Smoke and Mirrors Read online

  Smoke and Mirrors

  NEIL GAIMAN

  headline

  www.headline.co.uk

  Copyright © 1999 Neil Gaiman

  The right of Neil Gaiman to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2010

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 7997 2

  This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations

  Typeset in ZapfEllipt by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford on Avon,

  Warwickshire

  Printed and bound in the UK by

  CPI Mackays, Chatham ME5 8TD

  Headline’s policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and

  recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests.

  The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the

  environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Reading the Entrails: A Rondel

  An Introduction

  Chivalry

  Nicholas Was . . .

  The Price

  Troll Bridge

  Don’t Ask Jack

  The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories

  Eaten (Scenes from a Moving Picture)

  The White Road

  Queen of Knives

  The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch

  Changes

  The Daughter of Owls

  Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar

  Virus

  Looking for the Girl

  Only the End of the World Again

  Bay Wolf

  Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot

  We Can Get Them for You Wholesale

  One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock

  Cold Colours

  The Sweeper of Dreams

  Foreign Parts

  Vampire Sestina

  Mouse

  The Sea Change

  How Do You Think It Feels?

  When We Went to See the End of the World by Dawnie Morningside, age 11¼

  Desert Wind

  Tastings

  In the End

  Babycakes

  Murder Mysteries

  Snow, Glass, Apples

  Exclusive Material

  Web Link to Free Audio Download

  An Interview with Neil Gaiman

  Neil Gaiman is a messy-haired white male author trapped in the body of an identical white male author with perhaps even less-tidy hair. His books and comics have won many awards. He thanks you for your offer of a comb but does not believe it would do any good. Despite being English, he lives more in America than he does anywhere else in the world, and is currently somewhere in his mid-forties. He wrote this book especially for you.

  Also by Neil Gaiman and available from Review

  MirrorMask: The Illustrated Film Script

  (with Dave McKean)

  Anansi Boys

  American Gods

  Stardust

  Neverwhere

  For Ellen Datlow and Steve Jones

  But where there’s a monster there’s a miracle.

  – OGDEN NASH, DRAGONS ARE TOO SELDOM

  Reading the Entrails: A Rondel

  ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that one can’t help growing older.’ ‘One can’t perhaps,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘but two can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven.’

  – LEWIS CARROLL, THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

  They’ll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate –

  The cards and stars that tumble as they will.

  Tomorrow manifests and brings the bill

  For every kiss and kill, the small and great.

  You want to know the future, love? Then wait:

  I’ll answer your impatient questions. Still –

  They’ll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate,

  The cards and stars that tumble as they will.

  I’ll come to you tonight, dear, when it’s late,

  You will not see me; you may feel a chill.

  I’ll wait until you sleep, then take my fill,

  And that will be your future on a plate.

  They’ll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate.

  An Introduction

  Writing is flying in dreams.

  When you remember. When you can. When it works.

  It’s that easy.

  – AUTHOR’S NOTEBOOK, FEBRUARY 1992

  They do it with mirrors. It’s a cliché, of course, but it’s also true. Magicians have been using mirrors, usually set at a forty-five-degree angle, ever since the Victorians began to manufacture reliable, clear mirrors in quantity, well over a hundred years ago. John Nevil Maskelyne began it, in 1862, with a wardrobe that, thanks to a cunningly placed mirror, concealed more than it revealed.

  Mirrors are wonderful things. They appear to tell the truth, to reflect life back out at us; but set a mirror correctly and it will lie so convincingly you’ll believe that something has vanished into thin air, that a box filled with doves and flags and spiders is actually empty, that people hidden in the wings or the pit are floating ghosts upon the stage. Angle it right and a mirror becomes a magic casement; it can show you anything you can imagine and maybe a few things you can’t.

  (The smoke blurs the edges of things.)

  Stories are, in one way or another, mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in the darkness.

  Fantasy – and all fiction is fantasy of one kind or another – is a mirror. A distorting mirror, to be sure, and a concealing mirror, set at forty-five degrees to reality, but it’s a mirror nonetheless, which we can use to tell ourselves things we might not otherwise see. (Fairy tales, as G. K. Chesterton once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.)

  Winter started today. The sky turned grey and the snow began to fall and it did not stop falling until well after dark. I sat in the darkness and watched the snow falling, and the flakes glistened and glimmered as they spun into the light and out again, and I wondered about where stories came from.

  This is the kind of thing that you wonder about when you make things up for a living. I remain unconvinced that it is the kind of activity that is a fit occupation for an adult, but it’s too late now: I seem to have a career that I enjoy which doesn’t involve getting up too early in the morning. (When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.)

  Most of the stories in this book were written to entertain the various editors who had asked me for tales for specific anthologies (‘It’s for an anthology of stories about the Holy Grail,’ ‘. . . about sex,’ ‘. . .
of fairy stories retold for adults,’ ‘. . . about sex and horror,’ ‘. . . of revenge stories,’ ‘. . . about superstition,’ ‘. . . about more sex’). A few of them were written to amuse myself or, more precisely, to get an idea or an image out of my head and pinned safely down on paper; which is as good a reason for writing as I know: releasing demons, letting them fly. Some of the stories began in idleness: fancies and curiosities that got out of hand.

  I once made up a story as a wedding present for some friends. It was about a couple who were given a story as a wedding present. It was not a reassuring story. Having made up the story, I decided that they’d probably prefer a toaster, so I got them a toaster, and to this day have not written the story down. It sits in the back of my head to this day, waiting for someone to get married who would appreciate it.

  It occurs to me now (writing this introduction in blue-black fountain pen ink in a black-bound notebook, in case you were wondering) that, although one way or another most of the stories in this book are about love in some form or another, there aren’t enough happy stories, stories of properly requited love to balance out all the other kinds you’ll find in this book; and indeed, that there are people who don’t read introductions. For that matter, some of you out there may be having weddings one day, after all. So for all of you who do read introductions, here is the story I did not write. (And if I don’t like the story once it’s written, I can always cross out this paragraph, and you’ll never know that I stopped writing the introduction to start writing a story instead.)

  The Wedding Present

  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 teasmade and the curtains.

  ‘Right,’ said Gordon. ‘That’s the large objects thank-you’d. What’ve we got left?’

  ‘Things in envelopes,’ said Belinda. ‘Cheques, I hope.’

  There were several cheques, 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 colour 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 honour 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.

  Gordon 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, Belinda 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.’

  Belinda opened the envelope and pulled out the sheet of cream paper. She read what was typed upon the paper, and made a face. Then she put it away without saying anything.

  ‘Can’t I see it, dear?’ asked her mother.

  ‘I think it’s Gordon playing a joke,’ said Belinda. ‘Not in good taste, either.’

  Belinda was sitting up in bed that night, breastfeeding Melanie, when she said to Gordon, who was staring at his wife and new daughter with a foolish smile upon his face, ‘Darling, why did you write those things?’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘In the letter. That wedding thing. You know.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It wasn’t funny.’

  He sighed. ‘What are you talking about?’

  Belinda pointed to the box file, which she had brought upstairs and placed upon her dressing table. Gordon opened it an
d took out the envelope. ‘Did it always say that on the envelope?’ he asked. ‘I thought it said something about our wedding.’ Then he took out and read the single sheet of ragged-edged paper, and his forehead creased. ‘I didn’t write this.’ He turned the paper over, staring at the blank side as if expecting to see something else written there.

  ‘You didn’t write it?’ she asked. ‘Really you didn’t?’ Gordon shook his head. Belinda wiped a dribble of milk from the baby’s chin. ‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘I thought you wrote it, but you didn’t.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let me see that again,’ she said. He passed the paper to her. ‘This is so weird. I mean, it’s not funny, and it’s not even true.’