“Spider does not bleat,” he said. He was not certain it was true.
Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.
“If you kill me,” said Spider, “my curse will be upon you.” He wondered if he actually had a curse. He probably did.
“It will not be I that kills you,” she said. She raised her hand, and it was not a hand but a raptor’s talon. She raked her talon down his face, down his chest, her cruel claws sinking into his flesh, ripping his skin.
It did not hurt, although Spider knew that it would hurt soon enough.
Beads of blood crimsoned his chest and dripped down his face. His eyes stung. His blood touched his lips. He could taste it and smell the iron scent of it.
“Now,” she said in the cries of distant birds. “Now your death begins.”
Spider said, “We’re both reasonable entities. Let me present you with a perhaps rather more feasible alternative scenario that might conceivably have benefits for both of us.” He said it with an easy smile. He said it convincingly.
“You talk too much,” she said. Then she reached into his mouth with her sharp talons, and with one wrenching movement she tore out his tongue.
“There,” she said. And then she said, “Sleep.”
E-BOOK EXTRA TWO
HOW DARE YOU?
By Neil Gaiman
NOBODY’S ASKED THE QUESTION I’VE BEEN DREADING, so far, the question I have been hoping that no-one would ask. So I’m going to ask it myself, and try to answer it myself.
And the question is this: How dare you?
Or, in its expanded form,
How dare you, an Englishman, try and write a book about America, about American myths and the American soul? How dare you try and write about what makes America special, as a country, as a nation, as an idea?
And, being English, my immediate impulse is to shrug my shoulders and promise it won’t happen again.
But then, I did dare, in my novel American Gods, and it took an odd sort of hubris to write it.
As a young man, I wrote a comic-book about dreams and stories called Sandman (collected, and still in print, in ten graphic novels, and you should read it if you haven’t). I got a similar question all the time, back then: “You live in England. How can you set so much of this story in America?”
And I would point out that, in media terms, the UK was practically the 51st state. We get American films, watch American TV. “I might not write a Seattle that would satisfy an inhabitant,” I used to say, “But I’ll write one as good as a New Yorker who’s never been to Seattle.”
I was, of course, wrong. I didn’t do that at all. What I did instead was, in retrospect, much more interesting: I created an America that was entirely imaginary, in which Sandman could take place. A delirious, unlikely place out beyond the edge of the real.
And that satisfied me until I came to live in America about eight years ago.
Slowly I realised both that the America I’d been writing was wholly fictional, and that the real America, the one underneath the what-you-see-is-what-you-get surface, was much more interesting than the fictions.
The immigrant experience is, I suspect, a universal one (even if you’re the kind of immigrant, like me, who holds on tightly, almost superstitiously, to his UK citizenship). On the one hand, there’s you, and on the other hand, there’s America. It’s bigger than you are. So you try and make sense of it. You try to figure it out—something which it resists. It’s big enough, and contains enough contradictions, that it is perfectly happy not to be figured out. As a writer, all I could do was to describe a small part of the whole.
And it was too big to see.
I didn’t really know what kind of book I wanted to write until, in the summer of 1998, I found myself in Reykjavik, in Iceland. And it was then that fragments of plot, an unwieldy assortment of characters, and something faintly resembling a structure, came together in my head. Either way, the book came into focus. It would be a thriller, and a murder mystery, and a romance, and a road trip. It would be about the immigrant experience, about what people believed in when they came to America. And about what happened to the things that they believed.
I wanted to write about America as a mythic place.