The Sandman: Book of Dreams

by Neil Gaiman

A flame caught her finger, caressed it to rosy life. She closed her long, dark eyes. "I cannot," she murmured. "I cannot go outside."

  "Then you must stay inside." The voice was the Witch's own, and the face to which she raised her eyes. Both voice and face were cast over with a silver brilliance like the moon's.

  "You," said the Witch.

  "You," agreed the other.

  "The hour has come."

  "But you can't seize it." The fluting voice was both despairing and mocking. "You're afraid."

  The Witch curled herself into the scarlet cushions of her chair and gathered a black shawl around her shoulders. Her visitor laid one arm along the mantel and gazed down at her, smiling slightly. Meeting her eyes, the Witch thought that she saw the moon in them, dead and leering; she shivered, but did not look away.

  "I cannot feel fear," she said.

  "No," said her visitor. "Nonetheless, you will not go out. Out is too cold, too hard, too bright. You have not been out in years. Besides, it would have pleased your father."

  The Witch reached for a cup of tea--peppermint-- fragrant and steaming to warm her hands and her cold, empty belly, and found one ready on the table. "What," she said when she had taken a careful sip, "could my father's pleasure have to do with my going out?"

  "Very good," approved her twin. "The tea is a nice touch. Haven't you noticed that you never do anything you think would have pleased your father?"

  "But breaking the spell would not please him. That was the bargain, wasn't it? That I should live like this forever?"

  "That's what I said." The other turned to admire her reflection in the overmantel mirror. "Pretty. I like the earrings. But you should do something new with your hair."

  The Witch put her hand to her hair. It poured over her chair like carved and polished wood, deep brown, with a red glint in its depths. "I like it," she said.

  "You're afraid to change it," said her visitor. "Your father liked it loose, you know. I remember him saying so."

  "I did not call you," said the Witch. "I do not need you. Begone."

  "Ungrateful bitch. I was just trying to help."

  "I do not need your help."

  The other began to laugh, showing small, white teeth that lengthened as she laughed and grew sharp and yellow until they filled all her mouth, and her tongue between them grew long and flat and red, and her laughter slid up into a shuddering howl. And then she was gone, taking the fire with her.

  The next night the Witch watched for the wolf in the library from a French door that gave onto the courtyard.

  The moon had paced across the sky before the wolf finally appeared, silent as smoke and close enough for the Witch to see the wet gleam of its eyes and its vaporous breath rising. Its shadow on the snow was sharp and clear as a black paper silhouette, blocky and awkwardly configured, yet unmistakably human.

  The Witch forced herself to push the door ajar, then her nerve failed her. Shivering, she called:

  "Come!"

  The wolf started at her voice and loped back into the wood, pausing under the first trees and looking back over its brindled shoulder before taking itself and its shadow to the shelter of the wood.

  The Witch ran after it, a step and then another crunching over the pathless snow, carrying her out of the shadow of the manor and into the moonlight. It dazzled her, so that she reeled and lifted both hands to her face and staggered backwards with the snow dragging at her feet like quicksand. Tripping over the threshold, she fell hard upon the library's carpeted floor, where she sat with her fingers pressing hard against her lids until stars appeared in the darkness there, and a milky light like moonrise. Hastily, she opened her eyes. The French doors were closed and shrouded, as they ought to be. But a silver chill was upon her.

  In her chamber, she blew up the fire and wrapped herself in the wolf pelt from her bed. Half-expecting the Lady to appear, black-eyed and mocking, she brooded over the fire. The porphyry clock chimed meaningless hours. The flames were scarlet and gold, with coals glowing below them, hot and alive as the sun. One coal was larger than the rest, dull red in the fire's ice-blue heart, drawing her eye until it filled all her vision: a carbuncle encased in faceted crystal. The logs shifted, and the coal flared into whiteness marked with red, like the red mouth in a woman's face--her own face, the Lady's face, salt white, with blind stone eyes turned inward and two lines carved between the brows. The stone eyes twitched and opened on stars in a sky so black that it sucked into itself the soul of anyone gazing upon it. Into its deeps fell the Witch's soul, flying among adamantine knives that pricked her toward the moon, which looked upon her with loving eyes and stretched its bearded lips to engulf her.

  The Witch seized one of the adamantine knives. It was all blade. Her hand scattered rubies from her wounded fingers, but she felt no pain as she sliced the star across and across the moon's face, only cold.

  "That didn't work the last twenty thousand times you tried it," the Lady remarked. "Can't you try something else?"

  The Witch gave a strangled mew, sat upright in the cushioned chair, put her hand out for a glass of wine. Her fingers groped in empty air. "Red wine," she said aloud. "In a golden cup. Set with rubies. Now."

  "You must be mad," said the Lady cheerfully. "What you really need is meat. You haven't eaten anything in ages."

  "Red wine," said the Witch decidedly, and lifted a brimming goblet to her lips. The wine was warm and fragrant with cinnamon and cloves; it burned in her hands and feet and behind her eyes. She drained the goblet, then dressed herself in a crimson velvet riding dress and little heeled boots lined with wolf fur, wrapped herself in pelisse and shawls, veiled her face against the wind and the cold gaze of the moon and stars. She unbolted the front door, opened it, and stepped outside to wait on the snow while the moon rose over the Mountain, bringing with it the she-wolf and her human shadow.

  Seeing the woman, the wolf stopped. The Witch took a step forward. The wolf hesitated, lowered her tail, advanced one paw and then another. Step by slow step, wild-eyed and shivering, wolf and Witch left the safety of manor and forest, approaching the exposed and brilliant center of the clearing, approaching each other. They met. The she-wolf sat on her haunches; the Witch knelt before her and put back the veil, trembling like a bride. "You are Fida," she said. "You are my faithful servant."

  The wolf shuddered all over, quick and hard as a death throe, then rolled onto her back and sprawled her back legs, offering the Witch heir soft, pink belly. The Witch laid her gloved hand in the furry hollow, stroked upward to the furry chin, and stood.

  "Come," she said, and this time the she-wolf obeyed, following at her heel like a well-trained dog back across the clearing through the open door, stopping only to mark the threshold with her scent. She looked about her, with ears pricked curiously, until the Witch closed the door and barred it. The cold, clear scents of pine and game and night and her pack drowned in a hot miasma of dusty wool and woodsmoke. The she-wolf sat down on the Turkey red rug and howled.

  The Witch grasped her muzzle in both hands. "I don't like that noise," she said, shaking her gently. "Bad cub."

  The wolf drooped her ears and whined; but when Witch released her, she howled again: a long, panicked ululation.

  Cold prickled up the Witch's spine. She needed utter devotion, and here was Fida, scrabbling frantically at the heavy oak door, snuffling at the thread of clean air, telling her that home was on the other side.

  Laughter echoed in her ears like a silver bell. "Your father would be very pleased," it rang, mocking.

  The Witch stamped her foot. "Bad cub," she shouted, to drown the bell. "Stop that at once and come with me."

  The wolf raised her head and fixed her with moonstone eyes. Her nose wrinkled, her lip lifted from her sharp, yellow teeth; she rumbled threateningly. The Witch kicked her sharply in the ribs. She gave one startled yelp; the Witch kicked her again. Whining, the wolf offered her belly as she had in the courtyard. The Witch bent t
o accept her submission. "Good cub."

  The ritual chamber was in the cellar, as far as possible from the open sky and the stars. The stairs leading down to it were cold and smelled of stale earth, like a long-abandoned den. The she-wolf marked them with her scent, and the chamber door and the high stone table that was its only furnishing. In one corner, she discovered a long, lumpy shape covered by a heavy carpet. Her nose pronounced the carpet dusty and the bones beneath it dry and fleshless and long, long dead. She sneezed, then leaped onto the table and sat, ears flicking back and forth, panting anxiously.

  She whined when the Witch swept her front paws from under her and flipped her awkwardly on her back, but made no other objection. She even stretched her neck when the Witch put the knife to her underjaw and began to slit her skin away.

  The Witch herself had never performed this ritual, but she had watched her father countless times, skinning the pelts from wolves and deer and bears to create servants to wait on him and her. After he died, she had made no more. She needed no servants; she preferred to do things for herself. If she knew absolutely that there would be wood for her fire and bread for her table, it would be so. That was the way of her magic, to work by absolute knowledge. Now, she knew absolutely that the she-wolf would lie still and trustful under her knife, and it was so. She knew she must cut only so deep and no deeper, must cut surely, without hesitation. A moment's doubt would kill the wolf and all the Witch's hopes of warmth. Once she might have doubted. But her father's bargain with the Lady had neatly excised disgust, compassion, and fear, leaving behind nothing but her absolute knowledge and a steady hand upon the knife.

  There was no blood. The edges of the pelt were white and dry in the knife's wake, the flesh under it pink and whole and hairless. The pain, the Witch knew, would not be great unless by chance she pierced too deep. As the thought brushed her mind, the knife faltered, leaving a slender, scarlet track just over the breastbone. The she-wolf cried out in a voice neither human nor wolf, and the Witch sucked her breath in hard between her teeth. So easy to slip, to let out life and let in death--the ultimate coldness. Somewhere in the back of her mind a memory stirred, of blood hot on her cold hands, peat brown eyes wide with terror, and a thin, high scream like a dying rabbit's. Annoyed, she began to mutter the ritual aloud, the fluid words drawing the knife with them down the belly to the tail, then sideways between skin and pelt, working the wolf loose from the girl-form beneath.

  The ritual took all night, and when the Witch was done, her hands ached with pulling and cutting, her lip bled where she had bitten through it, her eyes and knees twitched and strained. A brindled wolf pelt lay piled at one end of the stone table at the feet of a naked girl.

  She wasn't pretty, not as humans measure beauty, being thin-hipped and shallow-breasted, her torso too long for her legs and arms, her hands and feet broad and stumpy, with horny palms and soles. Her hair was brindle gray like her pelt, and stood out in a wild aureole around her sharply planed face. Her nose was long and blunt, and her lips were very thin. Along her breast-bone was a scar, red and raised like a whip welt.

  "Fida," the Witch called her, and she opened eyes like winter moons. The thin, mobile lips twitched and worked, parted for the long, pink tongue to explore them. She made a tentative huffing noise, sneezed and sat up, eyeing the Witch with her head tilted awkwardly to one side.

  "Mistress," she said, her voice rough and deep. She looked down at herself, lifted her hands one by one, licked between her stubby fingers, twisted to examine her altered body. She even tried to smell her crotch, at which the Witch laughed, cracking open the cut on her lip. The wolf-girl's head came up at the sound. Seeing the blood dribbling down the Witch's chin, she licked at it as she would lick the blood from a packmate's jaws. The Witch drew back from the touch of her tongue, hand to mouth, eyes showing white around the starless pupils.

  "Bad cub?" the wolf-girl inquired anxiously.

  The Witch shook her head slowly, then reached out to tousle the rough, brindled hair. "No," she said. "Good cub."

  That day, Fida slept and woke and slept again, curled at the foot of the Witch's bed. When she woke at dusk, the Witch returned her pelt to her so that she could hunt. Following old habit, Fida searched out her pack. But she smelled wrong now--of woodsmoke and hot wool and dust and magic and humanity--and they soon drove her away again. For a little while, she licked her nipped haunches and whined before hunger drove her to hunt alone. She caught a rabbit and ate it, and then caught another to carry home to her new den. The rabbit was a little torn and chewed about the throat and back, but the Witch laughed when Fida laid it at her feet. She picked it up and smoothed the fur matted with blood and saliva, then knelt to caress the wolf's dripping jaws. "Good cub," she said. "I need meat."

  "That's what I said." The Lady's voice was smug. Fida growled.

  "Be still," said the Witch, and carried the rabbit into the dining room, where she laid it on the dark oak table, seated herself, and looked thoughtfully into the bogbrown eyes of her father's portrait hanging over the sideboard. "Stewed rabbit with dried apricocks and cinnamon," she said, and picked up silver-gilt cutlery. But when she looked down at her first real meal in a hundred years, the rabbit was still whole: laid out on the golden plate she'd imagined for it, mangled and cold.

  "Eat," urged a hoarse voice behind her.

  "I can't," whispered the Witch. The candle flames reflected in the rabbit's jet-bead eye were chips of diamond, or stars. A broad hand jerked the rabbit off the plate.

  "Rabbit good," said Fida, and set her teeth to its soft belly to demonstrate. The Lady began to laugh, and the Witch put her hands over her ears and ran down the stairs to the ritual chamber, where the Lady never went.

  When she emerged, she tripped over Fida, naked in her girl-shape, stretched out across the threshold.

  "Bad cub," she said, and rolled over onto her back.

  The Witch lifted her slippered foot and rested it lightly on the girl's hollow belly, at the end of the scar. "Bad cub," she agreed. "Bring me a deer, alive and unharmed, and I'll think you a very good cub indeed."

  "Alive?"

  "And unhurt."

  It took Fida until spring, but she did it in the end, catching the deer in a trap she'd rigged in a shallow cave at the Mountain's tumbled hem. The Witch followed her into the wood to retrieve it, feeling for the first time in centuries the spring of grass and moss and pine needles under her feet, the weave of bark under her hand, the prick of pine scent and decaying leaves in her nose. Fida's shaggy presence at her knee warmed her through; as she led the spell-tamed buck back to the manor, she threw off her heavy shawl and loosened her gown at the neck.

  In the front hall, the Lady was waiting for her. "What's this?" she inquired. "Following in Daddy's footsteps?"

  "You said I needed meat," said the Witch defensively.

  "Did I?" The Lady surveyed the buck. "How obedient of you. Do you intend to eat it alive?"

  "I'm going to make a cook out of him." The Witch giggled suddenly. "I think his specialty should be venison stew, don't you?"

  The Lady put out her hand to Fida, who advanced stiff-legged and bristling to sniff it. "Clever doggie," she said. Fida began to growl, the hair on her crest rising upright as her lip drew away from her fangs. The Lady snapped slender fingers under her nose. "A two-edged blade," she said, and disappeared.

  All that summer of warmth and light and dappled sunshine, the Witch stalked the wood with the wolf padding beside her, silver-gray and graceful through the long evenings. She discovered the joys of the hunt, of blood hot on her hands and coppery on her tongue, and the sweet warmth of Fida's breath on her neck in the black hours between midnight and dawn. Sometimes she slept, and when she slept, she dreamed.

  Walking in an ice cave, blue-white and cold as the stars, with one warm spot in the heart of it: a carbuncle in a crystal coffer. The carbuncle was carved in the shape of a human heart, two-lobed, veined delicately with blue. As she
approached, it swelled slowly, contracted, and swelled again, warming as its beating strengthened, filling all the crystal cave with blood and heat and life. All save one corner, where a white-faced figure stood, robed in impenetrable black.

  So the summer passed and autumn came. The days grew shorter, the nights longer, deeper, brighter with stars, and much, much colder. When the snows came, Fida wandered for a week in her wolf-form, sniffing at old dens and the bones of old kills, howling her frustration to the moon. The moon did not answer her, nor did the Witch, who greeted her return with black silence. Her body was bloodless and white with cold, but she thawed when Fida curled around her in the crimson-hung bed, and closed her eyes and sighed. With her mahogany hair folded across her throat, her unfathomable eyes veiled, her red lips half-open upon her small, sharp teeth, she was like a cub fallen from the teat. Fida nuzzled her neck, smooth and white and hairless, and the Witch turned to her and licked her mouth, petting her shoulders and her soft, shallow breasts. Their legs scissored together, thighs interlaced. Fida whined and nipped at the Witch's lips. The Witch whined too, then scrabbled from Fida's embrace to huddle against the bedpost, shivering and clutching her hair around her like a cloak. There was blood on her lower lip.

  "Go away," she told Fida. "I'm cold."

  Fida held out her arms. "Let me warm you, then."

  The Witch gave a convulsive shudder. "No! No. You're making me cold. Go away."

  Fida slipped out of the bed and padded naked to the door.

  "Poor doggie," said the Lady.

  Fida's eyes narrowed and her lips twitched.

  "You don't like me, do you, doggie? Well, I like you. But I like your mistress better." Fida growled, as deep as her human throat would allow. The Lady smiled. "Jealous? I won't touch her, I promise. Now. Run away."

  As the door closed behind Fida, the Lady settled herself comfortably in the Witch's cushioned chair. "Lazy girl," she said. "Tsk, tsk. Your father would be so ashamed of you. Don't you want your heart back?"

  The Witch searched among the covers for her bed gown. "Of course I want it," she said.

  "You're getting fat," said the Lady. "Must be all that venison stew. Or maybe it's love."

  The Witch wrapped herself in fur-lined velvet. "I have no heart," she said sulkily. "You have to have a heart to love anything."