Neil Gaiman - Trigger Warning - Short Fictions and Disturbances

‘You’ll see, when we get up there. It’s perfectly flat, the top of the hill.’

I wanted to contribute something, so I said, ‘Where I come from, five hundred years ago the local lord was visiting the king. And the king showed off his enormous table, his candles, his beautiful painted ceiling, and as each one was displayed, instead of praising it, the lord simply said, “I have a finer, and bigger, and better one.” The king wanted to call his bluff, so he told him that the following month he would come and eat at this table, bigger and finer than the king’s, lit by candles in candleholders bigger and finer than the king’s, under a ceiling painting bigger and better than the king’s.’

My guide said, ‘Did he lay out a tablecloth on the flatness of the hill, and have twenty brave men holding candles, and did they dine beneath God’s own stars? They tell a story like that in these parts, too.’

‘That’s the story,’ I admitted, slightly miffed that my contribution had been so casually dismissed. ‘And the king acknowledged that the lord was right.’

‘Didn’t the boss have him imprisoned, and tortured?’ asked my guide. ‘That’s what happened in the version of the story they tell hereabouts. They say that the man never even made it as far as the Cordon-bleu dessert his chef had whipped up. They found him on the following day with his hands cut off, his severed tongue placed neatly in his breast pocket and a final bullet-hole in his forehead.’

‘Here? In the house back there?’

‘Good lord, no. They left his body in his nightclub. Over in the city.’

I was surprised how quickly dusk had ended. There was still a glow in the west, but the rest of the sky had become night, plum-purple in its majesty.

‘The days before the full of the moon, in the labyrinth,’ he said. ‘They were set aside for the infirm, and those in need. My sister had a women’s condition. They told her it would be fatal if she didn’t have her insides all scraped out, and then it might be fatal anyway. Her stomach had swollen up as if she was carrying a baby, not a tumour, although she must have been pushing fifty. She came up here when the moon was a day from full and she walked the labyrinth. Walked it from the outside in, in the moon’s light, and she walked it from the centre back to the outside, with no false steps or mistakes.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘She lived,’ he said, shortly.

We crested the hill, but I could not see what I was looking at. It was too dark.

‘They delivered her of the thing inside her. It lived as well, for a while.’ He paused. Then he tapped my arm. ‘Look over there.’

I turned and looked. The size of the moon astonished me. I know it’s an optical illusion, that the moon grows no smaller as it rises, but this moon seemed to take up so much of the horizon as it rose that I found myself thinking of the old Frank Frazetta paperback covers, where men with their swords raised would be silhouetted in front of huge moons, and I remembered paintings of wolves howling on hilltops, black cutouts against the circle of snow-white moon that framed them. The enormous moon that was rising was the creamy yellow of freshly churned butter.

‘Is the moon full?’ I asked.

‘That’s a full moon, all right.’ He sounded satisfied. ‘And there’s the labyrinth.’

We walked towards it. I had expected to see ash on the ground, or nothing. Instead, in the buttery moonlight, I saw a maze, complex and elegant, made of circles and whorls inside a huge square. I could not judge distances properly in that light, but I thought that each side of the square must be two hundred feet or more.

The plants that outlined the maze were low to the ground, though. None of them was more than a foot tall. I bent down, picked a needle-like leaf, black in the moonlight, and crushed it between finger and thumb. I inhaled, and thought of raw lamb, carefully dismembered and prepared, and placed in an oven on a bed of branches and needles that smelled just like this.

‘I thought you people burned all this to the ground,’ I said.

‘We did. They aren’t hedges, not any longer. But things grow again, in their season. There’s no killing some things. Rosemary’s tough.’

‘Where’s the entrance?’

‘You’re standing in it,’ he said. He was an old man, who walked with a stick and talked to strangers. Nobody would ever miss him.

‘So what happened up here when the moon was full?’

‘Locals didn’t walk the labyrinth then. That was the one night that paid for all.’

I took a step into the maze. There was nothing difficult about it, not with the bushes that marked it no higher than my shins, no higher than a kitchen garden. If I got lost, I could simply step over the bushes, walk back out. But for now I followed the path into the labyrinth. It was easy to make out in the light of the full moon. I could hear my guide, as he continued to talk.

‘Some folk thought even that price was too high. That was why we came up here, why we burned the lunar labyrinth. We came up that hill when the moon was dark, and we carried burning torches, like in the old black-and-white movies. We all did. Even me. But you can’t kill everything. It don’t work like that.’

‘Why rosemary?’ I asked.

‘Rosemary’s for remembering,’ he told me.

The butter-yellow moon was rising faster than I imagined or expected. Now it was a pale ghost-face in the sky, calm and compassionate, and its colour was white, bone-white.

The man said, ‘There’s always a chance that you could get out safely. Even on the night of the full moon. First you have to get to the centre of the labyrinth. There’s a fountain there. You’ll see. You can’t mistake it. Then you have to make it back from the centre. No missteps, no dead ends, no mistakes on the way in or on the way out. It’s probably easier now than it was when the bushes were high. It’s a chance. Otherwise, the labyrinth gets to cure you of all that ails you. Of course, you’ll have to run.’

I looked back. I could not see my guide. Not any longer. There was something in front of me, beyond the bush-path pattern, a black shadow padding silently along the perimeter of the square. It was the size of a large dog, but it did not move like a dog.

It threw back its head and howled to the moon with amusement and with merriment. The huge flat table at the top of the hill echoed with joyous howls, and, my left knee aching from the long hill-climb, I stumbled forward.

The maze had a pattern; I could trace it. Above me the moon shone, bright as day. She had always accepted my gifts in the past. She would not play me false at the end.

‘Run,’ said a voice that was almost a growl.

I ran like a lamb to his laughter.

The Thing About Cassandra

So there’s Scallie and me wearing Starsky-and-Hutch wigs, complete with sideburns, at five o’clock in the morning by the side of a canal in Amsterdam. There had been ten of us that night, including Rob, the groom, last seen handcuffed to a bed in the red-light district with shaving foam covering his nether regions and his future brother-in-law giggling and patting the hooker holding the straight razor on the arse, which was the point I looked at Scallie and he looked at me, and he said, ‘Maximum deniability?’ and I nodded, because there are some questions you don’t want to be able to answer when a bride starts asking pointed questions about the stag weekend, so we slipped off for a drink, leaving eight men in Starsky-and-Hutch wigs (one of whom was mostly naked, attached to a bed by fluffy pink handcuffs, and seemed to be starting to think that this adventure wasn’t such a good idea after all) behind us, in a room that smelled of disinfectant and cheap incense, and we went and sat by a canal and drank cans of Danish lager and talked about the old days.