By Neil Gaiman

It began in darkness; the little girl hesitantly
touching the piano-key. She made up a song to sing to the darkness. She sang
about the big girls, the pretty ones. She sang all her fear of growing up, all her
fear of what she knew she would never be.

When the song was done she lay down, beneath the piano, in the dark

The piano sang her a lullaby. The black keys and the white keys began to
grow, and twine, and blossom, and she was dreaming: and they came into the
bare room, all the dream people, crowding and strutting and scuttling and
dancing.

There was a woman with a rose in her dark hair, a rose the colour of blood.
She had a bruise on her cheek, and her eye make-up was smudged and
streaked. She stared at the other people as if she was scared of them; as if any
one of them might hurt her again.

There was a hairy-legged man with horns and tail; he looked like a devil, but
when the little girl asked he told her he had been around before ever the devils
walked, and he smelled of rain and the forest. The Prophet, his beard dusty
with the desert sand, fixed his lipstick, and whispered, "Hey, is that a
thunderbolt in your toga, or are you just, pleased to see me?" But nobody
heard. Wild horses thundered past, their hooves drowning out the noise of the
lost lovers, damaged children, wakened babies . . .

And by then the party was underway, and all the boys were partying, even the
boys who were girls, and the World War One flier and the secret genetic
agent, all of them grabbing the party food and spilling their drinks and
laughing nervously and too loudly. Each of the people had a shadow, and the
little sleeping girl found herself staring not at the people but at thier shadows,
as they danced their flickering shadow party on the floor and on the walls and
ceilings, as they caressed and fought, and fucked and died in their silent
shadow carnival.

A beautiful woman-much too beautiful ever to be a beauty queen, with a
tongue split, like a snakes-was carrying a window underneath her arm.
Through the window the little girl could see a mirror, and reflected in the
mirror was the dark smoke from the mountain. The man with the
black-and-white-stiped eyes shivered, and began hunting for a door, but none
of the guests had remembered to bring a door with them. The virgin began to
cry, as her friends stapped her to a chair. They took her gun away from her
before they threw the switch, dropped the pill into the water-glass, got her in
their sights: four live bullets, one blank; that's the tradition. The American
way.

The houngan was feeling up the junkie widow. "I shouldn't be here," she said.
"I really shouldn't be here. Maybe I'm not." She pissed herself, then, a thin
trickle of vivid yellow urine which ran over his hand and down her stained
legs and collected in a pool at her feet.

The floor juddered and trembled. The moon shone through the window, past
the volcano, through every mirror in the world.

One bye one all the dream people climbed into their shadows. One by one the
shadows crawled beneath the piano, nestled under the little girl. The shadows
slept inside her dream.

And when she woke, there was nothing there to show that anything had ever
happened at all, only a distant star that twinkled in the window that someone
had left propped up against the wall.

She played a song to the star on the piano, one note at a time, while the
shadows billowed and swelled and filled the room with darkness,
extinguishing the lamps, swallowing the candle-flames one by one, until there
was nothing left at all.

Only the dark; and in the darkness, just a twinkle.