Neil Gaiman - Trigger Warning - Short Fictions and Disturbances

‘Is it magic?’ I asked, although I smelled no magic on the air.
Calum said, ‘It is nothing. A property of the light. A shadow. A reflection. No more. I see a man beside me, as well. He moves as I move.’ I glanced back, but I saw nobody beside him.

And then the little glowing man in the air faded, and the cloud, and it was day, and we were alone.

We climbed all that morning, ascending. Calum’s ankle had twisted the day before, when he had slipped at the waterfall. Now it swelled in front of me, swelled and went red, but his pace did not ever slow, and if he was in discomfort or in pain it did not show upon his face.

I said, ‘How long?’ as the dusk began to blur the edges of the world.

‘An hour, less, perhaps. We will reach the cave, and then we will sleep for the night. In the morning you will go inside. You can bring out as much gold as you can carry, and we will make our way back off the island.’

I looked at him, then: grey-streaked hair, grey eyes, so huge and wolfish a man, and I said, ‘You would sleep outside the cave?’

‘I would. There are no monsters in the cave. Nothing that will come out and take you in the night. Nothing that will eat us. But you should not go in until daylight.’

And then we rounded a rockfall, all black rocks and grey half-blocking our path, and we saw the cave mouth. I said, ‘Is that all?’

‘You expected marble pillars? Or a giant’s cave from a gossip’s fireside tales?’

‘Perhaps. It looks like nothing. A hole in the rockface. A shadow. And there are no guards?’

‘No guards. Only the place, and what it is.’

‘A cave filled with treasure. And you are the only one who can find it?’

Calum laughed then, like a fox’s bark. ‘The islanders know how to find it. But they are too wise to come here, to take its gold. They say that the cave makes you evil: that each time you visit it, each time you enter to take gold, it eats the good in your soul, so they do not enter.’

‘And is that true? Does it make you evil?’

‘. . . No. The cave feeds on something else. Not good and evil. Not really. You can take your gold, but afterwards, things are’ – he paused – ‘things are flat . There is less beauty in a rainbow, less meaning in a sermon, less joy in a kiss . . .’ He looked at the cave mouth and I thought I saw fear in his eyes. ‘Less.’

I said, ‘There are many for whom the lure of gold outweighs the beauty of a rainbow.’

‘Me, when young, for one. You, now, for another.’

‘So we go in at dawn.’

‘You will go in. I will wait for you out here. Do not be afraid. No monster guards the cave. No spells to make the gold vanish, if you do not know some cantrip or rhyme.’

We made our camp, then: or rather we sat in the darkness, against the cold rock wall. There would be no sleep there.

I said, ‘You took the gold from here, as I will do tomorrow. You bought a house with it, a bride, a good name.’

His voice came from the darkness. ‘Aye. And they meant nothing to me, once I had them, or less than nothing. And if your gold pays for the king over the water to come back to us and rule us and bring about a land of joy and prosperity and warmth, it will still mean nothing to you. It will be as something you heard of that happened to a man in a tale.’

‘I have lived my life to bring the king back,’ I told him.

He said, ‘You take the gold back to him. Your king will want more gold, because kings want more. It is what they do. Each time you come back, it will mean less. The rainbow means nothing. Killing a man means nothing.’

Silence then, in the darkness. I heard no birds: only the wind that called and gusted about the peaks like a mother seeking her babe.

I said, ‘We have both killed men. Have you ever killed a woman, Calum MacInnes?’

‘I have not. I have killed no women, no girls.’

I ran my hands over my dirk in the darkness, seeking the wood and silver of the hilt, the steel of the blade. It was there in my hands. I had not intended ever to tell him, only to strike when we were out of the mountains, strike once, strike deep, but now I felt the words being pulled from me, would I or never-so. ‘They say there was a girl,’ I told him. ‘And a thornbush.’

Silence. The whistling of the wind. ‘Who told you?’ he asked. Then, ‘Never mind. I would not kill a woman. No man of honour would kill a woman . . .’

If I said a word, I knew, he would be silent on the subject, and never talk about it again. So I said nothing. Only waited.

Calum MacInnes began to speak, choosing his words with care, talking as if he was remembering a tale he had heard as a child and had almost forgotten. ‘They told me the kine of the lowlands were fat and bonny, and that a man could gain honour and glory by adventuring off to the south and returning with the fine red cattle. So I went south, and never a cow was good enough, until on a hillside in the lowlands I saw the finest, reddest, fattest cows that ever a man has seen. So I began to lead them away, back the way I had come.

‘She came after me with a stick. The cattle were her father’s, she said, and I was a rogue and a knave and all manner of rough things. But she was beautiful, even when angry, and had I not already a young wife I might have dealt more kindly with her. Instead I pulled a knife, and touched it to her throat, and bade her to stop speaking. And she did stop.

‘I would not kill her – I would not kill a woman, and that is the truth – so I tied her, by her hair, to a thorn tree, and I took her knife from her waistband, to slow her as she tried to free herself, and pushed the blade of it deep into the sod. I tied her to the thorn tree by her long hair, and I thought no more of her as I made off with her cattle.

‘It was another year before I was back that way. I was not after cows that day, but I walked up the side of that bank – it was a lonely spot, and if you had not been looking, you might not have seen it. Perhaps nobody searched for her.’

‘I heard they searched,’ I told him. ‘Although some believed her taken by reavers, and others believed her run away with a tinker, or gone to the city. But still, they searched.’

‘Aye. I saw what I did see – perhaps you’d have to have stood where I was standing, to see what I did see. It was an evil thing I did, perhaps.’

‘Perhaps?’

He said, ‘I have taken gold from the cave of the mists. I cannot tell any longer if there is good or there is evil. I sent a message, by a child, at an inn, telling them where she was, and where they could find her.’

I closed my eyes but the world became no darker.

‘There is evil,’ I told him.

I saw it in my mind’s eye: her skeleton picked clean of clothes, picked clean of flesh, as naked and white as anyone would ever be, hanging like a child’s puppet against the thornbush, tied to a branch above it by its red-golden hair.

‘At dawn,’ said Calum MacInnes, as if we had been talking of provisions or the weather, ‘you will leave your dirk behind, for such is the custom, and you will enter the cave, and bring out as much gold as you can carry. And you will bring it back with you, to the mainland. There’s not a soul in these parts, knowing what you carry or where it’s from, would take it from you. Then send it to the king over the water, and he will pay his men with it, and feed them, and buy their weapons. One day, he will return. Tell me on that day, that there is evil, little man.’

***

When the sun was up, I entered the cave. It was damp in there. I could hear water running down one wall, and I felt a wind on my face, which was strange, because there was no wind inside the mountain.

In my mind, the cave would be filled with gold. Bars of gold would be stacked like firewood, and bags of golden coins would sit between them. There would be golden chains and golden rings, and golden plates, heaped high like the china plates in a rich man’s house.