Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

by Neil Gaiman

“Hello,” said Polly. She didn’t know what else to say. “I . . . I left my diary behind.” “I know. I was reading it.” He raised the diary. He was not the same as the man in the rabbit mask, the woman in the cat mask, but everything Polly had felt about them, about the wrongness, was intensified here. “Do you want it back?” “Yes please,” Polly said to the dog-masked man. She felt hurt and violated: this man had been reading her diary. But she wanted it back. “You know what you need to do, to get it?” She shook her head. “Ask me what the time is.” She opened her mouth. It was dry. She licked her lips, and muttered, “What time is it?” “And my name,” he said. “Say my name. I’m Mister Wolf.” “What’s the time, Mister Wolf?” asked Polly. A playground game rose unbidden to her mind. Mister Wolf smiled (but how can a mask smile?) and he opened his mouth so wide to show row upon row of sharp, sharp teeth. “Dinnertime,” he told her. Polly started to scream then, as he came towards her, but she didn’t get to scream for very long.

“Doctor? What’s going on?” asked Amy. “Can you explain any of this?” “All of it,” said the Doctor. “Sort of wish I couldn’t. They’ve come here to take over the Earth. They’re going to become the population of the planet.” “Oh, no, Doctor,” said the huge crouching creature in the paper mask. “You don’t understand. That’s not why we take over the planet. We will take over the world and let humanity become extinct simply in order to get you here, now.”

“The Kin,” said the Doctor. “A population that only consists of one creature, but able to move through time as easily and instinctively as a human can cross the road. There was only one of you. But you’d populate a place by moving backwards and forwards in time until there were hundreds of you, then thousands and millions, all interacting with yourselves at different moments in your own timeline. And this would go on until the local structure of time would collapse, like rotten wood. You need other entities, at least in the beginning, to ask you the time, and create the quantum superpositioning that allows you to anchor to a place-time location.”

He had tried for so long to rule wisely, and well, and to be a good monarch, but it is hard to rule, and wisdom can be painful. And it is impossible, he had found, if you rule, to do only good, for you cannot build anything without tearing something down, and even he could not care about every life, every dream, every population of every world. Bit by bit, moment by moment, death by little death, he ceased to care. He would not die, for only inferior people died, and he was the inferior of no one. Time passed. One day, in the deep dungeons, a man with blood on his face looked at the Duke and told him he had become a monster. The next moment, the man was no more; a footnote in a history book. The Duke gave this conversation much thought over the next several days, and eventually he nodded his head. “The traitor was right,” he said. “I have become a monster. Ah well. I wonder if any of us set out to be monsters?”

You have walked past me and looked at me and smiled, and you have walked past me and other times you barely noticed me as anything other than an object. Truly, it is remarkable how little regard you, or any human, gives to something that remains completely motionless. You have woken in the night, got up, walked to the little toilet, micturated, walked back to your bed, slept once more, peacefully. You would not notice something perfectly still, would you? Something in the shadows?

I love you, I want you, I need you. I am yours just as you are mine. There. I have declared my love for you. Soon, I hope, you will know this for yourself. And then we will never part. It will be time, in a moment, to turn around, put down the letter. I am with you, even now, in these old apartments with the Iranian carpets on the walls. You have walked past me too many times. No more. I am here with you. I am here now. When you put down this letter. When you turn and look across this old room, your eyes sweeping it with relief or with joy or even with terror . . . Then I will move. Move, just a fraction. And, finally, you will see me.

“HAVE YOU NOTICED,” ASKED the shortest of the dwarfs, “something unusual?” They had names, the dwarfs, but human beings were not permitted to know what they were, such things being sacred. The queen had a name, but nowadays people only ever called her Your Majesty. Names are in short supply in this telling.

The witch was as old as the mulberry tree She lived in the house of a hundred clocks She sold storms and sorrows and calmed the sea And she kept her life in a box.

The tree was the oldest that I’d ever seen Its trunk flowed like liquid. It dripped with age. But every September its fruit stained the green As scarlet as harlots, as red as my rage.

“What are you drinking?” asked the landlord. There was a handwritten piece of paper taped to the wall by the bar telling customers not to order a lager “as a punch in the face often offends.” “What’s good and local?” asked Shadow, who had learned that this was mostly the wisest thing to say.

“You’re not a dog person, are you?” asked the dark-haired woman. “I’m not a dog person,” said Shadow. Had he been someone else, someone who talked about what was happening inside his head, Shadow might have told her that his wife had owned dogs when she was younger, and sometimes called Shadow puppy because she wanted a dog she could not have. But Shadow kept things on the inside. It was one of the things he liked about the British: even when they wanted to know what was happening on the inside, they did not ask. The world on the inside remained the world on the inside.

He had stopped in front of a lion’s cage, but what had been in the cage was a sphinx, half lion and half woman, her tail swishing. She had smiled at him, and her smile had been his mother’s smile. He heard her voice, accented and warm and feline. It said, Know thyself. I know who I am, said Shadow in his dream, holding the bars of the cage. Behind the bars was the desert. He could see pyramids. He could see shadows on the sand. Then who are you, Shadow? What are you running from? Where are you running to? Who are you?

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.”

“Feeling a bit embarrassed. All that Hound of the Baskervilles nonsense behind me now.” “You really have nothing to be embarrassed about,” said Shadow, reflecting that the English found embarrassment wherever they looked for it.

“You think ghosts can talk to everyone?” asked Cassie Burglass’s voice in the darkness, urgently. “We are moths. And you are the flame.”