Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Robert Silverberg asked me for a novella for his second Legends collection. He didn’t mind if I wrote a Neverwhere novella or an American Gods novella. The Neverwhere novella I began had some technical troubles (it was called “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back” and I shall finish it one day). I began writing “The Monarch of the Glen” in a flat in Notting Hill, where I was directing a short film called “A Short Film about John Bolton,” and finished it in one long mad winter’s dash in the cabin by the lake where I’m currently typing this introduction. My friend Iselin Evensen from Norway first told me tales of the huldra, and she corrected my Norwegian. Like “Bay Wolf” in Smoke and Mirrors, this was influenced by Beowulf, and by the time I wrote it I was certain that the script for Beowulf that I had written for and with Roger Avary would never be made. I was of course wrong, but I enjoy the gulf between Angelina Jolie’s portrayal of Grendel’s mother in the Robert Zemeckis film and the version of the character that turns up here.

I want to thank all the editors of the various volumes in which these stories and poems first appeared, and particularly to thank Jennifer Brehl and Jane Morpeth, my editors in the U.S. and U.K., for their help and assistance and, particularly, their patience, and my literary agent, the redoubtable Merrilee Heifetz, and her gang around the world.

As I write this now, it occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.

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

F RESH 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.