Neil Gaiman - Trigger Warning - Short Fictions and Disturbances

She came to no conclusions. Either way was possible.

And then her world was warm and comfortable, and she became certain that closing her eyes for only a handful of moments would not be harmful. Who would mind?

‘Help me,’ croaked the queen.

The dwarf with the brown beard pulled a thorn from the rosebush nearest to him, and jabbed it hard into the queen’s thumb, and pulled it out again. A drop of dark blood dripped onto the flagstones of the gateway.

‘Ow!’ said the queen. And then, ‘Thank you!’

They stared at the thick barrier of thorns, the dwarfs and the queen. She reached out and picked a rose from the thorn-creeper nearest her, and bound it into her hair.

‘We could tunnel our way in,’ said the dwarfs. ‘Go under the moat and into the foundations and up. Only take us a couple of days.’

The queen pondered. Her thumb hurt, and she was pleased her thumb hurt. She said, ‘This began here eighty or so years ago. It began slowly. It only spread recently. It is spreading faster and faster. We do not know if the sleepers can ever wake. We do not know anything, save that we may not actually have another two days.’

She eyed the dense tangle of thorns, living and dead, decades of dried, dead plants, their thorns as sharp in death as ever they were when alive. She walked along the wall until she reached a skeleton, and she pulled the rotted cloth from its shoulders, and felt it as she did so. It was dry, yes. It would make good kindling.

‘Who has the tinder box?’ she asked.

***

The old thorns burned so hot and so fast. In fifteen minutes orange flames snaked upwards: they seemed, for a moment, to engulf the building, and then they were gone, leaving just blackened stone. The remaining thorns, those strong enough to have withstood the heat, were easily cut through by the queen’s sword, and were hauled away and tossed into the moat.

The four travellers went into the castle.

The old woman peered out of the slitted window at the flames below her. Smoke drifted in through the window, but neither the flames nor the roses reached the highest tower. She knew that the castle was being attacked, and she would have hidden in the tower room, had there been anywhere to hide, had the sleeper not been on the bed.

She swore, and began, laboriously, to walk down the steps, one at a time. She intended to make it down as far as the castle’s battlements, where she could head over to the far side of the building, to the cellars. She could hide there. She knew the building better than anybody. She was slow, but she was cunning, and she could wait. Oh, she could wait.

She heard their calls rising up the stairwell.

‘This way!’

‘Up here!’

‘It feels worse this way. Come on! Quickly!’

She turned around, then, did her best to hurry upward, but her legs moved no faster than they had when she was climbing earlier that day. They caught her just as she reached the top of the steps, three men, no higher than her hips, closely followed by a young woman in travel-stained clothes, with the blackest hair the old woman had ever seen.

The young woman said, ‘Seize her,’ in a tone of casual command.

The little men took her stick. ‘She’s stronger than she looks,’ said one of them, his head still ringing from the blow she had got in with the stick, before he had taken it. They walked her back into the round tower room.

‘The fire?’ said the old woman, who had not talked to anyone who could answer her for decades. ‘Was anyone killed in the fire? Did you see the king or the queen?’

The young woman shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. The sleepers we passed were all inside, and the walls are thick. Who are you?’

Names. Names. The old woman squinted, then she shook her head. She was herself, and the name she had been born with had been eaten by time and lack of use.

‘Where is the princess?’

The old woman just stared at her.

‘And why are you awake?’

She said nothing. They spoke urgently to one another then, the little men and the queen. ‘Is she a witch? There’s a magic about her, but I do not think it’s of her making.’

‘Guard her,’ said the queen. ‘If she is a witch, that stick might be important. Keep it from her.’

‘It’s my stick,’ said the old woman. ‘I think it was my father’s. But he had no more use for it.’

The queen ignored her. She walked to the bed, pulled down the silk netting. The sleeper’s face stared blindly up at them.

‘So this is where it began,’ said one of the little men.

‘On her birthday,’ said another.

‘Well,’ said the third. ‘Somebody’s got to do the honours.’

‘I shall,’ said the queen, gently. She lowered her face to the sleeping woman’s. She touched the pink lips to her own carmine lips and she kissed the sleeping girl long and hard.

***

‘Did it work?’ asked a dwarf.

‘I do not know,’ said the queen. ‘But I feel for her, poor thing. Sleeping her life away.’

‘You slept for a year in the same witch-sleep,’ said the dwarf. ‘You did not starve. You did not rot.’

The figure on the bed stirred, as if she were having a bad dream from which she was fighting to wake herself.

The queen ignored her. She had noticed something on the floor beside the bed. She reached down and picked it up. ‘Now this,’ she said. ‘This smells of magic.’

‘There’s magic all through this,’ said the smallest dwarf.

‘No, this, ’ said the queen. She showed him the wooden spindle, the base half wound around with yarn. ‘ This smells of magic.’

‘It was here, in this room,’ said the old woman, suddenly. ‘And I was little more than a girl. I had never gone so far before, but I climbed all the steps, and I went up and up and round and round until I came to the topmost room. I saw that bed, the one you see, although there was nobody in it. There was only an old woman, sitting on the stool, spinning wool into yarn with her spindle. I had never seen a spindle before. She asked if I would like a go. She took the wool in her hand and gave me the spindle to hold. And then, she held my thumb and pressed it against the point of the spindle until blood flowed, and she touched the blooming blood to the thread. And then she said—’

A voice interrupted her. A young voice it was, a girl’s voice, but still sleep-thickened. ‘I said, now I take your sleep from you, girl, just as I take from you your ability to harm me in my sleep, for someone needs to be awake while I sleep. Your family, your friends, your world will sleep too. And then I lay down on the bed, and I slept, and they slept, and as each of them slept I stole a little of their life, a little of their dreams, and as I slept I took back my youth and my beauty and my power. I slept and I grew strong. I undid the ravages of time and I built myself a world of sleeping slaves.’

She was sitting up in the bed. She looked so beautiful, and so very young.

The queen looked at the girl, and saw what she was searching for: the same look that she had seen in her stepmother’s eyes, and she knew what manner of creature this girl was.

‘We had been led to believe,’ said the tallest dwarf, ‘that when you woke, the rest of the world would wake with you.’

‘Why ever would you think that?’ asked the golden-haired girl, all childlike and innocent (ah, but her eyes! Her eyes were so old.) ‘I like them asleep. They are more . . . biddable .’ She stopped for a moment. Then she smiled. ‘Even now they come for you. I have called them here.’

‘It’s a high tower,’ said the queen. ‘And sleeping people do not move fast. We still have a little time to talk, Your Darkness.’

‘Who are you? Why would we talk? Why do you know to address me that way?’ The girl climbed off the bed and stretched deliciously, pushing each finger out before running her fingertips through her golden hair. She smiled, and it was as if the sun shone into that dim room. ‘The little people will stop where they are, now. I do not like them. And you, girl. You will sleep too.’