Angels and Visitations Read online

  The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds: It’s juvenilia, admittedly, but I still have a soft spot for this story. Tidying it for this publication, I found myself changing back a handful of editorial emendations made almost a decade before.

  It was the third piece of fiction I wrote to be published in a mass-circulation magazine. (There were two earlier stories, “Featherquest” and “How to Sell The Ponti Bridge”, published in Imagine magazine. They were good-natured, if uninspired, fantasies, and aren’t reprinted here.)

  It was also the first thing I ever wrote to be plagiarised. I turned on the television some months after it had been published, and saw it being acted on BBC2 as a sketch on a children’s programme. I suppose the writers sensibly assumed that the preteen audience of whatever-the-show-was were unlikely to also read Knave.

  I remember thinking that I should have been offended, and instead found myself hugely flattered.

  Introductions to stories should tell you things like this.

  Virus: This was written for David Barrett’s computer-fiction anthology, Digital Dreams. I don’t play many computer games; when I do, I notice they tend to take up areas of my head. Blocks fall, or little men run and jump, behind my eyelids as I go to sleep. Mostly I’d lose, even when playing with my mind. This came from that.

  Looking for the Girl: This was commissioned by Penthouse for their twentieth anniversary issue, January 1985.

  For the previous couple of years I’d been doing interviews for Penthouse and Knave, two English “skin” magazines—tamer by far than their American equivalents; still, it was an education, all things considered.

  I asked a model once if she felt she was being exploited. “Me?” she said. Her name was Marie. “I’m getting well-paid for it, love. And it beats working the night shift in a Bradford biscuit factory. But I’ll tell you who’s being exploited. All those blokes who buy it. Wanking over me, every month. They’re being exploited.”

  I think this story began with that conversation.

  I was satisfied with this story when I wrote it. It was the first fiction I had written that sounded in any way like me and that didn’t read like someone else. I was edging towards a style.

  To research the story I sat in the Penthouse Docklands offices, and thumbed through twenty years’ worth of bound magazines. In the first Penthouse was my friend Dean Smith. Dean did makeup for Knave, and, it turned out, she’d been the very first Penthouse Pet of the Year, in 1965. I stole the 1965 Charlotte blurb directly from Dean’s blurb, “resurgent individualist” and all. The last I heard, Penthouse was hunting for Dean, for their 25th Anniversary celebrations. She’d dropped out of sight. It was in all the newspapers.

  It occurred to me, while I was looking at two decades of Penthouses, that Penthouse and magazines like it had nothing to do with women, and everything to do with photographs of women.

  And that was other place the story began.

  I wouldn’t write this story now, but I wrote it then. When it was published it was cut by a thousand words; it makes more sense now.

  Post-Mortem on Our Love: This is a song lyric, and it’s also a riddle of sorts.

  It’s sung by the Flash Girls, the internationally renowned singing duo consisting of award-winning author Emma Bull, and The Fabulous Lorraine Garland (who set it to music. She said I came to her in a dream and told her what the tune was).

  Every now and then I just write things, and they sit in a dusty corner of the computer’s hard drive. This was one of them. It sat on the computer for a couple of years, until the Flash Girls asked if I had any spare words.

  They sing it very sweetly.

  Being an Experiment: This was written for the short-lived British magazine 2020, and was commissioned by editor Maria Lexton.

  When I was a young journalist-about-town I was a reasonably good drinker, insofar as I remained standing and could form coherent sentences and find my way home again no matter how late I stayed out or how much I drank.

  I’m out of practice, however, and have lost the knack; which is perhaps, all things considered, a good thing.

  We Can Get Them for You Wholesale: I dozed off one night listening to the radio. When I fell asleep I was listening to a piece on buying in bulk; when I woke up they were talking about hired killers.

  That was where this story came from.

  I reread it last night, for the first time since its publication in 1984, and realised that it was a John Collier story. Not as good as any good John Collier story, nor written as well as Collier wrote; but it’s still a Collier story for all that, and I hadn’t noticed that when I was writing it.

  Ian Pemble was the editor of Knave, where this story and “The Case of The Four And Twenty Blackbirds” (and a third story, “Mss. Found In a Milk Bottle”, not reprinted here first appeared. Ian was a good editor, and a nice man, and an SF fan, and he gave me my first regular journalistic work. It was a monthly interview spot, which paid for my rent, and food, and let me save up for an electric typewriter. During his tenure as editor, Knave became, briefly, a good little magazine. He published me, and Kim Newman, and John Grant, and Dave Langford; he commissioned one of Alan Moore’s only prose short stories, “Sawdust Memories”. He would let me interview anyone I wanted to, as long as we both agreed they were interesting, which meant I got to meet many of the people (mostly authors) I admired or just wanted to meet, and got paid for talking to them. It was a good deal.

  (After a few years Ian went back into advertising, and Knave began publishing pieces on cars and cardigans and lousy short stories with dull sex in them. They wanted interviews with Sports Stars and Celebrities. It was no longer a magazine I wanted to work for, and so I stopped.)

  Father Brown: I do not know whether the first Chesterton book I read was The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, or the collected Father Brown stories. This is because they were all read at roughly the same time—between the ages of nine and twelve, in the little panelled library, upstairs, at Ardingly College Junior School. (The library moved downstairs when I was twelve).

  I’d go there whenever I could, and read, pretty indiscriminately. I worked my way through the collected works of J.R.R. Tolkien (actually only the first two books of Lord of the Rings, which I read and reread; when I was thirteen I won the school English Prize, and asked for The Return of the King as my prize book, so I could find out how it all ended), and H. Rider Haggard, Dennis Wheatley and Leslie Charteris, O. Henry and M. R. James, Col. Oreste Pinto and Baroness Orczy, Anthony Buckeridge and Gerald Durrell and Geoffrey Trease and H. E. Bates and Edgar Wallace and dozens of others—all authors who, in my head, are linked by the faint smell of aromatic pipe-smoke (the library was across from the headmaster’s office, and he moved in an atmosphere of Three Nuns pipe tobacco).

  G. K. Chesterton was, even then, one of my favourites, and is one of the few authors that I loved as a child I still admire and enjoy, for the hugeness of his fiction, because he could get words to do whatever he wanted them to do, for the colour and poetry and magic.

  Maxim Jakubowski ran into me one day in London and asked if I’d like to write an essay for his book 100 Great Detectives. I could write anything I wanted to about any fictional detective I wanted. “Of course, most of the good ones are already gone,” he said, apologetically. “I suppose Father Brown’s been taken, then?” “No,” he said. “Actually, he hasn’t.”

  So I wrote this for Maxim.

  Murder Mysteries: When I had the idea for this story it was called “City of Angels”. But around the time I actually began to write it a Broadway show with that title appeared, so when the story was finished I gave it a new name.

  It was written for Jessie Horsting at Midnight Graffiti magazine, for her paperback anthology, also called Midnight Graffiti. Pete Atkins, to whom I faxed draft after draft as I wrote and rewrote it, was invaluable as a sounding board, and a paragon of patience and good humour.

  I tried to play fair with the detective part of the
story. There are clues everywhere.

  There’s even one in the title.

  This book owes its existence to Greg Ketter, of DreamHaven. Bob Garcia designed it, and had ulcers and headaches and screaming fits on its behalf. Teresa Nielsen Hayden proofread it with persnickety panache. To them; to Michael, Jill, Charles, Craig, Steve and Bill, my friends who did the drawings (not to mention Randy); to Dave McKean, for a most marvellous cover; to the editors over the years who commissioned or accepted the pieces that follow—and to my wife Mary, and my children, Michael and Holly, who mostly left me alone to write them, my thanks.

  Sweet dreams.

  Neil Gaiman, August 1993.

  CHIVALRY

  MRS WHITAKER FOUND the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat.

  Every Thursday afternoon Mrs Whitaker walked down to the post office to collect her pension, even though her legs were no longer what they were, and on the way back home she would stop in at the Oxfam Shop and buy herself a little something.

  The Oxfam Shop sold old clothes, knickknacks, oddments, bits and bobs, and large quantities of old paperbacks, all of them donations: secondhand flotsam, often the house clearances of the dead. All the profits went to charity.

  The shop was staffed by volunteers. The volunteer on duty this afternoon was Marie, seventeen, slightly overweight, and dressed in a baggy mauve jumper which looked like she had bought it from the shop.

  Marie sat by the till with a copy of Modern Woman magazine, filling out a Reveal Your Hidden Personality questionnaire. Every now and then she’d flip to the back of the magazine, and check the relative points assigned to an A), B) or C) answer, before making up her mind how she’d respond to the question.

  Mrs Whitaker pottered around the shop.

  They still hadn’t sold the stuffed cobra, she noted. It had been there for six months now, gathering dust, glass eyes gazing balefully at the clothes racks and the cabinet filled with chipped porcelain and chewed toys.

  Mrs Whitaker patted its head as she went past.

  She picked out a couple of Mills & Boon novels from a bookshelf—Her Thundering Soul and Her Turbulent Heart, a shilling each—and gave careful consideration to the empty bottle of Mateus Rosé with a decorative lampshade on it, before deciding she really didn’t have anywhere to put it.

  She moved a rather threadbare fur coat, which smelled badly of mothballs. Underneath it was a walking stick, and a water-stained copy of Romance and Legend of Chivalry by A. R. Hope Moncrieff, priced at five pence. Next to the book, on its side, was the Holy Grail. It had a little round paper sticker on the base, and written on it, in felt pen, was the price: 30p.

  Mrs Whitaker picked up the dusty silver goblet, and appraised it through her thick spectacles.

  “This is nice,” she called to Marie.

  Marie shrugged.

  “It’d look nice on the mantlepiece.”

  Marie shrugged again.

  Mrs Whitaker gave fifty pence to Marie, who gave her ten pence change and a brown paper bag to put the books and the Holy Grail in. Then she went next door to the butcher’s and bought herself a nice piece of liver. Then she went home.

  The inside of the goblet was thickly coated with a brownish-red dust. Mrs Whitaker washed it out with great care, then left it to soak for an hour in warm water with a dash of vinegar added.

  Then she polished it with metal-polish until it gleamed, and she put it on the mantlepiece in her parlour, where it sat between a small, soulful, china basset hound and a photograph of her late husband Henry on the beach at Frinton in 1953.

  She had been right: it did look nice.

  For dinner that evening she had the liver fried in breadcrumbs, with onions. It was very nice.

  The next morning was Friday; on alternate Fridays Mrs Whitaker and Mrs Greenberg would visit each other. Today it was Mrs Greenberg’s turn to visit Mrs Whitaker. They sat in the parlour and ate macaroons and drank tea. Mrs Whitaker took one sugar in her tea, but Mrs Greenberg took sweetener, which she always carried in her handbag in a small plastic container.

  “That’s nice,” said Mrs Greenberg, pointing to the Grail. “What is it?”

  “It’s the Holy Grail,” said Mrs Whitaker. “It’s the cup that Jesus drunk out of at the Last Supper. Later, at the crucifixion, it caught His precious blood, when the centurion’s spear pierced His side.”

  Mrs Greenberg sniffed. She was small and Jewish and didn’t hold with unsanitary things. “I wouldn’t know about that,” she said, “but it’s very nice. Our Myron got one just like that when he won the swimming tournament, only it’s got his name on the side.”

  “Is he still with that nice girl? The hairdresser?”

  “Bernice? Oh yes. They’re thinking of getting engaged,” said Mrs Greenberg.

  “That’s nice,” said Mrs Whitaker. She took another macaroon.

  Mrs Greenberg baked her own macaroons and brought them over every alternate Friday: small sweet light-brown biscuits with almonds on top.

  They talked about Myron and Bernice, and Mrs Whitaker’s nephew Ronald (she had had no children), and about their friend Mrs Perkins who was in hospital with her hip, poor dear.

  At midday Mrs Greenberg went home, and Mrs Whitaker made herself cheese on toast for lunch, and after lunch Mrs Whitaker took her pills: the white and the red and two little orange ones.

  The doorbell rang.

  Mrs Whitaker answered the door. It was a young man with shoulder-length hair so fair it was almost white, wearing gleaming silver armour, with a white surcoat.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” said Mrs Whitaker.

  “I’m on a quest,” he said.

  “That’s nice,” said Mrs Whitaker, noncommittally

  “Can I come in?” he asked.

  Mrs Whitaker shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t think so,” she said.

  “I’m on a quest for the Holy Grail,” the young man said. “Is it here?”

  “Have you got any identification?” Mrs Whitaker asked. She knew that it was unwise to let unidentified strangers into your home, when you were elderly and living on your own. Handbags get emptied, and worse than that.

  The young man went back down the garden path. His horse, a huge grey charger, big as a shire-horse, its head high and its eyes intelligent, was tethered to Mrs Whitaker’s garden gate. The knight fumbled in the saddlebag, and returned with a scroll.

  It was signed by Arthur, King of All Britons, and charged all persons of whatever rank or station to know that here was Galaad, Knight of the Table Round, and that he was on a Right High and Noble Quest. There was a drawing of the young man below that. It wasn’t a bad likeness.

  Mrs Whitaker nodded. She had been expecting a little card with a photograph on it, but this was far more impressive.

  “I suppose you had better come in,” she said.

  They went into her kitchen. She made Galaad a cup of tea, then she took him into the parlour.

  Galaad saw the Grail on her mantlepiece, and dropped to one knee. He put down the tea cup carefully on the russet carpet. A shaft of light came through the net curtains and painted his awed face with golden sunlight and turned his hair into a silver halo.

  “It is truly the Sangrail,” he said, very quietly. He blinked his pale blue eyes three times, very fast, as if he were blinking back tears.

  He lowered his head as if in silent prayer.

  Galaad stood up again, and turned to Mrs Whitaker. “Gracious lady, keeper of the Holy of Holies, let me now depart this place with the Blessed Chalice, that my journeyings may be ended and my geas fulfilled.”

  “Sorry?” said Mrs Whitaker.

  Galaad walked over to her and took her old hands in his. “My quest is over,” he told her. “The Sangrail is finally within my reach.”

  Mrs Whitaker pursed her lips. “Can you pick your tea cup and saucer up, please?” she said.

  Galaad picked up his tea cup, apologetically.

  “No. I don’t think so,” sa
id Mrs Whitaker. “I rather like it there. It’s just right, between the dog and the photograph of my Henry.”

  “Is it gold you need? Is that it? Lady, I can bring you gold . . .”

  “No,” said Mrs Whitaker. “I don’t want any gold thank you. I’m simply not interested.”

  She ushered Galaad to the front door. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

  His horse was leaning its head over her garden fence, nibbling her gladioli. Several of the neighbourhood children were standing on the pavement watching it.

  Galaad took some sugar lumps from the saddlebag, and showed the braver of the children how to feed the horse, their hands held flat. The children giggled. One of the older girls stroked the horse’s nose.

  Galaad swung himself up onto the horse in one fluid movement. Then the horse and the knight trotted off down Hawthorne Crescent.

  Mrs Whitaker watched them until they were out of sight, then sighed and went back inside.

  The weekend was quiet.

  On Saturday Mrs Whitaker took the bus into Maresfield to visit her nephew Ronald, his wife Euphonia, and their daughters, Clarissa and Dillian. She took them a currant cake she had baked herself.

  On Sunday morning Mrs Whitaker went to church. Her local church was St James the Less, which was a little more “don’t think of this as a church, think of it as a place where like-minded friends hang out and are joyful” than Mrs Whitaker felt entirely comfortable with, but she liked the Vicar, the Reverend Bartholomew, when he wasn’t actually playing the guitar.

  After the service, she thought about mentioning to him that she had the Holy Grail in her front parlour, but decided against it.

  On Monday morning Mrs Whitaker was working in the back garden. She had a small herb garden she was extremely proud of: dill, vervain, mint, rosemary, thyme and a wild expanse of parsley. She was down on her knees, wearing thick green gardening gloves, weeding, and picking out slugs and putting them in a plastic bag.