Neil Gaiman - Fragile Things - Short Fictions and Wonders

“They’re paying good money,” he told her.

She touched him then, for the first time, placed her pale fingers on the back of his dark hand. “And what good is money to a monster?” she asked, and smiled, and Shadow was damned if he didn’t think that maybe she was beautiful, at that.

And then she put down her hand and backed away. “Well?” she said. “Shouldn’t you be off on your walk? You’ve not got much longer before you’ll have to start heading back again. The light goes fast when it goes, this time of year.”

And she stood and watched him as he hefted his rucksack, and began to walk down the hill. He turned around when he reached the bottom and looked up. She was still looking at him. He waved, and she waved back.

The next time he looked back she was gone.

He took the little ferry across the kyle to the cape, and walked up to the lighthouse. There was a minibus from the lighthouse back to the ferry, and he took it.

He got back to the hotel at eight that night, exhausted but feeling satisfied. It had rained once, in the late afternoon, but he had taken shelter in a tumbledown bothy, and read a five-year-old newspaper while the rain drummed against the roof. It had ended after half an hour, but Shadow had been glad that he had good boots, for the earth had turned to mud.

He was starving. He went into the hotel restaurant. It was empty. Shadow said “Hello?”

An elderly woman came to the door between the restaurant and the kitchen and said “Aye?”

“Are you still serving dinner?”

“Aye.” She looked at him disapprovingly, from his muddy boots to his tousled hair. “Are you a guest?”

“Yes. I’m in room eleven.”

“Well…you’ll probably want to change before dinner,” she said. “It’s kinder to the other diners.”

“So you are serving.”

“Aye.”

He went up to his room, dropped his rucksack on the bed, and took off his boots. He put on his sneakers, ran a comb through his hair, and went back downstairs.

The dining room was no longer empty. Two people were sitting at a table in the corner, two people who seemed different in every way that people could be different: a small woman who looked to be in her late fifties, hunched and birdlike at the table, and a young man, big and awkward and perfectly bald. Shadow decided that they were mother and son.

He sat down at a table in the center of the room.

The elderly waitress came in with a tray. She gave both of the other diners a bowl of soup. The man began to blow on his soup, to cool it; his mother tapped him, hard, on the back of his hand, with her spoon. “Stop that,” she said. She began to spoon the soup into her mouth, slurping it noisily.

The bald man looked around the room, sadly. He caught Shadow’s eye, and Shadow nodded at him. The man sighed, and returned to his steaming soup.

Shadow scanned the menu without enthusiasm. He was ready to order, but the waitress had vanished again.

A flash of gray; Dr. Gaskell peered in at the door of the restaurant. He walked into the room, came over to Shadow’s table.

“Do you mind if I join you?”

“Not at all. Please. Sit down.”

He sat down, opposite Shadow. “Have a good day?”

“Very good. I walked.”

“Best way to work up an appetite. So. First thing tomorrow they’re sending a car out here to pick you up. Bring your things. They’ll take you out to the house. Show you the ropes.”

“And the money?” asked Shadow.

“They’ll sort that out. Half at the beginning, half at the end. Anything else you want to know?”

The waitress stood at the edge of the room, watching them, making no move to approach. “Yeah. What do I have to do to get some food around here?”

“What do you want? I recommend the lamb chops. The lamb’s local.”

“Sounds good.”

Gaskell said loudly, “Excuse me, Maura. Sorry to trouble you, but could we both have the lamb chops?”

She pursed her lips, and went back to the kitchen.

“Thanks,” said Shadow.

“Don’t mention it. Anything else I can help you with?”

“Yeah. These folk coming in for the party. Why don’t they hire their own security? Why hire me?”

“They’ll be doing that too, I have no doubt,” said Gaskell. “Bringing in their own people. But it’s good to have local talent.”

“Even if the local talent is a foreign tourist?”

“Just so.”

Maura brought two bowls of soup, put them down in front of Shadow and the doctor. “They come with the meal,” she said. The soup was too hot, and it tasted faintly of reconstituted tomatoes and vinegar. Shadow was hungry enough that he’d finished most of the bowl off before he realized that he did not like it.

“You said I was a monster,” said Shadow to the steel gray man.

“I did?”

“You did.”

“Well, there’s a lot of monsters in this part of the world.” He tipped his head toward the couple in the corner. The little woman had picked up her napkin, dipped it into her water glass, and was dabbing vigorously with it at the spots of crimson soup on her son’s mouth and chin. He looked embarrassed. “It’s remote. We don’t get into the news unless a hiker or a climber gets lost, or starves to death. Most people forget we’re here.”

The lamb chops arrived, on a plate with overboiled potatoes, underboiled carrots, and something brown and wet that Shadow thought might have started life as spinach. He started to cut at the chops with his knife. The doctor picked his up in his fingers, and began to chew.

“You’ve been inside,” said the doctor.

“Inside?”

“Prison. You’ve been in prison.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

“So you know how to fight. You could hurt someone, if you had to.”

Shadow said, “If you need someone to hurt people, I’m probably not the guy you’re looking for.”

The little man grinned, with greasy gray lips. “I’m sure you are. I was just asking. You can’t give a man a hard time for asking. Anyway. He’s a monster,” he said, gesturing across the room with a mostly chewed lamb chop. The bald man was eating some kind of white pudding with a spoon. “So’s his mother.”

“They don’t look like monsters to me,” said Shadow.

“I’m teasing you, I’m afraid. Local sense of humor. They should warn you about mine when you enter the village. Warning, loony old doctor at work. Talking about monsters. Forgive an old man. You mustn’t listen to a word I say.” A flash of tobacco-stained teeth. He wiped his hands and mouth on his napkin. “Maura, we’ll be needing the bill over here. The young man’s dinner is on me.”

“Yes, Doctor Gaskell.”

“Remember,” said the doctor to Shadow. “Eight-fifteen tomorrow morning, be in the lobby. No later. They’re busy people. If you aren’t there, they’ll just move on, and you’ll have missed out on fifteen hundred pounds, for a weekend’s work. A bonus, if they’re happy.”

Shadow decided to have his after-dinner coffee in the bar. There was a log fire there, after all. He hoped it would take the chill from his bones.

Gordon from reception was working behind the bar. “Jennie’s night off?” asked Shadow.

“What? No, she was just helping out. She’ll do it if we’re busy, sometimes.”

“Mind if I put another log on the fire?”

“Help yourself.”

If this is how the Scots treat their summers, thought Shadow, remembering something Oscar Wilde had once said, they don’t deserve to have any.

The bald young man came in. He nodded a nervous greeting to Shadow. Shadow nodded back. The man had no hair that Shadow could see: no eyebrows, no eyelashes. It made him look babyish, and unformed. Shadow wondered if it was a disease, or if it was perhaps a side effect of chemotherapy. He smelled of damp.