Neil Gaiman - Trigger Warning - Short Fictions and Disturbances

He was not alone up there. A woman with short dark hair was sitting and sketching on the hill’s side, perched comfortably on a grey boulder. There was a tree behind her, which acted as a windbreak. She wore a green sweater and blue jeans, and he recognised Cassie Burglass before he saw her face.

As he got close, she turned. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, holding her sketchbook up for his inspection. It was an assured pencil drawing of the hillside.

‘You’re very good. Are you a professional artist?’

‘I dabble,’ she said.

Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National Gallery or Tate Modern.

‘You must be cold,’ he said. ‘You’re only wearing a sweater.’

‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘But, up here, I’m used to it. It doesn’t really bother me. How’s Ollie doing?’

‘He’s still under the weather,’ Shadow told her.

‘Poor old sod,’ she said, looking from her paper to the hillside and back. ‘It’s hard for me to feel properly sorry for him, though.’

‘Why’s that? Did he bore you to death with interesting facts?’

She laughed, a small huff of air at the back of her throat. ‘You really ought to listen to more village gossip. When Ollie and Moira met, they were both with other people.’

‘I know that. They told me that.’ Shadow thought a moment. ‘So he was with you first?’

‘No. She was. We’d been together since college.’ There was a pause. She shaded something, her pencil scraping the paper. ‘Are you going to try and kiss me?’ she asked.

‘I, uh. I, um,’ he said. Then, honestly, ‘It hadn’t occurred to me.’

‘Well,’ she said, turning to smile at him, ‘it bloody well should. I mean, I asked you up here, and you came, up to Wod’s Hill, just to see me.’ She went back to the paper and the drawing of the hill. ‘They say there’s dark doings been done on this hill. Dirty dark doings. And I was thinking of doing something dirty myself. To Moira’s lodger.’

‘Is this some kind of revenge plot?’

‘It’s not an anything plot. I just like you. And there’s no one around here who wants me any longer. Not as a woman.’

The last woman that Shadow had kissed had been in Scotland. He thought of her, and what she had become, in the end. ‘You are real, aren’t you?’ he asked. ‘I mean . . . you’re a real person. I mean . . .’

She put the pad of paper down on the boulder and she stood up. ‘Kiss me and find out,’ she said.

He hesitated. She sighed, and she kissed him.

It was cold on that hillside, and Cassie’s lips were cold. Her mouth was very soft. As her tongue touched his, Shadow pulled back.

‘I don’t actually know you,’ Shadow said.

She leaned away from him, looked up into his face. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘all I dream of these days is somebody who will look my way and see the real me. I had given up until you came along, Mr American, with your funny name. But you looked at me, and I knew you saw me. And that’s all that matters.’

Shadow’s hands held her, feeling the softness of her sweater.

‘How much longer are you going to be here? In the district?’ she asked.

‘A few more days. Until Oliver’s feeling better.’

‘Pity. Can’t you stay forever?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You have nothing to be sorry for, sweet man. You see that opening over there?’

He glanced over to the hillside, but could not see what she was pointing at. The hillside was a tangle of weeds and low trees and half-tumbled drystone walls. She pointed to her drawing, where she had drawn a dark shape, like an archway, in the middle of a clump of gorse bushes on the side of the hill. ‘There. Look.’ He stared, and this time he saw it immediately.

‘What is it?’ Shadow asked.

‘The Gateway to Hell,’ she told him, impressively.

‘Uh-huh.’

She grinned. ‘That’s what they call it round here. It was originally a Roman temple, I think, or something even older. But that’s all that remains. You should check it out, if you like that sort of thing. Although it’s a bit disappointing: just a little passageway going back into the hill. I keep expecting some archaeologists will come out this way, dig it up, catalogue what they find, but they never do.’

Shadow examined her drawing. ‘So what do you know about big black dogs?’ he asked.

‘The one in Shuck’s Lane?’ she said. He nodded. ‘They say the barghest used to wander all around here. But now it’s just in Shuck’s Lane. Dr Scathelocke once told me it was folk memory. The wish hounds are all that are left of the Wild Hunt, which was based around the idea of Odin’s hunting wolves, Freki and Geri. I think it’s even older than that. Cave memory. Druids. The thing that prowls in the darkness beyond the fire circle, waiting to tear you apart if you edge too far out alone.’

‘Have you ever seen it, then?’

She shook her head. ‘No. I researched it, but never saw it. My semi-imaginary local beast. Have you?’

‘I don’t think so. Maybe.’

‘Perhaps you woke it up when you came here. You woke me up, after all.’

She reached up, pulled his head down towards her and kissed him again. She took his left hand, so much bigger than hers, and placed it beneath her sweater.

‘Cassie, my hands are cold,’ he warned her.

‘Well, my everything is cold. There’s nothing but cold up here. Just smile and look like you know what you’re doing,’ she told him. She pushed Shadow’s left hand higher, until it was cupping the lace of her bra, and he could feel, beneath the lace, the hardness of her nipple and the soft swell of her breast.

He began to surrender to the moment, his hesitation a mixture of awkwardness and uncertainty. He was not sure how he felt about this woman: she had history with his benefactors, after all. Shadow never liked feeling that he was being used; it had happened too many times before. But his left hand was touching her breast and his right hand was cradling the nape of her neck, and he was leaning down and now her mouth was on his, and she was clinging to him as tightly as if, he thought, she wanted to occupy the very same space that he was in. Her mouth tasted like mint and stone and grass and the chilly afternoon breeze. He closed his eyes, and let himself enjoy the kiss and the way their bodies moved together.

Cassie froze. Somewhere close to them, a cat mewed. Shadow opened his eyes.

‘Jesus,’ he said.

They were surrounded by cats. White cats and tabbies, brown and ginger and black cats, long-haired and short. Well-fed cats with collars and disreputable ragged-eared cats that looked as if they had been living in barns and on the edges of the wild. They stared at Shadow and Cassie with green eyes and blue eyes and golden eyes, and they did not move. Only the occasional swish of a tail or the blinking of a pair of feline eyes told Shadow that they were alive.

‘This is weird,’ said Shadow.

Cassie took a step back. He was no longer touching her now. ‘Are they with you?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think they’re with anyone. They’re cats.’

‘I think they’re jealous,’ said Cassie. ‘Look at them. They don’t like me.’

‘That’s . . .’ Shadow was going to say ‘nonsense’, but no, it was sense, of a kind. There had been a woman who was a goddess, a continent away and years in his past, who had cared about him, in her own way. He remembered the needle-sharpness of her nails and the catlike roughness of her tongue.

Cassie looked at Shadow dispassionately. ‘I don’t know who you are, Mr American,’ she told him. ‘Not really. I don’t know why you can look at me and see the real me, or why I can talk to you when I find it so hard to talk to other people. But I can. And you know, you seem all normal and quiet on the surface, but you are so much weirder than I am. And I’m extremely fucking weird.’