Neil Gaiman - Stories - All-New Tales

by fire at some time

in the not so far-off past,

and I made my descent through

stands of scorched, shattered pines,

the hillside all blackened and charred.

Only there had been no fire on that part of

the hill, not for as long as I could remember.

The breeze carried on it an unmistakable warmth.

I began to feel unpleasantly overheated in my clothes.

I

followed

the staircase

round a switchback

and saw below me a boy

sitting on a stone landing.

He

had a

collection

of curious wares

spread on a blanket.

There was a wind-up tin

bird in a cage, a basket of

white apples, a dented gold lighter.

There was a jar and in the jar was light.

This light would increase in brightness until

the landing was lit as if by the rising sun, and

then it would collapse into darkness, shrinking to a

single point like some impossibly brilliant lightning bug.

He

smiled

to see me.

He had golden

hair and the most

beautiful smile I have

ever seen on a child’s face

and I was afraid of him-even

before he called out to me by name.

I pretended I didn’t hear him, pretended

he wasn’t there, that I didn’t see him, walked

right past him. He laughed to see me hurrying by.

The

farther

I went the

steeper it got.

There seemed to be

a light below, as if

somewhere beyond a ledge,

through the trees, there was

a great city, on the scale of Roma,

a bowl of lights like a bed of embers.

I could smell food cooking on the breeze.

if

it was

food-that

hungry-making

perfume of meat

charring over flame.

Voices

ahead of me:

a man speaking

wearily, perhaps

to himself, a long

and joyless discourse;

someone else laughing, bad

laughter, unhinged and angry.

A third man was asking questions.

“Is

a plum

sweeter after

it has been pushed

in the mouth of a virgin

to silence her as she is taken?

And who will claim the baby child

sleeping in the cradle made from the

rotten carcass of the lamb that laid with

the lion only to be eviscerated?” And so on.

At

the

next

turn in

the steps

they finally

came into sight.

They lined the stairs:

half a dozen men nailed on

to crosses of blackened pine.

I couldn’t go on and for a time

I couldn’t go back; it was the cats.

One of the men had a wound in his side,

a red seeping wound that made a puddle on

the stairs, and kittens lapped at it as if it

were cream and he was talking to them in his tired

voice, telling all the good kitties to drink their fill.

I

did

not go

close enough

to see his face.

At

last

I returned

the way I had

come on shaky legs.

The boy awaited me with

his collection of oddities.

“Why

not sit

and rest your

sore feet, Quirinus

Calvino?” he asked me.

And I sat down across from

him, not because I wanted to but

because that was where my legs gave out.

Neither of us spoke at first. He smiled across the blanket spread with his goods, and I pretended an interest in the stone wall that overhung the landing there. That light in the jar built and built until our shadows lunged against the rock like deformed giants, before the brightness winked out and plunged us back into our shared darkness. He offered me a skin of water but I knew better than to take anything from that child. Or thought I knew better. The light in the jar began to grow again, a single floating point of perfect whiteness, swelling like a balloon. I tried to look at it, but felt a pinch of pain in the back of my eyeballs and glanced away.

“What is that? It burns my eyes,” I asked.

“A little spark stolen from the sun. You can do all sorts of wonderful things with it. You could make a furnace with it, a giant furnace, powerful enough to warm a whole city, and light a thousand Edison lights. Look how bright it gets. You have to be careful though. If you were to smash this jar and let the spark escape, that same city would disappear in a clap of brightness. You can have it if you want.”

“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.