Gaiman & Russell - Only the End of the ...
Gaiman & Russell - Only the End of the World Again, Gaiman - books
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A weary
werewolf once again joins in the eternal battle to prevent the
freeing of dark forces that was first revealed in
A Night in the Lonesome
October—
but this time, none of the other good guys shows up.
ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD
AGAIN
NEIL GAIMAN
IT WAS A BAD DAY: I WOKE UP NAKED IN THE BED, WITH A cramp in
my stomach, feeling more or less like hell. Something about the quality of
the light, stretched and metallic, like the color of a migraine, told me it was
afternoon.
The room was freezing—literally: there was a thin crust of ice on the
inside of the windows. The sheets on the bed around me were ripped and
clawed, and there was animal hair in the bed. It itched.
I was thinking about staying in bed for the next week— I’m always
tired after a change—but a wave of nausea forced me to disentangle
myself from the bedding, and to stumble, hurriedly, into the apartment’s tiny
bathroom.
The cramps hit me again as I got to the bathroom door. I held on to
the door-frame and I started to sweat. Maybe it was a fever; I hoped I
wasn’t coming down with something.
The cramping was sharp in my guts. My head felt swimmy. I crumpled
to the floor, and, before I could man-age to raise my head enough to find
the toilet bowl, I began to spew.
I vomited a foul-smelling thin yellow liquid; in it was a dog’s paw—my
guess was a Doberman’s, but I’m not really a dog person; a tomato peel;
some diced carrots and sweet corn; some lump of half-chewed meat, raw;
and some fingers. They were fairly small, pale fingers, obviously a child’s.
“Shit.”
The cramps eased up, and the nausea subsided. I lay on the floor,
with stinking drool coming out of my mouth and nose, with the tears you cry
when you’re being sick drying on my cheeks.
When I felt a little better I picked up the paw and the fingers from the
pool of spew and threw them into the toilet bowl, flushed them away.
I turned on the tap, rinsed out my mouth with the briny Innsmouth
water, and spat it into the sink. I mopped up the rest of the sick as best I
could with washcloth and toilet paper. Then I turned on the shower, and
stood in the bathtub like a zombie as the hot water sluiced over me.
I soaped myself down, body and hair. The meager lather turned gray;
I must have been filthy. My hair was matted with something that felt like
dried blood, and I worked at it with the bar of soap until it was gone. Then I
stood under the shower until the water turned icy.
There was a note under the door from my landlady. It said that I owed
her for two weeks’ rent. It said that all the answers were in the Book of
Revelations. It said that I made a lot of noise coming home in the early
hours of this morning, and she’d thank me to be quieter in the future. It said
that when the Elder Gods rose up from the ocean, all the scum of the Earth,
all the nonbelievers, all the human garbage and the wastrels and deadbeats
would be swept away, and the world would be cleansed by ice and deep
water. It said that she felt she ought to remind me that she had assigned
me a shelf in the refrigerator when I arrived and she’d thank me if in the
future I’d keep to it.
I crumpled the note, dropped it on the floor, where it lay alongside the
Big Mac cartons and the empty pizza cartons, and the long-dead dried
slices of pizza.
It was time to go to work.
I’d been in Innsmouth for two weeks, and I disliked it. It smelled fishy.
It was a claustrophobic little town: marsh-land to the east, cliffs to the west,
and, in the center, a harbor that held a few rotting fishing boats, and was not
even scenic at sunset. The yuppies had come to Innsmouth in the Eighties
anyway, bought their picturesque fish-ermen’s cottages overlooking the
harbor. The yuppies had been gone for some years, now, and the cottages
by the bay were crumbling, abandoned.
The inhabitants of Innsmouth lived here and there in and around the
town, and in the trailer parks that ringed it, filled with dank mobile homes that
were never going anywhere.
I got dressed, pulled on my boots and put on my coat and left my
room. My landlady was nowhere to be seen. She was a short, pop-eyed
woman, who spoke little, al-though she left extensive notes for me pinned
to doors and placed where I might see them; she kept the house filled with
the smell of boiling seafood: huge pots were always simmering on the
kitchen stove, filled with things with too many legs and other things with no
legs at all.
There were other rooms in the house, but no one else rented them.
No one in their right mind would come to Innsmouth in winter.
Outside the house it didn’t smell much better. It was colder, though,
and my breath steamed in the sea air. The snow on the streets was crusty
and filthy; the clouds prom-ised more snow.
A cold, salty wind came up off the bay. The gulls were screaming
miserably. I felt shitty. My office would be freezing, too. On the corner of
Marsh Street and Leng Avenue was a bar, The Opener, a squat building
with small, dark windows that I’d passed two dozen times in the last couple
of weeks. I hadn’t been in before, but I really needed a drink, and besides,
it might be warmer in there. I pushed open the door.
The bar was indeed warm. I stamped the snow off my boots and went
inside. It was almost empty and smelled of old ashtrays and stale beer. A
couple of elderly men were playing chess by the bar. The barman was
reading a battered old gilt-and-green-leather edition of the poetical works of
Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
“Hey. How about a Jack Daniel’s straight up?”
“Sure thing. You’re new in town,” he told me, putting his book face
down on the bar, pouring the drink into a glass.
“Does it show?”
He smiled, passed me the Jack Daniel’s. The glass was filthy, with a
greasy thumb-print on the side, and I shrugged and knocked back the drink
anyway. I could barely taste it.
“Hair of the dog?” he said.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“There is a belief,” said the barman, whose fox-red hair was tightly
greased back, “that the
lykanthropoi
can be returned to their natural forms
by thanking them, while they’re in wolf form, or by calling them by their given
names.”
“Yeah? Well, thanks.”
He poured another shot for me, unasked. He looked a little like Peter
Lorre, but then, most of the folk in Innsmouth look a little like Peter Lorre,
including my land-lady.
I sank the Jack Daniel’s, this time felt it burning down into my
stomach, the way it should.
“It’s what they say. I never said I believed it.”
“What
do
you believe?”
“Burn the girdle.”
“Pardon?”
“The
lykanthropoi
have girdles of human skin, given to them at their
first transformation, by their masters in hell. Burn the girdle.”
One of the old chess-players turned to me then, his eyes huge and
blind and protruding. “If you drink rainwater out of warg-wolf s paw-print,
that’ll make a wolf of you, when the moon is full,” he said. “The only cure is
to hunt down the wolf that made the print in the first place and cut off its
head with a knife forged of virgin silver.”
“Virgin, huh?” I smiled.
His chess partner, bald and wrinkled, shook his head and croaked a
single sad sound. Then he moved his queen, and croaked again.
There are people like him all over Innsmouth.
I paid for the drinks, and left a dollar tip on the bar. The barman was
reading his book once more, and ignored it.
Outside the bar big wet kissy flakes of snow had begun to fall, settling
in my hair and eyelashes. I hate snow. I hate New England. I hate
Innsmouth: it’s no place to be alone, but if there’s a good place to be alone
I’ve not found it yet. Still, business has kept me on the move for more
moons than I like to think about. Business, and other things.
I walked a couple of blocks down Marsh Street—like most of
Innsmouth, an unattractive mixture of eighteenth-century American Gothic
houses, late-nineteenth-century stunted brownstones, and late-twentieth
prefab gray-brick boxes—until I got to a boarded-up fried chicken joint, and
I went up the stone steps next to the store and unlocked the rusting metal
security door.
There was a liquor store across the street; a palmist was operating on
the second floor.
Someone had scrawled graffiti in black marker on the metal: JUST
DIE, it said. Like it was easy.
The stairs were bare wood; the plaster was stained and peeling. My
one-room office was at the top of the stairs.
I don’t stay anywhere long enough to bother with my name in gilt on
glass. It was handwritten in block letters on a piece of ripped cardboard that
I’d thumbtacked to the door.
LAWRENCE TALBOT.
ADJUSTOR.
I unlocked the door to my office and went in.
I inspected my office, while adjectives like
seedy
and
rancid
and
squalid
wandered through my head, then gave up, outclassed. It was fairly
unpreposessing—a desk, an office chair, an empty filing cabinet: a window,
which gave you a terrific view of the liquor store and the empty palmist’s.
The smell of old cooking grease permeated from the store below. I
wondered how long the fried chicken joint had been boarded up; I imagined
a multitude of black cockroaches swarming over every surface in the
darkness beneath me.
“That’s the shape of the world that you’re thinking of there,” said a
deep, dark voice, deep enough that I felt it in the pit of my stomach.
There was an old armchair in one corner of the office. The remains of
a pattern showed through the patina of age and grease the years had given
it. It was the color of dust.
The fat man sitting in the armchair, his eyes still tightly closed,
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