The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  He paid the barmaid and maneuvered his way back to his new friends.

  “So. What you doin’ in Innsmouth?” asked the taller of the two. “I suppose you’re one of our American cousins, come to see the most famous of English villages.”

  “They named the one in America after this one, you know,” said the smaller one.

  “Is there an Innsmouth in the States?” asked Ben.

  “I should say so,” said the smaller man. “He wrote about it all the time. Him whose name we don’t mention.”

  “I’m sorry?” said Ben.

  The little man looked over his shoulder, then he hissed, very loudly, “H. P. Lovecraft!”

  “I told you not to mention that name,” said his friend, and he took a sip of the dark brown beer. “H. P. Lovecraft. H. P. bloody Lovecraft. H. bloody P. bloody Love bloody craft.” He stopped to take a breath. “What did he know. Eh? I mean, what did he bloody know?”

  Ben sipped his beer. The name was vaguely familiar; he remembered it from rummaging through the pile of old-style vinyl LPs in the back of his father’s garage. “Weren’t they a rock group?”

  “Wasn’t talkin’ about any rock group. I mean the writer.”

  Ben shrugged. “I’ve never heard of him,” he admitted. “I really mostly only read Westerns. And technical manuals.”

  The little man nudged his neighbor. “Here. Wilf. You hear that? He’s never heard of him.”

  “Well. There’s no harm in that. I used to read that Zane Grey,” said the taller.

  “Yes. Well. That’s nothing to be proud of. This bloke—what did you say your name was?”

  “Ben. Ben Lassiter. And you are . . . ? ”

  The little man smiled; he looked awfully like a frog, thought Ben. “I’m Seth,” he said. “And my friend here is called Wilf.”

  “Charmed,” said Wilf.

  “Hi,” said Ben.

  “Frankly,” said the little man, “I agree with you.”

  “You do?” said Ben, perplexed.

  The little man nodded. “Yer. H. P. Lovecraft. I don’t know what the fuss is about. He couldn’t bloody write.” He slurped his stout, then licked the foam from his lips with a long and flexible tongue. “I mean, for starters, you look at them words he used. Eldritch. You know what eldritch means?”

  Ben shook his head. He seemed to be discussing literature with two strangers in an English pub while drinking beer. He wondered for a moment if he had become someone else, while he wasn’t looking. The beer tasted less bad, the farther down the glass he went, and was beginning to erase the lingering aftertaste of the cherryade.

  “Eldritch. Means weird. Peculiar. Bloody odd. That’s what it means. I looked it up. In a dictionary. And gibbous?”

  Ben shook his head again.

  “Gibbous means the moon was nearly full. And what about that one he was always calling us, eh? Thing. Wossname. Starts with a b. Tip of me tongue . . .”

  “Bastards?” suggested Wilf.

  “Nah. Thing. You know. Batrachian. That’s it. Means looked like frogs.”

  “Hang on,” said Wilf. “I thought they was, like, a kind of camel.”

  Seth shook his head vigorously. “S’definitely frogs. Not camels. Frogs.”

  Wilf slurped his Shoggoth’s. Ben sipped his, carefully, without pleasure.

  “So?” said Ben.

  “They’ve got two humps,” interjected Wilf, the tall one.

  “Frogs?” asked Ben.

  “Nah. Batrachians. Whereas your average dromederary camel, he’s only got one. It’s for the long journey through the desert. That’s what they eat.”

  “Frogs?” asked Ben.

  “Camel humps.” Wilf fixed Ben with one bulging yellow eye. “You listen to me, matey-me-lad. After you’ve been out in some trackless desert for three or four weeks, a plate of roasted camel hump starts looking particularly tasty.”

  Seth looked scornful. “You’ve never eaten a camel hump.”

  “I might have done,” said Wilf.

  “Yes, but you haven’t. You’ve never even been in a desert.”

  “Well, let’s say, just supposing I’d been on a pilgrimage to the Tomb of Nyarlathotep . . .”

  “The black king of the ancients who shall come in the night from the east and you shall not know him, you mean?”

  “Of course that’s who I mean.”

  “Just checking.”

  “Stupid question, if you ask me.”

  “You could of meant someone else with the same name.”

  “Well, it’s not exactly a common name, is it? Nyarlathotep. There’s not exactly going to be two of them, are there? ‘Hullo, my name’s Nyarlathotep, what a coincidence meeting you here, funny them bein’ two of us,’ I don’t exactly think so. Anyway, so I’m trudging through them trackless wastes, thinking to myself, I could murder a camel hump . . .”

  “But you haven’t, have you? You’ve never been out of Innsmouth harbor.”

  “Well . . . No.”

  “There.” Seth looked at Ben triumphantly. Then he leaned over and whispered into Ben’s ear, “He gets like this when he gets a few drinks into him, I’m afraid.”

  “I heard that,” said Wilf.

  “Good,” said Seth. “Anyway. H. P. Lovecraft. He’d write one of his bloody sentences. Ahem. ‘The gibbous moon hung low over the eldritch and batrachian inhabitants of squamous Dulwich.’ What does he mean, eh? What does he mean? I’ll tell you what he bloody means. What he bloody means is that the moon was nearly full, and everybody what lived in Dulwich was bloody peculiar frogs. That’s what he means.”

  “What about the other thing you said?” asked Wilf.

  “What?”

  “Squamous. Wossat mean, then?”

  Seth shrugged. “Haven’t a clue,” he admitted. “But he used it an awful lot.”

  There was another pause.

  “I’m a student,” said Ben. “Gonna be a metallurgist.” Somehow he had managed to finish the whole of his first pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar, which was, he realized, pleasantly shocked, his first alcoholic beverage. “What do you guys do?”

  “We,” said Wilf, “are acolytes.”

  “Of Great Cthulhu,” said Seth proudly.

  “Yeah?” said Ben. “And what exactly does that involve?”

  “My shout,” said Wilf. “Hang on.” Wilf went over to the barmaid and came back with three more pints. “Well,” he said, “what it involves is, technically speaking, not a lot right now. The acolytin’ is not really what you might call laborious employment in the middle of its busy season. That is, of course, because of his bein’ asleep. Well, not exactly asleep. More like, if you want to put a finer point on it, dead.”

  “ ‘In his house at Sunken R’lyeh dead Cthulhu lies dreaming,’ ” interjected Seth. “Or, as the poet has it, ‘That is not dead what can eternal lie—’ ”

  “ ‘But in Strange Aeons—’ ” chanted Wilf. “—and by Strange he means bloody peculiar—”

  “Exactly. We are not talking your normal Aeons here at all.”

  “ ‘But in Strange Aeons even Death can die.’ ”

  Ben was mildly surprised to find that he seemed to be drinking another full-bodied pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar. Somehow the taste of rank goat was less offensive on the second pint. He was also delighted to notice that he was no longer hungry, that his blistered feet had stopped hurting, and that his companions were charming, intelligent men whose names he was having difficulty in keeping apart. He did not have enough experience with alcohol to know that this was one of the symptoms of being on your second pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar.

  “So right now,” said Seth, or possibly Wilf, “the business is a bit light. Mostly consisting of waiting.”

  “And praying,” said Wilf, if he wasn’t Seth.

  “And praying. But pretty soon now, that’s all going to change.”

  “Yeah?” asked Ben. “How’s that?”

  “Well,” confided the taller one.
“Any day now, Great Cthulhu (currently impermanently deceased), who is our boss, will wake up in his undersea living-sort-of quarters.”

  “And then,” said the shorter one, “he will stretch and yawn and get dressed—”

  “Probably go to the toilet, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

  “Maybe read the papers.”

  “—And having done all that, he will come out of the ocean depths and consume the world utterly.”

  Ben found this unspeakably funny. “Like a ploughman’s,” he said.

  “Exactly. Exactly. Well put, the young American gentleman. Great Cthulhu will gobble the world up like a ploughman’s lunch, leaving but only the lump of Branston pickle on the side of the plate.”

  “That’s the brown stuff?” asked Ben. They assured him that it was, and he went up to the bar and brought them back another three pints of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar.

  He could not remember much of the conversation that followed. He remembered finishing his pint, and his new friends inviting him on a walking tour of the village, pointing out the various sights to him. “That’s where we rent our videos, and that big building next door is the Nameless Temple of Unspeakable Gods and on Saturday mornings there’s a jumble sale in the crypt . . .”

  He explained to them his theory of the walking tour book and told them, emotionally, that Innsmouth was both scenic and charming. He told them that they were the best friends he had ever had and that Innsmouth was delightful.

  The moon was nearly full, and in the pale moonlight both of his new friends did look remarkably like huge frogs. Or possibly camels.

  The three of them walked to the end of the rusted pier, and Seth and/or Wilf pointed out to Ben the ruins of Sunken R’lyeh in the bay, visible in the moonlight, beneath the sea, and Ben was overcome by what he kept explaining was a sudden and unforeseen attack of seasickness and was violently and unendingly sick over the metal railings into the black sea below . . .

  After that it all got a bit odd.

  BEN LASSITER AWOKE on the cold hillside with his head pounding and a bad taste in his mouth. His head was resting on his backpack. There was rocky moorland on each side of him, and no sign of a road, and no sign of any village, scenic, charming, delightful, or even picturesque.

  He stumbled and limped almost a mile to the nearest road and walked along it until he reached a petrol station.

  They told him that there was no village anywhere locally named Innsmouth. No village with a pub called the Book of Dead Names. He told them about two men, named Wilf and Seth, and a friend of theirs, called Strange Ian, who was fast asleep somewhere, if he wasn’t dead, under the sea. They told him that they didn’t think much of American hippies who wandered about the countryside taking drugs, and that he’d probably feel better after a nice cup of tea and a tuna and cucumber sandwich, but that if he was dead set on wandering the country taking drugs, young Ernie who worked the afternoon shift would be all too happy to sell him a nice little bag of homegrown cannabis, if he could come back after lunch.

  Ben pulled out his A Walking Tour of the British Coastline book and tried to find Innsmouth in it to prove to them that he had not dreamed it, but he was unable to locate the page it had been on—if ever it had been there at all. Most of one page, however, had been ripped out, roughly, about halfway through the book.

  And then Ben telephoned a taxi, which took him to Bootle railway station, where he caught a train, which took him to Manchester, where he got on an airplane, which took him to Chicago, where he changed planes and flew to Dallas, where he got another plane going north, and he rented a car and went home.

  He found the knowledge that he was over 600 miles away from the ocean very comforting; although, later in life, he moved to Nebraska to increase the distance from the sea: there were things he had seen, or thought he had seen, beneath the old pier that night that he would never be able to get out of his head. There were things that lurked beneath gray raincoats that man was not meant to know. Squamous. He did not need to look it up. He knew. They were squamous.

  A couple of weeks after his return home Ben posted his annotated copy of A Walking Tour of the British Coastline to the author, care of her publisher, with an extensive letter containing a number of helpful suggestions for future editions. He also asked the author if she would send him a copy of the page that had been ripped from his guidebook, to set his mind at rest; but he was secretly relieved, as the days turned into months, and the months turned into years and then into decades, that she never replied.

  The Wedding Present

  1998

  AFTER ALL THE joys and the headaches of the wedding, after the madness and the magic of it all (not to mention the embarrassment of Belinda’s father’s after-dinner speech, complete with family slide show), after the honeymoon was literally (although not yet metaphorically) over and before their new suntans had a chance to fade in the English autumn, Belinda and Gordon got down to the business of unwrapping the wedding presents and writing their thank-you letters—thank-yous enough for every towel and every toaster, for the juicer and the breadmaker, for the cutlery and the crockery and the teas made and the curtains.

  “Right,” said Gordon. “That’s the large objects thank-you’d.

  What’ve we got left?”

  “Things in envelopes,” said Belinda. “Checks, I hope.”

  There were several checks, a number of gift tokens, and even a £10 book token from Gordon’s Aunt Marie, who was poor as a church mouse, Gordon told Belinda, but a dear, and who had sent him a book token every birthday as long as he could remember. And then, at the very bottom of the pile, there was a large brown businesslike envelope.

  “What is it?” asked Belinda.

  Gordon opened the flap and pulled out a sheet of paper the color of two-day-old cream, ragged at top and bottom, with typing on one side. The words had been typed with a manual typewriter, something Gordon had not seen in some years. He read the page slowly.

  “What is it?” asked Belinda. “Who’s it from?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gordon. “Someone who still owns a typewriter. It’s not signed.”

  “Is it a letter?”

  “Not exactly,” he said, and he scratched the side of his nose and read it again.

  “Well,” she said in an exasperated voice (but she was not really exasperated; she was happy. She would wake in the morning and check to see if she were still as happy as she had been when she went to sleep the night before, or when Gordon had woken her in the night by brushing up against her, or when she had woken him. And she was). “Well, what is it?”

  “It appears to be a description of our wedding,” he said. “It’s very nicely written. Here,” and he passed it to her.

  She looked it over.

  It was a crisp day in early October when Gordon Robert Johnson and Belinda Karen Abingdon swore that they would love each other, would support and honor each other as long as they both should live. The bride was radiant and lovely, the groom was nervous, but obviously proud and just as obviously pleased.

  That was how it began. It went on to describe the service and the reception clearly, simply, and amusingly.

  “How sweet,” she said. “What does it say on the envelope?”

  “ ‘Gordon and Belinda’s Wedding,’ ” he read.

  “No name? Nothing to indicate who sent it?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Well, it’s very sweet, and it’s very thoughtful,” she said. “Whoever it’s from.”

  She looked inside the envelope to see if there was something else inside that they had overlooked, a note from whichever one of her friends (or his, or theirs) had written it, but there wasn’t, so, vaguely relieved that there was one less thank you note to write, she placed the cream sheet of paper back in its envelope, which she placed in a box file, along with a copy of the wedding banquet menu, and the invitations, and the contact sheets for the wedding photographs, and one white rose from the bridal bouquet.

  Go
rdon was an architect, and Belinda was a vet. For each of them what they did was a vocation, not a job. They were in their early twenties. Neither of them had been married before, nor even seriously involved with anyone. They met when Gordon brought his thirteen-year-old golden retriever, Goldie, gray-muzzled and half-paralyzed, to Belinda’s surgery to be put down. He had had the dog since he was a boy and insisted on being with her at the end. Belinda held his hand as he cried, and then, suddenly and unprofessionally, she hugged him, tightly, as if she could squeeze away the pain and the loss and the grief. One of them asked the other if they could meet that evening in the local pub for a drink, and afterward neither of them was sure which of them had proposed it.

  The most important thing to know about the first two years of their marriage was this: they were pretty happy. From time to time they would squabble, and every once in a while they would have a blazing row about nothing very much that would end in tearful reconciliations, and they would make love and kiss away the other’s tears and whisper heartfelt apologies into each other’s ears. At the end of the second year, six months after she came off the pill, Brenda found herself pregnant.

  Gordon bought her a bracelet studded with tiny rubies, and he turned the spare bedroom into a nursery, hanging the wallpaper himself. The wallpaper was covered with nursery rhyme characters, with Little Bo Peep, and Humpty Dumpty, and the Dish Running Away with the Spoon, over and over and over again.

  Belinda came home from the hospital, with little Melanie in her carry-cot, and Belinda’s mother came to stay with them for a week, sleeping on the sofa in the lounge.

  It was on the third day that Belinda pulled out the box file to show her wedding souvenirs to her mother and to reminisce. Already their wedding seemed like such a long time ago. They smiled at the dried brown thing that had once been a white rose, and clucked over the menu and the invitation. At the bottom of the box was a large brown envelope.

  “ ‘Gordon and Belinda’s Marriage,’ ” read Belinda’s mother.

  “It’s a description of our wedding,” said Belinda. “It’s very sweet. It even has a bit in it about Daddy’s slide show.”