by Neil Gaiman
“No, I don’t want it,” I said.
“No. Of course not. That isn’t your sort of thing. No matter. Someone will be along later for this. But take something. Anything you want,” he said.
“Are you Lucifer?” I asked in a rough voice.
“Lucifer is an awful old goat who has a pitchfork and hooves and makes people suffer. I hate suffering. I only want to help people. I give gifts. That’s why I’m here. Everyone who walks these stairs before their time gets a gift to welcome them. You look thirsty. Would you like an apple?” Holding up the basket of white apples as he spoke.
I was thirsty—my throat felt not just sore, but singed, as if I had inhaled smoke recently, and I began to reach for the offered fruit, almost reflexively, but then drew my hand back for I knew the lessons of at least one book. He grinned at me.
“Are those—” I asked.
“They’re from a very old and honorable tree,” he said. “You will never taste a sweeter fruit. And when you eat of it, you will be filled with ideas. Yes, even one such as you, Quirinus Calvino, who barely learned to read.”
“I don’t want it,” I said, when what I really wanted to tell him was not to call me by name. I could not bear that he knew my name.
He said, “Everyone will want it. They will eat and eat and be filled with understanding. Why, learning how to speak another language will be as simple as, oh, learning to build a bomb. Just one bite of the apple away. What about the lighter? You can light anything with this lighter. A cigarette. A pipe. A campfire. Imaginations. Revolutions. Books. Rivers. The sky. Another man’s soul. Even the human soul has a temperature at which it becomes flammable. The lighter has an enchantment on it, is tapped into the deepest wells of oil on the planet, and will set fire to things for as long as the oil lasts, which I am sure will be forever.”
“You have nothing I want,” I said.
“I have something for everyone,” he said.
I rose to my feet, ready to leave, although I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t walk back down the stairs. The thought made me dizzy. Neither could I go back up. Lithodora would have returned to the village by now. They would be searching the stairs for me with torches. I was surprised I hadn’t heard them already.
The tin bird turned its head to look at me as I swayed on my heels, and blinked, the metal shutters of its eyes snapping closed, then popping open again. It let out a rusty cheep. So did I, startled by its sudden movement. I had thought it a toy, inanimate. It watched me steadily and I stared back. I had, as a child, always had an interest in ingenious mechanical objects, clockwork people who ran out of their hiding places at the stroke of noon, the woodcutter to chop wood, the maiden to dance a round. The boy followed my gaze, and smiled, then opened the cage and reached in for it. The bird leaped lightly onto his finger.
“It sings the most beautiful song,” he said. “It finds a master, a shoulder it likes to perch on, and it sings for this person all the rest of its days. The trick to making it sing for you is to tell a lie. The bigger the better. Feed it a lie, and it will sing you the most marvelous little tune. People love to hear its song. They love it so much, they don’t even care they’re being lied to. He’s yours if you want him.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” I said, but when I said it, the bird began to whistle: the sweetest, softest melody, as good a sound as the laughter of a pretty girl, or your mother calling you to dinner. The song sounded a bit like something played on a music box, and I imagined a studded cylinder turning inside it, banging the teeth of a silver comb. I shivered to hear it. In this place, on these stairs, I had never imagined I could hear something so right.
He laughed and waved his hand at me. The bird’s wings snapped from the side of its body, like knives leaping from sheaths, and it glided up and lit on my shoulder.
“You see,” said the boy on the stairs. “It likes you.”
“I can’t pay,” I said, my voice rough and strange.
“You’ve already paid,” said the boy.
Then he turned his head and looked down the stairs and seemed to listen. I heard a wind rising. It made a low, soughing moan as it came up through the channel of the staircase, a deep and lonely and restless cry. The boy looked back at me. “Now go. I hear my father coming. The awful old goat.”
I backed away and my heels struck the stair behind me. I was in such a hurry to get away I fell sprawling across the granite steps. The bird on my shoulder took off, rising in widening circles through the air, but when I found my feet it glided down to where it had rested before on my
shoulder
and I began
to run back up
the way I had come.
I
climbed
in haste for
a time but soon
was tired again and
had to slow to a walk.
I began to think about what
I would say when I reached the
main staircase and was discovered.
“I will confess everything and accept
my punishment, whatever that is,” I said.
The tin bird sang a gay and humorous ditty.
It
fell
silent
though as
I reached the
gate, quieted by
a different song not
far off: a girl’s sobs.
I listened, confused, and
crept uncertainly back to where
I had murdered Lithodora’s beloved.
I heard no sound except for Dora’s cries.
No men shouting, no feet running on the steps.
I had been gone half the night, it seemed to me but
when I reached the ruins where I had left the Saracen
and looked upon Dora it was as if only minutes had passed.
I
came
toward
her and
whispered
to her, afraid
almost to be heard.
The second time I spoke
her name she turned her head
and looked at me with red-rimmed
hating eyes and screamed to get away.
I wanted to comfort her, to tell her I was
sorry, but when I came close she sprang to her
feet and ran at me, striking me and flaying at my
face with her fingernails while she cursed my name.
I meant
to put my
hands on her
shoulders to hold
her still but when I
reached for her they found
her smooth white neck instead.
Her
father
and his
fellows and
my unemployed
friends discovered
me weeping over her.
Running my fingers through
the silk of her long black hair.
Her father fell to his knees and took
her in his arms and for a while the hills
rang with her name repeated over and over again.
Another
man, who held
a rifle, asked me
what had happened and
I told him—I told him—
the Arab, that monkey from the
desert, had lured her here and when
he couldn’t force her innocence from her
he throttled her in the grass and I found them
and we fought and I killed him with a block of stone.
And
as I
told it
the tin bird
began to whistle
and sing, the most
mournful and sweetest
melody I had ever heard
and the men listened until
the sad song was sung complete.
I
held
Lithodora
in my arms as
we walked back down.
the bird began to sing again as
I told them the Saracen had planned
to take the sweetest and most beautiful
girls and auction their white flesh in Araby—
a more profitable line of trade than selling wine.
The bird was by now whistling a marching song and the
faces of the men who walked with me were rigid and dark.
Ahmed’s
men burned
along with the
Arab’s ship, and
sank in the harbor.
His goods, stored in a
warehouse by the quay, were
seized and his money box fell
to me as a reward for my heroism.
No
one
ever
would’ve
imagined when
I was a boy that
one day I would be
the wealthiest trader
on the whole Amalfi coast,
or that I would come to own the
prized vineyards of Don Carlotta, I
who once worked like a mule for his coin.
No
one
would’ve
guessed that
one day I would
be the beloved mayor
of Sulle Scalle, or a man
of such renown that I would be
invited to a personal audience with
his holiness the pope himself, who thanked
me for my many well-noted acts of generosity.
The
springs
inside the
pretty tin bird
wore down, in time,
and it ceased to sing,
but by then it did not matter
if anyone believed my lies or not
such was my wealth and power and fame.
However.
Several years
before the tin bird
fell silent, I woke one
morning in my manor to find
it had constructed a nest of wire
on my windowsill, and filled it with
fragile eggs made of bright silver foil.
I regarded these eggs with unease but when I
reached to touch them, their mechanical mother
nipped at me with her needle-sharp beak and I did
not after that time make any attempt to disturb them.
Months
later the
nest was filled
with foil tatters.
The young of this new
species, creatures of a new
age, had fluttered on their way.
I
cannot
tell you
how many birds
of tin and wire and
electric current there
are in the world now—but I
have, this very month, heard speak
our newest prime minister, Mr. Mussolini.
When he sings of the greatness of the Italian
people and our kinship with our German neighbors,
I am quite sure I can hear a tin bird singing with him.
Its tune plays especially well amplified over modern radio.
I don’t
live in the
hills anymore.
It has been years
since I saw Sulle Scale.
I discovered, as I descended
at last into my senior years, that
I could no longer attempt the staircases.
I told people it was my poor sore old knees.
But in truth I
developed a
fear of
heights.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Dublin-born Roddy Doyle has written novels, play, and screenplays. His novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the Booker Prize in 1993. His Barry-town trilogy has been filmed as The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van.
Joyce Carol Oates has published more than fifty novels, as well as numerous short story collections and volumes of poetry and nonfiction. Her novel Them won the National Book Award.
Joanne Harris is the author of The Evil Seed and Chocolat, which was a number one best-seller on the London Sunday Times and was shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Novel of the Year. Runemarks, published in 2007, was her first book for children and young adults.
Michael Marshall Smith is a British novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer. He has won the British Fantasy, the August Derleth, and the Philip K. Dick awards. His book The Intruders was picked up by the BBC for a major new drama series.
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of scores of novels and short stories, including the popular Hap and Leonard mystery series. He is a multiple winner of the Bram Stoker Award. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife and family.
Walter Mosley is the author of more than twenty books in many categories, but is perhaps best known for the highly regarded and popular Easy Rawlins hard-boiled detective novels. Born in Los Angeles, he now lives in New York City.
Richard Adams is the author of Shardik, The Girl in the Swing, and many other novels, but is perhaps best known for Watership Down, which was a national best-seller, and was awarded the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction.
Jodi Picoult is a number one best-selling author, with more than 14 million books in print worldwide. She won the New England Bookseller Award for fiction in 2003, and currently lives in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Michael Swanwick began publishing in the early 1980s, and is currently based in Philadelphia. He is the winner of the Hugo, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and Nebula awards.
Peter Straub’s novel Ghost Story is generally considered a high point of the modern horror novel. He has won the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and International Horror Guild awards. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he now lives in New York City.
Lawrence Block is the highly acclaimed author of two series set in New York, featuring Private Eye Matthew Scudder and burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr. In 1993 Block was tapped as a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.
Jeffrey Ford is known for his iconoclastic and literary dark fantasy novels. He is the winner of numerous awards for both his short stories and longer works. He lives in southern New Jersey with his wife and family.
Chuck Palahniuk is the author of Fight Club and numerous other novels, including the recent novel Pygmy. He is the recipient of many awards, among them the Pacific Northwest Bookseller Association Award. He lives in Washington State.
Diana Wynne Jones has written many fantasy novels for adults and children, among them the Chrestomanci series, which won the 1977 Guardian Award for children’s books. Her Howl’s Moving Castle was made into a notable film by Japanese director Havai Miazaki. She lives in Great Britain.
Pittsburgh native Stewart O’Nan is the author of numerous novels, such as Songs for the Missing and The Good Wife. His first short story collection, In the Walled City, was awarded the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 1993.
Multiple award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer Gene Wolf is perhaps best known for The Book of the New Sun, which comprises four volumes. He lives in Illinois.
Carolyn Parkhurst is the best-selling author of The Dogs of Babel (which was also a New York Times notable book in 2003) and Lost and Found. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Kat Howard currently lives in Minneapolis. She earned a law degree, then acquired a Ph.D. in English literature, both from the University of Minnesota. She is a 2008 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. “A Life in Fictions” is her first published story.
Jonathan Carroll, generally considered a magic realist, is the author of the novel The Land of the Laughs and many others. He has won the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy awards.
International number one best-selling author Jeffery Deaver’s books are sold in 150 countries and have been translated into 25 languages. He is t
he winner of numerous awards. His most recent books are The Bodies Left Behind and More Twisted: Collected Stories, Volume II.
Tim Powers, another magic realist, has won the World Fantasy Award two times, for his novels Last Call and Declare. Born in Buffalo, New York, he grew up in California, where he still lives.
Kurt Andersen is a novelist and host of the public radio program Studio 360. A cofounder of Spy magazine and former editor in chief of New York magazine, he has also written for Vanity Fair, Time, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.
Michael Moorcock has published science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as more overtly literary works. As editor of New Worlds magazine, he helped foster the new wave movement in science fiction, which helped bring it into the literary mainstream.
Elizabeth Hand grew up in New York and currently lives in Maine. She is the winner of the World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and International Horror Guild awards. Among her novels are Illyria and Generation Loss.
New England native Joe Hill’s first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, was a best-seller. He has won many awards. His first short-story collection, 20th Century Ghosts, was published in 2005, and his most recent novel is Horns.
Acknowledgments
Many loving thanks to Jennifer Brehl and Merrilee Heifetz, dual rudders on a long boat, for steering us safely to shore.
About the Editors
Neil Gaiman is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, Anansi Boys, The Graveyard Book, and Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett); the Sandman series of graphic novels; and the story collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. He is the winner of numerous literary honors, including the Hugo, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy Awards, and the Newbery Medal. Originally from England, he now lives in America.
www.neilgaiman.com
Award winner Al Sarrantonio is the author of forty previous books, including several highly acclaimed novels. He has edited numerous collections, including the groundbreaking 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense and Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy. He lives in Newburgh, New York.
