Neil Gaiman - Trigger Warning - Short Fictions and Disturbances

‘Is she looking for a miracle, your wife? They do, sometimes.’

‘She has . . . faith,’ he said. ‘I’ve never believed. But no, I don’t think so.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘So. Um. Are you married?’

‘I lost my husband.’

‘Was it a bomb?’

‘What?’

‘How you lost your husband?’

‘An American tourist. From Seattle.’

‘Oh.’

They finished their coffee. ‘Shall we see how your wife’s feet are doing?’

As they walked up the narrow street, towards the hotel, Morrison said, ‘I’m really lonely. I work at a job I don’t enjoy and come home to a wife who loves me but doesn’t much like me, and some days it feels like I can’t move and that all I want is for the whole world to go away.’

She nodded. ‘Yes, but you don’t live in Jerusalem.’

The guide waited in the lobby of the hotel while Morrison went up to his room. He was, somehow, not surprised in the least to see that Delores was not in the bedroom, or in the tiny bathroom, and that the sheets that had been on the bed that morning were now gone.

His dog could have walked the Heath forever, but Morrison was getting tired and a fine rain was drizzling. He walked back through a green world. A green and pleasant world, he thought, knowing that wasn’t quite it. His head was like a filing cabinet that had fallen downstairs, and all the information in it was jumbled and disordered.

They caught up with his wife on the Via Dolorosa. She wore a sheet, yes, but she seemed intent, not mad. She was calm, frighteningly so.

‘Everything is love,’ she was telling the people. ‘Everything is Jerusalem. God is love. Jerusalem is love.’

A tourist took a photograph, but the locals ignored her. Morrison put his hand on her arm. ‘Come on, love,’ he said. ‘Let’s go home.’

She looked through him. He wondered what she was seeing. She said, ‘We are home. In this place the walls of the world are thin. We can hear Him calling to us, through the walls. Listen. You can hear Him. Listen!’

Delores did not fight or even protest as they led her back to the hotel. Delores did not look like a prophet. She looked like a woman in her late thirties wearing nothing but a sheet. Morrison suspected that their guide was amused, but when he caught her eyes he could see only concern.

They drove from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, and it was on the beach in front of their hotel, after sleeping for almost twenty-four hours, that Delores came back, now just slightly confused, with little memory of the previous day. He tried to talk to her about what he had seen, about what she had said, but stopped when he saw it was upsetting her. They pretended that it had not happened, did not mention it again.

Sometimes he wondered what it had felt like inside her head, that day, hearing the voice of God through the golden-coloured stones, but truly, he did not want to know. It was better not to.

It’s location-specific. You take the person out of Jerusalem, he thought – wondering, as he had wondered a hundred times in the last few days, if this was truly far enough.

He was glad they were back in England, glad they were home, where there was not enough Time to crush you, to suffocate you, to make you dust.

Morrison walked back up the avenue in the drizzle, past the trees in the pavement, past the neat front gardens and the summer flowers and the perfect green of the lawns, and he felt cold.

He knew she would be gone before he turned the corner, before he saw the open front door banging in the wind.

He would follow her. And, he thought, almost joyfully, he would find her.

This time he would listen.

Click-Clack the Rattlebag

‘Before you take me up to bed, will you tell me a story?’

‘Do you actually need me to take you up to bed?’ I asked the boy.

He thought for a moment. Then, with intense seriousness, ‘Yes, actually I think I do. It’s because of, I’ve finished my homework, and so it’s my bedtime, and I am a bit scared. Not very scared. Just a bit. But it is a very big house, and lots of times the lights don’t work and it’s sort of dark.’

I reached over and tousled his hair.

‘I can understand that,’ I said. ‘It is a very big old house.’ He nodded. We were in the kitchen, where it was light and warm. I put down my magazine on the kitchen table. ‘What kind of story would you like me to tell you?’

‘Well,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think it should be too scary, because then when I go up to bed, I will just be thinking about monsters the whole time. But if it isn’t just a little bit scary then I won’t be interested. And you make up scary stories, don’t you? I know she says that’s what you do.’

‘She exaggerates. I write stories, yes. Nothing that’s really been published, yet, though. And I write lots of different kinds of stories.’

‘But you do write scary stories?’

‘Yes.’

The boy looked up at me from the shadows by the door, where he was waiting. ‘Do you know any stories about Click-Clack the Rattlebag?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Those are the best sorts of stories.’

‘Do they tell them at your school?’

He shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’

‘What’s a Click-Clack the Rattlebag story?’

He was a precocious child, and was unimpressed by his sister’s boyfriend’s ignorance. You could see it on his face. ‘Everybody knows them.’

‘I don’t,’ I said, trying not to smile.

He looked at me as if he was trying to decide whether or not I was pulling his leg. He said, ‘I think maybe you should take me up to my bedroom, and then you can tell me a story before I go to sleep, but probably it should be a not-scary story because I’ll be up in my bedroom then, and it’s actually a bit dark up there, too.’

I said, ‘Shall I leave a note for your sister, telling her where we are?’

‘You can. But you’ll hear when they get back. The front door is very slammy.’

We walked out of the warm and cosy kitchen into the hallway of the big house, where it was chilly and draughty and dark. I flicked the light switch, but the hall remained dark.

‘The bulb’s gone,’ the boy said. ‘That always happens.’

Our eyes adjusted to the shadows. The moon was almost full, and blue-white moonlight shone in through the high windows on the staircase, down into the hall. ‘We’ll be all right,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said the boy, soberly. ‘I am very glad you’re here.’ He seemed less precocious now. His hand found mine, and he held on to my fingers comfortably, trustingly, as if he’d known me all his life. I felt responsible and adult. I did not know if the feeling I had for his sister, who was my girlfriend, was love, not yet, but I liked that the child treated me as one of the family. I felt like his big brother, and I stood taller, and if there was something unsettling about the empty house I would not have admitted it for worlds.

The stairs creaked beneath the threadbare stair-carpet.

‘Click-Clacks,’ said the boy, ‘are the best monsters ever.’

‘Are they from television?’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t think any people know where they come from. Mostly they come from the dark.’

‘Good place for a monster to come from.’

‘Yes.’

We walked along the upper corridor in the shadows, moving from patch of moonlight to patch of moonlight. It really was a big house. I wished I had a flashlight.

‘They come from the dark,’ said the boy, holding on to my hand. ‘I think probably they’re made of dark. And they come in when you don’t pay attention. That’s when they come in. And then they take you back to their . . . not nests. What’s a word that’s like nests, but not?’