Neil Gaiman - Trigger Warning - Short Fictions and Disturbances

‘DOWN!’ called Twelve.

The sharp thing went over their heads and crashed into a tree behind them.

The kid said, ‘I thought you said it wasn’t always like this.’

Twelve shrugged.

‘Where are they coming from?’

‘Time,’ said Twelve. ‘They’re hiding behind the seconds, trying to get in.’

In the forest close to them something went whumpf, and a tall fir tree began to burn with a flickering copper-green flame.

‘Where are they?’

‘Above us, again. They’re normally above you or beneath you.’ They came down like sparks from a sparkler, beautiful and white and possibly slightly dangerous.

The kid was getting the hang of it. This time the two of them fired together.

‘Did they brief you?’ asked Twelve. As they landed, the sparks looked less beautiful and much more dangerous.

‘Not really. They just told me that it was only for a year.’

Twelve barely paused to reload. He was grizzled and scarred. The kid looked barely old enough to pick up a weapon. ‘Did they tell you that a year would be a lifetime?’

The kid shook his head. Twelve remembered when he was a kid like this, his uniform clean and unburned. Had he ever been so fresh-faced? So innocent?

He dealt with five of the spark-demons. The kid took care of the remaining three.

‘So it’s a year of fighting,’ said the kid.

‘Second by second,’ said Twelve.

Whap!

The waves crashed on the beach. It was hot here, a Southern Hemisphere January. It was still night, though. Above them fireworks hung in the sky, unmoving. Twelve checked his yearglass: there were only a couple of grains left. He was almost done.

He scanned the beach, the waves, the rocks.

‘I don’t see it,’ he said.

‘I do,’ said the kid.

It rose from the sea as he pointed, something huge beyond the mind’s holding, all bulk and malevolent vastness, all tentacles and claws, and it roared as it rose.

Twelve had the rocket launcher off his back and over his shoulder. He fired it, and watched as flame blossomed on the creature’s body.

‘Biggest I’ve seen yet,’ he said. ‘Maybe they save the best for last.’

‘Hey,’ said the kid, ‘I’m only at the beginning.’

It came for them then, crab-claws flailing and snapping, tentacles lashing, maw opening and vainly closing. They sprinted up the sandy ridge.

The kid was faster than Twelve: he was young, but sometimes that’s an advantage. Twelve’s hip ached, and he stumbled. His final grain of sand was falling through the yearglass when something – a tentacle, he figured – wrapped itself around his leg, and he fell.

He looked up.

The kid was standing on the ridge, feet planted like they teach you in boot camp, holding a rocket launcher of unfamiliar design – something after Twelve’s time, he assumed. He began mentally to say his goodbyes as he was hauled down the beach, sand scraping his face, and then a dull bang and the tentacle was whipped from his leg as the creature was blown backwards, into the sea.

He was tumbling through the air as the final grain fell and Midnight took him.

Twelve opened his eyes in the place the old years go. Fourteen helped him down from the dais.

‘How’d it go?’ asked Nineteen Fourteen. She wore a floor-length white skirt and long, white gloves.

‘They’re getting more dangerous every year,’ said Twenty Twelve. ‘The seconds, and the things behind them. But I like the new kid. I think he’s going to do fine.’

February Tale

Grey February skies, misty white sands, black rocks, and the sea seemed black too, like a monochrome photograph, with only the girl in the yellow raincoat adding any colour to the world.

Twenty years ago the old woman had walked the beach in all weathers, bowed over, staring at the sand, occasionally bending, laboriously, to lift a rock and look beneath it. When she had stopped coming down to the sands, a middle-aged woman, her daughter I assumed, came, and walked the beach with less enthusiasm than her mother. Now that woman had stopped coming, and in her place there was the girl.

She came towards me. I was the only other person on the beach in that mist. I don’t look much older than her.

‘What are you looking for?’ I called.

She made a face. ‘What makes you think I’m looking for anything?’

‘You come down here every day. Before you it was the lady, before her the very old lady, with the umbrella.’

‘That was my grandmother,’ said the girl in the yellow raincoat.

‘What did she lose?’

‘A pendant.’

‘It must be very valuable.’

‘Not really. It has sentimental value.’

‘Must be worth more than that, if your family has been looking for it for umpteen years.’

‘Yes.’ She hesitated. Then she said, ‘Grandma said it would take her home again. She said she only came here to look around. She was curious. And then she got worried about having the pendant on her, so she hid it under a rock, so she’d be able to find it again, when she got back. And then, when she got back, she wasn’t sure which rock it was, not any more. That was fifty years ago.’

‘Where was her home?’

‘She never told us.’

The way the girl was talking made me ask the question that scared me. ‘Is she still alive? Your grandmother?’

‘Yes. Sort of. But she doesn’t talk to us these days. She just stares out at the sea. It must be horrible to be so old.’

I shook my head. It isn’t. Then I put my hand into my coat pocket and held it out to her. ‘Was it anything like this? I found it on this beach a year ago. Under a rock.’

The pendant was untarnished by sand or by salt water.

The girl looked amazed, then she hugged me, and thanked me, and she took the pendant, and ran up the misty beach, in the direction of the little town.

I watched her go: a splash of gold in a black-and-white world, carrying her grandmother’s pendant in her hand. It was a twin to the one I wore around my own neck.

I wondered about her grandmother, my little sister, whether she would ever go home; whether she would forgive me for the joke I had played on her if she did. Perhaps she would elect to stay on the earth, and would send the girl home in her place. That might be fun.

Only when my great-niece was gone and I was alone did I swim upward, letting the pendant pull me home, up into the vastness above us, where we wander with the lonely sky-whales and the skies and seas are one.

March Tale

. . . only this we know, that she was not executed.

– CHARLES JOHNSON, A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE ROBBERIES

AND MURDERS OF THE MOST NOTORIOUS PIRATES

It was too warm in the great house, and so the two of them went out onto the porch. A spring storm was brewing far to the west. Already the flicker of lightning, and the unpredictable chilly gusts blew about them and cooled them. They sat decorously on the porch swing, the mother and the daughter, and they talked of when the woman’s husband would be home, for he had taken ship with a tobacco crop to faraway England.

Mary, who was thirteen, so pretty, so easily startled, said, ‘I do declare. I am glad that all the pirates have gone to the gallows, and Father will come back to us safely.’

Her mother’s smile was gentle, and it did not fade as she said, ‘I do not care to talk about pirates, Mary.’

***

She was dressed as a boy when she was a girl, to cover up her father’s scandal. She did not wear a woman’s dress until she was on the ship with her father, and with her mother, his serving-girl mistress whom he would call wife in the New World, and they were on their way from Cork to the Carolinas.