The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  The door opened as he knocked. Marguerite Olsen looked almost as nervous as he felt. She took the wine bottle and the potted plant, and said thank you. The television was on, The Wizard of Oz on video. It was still in sepia, and Dorothy was still in Kansas, sitting with her eyes closed in Professor Marvel’s wagon as the old fraud pretended to read her mind, and the twister-wind that would tear her away from her life was approaching. Leon sat in front of the screen, playing with a toy fire truck. When he saw Shadow an expression of delight touched his face; he stood up and ran, tripping over his feet in his excitement, into a back bedroom, from which he emerged a moment later, triumphantly waving a quarter.

  “Watch, Mike Ainsel!” he shouted. Then he closed both his hands and he pretended to take the coin into his right hand, which he opened wide. “I made it disappear, Mike Ainsel!”

  “You did,” agreed Shadow. “After we’ve eaten, if it’s okay with your mom, I’ll show you how to do it even smoother than that.”

  “Do it now if you want,” said Marguerite. “We’re still waiting for Samantha. I sent her out for sour cream. I don’t know what’s taking her so long.”

  And, as if that was her cue, footsteps sounded on the wooden deck, and somebody shouldered open the front door. Shadow did not recognize her at first, then she said, “I didn’t know if you wanted the kind with calories or the kind that tastes like wallpaper paste so I went for the kind with calories,” and he knew her then: the girl from the road to Cairo.

  “That’s fine,” said Marguerite. “Sam, this is my neighbor, Mike Ainsel. Mike, this is Samantha Black Crow, my sister.”

  I don’t know you, thought Shadow desperately. You’ve never met me before. We’re total strangers. He tried to remember how he had thought snow, how easy and light that had been: this was desperate. He put out his hand and said, “Pleased to meetcha.”

  She blinked, looked up at his face. A moment of puzzlement, then recognition entered her eyes and curved the corners of her mouth into a grin. “Hello,” she said.

  “I’ll see how the food is doing,” said Marguerite, in the taut voice of someone who burns things in kitchens if they leave them alone and unwatched even for a moment.

  Sam took off her puffy coat and her hat. “So you’re the melancholy but mysterious neighbor,” she said. “Who’da thunk it?” She kept her voice down.

  “And you,” he said, “are girl Sam. Can we talk about this later?”

  “If you promise to tell me what’s going on.”

  “Deal.”

  Leon tugged at the leg of Shadow’s pants. “Will you show me now?” he asked, and held out his quarter.

  “Okay,” said Shadow. “But if I show you, you have to remember that a master magician never tells anyone how it’s done.”

  Other People

  2001

  TIME IS FLUID here,” said the demon.

  He knew it was a demon the moment he saw it. He knew it, just as he knew the place was Hell. There was nothing else that either of them could have been.

  The room was long, and the demon waited by a smoking brazier at the far end. A multitude of objects hung on the rock-gray walls, of the kind that it would not have been wise or reassuring to inspect too closely. The ceiling was low, the floor oddly insubstantial.

  “Come close,” said the demon, and he did.

  The demon was rake thin and naked. It was deeply scarred, and it appeared to have been flayed at some time in the distant past. It had no ears, no sex. Its lips were thin and ascetic, and its eyes were a demon’s eyes: they had seen too much and gone too far, and under their gaze he felt less important than a fly.

  “What happens now?” he asked.

  “Now,” said the demon, in a voice that carried with it no sorrow, no relish, only a dreadful flat resignation, “you will be tortured.”

  “For how long?”

  But the demon shook its head and made no reply. It walked slowly along the wall, eyeing first one of the devices that hung there, then another. At the far end of the wall, by the closed door, was a cat-o’-nine-tails made of frayed wire. The demon took it down with one three-fingered hand and walked back, carrying it reverently. It placed the wire tines onto the brazier, and stared at them as they began to heat up.

  “That’s inhuman.”

  “Yes.”

  The tips of the cat’s tails were glowing a dead orange.

  As the demon raised its arm to deliver the first blow, it said, “In time you will remember even this moment with fondness.”

  “You are a liar.”

  “No,” said the demon. “The next part,” it explained, in the moment before it brought down the cat, “is worse.”

  Then the tines of the cat landed on the man’s back with a crack and a hiss, tearing through the expensive clothes, burning and rending and shredding as they struck, and, not for the last time in that place, he screamed.

  There were two hundred and eleven implements on the walls of that room, and in time he was to experience each of them.

  When, finally, the Lazarene’s Daughter, which he had grown to know intimately, had been cleaned and replaced on the wall in the two hundred and eleventh position, then, through wrecked lips, he gasped, “Now what?”

  “Now,” said the demon, “the true pain begins.”

  It did.

  Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told—told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything.

  “Tell me what you thought as she walked out the door,” said the demon.

  “I thought my heart was broken.”

  “No,” said the demon, without hate, “you didn’t.” It stared at him with expressionless eyes, and he was forced to look away.

  “I thought, now she’ll never know I’ve been sleeping with her sister.”

  The demon took apart his life, moment by moment, instant to awful instant. It lasted a hundred years, perhaps, or a thousand—they had all the time there ever was, in that gray room—and toward the end he realized that the demon had been right. The physical torture had been kinder.

  And it ended.

  And once it had ended, it began again. There was a self-knowledge there he had not had the first time, which somehow made everything worse.

  Now, as he spoke, he hated himself. There were no lies, no evasions, no room for anything except the pain and the anger.

  He spoke. He no longer wept. And when he finished, a thousand years later, he prayed that now the demon would go to the wall, and bring down the skinning knife, or the choke-pear, or the screws.

  “Again,” said the demon.

  He began to scream. He screamed for a long time.

  “Again,” said the demon, when he was done, as if nothing had been said.

  It was like peeling an onion. This time through his life he learned about consequences. He learned the results of things he had done; things he had been blind to as he did them; the ways he had hurt the world; the damage he had done to people he had never known, or met, or encountered. It was the hardest lesson yet.

  “Again,” said the demon, a thousand years later.

  He crouched on the floor, beside the brazier, rocking gently, his eyes closed, and he told the story of his life, re-experiencing it as he told it, from birth to death, changing nothing, leaving nothing out, facing everything. He opened his heart.

  When he was done, he sat there, eyes closed, waiting for the voice to say, “Again,” but nothing was said. He opened his eyes.

  Slowly, he stood up. He was alone.

  At the far end of the room, there was a door, and as he watched, it opened.

  A man stepped through the door. There was terror in the man’s face, and arrogance, and pride. The man, who wore expensive clothes, took several hesitant steps into the room, and then stopped.
/>
  When he saw the man, he understood.

  “Time is fluid here,” he told the new arrival.

  Strange Little Girls

  2001

  The Girls

  New Age

  SHE SEEMS SO cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon.

  You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood.

  She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.

  Bonnie’s Mother

  You know how it is when you love someone?

  And the hard part, the bad part, the Jerry Springer Show part is that you never stop loving someone. There’s always a piece of them in your heart.

  Now that she is dead, she tries to remember only the love. She imagines every blow a kiss, the makeup that inexpertly covers the bruises, the cigarette burn on her thigh—all these things, she decides, were gestures of love.

  She wonders what her daughter will do.

  She wonders what her daughter will be.

  She is holding a cake, in her death. It is the cake she was always going to bake for her little one. Maybe they would have mixed it together.

  They would have sat and eaten it and smiled, all three of them, and the apartment would have slowly filled with laughter and with love.

  Strange

  There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won’t remember and that she can’t even let herself think about because that’s when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it’s always raining a slow and endless drizzle.

  You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sing, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.

  Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again.

  Whenever it rains you will think of her.

  Silence

  Thirty-five years a showgirl that she admits to, and her feet hurt, day in, day out, from the high heels, but she can walk down steps with a forty-pound headdress in high heels, she’s walked across a stage with a lion in high heels, she could walk through goddamn Hell in high heels if it came to that.

  These are the things that have helped, that kept her walking and her head high: her daughter; a man from Chicago who loved her, although not enough; the national news anchor who paid her rent for a decade and didn’t come to Vegas more than once a month; two bags of silicone gel; and staying out of the desert sun.

  She will be a grandmother soon, very soon.

  Love

  And then there was the time that one of them simply wouldn’t return her calls to his office. So she called the number he did not know that she had, and she said to the woman who answered that this was so embarrassing but as he was no longer talking to her could he be told that she was still waiting for the return of her lacy black underthings, which he had taken because, he said, they smelled of her, of both of them. Oh, and that reminded her, she said, as the woman on the other end of the phone said nothing, could they be laundered first, and then simply posted back to her. He has her address. And then, her business joyfully concluded, she forgets him utterly and forever, and she turns her attention to the next.

  One day she won’t love you, too. It will break your heart.

  Time

  She is not waiting. Not quite. It is more that the years mean nothing to her anymore, that the dreams and the street cannot touch her.

  She remains on the edges of time, implacable, unhurt, beyond, and one day you will open your eyes and see her; and after that, the dark.

  It is not a reaping. Instead, she will pluck you, gently, like a feather, or a flower for her hair.

  Rattlesnake

  She doesn’t know who owned the jacket originally. Nobody claimed it after a party, and she figured it looked good on her.

  It says KISS, and she does not like to kiss. People, men and women, have told her that she is beautiful, and she has no idea what they mean. When she looks in the mirror she does not see beauty looking back at her. Only her face.

  She does not read, watch TV, or make love. She listens to music. She goes places with her friends. She rides roller coasters but never screams when they plummet or twist and plunge upside down.

  If you told her the jacket was yours she’d just shrug and give it back to you. It’s not like she cares, not one way or the other.

  Heart of Gold

  —sentences.

  Sisters, maybe twins, possibly cousins. We won’t know unless we see their birth certificates, the real ones, not the ones they use to get ID.

  This is what they do for a living. They walk in, take what they need, walk out again.

  It’s not glamorous. It’s just business. It may not always be strictly legal. It’s just business.

  They are too smart for this, and too tired.

  They share clothes, wigs, makeup, cigarettes. Restless and hunting, they move on. Two minds. One heart.

  Sometimes they even finish each other’s—

  Monday’s Child

  Standing in the shower, letting the water run over her, washing it away, washing everything away, she realizes that what made it hardest was that it had smelled just like her own high school.

  She had walked through the corridors, heart beating raggedly in her chest, smelling that school smell, and it all came back to her.

  It was only, what, six years, maybe less, since it had been her running from locker to classroom, since she had watched her friends crying and raging and brooding over the taunts and the names and the thousand hurts that plague the powerless. None of them had ever gone this far.

  She found the first body in a stairwell.

  That night, after the shower, which could not wash what she had had to do away, not really, she said to her husband, “I’m scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “That this job is making me hard. That it’s making me someone else. Someone I don’t know anymore.”

  He pulled her close and held her, and they stayed touching, skin to skin, until dawn.

  Happiness

  She feels at home on the range; ear protectors in position, man-shaped paper target up and waiting for her.

  She imagines, a little, she remembers, a little, and she sights and squeezes and as her time on the range begins she feels rather than sees the head and the heart obliterate. The smell of cordite always makes her think of the Fourth of July.

  You use the gifts God gave you. That was what her mother had said, which makes their falling-out even harder, somehow.

  Nobody will ever hurt her. She’ll just smile her faint vague wonderful smile and walk away.

  It’s not about the money. It’s never about the money.

  Raining Blood

  Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.

  She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny Frenchwoman with white hair, with a daughter and a granddaughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.

  Or that’s a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.

  Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months’ pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.

  There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.

  There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughte
r’s wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.

  Real Men

  Some of the girls were boys.

  The view changes from where you are standing.

  Words can wound, and wounds can heal.

  All of these things are true.

  October in the Chair

  2002

  OCTOBER WAS IN the chair, so it was chilly that evening, and the leaves were red and orange and tumbled from the trees that circled the grove. The twelve of them sat around a campfire roasting huge sausages on sticks, which spat and crackled as the fat dripped onto the burning applewood, and drinking fresh apple cider, tangy and tart in their mouths.

  April took a dainty bite from her sausage, which burst open as she bit into it, spilling hot juice down her chin. “Beshrew and suck ordure on it,” she said.

  Squat March, sitting next to her, laughed, low and dirty, and then pulled out a huge, filthy handkerchief. “Here you go,” he said.

  April wiped her chin. “Thanks,” she said. “The cursed bag of innards burned me. I’ll have a blister there tomorrow.”

  September yawned. “You are such a hypochondriac,” he said, across the fire. “And such language.” He had a pencil-thin mustache and was balding in the front, which made his forehead seem high and wise.

  “Lay off her,” said May. Her dark hair was cropped short against her skull, and she wore sensible boots. She smoked a small brown cigarillo that smelled heavily of cloves. “She’s sensitive.”

  “Oh puhlease,” said September. “Spare me.”

  October, conscious of his position in the chair, sipped his apple cider, cleared his throat, and said, “Okay. Who wants to begin?” The chair he sat in was carved from one large block of oakwood, inlaid with ash, with cedar, and with cherrywood. The other eleven sat on tree stumps equally spaced about the small bonfire. The tree stumps had been worn smooth and comfortable by years of use.

  “What about the minutes?” asked January. “We always do minutes when I’m in the chair.”