The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  I was thinking about staying in bed for the next week—I’m always tired after a change—but a wave of nausea forced me to disentangle myself from the bedding and to stumble, hurriedly, into the apartment’s tiny bathroom.

  The cramps hit me again as I got to the bathroom door. I held on to the door frame and I started to sweat. Maybe it was a fever; I hoped I wasn’t coming down with something.

  The cramping was sharp in my guts. My head felt swimmy. I crumpled to the floor, and, before I could manage to raise my head enough to find the toilet bowl, I began to spew.

  I vomited a foul-smelling thin yellow liquid; in it was a dog’s paw—my guess was a Doberman’s, but I’m not really a dog person; a tomato peel; some diced carrots and sweet corn; some lumps of half-chewed meat, raw; and some fingers. They were fairly small pale fingers, obviously a child’s.

  “Shit.”

  The cramps eased up, and the nausea subsided. I lay on the floor with stinking drool coming out of my mouth and nose, with the tears you cry when you’re being sick drying on my cheeks.

  When I felt a little better, I picked up the paw and the fingers from the pool of spew and threw them into the toilet bowl, flushed them away.

  I turned on the tap, rinsed out my mouth with the briny Innsmouth water, and spat it into the sink. I mopped up the rest of the sick as best I could with washcloth and toilet paper. Then I turned on the shower and stood in the bathtub like a zombie as the hot water sluiced over me.

  I soaped myself down, body and hair. The meager lather turned gray; I must have been filthy. My hair was matted with something that felt like dried blood, and I worked at it with the bar of soap until it was gone. Then I stood under the shower until the water turned icy.

  There was a note under the door from my landlady. It said that I owed her for two weeks’ rent. It said that all the answers were in the Book of Revelation. It said that I made a lot of noise coming home in the early hours of this morning, and she’d thank me to be quieter in future. It said that when the Elder Gods rose up from the ocean, all the scum of the Earth, all the nonbelievers, all the human garbage and the wastrels and deadbeats would be swept away, and the world would be cleansed by ice and deep water. It said that she felt she ought to remind me that she had assigned me a shelf in the refrigerator when I arrived and she’d thank me if in the future I’d keep to it.

  I crumpled the note, dropped it on the floor, where it lay alongside the Big Mac cartons and the empty pizza cartons and the long-dead dried slices of pizza.

  It was time to go to work.

  I’d been in Innsmouth for two weeks, and I disliked it. It smelled fishy. It was a claustrophobic little town: marshland to the east, cliffs to the west, and, in the center, a harbor that held a few rotting fishing boats and was not even scenic at sunset. The yuppies had come to Innsmouth in the eighties anyway, bought their picturesque fisherman’s cottages overlooking the harbor. The yuppies had been gone for some years now, and the cottages by the bay were crumbling, abandoned.

  The inhabitants of Innsmouth lived here and there in and around the town and in the trailer parks that ringed it, filled with dank mobile homes that were never going anywhere.

  I got dressed, pulled on my boots, put on my coat, and left my room. My landlady was nowhere to be seen. She was a short pop-eyed woman who spoke little, although she left extensive notes for me pinned to doors and placed where I might see them; she kept the house filled with the smell of boiling seafood: huge pots were always simmering on the kitchen stove, filled with things with too many legs and other things with no legs at all.

  There were other rooms in the house, but no one else rented them. No one in their right mind would come to Innsmouth in winter.

  Outside the house it didn’t smell much better. It was colder, though, and my breath steamed in the sea air. The snow on the streets was crusty and filthy; the clouds promised more snow.

  A cold salty wind came up off the bay. The gulls were screaming miserably. I felt shitty. My office would be freezing, too. On the corner of Marsh Street and Leng Avenue was a bar, The Opener, a squat building with small dark windows that I’d passed two dozen times in the last couple of weeks. I hadn’t been in before, but I really needed a drink, and besides, it might be warmer in there. I pushed open the door.

  The bar was indeed warm. I stamped the snow off my boots and went inside. It was almost empty and smelled of old ashtrays and stale beer. A couple of elderly men were playing chess by the bar. The barman was reading a battered old gilt-and-green-leather edition of the poetical works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

  “Hey. How about a Jack Daniel’s, straight up?”

  “Sure thing. You’re new in town,” he told me, putting his book facedown on the bar, pouring the drink into a glass.

  “Does it show?”

  He smiled, passed me the Jack Daniel’s. The glass was filthy, with a greasy thumbprint on the side, and I shrugged and knocked back the drink anyway. I could barely taste it.

  “Hair of the dog?” he said. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “There is a belief,” said the barman, whose fox-red hair was tightly greased back, “that the lykanthropoi can be returned to their natural forms by thanking them, while they’re in wolf form, or by calling them by their given names.”

  “Yeah? Well, thanks.”

  He poured another shot for me, unasked. He looked a little like Peter Lorre, but then, most of the folk in Innsmouth look a little like Peter Lorre, including my landlady.

  I sank the Jack Daniel’s, this time felt it burning down into my stomach, the way it should.

  “It’s what they say. I never said I believed it.”

  “What do you believe?”

  “Burn the girdle.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The lykanthropoi have girdles of human skin, given to them at their first transformation by their masters in Hell. Burn the girdle.”

  One of the old chess players turned to me then, his eyes huge and blind and protruding. “If you drink rainwater out of a wargwolf’s pawprint, that’ll make a wolf of you, when the moon is full,” he said. “The only cure is to hunt down the wolf that made the print in the first place and cut off its head with a knife forged of virgin silver.”

  “Virgin, huh?” I smiled.

  His chess partner, bald and wrinkled, shook his head and croaked a single sad sound. Then he moved his queen and croaked again.

  There are people like him all over Innsmouth.

  I paid for the drinks and left a dollar tip on the bar. The barman was reading his book once more and ignored it.

  Outside the bar big wet kissy flakes of snow had begun to fall, settling in my hair and eyelashes. I hate snow. I hate New England. I hate Innsmouth: it’s no place to be alone, but if there’s a good place to be alone, I’ve not found it yet. Still, business has kept me on the move for more moons than I like to think about. Business, and other things.

  I walked a couple of blocks down Marsh Street—like most of Innsmouth, an unattractive mixture of eighteenth-century American Gothic houses, late-nineteenth-century stunted brownstones, and late-twentieth prefab gray-brick boxes—until I got to a boarded-up fried chicken joint, and I went up the stone steps next to the store and unlocked the rusting metal security door.

  There was a liquor store across the street; a palmist was operating on the second floor.

  Someone had scrawled graffiti in black marker on the metal: JUST DIE, it said. Like it was easy.

  The stairs were bare wood; the plaster was stained and peeling. My one-room office was at the top of the stairs.

  I don’t stay anywhere long enough to bother with my name in gilt on glass. It was handwritten in block letters on a piece of ripped cardboard that I’d thumbtacked to the door.

  LAWRENCE TALBOT

  ADJUSTOR

  I unlocked the door to my office and went in.

  I inspected my office, while adjectives like seedy and rancid and squalid wandered through my head, then g
ave up, outclassed. It was fairly unprepossessing—a desk, an office chair, an empty filing cabinet; a window, which gave you a terrific view of the liquor store and the empty palmist’s. The smell of old cooking grease permeated from the store below. I wondered how long the fried chicken joint had been boarded up; I imagined a multitude of black cockroaches swarming over every surface in the darkness beneath me.

  “That’s the shape of the world that you’re thinking of there,” said a deep dark voice, deep enough that I felt it in the pit of my stomach.

  There was an old armchair in one corner of the office. The remains of a pattern showed through the patina of age and grease the years had given it. It was the color of dust.

  The fat man sitting in the armchair, his eyes still tightly closed, continued: “We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm.”

  His head was lolled back on the armchair, and the tip of his tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth.

  “You read my mind?”

  The man in the armchair took a slow deep breath that rattled in the back of his throat. He really was immensely fat, with stubby fingers like discolored sausages. He wore a thick old coat, once black, now an indeterminate gray. The snow on his boots had not entirely melted.

  “Perhaps. The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck.

  “Ah well. It’s too late now: The Elder Gods have chosen their vessels. When the moon rises . . .”

  A thin trickle of drool came from one corner of his mouth, oozed down in a thread of silver to his collar. Something scuttled from his collar into the shadows of his coat.

  “Yeah? What happens when the moon rises?”

  The man in the armchair stirred, opened two little eyes, red and swollen, and blinked them in waking.

  “I dreamed I had many mouths,” he said, his new voice oddly small and breathy for such a huge man. “I dreamed every mouth was opening and closing independently. Some mouths were talking, some whispering, some eating, some waiting in silence.”

  He looked around, wiped the spittle from the corner of his mouth, sat back in the chair, blinking puzzledly. “Who are you?”

  “I’m the guy who rents this office,” I told him.

  He belched suddenly, loudly. “I’m sorry,” he said in his breathy voice, and lifted himself heavily from the armchair. He was shorter than I was, when he was standing. He looked me up and down blearily. “Silver bullets,” he pronounced after a short pause. “Old-fashioned remedy.”

  “Yeah,” I told him. “That’s so obvious—must be why I didn’t think of it. Gee, I could just kick myself. I really could.”

  “You’re making fun of an old man,” he told me.

  “Not really. I’m sorry. Now, out of here. Some of us have work to do.”

  He shambled out. I sat down in the swivel chair at the desk by the window and discovered, after some minutes, through trial and error, that if I swiveled the chair to the left, it fell off its base.

  So I sat still and waited for the dusty black telephone on my desk to ring while the light slowly leaked away from the winter sky.

  Ring.

  A man’s voice: Had I thought about aluminum siding? I put down the phone.

  There was no heating in the office. I wondered how long the fat man had been asleep in the armchair.

  Twenty minutes later the phone rang again. A crying woman implored me to help her find her five-year-old daughter, missing since last night, stolen from her bed. The family dog had vanished, too.

  I don’t do missing children, I told her. I’m sorry: too many bad memories. I put down the telephone, feeling sick again.

  It was getting dark now, and, for the first time since I had been in Innsmouth, the neon sign across the street flicked on. It told me that MADAME EZEKIEL performed TAROT READINGS AND PALMISTRY.

  Red neon stained the falling snow the color of new blood.

  Armageddon is averted by small actions. That’s the way it was. That’s the way it always has to be.

  The phone rang a third time. I recognized the voice; it was the aluminum siding man again. “You know,” he said chattily, “transformation from man to animal and back being, by definition, impossible, we need to look for other solutions. Depersonalization, obviously, and likewise some form of projection. Brain damage? Perhaps. Pseudoneurotic schizophrenia? Laughably so. Some cases have been treated with intravenous thioridazine hydrochloride.”

  “Successfully?”

  He chuckled. “That’s what I like. A man with a sense of humor. I’m sure we can do business.”

  “I told you already. I don’t need aluminum siding.”

  “Our business is more remarkable than that and of far greater importance. You’re new in town, Mr. Talbot. It would be a pity if we found ourselves at, shall we say, loggerheads?”

  “You can say whatever you like, pal. In my book you’re just another adjustment, waiting to be made.”

  “We’re ending the world, Mr. Talbot. The Deep Ones will rise out of their ocean graves and eat the moon like a ripe plum.”

  “Then I won’t ever have to worry about full moons anymore, will I?”

  “Don’t try to cross us,” he began, but I growled at him, and he fell silent.

  Outside my window the snow was still falling.

  Across Marsh Street, in the window directly opposite mine, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen stood in the ruby glare of her neon sign, and she stared at me.

  She beckoned with one finger.

  I put down the phone on the aluminum siding man for the second time that afternoon, and went downstairs, and crossed the street at something close to a run; but I looked both ways before I crossed.

  She was dressed in silks. The room was lit only by candles and stank of incense and patchouli oil.

  She smiled at me as I walked in, beckoned me over to her seat by the window. She was playing a card game with a tarot deck, some version of solitaire. As I reached her, one elegant hand swept up the cards, wrapped them in a silk scarf, placed them gently in a wooden box.

  The scents of the room made my head pound. I hadn’t eaten anything today, I realized; perhaps that was what was making me lightheaded. I sat down across the table from her, in the candlelight.

  She extended her hand and took my hand in hers.

  She stared at my palm, touched it, softly, with her forefinger.

  “Hair?” She was puzzled.

  “Yeah, well. I’m on my own a lot.” I grinned. I had hoped it was a friendly grin, but she raised an eyebrow at me anyway.

  “When I look at you,” said Madame Ezekiel, “this is what I see. I see the eye of a man. Also I see the eye of a wolf. In the eye of a man I see honesty, decency, innocence. I see an upright man who walks on the square. And in the eye of a wolf I see a groaning and a growling, night howls and cries, I see a monster running with blood-flecked spittle in the darkness of the borders of the town.”

  “How can you see a growl or a cry?”

  She smiled. “It is not hard,” she said. Her accent was not American. It was Russian, or Maltese, or Egyptian perhaps. “In the eye of the mind we see many things.”

  Madame Ezekiel closed her green eyes. She had remarkably long eyelashes; her skin was pale, and her black hair was never still—it drifted gently around her head, in the silks, as if it were floating on distant tides.

  “There is a traditional way,” she told me. “A way to wash off a bad shape. You stand in running water, in clear spring water, while eating white rose petals.”

  “And then?”

  “The shape of darkness will be washed from you.”

  “It will return,” I told her, “with the next full of the moon.”

  “So,”
said Madame Ezekiel, “once the shape is washed from you, you open your veins in the running water. It will sting mightily, of course. But the river will carry the blood away.”

  She was dressed in silks, in scarves and cloths of a hundred different colors, each bright and vivid, even in the muted light of the candles.

  Her eyes opened.

  “Now,” she said, “the tarot.” She unwrapped her deck from the black silk scarf that held it, passed me the cards to shuffle. I fanned them, riffed and bridged them.

  “Slower, slower,” she said. “Let them get to know you. Let them love you, like . . . like a woman would love you.”

  I held them tightly, then passed them back to her.

  She turned over the first card. It was called The Warwolf. It showed darkness and amber eyes, a smile in white and red.

  Her green eyes showed confusion. They were the green of emeralds. “This is not a card from my deck,” she said and turned over the next card. “What did you do to my cards?”

  “Nothing, ma’am. I just held them. That’s all.”

  The card she had turned over was The Deep One. It showed something green and faintly octopoid. The thing’s mouths—if they were indeed mouths and not tentacles—began to writhe on the card as I watched.

  She covered it with another card, and then another, and another. The rest of the cards were blank pasteboard.

  “Did you do that?” She sounded on the verge of tears.

  “No.”

  “Go now,” she said.

  “But—”

  “Go.” She looked down, as if trying to convince herself I no longer existed.

  I stood up, in the room that smelled of incense and candlewax, and looked out of her window, across the street. A light flashed briefly in my office window. Two men with flashlights were walking around. They opened the empty filing cabinet, peered around, then took up their positions, one in the armchair, the other behind the door, waiting for me to return. I smiled to myself. It was cold and inhospitable in my office, and with any luck they would wait there for hours until they finally decided I wasn’t coming back.