Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Shadow went up the back stairs to the long corridor at the top of the house. He went into his room. He could hear party noises, and looked out of the small window. The french windows opposite were wide open, and the partygoers, now wearing coats and gloves, holding their glasses of wine, had spilled out into the inner courtyard. He could hear fragments of conversations that transformed and reshaped themselves; the noises were clear but the words and the sense were lost. An occasional phrase would break free of the susurrus. A man said, “I told him, judges like you, I don’t own, I sell…” Shadow heard a woman say, “It’s a monster, darling. An absolute monster. Well, what can you do?” and another woman saying, “Well, if only I could say the same about my boyfriend’s!” and a bray of laughter.

He had two alternatives. He could stay, or he could try to go.

“I’ll stay,” he said, aloud.

VI

It was a night of dangerous dreams.

In Shadow’s first dream he was back in America, standing beneath a streetlight. He walked up some steps, pushed through a glass door, and stepped into a diner, the kind that had once been a dining car on a train. He could hear an old man singing, in a deep gravelly voice, to the tune of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,”

“My grandpa sells condoms to sailors

He punctures the tips with a pin

My grandma does back-street abortions

My God how the money rolls in.”

Shadow walked along the length of the dining car. At a table at the end of the car, a grizzled man was sitting, holding a beer bottle, and singing, “Rolls in, rolls in, my God how the money rolls in.” When he caught sight of Shadow his face split into a huge monkey grin, and he gestured with the beer bottle. “Sit down, sit down,” he said.

Shadow sat down opposite the man he had known as Wednesday.

“So what’s the trouble?” asked Wednesday, dead for almost two years, or as dead as his kind of creature was going to get. “I’d offer you a beer, but the service here stinks.”

Shadow said that was okay. He didn’t want a beer.

“Well?” asked Wednesday, scratching his beard.

“I’m in a big house in Scotland with a shitload of really rich folks, and they have an agenda. I’m in trouble, and I don’t know what kind of trouble I’m in. But I think it’s pretty bad trouble.”

Wednesday took a swig of his beer. “The rich are different, m’boy,” he said, after a while.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Well,” said Wednesday. “For a start, most of them are probably mortal. Not something you have to worry about.”

“Don’t give me that shit.”

“But you aren’t mortal,” said Wednesday. “You died on the tree, Shadow. You died and you came back.”

“So? I don’t even remember how I did that. If they kill me this time, I’ll still be dead.”

Wednesday finished his beer. Then he waved his beer bottle around, as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra with it, and sang another verse:

“My brother’s a missionary worker,

He saves fallen women from sin

For five bucks he’ll save you a redhead,

My God how the money rolls in.”

“You aren’t helping,” said Shadow. The diner was a train carriage now, rattling through a snowy night.

Wednesday put down his beer bottle, and he fixed Shadow with his real eye, the one that wasn’t glass. “It’s patterns,” he said. “If they think you’re a hero, they’re wrong. After you die, you don’t get to be Beowulf or Perseus or Rama any more. Whole different set of rules. Chess, not checkers. Go, not chess. You understand?”

“Not even a little,” said Shadow, frustrated.

People, in the corridor of the big house, moving loudly and drunkenly, shushing each other as they stumbled and giggled their way down the hall.

Shadow wondered if they were servants, or if they were strays from the other wing, slumming. And the dreams took him once again…

Now he was back in the bothy where he had sheltered from the rain, the day before. There was a body on the floor: a boy, no more than five years old. Naked, on his back, limbs spread. There was a flash of intense light, and someone pushed through Shadow as if he was not there and rearranged the position of the boy’s arms. Another flash of light.

Shadow knew the man taking the photographs. It was Dr. Gaskell, the little steel-haired man from the hotel bar.

Gaskell took a white paper bag from his pocket, and fished about in it for something that he popped into his mouth.

“Dolly mixtures,” he said to the child on the stone floor. “Yum yum. Your favorites.”

He smiled and crouched down, and took another photograph of the dead boy.

Shadow pushed through the stone wall of the cottage, flowing through the cracks in the stones like the wind. He flowed down to the seashore. The waves crashed on the rocks and Shadow kept moving across the water, through gray seas, up the swells and down again, toward the ship made of dead men’s nails.

The ship was far away, out at sea, and Shadow passed across the surface of the water like the shadow of a cloud.