Neil Gaiman - Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions

HARPERCOLLINS E-BOOK SPECIAL FEATURE:

Three stories not available in the print edition of this book

But where theres a monster theres a miracle.

Theyll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate

They do it with mirrors. Its a clich, of course, but its also

Mrs. Whitaker found the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat.

older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter.

Tramps and vagabonds have marks they make on gate posts

They pulled up most of the railway tracks in the early sixties

Nobody knew where the toy had come from

It was raining when I arrived in L.A.

I wish that you would visit me one day

When I was a boy, from time to time

Later, they would point to his sisters death, the cancer

I had this story from my friend Edmund Wyld Esq.

Benjamin Lassiter was coming to the unavoidable conclusion

There was a computer game, I was given it

I was nineteen in 1965, in my drainpipe trousers

It was a bad day: I woke up naked in the bed with a cramp

Listen, Talbot. Somebodys killing my people

Peter Pinter had never heard of Aristippus of the Cyrenaics

The Pale albino prince lofted on high his great black sword

Woken at nine oclock by the postman

After all the dreaming is over, after you wake, and leave

Simon Powers didnt like sex. Not really

I wait here at the boundaries of dream

They had a number of devices that would kill the mouse fast

Now is a good time to write this down

BY DAWNIE MORNINGSIDE, AGE 11

What I did on the founders day holiday was, my dad said

There was an old man with skin baked black by the desert sun

He had a tattoo on his upper arm, of a small heart

A few years back all the animals went away.

This is true.

I do not know what manner of things she is. None of us do.

What do you want?

INT. WEBSTERS OFFICE. DAY

In the end, the Lord gave Mankind the world.

R EADING THE E NTRAILS : A R ONDEL

I mean, she said, that one cant help growing older.

One cant perhaps, said Humpty Dumpty, but two can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven.

LEWIS CARROLL, THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

Theyll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate

The cards and stars that tumble as they will.

Tomorrow manifests and brings the bill

For every kiss and kill, the small and great.

You want to know the future, love? Then wait:

Ill answer your impatient questions. Still

Theyll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate,

The cards and stars that tumble as they will.

Ill come to you tonight, dear, when its late,

You will not see me; you may feel a chill.

Ill wait until you sleep, then take my fill,

And that will be your future on a plate.

Theyll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate.

Writing is flying in dreams.

When you remember. When you can. When it works.

Its that easy.

AUTHORS NOTEBOOK, FEBRUARY 1992

T hey do it with mirrors. Its a clich, of course, but its also true. Magicians have been using mirrors, usually set at a forty-five-degree angle, ever since the Victorians began to manufacture reliable, clear mirrors in quantity, well over a hundred years ago. John Nevil Maskelyne began it, in 1862, with a wardrobe that, thanks to a cunningly placed mirror, concealed more than it revealed.

Mirrors are wonderful things. They appear to tell the truth, to reflect life back out at us; but set a mirror correctly and it will lie so convincingly youll believe that something has vanished into thin air, that a box filled with doves and flags and spiders is actually empty, that people hidden in the wings or the pit are floating ghosts upon the stage. Angle it right and a mirror becomes a magic casement; it can show you anything you can imagine and maybe a few things you cant.

(The smoke blurs the edges of things.)

Stories are, in one way or another, mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesnt work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in the darkness.

Fantasyand all fiction is fantasy of one kind or anotheris a mirror. A distorting mirror, to be sure, and a concealing mirror, set at forty-five degrees to reality, but its a mirror nonetheless, which we can use to tell ourselves things we might not otherwise see. (Fairy tales, as G. K. Chesterton once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.)

Winter started today. The sky turned gray and the snow began to fall and it did not stop falling until well after dark. I sat in the darkness and watched the snow falling, and the flakes glistened and glimmered as they spun into the light and out again, and I wondered about where stories came from.

This is the kind of thing that you wonder about when you make things up for a living. I remain unconvinced that it is the kind of activity that is a fit occupation for an adult, but its too late now: I seem to have a career that I enjoy which doesnt involve getting up too early in the morning. (When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.) Most of the stories in this book were written to entertain the various editors who had asked me for tales for specific anthologies (Its for an anthology of stories about the Holy Grail,... about sex,... of fairy stories retold for adults,... about sex and horror,... of revenge stories,... about superstition,... about more sex). A few of them were written to amuse myself or, more precisely, to get an idea or an image out of my head and pinned safely down on paper; which is as good a reason for writing as I know: releasing demons, letting them fly. Some of the stories began in idleness: fancies and curiosities that got out of hand.