Neil Gaiman - Trigger Warning - Short Fictions and Disturbances

With that, Shadow took a deep breath and let go of the dog’s muzzle.

It did not attack. It made a noise, a baffled whine deep in its throat that was almost a whimper.

‘Go home,’ said Shadow, aloud.

The dog hesitated. Shadow thought for a moment then that he had won, that he was safe, that the dog would simply go away. But then the creature lowered its head, raised the ruff around its neck, and bared its teeth. It would not leave, Shadow knew, until he was dead.

The corridor in the hillside was filling with light: the rising sun shone directly into it. Shadow wondered if the people who had built it, so long ago, had aligned their temple to the sunrise. He took a step to the side, stumbled on something, and fell awkwardly to the ground.

Beside Shadow on the grass was Oliver, sprawled and unconscious. Shadow had tripped over his leg. The man’s eyes were closed; he made a growling sound in the back of his throat, and Shadow heard the same sound, magnified and triumphant, from the dark beast that filled the mouth of the temple.

Shadow was down, and hurt, and was, he knew, a dead man.

Something soft touched his face, gently.

Something else brushed his hand. Shadow glanced to his side, and he understood. He understood why Bast had been with him in this place, and he understood who had brought her.

They had been ground up and sprinkled on these fields more than a hundred years before, stolen from the earth around the temple of Bastet and Beni Hasan. Tons upon tons of them, mummified cats in their thousands, each cat a tiny representation of the deity, each cat an act of worship preserved for an eternity.

They were there, in that space, beside him: brown and sand-coloured and shadowy grey, cats with leopard spots and cats with tiger stripes, wild, lithe and ancient. These were not the local cats Bast had sent to watch him the previous day. These were the ancestors of those cats, of all our modern cats, from Egypt, from the Nile Delta, from thousands of years ago, brought here to make things grow.

They trilled and chirrupped, they did not meow.

The black dog growled louder but now it made no move to attack. Shadow forced himself into a sitting position. ‘I thought I told you to go home, Shuck,’ he said.

The dog did not move. Shadow opened his right hand, and gestured. It was a gesture of dismissal, of impatience. Finish this.

The cats sprang, with ease, as if choreographed. They landed on the beast, each of them a coiled spring of fangs and claws, both as sharp as they had ever been in life. Pin-sharp claws sank into the black flanks of the huge beast, tore at its eyes. It snapped at them, angrily, and pushed itself against the wall, toppling more rocks, in an attempt to shake them off, but without success. Angry teeth sank into its ears, its muzzle, its tail, its paws.

The beast yelped and growled, and then it made a noise which, Shadow thought, would, had it come from any human throat, have been a scream.

Shadow was never certain what happened then. He watched the black dog put its muzzle down to Oliver’s mouth, and push, hard. He could have sworn that the creature stepped into Oliver, like a bear stepping into a river.

Oliver shook, violently, on the sand.

The scream faded, and the beast was gone, and sunlight filled the space on the hill.

Shadow felt himself shivering. He felt like he had just woken up from a waking sleep; emotions flooded through him, like sunlight: fear and revulsion and grief and hurt, deep hurt.

There was anger in there, too. Oliver had tried to kill him, he knew, and he was thinking clearly for the first time in days.

A man’s voice shouted, ‘Hold up! Everyone all right over there?’

A high bark, and a lurcher ran in, sniffed at Shadow, his back against the wall, sniffed at Oliver Bierce, unconscious on the ground, and at the remains of Cassie Burglass.

A man’s silhouette filled the opening to the outside world, a grey paper cutout against the rising sun.

‘Needles! Leave it!’ he said. The dog returned to the man’s side. The man said, ‘I heard someone screaming. Leastways, I wouldn’t swear to it being a someone. But I heard it. Was that you?’

And then he saw the body, and he stopped. ‘Holy fucking mother of all fucking bastards,’ he said.

‘Her name was Cassie Burglass,’ said Shadow.

‘Moira’s old girlfriend?’ said the man. Shadow knew him as the landlord of the pub, could not remember whether he had ever known the man’s name. ‘Bloody Nora. I thought she went to London.’

Shadow felt sick.

The landlord was kneeling beside Oliver. ‘His heart’s still beating,’ he said. ‘What happened to him?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Shadow. ‘He screamed when he saw the body – you must have heard him. Then he just went down. And your dog came in.’

The man looked at Shadow, worried. ‘And you? Look at you! What happened to you, man?’

‘Oliver asked me to come up here with him. Said he had something awful he had to get off his chest.’ Shadow looked at the wall on each side of the corridor. There were other bricked-in nooks there. Shadow had a good idea of what would be found behind them if any of them were opened. ‘He asked me to help him open the wall. I did. He knocked me over as he went down. Took me by surprise.’

‘Did he tell you why he had done it?’

‘Jealousy,’ said Shadow. ‘Just jealous of Moira and Cassie, even after Moira had left Cassie for him.’

The man exhaled, shook his head. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘Last bugger I’d expect to do anything like this. Needles! Leave it!’ He pulled a mobile phone from his pocket, and called the police. Then he excused himself. ‘I’ve got a bag of game to put aside until the police have cleared out,’ he explained.

Shadow got to his feet, and inspected his arms. His sweater and coat were both ripped in the left arm, as if by huge teeth, but his skin was unbroken beneath it. There was no blood on his clothes, no blood on his hands.

He wondered what his corpse would have looked like, if the black dog had killed him.

Cassie’s ghost stood beside him, and looked down at her body, half-fallen from the hole in the wall. The corpse’s fingertips and the fingernails were wrecked, Shadow observed, as if she had tried, in the hours or the days before she died, to dislodge the rocks of the wall.

‘Look at that,’ she said, staring at herself. ‘Poor thing. Like a cat in a glass box.’ Then she turned to Shadow. ‘I didn’t actually fancy you,’ she said. ‘Not even a little bit. I’m not sorry. I just needed to get your attention.’

‘I know,’ said Shadow. ‘I just wish I’d met you when you were alive. We could have been friends.’

‘I bet we would have been. It was hard in there. It’s good to be done with all of this. And I’m sorry, Mr American. Try not to hate me.’

Shadow’s eyes were watering. He wiped his eyes on his shirt. When he looked again, he was alone in the passageway.

‘I don’t hate you,’ he told her.

He felt a hand squeeze his hand. He walked outside, into the morning sunlight, and he breathed and shivered, and listened to the distant sirens.

Two men arrived and carried Oliver off on a stretcher, down the hill to the road where an ambulance took him away, siren screaming to alert any sheep on the lanes that they should shuffle back to the grass verge.

A female police officer turned up as the ambulance disappeared, accompanied by a younger male officer. They knew the landlord, whom Shadow was not surprised to learn was also a Scathelocke, and were both impressed by Cassie’s remains, to the point that the young male officer left the passageway and vomited into the ferns.

If it occurred to either of them to inspect the other bricked-in cavities in the corridor, for evidence of centuries-old crimes, they managed to suppress the idea, and Shadow was not going to suggest it.