Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances Read online

  It is a very silly story, so I gave it a slightly pompous title.

  Nothing O’Clock

  I have wholeheartedly and unashamedly loved the television series Doctor Who since I was a three-year-old boy at Mrs. Pepper’s School in Portsmouth, and William Hartnell was the Doctor. Writing actual episodes of the show, almost fifty years later, was one of the most fun things I’ve done. (One of them even won a Hugo Award.) By this time Matt Smith played the eleventh Doctor. Puffin Books asked if I would write a story for their book Doctor Who: 11 Doctors, 11 Stories. I chose to set the story during the first season of Matt’s run.

  You might think you need to know a lot about Doctor Who, given that it is a fifty-year-old show, to enjoy this story, but you don’t need to know much. The Doctor is an alien, a Time Lord, the last of his race, who travels through time and space in a blue box that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It sometimes lands where he wanted to go. If there’s something wrong, he may well sort it out. He’s very clever.

  There is a game in England, or there was when I was growing up, called What’s the Time, Mister Wolf? It’s a fun game. Sometimes Mister Wolf tells you the time. Sometimes he tells you something much more disquieting.

  Diamonds and Pearls: A Fairy Tale

  I first spent time with the woman who would become my wife because she wanted to make a book of photographs of herself dead, to accompany her album Who Killed Amanda Palmer? She had been taking photographs of herself dead since she was eighteen. She wrote to me and pointed out that nobody was going to buy a book of photos of a dead woman who wasn’t even actually dead, but perhaps if I wrote some captions they might.

  Photographer Kyle Cassidy and Amanda and I gathered in Boston for a few days of making art. The photographs Kyle took were like stills from lost films, and I would write stories to accompany them. Unfortunately, most of the stories don’t work when separated from their photographs. (My favorite was a murder mystery, involving a woman killed by a typewriter.)

  I like this one, though, and you do not need the photograph (of young Amanda with her mouth open and a floor covered with costume jewelry) to understand it.

  The Return of the Thin White Duke

  The title is a quote from a David Bowie song, and the story began, some years ago, with a fashion magazine asking the remarkable Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano to do some fashion drawings of Bowie and his wife, Iman. Mr. Amano asked if I would like to write a story to accompany them. I wrote the first half of a story, with plans to conclude it in the next issue of the magazine. But the magazine lost interest before they had published the first part, and the story was forgotten. For this anthology I thought it would be an adventure to finish it, and find out what was going to happen, and where it was all heading. If I had known once (I must have known once), I still found myself reading the story like a stranger, and walking alone into the mist to learn where it was going.

  Feminine Endings

  Life imitates art, but clumsily, copying its movements when it thinks it isn’t looking.

  There are stories it feels almost impious to put on paper, for fear of allowing the things in the story to begin to influence the real world.

  I was asked to write a love letter, for a book of love letters. I remembered a human statue I had seen in the square in Kraków, a city with a smoke dragon beneath it.

  When I met the woman I would one day marry, we traded stories of our lives. She had once, she told me, been a human statue. I sent her this story, and it did not frighten her away.

  For my birthday, shortly after we met, she surprised me in a park in her human-statue incarnation. As a human statue she wore a wedding dress that she had bought for $20, and stood on a box. They called her the Eight-Foot Bride. She wore the wedding dress she had been a statue in on the day we were married. Nobody has seen the dress since that day.

  Observing the Formalities

  I am not scared of bad people, of wicked evildoers, of monsters and creatures of the night.

  The people who scare me are the ones who are certain of their own rightness. The ones who know how to behave, and what their neighbors need to do to be on the side of the good.

  We are all the heroes of our own stories.

  In this case, Sleeping Beauty. Which, seen from another direction, is also the subject of . . .

  The Sleeper and the Spindle

  Written for Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt’s anthology Rags and Bones, subtitled New Twists on Timeless Tales. They asked a few writers to create stories based on stories that had influenced us. I chose two fairy tales.

  I love fairy tales. I remember the first one I encountered, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” in a beautiful illustrated book my mother would read to me when I was two. I loved everything about that story and those pictures. She read it to me, and soon enough I was reading it to myself. It wasn’t until I was older that I started pondering the stranger parts of the story, and I wrote “Snow, Glass, Apples” (in Smoke and Mirrors).

  I loved Sleeping Beauty too, in all her incarnations. When I was a young journalist I read a dozen thick bestsellers, and realized I could retell the story of Sleeping Beauty as a huge, sex-and-shopping blockbuster, complete with an evil multinational corporation, a noble young scientist, and a young girl in a mysterious coma. I decided not to write it: it seemed too calculated, and the sort of thing that might actually put me off the writing career I was hoping for.

  When Melissa and Tim asked me for a story, I had been pondering what would happen if two stories were happening at the same time. And what if the women who were already the subjects of the stories had a little more to do, and were active and not passive . . . ?

  I love this story more than, perhaps, I should. (It is now available in the UK as an illustrated storybook in its own right, pictures by the redoubtable Chris Riddell and at the end of 2015 in the U.S.)

  Witch Work

  When I was a child and read books of poems I would wonder more than was healthy about the person telling the story. I still do, even with my own poems. In this case there is a witch, and there is a watcher. This was also written as an apologetic gift for Jonathan Strahan, after I realized that The Ocean at the End of the Lane was turning into a novel.

  In Relig Odhráin

  This is a true story. Well, as true as any story about a sixth-century Irish saint can be. The churchyard is there, on Iona. You can even visit it.

  I didn’t mean to write this as a poem, but the meter turned up in my head and after that I simply had no say in the matter.

  They used to bury people alive in the walls or the foundations, to ensure that buildings remained standing. Even saints.

  Black Dog

  We first met Baldur “Shadow” Moon in American Gods, in which he gets caught up in a war between gods in America. In “The Monarch of the Glen,” a story in the Fragile Things collection, Shadow found himself a bouncer at a party in northern Scotland.

  He is on his way back to America, but in this story has only made it as far as Derbyshire’s Peak District. (This was the very last of the stories in this book to be written and is, as they say on the book jackets, original to this collection.)

  I want to thank my friends Colin Greenland and Susanna Clarke for taking me to the Three Stags Heads pub in Wardlow, which, cat, lurchers and all, inspired the opening, and to Colin for telling me that Black Shuck walked Trot Lane, when I asked him about black dogs.

  There is one last story to be told, about what happens to Shadow when he reaches London. And then, if he survives that, it will be time to send him back to America. So much has changed, after all, since he went away.

  VI. FINAL WARNING

  There are monsters in these pages, but as Ogden Nash pointed out in my first short-story collection, Smoke and Mirrors, where there’s a monster, there’s also a miracle.

  There are some long stories and some short ones. There are a handful of poems, which perhaps might need their own warning for the people who are frighte
ned, disturbed, or terminally puzzled by poetry. (In my second short-story collection, Fragile Things, I tried to explain that the poems come free. They are bonuses for the kind of people who do not need to worry about sneaky and occasional poems lurking inside their short-story collections.)

  There. Consider yourself warned. There are so many little triggers out there, being squeezed in the darkness even as I write this. This book is correctly labeled. Now all we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you.

  Thank you for coming. Enjoy the things that never happened. Secure your own mask again after you read these stories, but do not forget to help others.

  NEIL GAIMAN

  In a cabin in the dark woods, 2014

  Making a Chair

  Today I intended to begin to write.

  Stories are waiting like distant thunderstorms

  grumbling and flickering on the gray horizon

  and there are emails and introductions

  and a book, a whole damn book

  about a country and a journey and belief

  I’m here to write.

  I made a chair.

  I opened a cardboard box with a blade

  (I assembled the blade)

  removed the parts, carried them, carefully, up the stairs.

  “Functional seating for today’s workplace”

  I pressed five casters into the base,

  learned that they press in with a most satisfying pop.

  Attached the armrests with the screws,

  puzzling over the left and the right of it,

  the screws not being what they should be

  as described in the instructions. And then the base

  beneath the seat,

  which attached with six 40 mm screws (that were

  puzzlingly six 45 mm screws).

  Then the headpiece to the chairback,

  the chairback to the seat, which is where the problems start

  as the middle screw on either side declines

  to penetrate and thread.

  This all takes time. Orson Welles is Harry Lime

  on the old radio as I assemble my chair. Orson meets a dame

  and a crooked fortune-teller, and a fat man,

  and a New York gang boss in exile,

  and has slept with the dame, solved the mystery,

  read the script

  and pocketed the money

  before I have assembled my chair.

  Making a book is a little like making a chair.

  Perhaps it ought to come with warnings,

  like the chair instructions.

  A folded piece of paper slipped into each copy,

  warning us:

  “Only for one person at a time.”

  “Do not use as a stool or a stepladder.”

  “Failure to follow these warnings can result in serious injury.”

  One day I will write another book, and when I’m done

  I will climb it,

  like a stool or a stepladder,

  or a high old wooden ladder propped against the side of a plum tree,

  in the autumn,

  and I will be gone.

  But for now I shall follow these warnings,

  and finish making the chair.

  A Lunar Labyrinth

  WE WERE WALKING UP a gentle hill on a summer’s evening. It was gone eight thirty, but it still felt like midafternoon. The sky was blue. The sun was low on the horizon, and it splashed the clouds with gold and salmon and purple-gray.

  “So how did it end?” I asked my guide.

  “It never ends,” he said.

  “But you said it’s gone,” I said. “The maze.”

  I had found the lunar labyrinth mentioned online, a small footnote on a website that told you what was interesting and noteworthy wherever you were in the world. Unusual local attractions: the tackier and more manmade the better. I do not know why I am drawn to them: stoneless henges made of cars or of yellow school buses, polystyrene models of enormous blocks of cheese, unconvincing dinosaurs made of flaking powdery concrete and all the rest.

  I need them, and they give me an excuse to stop driving, wherever I am, and actually to talk to people. I have been invited into people’s houses and into their lives because I wholeheartedly appreciated the zoos they made from engine parts, the houses they had built from tin cans, stone blocks and then covered with aluminum foil, the historical pageants made from shop-window dummies, the paint on their faces flaking off. And those people, the ones who made the roadside attractions, they would accept me for what I am.

  “WE BURNED IT DOWN,” said my guide. He was elderly, and he walked with a stick. I had met him sitting on a bench in front of the town’s hardware store, and he had agreed to show me the site that the lunar labyrinth had once been built upon. Our progress across the meadow was not fast. “The end of the lunar labyrinth. It was easy. The rosemary hedges caught fire and they crackled and flared. The smoke was thick and drifted down the hill and made us all think of roast lamb.”

  “Why was it called a lunar labyrinth?” I asked. “Was it just the alliteration?”

  He thought about this. “I wouldn’t rightly know,” he said. “Not one way or the other. We called it a labyrinth, but I guess it’s just a maze . . .”

  “Just amazed,” I repeated.

  “There were traditions,” he said. “We would start to walk it the day after the full moon. Begin at the entrance. Make your way to the center, then turn around and trace your way back. Like I say, we’d only start walking the day the moon began to wane. It would still be bright enough to walk. We’d walk it any night the moon was bright enough to see by. Come out here. Walk. Mostly in couples. We’d walk until the dark of the moon.”

  “Nobody walked it in the dark?”

  “Oh, some of them did. But they weren’t like us. They were kids, and they brought flashlights, when the moon went dark. They walked it, the bad kids, the bad seeds, the ones who wanted to scare each other. For those kids it was Hallowe’en every month. They loved to be scared. Some of them said they saw a torturer.”

  “What kind of a torturer?” The word had surprised me. You did not hear it often, not in conversation.

  “Just someone who tortured people, I guess. I never saw him.”

  A breeze came down toward us from the hilltop. I sniffed the air but smelled no burning herbs, no ash, nothing that seemed unusual on a summer evening. Somewhere there were gardenias.

  “It was only kids when the moon was dark. When the crescent moon appeared, then the children got younger, and parents would come up to the hill and walk with them. Parents and children. They’d walk the maze together to its center and the adults would point up to the new moon, how it looks like a smile in the sky, a huge yellow smile, and little Romulus and Remus, or whatever the kids were called, they’d smile and laugh, and wave their hands as if they were trying to pull the moon out of the sky and put it on their little faces.

  “Then, as the moon waxed, the couples would come. Young couples would come up here, courting, and elderly couples, comfortable in each other’s company, the ones whose courting days were long forgotten.” He leaned heavily on his stick. “Not forgotten,” he said. “You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you. Even if the brain has forgotten, perhaps the teeth remember. Or the fingers.”

  “Did they have flashlights?”

  “Some nights they did. Some nights they didn’t. The popular nights were always the nights where no clouds covered the moon, and you could just walk the labyrinth. And sooner or later, everybody did. As the moonlight increased, day by day—night by night, I should say. That world was so beautiful.

  “They parked their cars down there, back where you parked yours, at the edge of the property, and they’d come up the hill on foot. Always on foot, except for the ones in wheelchairs, or the ones whose parents carried them. Then, at the top of the hill some of them’d sto
p to canoodle. They’d walk the labyrinth too. There were benches, places to stop as you walked it. And they’d stop and canoodle some more. You’d think it was just the young ones, canoodling, but the older folk did it, too. Flesh to flesh. You would hear them sometimes, on the other side of the hedge, making noises like animals, and that always was your cue to slow down, or maybe explore another branch of the path for a while. Doesn’t come by too often, but when it does I think I appreciate it more now than I did then. Lips touching skin. Under the moonlight.”

  “How many years exactly was the lunar labyrinth here before it was burned down? Did it come before or after the house was built?”

  My guide made a dismissive noise. “After, before . . . these things all go back. They talk about the labyrinth of Minos, but that was nothing by comparison to this. Just some tunnels with a horn-headed fellow wandering lonely and scared and hungry. He wasn’t really a bull-head. You know that?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Teeth. Bulls and cows are ruminants. They don’t eat flesh. The minotaur did.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “People don’t.” The hill was getting steeper now.

  I thought, There are no torturers, not any longer. And I was no torturer. But all I said was, “How high were the bushes that made up the maze? Were they real hedges?”

  “They were real. They were high as they needed to be.”