Stories: All-New Tales - By Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio Page 0,151

of mysterious authority—and of feared nebulosity.

Such a period is, of course, where we find ourselves at the moment.

I might add at this point that my interest in the Cult is not a recently flowering one; I have been gathering references to it and carefully formulating my theories for many years.

FOR THE RECORD, MY interest was sparked during the waning months of the free world’s involvement in the Vietnam War. At that time I was a special attaché aligned with a covert arm of American intelligence, checking black-and-white photographs taken by spies and insurgents behind Communist lines—these were photos smuggled out of prisoner-of-war camps and such. I might also add that this was a period in which I was seeking to forget an unfortunate incident in my personal life: my young spouse, understandably lonely due to my lengthy absence, took up with another man and had a child by him. I sought solace by immersing myself in my work.

I began to notice in some of the photos I handled a recurring and curious phenomenon. Here and there, tucked in a corner or peering out from behind a barracks, was a peculiar figure wearing what seemed to be a false nose upon its face. Often the figure was identifiably male; at other times it appeared to be a female, or even a child. Many prisoners of war at that time, due to malnutrition and concurrent emaciation, were barely identifiable by their gender—or their age—so it must be remembered that any sort of positive identification was difficult. Many of the nose-wearing figures appeared beside, or within (though they were apparently not dead) mass graves.

I put these photographs aside, thinking that, though there was little here to interest my superiors, there might yet be something to investigate further.

I began to dream of figures, birdlike, resembling Bosch’s horrid hell beasts, wearing false, beaklike noses.

My collection of photographs grew. I realized that as the scenes of horror increased—by this time we were receiving covert daily pictures from death camps holding Americans and Vietnamese Buddhists—the number of nose-bearing figures increased. In one photograph—one I keep to this day folded in my wallet—a man, woman and child, in a long line of tired and bleakly hopeless prisoners, most of them in tatters of clothes hanging on barely enough bones to stand, being led meekly to an open pit by machine gun–bearing guards, have turned their faces toward the camera, three in a row, and are smiling a death’s-head smile. There seems to be a bit more meat on their bones than on those in front and in back of them.

They each wear the Nose.

OTHER ACTIVITIES SOON SAVED me from complete absorption in the manner of these curious photographs, and it was not until well after the war’s resolution, after I had settled in Montreal, far away from my ex-wife, her son and husband (who traveled extensively) that I came across a small bundle of the grainy pictures in a box (the above-mentioned photo was among them) and all of my former interest was rekindled. I began to search other sources—having a bit of influence, due to my war service, in being able to access materials not easily available by the public—and began to come across other photos taken in other sectors of the war in which figures bearing the Nose appeared.

I then broadened my research, and found similar artifacts among World War II memorabilia. I came across one precious bit of evidence (alas, recently lost to fire) that depicted a Third Reich rally in which two separate nosed figures could plainly be discerned. I remember this photo clearly, because one of the figures stood a few scant feet from Hitler himself, and grinned maliciously at the camera.

Eventually, my interest once again waned, until I picked up one morning in 1979 a London newspaper that contained a news-service photo on the front page presenting the dead body of the assassinated president of South Korea, Park Chung Hee. To the right of the body, barely visible in the deep background, was a figure with the Nose on its face.

I immediately researched other photos that were taken at the time but came up with nothing useful.

However, another reference turned up in a photograph of a train derailment that killed forty-five passengers in Ohio the same week: among the twisted metal a head could be seen poking through with the false appendage attached to it by a thin silver strap. The figure it belonged to, which was surrounded by dead commuters, was