to within a foot of a fireplace heaped with ashes in a downstairs room of the old clapboard colonial crowded with furniture and what appeared to be the accumulated debris of decades but which may have been materials for artworks or the very artworks themselves of the eccentric artist known as E.W., the elderly Waldman brothers in layers of bulky clothing must have fallen asleep in front of a fire in the otherwise unheated house, the fire must have burnt out in the night and the brothers died in their sleep in a protracted January cold spell: the brother to be identified as Edgar Waldman, eighty-seven, embracing his brother Edward Waldman, also eighty-seven, from behind, protectively fitting his body to his brother’s crippled body, forehead tenderly pressed to the back of the other’s head, the two figures coiled together like a gnarled organic material that has petrified to stone.

  Joanne Harris WILDFIRE IN MANHATTAN

  IT’S NOT MY NAME-WELL, NOT QUITE-but you can call me Lucky. I live right here in Manhattan, in the penthouse suite of a hotel just off Central Park. I’m a model citizen in every way, punctual, polite and orderly. I wear sharp suits. I wax my chest hair. You’d never think I was a god.

  It’s a truth often overlooked that old gods-like old dogs-have to die sometime. It just takes longer, that’s all; and in the meantime citadels may fall, empires collapse, worlds end and folk like us end up on the pile, redundant and largely forgotten.

  In many ways, I’ve been fortunate. My element is fire, which never quite goes out of style. There are Aspects of me that still wield power-there’s too much of the primitive left in you Folk for it to be otherwise, and although I don’t get as many sacrifices as I used to, I can still get obeisance if I want it (who doesn’t?)-after dark, when the campfires are lit. And the dry lightning strikes across the plains-yes, they’re mine-and the forest fires; and the funeral pyres and the random sparks and the human torches-all mine.

  But here, in New York, I’m Lukas Wilde, lead singer in the rock band Wild-re. Well, I say band. Our only album, Burn It Up, went platinum when the drummer was tragically killed on stage by a freakish blast of lightning.

  Well, maybe not so freakish. Our only U.S. tour was stalked by lightning from beginning to end; of fifty venues, thirty-one suffered a direct hit; in just nine weeks we lost three more drummers, six roadies and a truckload of gear. Even I was beginning to feel I’d taken it just a little too far.

  Still, it was a great show.

  Nowadays, I’m semiretired. I can afford to be; as one of only two surviving band members I have a nice little income, and when I’m feeling bored I play piano in a fetish bar called the Red Room. I’m not into rubber myself (too sweaty), but you can’t deny it makes a terrific insulator.

  By now you may have gathered-I’m a night person. Daylight rather cramps my style; and besides, fire needs a night sky to show to best advantage. An evening in the Red Room, playing piano and eyeing the girls, then downtown for rest and recreation. Not a scene that my brother frequents; and so it was with some surprise that I ran smack into him that night, as I was checking out the nicely flammable back streets of the Upper East Side, humming “Light My Fire” and contemplating a spot of arson.

  I didn’t say? Yes, in this present Aspect, I have a brother. Brendan. A twin. We’re not close; Wildfire and Hearth Fire have little in common, and he rather disapproves of my flamboyant lifestyle, preferring the more domestic joys of baking and grilling. Imagine that. A firegod running a restaurant-it makes me burn with shame. Still, it’s his funeral. Each of us goes to hell in his own way, and besides, his flame-grilled steaks are the best in the business.

  It was past midnight, I was a little light-headed from the booze-but not so drunk that you’d have noticed-and the streets were as still as they get in a city that only ever shuts one eye. A huddle of washouts sleeping in cardboard boxes under a fire escape; a cat raiding a Dumpster. It was November; steam plumed from the sewer grates and the sidewalks were shiny with cold sweat.

  I was just crossing the intersection of Eighty-First and Fifth, in front of the Hungarian meat market when I saw him, a familiar figure with hair the colour of embers tucked into the collar of a long grey coat. Tall, slim and ballet quick; you might almost have been forgiven for thinking it was me. Close scrutiny, however, reveals the truth. My eyes are red and green; his, on the other hand, are green and red. Anyway, I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing those shoes.

  I greeted him cheerily. “Do I smell burning?”

  He turned to me with a hunted expression. “Shh! Listen!”

  I was curious. I know there’s never been much love between us, but he usually greets me, at least, before he starts with the recriminations. He called me by my true name. Put a finger to his lips, then dragged me into a side alley that stank of piss.

  “Hey, Bren. What gives?” I whispered, correcting my lapels.

  His only reply was a curt nod in the direction of the near-deserted alley. In the shadows, two men, boxy in their long overcoats, hats pulled down over narrow, identical faces. They stopped for a second on the kerb, checked left, checked right and crossed over with swift, effortless choreography before vanishing, wolfish, into the night.

  “I see.” And I did. I’d seen them before. I could feel it in my blood. In another place, in another Aspect, I knew them, and they knew me. And believe me, they were men in form alone. Beneath those cartoon-detective overcoats they were all teeth. “What d’you think they’re doing here?”

  He shrugged. “Hunting.”

  “Hunting who?”

  He shrugged again. He’s never been a man of words, even when he wasn’t a man. Me, I’m on the wordy side. I find it helps.

  “So you’ve seen them here before?”

  “I was following them when you came along. I doubled back-I didn’t want to lead them home.”

  Well, I could understand that. “What are they?” I said. “Aspects of what? I haven’t seen anything like this since Ragnarók, but as I recall-”

  “Shh-”

  I was getting kinda sick of being shoved and shushed. He’s the elder twin, you know, and sometimes he takes liberties. I was about to give him a heated reply when I heard a sound coming from nearby, and something swam into rapid view. It took me a while to figure it out; derelicts are hard to see in this city, and he’d been hiding in a cardboard box under a fire escape, but now he shifted quick enough, his old overcoat flapping like wings around his bony ankles.

  I knew him, in passing. Old man Moony, here as an Aspect of Mani, the Moon, but mad as a coot, poor old sod (it often happens when they’ve been at the juice, and the mead of poetry is a heady brew). Still, he could run, and was running now, but as Bren and I stepped out of his way, the two guys in their long overcoats came to intercept him at the mouth of the alley.

  Closer this time-I could smell them. A rank and feral smell, half rotted. Well, you know what they say. You can’t teach a carnivore oral hygiene.

  At my side I could feel my brother trembling. Or was it me? I wasn’t sure. I was scared, I knew that-though there was still enough alcohol carousing in my veins to make me feel slightly removed from it all. In any case I stayed put, tucked into the shadows, not quite daring to move. The two guys stood there at the mouth of the alley, and Moony stopped, wavering now between fight and flight. And-

  Figh
t it was. Okay, I thought. Even a rat will turn when cornered. That didn’t mean I had to get involved. I could smell him too, the underpinning stench of him, like booze and dirt and that stinky sickly poet smell. He was scared, I knew that. But he was also a god-albeit a beat-up Aspect of one-and that meant he’d fight like a god, and even an old alky god like Moony has his tricks.

  Those two guys might yet have a shock coming.

  For a moment they held their position, two overcoats and a mad poet in a dark triangle under the single streetlight. Then they moved-the guys with that slick, fluid motion I’d seen before, Moony with a lurch and a yell and a flash from his fingertips. He’d cast Týr-a powerful rune-and I saw it flicker through the dark air like a shard of steel, hurtling towards the two not-quite-men. They dodged-no pas de deux could have had more grace-parting, then coming together again as the missile passed, moving in a tight axe-head formation towards the old god.

  But throwing Týr had thrown Moony. It takes strength to cast the runes of the Elder Script, and most of his glam was already gone. He opened his mouth-to speak a cantrip, I thought-but before he could, the overcoats moved in with that spooky superhuman speed and I could smell their rankness once more, but so much stronger, like the inside of a badger’s sett. They closed in, unbuttoning their coats as they ran-but were they running? Instead they seemed to glide, like boats, unfurling their long coats like sails to hide and envelop the beleaguered moongod.

  He began to chant-the mead of poetry, you know-and for a second the drunken voice cracked and changed, becoming that of Mani in his full Aspect. A sudden radiance shone forth-the predators gave a single growl, baring their teeth-and for a moment I heard the chariot chant of the mad moongod, in a language you could never learn, but of which a single word could drive a mortal crazy with rapture, bring down the stars, strike a man dead-or raise him back to life again.

  He chanted, and for a beat the hunters paused-and was that a single trace of a tear gleaming in the shadow of a black fedora? — and Mani sang a glamour of love and death, and of the beauty that is desolation and of the brief firefly that lights up the darkness-for a wing’s beat, for a breath-before it gutters, burns and dies.

  But the chant did not halt them for more than a second. Tears or not, these guys were hungry. They glided forward, hands outstretched, and now I could see inside their unbuttoned coats, and for a moment I was sure there was no body beneath their clothes, no fur or scale, no flesh or bone. There was just the shadow; the blackness of Chaos; a blackness beyond colour or even its absence; a hole in the world, all-devouring, all-hungry.

  Brendan took a single step, and I caught him by the arm and held him back. It was too late anyway; old Moony was already done for. He went down-not with a crash, but with an eerie sigh, as if he’d been punctured-and the creatures that now no longer even looked like men were on him like hyenas, fangs gleaming, static hissing in the folds of their garments.

  There was nothing human in the way they moved. Nothing superfluous. They Hoovered him up from blood to brain-every glamour, every spark, every piece of kith and kindling-and what they left looked less like a man than a cardboard cutout of a man left lying in the dirt of the alleyway.

  Then they were gone, buttoning up their overcoats over the terrible absence beneath.

  A silence. Brendan was crying. He always was the sensitive one. I wiped something (sweat, I think) from my face and waited for my breathing to return to normal.

  “That was nasty,” I said at last. “Haven’t seen anything quite like that since the End of the World.”

  “Did you hear him?” said Brendan.

  “I heard. Who would have thought the old man had so much glam in him?”

  My brother said nothing, but hid his eyes.

  I suddenly realized I was hungry, and thought for a moment of suggesting a pizza, but decided against it. Bren was so touchy nowadays, he might have taken offence.

  “Well, I’ll see you later, I guess,” and sloped off rather unsteadily, wondering why brothers are always so damned hard, and wishing I’d been able to ask him home.

  I wasn’t to know, but I wish I had-I’d never see that Aspect of him again.

  I SLEPT TILL LATE the next day. Awoke with a headache and a familiar post-cocktail nauseous feeling, then remembered-the way you remember doing something to your back when you were in the gym, but didn’t realize how bad it was going to be until you’d slept on it-and sat bolt upright.

  The guys, I thought. Those two guys.

  I must have been drunker than I’d thought last night, because this morning the memory of them froze me to the core. Delayed shock; I know it well, and to combat its elects I called room service and ordered the works. Over coffee, bacon, pancakes and rivers of maple syrup, I worked on my recovery, and though I did pretty well, given the circumstances, I found I couldn’t quite get the death of old Moony out of my mind, or the slick way the two overcoats had crawled over him, gobbling up his glam before buttoning up and back to business. Poetry in motion.

  I pondered my lucky escape-well, I guessed that if they hadn’t sniffed out Moony first, then it would have been Yours Truly and Brother Bren for a double serving of Dish of the Day-but my heart was far from light as it occurred to me that if these guys were really after our kind, this was at best a reprieve, not a pardon, and that sooner or later those overcoats would be sharpening their teeth at my door.

  So I finished breakfast and called Bren. But all I got was his answering machine, so I looked up the number of his restaurant and dialled it. The line was dead.

  I would have tried his mobile, but, like I said, we’re not close. I didn’t know it, or the name of his girl, or even the number of his house. Too late now, right? Just goes to show. Carpe diem, and all that. And so I showered and dressed and went off in haste under gathering clouds to the Flying Pizza, Bren’s place of work (but what a dumb name!), in the hope of getting some sense out of my twin.

  It was there that I realized something was amiss. Ten blocks away I knew it already, and the sirens and the engines and the shouting and the smoke were just confirmation. There was something ominous about those gathering thunderclouds, and the way they sat like a Russian hat all spiky with needles of lightning above the scene of devastation. My heart sank lower the closer I got. Something was amiss, all right.

  Looking around to ensure that I was unobserved, I cast the visionary rune Bjarkán with my left hand, and squinted through its spyglass shape. Smoke I saw; and lightning from the ground; my brother’s face looking pale and strained; then fire; darkness; then, as I’d feared, the Shadow-and its minions, the wolves, the shadow hunters, boxed into their heavy overcoats.

  Those guys, I thought, and cursed. Again.

  And now I knew where I’d known them before-and they were pretty bad in that Aspect, too, though I had more on my plate at that time than I do nowadays, and I’ll admit I didn’t give them my full attention. I did now, though, casting runes of concealment about me as I skirted the funnel of black smoke, the funeral pyre of my brother’s restaurant-and for all I knew, of Brendan himself, who had looked pretty wasted in my vision.

  I got there at last, keeping an eye out for overcoats, to find fire engines and cop cars everywhere. A line had been cordoned off at the end of the road, and there were men trying to spray water over the great fizzing spume of fire that had already dug its roots deep into the Flying Pizza.

  I could have told them they were wasting their time. You can’t put out the work of a firegod-even a god of hearth fire-like it was just a squib. The flames sheeted up, thirty, forty, fifty feet high, clean and yellow and shot through with glamours that would probably have looked like dancing sparks to your kind, but which, if they’d touched you, would have stripped you, flesh to bone, in one.

  And Brendan? I thought. Could he still be alive somewhere?

  Well, if he was, he must have run. There was no way anyone could have survived that blaze. And it wasn’t like Bren to flee the scene. He had turned and fou
ght; I’d seen as much in my vision, and my brother was so dead set against the use of glamours among the Folk that he wouldn’t have used them if he’d had any kind of choice.

  I used Ós-the rune of mystery-to scry my brother’s fate. I saw their faces, thin and wolfish; saw his smile, teeth bared, so that for a second in my vision he could have been me, wild and furious and filled with killing rage. He could be okay, my brother, you know; it just took more time to fire him up. I saw him draw his mindsword-flaming, it was, with an edge that shivered translucent light. A sword that could have cut through granite or silk with the same easy slice; a sword I hadn’t seen since the last time the world ended, a flickering flame of a firegod’s sword that just touched the shadow inside an unbuttoned overcoat and went out like a puff of smoke.

  Then, in the dark, they were on him. Question answered. Well, at least my brother went out in style.

  I wiped my face and pondered the points. Point one: I was now an only twin. Point two: unless he’d taken his assailants with him (which I doubted), by now the two coats would be on my tail. Point three-

  I was just embarking on point three when a heavy hand fell onto my shoulder, another grasped my arm just above the elbow and then both applied a painful pressure, which soon became excruciating as the joint locked and a low, familiar voice rasped in my ear.

  “Lucky. I should have known you were in this somehow. This shambles has got your mark all over it.”

  I yelped and tried to free my arm. But the other bastard was holding me too tight.

  “Move, and I’ll break it,” snarled the voice. “Hell, perhaps I ought to break it anyway. Just for old times’ sake.”

  I indicated to him that I’d rather he didn’t. He locked my arm a little further-I felt it begin to go and screamed-then he shoved me hard towards the alley wall. I hit it, bounced, spun round with mindsword ready, half drawn, and found myself staring into a pair of eyes as grim and colourless as a rainy day. Just my luck-a friend with a grievance, which is the only kind I tend to have nowadays.