Stories: All-New Tales ngss-1

by Neil Gaiman

  Somehow he’d gotten away with it. If they’d ever picked him up, if he’d ever attracted the slightest bit of official attention, he was sure he’d have caved immediately. He’d have told them everything, confessed to everything. They wouldn’t have needed trace evidence, let alone DNA. All they’d have needed was a cell to lock him into and a key to throw away.

  So there had been many, but he’d ranged far and wide and little of what he did ran to pattern. He’d read about other men who had very specific tastes, in essence always hunting the same woman and killing her in the same fashion. If anything, he’d deliberately sought variety, not for precautionary reasons but because it was indeed the spice of life-or death, as you prefer. When I have to choose between two evils, Mae West had said, I pick the one I haven’t tried yet. Made sense to him.

  And after he’d changed, after he had in fact become a catch-and-release fisherman, there’d been a point when it seemed to him as though he’d had a divine hand keeping him safe all those years. Who was to say that there was not a purpose to it all, and a guiding force running the universe? He’d been spared so that he could-do what? Catch and release?

  It hadn’t taken him long to decide that was nonsense. He’d killed all those girls because he’d wanted to-or needed to, whatever. And he’d stopped killing because he no longer needed or wanted to kill, was in fact better served by, well, catching and releasing.

  So how many had there been? The simple answer was that he did not know, and had no way of knowing. He had never taken trophies, never kept souvenirs. He had memories, but it had become virtually impossible to distinguish between recollections of actual events and recollections of fantasies. One memory was as real as another, whether it had happened or not. And, really, what difference did it make?

  He thought of that serial killer they’d caught in Texas, the idiot who kept finding new killings to confess to and leading the authorities to more unmarked graves. Except some of the victims turned out to have been killed when he was in custody in another state. Was he conning them, for some inexplicable reason? Or was he simply remembering-vividly, and in detail-acts he had not in actuality committed?

  HE DIDN’T MIND THE rain. His had been a solitary childhood, and he’d grown into a solitary adult. He had never had friends, and had never felt the need. Sometimes he liked the illusion of society, and at such times he would go to a bar or restaurant, or walk in a shopping mall, or sit in a movie theater, simply to be among strangers. But most of the time his own company was company enough.

  One rainy afternoon he picked a book from the shelf. It was The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton, and he’d read it through countless times and flipped through it many times more. He always seemed to find something worth thinking about between its covers.

  God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling, he read. The line resonated with him, as it always did, and he decided the only change he could make would be to the final word of it. He preferred fishing to angling, fisherman to angler. Stephen Leacock, after all, had observed that angling was the name given to fishing by people who couldn’t fish.

  On the first clear day, he made a grocery list and went to the mall. He pushed a cart up one aisle and down the next, picking up eggs and bacon and pasta and canned sauce, and he was weighing the merits of two brands of laundry detergent when he saw the woman.

  He hadn’t been looking for her, hadn’t been looking for anyone. The only thing on his mind was detergent and fabric softener, and then he looked up and there she was.

  She was beautiful, not young-pretty like the hitchhiker or slutty-available like Marni the barfly, but genuinely beautiful. She could have been an actress or a model, though he somehow knew she wasn’t.

  Long dark hair, long legs, a figure that was at once athletic and womanly. An oval face, a strong nose, high cheekbones. But it wasn’t her beauty he found himself responding to, it was something else, some indefinable quality that suddenly rendered the Tide and the Downy, indeed all the contents of his shopping cart, entirely unimportant.

  She was wearing slacks and an unbuttoned long-sleeved canvas shirt over a pale blue T-shirt, and there was nothing terribly provocative about her outfit, but it scarcely mattered what she wore. He saw that she had a long shopping list she consulted, and only a few items already in her cart. He had time, he decided, time enough to wheel his cart to the bank of cashiers and pay cash for his groceries. That was better than simply walking away from the cart. People tended to remember you when you did that.

  He loaded the bags of groceries back into his cart, and on the way to his SUV he turned periodically for a look at the entrance. He stowed the bags in back, got behind the wheel, and found a good spot to wait for her.

  He sat there patiently with the motor idling. He wasn’t paying attention to the time, was scarcely conscious of its passage, but felt he’d be comfortable waiting forever for the doors to slide open and the woman to emerge. The impatient man was not meant for fishing, and indeed waiting, patient passive waiting, was part of the pleasure of the pastime. If you got a bite every time your hook broke the water’s surface, if you hauled up one fish after another, why, where was the joy? Might as well drag a net. Hell, might as well toss a grenade into a trout stream and scoop up what floated to the surface.

  Ah. There she was.

  “I’M A FISHERMAN,” HE SAID.

  These were not the first words he spoke to her. Those were, “Let me give you a hand.” He’d pulled up behind her just as she was about to put her groceries into the trunk of her car, and hopped out and offered his help. She smiled, and was about to thank him, but she never had the chance. He had a flashlight in one hand, three C batteries in a hard rubber case, and he took her by the shoulder and swung her around and hit her hard on the back of the head. He caught her as she fell, eased her down gently.

  In no time at all she was propped up in the passenger seat of his SUV, and her groceries were in her trunk and the lid slammed shut. She was out cold, and for a moment he thought he might have struck too hard a blow, but he checked and found she had a pulse. He used duct tape on her wrists and ankles and across her mouth, fastened her seat belt, and drove off with her.

  And, as patiently as he’d waited for her to emerge from the supermarket, he waited for her to return to consciousness. I’m a fisherman, he thought, and waited for the chance to say the words. He kept his eyes on the road ahead, but from time to time he shot her a glance, and her appearance never changed. Her eyes were shut, her muscles slack.

  Then, not long after he’d turned onto a secondary road, he sensed that she was awake. He looked at her, and she looked the same, but he could somehow detect a change. He gave her another moment to listen to the silence, and then he spoke, told her that he was a fisherman.

  No reaction from her. But he was certain she’d heard him.

  “A catch-and-release fisherman,” he said. “Not everybody knows what that means. See, I enjoy fishing. It does something for me that nothing else has ever done. Call it a sport or a pastime, as you prefer, but it’s what I do and what I’ve always done.”

  He thought about that. What he’d always done? Well, just about. Some of his earliest childhood memories involved fishing with a bamboo pole and baiting his hook with worms he’d dug himself in the backyard. And some of his earliest and most enduring adult memories involved fishing of another sort.

  “Now I wasn’t always a catch-and release fisherman,” he said. “Way I saw it back in the day, why would a man go to all the trouble of catching a fish and then just throw it back? Way it looked to me, you catch something, you kill it. You kill something, you eat it. Pretty clear cut, wouldn’t you say?”

  Wouldn’t you say? But she wouldn’t say anything, couldn’t say anything, not with the duct tape over her mouth. He saw, though, that she’d given up the pretense of unconsciousness. Her eyes were open now, although he couldn’t see what expression they may have held.

  “What happened,” he said,
“is I lost the taste for it. The killing and all. Most people, they think of fishing, and they somehow manage not to think about killing. They seem to think the fish comes out of the water, gulps for air a couple of times, and then obligingly gives up the ghost. Maybe he flops around a little first, but that’s all there is to it. But, see, it’s not like that. A fish can live longer out of water than you’d think. What you have to do, you gaff it. Hit it in the head with a club. It’s quick and easy, but you can’t get around the fact that you’re killing it.”

  He went on, telling her how you were spared the chore of killing when you released your catch. And the other unpleasant chores, the gutting, the scaling, the disposal of offal.

  He turned from a blacktop road to a dirt road. He hadn’t been down this road in quite a while, but it was as he remembered it, a quiet path through the woods that led to a spot he’d always liked. He quit talking now, letting her think about what he’d said, letting her figure out what to make of it, and he didn’t speak again until he’d parked the car in a copse of trees, where it couldn’t be seen from the road.

  “I have to tell you,” he said, unfastening her seat belt, wrestling her out of the car. “I enjoy life a lot more as a catch-and-release fisherman. It’s got all the pleasure of fishing without the downside, you know?”

  He arranged her on the ground on her back. He went back for a tire iron, and smashed both her kneecaps before untaping her ankles, but left the tape on her wrists and across her mouth.

  He cut her clothing off her. Then he took off his own clothes and folded them neatly. Adam and Eve in the garden, he thought. Naked and unashamed. Lord, we finished all night and caught nothing.

  He fell on her.

  BACK HOME, HE LOADED his clothes into the washing machine, then drew a bath for himself. But he didn’t get into the tub right away. He had her scent on him, and found himself in no hurry to wash it off. Better to be able to breathe it in while he relived the experience, all of it, from the first sight of her in the supermarket to the snapped-twig sound of her neck when he broke it.

  And he remembered as well the first time he’d departed from the catch-and-release pattern. It had been less impulsive that time, he’d thought long and hard about it, and when the right girl turned up-young, blond, a cheerleader type, with a turned-up nose and a beauty mark on one cheek-when she turned up, he was ready.

  Afterward he’d been upset with himself. Was he regressing? Had he been untrue to the code he’d adopted? But it hadn’t taken him long to get past those thoughts, and this time he felt nothing but calm satisfaction.

  He was still a catch-and-release fisherman. He probably always would be. But, for God’s sake, that didn’t make him a vegetarian, did it?

  Hell, no. A man still had to have a square meal now and then.

  Jeffrey Ford. POLKA DOTS AND MOONBEAMS

  HE CAME FOR HER AT SEVEN in the Belvedere convertible, top down, emerald green, with those fins in the back, jutting up like goalposts. From her third-floor apartment window, she saw him pull to the curb out front.

  “Hey, Dex,” she called, “where’d you get the submarine?”

  He tilted back his homburg and looked up. “All hands on deck, baby,” he said, patting the white leather seat.

  “Give me a minute,” she said, laughed, and then blew him a kiss. She walked across the blue braided rug of the parlor and into the small bathroom with the water-stained ceiling and cracked plaster. Standing before the mirror, she leaned in close to check her makeup-enough rouge and powder to repair the walls. Her eye shadow was peacock blue, her mascara indigo. She gave her girdle a quick adjustment through her dress, then smoothed the material and stepped back to take it all in. Wrapped in strapless black, with a design of small white polka dots, like stars in a perfect universe, she turned in profile and inhaled. “Good Christ,” she said and exhaled. Passing through the kitchenette, she lifted a silver flask from the scarred tabletop and shoved it into her handbag.

  Her heels made a racket on the wooden steps, and she wobbled for balance just after the first landing. Pushing through the front door, she stepped out into the evening light and the first cool breeze in what seemed an eternity. Dex was waiting for her at the curb, holding the passenger door open. As she approached, he tipped his hat and bent slightly at the waist.

  “Looking fine there, madam,” he said.

  She stopped to kiss his cheek.

  The streets were empty, not a soul on the sidewalk, and save for the fact that here and there in a few of the windows of the tall, crumbling buildings they passed a dim yellow light could be seen, the entire city seemed empty as well. Dex turned left on Kraft and headed out of town.

  “It’s been too long, Adeline,” he said.

  “Hush now, sugar,” she told him. “Let’s not think about that. I want you to tell me where you’re taking me tonight.”

  “I’ll take you where I can get you,” he said.

  She slapped his shoulder.

  “I want a few cocktails,” she said.

  “Of course, baby, of course. I thought we’d head over to the Ice Garden, cut the rug, have a few, and then head out into the desert after midnight to watch the stars fall.”

  “You’re an ace,” she said and leaned forward to turn on the radio. A smoldering sax rendition of “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” like a ball of wax string unwinding, looped once around their necks and then blew away on the rushing wind.

  She lit them each a cigarette as the car sailed on through the rising night. An armadillo scuttled through the beams of the headlights fifty yards ahead, and the aroma of sage vied with Adeline’s orchid scent. Clamping his cigarette between his lips, Dex put his free hand on her knee. She took it into her own, twining fingers with him. Then it was dark, the asphalt turning to dirt, and the moon rose slow as a bubble in honey above the distant silhouette of hills; a cosmic cream pie of a face, eyeing Adeline’s décolletage. She leaned back into the seat, smiling, and closed her eyes. Only a moment passed before she opened them, but they were already there, passing down the long avenue lined with monkey-puzzle trees toward the circular drive of the glimmering Ice Garden. Dex pulled up and parked at the entrance. As he was getting out, a kid with red hair and freckles, dressed in a valet uniform, stepped forward.

  “Mr. Dex,” he said, “we haven’t seen you for a while.”

  “Take a picture, Jim-Jim,” said Dex and flipped a silver dollar in the air. The kid caught it and dropped it into his vest pocket before opening the door for Adeline.

  “How’s tricks, Jim?” she asked as he delivered her to the curb.

  “They just got better,” he said and patted his vest.

  Dex came around the back of the car, took his date by the arm, and together they headed past the huge potted palms and down a brief tunnel toward a large rectangular patio open to the desert sky and bounded by a lush garden of the most magnificent crystal flora, emitting a blizzard of reflection. At the edge of the high-arching portico, Dex and Adeline stood for a moment, scanning the hubbub of revelers and, at the other end of the expanse of tables and chairs and dance floor, the onstage antics of that night’s musical act, Nabob and His Ne’er-do-wells. Above the sea of heads, chrome trombone in one hand, mic in the other, Nabob belted out a jazzed-up version of “Weak Knees and Wet Privates.”

  A fellow in white tux and red fez approached the couple. He was a plump little man with a pencil mustache; a fifty-year-old baby playing dress-up. Dex removed his homburg and reached a hand out. “Mondrian,” he said.

  The maitre d’ bowed slightly and, raising his voice above the din of merriment, said, “Always a pleasure to have you both back.”

  Adeline also shook hands.

  “You’re looking particularly lovely tonight,” he said.

  “Table for two,” said Dex and flashed a crisp twenty under the nose of Mondrian. “Something close to the dance floor.”

  The plump man bowed again and in his ascent snatched the bill from Dex’s hand. “Follo
w me, my friends,” he said, and then turned and made his way slowly in amid the maze of tables and the milling crowd. As they moved through the packed house, Adeline waved hello to those who called her name, and when someone shouted to Dex, he winked, sighted them with his thumb, and pulled an invisible trigger. Mondrian found them a spot at the very front, just to the left of the stage. He pulled out and held Adeline’s chair, and once she was seated, he bowed.

  “Two gin wrinkles,” said Dex, and in an instant the maitre d’ vanished back into the crowd.

  Adeline retrieved two cigarettes from her purse and lit them on the small candle at the center of the table. Dex leaned over and she put one between his lips. She drew on the other.

  “How does it feel to be back in action?” he asked her.

  She smiled broadly, blew a stream of smoke, and nodded. “It always feels right, the first couple of hours on the loose. I’m not thinking about anything else at this moment,” she said.

  “Good,” he said and removed his hat, setting it on the empty chair next to him.

  The music stopped then and was replaced by the chatter and laughter of the crowd, the clink of glasses and silverware. Nabob jumped down from the band platform, hit the ground, and rolled forward to spring upright next to Dex.

  “Dexter,” he said.

  “Still sweating out the hits,” said Dex and laughed as he shook hands with the bandleader.

  “Bobby, aren’t you gonna give me a kiss?” said Adeline.

  “I’m just savoring the prospect,” he said and swept down to plant one on her lips. The kiss lasted for a while before Dex reached his leg around the table and kicked the performer in the ass. They all laughed as Nabob moved around the table and took a seat.

  Folding his willowy arms in front of him, the bandleader leaned forward and shook his thin head. “You two out for the stars tonight?” he asked.

  “And then some,” said Adeline.