Neil Gaiman: Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

Shadow could move quietly when he needed to. He slipped out of bed, pulled on his clothes and then, carrying his boots, he opened the window, reached over the sill and let himself tumble silently into the soil of the flower bed beneath. He got to his feet and put on the boots, lacing them up in the half dark. The moon was several days from full, bright enough to cast shadows.

Shadow stepped into a patch of darkness beside a wall, and he waited there.

He wondered how sane his actions were. It seemed very probable that he was wrong, that his memory had played tricks on him, or other people’s had. It was all so very unlikely, but then, he had experienced the unlikely before, and if he was wrong he would be out, what? A few hours’ sleep?

He watched a fox hurry across the lawn, watched a proud white cat stalk and kill a small rodent, and saw several other cats pad their way along the top of the garden wall. He watched a weasel slink from shadow to shadow in the flower bed. The constellations moved in slow procession across the sky.

The front door opened, and a figure came out. Shadow had half-expected to see Moira, but it was Oliver, wearing his pyjamas and, over them, a thick tartan dressing gown. He had Wellington boots on his feet, and he looked faintly ridiculous, like an invalid from a black-and-white movie, or someone in a play. There was no colour in the moonlit world.

Oliver pulled the front door closed until it clicked, then he walked towards the street, but walking on the grass, instead of crunching down the gravel path. He did not glance back, or even look around. He set off up the lane, and Shadow waited until Oliver was almost out of sight before he began to follow. He knew where Oliver was going, had to be going.

Shadow did not question himself, not any longer. He knew where they were both headed, with the certainty of a person in a dream. He was not even surprised when, halfway up Wod’s Hill, he found Oliver sitting on a tree stump, waiting for him. The sky was lightening, just a little, in the east.

‘The Gateway to Hell,’ said the little man. ‘As far as I can tell, they’ve always called it that. Goes back years and years.’

The two men walked up the winding path together. There was something gloriously comical about Oliver in his robe, in his striped pyjamas and his oversized black rubber boots. Shadow’s heart pumped in his chest.

‘How did you bring her up here?’ asked Shadow.

‘Cassie? I didn’t. It was her idea to meet up here on the hill. She loved coming up here to paint. You can see so far. And it’s holy, this hill, and she always loved that. Not holy to Christians, of course. Quite the obverse. The old religion.’

‘Druids?’ asked Shadow. He was uncertain what other old religions there were, in England.

‘Could be. Definitely could be. But I think it predates the druids. Doesn’t have much of a name. It’s just what people in these parts practise, beneath whatever else they believe. Druids, Norse, Catholics, Protestants, doesn’t matter. That’s what people pay lip service to. The old religion is what gets the crops up and keeps your cock hard and makes sure that nobody builds a bloody great motorway through an area of outstanding natural beauty. The Gateway stands, and the hill stands, and the place stands. It’s well, well over two thousand years old. You don’t go mucking about with anything that powerful.’

Shadow said, ‘Moira doesn’t know, does she? She thinks Cassie moved away.’ The sky was continuing to lighten in the east, but it was still night, spangled with a glitter of stars, in the purple-black sky to the west.

‘That was what she needed to think. I mean, what else was she going to think? It might have been different if the police had been interested . . . but it wasn’t like . . . Well. It protects itself. The hill. The gate.’

They were coming up to the little meadow on the side of the hill. They passed the boulder where Shadow had seen Cassie drawing. They walked towards the hill.

‘The black dog in Shuck’s Lane,’ said Oliver. ‘I don’t actually think it is a dog. But it’s been there so long.’ He pulled out a small LED flashlight from the pocket of his bathrobe. ‘You really talked to Cassie?’

‘We talked, I even kissed her.’

‘Strange.’

‘I first saw her in the pub, the night I met you and Moira. That was what made me start to figure it out. Earlier tonight, Moira was talking as if she hadn’t seen Cassie in years. She was baffled when I asked. But Cassie was standing just behind me that first night, and she spoke to us. Tonight, I asked at the pub if Cassie had been in, and nobody knew who I was talking about. You people all know each other. It was the only thing that made sense of it all. It made sense of what she said. Everything.’

Oliver was almost at the place Cassie had called the Gateway to Hell. ‘I thought that it would be so simple. I would give her to the hill, and she would leave us both alone. Leave Moira alone. How could she have kissed you?’

Shadow said nothing.

‘This is it,’ said Oliver. It was a hollow in the side of the hill, like a short hallway that went back. Perhaps, once, long ago, there had been a structure, but the hill had weathered, and the stones had returned to the hill from which they had been taken.

‘There are those who think it’s devil worship,’ said Oliver. ‘And I think they are wrong. But then, one man’s god is another’s devil. Eh?’

He walked into the passageway, and Shadow followed him.

‘Such bullshit,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘But you always were a bullshitter, Ollie, you pusillanimous little cock-stain.’

Oliver did not move or react. He said, ‘She’s here. In the wall. That’s where I left her.’ He shone the flashlight at the wall, in the short passageway into the side of the hill. He inspected the drystone wall carefully, as if he were looking for a place he recognised, then he made a little grunting noise of recognition. Oliver took out a compact metal tool from his pocket, reached as high as he could and levered out one little rock with it. Then he began to pull rocks out from the wall, in a set sequence, each rock opening a space to allow another to be removed, alternating large rocks and small.

‘Give me a hand. Come on.’

Shadow knew what he was going to see behind the wall, but he pulled out the rocks, placed them down on the ground, one by one.

There was a smell, which intensified as the hole grew bigger, a stink of old rot and mould. It smelled like meat sandwiches gone bad. Shadow saw her face first, and he barely knew it as a face: the cheeks were sunken, the eyes gone, the skin now dark and leathery, and if there were freckles they were impossible to make out; but the hair was Cassie Burglass’s hair, short and black, and in the LED light, he could see that the dead thing wore an olive-green sweater, and the blue jeans were her blue jeans.

‘It’s funny. I knew she was still here,’ said Oliver. ‘But I still had to see her. With all your talk. I had to see it. To prove she was still here.’

‘Kill him,’ said the woman’s voice. ‘Hit him with a rock, Shadow. He killed me. Now he’s going to kill you.’

‘Are you going to kill me?’ Shadow asked.

‘Well, yes, obviously,’ said the little man, in his sensible voice. ‘I mean, you know about Cassie. And once you’re gone, I can just finally forget about the whole thing, once and for all.’

‘Forget?’

‘Forgive and forget. But it’s hard. It’s not easy to forgive myself, but I’m sure I can forget. There. I think there’s enough room for you to get in there now, if you squeeze.’

Shadow looked down at the little man. ‘Out of interest,’ he said, curious, ‘how are you going to make me get in there? You don’t have a gun on you. And, Ollie, I’m twice your size. You know, I could just break your neck.’