Smoke & Mirrors by Neil Gaiman

Author:Neil Gaiman [Gaiman, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-01-08T07:14:53+00:00

16. Only the End of the World Again

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 quallty of the light, stretched and metallic, like the colour 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 manage 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 com; some lumps 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 meagre lather turned grey; 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 future. It said that when the Elder Gods rose up from the ocean, all the scum of the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.