Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas—abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken—and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.
And while I do not believe that any of the stories in this volume will do that, it’s nice to collect them together, to find a home for them where they can be read, and remembered. I hope you enjoy reading them.
Neil Gaiman
On the first day of Spring 2006
A STUDY IN EMERALD
I. The New Friend
FRESH FROM THEIR STUPENDOUS EUROPEAN TOUR, WHERE THEY PERFORMED BEFORE SEVERAL OF THE CROWNED HEADS OF EUROPE, GARNERING THEIR PLAUDITS AND PRAISE WITH MAGNIFICENT DRAMATIC PERFORMANCES, COMBINING BOTH COMEDY AND TRAGEDY, THE STRAND PLAYERS WISH TO MAKE IT KNOWN THAT THEY SHALL BE APPEARING AT THE ROYAL COURT THEATRE, DRURY LANE, FOR A LIMITED ENGAGEMENT IN APRIL, AT WHICH THEY WILL PRESENT MY LOOK-ALIKE BROTHER TOM!, THE LITTLEST VIOLET-SELLER AND THE GREAT OLD ONES COME （THIS LAST AN HISTORICAL EPIC OF PAGEANTRY AND DELIGHT）; EACH AN ENTIRE PLAY IN ONE ACT! TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE NOW FROM THE BOX OFFICE.
It is the immensity, I believe. The hugeness of things below. The darkness of dreams.
But I am woolgathering. Forgive me. I am not a literary man.
I had been in need of lodgings. That was how I met him. I wanted someone to share the cost of rooms with me. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, in the chemical laboratories of St. Bart’s. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” that was what he said to me, and my mouth fell open and my eyes opened very wide.
“Astonishing,” I said.
“Not really,” said the stranger in the white lab-coat, who was to become my friend. “From the way you hold your arm, I see you have been wounded, and in a particular way. You have a deep tan. You also have a military bearing, and there are few enough places in the Empire that a military man can be both tanned and, given the nature of the injury to your shoulder and the traditions of the Afghan cave-folk, tortured.”
Put like that, of course, it was absurdly simple. But then, it always was. I had been tanned nut-brown. And I had indeed, as he had observed, been tortured.
The gods and men of Afghanistan were savages, unwilling to be ruled from Whitehall or from Berlin or even from Moscow, and unprepared to see reason. I had been sent into those hills, attached to the——th Regiment. As long as the fighting remained in the hills and mountains, we fought on an equal footing. When the skirmishes descended into the caves and the darkness then we found ourselves, as it were, out of our depth and in over our heads.
I shall not forget the mirrored surface of the underground lake, nor the thing that emerged from the lake, its eyes opening and closing, and the singing whispers that accompanied it as it rose, wreathing their way about it like the buzzing of flies bigger than worlds.
That I survived was a miracle, but survive I did, and I returned to England with my nerves in shreds and tatters. The place that leech-like mouth had touched me was tattooed forever, frog-white, into the skin of my now-withered shoulder. I had once been a crack-shot. Now I had nothing, save a fear of the world-beneath-the-world akin to panic, which meant that I would gladly pay sixpence of my army pension for a Hansom cab rather than a penny to travel underground.
Still, the fogs and darknesses of London comforted me, took me in. I had lost my first lodgings because I screamed in the night. I had been in Afghanistan; I was there no longer.
“I scream in the night,” I told him.
“I have been told that I snore,” he said. “Also I keep irregular hours, and I often use the mantelpiece for target practice. I will need the sitting room to meet clients. I am selfish, private, and easily bored. Will this be a problem?”
I smiled, and I shook my head, and extended my hand. We shook on it.
The rooms he had found for us, in Baker Street, were more than adequate for two bachelors. I bore in mind all my friend had said about his desire for privacy, and I forbore from asking what it was he did for a living. Still, there was much to pique my curiosity. Visitors would arrive at all hours, and when they did I would leave the sitting room and repair to my bedroom, pondering what they could have in common with my friend: the pale woman with one eye bone-white, the small man who looked like a commercial traveler, the portly dandy in his velvet jacket, and the rest. Some were frequent visitors, many others came only once, spoke to him, and left, looking troubled or looking satisfied.