American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition (Author’s Preferred Text)

CHAPTER ONE

Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough, and looked don’t-fuck-with-me enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought a lot about how much he loved his wife.

The best thing—in Shadow’s opinion, perhaps the only good thing—about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he’d plunged as low as he could plunge and he’d hit bottom. He didn’t worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He did not awake in prison with a feeling of dread; he was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.

It did not matter, Shadow decided, if you had done what you had been convicted of or not. In his experience everyone he met in prison was aggrieved about something: there was always something the authorities had got wrong, something they said you did when you didn’t—or you didn’t do quite like they said you did. What was important was that they had got you.

He had noticed it in the first few days, when everything, from the slang to the bad food, was new. Despite the misery and the utter skin-crawling horror of incarceration, he was breathing relief.

Shadow tried not to talk too much. Somewhere around the middle of year two he mentioned his theory to Low Key Lyesmith, his cellmate.

Low Key, who was a grifter from Minnesota, smiled his scarred smile. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s true. It’s even better when you’ve been sentenced to death. That’s when you remember the jokes about the guys who kicked their boots off as the noose flipped around their necks, because their friends always told them they’d die with their boots on.”

“Is that a joke?” asked Shadow.

“Damn right. Gallows humor. Best kind there is—bang, the worst has happened. You get a few days for it to sink in, then you’re riding the cart on your way to do the dance on nothing.”

“When did they last hang a man in this state?” asked Shadow.

“How the hell should I know?” Lyesmith kept his orange-blond hair pretty much shaved. You could see the lines of his skull. “Tell you what, though. This country started going to hell when they stopped hanging folks. No gallows dirt. No gallows deals.”

Shadow shrugged. He could see nothing romantic in a death sentence.

If you didn’t have a death sentence, he decided, then prison was, at best, only a temporary reprieve from life, for two reasons. First, life creeps back into prison. There are always places to go further down, even when you’ve been taken off the board; life goes on, even if it’s life under a microscope or life in a cage. And second, if you just hang in there, some day they’re going to have to let you out.

In the beginning it was too far away for Shadow to focus on. Then it became a distant beam of hope, and he learned how to tell himself “this too shall pass” when the prison shit went down, as prison shit always did. One day the magic door would open and he’d walk through it. So he marked off the days on his Songbirds of North America calendar, which was the only calendar they sold in the prison commissary, and the sun went down and he didn’t see it and the sun came up and he didn’t see it. He practiced coin tricks from a book he found in the wasteland of the prison library; and he worked out; and he made lists in his head of what he’d do when he got out of prison.

Shadow’s lists got shorter and shorter. After two years he had it down to three things.

First, he was going to take a bath. A real, long, serious soak, in a tub with bubbles in it. Maybe read the paper, maybe not. Some days he thought one way, some days the other.

Second, he was going to towel himself off, put on a robe. Maybe slippers. He liked the idea of slippers. If he smoked he would be smoking a pipe about now, but he didn’t smoke. He would pick up his wife in his arms (“Puppy,” she would squeal in mock horror and real delight, “what are you doing?”). He would carry her into the bedroom, and close the door. They’d call out for pizzas if they got hungry.

Third, after he and Laura had come out of the bedroom, maybe a couple of days later, he was going to keep his head down and stay out of trouble for the rest of his life.

“And then you’ll be happy?” asked Low Key Lyesmith. That day they were working in the prison shop, assembling bird feeders, which was barely more interesting than stamping out license plates.

“Call no man happy,” said Shadow, “until he is dead.”

“Herodotus,” said Low Key. “Hey. You’re learning.”

“Who the fuck’s Herodotus?” asked the Iceman, slotting together the sides of a bird feeder, and passing it to Shadow, who bolted and screwed it tight.

“Dead Greek,” said Shadow.

“My last girlfriend was Greek,” said the Iceman. “The shit her family ate. You would not believe. Like rice wrapped in leaves. Shit like that.”

The Iceman was the same size and shape as a Coke machine, with blue eyes and hair so blond it was almost white. He had beaten the crap out of some guy who had made the mistake of copping a feel off his girlfriend in the bar where she danced and the Iceman bounced. The guy’s friends had called the police, who arrested the Iceman and ran a check on him, which revealed that the Iceman had walked from a work-release program eighteen months earlier.

“So what was I supposed to do?” asked the Iceman, aggrieved, when he had told Shadow the whole sad tale. “I’d told him she was my girlfriend. Was I supposed to let him disrespect me like that? Was I? I mean, he had his hands all over her.”

Shadow had said something meaningless, like “You tell ’em,” and left it at that. One thing he had learned early, you do your own time in prison. You don’t do anyone else’s time for them.

Keep your head down. Do your own time.

Lyesmith had loaned Shadow a battered paperback copy of Herodotus’s Histories several months earlier. “It’s not boring. It’s cool,” he said, when Shadow protested that he didn’t read books. “Read it first, then tell me it’s cool.”

Shadow had made a face, but he had started to read, and had found himself hooked against his will.

“Greeks,” said the Iceman, with disgust. “And it ain’t true what they say about them, neither. I tried giving it to my girlfriend in the ass, she almost clawed my eyes out.”

Lyesmith was transferred one day, without warning. He left Shadow his copy of Herodotus with several actual coins hidden in the pages: two quarters, a penny, and a nickel. Coins were contraband: you can sharpen the edges against a stone, slice open someone’s face in a fight. Shadow didn’t want a weapon; Shadow just wanted something to do with his hands.

Shadow was not superstitious. He did not believe in anything he could not see. Still, he could feel disaster hovering above the prison in those final weeks, just as he had felt it in the days before the robbery. There was a hollowness in the pit of his stomach, which he told himself was simply a fear of going back to the world on the outside. But he could not be sure. He was more paranoid than usual, and in prison usual is very, and is a survival skill. Shadow became more quiet, more shadowy, than ever. He found himself watching the body language of the guards, of the other inmates, searching for a clue to the bad thing that was going to happen, as he was certain that it would.

A month before he was due to be released. Shadow sat in a chilly office, facing a short man with a port-wine birthmark on his forehead. They sat across a desk from each other; the man had Shadow’s file open in front of him, and was holding a ballpoint pen. The end of the pen was badly chewed.

“You cold, Shadow?”

“Yes,” said Shadow. “A little.”

The man shrugged. “That’s the system,” he said. “Furnaces don’t go on until December the first. Then they go off March the first. I don’t make the rules.” Social niceties done with, he ran his forefinger down the sheet of paper stapled to the inside-left of the folder. “You’re thirty-two years old?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You look younger.”

“Clean living.”

“Says here you’ve been a model inmate.”

“I learned my lesson, sir.”

“Did you? Did you really?” He looked at Shadow intently, the birthmark on his forehead lowering. Shadow thought about telling the man some of his theories about prison, but he said nothing. He nodded, instead, and concentrated on appearing properly remorseful.

“Says here you’ve got a wife, Shadow.”

“Her name’s Laura.”

“How’s everything there?”

“Pretty good. She got kind of mad at me when I was arrested. But she’s come down to see me as much as she could—it’s a long way to travel. We write and I call her when I can.”

“What does your wife do?”

“She’s a travel agent. Sends people all over the world.”

“How’d you meet her?”

Shadow could not decide why the man was asking. He considered telling him it was none of his business, then said, “She was my best buddy’s wife’s best friend. They set us up on a blind date. We hit it off.”

“And you’ve got a job waiting for you?”

“Yessir. My buddy, Robbie, the one I just told you about, he owns the Muscle Farm, the place I used to train. He says my old job is waiting for me.”

An eyebrow raised. “Really?”

“Says he figures I’ll be a big draw. Bring back some old-timers, and pull in the tough crowd who want to be tougher.”

The man seemed satisfied. He chewed the end of his ballpoint pen, then turned over the sheet of paper.

“How do you feel about your offense?”

Shadow shrugged. “I was stupid,” he said, and meant it.

The man with the birthmark sighed. He ticked off a number of items on a checklist. Then he riffled through the papers in Shadow’s file. “How’re you getting home from here?” he asked. “Greyhound?”

“Flying home. It’s good to have a wife who’s a travel agent.”

The man frowned, and the birthmark creased. “She sent you a ticket?”

“Didn’t need to. Just sent me a confirmation number. Electronic ticket. All I have to do is turn up at the airport in a month and show ’em my ID, and I’m outta here.”

The man nodded, scribbled one final note, then he closed the file and put down the ballpoint pen. Two pale hands rested on the gray desk like pink animals. He brought his hands close together, made a steeple of his forefingers, and stared at Shadow with watery hazel eyes.

“You’re lucky,” he said. “You have someone to go back to, you got a job waiting. You can put all this behind you. You got a second chance. Make the most of it.”

The man did not offer to shake Shadow’s hand as he rose to leave, nor did Shadow expect him to.

The last week was the worst. In some ways it was worse than the whole three years put together. Shadow wondered if it was the weather: oppressive, still and cold. It felt as if a storm was on the way, but the storm never came. He had the jitters and the heebie-jeebies, a feeling deep in his stomach that something was entirely wrong. In the exercise yard the wind gusted. Shadow imagined that he could smell snow on the air.

He called his wife collect. Shadow knew that the phone companies whacked a three-dollar surcharge on every call made from a prison phone. That’s why operators are always real polite to people calling from prisons, Shadow had decided: they knew that he paid their wages.

“Something feels weird,” he told Laura. That wasn’t the first thing he said to her. The first thing was “I love you,” because it’s a good thing to say if you can mean it, and Shadow did.

“Hello,” said Laura. “I love you too. What feels weird?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe the weather. It feels like if we could only get a storm, everything would be okay.”

“It’s nice here,” she said. “The last of the leaves haven’t quite fallen. If we don’t get a storm, you’ll be able to see them when you get home.”

“Five days,” said Shadow.

“A hundred and twenty hours, and then you come home,” she said.

“Everything okay there? Nothing wrong?”

“Everything’s fine. I’m seeing Robbie tonight. We’re planning your surprise welcome-home party.”

“Surprise party?”

“Of course. You don’t know anything about it, do you?”

“Not a thing.”

“That’s my husband,” she said. Shadow realized that he was smiling. He had been inside for three years, but she could still make him smile.

“Love you, babes,” said Shadow.

“Love you, puppy,” said Laura.

Shadow put down the phone.

When they got married Laura told Shadow that she wanted a puppy, but their landlord had pointed out they weren’t allowed pets under the terms of their lease. “Hey,” Shadow had said, “I’ll be your puppy. What do you want me to do? Chew your slippers? Piss on the kitchen floor? Lick your nose? Sniff your crotch? I bet there’s nothing a puppy can do I can’t do!” And he picked her up as if she weighed nothing at all, and began to lick her nose while she giggled and shrieked, and then he carried her to the bed.

In the food hall Sam Fetisher sidled over to Shadow and smiled, showing his old teeth. He sat down beside Shadow and began to eat his macaroni and cheese.

“We got to talk,” said Sam Fetisher.

Sam Fetisher was one of the blackest men that Shadow had ever seen. He might have been sixty. He might have been eighty. Then again, Shadow had met thirty-year-old crackheads who looked older than Sam Fetisher.

“Mm?” said Shadow.

“Storm’s on the way,” said Sam.

“Feels like it,” said Shadow. “Maybe it’ll snow soon.”

“Not that kind of storm. Bigger storms than that coming. I tell you, boy, you’re better off in here than out on the street when the big storm comes.”

“Done my time,” said Shadow. “Friday, I’m gone.”

Sam Fetisher stared at Shadow. “Where you from?” he asked.

“Eagle Point. Indiana.”

“You’re a lying fuck,” said Sam Fetisher. “I mean originally. Where are your folks from?”

“Chicago,” said Shadow. His mother had lived in Chicago as a girl, and she had died there, half a lifetime ago.

“Like I said. Big storm coming. Keep your head down, Shadow-boy. It’s like…what do they call those things continents ride around on? Some kind of plates?”

“Tectonic plates?” Shadow hazarded.

“That’s it. Tectonic plates. It’s like when they go riding, when North America goes skidding into South America, you don’t want to be in the middle. You dig me?”

“Not even a little.”

One brown eye closed in a slow wink. “Hell, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” said Sam Fetisher, and he spooned a trembling lump of orange Jell-O into his mouth.

Shadow spent the night half-awake, drifting in and out of sleep, listening to his new cellmate grunt and snore in the bunk below him. Several cells away a man whined and howled and sobbed like an animal, and from time to time someone would scream at him to shut the fuck up. Shadow tried not to hear. He let the empty minutes wash over him, lonely and slow.

Two days to go. Forty-eight hours, starting with oatmeal and prison coffee and a guard named Wilson who tapped Shadow harder than he had to on the shoulder and said, “Shadow? This way.”

Shadow checked his conscience. It was quiet, which did not, he had observed, in a prison, mean that he was not in deep shit. The two men walked more or less side by side, feet echoing on metal and concrete.

Shadow tasted fear in the back of his throat, bitter as old coffee. The bad thing was happening…

There was a voice in the back of his head whispering that they were going to slap another year onto his sentence, drop him into solitary, cut off his hands, cut off his head. He told himself he was being stupid, but his heart was pounding fit to burst out of his chest.

“I don’t get you, Shadow,” said Wilson, as they walked.

“What’s not to get, sir?”

“You. You’re too fucking quiet. Too polite. You wait like the old guys, but you’re what? Twenty-five? Twenty-eight?”

“Thirty-two, sir.”

“And what are you? A spic? A gypsy?”

“Not that I know of, sir. Maybe.”

“Maybe you got nigger blood in you. You got nigger blood in you, Shadow?”

“Could be, sir.” Shadow stood tall and looked straight ahead, and concentrated on not allowing himself to be riled by this man.

“Yeah? Well, all I know is, you fucking spook me.” Wilson had sandy blond hair and a sandy blond face and a sandy blond smile. “You leaving us soon?”

“Hope so, sir.”

“You’ll be back. I can see it in your eyes. You’re a fuckup, Shadow. Now, if I had my way, none of you assholes would ever get out. We’d drop you in the hole and forget you.”

Oubliettes, thought Shadow, and he said nothing. It was a survival thing: he didn’t answer back, didn’t say anything about job security for prison guards, debate the nature of repentance, rehabilitation, or rates of recidivism. He didn’t say anything funny or clever, and, to be on the safe side, when he was talking to a prison official, whenever possible, he didn’t say anything at all. Speak when you’re spoken to. Do your own time. Get out. Get home. Have a long hot bath. Tell Laura you love her. Rebuild a life.

They walked through a couple of checkpoints. Wilson showed his ID each time. Up a set of stairs, and they were standing outside the prison warden’s office. Shadow had never been there before, but he knew what it was. It had the prison warden’s name—G. Patterson—on the door in black letters, and beside the door, a miniature traffic light.

The top light burned red.

Wilson pressed a button below the traffic light.

They stood there in silence for a couple of minutes. Shadow tried to tell himself that everything was all right, that on Friday morning he’d be on the plane up to Eagle Point, but he did not believe it himself.

The red light went out and the green light went on, and Wilson opened the door. They went inside.

Shadow had seen the warden a handful of times in the last three years. Once he had been showing a politician around; Shadow had not recognized the man. Once, during a lock-down, the warden had spoken to them in groups of a hundred, telling them that the prison was over-crowded, and that, since it would remain overcrowded, they had better get used to it. This was Shadow’s first time up close to the man.

Up close, Patterson looked worse. His face was oblong, with gray hair cut into a military bristle cut. He smelled of Old Spice. Behind him was a shelf of books, each with the word prison in the title; his desk was perfectly clean, empty but for a telephone and a tear-off-the-pages Far Side calendar. He had a hearing aid in his right ear.

“Please, sit down.”

Shadow sat down at the desk, noting the civility.

Wilson stood behind him.

The warden opened a desk drawer and took out a file, placed it on his desk.

“Says here you were sentenced to six years for aggravated assault and battery. You’ve served three years. You were due to be released on Friday.”

Were? Shadow felt his stomach lurch inside him. He wondered how much longer he was going to have to serve—another year? Two years? All three? All he said was “Yes, sir.”

The warden licked his lips. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Yes, sir.’”

“Shadow, we’re going to be releasing you later this afternoon. You’ll be getting out a couple of days early.” The warden said this with no joy, as if he were intoning a death sentence. Shadow nodded, and he waited for the other shoe to drop. The warden looked down at the paper on his desk. “This came from the Johnson Memorial Hospital in Eagle Point…Your wife. She died in the early hours of this morning. It was an automobile accident. I’m sorry.”

Shadow nodded once more.

Wilson walked him back to his cell, not saying anything. He unlocked the cell door and let Shadow in. Then he said, “It’s like one of them good-news, bad-news jokes, isn’t it? Good news, we’re letting you out early, bad news, your wife is dead.” He laughed, as if it were genuinely funny.

Shadow said nothing at all.

Numbly, he packed up his possessions, gave several away. He left behind Low Key’s Herodotus and the book of coin tricks, and, with a momentary pang, he abandoned the blank metal disks he had smuggled out of the workshop which had, until he had found Low Key’s change in the book, served him for coins. There would be coins, real coins, on the outside. He shaved. He dressed in civilian clothes. He walked through door after door, knowing that he would never walk back through them again, feeling empty inside.

The rain had started to gust from the gray sky, a freezing rain. Pellets of ice stung Shadow’s face, while the rain soaked the thin overcoat as they walked away from the prison building, toward the yellow ex-school bus that would take them to the nearest city.

By the time they got to the bus they were soaked. Eight of them were leaving, Shadow thought. Fifteen hundred still inside. He sat on the bus and shivered until the heaters started working, wondering what he was doing, where he was going now.

Ghost images filled his head, unbidden. In his imagination he was leaving another prison, long ago.

He had been imprisoned in a lightless garret room for far too long: his beard was wild and his hair was a tangle. The guards had walked him down a gray stone stairway and out into a plaza filled with brightly colored things, with people and with objects. It was a market day and he was dazzled by the noise and the color, squinting at the sunlight that filled the square, smelling the salt-wet air and all the good things of the market, and on his left the sun glittered from the water….

The bus shuddered to a halt at a red light.

The wind howled about the bus, and the wipers slooshed heavily back and forth across the windshield, smearing the city into a red and yellow neon wetness. It was early afternoon, but it looked like night through the glass.

“Shit,” said the man in the seat behind Shadow, rubbing the condensation from the window with his hand, staring at a wet figure hurrying down the sidewalk. “There’s pussy out there.”

Shadow swallowed. It occurred to him that he had not cried yet—had in fact felt nothing at all. No tears. No sorrow. Nothing.

He found himself thinking about a guy named Johnnie Larch he’d shared a cell with when he’d first been put inside, who told Shadow how he’d once got out after five years behind bars, with $100 and a ticket to Seattle, where his sister lived.

Johnnie Larch had got to the airport, and he handed his ticket to the woman on the counter, and she asked to see his driver’s license.

He showed it to her. It had expired a couple of years earlier. She told him it was not valid as ID. He told her it might not be valid as a driver’s license, but it sure as hell was fine identification, and it had a photo of him on it, and his height and his weight, and damn it, who else did she think he was, if he wasn’t him?

She said she’d thank him to keep his voice down.

He told her to give him a fucking boarding pass, or she was going to regret it, and that he wasn’t going to be disrespected. You don’t let people disrespect you in prison.

Then she pressed a button, and a few moments later the airport security showed up, and they tried to persuade Johnnie Larch to leave the airport quietly, and he did not wish to leave, and there was something of an altercation.

The upshot of it all was that Johnnie Larch never actually made it to Seattle, and he spent the next couple of days in town in bars, and when his $100 was gone he held up a gas station with a toy gun for money to keep drinking, and the police finally picked him up for pissing in the street. Pretty soon he was back inside serving the rest of his sentence and a little extra for the gas station job.

And the moral of this story, according to Johnnie Larch, was this: don’t piss off people who work in airports.

“Are you sure it’s not something like ‘kinds of behavior that work in a specialized environment, such as a prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment’?” said Shadow, when Johnnie Larch told him the story.

“No, listen to me, I’m telling you, man,” said Johnnie Larch, “don’t piss off those bitches in airports.”

Shadow half-smiled at the memory. His own driver’s license had several months still to go before it expired.

“Bus station! Everybody out!”

The building stank of piss and sour beer. Shadow climbed into a taxi and told the driver to take him to the airport. He told him that there was an extra five dollars if he could do it in silence. They made it in twenty minutes and the driver never said a word.

Then Shadow was stumbling through the brightly lit airport terminal. Shadow worried about the whole e-ticket business. He knew he had a ticket for a flight on Friday, but he didn’t know if it would work today. Anything electronic seemed fundamentally magical to Shadow, and liable to evaporate at any moment. He liked things he could hold and touch.

Still, he had his wallet, back in his possession for the first time in three years, containing several expired credit cards and one Visa card which, he was pleasantly surprised to discover, didn’t expire until the end of January. He had a reservation number. And, he realized, he had the certainty that once he got home everything would, somehow, be right once more. Laura would be fine again. Maybe it was some kind of scam to spring him a few days early. Or perhaps it was a simple mix-up: some other Laura Moon’s body had been dragged from the highway wreckage.

Lightning flickered outside the airport, through the windows-walls. Shadow realized he was holding his breath, waiting for something. A distant boom of thunder. He exhaled.

A tired white woman stared at him from behind the counter.

“Hello,” said Shadow. You’re the first strange woman I’ve spoken to, in the flesh, in three years. “I’ve got an e-ticket number. I was supposed to be traveling on Friday but I have to go today. There was a death in my family.”

“Mm. I’m sorry to hear that.” She tapped at the keyboard, stared at the screen, tapped again. “No problem. I’ve put you on the three thirty. It may be delayed, because of the storm, so keep an eye on the screens. Checking any baggage?”

He held up a shoulder bag. “I don’t need to check this, do I?”

“No,” she said. “It’s fine. Do you have any picture ID?”

Shadow showed her his driver’s license. Then he assured her that no one had given him a bomb to take onto the plane, and she, in return, gave him a printed boarding pass. Then he passed through the metal detector while his bag went through the X-ray machine.

It was not a big airport, but the number of people wandering, just wandering, amazed him. He watched people put down bags casually, observed wallets stuffed into back pockets, saw purses put down, unwatched, under chairs. That was when he realized he was no longer in prison.

Thirty minutes to wait until boarding. Shadow bought a slice of pizza and burned his lip on the hot cheese. He took his change and went to the phones. Called Robbie at the Muscle Farm, but the machine answered.

“Hey, Robbie,” said Shadow. “They tell me that Laura’s dead. They let me out early. I’m coming home.”

Then, because people do make mistakes, he’d seen it happen, he called home, and listened to Laura’s voice.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m not here or I can’t come to the phone. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you. And have a good day.”

Shadow couldn’t bring himself to leave a message.

He sat in a plastic chair by the gate, and held his bag so tight he hurt his hand.

He was thinking about the first time he had ever seen Laura. He hadn’t even known her name then. She was Audrey Burton’s friend. He had been sitting with Robbie in a booth at Chi-Chi’s, talking about something, probably how one of the other trainers had just announced she was opening her own dance studio, when Laura had walked in a pace or so behind Audrey, and Shadow had found himself staring. She had long, chestnut hair and eyes so blue Shadow mistakenly thought she was wearing tinted contact lenses. She had ordered a strawberry daiquiri, and insisted that Shadow taste it, and laughed delightedly when he did.

Laura loved people to taste what she tasted.

He had kissed her good night, that night, and she had tasted of strawberry daiquiris, and he had never wanted to kiss anyone else again. A woman announced that his plane was boarding, and Shadow’s row was the first to be called. He was in the very back, an empty seat beside him. The rain pattered continually against the side of the plane: he imagined small children tossing down dried peas by the handful from the skies.

As the plane took off he fell asleep.

Shadow was in a dark place, and the thing staring at him wore a buffalo’s head, rank and furry with huge wet eyes. Its body was a man’s body, oiled and slick.

“Changes are coming,” said the buffalo without moving its lips. “There are certain decisions that will have to be made.”

Firelight flickered from wet cave walls.

“Where am I?” Shadow asked.

“In the earth and under the earth,” said the buffalo man. “You are where the forgotten wait.” His eyes were liquid black marbles, and his voice was a rumble from beneath the world. He smelled like wet cow. “Believe,” said the rumbling voice. “If you are to survive, you must believe.”

“Believe what?” asked Shadow. “What should I believe?”

He stared at Shadow, the buffalo man, and he drew himself up huge, and his eyes filled with fire. He opened his spit-flecked buffalo mouth and it was red inside with the flames that burned inside him, under the earth.

“Everything,” roared the buffalo man.

The world tipped and spun, and Shadow was on the plane once more; but the tipping continued. In the front of the plane a woman screamed, half-heartedly.

Lightning burst in blinding flashes around the plane. The captain came on the intercom to tell them that he was going to try and gain some altitude, to get away from the storm.

The plane shook and shuddered, and Shadow wondered, coldly and idly, if he was going to die. It seemed possible, he decided, but unlikely. He stared out of the window and watched the lightning illuminate the horizon.

Then he dozed once more, and dreamed he was back in prison, and Low Key had whispered to him in the food line that someone had put out a contract on his life, but that Shadow could not find out who or why; and when he woke up they were coming in for a landing.

He stumbled off the plane, blinking and waking.

All airports, he had long ago decided, look very much the same. It doesn’t actually matter where you are, you are in an airport: tiles and walkways and restrooms, gates and newsstands and fluorescent lights. This airport looked like an airport. The trouble is, this wasn’t the airport he was going to. This was a big airport, with way too many people, and way too many gates.

The people had the glazed, beaten look you only see in airports and prisons. If Hell is other people, thought Shadow, then Purgatory is airports.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

The woman looked at him over the clipboard. “Yes?”

“What airport is this?”

She looked at him, puzzled, trying to decide whether or not he was joking, then she said, “St. Louis.”

“I thought this was the plane to Eagle Point.”

“It was. They redirected it here because of the storms. Didn’t they make an announcement?”

“Probably. I fell asleep.”

“You’ll need to talk to that man over there, in the red coat.”

The man was almost as tall as Shadow: he looked like the father from a seventies sitcom, and he tapped something into a computer and told Shadow to run—run! —to a gate on the far side of the terminal.

Shadow ran through the airport, but the doors were already closed when he got to the gate. He watched the plane pull away from the gate, through the plate glass. Then he explained his problem to the gate attendant (calmly, quietly, politely) and she sent him to a passenger assistance desk, where Shadow explained that he was on his way home after a long absence and his wife had just been killed in a road accident, and that it was vitally important that he went home now. He said nothing about prison.

The woman at the passenger assistance desk (short and brown, with a mole on the side of her nose) consulted with another woman and made a phone call (“Nope, that one’s out. They’ve just cancelled it”) then she printed out another boarding card. “This will get you there,” she told him. “We’ll call ahead to the gate and tell them you’re coming.”

Shadow felt like a pea being flicked between three cups, or a card being shuffled through a deck. Again he ran through the airport, ending up near where he had gotten off in the first place.

A small man at the gate took his boarding pass. “We’ve been waiting for you,” he confided, tearing off the stub of the boarding pass, with Shadow’s seat assignment—17-D—on it. Shadow hurried onto the plane, and they closed the door behind him.

He walked through first class—there were only four first-class seats, three of which were occupied. The bearded man in a pale suit seated next to the unoccupied seat at the very front grinned at Shadow as he got onto the plane, then raised his wrist and tapped his watch as Shadow walked past.

Yeah, yeah, I’m making you late, thought Shadow. Let that be the worst of your worries.

The plane seemed pretty full, as he made his way down toward the back. Actually, Shadow quickly discovered, it was completely full, and there was a middle-aged woman sitting in seat 17-D. Shadow showed her his boarding card stub, and she showed him hers: they matched.

“Can you take your seat, please?” asked the flight attendant.

“No,” he said, “I’m afraid I can’t. This lady is sitting in it.”

She clicked her tongue and checked their boarding cards, then she led him back up to the front of the plane, and pointed him to the empty seat in first class. “Looks like it’s your lucky day,” she told him.

Shadow sat down. “Can I bring you something to drink?” she asked him. “We’ll just have time before we take off. And I’m sure you need one after that.”

“I’d like a beer, please,” said Shadow. “Whatever you’ve got.”

The flight attendant went away.

The man in the pale suit in the seat beside Shadow put out his arm and tapped his watch with his fingernail. It was a black Rolex. “You’re late,” said the man, and he grinned a huge grin with no warmth in it at all.

“Sorry?”

“I said, you’re late.”

The flight attendant handed Shadow a glass of beer. He sipped it. For one moment, he wondered if the man was crazy, and then he decided he must have been referring to the plane, waiting for one last passenger.

“Sorry if I held you up,” he said, politely. “You in a hurry?”

The plane backed away from the gate. The flight attendant came back and took away Shadow’s beer, half-finished. The man in the pale suit grinned at her and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll hold on to this tightly,” and she let him keep his glass of Jack Daniel’s, while protesting, weakly, that it violated airline regulations. (“Let me be the judge of that, m’dear.”)

“Time is certainly of the essence,” said the man. “But no, I am not in a hurry. I was merely concerned that you would not make the plane.”

“That was kind of you.”

The plane sat restlessly on the ground, engines throbbing, aching to be off.

“Kind my ass,” said the man in the pale suit. “I’ve got a job for you, Shadow.”

A roar of engines. The little plane jerked forward into a take-off, pushing Shadow back into his seat. Then they were airborne, and the airport lights were falling away below them. Shadow looked at the man in the seat next to him.

His hair was a reddish-gray; his beard, little more than stubble, was grayish-red. He was smaller than Shadow, but he seemed to take up a hell of a lot of room. A craggy, square face with pale gray eyes. The suit looked expensive, and was the color of melted vanilla ice cream. His tie was dark gray silk, and the tiepin was a tree, worked in silver: trunk, branches, and deep roots.

He held his glass of Jack Daniel’s as they took off, and did not spill a drop.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what kind of job?”

“How do you know who I am?”

The man chuckled. “Oh, it’s the easiest thing in the world to know what people call themselves. A little thought, a little luck, a little memory. Ask me what kind of job.”

“No,” said Shadow. The attendant brought him another glass of beer, and he sipped at it.

“Why not?”

“I’m going home. I’ve got a job waiting for me there. I don’t want any other job.”

The man’s craggy smile did not change, outwardly, but now he seemed, actually, amused. “You don’t have a job waiting for you at home,” he said. “You have nothing waiting for you there. Meanwhile, I am offering you a perfectly legal job—good money, limited security, remarkable fringe benefits. Hell, if you live that long, I could throw in a pension plan. You think maybe you’d like one of them?”

Shadow said, “You could have seen my name on my boarding pass. Or on the side of my bag.”

The man said nothing.

“Whoever you are,” said Shadow, “you couldn’t have known I was going to be on this plane. I didn’t know I was going to be on this plane, and if my plane hadn’t been diverted to St. Louis, I wouldn’t have been. My guess is you’re a practical joker. Maybe you’re hustling something. But I think maybe we’ll have a better time if we end this conversation here.”

The man shrugged.

Shadow picked up the in-flight magazine. The little plane jerked and bumped through the sky, making it harder to concentrate. The words floated through his mind like soap bubbles, there as he read them, gone completely a moment later.

The man sat quietly in the seat beside him, sipping his Jack Daniel’s. His eyes were closed.

Shadow read the list of in-flight music channels available on transatlantic flights, and then he was looking at the map of the world with red lines on it that showed where the airline flew. Then he had finished reading the magazine, and, reluctantly, he closed the cover, and slipped it into the pocket on the wall.

The man opened his eyes. There was something strange about his eyes, Shadow thought. One of them was a darker gray than the other. He looked at Shadow. “By the way,” he said, “I was sorry to hear about your wife, Shadow. A great loss.”

Shadow nearly hit the man, then. Instead he took a deep breath. (“Like I said, don’t piss off those bitches in airports,” said Johnnie Larch, in the back of his mind, “or they’ll haul your sorry ass back here before you can spit.”) He counted to five.

“So was I,” he said.

The man shook his head. “If it could but have been any other way,” he said, and sighed.

“She died in a car crash,” said Shadow. “It’s a fast way to go. Other ways could have been worse.”

The man shook his head, slowly. For a moment it seemed to Shadow as if the man was insubstantial; as if the plane had suddenly become more real, while his neighbor had become less so.

“Shadow,” he said. “It’s not a joke. It’s not a trick. I can pay you better than any other job you’ll find will pay you. You’re an ex-con. There’s not a long line of people elbowing each other out of the way to hire you.”

“Mister whoever-the-fuck-you-are,” said Shadow, just loud enough to be heard over the din of the engines, “there isn’t enough money in the world.”

The grin got bigger. Shadow found himself remembering a PBS show he had seen as a teenager, about chimpanzees. The show claimed that when apes and chimps smile it’s only to bare their teeth in a grimace of hate or aggression or terror. When a chimp grins, it’s a threat. This grin was one of those.

“Sure there’s money enough. And there are also bonuses. Work for me, and I’ll tell you things. There may be a little risk, of course, but if you survive you can have whatever your heart desires. You could be the next king of America. Now,” said the man, “who else is going to pay you that well? Hmm?”

“Who are you?” asked Shadow.

“Ah, yes. The age of information—young lady, could you pour me another glass of Jack Daniel’s? Easy on the ice—not, of course, that there has ever been any other kind of age. Information and knowledge: these are currencies that have never gone out of style.”

“I said, who are you?”

“Let’s see. Well, seeing that today certainly is my day—why don’t you call me Wednesday? Mister Wednesday. Although given the weather, it might as well be Thursday, eh?”

“What’s your real name?”

“Work for me long enough and well enough,” said the man in the pale suit, “and I may even tell you that. There. Job offer. Think about it. No one expects you to say yes immediately, not knowing whether you’re leaping into a piranha tank or a pit of bears. Take your time.” He closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat.

“I don’t think so,” said Shadow. “I don’t like you. I don’t want to work with you.”

“Like I say,” said the man, without opening his eyes, “don’t rush into it. Take your time.”

The plane landed with a bump, and a few passengers got off. Shadow looked out of the window: it was a little airport in the middle of nowhere, and there were still two little airports to go before Eagle Point. Shadow transferred his glance to the man in the pale suit—Mr. Wednesday? He seemed to be asleep.

Shadow stood up, grabbed his bag, and stepped off the plane, down the steps onto the slick wet tarmac, walking at an even pace toward the lights of the terminal. A light rain spattered his face.

Before he went inside the airport building, he stopped, and turned, and watched. No one else got off the plane. The ground crew rolled the steps away, the door was closed, and it taxied off down the runway. Shadow stared at it until it took off, then he walked inside, to the Budget car rental desk, the only one open, and he rented what turned out, when he got to the parking lot, to be a small red Toyota.

Shadow unfolded the map they had given him. He spread it out on the passenger’s seat. Eagle Point was about two hundred and fifty miles away, most of the journey on the freeway. He had not driven a car in three years.

The storms had passed, if they had come this far. It was cold and clear. Clouds scudded in front of the moon, and for a moment Shadow could not be certain whether it was the clouds or the moon that was moving.

He drove north for an hour and a half.

It was getting late. He was hungry, and when he realized how hungry he really was, he pulled off at the next exit, and drove into the town of Nottamun (pop. 1,301). He filled the gas-tank at the Amoco, and asked the bored woman at the cash register where the best bar in the area was—somewhere that he could get something to eat.

“Jack’s Crocodile Bar,” she told him. “It’s west on County Road N.”

“Crocodile Bar?”

“Yeah. Jack says they add character.” She drew him a map on the back of a mauve flyer, which advertised a chicken roast to raise money for a young girl who needed a new kidney. “He’s got a couple of crocodiles, a snake, one a them big lizard things.”

“An iguana?”

“That’s him.”

Through the town, over a bridge, on for a couple of miles, and he stopped at a low, rectangular building with an illuminated Pabst sign, and a Coca-Cola machine by the door.

The parking lot was half-empty. Shadow parked the red Toyota and went inside.

The air was thick with smoke and “Walkin’ after Midnight” was playing on the jukebox. Shadow looked around for the crocodiles, but could not see them. He wondered if the woman in the gas station had been pulling his leg.

“What’ll it be?” asked the bartender.

“You Jack?”

“It’s Jack’s night off. I’m Paul.”

“Hi, Paul. House beer, and a hamburger with all the trimmings. No fries.”

“Bowl of chili to start? Best chili in the state.”

“Sounds good,” said Shadow. “Where’s the restroom?”

The man pointed to a door in the corner of the bar. There was a stuffed alligator head mounted on the door. Shadow went through the door.

It was a clean, well-lit restroom. Shadow looked around the room first; force of habit. (“Remember, Shadow, you can’t fight back when you’re pissing,” Low Key said, low-key as always, in the back of his head.) He took the urinal stall on the left. Then he unzipped his fly and pissed for an age, relaxing, feeling relief. He read the yellowing press clipping framed at eye-level, with a photo of Jack and two alligators.

There was a polite grunt from the urinal immediately to his right, although he had heard nobody come in.

The man in the pale suit was bigger standing than he had seemed sitting on the plane beside Shadow. He was almost Shadow’s height, and Shadow was a big man. He was staring ahead of him. He finished pissing, shook off the last few drops, and zipped himself up.

Then he grinned, like a fox eating shit from a barbed wire fence. “So,” said Mr. Wednesday. “You’ve had time to think, Shadow. Do you want a job?”

In a dark red room—the color of the walls is close to that of raw liver—is a tall woman dressed cartoonishly in too-tight silk shorts, her breasts pulled up and pushed forward by the yellow blouse tied beneath them. Her black hair is piled high and knotted on top of her head. Standing beside her is a short man wearing an olive T-shirt and expensive blue jeans. He is holding, in his right hand, a wallet and a Nokia mobile phone with a red, white, and blue face-plate.

The red room contains a bed, upon which are white satin-style sheets and an ox-blood bedspread. At the foot of the bed is a small wooden table, upon which is a small stone statue of a woman with enormous hips, and a candleholder.

The woman hands the man a small red candle. “Here,” she says. “Light it.”

“Me?”

“Yes,” she says, “if you want to have me.”

“I shoulda just got you to suck me off in the car.”

“Perhaps,” she says. “Don’t you want me?” Her hand runs up her body from thigh to breast, a gesture of presentation, as if she were demonstrating a new product.

Red silk scarves over the lamp in the corner of the room make the light red.

The man looks at her hungrily, then he takes the candle from her and pushes it into the candleholder. “You got a light?”

She passes him a book of matches. He tears off a match, lights the wick: it flickers and then burns with a steady flame, which gives the illusion of motion to the faceless statue beside it, all hips and breasts. “Put the money beneath the statue.”

“Fifty bucks.”

“Yes.”

“When I saw you first, on Sunset, I almost thought you were a man.”

“But I have these,” she says, unknotting the yellow blouse, freeing her breasts.

“So do a lot of guys, these days.”

She stretches and smiles. “Yes,” she says. “Now, come love me.”

He unbuttons his blue jeans, and removes his olive T-shirt. She massages his white shoulders with her brown fingers; then she turns him over, and begins to make love to him with her hands, and her fingers, and her tongue.

It seems to him that the lights in the red room have been dimmed, and the sole illumination comes from the candle, which burns with a bright flame.

“What’s your name?” he asks her.

“Bilquis,” she tells him, raising her head. “With a Q.”

“A what?”

“Never mind.”

He is gasping now. “Let me fuck you,” he says. “I have to fuck you.”

“Okay, hon,” she says. “We’ll do it. But will you do something for me, while you’re doing it?”

“Hey,” he says, suddenly tetchy, “I’m paying you, you know.”

She straddles him, in one smooth movement, whispering, “I know, honey, I know, you’re paying me, and I mean, look at you, I should be paying you, I’m so lucky…”

He purses his lips, trying to show that her hooker talk is having no effect on him, he can’t be taken; that she’s a street whore for Chrissakes, while he’s practically a producer, and he knows all about last-minute rip-offs, but she doesn’t ask for money. Instead she says, “Honey, while you’re giving it to me, while you’re pushing that big hard thing inside of me, will you worship me?”

“Will I what?”

She is rocking back and forth on him: the engorged head of his penis is being rubbed against the wet lips of her vulva.

“Will you call me goddess? Will you pray to me? Will you worship me with your body?”

He smiles. Is that what she wants? “Sure,” he says. We’ve all got our kinks, at the end of the day. She reaches her hand between her legs and slips him inside her.

“Is that good, is it, goddess?” he asks, gasping.

“Worship me, honey,” says Bilquis, the hooker.

“Yes,” he says. “I worship your breasts and your eyes and your cunt. I worship your thighs and your eyes and your cherry-red lips…”

“Yes…,” she croons, riding him like a storm-tossed boat rides the waves.

“I worship your nipples, from which the milk of life flows. Your kiss is honey and your touch scorches like fire, and I worship it.” His words are becoming more rhythmic now, keeping pace with the thrust and roll of their bodies. “Bring me your lust in the morning, and bring me relief and your blessing in the evening. Let me walk in dark places unharmed and let me come to you once more and sleep beside you and make love with you again. I worship you with everything that is within me, and everything inside my mind, with everywhere I’ve been and my dreams and my…” He breaks off, panting for breath. “…What are you doing? That feels amazing. So amazing…” And he looks down at his hips, at the place where the two of them conjoin, but her forefinger touches his chin and pushes his head back, so he is looking only at her face and at the ceiling once again.

“Keep talking, honey,” she says. “Don’t stop. Doesn’t it feel good?”

“It feels better than anything has ever felt,” he tells her, meaning it as he says it. “Your eyes are stars, burning in the, shit, the firmament, and your lips are gentle waves that lick the sand, and I worship them,” and now he’s thrusting deeper and deeper inside her: he feels electric, as if his whole lower body has become sexually charged: priapic, engorged, blissful.

“Bring me your gift,” he mutters, no longer knowing what he is saying, “your one true gift, and make me always this…always so…I pray…I…”

And then the pleasure crests into orgasm, blasting his mind into void, his head and self and entire beingness a perfect blank as he thrusts deeper into her and deeper still…

Eyes closed, spasming, he luxuriates in the moment; and then he feels a lurch, and it seems to him that he is hanging, head-down, although the pleasure continues.

He opens his eyes.

He thinks, grasping for thought and reason again, of birth, and wonders, without fear, in a moment of perfect postcoital clarity, whether what he sees is some kind of illusion.

This is what he sees:

He is inside her to the chest, and as he stares at this in disbelief and wonder she rests both hands upon his shoulders and puts gentle pressure on his body.

He slipslides further inside her.

“How are you doing this to me?” he asks, or he thinks he asks, but perhaps it is only in his head.

“You’re doing it, honey,” she whispers. He feels the lips of her vulva tight around his upper chest and back, constricting and enveloping him. He wonders what this would look like to somebody watching them. He wonders why he is not scared. And then he knows.

“I worship you with my body,” he whispers, as she pushes him inside her. Her labia pull slickly across his face, and his eyes slip into darkness.

She stretches on the bed, like a huge cat, and then she yawns. “Yes,” she says, “You do.”

The Nokia phone plays a high, electrical transposition of the “Ode to Joy.” She picks it up, and thumbs a key, and puts the telephone to her ear.

Her belly is flat, her labia small and closed. A sheen of sweat glistens on her forehead and on her upper lip.

“Yeah?” she says. And then she says, “No, honey, he’s not here. He’s gone away.”

She turns the telephone off before she flops out on the bed in the dark red room, then she stretches once more, and she closes her eyes, and she sleeps.

CHAPTER TWO

“I have taken the liberty,” said Mr. Wednesday, washing his hands in the men’s room of Jack’s Crocodile Bar, “of ordering food for myself, to be delivered to your table. We have much to discuss, after all.”

“I don’t think so,” said Shadow. He dried his own hands on a paper towel and crumpled it, and dropped it into the bin.

“You need a job,” said Wednesday. “People don’t hire ex-cons. You folk make them uncomfortable.”

“I have a job waiting. A good job.”

“Would that be the job at the Muscle Farm?”

“Maybe,” said Shadow.

“Nope. You don’t. Robbie Burton’s dead. Without him the Muscle Farm’s dead too.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Of course. And a good one. The best you will ever meet. But, I’m afraid, I’m not lying to you about this.” He reached into his pocket, produced a newspaper, much folded, and handed it to Shadow. “Page seven,” he said. “Come on back to the bar. You can read it at the table.” Shadow pushed open the door, back into the bar. The air was blue with smoke, and the Dixie Cups were on the jukebox singing “Iko Iko.” Shadow smiled, slightly, in recognition of the old children’s song.

The barman pointed to a table in the corner. There was a bowl of chili and a burger at one side of the table, a rare steak and a bowl of fries laid in the place across from it.

Shadow took his seat at the table. He put the newspaper down. “I got out of prison this morning,” he said. “This is my first meal as a free man. You won’t object if I wait until after I’ve eaten to read your page seven?”

“Not in the slightest bit.”

Shadow ate his hamburger. It was better than prison hamburgers. The chili was good but, he decided, after a couple of mouthfuls, not the best in the state.

Laura made a great chili. She used lean-cut meat, dark kidney beans, carrots cut small, a bottle or so of dark beer, and freshly sliced hot peppers. She would let the chili cook for a while, then add red wine, lemon juice, and a pinch of fresh dill, and, finally, measure out and add her chili powders. On more than one occasion Shadow had tried to get her to show him how she made it: he would watch everything she did, from slicing the onions and dropping them into the olive oil at the bottom of the pot on. He had even written down the sequence of events, ingredient by ingredient, and he had once made Laura’s chili for himself on a weekend when she had been out of town. It had tasted okay—it was certainly edible, and he ate it, but it had not been Laura’s chili.

The news item on page seven was the first account of his wife’s death that Shadow had read. It felt strange, as if he were reading about someone in a story: how Laura Moon, whose age was given in the article as twenty-seven, and Robbie Burton, thirty-nine, were in Robbie’s car on the interstate, when they swerved into the path of a thirty-two wheeler, which sideswiped them as it tried to change lanes and avoid them. The truck brushed Robbie’s car and sent it spinning off the side of the road, where the car had hit a road sign, hard, and stopped spinning.

Rescue crews were on the scene in minutes. They pulled Robbie and Laura from the wreckage. They were both dead by the time they arrived at the hospital.

Shadow folded the newspaper up once more, and slid it back across the table, toward Wednesday, who was gorging himself on a steak so bloody and so blue it might never have been introduced to a kitchen flame.

“Here. Take it back,” said Shadow.

Robbie had been driving. He must have been drunk, although the newspaper account said nothing about this. Shadow found himself imagining Laura’s face when she realized that Robbie was too drunk to drive. The scenario unfolded in Shadow’s mind, and there was nothing he could do to stop it: Laura shouting at Robbie—shouting at him to pull off the road, then the thud of car against truck, and the steering wheel wrenching over…

…the car on the side of the road, broken glass glittering like ice and diamonds in the headlights, blood pooling in rubies on the road beside them. Two bodies, dead or soon-to-die, being carried from the wreck, or laid neatly by the side of the road.

“Well?” asked Mr. Wednesday. He had finished his steak, sliced and devoured it like a starving man. Now he was munching the french fries, spearing them with his fork.

“You’re right,” said Shadow. “I don’t have a job.”

Shadow took a quarter from his pocket, tails up. He flicked it up in the air, knocking it against his finger as it left his hand to give it a wobble that made it look as if it were turning, caught it, slapped it down on the back of his hand.

“Call,” he said.

“Why?” asked Wednesday.

“I don’t want to work for anyone with worse luck than me. Call.”

“Heads,” said Mr. Wednesday.

“Sorry,” said Shadow, revealing the coin without even bothering to glance at it. “It was tails. I rigged the toss.”

“Rigged games are the easiest ones to beat,” said Wednesday, wagging a square finger at Shadow. “Take another look at the quarter.”

Shadow glanced down at it. The head was face-up.

“I must have fumbled the toss,” he said, puzzled.

“You do yourself a disservice,” said Wednesday, and he grinned. “I’m just a lucky, lucky guy.” Then he looked up. “Well I never. Mad Sweeney. Will you have a drink with us?”

“Southern Comfort and Coke, straight up,” said a voice from behind Shadow.

“I’ll go and talk to the barman,” said Wednesday. He stood up, and began to make his way toward the bar.

“Aren’t you going to ask what I’m drinking?” called Shadow.

“I already know what you’re drinking,” said Wednesday, and then he was standing by the bar. Patsy Cline started to sing “Walkin’ after Midnight” on the jukebox again.

The man who had ordered Southern Comfort and Coke sat down beside Shadow. He had a short ginger-colored beard. He wore a denim jacket covered with bright sew-on patches, and under the jacket a stained white T-shirt. On the T-shirt was printed:

He wore a baseball cap, on which was printed:

He opened a soft pack of Lucky Strikes with a dirty thumbnail, took a cigarette, offered one to Shadow. Shadow was about to take one, automatically—he did not smoke, but a cigarette makes good barter material—when he realized that he was no longer inside. You could buy cigarettes here whenever you wanted. He shook his head.

“You working for our man then?” asked the bearded man. He was not sober, although he was not yet drunk.

“It looks that way,” said Shadow.

The bearded man lit his cigarette. “I’m a leprechaun,” he said.

Shadow did not smile. “Really?” he said. “Shouldn’t you be drinking Guinness?”

“Stereotypes. You have to learn to think outside the box,” said the bearded man. “There’s a lot more to Ireland than Guinness.”

“You don’t have an Irish accent.”

“I’ve been over here too fucken long.”

“So you are originally from Ireland?”

“I told you. I’m a leprechaun. We don’t come from fucken Moscow.”

“I guess not.”

Wednesday returned to the table, three drinks held easily in his paw-like hands. “Southern Comfort and Coke for you, Mad Sweeney, m’man, and a Jack Daniel’s for me. And this is for you, Shadow.”

“What is it?”

“Taste it.”

The drink was a tawny golden color. Shadow took a sip, tasting an odd blend of sour and sweet on his tongue. He could taste the alcohol underneath, and a strange blend of flavors. It reminded him a little of prison hooch, brewed in a garbage bag from rotten fruit and bread and sugar and water, but it was smoother, sweeter, infinitely stranger.

“Okay,” said Shadow. “I tasted it. What was it?”

“Mead,” said Wednesday. “Honey wine. The drink of heroes. The drink of the gods.”

Shadow took another tentative sip. Yes, he could taste the honey, he decided. That was one of the tastes. “Tastes kinda like pickle juice,” he said. “Sweet pickle juice wine.”

“Tastes like a drunken diabetic’s piss,” agreed Wednesday. “I hate the stuff.”

“Then why did you bring it for me?” asked Shadow, reasonably.

Wednesday stared at Shadow with his mismatched eyes. One of them, Shadow decided, was a glass eye, but he could not decide which one. “I brought you mead to drink because it’s traditional. And right now we need all the tradition we can get. It seals our bargain.”

“We haven’t made a bargain.”

“Sure we have. You work for me. You protect me. You help me. You transport me from place to place. You investigate, from time to time—go places and ask questions for me. You run errands. In an emergency, but only in an emergency, you hurt people who need to be hurt. In the unlikely event of my death, you will hold my vigil. And in return I shall make sure that your needs are adequately taken care of.”

“He’s hustling you,” said Mad Sweeney, rubbing his bristly ginger beard. “He’s a hustler.”

“Damn straight I’m a hustler,” said Wednesday. “That’s why I need someone to look out for my best interests.”

The song on the jukebox ended, and for a moment the bar fell quiet, every conversation at a lull.

“Someone once told me that you only get those everybody-shuts-up-at-once moments at twenty past or twenty to the hour,” said Shadow.

Sweeney pointed to the clock above the bar, held in the massive and indifferent jaws of a stuffed alligator head. The time was 11:20.

“There,” said Shadow. “Damned if I know why that happens.”

“I know why,” said Wednesday.

“You going to share with the group?”

“I may tell you, one day, yes. Or I may not. Drink your mead.”

Shadow knocked the rest of the mead back in one long gulp. “It might be better over ice,” he said.

“Or it might not,” said Wednesday. “It’s terrible stuff.”

“That it is,” agreed Mad Sweeney. “You’ll excuse me for a moment, gentlemen, but I find myself in deep and urgent need of a lengthy piss.” He stood up and walked away, an impossibly tall man. He had to be almost seven feet tall, decided Shadow.

A waitress wiped a cloth across the table and took their empty plates. She emptied Sweeney’s ashtray, and asked if they would like to order any more drinks. Wednesday told her to bring the same again for everyone, although this time Shadow’s mead was to be on the rocks. “Anyway,” said Wednesday, “that’s what I need of you, if you’re working for me. Which, of course, you are.”

“That’s what you want,” said Shadow. “Would you like to know what I want?”

“Nothing could make me happier.”

The waitress brought the drink. Shadow sipped his mead on the rocks. The ice did not help—if anything it sharpened the sourness, and made the taste linger in the mouth after the mead was swallowed. However, Shadow consoled himself, it did not taste particularly alcoholic. He was not ready to be drunk. Not yet.

He took a deep breath.

“Okay,” said Shadow. “My life, which for three years has been a long way from being the greatest life there has ever been, just took a distinct and sudden turn for the worse. Now there are a few things I need to do. I want to go to Laura’s funeral. I want to say goodbye. After that, if you still need me, I want to start at five hundred dollars a week.” The figure was a stab in the dark, a made-up number. Wednesday’s eyes revealed nothing. “If we’re happy working together, in six months’ time you raise it to a thousand a week.”

He paused. It was the longest speech he’d made in years. “You say you may need people to be hurt. Well, I’ll hurt people if they’re trying to hurt you. But I don’t hurt people for fun or for profit. I won’t go back to prison. Once was enough.”

“You won’t have to,” said Wednesday.

“No,” said Shadow. “I won’t.” He finished the last of the mead. He wondered, suddenly, somewhere in the back of his head, whether the mead was responsible for loosening his tongue. But the words were coming out of him like the water spraying from a broken fire hydrant in summer, and he could not have stopped them if he had tried. “I don’t like you, Mister Wednesday, or whatever your real name may be. We are not friends. I don’t know how you got off that plane without me seeing you, or how you trailed me here. But I’m impressed. You have class. And I’m at a loose end right now. You should know that when we’re done, I’ll be gone. And if you piss me off, I’ll be gone too. Until then, I’ll work for you.”

Wednesday grinned. His smiles were strange things, Shadow decided. They contained no shred of humor, no happiness, no mirth. Wednesday looked like he had learned to smile from a manual.

“Very good,” he said. “Then we have a compact. And we are agreed.”

“What the hell,” said Shadow. Across the room, Mad Sweeney was feeding quarters into the jukebox. Wednesday spat in his hand and extended it. Shadow shrugged. He spat in his own palm. They clasped hands. Wednesday began to squeeze. Shadow squeezed back. After a few seconds his hand began to hurt. Wednesday held the grip for another half-minute, and then he let go.

“Good,” he said. “Good. Very good.” He smiled, a brief flash, and Shadow wondered if there had been real humor in that smile, actual pleasure. “So, one last glass of evil, vile fucking mead to seal our deal, and then we are done.”

“It’ll be a Southern Comfort and Coke for me,” said Sweeney, lurching back from the jukebox.

The jukebox began to play the Velvet Underground’s “Who Loves the Sun?” Shadow thought it a strange song to find on a jukebox. It seemed very unlikely. But then, this whole evening had become increasingly unlikely.

Shadow took the quarter he had used for the coin-toss from the table, enjoying the sensation of a freshly milled coin against his fingers, producing it in his right hand between forefinger and thumb. He appeared to take it into his left hand in one smooth movement, while casually finger-palming it. He closed his left hand on the imaginary quarter. Then he took a second quarter in his right hand, between finger and thumb, and, as he pretended to drop that coin into the left hand, he let the palmed quarter fall into his right hand, striking the quarter he held there on the way. The chink confirmed the illusion that both coins were in his left hand, while they were now both held safely in his right.

“Coin tricks is it?” asked Sweeney, his chin raising, his scruffy beard bristling. “Why, if it’s coin tricks we’re doing, watch this.”

He took a glass from the table, a glass that had once held mead, and he tipped the ice-cubes into the ashtray. Then he reached out and took a large coin, golden and shining, from the air. He dropped it into the glass. He took another gold coin from the air and tossed it into the glass, where it clinked against the first. He took a coin from the candle flame of a candle on the wall, another from his beard, a third from Shadow’s empty left hand, and dropped them, one by one, into the glass. Then he curled his fingers over the glass, and blew hard, and several more golden coins dropped into the glass from his hand. He tipped the glass of sticky coins into his jacket pocket, and then tapped the pocket to show, unmistakably, that it was empty.

“There,” he said. “That’s a coin trick for you.”

Shadow, who had been watching closely throughout the impromptu performance, put his head on one side. “We have to talk about that,” he said. “I need to know how you did it.”

“I did it,” said Sweeney, with the air of one confiding a huge secret, “with panache and style. That’s how I did it.” He laughed, silently, rocking on his heels, his gappy teeth bared.

“Yes,” said Shadow. “That is how you did it. You’ve got to teach me. All the ways of doing the Miser’s Dream that I’ve read about you’d be hiding the coins in the hand that holds the glass, and dropping them in while you produce and vanish the coin in your right hand.”

“Sounds like a hell of a lot of work to me,” said Mad Sweeney. “It’s easier just to pick them out of the air.” He picked up his half-finished Southern Comfort and Coke, looked at it, and put it down on the table.

Wednesday stared at both of them as if he had just discovered new and previously unimagined life forms. Then he said, “Mead for you, Shadow. I’ll stick with Mister Jack Daniel’s, and for the freeloading Irishman…?”

“A bottled beer, something dark for preference,” said Sweeney. “Freeloader, is it?” He picked up what was left of his drink, and raised it to Wednesday in a toast. “May the storm pass over us, and leave us hale and unharmed,” he said, and knocked the drink back.

“A fine toast,” said Wednesday. “But it won’t.”

Another mead was placed in front of Shadow.

“Do I have to drink this?” he asked, without enthusiasm.

“Yes, I’m afraid you do. It seals our deal. Third time’s the charm, eh?”

“Shit,” said Shadow. He swallowed the mead in two large gulps. The pickled honey taste filled his mouth.

“There,” said Mr. Wednesday. “You’re my man, now.”

“So,” said Sweeney, “you want to know the trick of how it’s done?”

“Yes,” said Shadow. “Were you loading them in your sleeve?”

“They were never in my sleeve,” said Sweeney. He chortled to himself, rocking and bouncing as if he were a lanky, bearded, drunken volcano preparing to erupt with delight at his own brilliance. “It’s the simplest trick in the world. I’ll fight you for it.”

Shadow shook his head. “I’ll pass.”

“Now there’s a fine thing,” said Sweeney to the room. “Old Wednesday gets himself a bodyguard, and the feller’s too scared to put up his fists, even.”

“I won’t fight you,” agreed Shadow.

Sweeney swayed and sweated. He fiddled with the peak of his baseball cap. Then he pulled one of his coins out of the air and placed it on the table. “Real gold, if you were wondering,” said Sweeney. “Win or lose—and you’ll lose—it’s yours if you fight me. A big fellow like you—who’d’a thought you’d be a fucken coward?”

“He’s already said he won’t fight you,” said Wednesday. “Go away, Mad Sweeney. Take your beer and leave us in peace.”

Sweeney took a step closer to Wednesday. “Call me a freeloader, will you, you doomed old creature? You cold-blooded, heartless old tree-hanger.” His face was turning a deep, angry red.

Wednesday put out his hands, palms up, pacific. “Foolishness, Sweeney. Watch where you put your words.”

Sweeney glared at him. Then he said, with the gravity of the very drunk, “You’ve hired a coward. What would he do if I hurt you, do you think?”

Wednesday turned to Shadow. “I’ve had enough of this,” he said. “Deal with it.”

Shadow got to his feet and looked up into Mad Sweeney’s face: how tall was the man? he wondered. “You’re bothering us,” he said. “You’re drunk. I think you ought to leave now.”

A slow smile spread over Sweeney’s face. “There, now,” he said. “Like a little yapping dog, it’s finally ready to fight. Hey, everybody,” he called to the room, “there’s going to be a lesson learned. Watch this!” He swung a huge fist at Shadow’s face. Shadow jerked back: Sweeney’s hand caught him beneath the right eye. He saw blotches of light, and felt pain.

And with that, the fight began.

Sweeney fought without style, without science, with nothing but enthusiasm for the fight itself: huge, barreling roundhouse blows that missed as often as they connected.

Shadow fought defensively, carefully, blocking Sweeney’s blows or avoiding them. He became very aware of the audience around them. Tables were pulled out of the way with protesting groans, making a space for the men to spar. Shadow was aware at all times of Wednesday’s eyes upon him, of Wednesday’s humorless grin. It was a test, that was obvious, but what kind of a test? In prison Shadow had learned there were two kinds of fights: don’t fuck with me fights, where you made it as showy and impressive as you could, and private fights, real fights which were fast and hard and nasty, and always over in seconds.

“Hey, Sweeney,” said Shadow, breathless, “why are we fighting?”

“For the joy of it,” said Sweeney, sober now, or at least, no longer visibly drunk. “For the sheer unholy fucken delight of it. Can’t you feel the joy in your own veins, rising like the sap in the springtime?” His lip was bleeding. So was Shadow’s knuckle.

“So how’d you do the coin production?” asked Shadow. He swayed back and twisted, took a blow on his shoulder intended for his face.

“To tell the truth,” grunted Sweeney, “I told you how I did it when first we spoke. But there’s none so blind—ow! Good one! —as those who will not listen.”

Shadow jabbed at Sweeney, forcing him back into a table; empty glasses and ashtrays crashed to the floor. Shadow could have finished him off then. The man was defenseless, in no position to be able to do anything, sprawled back as he was.

Shadow glanced at Wednesday, who nodded. Shadow looked down at Mad Sweeney. “Are we done?” he asked. Mad Sweeney hesitated, then nodded. Shadow let go of him, and took several steps backward. Sweeney, panting, pushed himself back up to a standing position.

“Not on yer ass!” he shouted. “It ain’t over till I say it is!” Then he grinned, and threw himself forward, swinging at Shadow. He stepped onto a fallen ice-cube, and his grin turned to open-mouthed dismay as his feet went out from under him, and he fell backward. The back of his head hit the barroom floor with a definite thud.

Shadow put his knee into Mad Sweeney’s chest. “For the second time, are we done fighting?” he asked.

“We may as well be, at that,” said Sweeney, raising his head from the floor, “for the joy’s gone out of me now, like the pee from a small boy in a swimming pool on a hot day.” And he spat the blood from his mouth and closed his eyes and began to snore, in deep and magnificent snores.

Somebody clapped Shadow on the back. Wednesday put a bottle of beer into his hand.

It tasted better than mead.

Shadow woke up stretched out in the back of a sedan car. The morning sun was dazzling, and his head hurt. He sat up awkwardly, rubbing his eyes.

Wednesday was driving. He was humming tunelessly as he drove. He had a paper cup of coffee in the cup holder. They were heading along what looked like an interstate highway, with the cruise control set to an even sixty-five. The passenger seat was empty.

“How are you feeling, this fine morning?” asked Wednesday, without turning around.

“What happened to my car?” asked Shadow. “It was a rental.”

“Mad Sweeney took it back for you. It was part of the deal the two of you cut last night.”

“Deal?”

“After the fight.”

“Fight?” He put one hand up and rubbed his cheek, and then he winced. Yes, there had been a fight. He remembered a tall man with a ginger beard, and the cheering and whooping of an appreciative audience. “Who won?”

“You don’t remember, eh?” Wednesday chuckled.

“Not so you’d notice,” said Shadow. Conversations from the night before began to jostle in his head uncomfortably. “You got any more of that coffee?”

The big man reached beneath the passenger seat and passed back an unopened bottle of water. “Here. You’ll be dehydrated. This will help more than coffee, for the moment. We’ll stop at the next gas station and get you some breakfast. You’ll need to clean yourself up, too. You look like something the goat dragged in.”

“Cat dragged in,” said Shadow.

“Goat,” said Wednesday. “Huge rank stinking goat with big teeth.”

Shadow unscrewed the top of the water and drank. Something clinked heavily in his jacket pocket. He put his hand into the pocket and pulled out a coin the size of a half-dollar. It was heavy, and a deep yellow in color. It was also slightly sticky. Shadow palmed it in his right hand, classic palm, then produced it from between his third and fourth fingers. He front-palmed it, holding it between his first and his little finger, so it was invisible from behind, then slipped his two middle fingers under it, pivoting it smoothly into a back-palm. Finally he dropped the coin back into his left hand, and he placed it into his pocket.

“What the hell was I drinking last night?” asked Shadow. The events of the night were crowding around him now, without shape, without sense, but he knew they were there.

Mr. Wednesday spotted an exit sign promising a gas station, and he gunned the engine. “You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“You were drinking mead,” said Wednesday. He grinned a huge grin.

Mead.

Yes.

Shadow leaned back in the seat, and sucked down water from the bottle, and let the night before wash over him. Most of it, he remembered. Some of it, he didn’t.

In the gas station Shadow bought a Clean-U-Up Kit, which contained a razor, a packet of shaving cream, a comb, and a disposable toothbrush packed with a tiny tube of toothpaste. Then he walked into the men’s restroom and looked at himself in the mirror.

He had a bruise under one eye—when he prodded it, experimentally, with one finger, he found it hurt deeply—and a swollen lower lip. His hair was a tangle, and he looked as if he had spent the first half of last night fighting and then the rest of the night fast asleep, fully dressed, in the back seat of a car. Tinny music played in the background: it took him some moments to identify it as the Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill.”

Shadow washed his face with the restroom’s liquid soap, then he lathered his face and shaved. He wet his hair and combed it back. He brushed his teeth. Then he washed the last traces of the soap and the toothpaste from his face with lukewarm water. Stared back at his reflection: clean-shaven, but his eyes were still red and puffy. He looked older than he remembered.

He wondered what Laura would say when she saw him, and then he remembered that Laura wouldn’t say anything ever again and he saw his face, in the mirror, tremble, but only for a moment.

He went out.

“I look like shit,” said Shadow.

“Of course you do,” agreed Wednesday.

Wednesday took an assortment of snack-food up to the cash register, and paid for that and their gas, changing his mind twice about whether he was doing it with plastic or with cash, to the irritation of the gum-chewing young lady behind the till. Shadow watched as Wednesday became increasingly flustered and apologetic. He seemed very old, suddenly. The girl gave him his cash back, and put the purchase on the card, and then gave him the card receipt and took his cash, then returned the cash and took a different card. Wednesday was obviously on the verge of tears, an old man made helpless by the implacable plastic march of the modern world.

Shadow checked out the payphone: an out-of-order sign hung on it.

They walked out of the warm gas station, and their breath steamed in the air.

“You want me to drive?” asked Shadow.

“Hell no,” said Wednesday.

The freeway slipped past them: browning grass meadows on each side of them. The trees were leafless and dead. Two black birds stared at them from a telegraph wire.

“Hey, Wednesday.”

“What?”

“The way I saw it in there, you never paid for the gas.”

“Oh?”

“The way I saw it, she wound up paying you for the privilege of having you in her gas station. You think she’s figured it out yet?”

“She never will.”

“So what are you? A two-bit con artist?”

Wednesday nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I am. Among other things.”

He swung out into the left lane to pass a truck. The sky was a bleak and uniform gray.

“It’s going to snow,” said Shadow.

“Yes.”

“Sweeney. Did he actually show me how he did that trick with the gold coins?”

“Oh yes.”

“I can’t remember.”

“It’ll come back. It was a long night.”

Several small snowflakes brushed the windshield, melting in seconds.

“Your wife’s body is on display at Wendell’s Funeral Parlor at present,” said Wednesday. “Then after lunch they will take her from there to the graveyard for the interment.”

“How do you know?”

“I called ahead while you were in the john. You know where Wendell’s Funeral Parlor is?”

Shadow nodded. The snowflakes whirled and dizzied in front of them.

“This is our exit,” said Shadow. The car stole off the interstate, and past the cluster of motels to the north of Eagle Point.

Three years had passed. Yes. The Super-8 motel had gone, torn down: in its place was a Wendy’s. There were more stoplights, unfamiliar storefronts. They drove downtown. Shadow asked Wednesday to slow as they drove past the Muscle Farm. CLOSED INDEFINITELY, said the hand-lettered sign on the door, DUE TO BEREAVEMENT.

Left on Main Street. Past a new tattoo parlor and the Armed Forces Recruitment Center, then the Burger King, and, familiar and unchanged, Olsen’s Drug Store, and at last the yellow-brick facade of Wendell’s Funeral Parlor. A neon sign in the front window said HOUSE OF REST. Blank tombstones stood unchristened and uncarved in the window beneath the sign.

Wednesday pulled up in the parking lot.

“Do you want me to come in?” he asked.

“Not particularly.”

“Good.” The grin flashed, without humor. “There’s business I can be getting on with while you say your goodbyes. I’ll get rooms for us at the Motel America. Meet me there when you’re done.”

Shadow got out of the car, and watched it pull away. Then he walked in. The dimly lit corridor smelled of flowers and of furniture polish, with just the slightest tang of formaldehyde and rot beneath the surface. At the far end was the Chapel of Rest.

Shadow realized that he was palming the gold coin, moving it compulsively from a back palm to a front palm to a Downs palm, over and over. The weight was reassuring in his hand.

His wife’s name was on a sheet of paper beside the door at the far end of the corridor. He walked into the Chapel of Rest. Shadow knew most of the people in the room: Laura’s family, her workmates at the travel agency, several of her friends.

They all recognized him. He could see it in their faces. There were no smiles, though, no hellos.

At the end of the room was a small dais, and, on it, a cream-colored casket with several displays of flowers arranged about it: scarlets and yellows and whites and deep, bloody purples. He took a step forward. He could see Laura’s body from where he was standing. He did not want to walk forward; he did not dare to walk away.

A man in a dark suit—Shadow guessed he worked at the funeral home—said, “Sir? Would you like to sign the condolence and remembrance book?” and pointed him to a leather-bound book, open on a small lectern.

He wrote SHADOW and the date in his precise handwriting, then, slowly, he wrote (PUPPY) beside it, putting off walking toward the end of the room, where the people were, and the casket, and the thing in the cream casket that was no longer Laura.

A small woman walked in from the corridor, and hesitated. Her hair was a coppery red, and her clothes were expensive and very black. Widow’s weeds, thought Shadow, who knew her well: Audrey Burton, Robbie’s wife.

Audrey was holding a sprig of violets, wrapped at the base with silver foil. It was the kind of thing a child would make in June, thought Shadow. But violets were out of season.

Audrey looked directly at Shadow, and there was no recognition in her eyes. Then she walked across the room, to Laura’s casket. Shadow followed her.

Laura lay with her eyes closed, and her arms folded across her chest. She wore a conservative blue suit he did not recognize. Her long brown hair was out of her eyes. It was his Laura and it was not: her repose, he realized, was what was unnatural. Laura was always such a restless sleeper.

Audrey placed her sprig of summer violets on Laura’s chest. Then she pursed her blackberry-colored lips, worked her mouth for a moment and spat, hard, onto Laura’s dead face.

The spit caught Laura on the cheek, and began to drip down toward her ear.

Audrey was already walking toward the door. Shadow hurried after her. “Audrey?” he said. This time she recognized him. He wondered if she was taking tranquilizers. Her voice was distant and detached.

“Shadow? Did you escape? Or did they let you out?”

“Let me out yesterday. I’m a free man,” said Shadow. “What the hell was that all about?”

She stopped in the dark corridor. “The violets? They were always her favorite flower. When we were girls we used to pick them together.”

“Not the violets.”

“Oh, that,” she said. She wiped a speck of something invisible from the corner of her mouth. “Well, I would have thought that was obvious.”

“Not to me, Audrey.”

“They didn’t tell you?” Her voice was calm, emotionless. “Your wife died with my husband’s cock in her mouth, Shadow.”

She turned away, walked out into the parking lot, and Shadow watched her leave.

He went back into the funeral home. Someone had already wiped away the spit.

None of the people at the viewing were able to meet Shadow’s eye. Those who came over and talked to him did so as little as they could, mumbled awkward commiserations and fled.

After lunch—Shadow ate at the Burger King—was the burial. Laura’s cream-colored coffin was interred in the small non-denominational cemetery on the edge of town: unfenced, a hilly woodland meadow filled with black granite and white marble headstones.

He rode to the cemetery in the Wendell’s hearse, with Laura’s mother. Mrs. McCabe seemed to feel that Laura’s death was Shadow’s fault. “If you’d been here,” she said, “this would never have happened. I don’t know why she married you. I told her. Time and again, I told her. But they don’t listen to their mothers, do they?” She stopped, looked more closely at Shadow’s face. “Have you been fighting?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Barbarian,” she said, then she set her mouth, raised her head so her chins quivered, and stared straight ahead of her.

To Shadow’s surprise Audrey Burton was also at the funeral, standing toward the back. The short service ended, the casket was lowered into the cold ground. The people went away.

Shadow did not leave. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, shivering, staring at the hole in the ground.

Above him the sky was iron gray, featureless and flat as a mirror. It continued to snow, erratically, in ghost-like tumbling flakes.

There was something he wanted to say to Laura, and he was prepared to wait until he knew what it was. The world slowly began to lose light and color. Shadow’s feet were going numb, while his hands and face hurt from the cold. He burrowed his hands into his pockets for warmth, and his fingers closed about the gold coin.

He walked over to the grave.

“This is for you,” he said.

Several shovels of earth had been emptied onto the casket, but the hole was far from full. He threw the gold coin into the grave with Laura, then he pushed more earth into the hole, to hide the coin from acquisitive gravediggers. He brushed the earth from his hands, and said, “Good night, Laura.” Then he said, “I’m sorry.” He turned his face toward the lights of the town, and began to walk back into Eagle Point.

His motel was a good two miles away, but after spending three years in prison he was relishing the idea that he could simply walk and walk, forever if need be. He could keep walking north, and wind up in Alaska, or head south, to Mexico and beyond. He could walk to Patagonia, or to Tierra del Fuego. The Land of Fire. He tried to remember how it had got its name: he remembered reading as a boy of naked men, crouched by fires to keep warm…

A car drew up beside him. The window hummed down.

“You want a lift, Shadow?” asked Audrey Burton.

“No,” he said. “Not from you.”

He continued to walk. Audrey drove beside him at three miles an hour. Snowflakes danced in the beams of her headlights.

“I thought she was my best friend,” said Audrey. “We’d talk every day. When Robbie and I had a fight, she’d be the first one to know—we’d go down to Chi-Chi’s for margaritas and to talk about what scumpots men can be. And all the time she was fucking him behind my back.”

“Please go away, Audrey.”

“I just want you to know I had good reason for what I did.”

He said nothing.

“Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”

Shadow turned. “Do you want me to tell you that you were right when you spit in Laura’s face? Do you want me to say it didn’t hurt? Or that what you told me made me hate her more than I miss her? It’s not going to happen, Audrey.”

She drove beside him for another minute, not saying anything. Then she said, “So, how was prison, Shadow?”

“It was fine,” said Shadow. “You would have felt right at home.”

She put her foot down on the gas then, making the engine roar, and drove on and away.

With the headlights gone, the world was dark. Twilight faded into night. Shadow kept expecting the act of walking to warm him, to spread warmth through his icy hands and feet. It didn’t happen.

Back in prison, Low Key Lyesmith had once referred to the little prison cemetery out behind the infirmary as the Bone Orchard, and the image had taken root in Shadow’s mind. That night he had dreamed of an orchard under the moonlight, of skeletal white trees, their branches ending in bony hands, their roots going deep down into the graves. There was fruit that grew upon the trees in the bone orchard, in his dream, and there was something very disturbing about the fruit in the dream, but on waking he could no longer remember what strange fruit grew on the trees, or why he found it so repellent.

Cars passed him. Shadow wished that there was a sidewalk. He tripped on something that he could not see in the dark and sprawled into the ditch on the side of the road, his right hand sinking into several inches of cold mud. He climbed to his feet and wiped his hands on the leg of his pants. He stood there, awkwardly. He had only enough time to observe that there was someone beside him before something wet was forced over his nose and mouth, and he tasted harsh, chemical fumes.

This time the ditch seemed warm and comforting.

Shadow’s temples felt as if they had been reattached to the rest of his skull with roofing nails, and his vision was blurred.

His hands were bound behind his back with what felt like some kind of straps. He was in a car, sitting on leather upholstery. For a moment he wondered if there was something wrong with his depth perception and then he understood that, no, the other seat really was that far away.

There were people sitting beside him, but he could not turn to look at them.

The fat young man at the other end of the stretch limo took a can of Diet Coke from the cocktail bar and popped it open. He wore a long black coat, made of some silky material, and he appeared barely out of his teens: a spattering of acne glistened on one cheek. He smiled when he saw that Shadow was awake.

“Hello, Shadow,” he said. “Don’t fuck with me.”

“Okay,” said Shadow. “I won’t. Can you drop me off at the Motel America, up by the interstate?”

“Hit him,” said the young man to the person on Shadow’s left. A punch was delivered to Shadow’s solar plexus, knocking the breath from him, doubling him over. He straightened up, slowly.

“I said don’t fuck with me. That was fucking with me. Keep your answers short and to the point or I’ll fucking kill you. Or maybe I won’t kill you. Maybe I’ll have the children break every bone in your fucking body. There are two hundred and six of them. So don’t fuck with me.”

“Got it,” said Shadow.

The ceiling lights in the limo changed color from violet to blue then to green and to yellow.

“You’re working for Wednesday,” said the young man.

“Yes,” said Shadow.

“What the fuck is he after? I mean, what’s he doing here? He must have a plan. What’s the game plan?”

“I started working for Mr. Wednesday this morning,” said Shadow. “I’m an errand boy. Maybe a driver, if he ever lets me drive. We’ve barely exchanged a dozen words.”

“You’re saying you don’t know?”

“I’m saying I don’t know.”

The boy stared at him. He swigged some Coke from the can, belched, stared some more. “Would you tell me if you did know?”

“Probably not,” admitted Shadow. “As you say, I’m working for Mr. Wednesday.”

The boy opened his jacket and took out a silver cigarette case from an inside pocket. He opened it, and offered a cigarette to Shadow. “Smoke?”

Shadow thought about asking for his hands to be untied, but decided against it. “No thank you,” he said.

The cigarette appeared to have been hand-rolled, and when the boy lit it, with a matte black Zippo lighter, the odor that filled the limo was not tobacco. It was not pot either, decided Shadow. It smelled a little like burning electrical parts.

The boy inhaled deeply, then held his breath. He let the smoke trickle out from his mouth, pulled it back into his nostrils. Shadow suspected that he had practiced that in front of a mirror for a while before doing it in public.

“If you’ve lied to me,” said the boy, as if from a long way away, “I’ll fucking kill you. You know that.”

“So you said.”

The boy took another long drag on his cigarette. The lights inside the limo transmuted from orange, to red, and back to purple. “You say you’re staying at the Motel America?” He tapped on the driver’s window, behind him. The glass window lowered. “Hey. Motel America, up by the interstate. We need to drop off our guest.”

The driver nodded, and the glass rose up again.

The glinting fiber-optic lights inside the limo continued to change, cycling through their set of dim colors. It seemed to Shadow that the boy’s eyes were glinting too, the green of an antique computer monitor.

“You tell Wednesday this, man. You tell him he’s history. He’s forgotten. He’s old. And he better accept it. Tell him that we are the future and we don’t give a fuck about him or anyone like him. His time is over. Yes? You fucking tell him that, man. He has been consigned to the Dumpster of history while people like me ride our limos down the superhighway of tomorrow.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Shadow. He was beginning to feel light-headed. He hoped that he was not going to be sick.

“Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I’ll fucking kill you,” said the young man mildly, from the smoke.

“Got it,” said Shadow. “You can let me out here. I can walk the rest of the way.”

The young man nodded. “Good talking to you,” he said. The smoke had mellowed him. “You should know that if we do fucking kill you then we’ll just delete you. You got that? One click and you’re overwritten with random ones and zeros. Undelete is not an option.” He tapped on the window behind him. “He’s getting off here,” he said. Then he turned back to Shadow, pointed to his cigarette. “Synthetic toad-skins,” he said. “You know they can synthesize bufotenin now?”

The car stopped. The person to Shadow’s right got out and held the door open for Shadow. Shadow climbed out awkwardly, his hands tied behind his back. He realized that he had not yet got a clear look at either of the people who had been in the back seat with him. He did not know if they were men or women, old or young.

Shadow’s bonds were cut. The nylon strips fell to the tarmac. Shadow turned around. The inside of the car was now one writhing cloud of smoke in which two lights glinted, copper-colored, like the beautiful eyes of a toad. “It’s all about the dominant fucking paradigm, Shadow. Nothing else is important. And hey, sorry to hear about your old lady.”

The door closed, and the stretch limo drove off, quietly. Shadow was a couple of hundred yards away from his motel, and he walked there, breathing the cold air, past red and yellow and blue lights advertising every kind of fast food a man could imagine, as long as it was a hamburger; and he reached the Motel America without incident.

CHAPTER THREE

There was a thin young woman behind the counter at the Motel America. She told Shadow he had already been checked in by his friend, and gave him his rectangular plastic room key. She had pale blonde hair and a rodent-like quality to her face that was most apparent when she looked suspicious, and eased when she smiled. Most of the time she looked at Shadow, she looked suspicious. She refused to tell him Wednesday’s room number, and insisted on telephoning Wednesday on the house phone to let him know his guest was here.

Wednesday came out of a room down the hall, and beckoned to Shadow.

“How was the funeral?” he asked.

“It’s over,” said Shadow.

“That shitty, huh? You want to talk about it?”

“No,” said Shadow.

“Good.” Wednesday grinned. “Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence. You hungry?”

“A little.”

“There’s no food here. But you can order a pizza and they’ll put it on the room.”

Wednesday led the way back to his room, which was across the hall from Shadow’s. There were maps all over the room, unfolded, spread out on the bed, taped to the walls. Wednesday had drawn all over the maps in bright marking pens, fluorescent greens and painful pinks and vivid oranges.

“I got hijacked by a fat kid in a limo,” said Shadow. “He says to tell you that you have been consigned to the dung heap of history while people like him ride in their limos down the superhighways of life. Something like that.”

“Little snot,” said Wednesday.

“You know him?”

Wednesday shrugged. “I know who he is.” He sat down, heavily, on the room’s only chair. “They don’t have a clue,” he said. “They don’t have a fucking clue. How much longer do you need to stay in town?”

“I don’t know. Maybe another week. I guess I need to wrap up Laura’s affairs. Take care of the apartment, get rid of her clothes, all that. It’ll drive her mother nuts, but the woman deserves it.”

Wednesday nodded his huge head. “Well, the sooner you’re done, the sooner we can move out of Eagle Point. Good night.”

Shadow walked across the hall. His room was a duplicate of Wednesday’s room, down to the print of a bloody sunset on the wall above the bed. He ordered a cheese and meatball pizza, then he ran a bath, pouring all the motel’s little plastic bottles of shampoo into the water, making it foam.

He was too big to lie down in the bathtub, but he sat in it and luxuriated as best he could. Shadow had promised himself a bath when he got out of prison, and Shadow kept his promises.

The pizza arrived shortly after he got out of the bath, and Shadow ate it, washing it down with a can of root beer.

He turned on the television, and watched an episode of Jerry Springer he remembered from before he went to prison. The theme of the show was “I want to be a prostitute” and several would-be whores, most of them female, were brought out, shouted at and hectored by the audience; then a gold-draped pimp came out and offered them employment in his stable, and an ex-hooker ran out and pleaded with them all to get real jobs. Shadow turned it off before Jerry got to his thought for the day.

Shadow lay in bed, thinking, This is my first bed as a free man, and the thought gave him less pleasure than he had imagined that it would. He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to any time he wanted.

Shadow could have been in his bed at home, he thought, in the apartment that he had shared with Laura—in the bed that he had shared with Laura. But the thought of being there without her, surrounded by her things, her scent, her life, was simply too painful…

Don’t go there, thought Shadow. He decided to think about something else. He thought about coin tricks. Shadow knew that he did not have the personality to be a magician: he could not weave the stories that were so necessary for belief, nor did he wish to do card tricks, or produce paper flowers. But he liked to manipulate coins; he enjoyed the craft of it. He started to list the coin vanishes he had mastered, which reminded him of the coin he had tossed into Laura’s grave, and then, in his head, Audrey was telling him that Laura had died with Robbie’s cock in her mouth, and once again he felt a small hurt in his chest. In his heart.

Every hour wounds. The last one kills. Where had he heard that? He could no longer remember. He could feel, somewhere deep inside him, anger and pain building, a knot of tension at the base of his skull, a tightness at the temples. He breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth, forcing himself to let the tension go.

He thought of Wednesday’s comment and smiled, despite himself: Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn’t feel anything at all.

Sleep took him then, without Shadow noticing.

He was walking…

He was walking through a room bigger than a city, and everywhere he looked there were statues and carvings and rough-hewn images. He was standing beside a statue of a woman-like thing: her naked breasts hung, flat and pendulous on her chest, around her waist was a chain of severed hands, both of her own hands held sharp knives, and, instead of a head, rising from her neck there were twin serpents, their bodies arched, facing each other, ready to attack. There was something profoundly disturbing about the statue, a deep and violent wrongness. Shadow backed away from it.

He began to walk through the hall. The carved eyes of those statues that had eyes seemed to follow his every step.

In his dream, he realized that each statue had a name burning on the floor in front of it. The man with the white hair, with a necklace of teeth about his neck, holding a drum, was Leucotios; the broad-hipped woman, with monsters dropping from the vast gash between her legs, was Hubur; the ram-headed man holding the golden ball was Hershef.

A precise voice, fussy and exact, was speaking to him, in his dream, but he could see no one.

“These are gods who have been forgotten, and now might as well be dead. They can be found only in dry histories. They are gone, all gone, but their names and their images remain with us.”

Shadow turned a corner, and knew himself to be in another room, even vaster than the first. It went on further than the eye could see. Close to him was the skull of a mammoth, polished and brown, and a hairy ochre cloak, being worn by a small woman with a deformed left hand. Next to that were three women, each carved from the same granite boulder, joined at the waist: their faces had an unfinished, hasty look to them, although their breasts and genitalia had been carved with elaborate care; and there was a flightless bird which Shadow did not recognize, twice his height, with a beak made for rending, like a vulture’s, but with human arms: and on, and on.

The voice spoke once more, as if it were addressing a class, saying, “These are the gods who have passed out of memory. Even their names are lost. The people who worshiped them are as forgotten as their gods. Their totems are long since broken and cast down. Their last priests died without passing on their secrets.

“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”

There was a whispering noise that began then to run through the hall, a low susurrus that caused Shadow, in his dream, to experience a chilling and inexplicable fear. An all-engulfing panic took him, there in the halls of the Gods whose very existence had been forgotten—octopus-faced gods and gods who were only mummified hands or falling rocks or forest fires…

Shadow woke with his heart jackhammering in his chest, his forehead clammy, entirely awake. The red numerals on the bedside clock told him the time was 1:03 A.M. The light of the Motel America sign outside shone through his bedroom window. Disoriented, Shadow got up and walked into the tiny motel bathroom. He pissed without turning on the lights, and returned to the bedroom. The dream was still fresh and vivid in his mind’s eye, but he could not explain to himself why it had scared him so.

The light that came into the room from outside was not bright, but Shadow’s eyes had become used to the dark. There was a woman sitting on the side of his bed.

He knew her. He would have known her in a crowd of a thousand, or of a hundred thousand. She sat straight on the side of his bed. She was still wearing the navy-blue suit they had buried her in.

Her voice was a whisper, but a familiar one. “I guess,” said Laura, “you’re going to ask what I’m doing here.”

Shadow said nothing.

He sat down on the room’s only chair, and, finally, asked, “Babe? Is that you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m cold, puppy.”

“You’re dead, babe.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I am.” She patted the bed next to her. “Come and sit by me,” she said.

“No,” said Shadow. “I think I’ll stay right here for now. We have some unresolved issues to address.”

“Like me being dead?”

“Possibly, but I was thinking more of how you died. You and Robbie.”

“Oh,” she said. “That.”

Shadow could smell—or perhaps, he thought, he simply imagined that he smelled—an odor of rot, of flowers and preservatives. His wife—his ex-wife…no, he corrected himself, his late wife…sat on the bed and stared at him, unblinking.

“Puppy,” she said. “Could you—do you think you could possibly get me—a cigarette?”

“I thought you gave them up.”

“I did,” she said. “But I’m no longer concerned about the health risks. And I think it would calm my nerves. There’s a machine in the lobby.”

Shadow pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt and went, barefoot, into the lobby. The night clerk was a middle-aged man, reading a book by John Grisham. Shadow bought a pack of Virginia Slims from the machine. He asked the night clerk for a book of matches.

The man stared at him, asked for his room number. Shadow told him. The man nodded. “You’re in a non-smoking room,” he said. “You make sure you open the window, now.” He passed Shadow a book of matches and a plastic ashtray with the Motel America logo on it.

“Got it,” said Shadow.

He went back into his bedroom. He did not turn the light on. His wife was still on the bed. She had stretched out now, on top of his rumpled covers. Shadow opened the window and then passed her the cigarettes and the matches. Her fingers were cold. She lit a match and he saw that her nails, usually pristine, were battered and chewed, and there was mud under them.

Laura lit the cigarette, inhaled, blew out the match. She took another puff. “I can’t taste it,” she said. “I don’t think this is doing anything.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Me too,” said Laura.

When she inhaled the cigarette tip glowed, and he was able to see her face.

“So,” she said. “They let you out.”

“Yes.”

“How was prison?”

“Could have been worse.”

“Yes.” The tip of the cigarette glowed orange. “I’m still grateful. I should never have got you mixed up in it.”

“Well,” he said, “I agreed to do it. I could have said no.” He wondered why he wasn’t scared of her: why a dream of a museum could leave him terrified, while he seemed to be coping with a walking corpse without fear.

“Yes,” she said. “You could have. You big galoot.” Smoke wreathed her face. She was very beautiful in the dim light. “You want to know about me and Robbie?”

“Yes.” It was Laura, he realized. Living or dead, he couldn’t fear her.

She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “You were in prison,” she said. “And I needed someone to talk to. I needed a shoulder to cry on. You weren’t there. I was upset.”

“I’m sorry.” Shadow realized something was different about her voice, and he tried to figure out what it was.

“I know. So we’d meet for coffee. Talk about what we’d do when you got out of prison. How good it would be to see you again. He really liked you, you know. He was looking forward to giving you back your old job.”

“Yes.”

“And then Audrey went to visit her sister for a week. This was, oh, a year, thirteen months after you’d gone away.” Her voice lacked expression; each word was flat and dull, like pebbles dropped, one by one, into a deep well. “Robbie came over. We got drunk together. We did it on the floor of the bedroom. It was good. It was really good.”

“I didn’t need to hear that.”

“No? I’m sorry. It’s harder to pick and choose when you’re dead. It’s like a photograph, you know. It doesn’t matter as much.”

“It matters to me.”

Laura lit a second cigarette. Her movements were fluid and competent, not stiff. Shadow wondered, for a moment, if she was dead at all. Perhaps this was some kind of elaborate trick. “Yes,” she said. “I see that. Well, we carried on our affair—although we didn’t call it that, we did not call it anything—for most of the last two years.”

“Were you going to leave me for him?”

“Why would I do that? You’re my big bear. You’re my puppy. You did what you did for me. I waited three years for you to come back to me. I love you.”

He stopped himself from saying I love you, too. He wasn’t going to say that. Not any more. “So what happened the other night?”

“The night I was killed?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Robbie and I went out to talk about your welcome-back surprise party. It would have been so good. And I told him that we were done. Finished. That now that you were back that was the way it had to be.”

“Mm. Thank you, babe.”

“You’re welcome, darling.” The ghost of a smile crossed her face. “We got maudlin. It was sweet. We got stupid. I got very drunk. He didn’t. He had to drive. We were driving home and I announced that I was going to give him a goodbye blowjob, one last time with feeling, and I unzipped his pants, and I did.”

“Big mistake.”

“Tell me about it. I knocked the gearshift with my shoulder, and then Robbie was trying to push me out of the way to put the car back in gear, and we were swerving, and there was a loud crunch and I remember the world started to roll and to spin, and I thought, I’m going to die. It was very dispassionate. I remember that. I wasn’t scared. And then I don’t remember anything more.”

There was a smell like burning plastic. It was the cigarette, Shadow realized: it had burned down to the filter. Laura did not seem to have noticed.

“What are you doing here, Laura?”

“Can’t a wife come and see her husband?”

“You’re dead. I went to your funeral this afternoon.”

“Yes.” She stopped talking, stared into nothing. Shadow stood up and walked over to her. He took the smoldering cigarette butt from her fingers and threw it out of the window.

“Well?”

Her eyes sought his. “I don’t know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn’t know then I can’t put into words.”

“Normally people who die stay in their graves,” said Shadow.

“Do they? Do they really, puppy? I used to think they did too. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps.” She climbed off the bed and walked over to the window. Her face, in the light of the motel sign, was as beautiful as it had ever been. The face of the woman he had gone to prison for.

His heart hurt in his chest as if someone had taken it in a fist and squeezed. “Laura…?”

She did not look at him. “You’ve gotten yourself mixed up in some bad things, Shadow. You’re going to screw it up, if someone isn’t there to watch out for you. I’m watching out for you. And thank you for my present.”

“What present?”

She reached into the pocket of her blouse, and pulled out the gold coin he had thrown into the grave earlier that day. There was still black dirt on it. “I may have it put on a chain. It was very sweet of you.”

“You’re welcome.”

She turned then and looked at him with eyes that seemed both to see and not to see him. “I think there are several aspects of our marriage we’re going to have to work on.”

“Babes,” he told her. “You’re dead.”

“That’s one of those aspects, obviously.” She paused. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going now. It will be better if I go.” And, naturally and easily, she turned and put her hands on Shadow’s shoulders, and went up on tiptoes to kiss him goodbye, as she had always kissed him goodbye.

Awkwardly he bent to kiss her on the cheek, but she moved her mouth as he did so and pushed her lips against his. Her breath smelled, faintly, of mothballs.

Laura’s tongue flickered into Shadow’s mouth. It was cold, and dry, and it tasted of cigarettes and of bile. If Shadow had had any doubts as to whether his wife was dead or not, they ended then.

He pulled back.

“I love you,” she said, simply. “I’ll be looking out for you.” She walked over to the motel room door. There was a strange taste in his mouth. “Get some sleep, puppy,” she told him. “And stay out of trouble.”

She opened the door to the hall. The fluorescent light in the hallway was not kind: beneath it, Laura looked dead, but then, it did that to every one.

“You could have asked me to stay the night,” she said, in her cold-stone voice.

“I don’t think I could,” said Shadow.

“You will, hon,” she said. “Before all this is over. You will.” She turned away from him, and walked down the corridor.

Shadow looked out of the doorway. The night clerk kept on reading his John Grisham novel, and barely looked up as she walked past him. There was thick graveyard mud clinging to her shoes. And then she was gone.

Shadow breathed out, a slow sigh. His heart was pounding arrhythmically in his chest. He walked across the hall, and knocked on Wednesday’s door. As he knocked he got the weirdest notion: that he was being buffeted by black wings, as if an enormous crow was flying through him, out into the hall and the world beyond.

Wednesday opened the door. He had a white motel towel wrapped around his waist, but was otherwise naked. “What the hell do you want?” he asked.

“Something you should know,” said Shadow. “Maybe it was a dream—but it wasn’t—or maybe I inhaled some of the fat kid’s synthetic toad-skin smoke, or probably I’m just going mad…”

“Yeah, yeah. Spit it out,” said Wednesday. “I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”

Shadow glanced into the room. He could see someone in the bed, watching him. A sheet pulled up over small breasts. Pale blonde hair, something rattish about the face. The girl from the motel desk. He lowered his voice. “I just saw my wife,” he said. “She was in my room.”

“A ghost, you mean? You saw a ghost?”

“No. Not a ghost. She was solid. It was her. She’s dead all right, but it wasn’t any kind of a ghost. I touched her. She kissed me.”

“I see.” Wednesday darted a look at the woman in the bed. “Be right back, m’dear,” he said.

They crossed the hall to Shadow’s room. Wednesday turned on the lamps. He looked at the cigarette butt in the ashtray. He scratched his chest. His nipples were dark, old-man nipples, and his chest hair was grizzled. There was a white scar down one side of his torso. He sniffed the air. Then he shrugged.

“Okay,” he said. “So your dead wife showed up. You scared?”

“A little.”

“Very wise. The dead always give me the screaming mimis. Anything else?”

“I’m ready to leave Eagle Point. Laura’s mother can sort out the apartment, all that. She hates me anyway. I’m ready to go when you are.”

Wednesday smiled. “Good news, my boy. We’ll leave in the morning. Now, you should get some sleep. I have some scotch in my room, if you need help sleeping. Yes?”

“No. I’ll be fine.”

“Then do not disturb me further. I have a long night ahead of me.”

“No sleep?” asked Shadow, smiling.

“I don’t sleep. It’s overrated. A bad habit I do my best to avoid—in company, wherever possible, and the young lady may go off the boil if I don’t get back to her.”

“Good night,” said Shadow.

“Exactly,” said Wednesday, and he closed the door as he went out.

Shadow sat down on the bed. The smell of cigarettes and preservatives lingered in the air. He wished that he were mourning Laura: it seemed more appropriate than being troubled by her or, he admitted it to himself now that she had gone, just a little scared by her. It was time to mourn. He turned the lights out, and lay on the bed, and thought of Laura as she was before he went to prison. He remembered their marriage when they were young and happy and stupid and unable to keep their hands off each other.

It had been a very long time since Shadow had cried, so long he thought he had forgotten how. He had not even cried when his mother died. But he began to cry then, in painful, lurching sobs. He missed Laura and the days that were forever gone.

For the first time since he was a small boy, Shadow cried himself to sleep.

They navigated the green sea by the stars and by the shore, and when the shore was only a memory and the night sky was overcast and dark they navigated by faith, and they called on the all-father to bring them safely to land once more.

A bad journey they had of it, their fingers numb and with a shiver in their bones that not even wine could burn off. They would wake in the morning to see that the rime had frosted their beards, and, until the sun warmed them, they looked like old men, white-bearded before their time.

Teeth were loosening and eyes were deep-sunken in their sockets when they made landfall on the green land to the West. The men said, “We are far, far from our homes and our hearths, far from the seas we know and the lands we love. Here on the edge of the world we will be forgotten by our gods.”

Their leader clambered to the top of a great rock, and he mocked them for their lack of faith. “The all-father made the world,” he shouted. “He built it with his hands from the shattered bones and the flesh of Ymir, his grandfather. He placed Ymir’s brains in the sky as clouds, and his salt blood became the seas we crossed. If he made the world, do you not realize that he created this land as well? And if we die here as men, shall we not be received into his hall?”

And the men cheered and laughed. They set to, with a will, to build a hall out of split trees and mud, inside a small stockade of sharpened logs, although as far as they knew they were the only men in the new land.

On the day that the hall was finished there was a storm: the sky at midday became as dark as night, and the sky was rent with forks of white flame, and the thunder-crashes were so loud that the men were almost deafened by them, and the ship’s cat they had brought with them for good fortune hid beneath their beached longboat. The storm was hard enough and vicious enough that the men laughed and clapped each other on the back, and they said, “The thunderer is here with us, in this distant land,” and they gave thanks, and rejoiced, and they drank until they were reeling.

In the smoky darkness of their hall, that night, the bard sang them the old songs. He sang of Odin, the all-father, who was sacrificed to himself as bravely and as nobly as others were sacrificed to him. He sang of the nine days that the all-father hung from the world-tree, his side pierced and dripping from the spear-point (at this point his song became, for a moment, a scream), and he sang them all the things the all-father had learned in his agony: nine names, and nine runes, and twice-nine charms. When he told them of the spear piercing Odin’s side, the bard shrieked in pain, as the all-father himself had called out in his agony, and all the men shivered, imagining his pain.

They found the scraeling the following day, which was the all-father’s own day. He was a small man, his long hair black as a crow’s wing, his skin the color of rich red clay. He spoke in words none of them could understand, not even their bard, who had been on a ship that had sailed through the pillars of Hercules, and who could speak the trader’s pidgin men spoke all across the Mediterranean. The stranger was dressed in feathers and in furs, and there were small bones braided into his long hair.

They led him into their encampment, and they gave him roasted meat to eat, and strong drink to quench his thirst. They laughed riotously at the man as he stumbled and sang, at the way his head rolled and lolled, and this on less than a drinking-horn of mead. They gave him more drink, and soon enough he lay beneath the table with his head curled under his arm.

Then they picked him up, a man at each shoulder, a man at each leg, carried him at shoulder height, the four men making him an eight-legged horse, and they carried him at the head of a procession to an ash tree on the hill overlooking the bay, where they put a rope around his neck and hung him high in the wind, their tribute to the all-father, the gallows lord. The scraeling’s body swung in the wind, his face blackening, his tongue protruding, his eyes popping, his penis hard enough to hang a leather helmet on, while the men cheered and shouted and laughed, proud to be sending their sacrifice to the Heavens.

And, the next day, when two huge ravens landed upon the scraeling’s corpse, one on each shoulder, and commenced to peck at its cheeks and eyes, the men knew their sacrifice had been accepted.

It was a long winter, and they were hungry, but they were cheered by the thought that, when spring came, they would send the boat back to the northlands, and it would bring settlers, and bring women. As the weather became colder, and the days became shorter, some of the men took to searching for the scraeling village, hoping to find food, and women. They found nothing, save for the places where fires had been, where small encampments had been abandoned.

One midwinter’s day, when the sun was as distant and cold as a dull silver coin, they saw that the remains of the scraeling’s body had been removed from the ash tree. That afternoon it began to snow, in huge, slow flakes.

The men from the northlands closed the gates of their encampment, retreated behind their wooden wall.

The scraeling war party fell upon them that night: five hundred men to thirty. They climbed the wall, and, over the following seven days, they killed each of the thirty men, in thirty different ways. And the sailors were forgotten, by history and their people.

The wall they tore down, and the village they burned. The longboat, upside-down and pulled high on the shingle, they also burned, hoping that the pale strangers had but one boat, and that by burning it they were ensuring that no other Northmen would come to their shores.

It was more than a hundred years before Leif the Fortunate, son of Erik the Red, rediscovered that land, which he would call Vineland. His gods were already waiting for him when he arrived: Tyr, one-handed, and gray Odin gallows-god, and Thor of the thunders.

They were there.

They were waiting.

CHAPTER FOUR

Shadow and Wednesday ate breakfast at a Country Kitchen across the street from their motel. It was eight in the morning, and the world was misty and chill.

“You still ready to leave Eagle Point?” asked Wednesday, at the breakfast bar. “I have some calls to make, if you are. Friday today. Friday’s a free day. A woman’s day. Saturday tomorrow. Much to do on Saturday.”

“I’m ready,” said Shadow. “Nothing keeping me here.”

Wednesday heaped his plate high with several kinds of breakfast meats. Shadow took some melon, a bagel, and a packet of cream cheese. They went and sat down in a booth.

“That was some dream you had last night,” said Wednesday.

“Yes,” said Shadow. “It was.” Laura’s muddy footprints had been visible on the motel carpet when he got up that morning, leading from his bedroom to the lobby and out the door.

“So,” said Wednesday. “Why’d they call you Shadow?”

Shadow shrugged. “It’s a name,” he said. Outside the plate glass the world in the mist had become a pencil drawing executed in a dozen different grays with, here and there, a smudge of electric red or pure white. “How’d you lose your eye?”

Wednesday shoveled half a dozen pieces of bacon into his mouth, chewed, wiped the fat from his lips with the back of his hand. “Didn’t lose it,” he said. “I still know exactly where it is.”

“So what’s the plan?”

Wednesday looked thoughtful. He ate several vivid pink slices of ham, picked a fragment of meat from his beard, dropped it onto his plate. “Plan is as follows. On Saturday night, which, as I have already remarked, is tomorrow, we shall be meeting with a number of persons preeminent in their respective fields—do not let their demeanor intimidate you. We shall meet at one of the most important places in the entire country. Afterward we shall wine and dine them. There will be, at a guess, thirty or forty of them. Perhaps more. I need to enlist them in my current enterprise.”

“And where is the most important place in the country?”

“One of them, m’boy. I said one of them. Opinions are justifiably divided. I have sent word to my colleagues. We’ll stop off in Chicago on the way, as I need to pick up some money. Entertaining, in the manner we shall need to entertain, will take more ready cash than I happen to have available. Then on to Madison.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t. But all will become clear in time.”

Wednesday paid and they left, walked back across the road to the motel parking lot. Wednesday tossed Shadow the car keys. He drove down to the freeway and out of town.

“You going to miss it?” asked Wednesday. He was sorting through a folder filled with maps.

“The town? No. Too many Laura memories. I didn’t really ever have a life here. I was never in one place too long as a kid, and I didn’t get here until I was in my twenties. So this town is Laura’s.”

“Let’s hope she stays here,” said Wednesday.

“It was a dream,” said Shadow. “Remember.”

“That’s good,” said Wednesday. “Healthy attitude to have. Did you fuck her last night?”

Shadow took a breath. Then, “That is none of your damn business. And no.”

“Did you want to?”

Shadow said nothing at all. He drove north, toward Chicago. Wednesday chuckled, and began to pore over his maps, unfolding and refolding them, making occasional notes on a yellow legal pad with a large silver ballpoint pen.

Eventually he was finished. He put his pen away, put the folder on the back seat. “The best thing about the states we’re heading for,” said Wednesday, “Minnesota, Wisconsin, all around there, is it has the kind of women I liked when I was younger. Pale-skinned and blue-eyed, hair so fair it’s almost white, wine-colored lips, and round, full breasts with the veins running through them like a good cheese.”

“Only when you were younger?” asked Shadow. “Looked like you were doing pretty good last night.”

“Yes.” Wednesday smiled. “Would you like to know the secret of my success?”

“You pay them?”

“Nothing so crude. No, the secret is charm. Pure and simple.”

“Charm, huh? Well, like they say, you either got it or you ain’t.”

“Charms can be learnt,” said Wednesday.

“So where are we going?” asked Shadow.

“There’s an old friend of mine we need to talk to. He’s one of the people who’ll be coming to the get-together. Old man, now. He’s expecting us for dinner.”

They drove north and west, toward Chicago.

“Whatever’s happening with Laura,” said Shadow, breaking the silence. “Is it your fault? Did you make it happen?”

“No,” said Wednesday.

“Like the kid in the car asked me: would you tell me if it was?”

“I’m as puzzled as you are.”

Shadow tuned the radio to an oldies station, and listened to songs that were current before he was born. Bob Dylan sang about a hard rain that was going to fall, and Shadow wondered if that rain had fallen yet, or if it was something that was still going to happen. The road ahead of them was empty and the ice crystals on the asphalt glittered like diamonds in the morning sun.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.

They parked outside a squat black brownstone. The sidewalk was clear of snow. They walked to the lobby. Wednesday pressed the top button on the gouged metal intercom box. Nothing happened. He pressed it again. Then, experimentally, he began to press the other buttons, for other tenants, with no response.

“It’s dead,” said a gaunt old woman, coming down the steps. “Doesn’t work. We call the super, ask him when he going to fix, when he going to mend the heating, he does not care, goes to Arizona for the winter for his chest.” Her accent was thick, Eastern European, Shadow guessed.

Wednesday bowed low. “Zorya, my dear, may I say how unutterably beautiful you look? A radiant creature. You have not aged.”

The old woman glared at him. “He don’t want to see you. I don’t want to see you neither. You bad news.”

“That’s because I don’t come if it isn’t important.”

The woman sniffed. She carried an empty string shopping bag, and wore an old red coat, buttoned up to her chin, and, perched on her gray hair, a green velvet hat that was, in appearance, a little bit flowerpot, a little bit bread-loaf. She looked at Shadow suspiciously.

“Who is the big man?” she asked Wednesday. “Another one of your murderers?”

“You do me a deep disservice, good lady. This gentleman is called Shadow. He is working for me, yes, but on your behalf. Shadow, may I introduce you to the lovely Miss Zorya Vechernyaya.”

“Good to meet you,” said Shadow.

Bird-like, the old woman peered up at him. “Shadow,” she said. “A good name. When the shadows are long, that is my time. And you are the long shadow.” She looked him up and down, then she smiled. “You may kiss my hand,” she said, and extended a cold hand to him.

Shadow bent down and kissed her thin hand. She had a large amber ring on her middle finger.

“Good boy,” she said. “I am going to buy groceries. You see, I am the only one of us who brings in any money. The other two cannot make money fortune-telling. This is because they only tell the truth, and the truth is not what people want to hear. It is a bad thing, and it troubles people, so they do not come back. But I can lie to them, tell them what they want to hear. I tell the pretty fortunes. So I bring home the bread. Do you think you will be here for supper?”

“I would hope so,” said Wednesday.

“Then you had better give me some money to buy more food,” she said. “I am proud, but I am not stupid. The others are prouder than I am, and he is the proudest of all. So give me money and do not tell them that you give me money.”

Wednesday opened his wallet, and reached in. He took out a twenty. Zorya Vechernyaya plucked it from his fingers, and waited. He took out another twenty and gave it to her.

“Is good,” she said. “We will feed you like princes. Like we would feed our own father. Now, go up the stairs to the top. Zorya Utrennyaya is awake, but our other sister is still asleep, so do not be making too much noise, when you get to the top.”

Shadow and Wednesday climbed the dark stairs. The landing two stories up was half-filled with black plastic garbage bags and it smelled of rotting vegetables.

“Are they gypsies?” asked Shadow.

“Zorya and her family? Not at all. They’re not Rom. They’re Russian. Slavs, I believe.”

“But she does fortune-telling.”

“Lots of people do fortune-telling. I dabble in it myself.” Wednesday was panting as they went up the final flight of stairs. “I’m out of condition.”

The landing at the top of the stairs ended in a single door painted red, with a peephole in it.

Wednesday knocked at the door. There was no response. He knocked again, louder this time.

“Okay! Okay! I heard you! I heard you!” The sound of locks being undone, of bolts being pulled, the rattle of a chain. The red door opened a crack.

“Who is it?” A man’s voice, old and cigarette-roughened.

“An old friend, Czernobog. With an associate.”

The door opened as far as the security chain would allow. Shadow could see a gray face, in the shadows, peering out at them. “What do you want, Grimnir?”

“Initially, simply the pleasure of your company. And I have information to share. What’s that phrase…oh yes. You may learn something to your advantage.”

The door opened all the way. The man in the dusty bathrobe was short, with iron-gray hair and craggy features. He wore gray pinstripe pants, shiny from age, and slippers. He held an unfiltered cigarette with square-tipped fingers, sucking the tip while keeping it cupped in his fist—like a convict, thought Shadow, or a soldier. He extended his left hand to Wednesday.

“Welcome then, Grimnir.”

“They call me Wednesday these days,” he said, shaking the old man’s hand.

A narrow smile; a flash of yellow teeth. “Yes,” he said. “Very funny. And this is?”

“This is my associate. Shadow, meet Mr. Czernobog.”

“Well met,” said Czernobog. He shook Shadow’s left hand with his own. His hands were rough and callused, and the tips of his fingers were as yellow as if they had been dipped in iodine.

“How do you do, Mr. Czernobog.”

“I do old. My guts ache, and my back hurts, and I cough my chest apart every morning.”

“Why you are standing at the door?” asked a woman’s voice. Shadow looked over Czernobog’s shoulder, at the old woman standing behind him. She was smaller and frailer than her sister, but her hair was long and still golden. “I am Zorya Utrennyaya,” she said. “You must not stand there in the hall. You must come in, go through to the sitting room, through there, I will bring you coffee, go, go in, through there.”

Through the doorway into an apartment that smelled like over-boiled cabbage and cat-box and unfiltered foreign cigarettes, and they were ushered through a tiny hallway past several closed doors to the sitting room at the far end of the corridor, and were seated on a huge old horsehair sofa, disturbing an elderly gray cat in the process, who stretched, stood up, and walked, stiffly, to a distant part of the sofa, where he lay down, warily stared at each of them in turn, then closed one eye and went back to sleep. Czernobog sat in an armchair across from them.

Zorya Utrennyaya found an empty ashtray and placed it beside Czernobog. “How you want your coffee?” she asked her guests. “Here we take it black as night, sweet as sin.”

“That’ll be fine, ma’am,” said Shadow. He looked out of the window, at the buildings across the street.

Zorya Utrennyaya went out. Czernobog stared at her as she left. “That’s a good woman,” he said. “Not like her sisters. One of them is a harpy, the other, all she does is sleep.” He put his slippered feet up on a long, low coffee table, a chess board inset in the middle, cigarette burns and mug rings on its surface.

“Is she your wife?” asked Shadow.

“She’s nobody’s wife.” The old man sat in silence for a moment, looking down at his rough hands. “No. We are all relatives. We come over here together, long time ago.”

From the pocket of his bathrobe, Czernobog produced a pack of unfiltered cigarettes. Shadow did not recognize the brand. Wednesday pulled out a narrow gold lighter from the pocket of his pale suit, and lit the old man’s cigarette. “First we come to New York,” said Czernobog. “All our countrymen go to New York. Then, we come out here, to Chicago. Everything got very bad. In the old country, they had nearly forgotten me. Here, I am a bad memory no one wants to remember. You know what I did when I got to Chicago?”

“No,” said Shadow.

“I get a job in the meat business. On the kill floor. When the steer comes up the ramp, I was a knocker. You know why we are called knockers? Is because we take the sledgehammer and we knock the cow down with it. Bam! It takes strength in the arms. Yes? Then the shackler chains the beef up, hauls it up, then they cut the throat. They drain the blood first before they cut the head off. We were the strongest, the knockers.” He pushed up the sleeve of his bathrobe, flexed his upper arm to display the muscles still visible under the old skin. “Is not just strong though. There was an art to it. To the blow. Otherwise the cow is just stunned, or angry. Then, in the fifties, they give us the bolt gun. You put it to the forehead, bam! Bam! Now you think, anybody can kill. Not so.” He mimed putting a metal bolt through a cow’s head. “It still takes skill.” He smiled at the memory, displaying an iron-colored tooth.

“Don’t tell them cow-killing stories.” Zorya Utrennyaya carried in their coffee on a red wooden tray. Small brightly enameled cups filled with a brown liquid so dark it was almost black. She gave them each a cup, then sat beside Czernobog.

“Zorya Vechernyaya is doing shopping,” she said. “She will be soon back.”

“We met her downstairs,” said Shadow. “She says she tells fortunes.”

“Yes,” said her sister. “In the twilight, that is the time for lies. I do not tell good lies, so I am a poor fortune-teller. And our sister, Zorya Polunochnaya, she can tell no lies at all.”

The coffee was even sweeter and stronger than Shadow had expected.

Shadow excused himself to use the bathroom—a cramped, closet-like room near the front door, hung with several brown-spotted framed photographs. It was early afternoon, but already the daylight was beginning to fade. He heard voices raised from down the hall. He washed his hands in icy-cold water with a sickly-smelling sliver of pink soap.

Czernobog was standing in the hall as Shadow came out.

“You bring trouble!” he was shouting. “Nothing but trouble! I will not listen! You will get out of my house!”

Wednesday was still sitting on the sofa, sipping his coffee, stroking the gray cat. Zorya Utrennyaya stood on the thin carpet, one hand nervously twining in and out of her long yellow hair.

“Is there a problem?” asked Shadow.

“He is the problem!” shouted Czernobog. “He is! You tell him that there is nothing will make me help him! I want him to go! I want him out of here! Both of you go!”

“Please,” said Zorya Utrennyaya, “please be quiet, you wake up Zorya Polunochnaya.”

“You are like him, you want me to join his madness!” shouted Czernobog. He looked as if he was on the verge of tears. A pillar of ash tumbled from his cigarette onto the threadbare hall carpet.

Wednesday stood up, walked over to Czernobog. He rested his hand on Czernobog’s shoulder. “Listen,” he said, peaceably. “Firstly, it’s not madness. It’s the only way. Secondly, everyone will be there. You would not want to be left out, would you?”

“You know who I am,” said Czernobog. “You know what these hands have done. You want my brother, not me. And he’s gone.”

A door in the hallway opened, and a sleepy female voice said, “Is something wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong, my sister,” said Zorya Utrennyaya. “Go back to sleep.” Then she turned to Czernobog. “See? See what you do with all your shouting? You go back in there and sit down. Sit!” Czernobog looked as if he were about to protest; and then the fight went out of him. He looked frail, suddenly: frail, and lonely.

The three men went back into the shabby sitting room. There was a brown nicotine ring around that room that ended about a foot from the ceiling, like the tide-line in an old bathtub.

“It doesn’t have to be for you,” said Wednesday to Czernobog, unfazed. “If it is for your brother, it’s for you as well. That’s one place you dualistic types have it over the rest of us, eh?”

Czernobog said nothing.

“Talking of Bielebog, have you heard anything from him?”

Czernobog shook his head. Then he spoke, staring down at the threadbare carpet. “None of us have heard of him. I am almost forgotten, but still, they remember me a little, here and in the old country.” He looked up at Shadow. “Do you have a brother?”

“No,” said Shadow. “Not that I know of.”

“I have a brother. They say, you put us together, we are like one person, you know? When we are young, his hair, it is very blond, very light, and people say, he is the good one. And my hair it is very dark, darker than yours even, and people say I am the rogue, you know? I am the bad one. And now time passes, and my hair is gray. His hair, too, I think, is gray. And you look at us, you would not know who was light, who was dark.”

“Were you close?” asked Shadow.

“Close?” asked Czernobog. “No. We were not close. How could we be? We cared about such different things.”

There was a clatter from the end of the hall, and Zorya Vechernyaya came in. “Supper in one hour,” she said. Then she went out.

Czernobog sighed. “She thinks she is a good cook,” he said. “She was brought up, there were servants to cook. Now, there are no servants. There is nothing.”

“Not nothing,” said Wednesday. “Never nothing.”

“You,” said Czernobog. “I shall not listen to you.” He turned to Shadow. “Do you play checkers?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Shadow.

“Good. You shall play checkers with me,” he said, taking a wooden box of pieces from the mantelpiece, and shaking them out onto the table. “I shall play black.”

Wednesday touched Shadow’s arm. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” he said.

“Not a problem. I want to,” said Shadow. Wednesday shrugged, and picked up an old copy of the Reader’s Digest from a small pile of yellowing magazines on the windowsill. Czernobog’s brown fingers finished arranging the pieces on the squares, and the game began.

In the days that were to come, Shadow often found himself remembering that game. Some nights he dreamed of it. His flat, round pieces were the color of old, dirty wood, nominally white. Czernobog’s were a dull, faded black. Shadow was the first to move. In his dreams, there was no conversation as they played, just the loud click as the pieces were put down, or the hiss of wood against wood as they were slid from square to adjoining square.

For the first half-dozen moves each of the men slipped pieces out onto the board, into the center, leaving the back rows untouched. There were pauses between the moves, long, chess-like pauses, while each man watched, and thought.

Shadow had played checkers in prison: it passed the time. He had played chess, too, but he was not temperamentally suited to chess. He did not like planning ahead. He preferred picking the perfect move for the moment. You could win in checkers like that, sometimes.

There was a click, as Czernobog picked up a black piece and jumped it over one of Shadow’s white pieces, placing it on the square on the other side. The old man picked up Shadow’s white piece and put it on the table at the side of the board.

“First blood. You have lost,” said Czernobog. “The game is done.”

“No,” said Shadow. “Game’s got a long way to go yet.”

“Then would you care for a wager? A little side bet, to make it more interesting?”

“No,” said Wednesday, without looking up from a “Humor in Uniform” column. “He wouldn’t.”

“I am not playing with you, old man. I play with him. So, you want to bet on the game, Mister Shadow?”

“What were you two arguing about, before?” asked Shadow.

Czernobog raised a craggy eyebrow. “Your master wants me to come with him. To help him with his nonsense. I would rather die.”

“You want to make a bet. Okay. If I win, you come with us.”

The old man pursed his lips. “Perhaps,” he said. “But only if you take my forfeit, when you lose.”

“And that is?”

There was no change in Czernobog’s expression. “If I win, I get to knock your brains out. With the sledgehammer. First you go down on your knees. Then I hit you a blow with it, so you don’t get up again.” Shadow looked at the man’s old face, trying to read him. He was not joking, Shadow was certain of that: there was a hunger there for something, for pain, or death or retribution.

Wednesday closed the Reader’s Digest. “This is getting ridiculous,” he said. “I was wrong to come here. Shadow, we’re leaving.” The gray cat, disturbed, got to its feet and leapt onto the table beside the checkers game. It stared at the pieces, then leapt down onto the floor and, tail held high, it stalked from the room.

“No,” said Shadow. He was not scared of dying. After all, it was not as if he had anything left to live for. “It’s fine. I accept. If you win the game, you get the chance to knock my brains out with one blow of your sledgehammer.” And he moved his next white piece to the adjoining square on the edge of the board.

Nothing more was said, but Wednesday did not pick up his Reader’s Digest again. He watched the game with his glass eye and his true eye, with an expression that betrayed nothing.

Czernobog took another of Shadow’s pieces. Shadow took two of Czernobog’s. From the corridor came the smell of unfamiliar foods cooking. While not all of the smells were appetizing, Shadow realized suddenly how hungry he was.

The two men moved their pieces, black and white, turn and turn-about. A flurry of pieces taken, a blossoming of two-piece-high kings: no longer forced to move only forward on the board, a sideways slip at a time, the kings could move forward or back, which made them doubly dangerous. They had reached the furthest row, and could go where they wanted. Czernobog had three kings, Shadow had two.

Czernobog moved one of his kings around the board, eliminating Shadow’s remaining pieces, while using the other two kings to keep Shadow’s pieces pinned down.

And then Czernobog made a fourth king, and returned down the board to Shadow’s two kings, and, unsmiling, took them both. And that was that.

“So,” said Czernobog. “I get to knock out your brains. And you will go on your knees willingly. Is good.” He reached out an old hand, and patted Shadow’s arm with it.

“We’ve still got time before dinner’s ready,” said Shadow. “You want another game? Same terms?”

Czernobog lit another cigarette, from a kitchen box of matches. “How can it be same terms? You want I should kill you twice?”

“Right now, you have one blow, that’s all. You told me yourself that it’s not just strength, it’s skill too. This way, if you win this game, you get two blows to my head.”

Czernobog glowered. “One blow, is all it takes, one blow. That is the art.” He patted his upper right arm, where the muscles were, with his left, scattering gray ash from the cigarette in his left hand.

“It’s been a long time. If you’ve lost your skill you might simply bruise me. How long has it been since you swung a killing hammer in the stock-yards? Thirty years? Forty?”

Czernobog said nothing. His closed mouth was a gray slash across his face. He tapped his fingers on the wooden table, drumming out a rhythm with them. Then he pushed the twenty-four checkers pieces back to their home squares on the board.

“Play,” he said. “Again, you are light. I am dark.”

Shadow pushed his first piece out. Czernobog pushed one of his own pieces forward. And it occurred to Shadow that Czernobog was going to try to play the same game again, the one that he had just won, that this would be his limitation.

This time Shadow played recklessly. He snatched tiny opportunities, moved without thinking, without a pause to consider. And this time, as he played, Shadow smiled; and whenever Czernobog moved a piece, Shadow smiled wider.

Soon, Czernobog was slamming his pieces down as he moved them, banging them down on the wooden table so hard that the remaining pieces shivered on their black squares.

“There,” said Czernobog, taking one of Shadow’s men with a crash, slamming the black piece down. “There. What do you say to that?”

Shadow said nothing: he simply smiled, and jumped the piece that Czernobog had put down, and another, and another, and a fourth, clearing the center of the board of black pieces. He took a white piece from the pile beside the board and kinged his man.

After that, it was just a mopping-up exercise: another handful of moves, and the game was done.

Shadow said, “Best of three?”

Czernobog simply stared at him, his gray eyes like points of steel. And then he laughed, clapped his hands on Shadow’s shoulders. “I like you!” he exclaimed. “You have balls.”

Then Zorya Utrennyaya put her head around the door to tell them that dinner was ready, and they should clear their game away, and put the tablecloth down on the table.

“We have no dining room,” she said, “I am sorry. We eat in here.”

Serving dishes were placed on the table. Each of the diners was given a small painted tray on which was some tarnished cutlery, to place on his or her lap.

Zorya Vechernyaya took five wooden bowls and placed an unpeeled boiled potato in each, then ladled in a healthy serving of a ferociously crimson borscht. She plopped a spoonful of white sour cream in, and handed the bowls to each of them.

“I thought there were six of us,” said Shadow.

“Zorya Polunochnaya is still asleep,” said Zorya Vechernyaya. “We keep her food in the refrigerator. When she wakes, she will eat.”

The borscht was vinegary, and tasted like pickled beets. The boiled potato was mealy.

The next course was a leathery pot roast, accompanied by greens of some description—although they had been boiled so long and so thoroughly that they were no longer, by any stretch of the imagination, greens, and were in fact well on their way to becoming browns.

Then there were cabbage leaves stuffed with ground meat and rice, cabbage leaves of such a toughness that they were almost impossible to cut without spattering ground meat and rice all over the carpet. Shadow pushed his around his plate.

“We played checkers,” said Czernobog, hacking himself another lump of pot roast. “The young man and me. He won a game, I won a game. Because he won a game, I have agreed to go with him and Wednesday, and help them in their madness. And because I won a game, when this is all done, I get to kill the young man, with a blow of a hammer.”

The two Zoryas nodded gravely. “Such a pity,” said Zorya Vechernyaya. “In my fortune for you, I should have said you would have a long life and a happy one, with many children.”

“That is why you are a good fortune-teller,” said Zorya Utrennyaya. She looked sleepy, as if it were an effort for her to be up so late. “You tell the best lies.”

It was a long meal, and at the end of it, Shadow was still hungry. Prison food had been pretty bad, and prison food was better than this.

“Good food,” said Wednesday, who had cleaned his plate with every evidence of enjoyment. “I thank you, ladies. And now, I am afraid that it is incumbent upon us to ask you to recommend to us a fine hotel in the neighborhood.”

Zorya Vechernyaya looked offended at this. “Why should you go to a hotel?” she said. “We are not your friends?”

“I couldn’t put you to any trouble…” said Wednesday.

“Is no trouble,” said Zorya Utrennyaya, one hand playing with her incongruously golden hair, and she yawned.

“You can sleep in Bielebog’s room,” said Zorya Vechernyaya, pointing to Wednesday. “Is empty. And for you, young man, I make up a bed on sofa. You will be more comfortable than in feather bed. I swear.”

“That would be really kind of you,” said Wednesday. “We accept.”

“And you pay me only no more than what you pay for hotel,” said Zorya Vechernyaya, with a triumphant toss of her head. “A hundred dollars.”

“Thirty,” said Wednesday.

“Fifty.”

“Thirty-five.”

“Forty-five.”

“Forty.”

“Is good. Forty-five dollar.” Zorya Vechernyaya reached across the table and shook Wednesday’s hand. Then she began to clean the pots off the table. Zorya Utrennyaya yawned so hugely Shadow worried that she might dislocate her jaw, and announced that she was going to bed before she fell asleep with her head in the pie, and she said good night to them all.

Shadow helped Zorya Vechernyaya to take the plates and dishes into the little kitchen. To his surprise there was an elderly dishwashing machine beneath the sink, and he filled it. Zorya Vechernyaya looked over his shoulder, tutted, and removed the wooden borscht bowls.

“Those, in the sink,” she told him.

“Sorry.”

“Is not to worry. Now, back in there, we have pie,” she said, and she took the pie from the oven.

The pie—it was an apple pie—had been bought in a store and oven-warmed, and was very, very good indeed. The four of them ate it with ice cream, and then Zorya Vechernyaya made everyone go out of the sitting room, and made up a very fine-looking bed on the sofa for Shadow.

Wednesday spoke to Shadow as they stood in the corridor.

“What you did in there, with the checkers game,” he said.

“Yes?”

“That was good. Very, very stupid of you. But good. Sleep safe.”

Shadow brushed his teeth and washed his face in the cold water of the little bathroom, and then walked back down the hall to the sitting room, turned out the light, and was asleep before his head touched the pillow.

There were explosions in Shadow’s dream: he was driving a truck through a minefield, and bombs were going off on each side of him. The windshield shattered and he felt warm blood running down his face.

Someone was shooting at him.

A bullet punctured his lung, a bullet shattered his spine, another hit his shoulder. He felt each bullet strike. He collapsed across the steering wheel.

The last explosion ended in darkness.

I must be dreaming, thought Shadow, alone in the darkness. I think I just died. He remembered hearing and believing, as a child, that if you died in your dreams, you would die in real life. He did not feel dead. He opened his eyes, experimentally.

There was a woman in the little sitting room, standing against the window, with her back to him. His heart missed a half-beat, and he said, “Laura?”

She turned, framed by the moonlight. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I did not mean to wake you.” She had a soft, Eastern European accent. “I will go.”

“No, it’s okay,” said Shadow. “You didn’t wake me. I had a dream.”

“Yes,” she said. “You were crying out, and moaning. Part of me wanted to wake you, but I thought, no, I should leave him.”

Her hair was pale and colorless in the moon’s thin light. She wore a thin white cotton nightgown, with a high, lace neck, and a hem that swept the ground. Shadow sat up, entirely awake. “You are Zorya Polu…” He hesitated. “The sister who was asleep.”

“I am Zorya Polunochnaya, yes. And you are called Shadow, yes? That was what Zorya Vechernyaya told me, when I woke.”

“Yes. What were you looking at, out there?”

She looked at him, then she beckoned him to join her by the window. She turned her back while he pulled on his jeans. He walked over to her. It seemed a long walk, for such a small room.

He could not tell her age. Her skin was unlined, her eyes were dark, her lashes were long, her hair was to her waist, and white. The moonlight drained colors into ghosts of themselves. She was taller than either of her sisters.

She pointed up into the night sky. “I was looking at that,” she said, pointing to the Big Dipper. “See?”

“Ursa Major,” he said. “The Great Bear.”

“That is one way of looking at it,” she said. “But it is not the way from where I come from. I am going to sit on the roof. Would you like to come with me?”

“I guess,” said Shadow.

“Is good,” she said.

She lifted the window and clambered, barefoot, out onto the fire escape. A freezing wind blew through the window. Something was bothering Shadow, but he did not know what it was; he hesitated, then pulled on his sweater, socks, and shoes and followed her out onto the rusting fire escape. She was waiting for him. His breath steamed in the chilly air. He watched her bare feet pad up the icy metal steps, and followed her up to the roof.

The wind gusted cold, flattening her nightgown against her body, and Shadow became uncomfortably aware that Zorya Polunochnaya was wearing nothing at all underneath.

“You don’t mind the cold?” he said, as they reached the top of the fire escape, and the wind whipped his words away.

“Sorry?”

She bent her face close to his. Her breath was sweet.

“I said, doesn’t the cold bother you?”

In reply, she held up a finger: Wait. She stepped, lightly, over the side of the building and onto the flat roof. Shadow stepped over a little more clumsily, and followed her across the roof, to the shadow of the water-tower. There was a wooden bench waiting for them there, and she sat down on it, and he sat down beside her.

The water-tower acted as a windbreak, for which Shadow was grateful. The lights of the city smudged the sky with yellow, swallowing half the stars he had been able to see from the open country. Still, he could see the Big Dipper and the North Star, and he found the three stars of Orion’s belt, which allowed him to see Orion, which he always saw as a man running to kick a football—

“No,” she said. “The cold does not bother me. This time is my time: I could no more feel uncomfortable in the night than a fish could feel uncomfortable in the deep water.”

“You must like the night,” said Shadow, wishing that he had said something wiser, more profound.

“My sisters are of their times. Zorya Utrennyaya is of the dawn. In the old country she would wake to open the gates, and let our father drive his—um, I forget the word, like a car but with horses?”

“Chariot?”

“His chariot. Our father would ride it out. And Zorya Vechernyaya, she would open the gates for him at dusk, when he returned to us.”

“And you?”

She paused. Her lips were full, but very pale. “I never saw our father. I was asleep.”

“Is it a medical condition?”

She did not answer. The shrug, if she shrugged, was imperceptible. “So. You wanted to know what I was looking at.”

“The Big Dipper.”

She raised an arm to point to it, and the wind flattened her nightgown against her body. Her nipples, every goose-bump on the areolae, were visible momentarily, dark against the white cotton. Shadow shivered.

“Odin’s Wain, they call it. And the Great Bear. Where we come from, we believe that is a, a thing, a, not a god, but like a god, a bad thing, chained up in those stars. If it escapes, it will eat the whole of everything. And there are three sisters who must watch the sky, all the day, all the night. If he escapes, the thing in the stars, the world is over. Pf!, like that.”

“And people believe that?”

“They did. A long time ago.”

“And you were looking to see if you could see the monster in the stars?”

“Something like that. Yes.”

He smiled. If it were not for the cold, he decided, he would have thought he was dreaming. Everything felt so much like a dream.

“Can I ask how old you are? Your sisters seem so much older.”

She nodded her head. “I am the youngest. Zorya Utrennyaya was born in the morning, and Zorya Vechernyaya was born in the evening, and I was born at midnight. I am the midnight sister: Zorya Polunochnaya. Are you married?”

“My wife is dead. She died last week in a car accident. It was her funeral yesterday.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“She came to see me last night.” It was not hard to say, in the darkness and the moonlight; it was not as unthinkable as it was by daylight.

“Did you ask her what she wanted?”

“No. Not really.”

“Perhaps you should. It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you. Zorya Vechernyaya tells me that you played checkers with Czernobog.”

“Yes. He won the right to knock in my skull with a sledge.”

“In the old days, they would take people up to the top of the mountains. To the high places. They would smash the back of their skulls with a rock. For Czernobog.”

Shadow glanced about. No, they were alone on the roof.

Zorya Polunochnaya laughed. “Silly, he is not here. And you won a game also. He may not strike his blow until this is all over. He said he would not. And you will know. Like the cows he killed. They always know, first. Otherwise, what is the point?”

“I feel,” Shadow told her, “like I’m in a world with its own sense of logic. Its own rules. Like when you’re in a dream, and you know there are rules you mustn’t break, but you don’t know what they are or what they mean. I have no idea what we’re talking about, or what happened today, or pretty much anything since I got out of jail. I’m just going along with it, you know?”

“I know,” she said. She held his hand, with a hand that was icy cold. “You were given protection once, but you lost it already. You gave it away. You had the sun in your hand. And that is life itself. All I can give you is much weaker protection. The daughter, not the father. But all helps. Yes?” Her white hair blew about her face in the chilly wind, and Shadow knew that it was time to go back inside.

“Do I have to fight you? Or play checkers?” he asked.

“You do not even have to kiss me,” she told him. “Just take the moon.”

“How?”

“Take the moon.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Watch,” said Zorya Polunochnaya. She raised her left hand and held it in front of the moon, so that her forefinger and thumb seemed to be grasping it. Then, in one smooth movement, she plucked at it. For a moment, it looked like she had taken the moon from the sky, but then Shadow saw that the moon shone still, and Zorya Polunochnaya opened her hand to display a silver Liberty-head dollar resting between finger and thumb.

“That was beautifully done,” said Shadow. “I didn’t see you palm it. And I don’t know how you did that last bit.”

“I did not palm it,” she said. “I took it. And now I give it to you, to keep safe. Here. Don’t give this one away.”

She placed it in his right hand and closed his fingers around it. The coin was cold in his hand. Zorya Polunochnaya leaned forward, and closed his eyes with her fingers, and kissed him, lightly, once upon each eyelid.

Shadow awoke on the sofa, fully dressed. A narrow shaft of sunlight streamed in through the window, making the dust motes dance.

He got out of bed, and walked over to the window. The room seemed much smaller in the daylight.

The thing that had been troubling him since last night came into focus as he looked out and down and across the street. There was no fire escape outside this window: no balcony, no rusting metal steps.

Still, held tight in the palm of his hand, bright and shiny as the day it had been minted, was a 1922 Liberty-head silver dollar.

“Oh. You’re up,” said Wednesday, putting his head around the door. “That’s good. You want coffee? We’re going to rob a bank.”

The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored. For the most part it is uninspected, unimagined, unthought, a representation of the thing, and not the thing itself. It is a fine fiction, he continued, pausing for a moment to dip his pen in the inkwell and collect his thoughts, that America was founded by pilgrims, seeking the freedom to believe as they wished, that they came to the Americas, spread and bred and filled the empty land.

In truth, the American colonies were as much a dumping ground as an escape, a forgetting place. In the days where you could be hanged in London from Tyburn’s triple-crowned tree for the theft of twelve pennies, the Americas became a symbol of clemency, of a second chance. But the conditions of transportation were such that, for some, it was easier to take the leap from the leafless and dance on nothing until the dancing was done. Transportation it was called: for five years, for ten years, for life. That was the sentence.

You were sold to a captain, and would ride in his ship, crowded tight as a slaver’s, to the colonies or to the West Indies; off the boat the captain would sell you on as an indentured servant to one who would take the cost of your skin out in your labor until the years of your indenture were done. But at least you were not waiting to hang in an English prison (for in those days prisons were places where you stayed until you were freed, transported, or hanged: you were not sentenced there for a term), and you were free to make the best of your new world. You were also free to bribe a sea captain to return you to England before the terms of your transportation were over and done. People did. And if the authorities caught you returning from transportation—if an old enemy, or an old friend with a score to settle, saw you and peached on you—then you were hanged without a blink.

I am reminded, he continued, after a short pause, during which he refilled the inkwell on his desk from the bottle of umber ink from the closet, and dipped his pen once more, of the life of Essie Tregowan, who came from a chilly little cliff-top village in Cornwall, in the Southwest of England, where her family had lived from time out of mind. Her father was a fisherman, and it was rumored that he was one of the wreckers—those who would hang their lamps high on the dangerous coast when the storm winds raged, luring ships onto the rocks, for the goods on shipboard. Essie’s mother was in service as a cook at the squire’s house, and, at the age of twelve, Essie began to work there, in the scullery. She was a thin little thing, with wide brown eyes and dark brown hair; and she was not a hard worker but was forever slipping off and away to listen to stories and tales, if there was anyone who would tell them: tales of the piskies and the spriggans, of the black dogs of the moors and the seal-women of the Channel. And, though the squire laughed at such things, the kitchen-folk always put out a china saucer of the creamiest milk at night, put it outside the kitchen door, for the piskies.

Several years passed, and Essie was no longer a thin little thing: now she curved and billowed like the swell of the green sea, and her brown eyes laughed, and her chestnut hair tossed and curled. Essie’s eyes lighted on Bartholomew, the squire’s eighteen-year-old son, home from Rugby, and she went at night to the standing stone on the edge of the woodland, and she put some bread that Bartholomew had been eating but had left unfinished on the stone, wrapped in a cut strand of her own hair. And on the very next day Bartholomew came and talked to her, and looked on her approvingly with his own eyes, the dangerous blue of a sky when a storm is coming, while she was cleaning out the grate in his bedroom.

He had such dangerous eyes, said Essie Tregowan.

Soon enough Bartholomew went up to Oxford, and, when Essie’s condition became apparent, she was dismissed. But the babe was stillborn, and, as a favor to Essie’s mother, who was a very fine cook, the squire’s wife prevailed upon her husband to return the former maiden to her former position in the scullery.

Even so, Essie’s love for Bartholomew had turned to hatred for his family, and within the year she took for her new beau a man from a neighboring village, with a bad reputation, who went by the name of Josiah Horner. And one night, when the family slept, Essie arose in the night and unbolted the side door, to let her lover in. He rifled the house while the family slept on.

Suspicion immediately fell upon someone in the house, for it was apparent that someone must have opened the door (which the squire’s wife distinctly remembered having bolted herself) and someone must have known where the squire kept his silver plate, and the drawer in which he kept his coins and his promissory notes. Still, Essie, by resolutely denying everything, was convicted of nothing until Master Josiah Horner was caught, in a chandler’s in Exeter, passing one of the squire’s notes. The squire identified it as his, and Horner and Essie went to trial.

Horner was convicted at the local assizes, and was, as the slang of the time so cruelly and so casually had it, turned off, but the judge took pity on Essie, because of her age or her chestnut hair, and he sentenced her to seven years’ transportation. She was to be transported on a ship called the Neptune, under the command of one Captain Clarke. So Essie went to the Carolinas; and on the way she conceived an alliance with the selfsame captain, and prevailed upon him to return her to England with him, as his wife, and to take her to his mother’s house in London, where no man knew her. The journey back, when the human cargo had been exchanged for cotton and tobacco, was a peaceful time, and a happy one, for the captain and his new bride, who were as two lovebirds or courting butterflies, unable to cease from touching each other or giving each other little gifts and endearments.

When they reached London, Captain Clarke lodged Essie with his mother, who treated her in all ways as her son’s new wife. Eight weeks later, the Neptune set sail again, and the pretty young bride with the chestnut hair waved her husband goodbye from dockside. Then she returned to her mother-in-law’s house, where, the old woman being absent, Essie helped herself to a length of silk, several gold coins, and a silver pot in which the old woman kept her buttons, and pocketing these things Essie vanished into the stews of London.

Over the following two years Essie became an accomplished shop-lifter, her wide skirts capable of concealing a multitude of sins, consisting chiefly of stolen bolts of silk and lace, and she lived life to the full. Essie gave thanks for her escapes from her vicissitudes to all the creatures that she had been told of as a child, to the piskies (whose influence, she was certain, extended as far as London), and she would put a wooden bowl of milk on a window-ledge each night, although her friends laughed at her; but she had the last laugh, as her friends got the pox or the clap and Essie remained in the peak of health.

She was a year shy of her twentieth birthday when fate dealt her an ill-blow: she sat in the Crossed Forks Inn off Fleet Street, in Bell Yard, when she saw a young man enter and seat himself near the fireplace, fresh down from the University. “Oho! A pigeon ripe for the plucking,” thinks Essie to herself, and she sits next to him, and tells him what a fine young man he is, and with one hand she begins to stroke his knee, while her other hand, more carefully, goes in search of his pocket-watch. And then he looked her full in the face, and her heart leapt and sank as eyes the dangerous blue of the summer sky before a storm gazed back into hers, and Master Bartholomew said her name.

She was taken to Newgate and charged with returning from transportation. Found guilty, Essie shocked no one by pleading her belly, although the town matrons, who assessed such claims (which were usually spurious), were surprised when they were forced to agree that Essie was indeed with child; although who the father was, Essie declined to say.

Her sentence of death was once more commuted to transportation, this time for life.

She rode out this time on the Sea-Maiden. There were two hundred transportees on that ship, packed into the hold like so many fat hogs on their way to market. Fluxes and fevers ran rampant; there was scarcely room to sit, let alone to lie down; a woman died in childbirth in the back of the hold, and, the people being pushed in too tightly to pass her body forward, she and the infant were forced out of a small porthole in the back, directly into the choppy gray sea. Essie was eight months gone, and it was a wonder she kept the baby, but keep it she did.

In her life ever after she would have nightmares of her time in that hold, and she would wake up screaming with the taste and stench of the place in her throat.

The Sea-Maiden landed at Norfolk in Virginia, and Essie’s indenture was bought by a “small planter,” a tobacco farmer named John Richardson, for his wife had died of the childbirth fever a week after giving birth to his daughter, and he had need of a wet-nurse and a maid of all work upon his smallholding.

So Essie’s baby boy, whom she called Anthony, after, she said, her late husband his father (knowing there was none there to contradict her, and perhaps she had known an Anthony once), sucked at Essie’s breast alongside of Phyllida Richardson, and her employer’s child always got first suck, so she grew into a healthy child, tall and strong, while Essie’s son grew weak and rickety on what was left.

And along with the milk, the children as they grew drank Essie’s tales: of the knockers and the blue-caps who live down the mines; of the Bucca, the tricksiest spirit of the land, much more dangerous than the red-headed, snub-nosed piskies, for whom the first fish of the catch was always left upon the shingle, and for whom a fresh-baked loaf of bread was left in the field, at reaping time, to ensure a fine harvest; she told them of the apple-tree men—old apple trees who talked when they had a mind, and who needed to be placated with the first cider of the crop, which was poured onto their roots as the year turned, if they were to give you a fine crop for the next year. She told them, in her mellifluous Cornish drawl, which trees they should be wary of, in the old rhyme:

She told them all these things, and they believed, because she believed.

The farm prospered, and Essie Tregowan placed a china saucer of milk outside the back door, each night, for the piskies. And after eight months John Richardson came a-knocking quietly on Essie’s bedroom door, and asked her for favors of the kind a woman shows a man, and Essie told him how shocked and hurt she was, a poor widow-woman, and an indentured servant no better than a slave, to be asked to prostitute herself for a man whom she had had so much respect for—and an indentured servant could not marry, so how he could even think to torment an indentured transportee girl so she could not bring herself to think—and her nut-brown eyes filled with tears, such that Richardson found himself apologizing to her, and the upshot of it was that John Richardson wound up, in that corridor, of that hot summer’s night, going down on one knee to Essie Tregowan and proposing an end to her indenture and offering his hand in marriage. Now, although she accepted him, she would not sleep a night with him until it was legal, whereupon she moved from the little room in the attic to the master bedroom in the front of the house; and if some of Farmer Richardson’s friends and their wives cut him when next they saw him in town, many more of them were of the opinion that the new Mistress Richardson was a damn fine-looking woman, and that Johnnie Richardson had done quite well for himself.

Within a year, she was delivered of another child, another boy, but as blond as his father and his half-sister, and they named him John, after his father.

The three children went to the local church to hear the traveling preacher on Sundays, and they went to the little school to learn their letters and their numbers with the children of the other small farmers; while Essie also made sure they knew the mysteries of the piskies, which were the most important mysteries there were: red-headed men, with eyes and clothes as green as a river, with turned-up noses, funny, squinting men who would, if they got a mind to, turn you and twist you and lead you out of your way, unless you had salt in your pocket, or a little bread. When the children went off to school, they each of them carried a little salt in one pocket, a little bread in the other, the old symbols of life and the earth, to make sure they came safely home once more, and they always did.

The children grew in the lush Virginia hills, grew tall and strong (although Anthony, her first son, was always weaker, paler, more prone to disease and bad airs) and the Richardsons were happy; and Essie loved her husband as best she could. They had been married a decade when John Richardson developed a toothache so bad it made him fall from his horse. They took him to the nearest town, where his tooth was pulled; but it was too late, and the blood-poisoning carried him off, black-faced and groaning, and they buried him beneath his favorite willow tree.

The widow Richardson was left the farm to manage until Richardson’s two children were of age: she managed the indentured servants and the slaves, and brought in the tobacco crop, year in, year out; she poured cider on the roots of the apple trees on New Year’s Eve, and placed a loaf of new-baked bread in the fields at harvest-time, and she always left a saucer of milk at the back door. The farm flourished, and the widow Richardson gained a reputation as a hard bargainer, but one whose crop was always good, and who never sold shoddy for better merchadise.

So all went well for another ten years; but after that was a bad year, for Anthony, her son, slew Johnnie, his half-brother, in a furious quarrel over the future of the farm and the disposition of Phyllida’s hand; and some said he had not meant to kill his brother, and that it was a foolish blow that struck too deep, and some said otherwise. Anthony fled, leaving Essie to bury her youngest son beside his father. Now, some said Anthony fled to Boston, and some said he went south, to Florida, and his mother was of the opinion that he had taken ship to England, to enlist in George’s army and fight the rebel Scots. But with both sons gone the farm was an empty place, and a sad one, and Phyllida pined and plained as if her heart had been broken, while nothing that her stepmother could say or do would put a smile back on her lips again.

But heartbroken or not, they needed a man about the farm, and so Phyllida married Harry Soames, a ship’s carpenter by profession, who had tired of the sea and who dreamed of a life on land on a farm like the Lincolnshire farm upon which he had grown up. And although the Richardsons’ farm was little enough like that, Harry Soames found correspondences enough to make him happy. Five children were born to Phyllida and Harry, three of whom lived.

The widow Richardson missed her sons, and she missed her husband, although he was now little more than a memory of a fair man who treated her kindly. Phyllida’s children would come to Essie for tales, and she would tell them of the Black Dog of the Moors, and of Raw-Head and Bloody-Bones, or the Apple Tree Man, but they were not interested; they only wanted tales of Jack—Jack up the Beanstalk, or Jack Giant-killer, or Jack and his Cat and the King. She loved those children as if they were her own flesh and blood, although sometimes she would call them by the names of those long dead.

It was May, and she took her chair out into the kitchen garden, to pick peas and to shuck them in the sunlight, for even in the lush heat of Virginia the cold had entered her bones as the frost had entered her hair, and a little warmth was a fine thing.

As the widow Richardson shucked the peas with her old hands, she got to thinking about how fine it would be to walk once more on the moors and the salty cliffs of her native Cornwall, and she thought of sitting on the shingle as a little girl, waiting for her father’s boat to return from the gray seas. Her hands, blue-knuckled and clumsy, opened the pea-pods, forced the full peas into an earthenware bowl, and dropped the empty pea-pods onto her aproned lap. And then she found herself remembering, as she had not remembered for a long time, a life well lost: how she had twitched purses and filched silks with her clever fingers; and now she remembers the warden of Newgate telling her that it would be a good twelve weeks before her case would be heard, and that she could escape the gallows if she could plead her belly, and what a pretty thing she was—and how she had turned to the wall and bravely lifted her skirts, hating herself and hating him, but knowing he was right; and the feel of the life, quickening inside her, that meant that she could cheat death for a little longer…

“Essie Tregowan?” said the stranger.

The widow Richardson looked up, shading her eyes in the May sunshine. “Do I know you?” she asked. She had not heard him approach.

The man was dressed all in green: dusty green trews, green jacket, and a dark green coat. His hair was a carroty red, and he grinned at her all lopsided. There was something about the man that made her happy to look at him, and something else that whispered of danger. “You might say that you know me,” he said.

He squinted down at her, and she squinted right back up at him, searching his moon-face for a clue to his identity. He looked as young as one of her own grandchildren, yet he had called her by her old name, and there was a burr in his voice she knew from her childhood, from the rocks and the moors of her home.

“You’re a Cornishman?” she asked.

“That I am, a Cousin Jack,” said the red-haired man. “Or rather, that I was, but now I’m here in this new world, where nobody puts out ale or milk for an honest fellow, or a loaf of bread come harvest time.”

The old woman steadied the bowl of peas upon her lap. “If you’re who I think you are,” she said, “then I’ve no quarrel with you.” In the house, she could hear Phyllida grumbling to the housekeeper.

“Nor I with you,” said the red-haired fellow, a little sadly, “although it was you that brought me here, you and a few like you, into this land with no time for magic and no place for piskies and such folk.”

“You’ve done me many a good turn,” she said.

“Good and ill,” said the squinting stranger. “We’re like the wind. We blows both ways.”

Essie nodded.

“Will you take my hand, Essie Tregowan?” And he reached out a hand to her. Freckled it was, and although Essie’s eyesight was going she could see each orange hair on the back of his hand, glowing golden in the afternoon sunlight. She bit her lip. Then, hesitantly, she placed her blue-knotted hand in his.

She was still warm when they found her, although the life had fled her body and only half the peas were shelled.

CHAPTER FIVE

Only Zorya Utrennyaya was awake to say goodbye to them, that Saturday morning. She took Wednesday’s forty-five dollars and insisted on writing him out a receipt for it in wide, looping handwriting, on the back of an expired soft-drink coupon. She looked quite doll-like in the morning light, with her old face carefully made-up and her golden hair piled high upon her head.

Wednesday kissed her hand. “Thank you for your hospitality, dear lady,” he said. “You and your lovely sisters remain as radiant as the sky itself.”

“You are a bad old man,” she told him, and shook a finger at him. Then she hugged him. “Keep safe,” she told him. “I would not like to hear that you were gone for good.”

“It would distress me equally, my dear.”

She shook hands with Shadow. “Zorya Polunochnaya thinks very highly of you,” she said. “I also.”

“Thank you,” said Shadow. “Thanks for the dinner.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “You liked? You must come again.”

Wednesday and Shadow walked down the stairs. Shadow put his hands in his jacket pockets. The silver dollar was cold in his hand. It was bigger and heavier than any coins he’d used so far. He classic-palmed it, let his hand hang by his side naturally, then straightened his hand as the coin slipped down to a front-palm position. It felt natural there, held between his forefinger and his little finger by the slightest of pressure.

“Smoothly done,” said Wednesday.

“I’m just learning,” said Shadow. “I can do a lot of the technical stuff. The hardest part is making people look at the wrong hand.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” said Shadow. “It’s called misdirection.” He slipped his middle fingers under the coin, pushing it into a back palm, and fumbled his grip on it, ever-so-slightly. The coin dropped from his hand to the stairwell with a clatter and bounced down half a flight of stairs. Wednesday reached down and picked it up.

“You cannot afford to be careless with people’s gifts,” said Wednesday. “Something like this, you need to hang on to it. Don’t go throwing it about.” He examined the coin, looking first at the eagle side, then at the face of Liberty on the obverse. “Ah, Lady Liberty. Beautiful, is she not?” He tossed the coin to Shadow, who picked it from the air, did a slide vanish—seeming to drop it into his left hand while actually keeping it in his right—and then appeared to pocket it with his left hand. The coin sat in the palm of his right hand, in plain view. It felt comforting there.

“Lady Liberty,” said Wednesday. “Like so many of the gods that Americans hold dear, a foreigner. In this case, a Frenchwoman, although, in deference to American sensibilities, the French covered up her magnificent bosom on that statue they presented to New York. Liberty,” he continued, wrinkling his nose at the used condom that lay on the bottom flight of steps, toeing it to the side of the stairs with distaste. “Someone could slip on that. Break their necks,” he muttered, interrupting himself. “Like a banana peel, only with bad taste and irony thrown in.” He pushed open the door, and the sunlight hit them. The world outside was colder than it had looked from indoors: Shadow wondered if there was more snow to come. “Liberty,” boomed Wednesday, as they walked to his car, “is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.”

“Yeah?” said Shadow.

“Quoting,” said Wednesday. “Quoting someone French. That’s who they have a statue to, in their New York harbor: a bitch, who liked to be fucked on the refuse from the tumbril. Hold your torch as high as you want to, m’dear, there’s still rats in your dress and cold jism dripping down your leg.” He unlocked the car, and pointed Shadow to the passenger seat.

“I think she’s beautiful,” said Shadow, holding the coin up close. Liberty’s silver face reminded him a little of Zorya Polunochnaya.

“That,” said Wednesday, driving off, “is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones. Worm food. At night, you’re rubbing yourself against worm food. No offense meant.”

Shadow had never seen Wednesday quite so expansive. His new boss, he decided, went through phases of extroversion followed by periods of intense quiet. “So you aren’t American?” asked Shadow.

“Nobody’s American,” said Wednesday. “Not originally. That’s my point.” He checked his watch. “We still have several hours to kill before the banks close. Good job last night with Czernobog, by the way. I would have closed him on coming eventually, but you enlisted him more wholeheartedly than ever I could have.”

“Only because he gets to kill me afterward.”

“Not necessarily. As you yourself so wisely pointed out, he’s old, and the killing stroke might merely leave you, well, paralyzed for life, say. A hopeless invalid. So you have much to look forward to, should Mister Czernobog survive the coming difficulties.”

“And there is some question about this?” said Shadow, echoing Wednesday’s manner, then hating himself for it.

“Fuck yes,” said Wednesday. He pulled up in the parking lot of a bank. “This,” he said, “is the bank I shall be robbing. They don’t close for another few hours. Let’s go in and say hello.”

He gestured to Shadow. Reluctantly, Shadow got out of the car and followed Wednesday in. If the old man was going to do something stupid, Shadow could see no reason why his face should be on the camera; but curiosity pulled him in and he walked into the bank. He looked down at the floor, rubbed his nose with his hand, doing his best to keep his face hidden.

“Deposit forms, ma’am?” said Wednesday to the lone teller.

“Over there.”

“Very good. And if I were to need to make a night deposit…?”

“Same forms.” She smiled at him. “You know where the night deposit slot is, hon? Left out the main door, it’s on the wall.”

“My thanks.”

Wednesday picked up several deposit forms. He grinned a goodbye at the teller, and he and Shadow walked out.

Wednesday stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, scratching his beard meditatively. Then he walked over to the ATM machine, and to the night safe, set in the side of the wall, and inspected them. He led Shadow across the road to the supermarket, where he bought a chocolate fudge Popsicle for himself, and a cup of hot chocolate for Shadow. There was a payphone set in the wall of the entryway, as you went in, below a notice board with rooms to rent, and puppies and kittens in need of good homes. Wednesday wrote down the telephone number of the payphone. They crossed the road once more. “What we need,” said Wednesday, suddenly, “is snow. A good, driving, irritating snow. Think ‘snow’ for me, will you?”

“Huh?”

“Concentrate on making those clouds—the ones over there, in the west—making them bigger and darker. Think gray skies and driving winds coming down from the arctic. Think snow.”

“I don’t think it will do any good.”

“Nonsense. If nothing else, it will keep your mind occupied,” said Wednesday, unlocking the car. “Kinko’s next. Hurry up.”

Snow, thought Shadow, in the passenger seat, sipping his hot chocolate. Huge, dizzying, clumps and clusters of snow falling through the air, patches of white against an iron-gray sky, snow that touches your tongue with cold and winter, that kisses your face with its hesitant touch before freezing you to death. Twelve cotton-candy inches of snow, creating a fairy-tale world, making everything unrecognizably beautiful…

Wednesday was talking to him.

“I’m sorry?” said Shadow.

“I said we’re here,” said Wednesday. “You were somewhere else.”

“I was thinking about snow,” said Shadow.

In Kinko’s, Wednesday set about photocopying the deposit slips from the bank. He had the clerk instant-print him two sets of ten business cards. Shadow’s head had begun to ache, and there was an uncomfortable feeling between his shoulder blades; he wondered if he had slept on it wrong, if it was an awkward legacy of the night before’s sofa.

Wednesday sat at the computer terminal, composing a letter, and, with the clerk’s help, making several large-sized signs.

Snow, thought Shadow. High in the atmosphere, perfect, tiny crystals that form about a minute piece of dust, each a lace-like work of unique, six-sided fractal art. And the snow crystals clump together into flakes as they fall, covering Chicago in their white plenty, inch upon inch…

“Here,” said Wednesday. He handed Shadow a cup of Kinko’s coffee, a half-dissolved lump of non-dairy creamer powder floating on the top. “I think that’s enough, don’t you?”

“Enough what?”

“Enough snow. Don’t want to immobilize the city, do we?”

The sky was a uniform battleship gray. Snow was coming. Yes.

“I didn’t really do that?” said Shadow. “I mean, I didn’t. Did I?”

“Drink the coffee,” said Wednesday. “It’s foul stuff, but it will ease the headache.” Then he said, “Good work.”

Wednesday paid the Kinko’s clerk, and he carried his signs and letters and cards outside to the car. He opened the trunk of his car, put the papers in a large black metal case of the kind carried by payroll guards, and closed the trunk. He passed Shadow a business card.

“Who,” said Shadow, “is A. Haddock, Director of Security, A1 Security Services?”

“You are.”

“A. Haddock?”

“Yes.”

“What does the A stand for?”

“Alfredo? Alphonse? Augustine? Ambrose? Your call entirely.”

“Oh. I see.”

“I’m James O’Gorman,” said Wednesday. “Jimmy to my friends. See? I’ve got a card too.”

They got back in the car. Wednesday said, “If you can think ‘A. Haddock’ as well as you thought ‘snow,’ we should have plenty of lovely money with which to wine and dine my friends of tonight.”

“And if we’re in jail by this evening?”

“Then my friends will just have to make do without us.”

“I’m not going back to prison.”

“You won’t be.”

“I thought we had agreed that I wouldn’t be doing anything illegal.”

“You aren’t. Possibly aiding and abetting, a little conspiracy to commit, followed of course by receiving stolen money, but trust me, you’ll come out of this smelling like a rose.”

“Is that before or after your elderly Slavic Charles Atlas crushes my skull with one blow?”

“His eyesight’s going,” said Wednesday reassuringly. “He’ll probably miss you entirely. Now, we still have a little time to kill—the bank closes at midday on Saturdays, after all. Would you like lunch?”

“Yes,” said Shadow. “I’m starving.”

“I know just the place,” said Wednesday. He hummed as he drove, some cheerful song that Shadow could not identify. Snowflakes began to fall, just as Shadow had imagined them, and he felt strangely proud. He knew, rationally, that he had nothing to do with the snow, just as he knew the silver dollar he carried in his pocket was not, and never had been, the moon. But still…

They stopped outside a large shed-like building. A sign said that the All-U-Can-Eat lunch buffet was $4.99. “I love this place,” said Wednesday.

“Good food?” asked Shadow.

“Not particularly,” said Wednesday. “But the ambience is unmissable.”

The ambience that Wednesday loved, it turned out, once lunch had been eaten—Shadow had the fried chicken, and enjoyed it—was the business that took up the rear of the shed: it was, the hanging flag across the center of the room announced, a Bankrupt and Liquidated Stock Clearance Depot.

Wednesday went out to the car, and reappeared with a small suitcase, which he took into the men’s room. Shadow figured he’d learn soon enough what Wednesday was up to, whether he wanted to or not, and so he prowled the liquidation aisles, staring at the things for sale: boxes of coffee “for use in airline filters only,” Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys and Xena: Warrior Princess harem dolls, teddy bears that played patriotic tunes on the xylophone when plugged in, and other teddy bears that played seasonal songs on the xylophone when plugged in, cans of processed meat, galoshes and sundry overshoes, marshmallows, Bill Clinton presidential wristwatches, artificial miniature Christmas trees, salt and pepper shakers in the shapes of animals, body parts, fruit and nuns, and, Shadow’s favorite, a “just add real carrot” snowman kit, with plastic coal eyes, a corncob pipe, and a plastic hat.

Shadow thought about how you made the moon seem to come out of the sky and become a silver dollar, and what made a woman get out of her grave and walk across town to talk to you.

“Isn’t it a wonderful place?” asked Wednesday when he came out of the men’s room. His hands were still wet, and he was drying them off on a handkerchief. “They’re out of paper towels in there,” he said. He had changed his clothes. He was now wearing a dark blue jacket, with matching trousers, a blue knit tie, a thick blue sweater, a white shirt, and black shoes. He looked like a security guard, and Shadow said so.

“What can I possibly say to that, young man,” said Wednesday, picking up a box of floating plastic aquarium fish (“They’ll never fade—and you’ll never have to feed them!!”), “other than to congratulate you on your perspicacity. How about Arthur Haddock? Arthur’s a good name.”

“Too mundane.”

“Well, you’ll think of something. There. Let us return to town. We should be in perfect time for our bank robbery, and then I shall have a little spending money.”

“Most people,” said Shadow, “would simply take it from the ATM.”

“Which is, oddly enough, more or less exactly what I was planning to do.”

Wednesday parked the car in the supermarket lot across the street from the bank. From the trunk of the car Wednesday brought out the metal case and a clipboard, and a pair of handcuffs. He handcuffed the case to his left wrist. He attached the other end of the cuff to the metal case’s handle. The snow continued to fall. Then he put a peaked blue cap on, and Velcroed a patch to the breast pocket of his jacket. A1 SECURITY was written on the cap and the patch. He put the deposit slips on his clipboard. Then he slouched. He looked like a retired beat cop, and appeared somehow to have gained himself a paunch.

“Now,” he said, “you do a little shopping in the food store, then hang out by the phone. If anyone asks, you’re waiting for a call from your girlfriend, whose car has broken down.”

“So why’s she calling me there?”

“How the hell should you know?”

Wednesday put on a pair of faded pink earmuffs. He closed the trunk. Snowflakes settled on his dark blue cap, and on his earmuffs.

“How do I look?” he asked.

“Ludicrous,” said Shadow.

“Ludicrous?”

“Or goofy, maybe,” said Shadow.

“Mm. Goofy and ludicrous. That’s good.” Wednesday smiled. The earmuffs made him appear, at the same time, reassuring, amusing, and, ultimately, loveable. He strode across the street and walked along the block to the bank building, while Shadow walked into the supermarket hall and watched.

Wednesday taped a large red OUT OF ORDER notice to the ATM. He put a red ribbon across the night deposit slot, and he taped a photocopied sign up above it. Shadow read it with amusement.

FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE, it said, WE ARE WORKING TO MAKE ONGOING IMPROVEMENT’S. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE TEMPORARY INCONVENIENCE.

Then Wednesday turned around and faced the street. He looked cold and put-upon.

A young woman came over to use the ATM. Wednesday shook his head, explained that it was out of order. She cursed, apologized for cursing, and ran off.

A car drew up, and a man got out holding a small gray sack and a key. Shadow watched as Wednesday apologized to the man, then made him sign the clipboard, checked his deposit slip, painstakingly wrote him out a receipt and puzzled over which copy to keep, and, finally, opened his big black metal case and put the man’s sack inside.

The man shivered in the snow, stamping his feet, waiting for the old security guard to be done with this administrative nonsense, so he could leave his takings and get out of the cold and be on his way, then he took his receipt and got back into his warm car and drove off.

Wednesday walked across the street carrying the metal case, and bought himself a coffee at the supermarket.

“Afternoon, young man,” he said, with an avuncular chuckle, as he passed Shadow. “Cold enough for you?”

He walked back across the street, and took gray sacks and envelopes from people coming to deposit their earnings or their takings on this Saturday afternoon, a fine old security man in his funny pink earmuffs.

Shadow bought some things to read—Turkey Hunting, People, and because the cover picture of Bigfoot was so endearing, the Weekly World News—and stared out of the window.

“Anything I can do to help?” asked a middle-aged black man with a white moustache. He seemed to be the manager.

“Thanks, man, but no. I’m waiting for a phone call. My girlfriend’s car broke down.”

“Probably the battery,” said the man. “People forget those things only last three, maybe four years. It’s not like they cost a fortune.”

“Tell me about it,” said Shadow.

“Hang in there, big guy,” said the manager, and he went back into the supermarket.

The snow had turned the street scene into the interior of a snowglobe, perfect in all its details.

Shadow watched, impressed. Unable to hear the conversations across the street, he felt it was like watching a fine silent movie performance, all pantomime and expression: the old security guard was gruff, earnest—a little bumbling perhaps, but enormously well-meaning. Everyone who gave him their money walked away a little happier from having met him.

And then the cops drew up outside the bank, and Shadow’s heart sank. Wednesday tipped his cap to them and ambled over to the police car. He said his hellos and shook hands through the open window, and nodded, then hunted through his pockets until he found a business card and a letter, and passed them through the window of the car. Then he sipped his coffee.

The telephone rang. Shadow picked up the hand piece and did his best to sound bored. “A1 Security Services,” he said.

“Can I speak to A. Haddock?” asked the cop across the street.

“This is Andy Haddock speaking,” said Shadow.

“Yeah, Mr. Haddock, this is the police,” said the cop in the car across the street. “You’ve got a man at the First Illinois Bank on the corner of Market and Second.”

“Uh, yeah. That’s right. Jimmy O’Gorman. And what seems to be the problem, officer? Jim behaving himself? He’s not been drinking?”

“No problem, sir. Your man is just fine, sir. Just wanted to make certain everything was in order.”

“You tell Jim that if he’s caught drinking again, officer, he’s fired. You got that? Out of a job. Out on his ass. We have zero tolerance at A1 Security.”

“I really don’t think it’s really my place to tell him that, sir. He’s doing a fine job. We’re just concerned because something like this really ought to be done by two personnel. It’s risky, having one unarmed guard dealing with such large amounts of money.”

“Tell me about it. Or more to the point, you tell those cheapskates down at the First Illinois about it. These are my men I’m putting on the line, officer. Good men. Men like you.” Shadow found himself warming to this identity. He could feel himself becoming Andy Haddock, chewed cheap cigar in his ashtray, a stack of paperwork to get to this Saturday afternoon, a home in Schaumburg and a mistress in a little apartment on Lake Shore Drive. “Y’know, you sound like a bright young man, officer, uh…”

“Myerson.”

“Officer Myerson. You need a little weekend work, or you wind up leaving the force, any reason, you give us a call. We always need good men. You got my card?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You hang on to it,” said Andy Haddock. “You call me.”

The police car drove off, and Wednesday shuffled back through the snow to deal with the small line of people who were waiting to give him their money.

“She okay?” asked the manager, putting his head around the door. “Your girlfriend?”

“It was the battery,” said Shadow. “Now I just got to wait.”

“Women,” said the manager. “I hope yours is worth waiting for.”

Winter darkness descended, the afternoon slowly graying into night. Lights went on. More people gave Wednesday their money. Suddenly, as if at some signal Shadow could not see, Wednesday walked over to the wall, removed the OUT OF ORDER signs, and trudged across the slushy road, heading for the car park. Shadow waited a minute, then followed him.

Wednesday was sitting in the back of the car. He had opened the metal case and was methodically laying everything he had been given out on the back seat in neat piles.

“Drive,” he said. “We’re heading for the First Illinois Bank over on State Street.”

“Repeat performance?” asked Shadow. “Isn’t that kind of pushing your luck?”

“Not at all,” said Wednesday. “We’re going to do a little banking.”

While Shadow drove, Wednesday sat in the back seat and removed the bills from the deposit bags in handfuls, leaving the checks and the credit card slips, and taking the cash from some, although not all, of the envelopes. He dropped the cash back into the metal case. Shadow pulled up outside the bank, stopping the car about fifty yards down the road, well out of camera range. Wednesday got out of the car, and pushed the envelopes through the night deposit slot. Then he opened the night safe, and dropped in the gray bags. He closed it again.

He climbed into the passenger seat. “You’re heading for I-90,” said Wednesday. “Follow the signs west for Madison.”

Shadow began to drive.

Wednesday looked back at the bank they were leaving. “There, my boy,” he said, cheerfully, “that will confuse everything. Now, to get the really big money, you need to do that at about 4:30 on a Sunday morning, when the clubs and the bars drop off their Saturday night’s takings. Hit the right bank, the right guy making the drop off—they tend to pick them big and honest, and sometimes have a couple of bouncers accompany them, but they aren’t necessarily smart—and you can walk away with a quarter of a million dollars for an evening’s work.”

“If it’s that easy,” said Shadow, “how come everybody doesn’t do it?”

“It’s not an entirely risk-free occupation,” said Wednesday, “especially not at 4:30 in the morning.”

“You mean the cops are more suspicious at 4:30 in the morning?”

“Not at all. But the bouncers are. And things can get awkward.”

He flicked through a sheaf of fifties, added a smaller stack of twenties, weighed them in his hand, then passed them over to Shadow. “Here,” he said. “Your first week’s wages.”

Shadow pocketed the money without counting it. “So, that’s what you do?” he asked. “To make money?”

“Rarely. Only when a great deal of cash is needed fast. On the whole, I make my money from people who never know they’ve been taken, and who never complain, and who will frequently line up to be taken when I come back that way again.”

“That Sweeney guy said you were a hustler.”

“He was right. But that is the least of what I am. And the least of what I need you for, Shadow.”

Snow spun through their headlights and into the windshield as they drove through the darkness. The effect was almost hypnotic.

“This is the only country in the world,” said Wednesday, into the stillness, “that worries about what it is.”

“What?”

“The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.”

“And…?”

“Just thinking out loud.”

“So you’ve been to lots of other countries, then?”

Wednesday said nothing. Shadow glanced at him. “No,” said Wednesday, with a sigh. “No. I never have.”

They stopped for gas, and Wednesday went into the restroom in his security guard jacket with his suitcase, and came out in a crisp, pale suit, brown shoes, and a knee-length brown coat that looked like it might be Italian.

“So when we get to Madison, what then?”

“Take Highway 14 west to Spring Green. We’ll be meeting everyone at a place called the House on the Rock. You been there?”

“No,” said Shadow. “But I’ve seen the signs.”

The signs for the House on the Rock were all around that part of the world: oblique, ambiguous signs all across Illinois and Minnesota and Wisconsin, probably as far away as Iowa, Shadow suspected, signs alerting you to the existence of the House on the Rock. Shadow had seen the signs, and wondered about them. Did the House balance perilously upon the Rock? What was so interesting about the Rock? About the House? He had given it a passing thought, but then forgotten it. Shadow was not in the habit of visiting roadside attractions.

They drove past the capitol dome of Madison, another perfect snowglobe scene in the falling snow, and then they were off the interstate, and driving down country roads. After almost an hour of driving through towns with names like Black Earth, they turned down a narrow driveway, past several enormous, snow-dusted flowerpots entwined with lizard-like dragons. The tree-lined parking lot was almost empty.

“They’ll be closing soon,” said Wednesday.

“So what is this place?” asked Shadow, as they walked through the parking lot toward a low, unimpressive wooden building.

“This is a roadside attraction,” said Wednesday. “One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.”

“Come again?”

“It’s perfectly simple,” said Wednesday. “In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would just be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples, or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or…well, you get the idea.”

“There are churches all across the States, though,” said Shadow.

“In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists’ offices. No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they’ve never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat-house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves being pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that.”

“You have some pretty whacked-out theories,” said Shadow.

“Nothing theoretical about it, young man,” said Wednesday. “You should have figured that out by now.”

There was only one ticket window open. “We stop selling tickets in half an hour,” said the girl. “It takes at least two hours to walk around, you see.”

Wednesday paid for their tickets in cash.

“Where’s the rock?” asked Shadow.

“Under the house,” said Wednesday.

“Where’s the house?”

Wednesday put his finger to his lips, and they walked forward. Farther in, a player piano was playing something that was intended to have been Ravel’s “Bolero.” The place seemed to be a geometrically reconfigured 1960s bachelor pad, with open stonework, pile carpeting, and magnificently ugly mushroom-shaped stained glass lampshades. Up a winding staircase was another room, filled with knickknacks.

“They say this was built by Frank Lloyd Wright’s evil twin,” said Wednesday. “Frank Lloyd Wrong.” He chuckled at his joke.

“I saw that on a T-shirt,” said Shadow.

Up and down more stairs, and now they were in a long, long room, made of glass, that protruded, needlelike, out over the leafless black-and-white countryside hundreds of feet below them. Shadow stood and watched the snow tumble and spin.

“This is the House on the Rock?” he asked, puzzled.

“More or less. This is the Infinity Room, part of the actual house, although a late addition. But no, my young friend, we have not scratched the tiniest surface of what the house has to offer.”

“So according to your theory,” said Shadow, “Walt Disney World would be the holiest place in America.”

Wednesday frowned, and stroked his beard. “Walt Disney bought some orange groves in the middle of Florida and built a tourist town on them. No magic there of any kind, although I think there might be something real in the original Disneyland. There may be some power there, although twisted, and hard to access. There’s definitely nothing out of the ordinary about Disney World. But some parts of Florida are filled with real magic. You just have to keep your eyes open. Ah, for the mermaids of Weeki Wachee…Follow me, this way.”

Everywhere was the sound of music: jangling, awkward music, ever-so-slightly off the beat and out of time. Wednesday took a five-dollar bill and put it into a change machine, receiving a handful of brass-colored metal coins in return. He tossed one to Shadow, who caught it, and, realizing that a small boy was watching him, held it up between forefinger and thumb and vanished it. The small boy ran over to his mother, who was inspecting one of the ubiquitous Santa Clauses—OVER 6000 ON DISPLAY! the signs said—and he tugged urgently at the hem of her coat.

Shadow followed Wednesday outside briefly, and then followed the signs to the Streets of Yesterday.

“Forty years ago Alex Jordan—his face is on the token you have palmed in your right hand, Shadow—began to build a house on a high jut of rock in a field he did not own, and even he could not have told you why. And people came to see him build it—the curious, and the puzzled, and those who were neither and who could not honestly have told you why they came. So he did what any sensible American male of his generation would do: he began to charge them money—nothing much. A nickel each, perhaps. Or a quarter. And he continued building, and the people kept coming.

“So he took those quarters and nickels and made something even bigger and stranger. He built these warehouses on the land beneath the house, and filled them with things for people to see, and then the people came to see them. Millions of people come here every year.”

“Why?”

But Wednesday simply smiled, and they walked into the dimly lit, tree-lined Streets of Yesterday. Prim-lipped Victorian china dolls stared in profusion through dusty store windows, like so many props from respectable horror films. Cobblestones under their feet, the darkness of a roof above their heads, jangling mechanical music in the background. They passed a glass box of broken puppets, and an overgrown golden music box in a glass case. They passed the dentist’s and the drugstore (RESTORE POTENCY! USE O’LEARY’S MAGNETICAL BELT!).

At the end of the street was a large glass box with a female mannequin inside it, dressed as a gypsy fortune-teller.

“Now,” boomed Wednesday, over the mechanical music, “at the start of any quest or enterprise it behooves us to consult the Norns. So let us designate this Sybil our Urd, eh?” He dropped a brass-colored House on the Rock coin into the slot. With jagged, mechanical motions, the gypsy lifted her arm and lowered it once more. A slip of paper chunked out of the slot.

Wednesday took it, read it, grunted, folded it up, and put it in his pocket.

“Aren’t you going to show it to me? I’ll show you mine,” said Shadow.

“A man’s fortune is his own affair,” said Wednesday, stiffly. “I would not ask to see yours.”

Shadow put his own coin in the slot. He took his slip of paper. He read it.

Shadow made a face. He folded the fortune up and put it in his inside pocket.

They went further in, down a red corridor, past rooms filled with empty chairs upon which rested violins and violas and cellos which played themselves, or seemed to, when fed a coin. Keys depressed, cymbals crashed, pipes blew compressed air into clarinets and oboes. Shadow observed, with a wry amusement, that the bows of the stringed instruments, played by mechanical arms, never actually touched the strings, which were often loose or missing. He wondered whether all the sounds he heard were made by wind and percussion, or whether there were tapes as well.

They had walked for what felt like several miles when they came to a room called the Mikado, one wall of which was a nineteenth-century pseudo-Oriental nightmare, in which beetle-browed mechanical drummers banged cymbals and drums while staring out from their dragon-encrusted lair. Currently, they were majestically torturing Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre.”

Czernobog sat on a bench in the wall facing the Mikado machine, tapping out the time with his fingers. Pipes fluted, bells jangled.

Wednesday sat next to him. Shadow decided to remain standing. Czernobog extended his left hand, shook Wednesday’s, shook Shadow’s. “Well met,” he said. Then he sat back, apparently enjoying the music.

The “Danse Macabre” came to a tempestuous and discordant end. That all the artificial instruments were ever-so-slightly out of tune added to the otherworldliness of the place. A new piece began.

“How was your bank robbery?” asked Czernobog. “It went well?” He stood, reluctant to leave the Mikado and its thundering, jangling music.

“Slick as a snake in a barrel of butter,” said Wednesday.

“I get a pension from the slaughterhouse,” said Czernobog. “I do not ask for more.”

“It won’t last forever,” said Wednesday. “Nothing does.”

More corridors, more musical machines. Shadow became aware that they were not following the path through the rooms intended for tourists, but seemed to be following a different route of Wednesday’s own devising. They were going down a slope, and Shadow, confused, wondered if they had already been that way.

Czernobog grasped Shadow’s arm. “Quickly, come here,” he said, pulling him over to a large glass box by a wall. It contained a diorama of a tramp asleep in a churchyard in front of a church door. THE DRUNKARD’S DREAM said the label, which explained that it was a nineteenth-century penny-in-the-slot machine, originally from an English railway station. The coin slot had been modified to take the brass House on the Rock coins.

“Put in the money,” said Czernobog.

“Why?” asked Shadow.

“You must see. I show you.”

Shadow inserted his coin. The drunk in the graveyard raised his bottle to his lips. One of the gravestones flipped over, revealing a grasping corpse; a headstone turned around, flowers replaced by a grinning skull. A wraith appeared on the right of the church, while on the left of the church something with a half-glimpsed pointed, unsettlingly bird-like face, a pale, Boschian nightmare, glided smoothly from a headstone into the shadows and was gone. Then the church door opened, a priest came out, and the ghosts, haunts, and corpses vanished, and only the priest and the drunk were left alone in the graveyard. The priest looked down at the drunk disdainfully, and backed through the open door, which closed behind him, leaving the drunk on his own.

The clockwork story was deeply unsettling. Much more unsettling, thought Shadow, than clockwork has any right to be.

“You know why I show that to you?” asked Czernobog.

“No.”

“That is the world as it is. That is the real world. It is there, in that box.”

They wandered through a blood-colored room filled with old theatrical organs, huge organ pipes, and what appeared to be enormous copper brewing vats, liberated from a brewery.

“Where are we going?” asked Shadow.

“The carousel,” said Czernobog.

“But we’ve passed signs to the carousel a dozen times already.”

“He goes his way. We travel a spiral. The quickest way is sometimes the longest.”

Shadow’s feet were beginning to hurt, and he found this sentiment to be extremely unlikely.

A mechanical machine played “Octopus’s Garden” in a room that went up for many stories, the center of which was filled entirely with a replica of a great black whale-like beast, with a life-sized replica of a boat in its vast fiberglass mouth. They passed on from there to a Travel Hall, where they saw the car covered with tiles, and the functioning Rube Goldberg chicken device and the rusting Burma Shave ads on the wall.

read one, and

and they were at the bottom of a ramp now, with an ice-cream shop in front of them. It was nominally open, but the girl washing down the surfaces had a closed look on her face, so they walked past it into the pizzeria-cafeteria, empty but for an elderly black man wearing a bright check suit and canary-yellow gloves. He was a small man, the kind of little old man who looked as if the passing of the years had shrunk him, eating an enormous, many-scooped ice-cream sundae, drinking a supersized mug of coffee. A black cigarillo was burning in the ashtray in front of him.

“Three coffees,” said Wednesday to Shadow. He went to the restroom.

Shadow bought the coffees and took them over to Czernobog, who was sitting with the old black man, and was smoking a cigarette surreptitiously, as if he were scared of being caught. The other man, happily toying with his sundae, mostly ignored his cigarillo, but as Shadow approached he picked it up, inhaled deeply, and blew two smoke rings—first one large one, then another, smaller one, which passed neatly through the first—and he grinned, as if he were astonishingly pleased with himself.

“Shadow, this is Mister Nancy,” said Czernobog.

The old man got to his feet, and thrust out his yellow-gloved right hand. “Good to meet you,” he said with a dazzling smile. “I know who you must be. You’re working for the old one-eye bastard, aren’t you?” There was a faint twang in his voice, a hint of a patois that might have been West Indian.

“I work for Mister Wednesday,” said Shadow. “Yes. Please, sit down.”

Czernobog inhaled on his cigarette.

“I think,” he pronounced, gloomily, “that our kind, we like the cigarettes so much because they remind us of the offerings that once they burned for us, the smoke rising up as they sought our approval or our favor.”

“They never gave me nothin’ like that,” said Nancy. “Best I could hope for was a pile of fruit to eat, maybe curry goat, something slow and cold and tall to drink, and a big old high-titty woman to keep me company.” He grinned white teeth, and winked at Shadow.

“These days,” said Czernobog, his expression unchanged, “we have nothing.”

“Well, I don’t get anywhere near as much fruit as I used to,” said Mr. Nancy, his eyes shining. “But there still ain’t nothing out there in the world for my money that can beat a big old high-titty woman. Some folk you talk to, they say it’s the booty you got to inspect at first, but I’m here to tell you that it’s the titties that still crank my engine on a cold morning.” Nancy began to laugh, a wheezing, rattling, good-natured laugh, and Shadow found himself liking the old man despite himself.

Wednesday returned from the restroom, and shook hands with Nancy. “Shadow, you want something to eat? A slice of pizza? Or a sandwich?”

“I’m not hungry,” said Shadow.

“Let me tell you somethin’,” said Mr. Nancy. “It can be a long time between meals. Someone offers you food, you say yes. I’m no longer young as I was, but I can tell you this, you never say no to the opportunity to piss, to eat, or to get half an hour’s shut-eye. You follow me?”

“Yes. But I’m really not hungry.”

“You’re a big one,” said Nancy, staring into Shadow’s light-gray eyes with old eyes the color of mahogany, “a tall drink of water, but I got to tell you, you don’t look too bright. I got a son, stupid as a man who bought his stupid at a two-for-one sale, and you remind me of him.”

“If you don’t mind, I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Shadow.

“Being called dumb as a man who slept late the mornin’ they handed out brains?”

“Being compared to a member of your family.”

Mr. Nancy stubbed out his cigarillo, then he flicked an imaginary speck of ash off his yellow gloves. “You may not be the worst choice old one-eye could have made, come to that.” He looked up at Wednesday. “You got any idea how many of us there’s goin’ to be here tonight?”

“I sent the message out to everyone I could find,” said Wednesday. “Obviously not everyone is going to be able to come. And some of them,” he said with a pointed look at Czernobog, “might not want to. But I think we can confidently expect several dozen of us. And the word will travel.”

They made their way past a display of suits of armor (“Victorian fake,” pronounced Wednesday as they passed the glassed-in display, “modern fake, twelfth-century helm on a seventeenth-century reproduction, fifteenth-century left gauntlet…”) and then Wednesday pushed through an exit door, circled them around the outside of the building (“I can’t be doin’ with all these ins and outs,” said Nancy, “I’m not as young as I used to be, and I come from warmer climes,”) along a covered walk-way, in through another exit door, and they were in the Carousel room.

Calliope music played: a Strauss waltz, stirring and occasionally discordant. The wall as they entered was hung with antique carousel horses, hundreds of them, some in need of a lick of paint, others in need of a good dusting; above them hung dozens of winged angels constructed rather obviously from female store window mannequins; some of them bared their sexless breasts; some had lost their wigs and stared baldly and blindly down from the darkness.

And then there was the Carousel.

A sign proclaimed it was the largest in the world, said how much it weighed, how many thousand light bulbs were to be found in the chandeliers that hung from it in gothic profusion, and forbade anyone from climbing on it or from riding on the animals.

And such animals! Shadow stared, impressed in spite of himself, at the hundreds of full-sized creatures who circled on the platform of the carousel. Real creatures, imaginary creatures, and transformations of the two: each creature was different—he saw mermaid and merman, centaur and unicorn, elephants (one huge, one tiny), bulldog, frog and phoenix, zebra, tiger, manticore and basilisk, swans pulling a carriage, a white ox, a fox, twin walruses, even a sea serpent, all of them brightly colored and more than real: each rode the platform as the waltz came to an end and a new waltz began. The carousel did not even slow down.

“What’s it for?” asked Shadow. “I mean, okay, world’s biggest, hundreds of animals, thousands of light bulbs, and it goes around all the time, and no one ever rides it.”

“It’s not there to be ridden, not by people,” said Wednesday. “It’s there to be admired. It’s there to be.”

“Like a prayer wheel goin’ round and round,” said Mr. Nancy. “Accumulating power.”

“So where are we meeting everyone?” asked Shadow. “I thought you said that we were meeting them here. But the place is empty.”

Wednesday grinned his scary grin. “Shadow,” he said. “You’re asking too many questions. You’re paid not to ask questions.”

“Sorry.”

“Now, stand over here and help us up,” said Wednesday, and he walked over to the platform on one side, with a description of the Carousel on it, and a warning that the Carousel was not to be ridden.

Shadow thought of saying something, but instead he helped them, one by one, up onto the ledge. Wednesday seemed profoundly heavy, Czernobog climbed up himself, only using Shadow’s shoulder to steady himself, Nancy seemed to weigh nothing at all. Each of the old men climbed out onto the ledge, and then, with a step and a hop, they walked out onto the circling Carousel platform.

“Well?” barked Wednesday. “Aren’t you coming?”

Shadow, not without a certain amount of hesitation, and a hasty look around for any House on the Rock personnel who might be watching, swung himself up onto the ledge beside the World’s Largest Carousel. Shadow was puzzled to realize that he was far more concerned with breaking the rules by climbing onto the Carousel than he had been aiding and abetting this afternoon’s bank robbery.

Each of the old men selected a mount. Wednesday climbed onto a golden wolf. Czernobog climbed onto an armored centaur, its face hidden by a metal helmet. Nancy, chuckling, slithered up onto the back of an enormous, leaping lion, captured by the sculptor mid-roar. He patted the side of the lion. The Strauss waltz carried them around, majestically.

Wednesday was smiling, and Nancy was laughing delightedly, an old man’s cackle, and even the dour Czernobog seemed to be enjoying himself. Shadow felt as if a weight were suddenly lifted from his back: three old men were enjoying themselves, riding the world’s biggest carousel. So what if they did all get thrown out of the place? Wasn’t it worth it, worth anything, to say that you had ridden on the World’s Largest Carousel? Wasn’t it worth it to have traveled on one of those glorious monsters?

Shadow inspected a bulldog, and a mer-creature, and an elephant with a golden howdah, and then he climbed on the back of a creature with an eagle’s head and the body of a tiger, and held on tight.

The rhythm of the “Blue Danube” waltz rippled and rang and sang in his head, the lights of a thousand chandeliers glinted and prismed, and for a heartbeat Shadow was a child again, and all it took to make him happy was to ride the Carousel: he stayed perfectly still, riding his eagle-tiger at the center of everything, and the world revolved around him.

Shadow heard himself laugh, over the sound of the music. He was happy. It was as if the last thirty-six hours had never happened, as if the last three years had not happened, as if his life had evaporated into the daydream of a small child, riding the carousel in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, on his first trip back to the States, a marathon journey by ship and by car, his mother standing there, watching him proudly, and himself sucking his melting Popsicle, holding on tightly, hoping that the music would never stop, the carousel would never slow, the ride would never end. He was going around and around and around again…

Then the lights went out, and Shadow saw the gods.

CHAPTER SIX

One moment Shadow was riding the World’s Largest Carousel, holding on to his eagle-headed tiger, and then the red and white lights of the Carousel stretched and shivered and went out, and he was falling through an ocean of stars, while the mechanical waltz was replaced by a pounding rhythmic roll and crash, as of cymbals or the breakers on the shores of a far ocean.

The only light was starlight, but it illuminated everything with a cold clarity. Beneath him his mount stretched, and padded, its warm fur under his left hand, its feathers beneath his right.

“It’s a good ride, isn’t it?” The voice came from behind him, in its ears and in his mind.

Shadow turned, slowly, streaming images of himself as he moved, frozen moments, each him captured in a fraction of a second, every tiny movement lasting for an infinite period. The images that reached his mind made no sense: it was like seeing the world through the multifaceted jeweled eyes of a dragonfly, but each facet saw something completely different, and he was unable to combine the things he was seeing, or thought he was seeing, into a whole that made any sense.

He was looking at Mr. Nancy, an old black man with a pencil moustache, in his check sports jacket and his lemon-yellow gloves, riding a carousel lion as it rose and lowered, high in the air; and, at the same time, in the same place, he saw a jeweled spider as high as a horse, its eyes an emerald nebula, strutting, staring down at him; and simultaneously he was looking at an extraordinarily tall man with teak-colored skin and three sets of arms, wearing a flowing ostrich-feather headdress, his face painted with red stripes, riding an irritated golden lion, two of his six hands holding on tightly to the beast’s mane; and he was also seeing a young black boy, dressed in rags, his left foot all swollen and crawling with black flies; and last of all, and behind all these things, Shadow was looking at a tiny brown spider, hiding under a withered ochre leaf.

Shadow saw all these things, and he knew they were the same thing.

“If you don’t close your mouth,” said the many things that were Mr. Nancy, “somethin’s goin’ to fly in there.”

Shadow closed his mouth and swallowed, hard.

There was a wooden hall on a hill, a mile or so from them. They were trotting toward the hall, their mounts’ hooves and feet padding noiselessly on the dry sand at the sea’s edge.

Czernobog trotted up on his centaur. He tapped the human arm of his mount. “None of this is truly happening,” he said to Shadow. He sounded miserable. “Is all in your head. Best not to think of it.”

Shadow saw a gray-haired old East-European immigrant, with a shabby raincoat and one iron-colored tooth, true. But he also saw a squat black thing, darker than the darkness that surrounded them, its eyes two burning coals; and he saw a prince, with long flowing black hair, and long black moustaches, blood on his hands and his face, riding, naked but for a bearskin over his shoulder, on a creature half-man, half-beast, its face and torso blue-tattooed with swirls and spirals.

“Who are you?” asked Shadow. “What are you?”

Their mounts padded along the shore. Waves broke and crashed implacably on the night beach.

Wednesday guided his wolf—now a huge and charcoal-gray beast with green eyes—over to Shadow. Shadow’s mount caracoled away from it, and Shadow stroked its neck and told it not to be afraid. Its tiger tail swished, aggressively. It occurred to Shadow that there was another wolf, a twin to the one that Wednesday was riding, keeping pace with them in the sand dunes, just a moment out of sight.

“Do you know me, Shadow?” said Wednesday. He rode his wolf with his head high. His right eye glittered and flashed, his left eye was dull. He wore a cloak, with a deep, monk-like cowl, and his face stared out at them from the shadows. “I told you I would tell you my names. This is what they call me. I am called Glad-of-War, Grim, Raider, and Third. I am One-eyed. I am called Highest, and True-Guesser. I am Grimnir, and I am the Hooded One. I am All-Father, and I am Gondlir Wand-bearer. I have as many names as there are winds, as many titles as there are ways to die. My ravens are Huginn and Muninn: Thought and Memory; my wolves are Freki and Geri; my horse is the gallows.” Two ghostly-gray ravens, like transparent skins of birds, landed on Wednesday’s shoulders, pushed their beaks into the side of Wednesday’s head as if tasting his mind, and flapped out into the world once more.

What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything.

“Odin?” said Shadow, and the wind whipped the word from his lips.

“Odin,” whispered Wednesday, and the crash of the breakers on the beach of skulls was not loud enough to drown that whisper. “Odin,” said Wednesday, tasting the sound of the words in his mouth. “Odin,” said Wednesday, his voice a triumphant shout that echoed from horizon to horizon. His name swelled and grew and filled the world like the pounding of blood in Shadow’s ears.

And then, as in a dream, they were no longer riding toward a distant hall. They were already there, and their mounts were tied in the shelter beside the hall.

The hall was huge but primitive. The roof was thatched, the walls were wooden. There was a fire burning in the center of the hall, and the smoke stung Shadow’s eyes.

“We should have done this in my mind, not in his,” muttered Mr. Nancy to Shadow. “It would have been warmer there.”

“We’re in his mind?”

“More or less. This is Valaskjalf. It’s his old hall.”

Shadow was relieved to see that Nancy was now once more an old man wearing yellow gloves, although his shadow shook and shivered and changed in the flames of the fire, and what it changed into was not always entirely human.

There were wooden benches against the walls, and, sitting on them or standing beside them, perhaps ten people. They kept their distance from each other: a mixed lot, who included a dark-skinned, matronly woman in a red sari, several shabby-looking businessmen, and others, too close to the fire for Shadow to be able to make them out.

“Where are they?” whispered Wednesday fiercely, to Nancy. “Well? Where are they? There should be scores of us here. Dozens!”

“You did all the inviting,” said Nancy. “I think it’s a wonder you got as many here as you did. You think I should tell a story, to start things off?”

Wednesday shook his head. “Out of the question.”

“They don’t look very friendly,” said Nancy. “A story’s a good way of gettin’ someone on your side. And you don’t have a bard to sing to them.”

“No stories,” said Wednesday. “Not now. Later, there will be time for stories. Not now.”

“No stories. Right. I’ll just be the warm-up man.” And Mr. Nancy strode out into the firelight with an easy smile.

“I know what you are all thinking,” he said. “You are thinking, what is Compé Anansi doing, coming out to talk to you all, when the All-Father called you all here, just like he called me here? Well, you know, sometimes people need reminding of things. I look around when I come in, and I thought, Where’s the rest of us? But then I thought, just because we are few and they are many, we are weak, and they are powerful, it does not mean that we are lost.

“You know, one time I saw Tiger down at the waterhole: he had the biggest testicles of any animal, and the sharpest claws, and two front teeth as long as knives and as sharp as blades. And I said to him, ‘Brother Tiger, you go for a swim, I’ll look after your balls for you.’ He was so proud of his balls. So he got into the waterhole for a swim, and I put his balls on, and left him my own little spider-balls. And then, you know what I did? I ran away, fast as my legs would take me.

“I didn’t stop till I got to the next town. And I saw Old Monkey there. ‘You lookin’ mighty fine, Anansi,’ said Old Monkey. I said to him, ‘You know what they all singin’ in the town over there?’ ‘What are they singin’?’ he asks me. ‘They singin’ the funniest song,’ I told him. Then I did a dance, and I sings,

“Old Monkey he laughs fit to bust, holding his side and shakin’, and stampin’, then he starts singin’, ‘Tiger’s Balls, I ate tiger’s balls,’ snappin’ his fingers, spinnin’ around on his two feet. ‘That’s a fine song,’ he says, ‘I’m going to sing it to all my friends.’ ‘You do that,’ I tell him, and I head back to the watering hole.

“There’s Tiger, down by the watering hole, walking up and down, with his tail switchin’ and swishin’ and his ears and the fur on his neck up as far as they can go, and he’s snappin’ at every insect comes by with his huge old saber-teeth, and his eyes flashin’ orange fire. He looks mean and scary and big, but danglin’ between his legs, there’s the littlest balls in the littlest blackest most wrinkledy ball-sack you ever did see.

“‘Hey, Anansi,’ he says, when he sees me. ‘You were supposed to be guarding my balls while I went swimming. But when I got out of the swimming hole, there was nothing on the side of the bank but these little black shriveled-up good-for-nothing spider balls I’m wearing.’

“‘I done my best,’ I tells him, ‘but it was those monkeys, they come by and eat your balls all up, and when I tell them off, then they pulled off my own little balls. And I was so ashamed I ran away.’

“‘You a liar, Anansi,’ says Tiger. ‘I’m going to eat your liver.’ But then he hears the monkeys coming from their town to the watering hole. A dozen happy monkeys, boppin’ down the path, clickin’ their fingers and singin’ as loud as they could sing,

“And Tiger, he growls, and he roars and he’s off into the forest after them, and the monkeys screech and head for the highest trees. And I scratch my nice new big balls, and damn they felt good hangin’ between my skinny legs, and I walk on home. And even today, Tiger keeps chasin’ monkeys. So you all remember: just because you’re small, doesn’t mean you got no power.”

Mr. Nancy smiled, and bowed his head, and spread his hands, accepting the applause and laughter like a pro, and then he turned and walked back to where Shadow and Czernobog were standing.

“I thought I said no stories,” said Wednesday.

“You call that a story?” said Nancy. “I barely cleared my throat. Just warmed them up for you. Go knock them dead.”

Wednesday walked out into the firelight, a big old man with a glass eye in a brown suit and an old Armani coat. He stood there, looking at the people on the wooden benches, saying nothing for longer than Shadow could believe someone could comfortably say nothing. And, finally, he spoke.

“You know me,” he said. “You all know me. Some of you have no cause to love me, and I’m not sure I can blame you for that, but love me or not, you know me.”

There was a rustling, a stir among the people on the benches.

“I’ve been here longer than most of you. Like the rest of you, I figured we could get by on what we got. Not enough to make us happy, but enough to keep going.

“That may not be the case any more. There’s a storm coming, and it’s not a storm of our making.”

He paused. Now he stepped forward, and folded his arms across his chest.

“When the people came to America they brought us with them. They brought me, and Loki and Thor, Anansi and the Lion-God, Leprechauns and Cluracans and Banshees, Kubera and Frau Holle and Ashtaroth, and they brought you. We rode here in their minds, and we took root. We traveled with the settlers to the new lands across the ocean.

“The land is vast. Soon enough, our people abandoned us, remembered us only as creatures of the old land, as things that had not come with them to the new. Our true believers passed on, or stopped believing, and we were left, lost and scared and dispossessed, to get by on what little smidgens of worship or belief we could find. And to get by as best we could.

“So that’s what we’ve done, gotten by, out on the edges of things, where no one was watching us too closely.

“We have, let us face it and admit it, little influence. We prey on them, and we take from them, and we get by; we strip and we whore and we drink too much; we pump gas and we steal and we cheat and we exist in the cracks at the edges of society. Old gods, here in this new land without gods.”

Wednesday paused. He looked from one to another of his listeners, grave and statesmanlike. They stared back at him impassively, their faces masklike and unreadable. Wednesday cleared his throat, and he spat, hard, into the fire. It flared and flamed, illuminating the inside of the hall.

“Now, as all of you will have had reason aplenty to discover for yourselves, there are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit-card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance.

“They are aware of us, and they fear us, and they hate us,” said Odin. “You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise. They will destroy us, if they can. It is time for us to band together. It is time for us to act.”

The old woman in the red sari stepped into the firelight. On her forehead was a small dark blue jewel. She said, “You called us here for this nonsense?” And then she snorted, a snort of mingled amusement and irritation.

Wednesday’s brows lowered. “I called you here, yes. But this is sense, Mama-ji, not nonsense. Even a child could see that.”

“So I am a child, am I?” She wagged a finger at him. “I was old in Kalighat before you were dreamed of, you foolish man. I am a child? Then I am a child, for there is nothing in your foolish talk to see.”

Again, a moment of double-vision: Shadow saw the old woman, her dark face pinched with age and disapproval, but behind her he saw something huge, a naked woman with skin as black as a new leather jacket, and lips and tongue the bright red of arterial blood. Around her neck were skulls, and her many hands held knives, and swords, and severed heads.

“I did not call you a child, Mama-ji,” said Wednesday, peaceably. “But it seems self-evident—”

“The only thing that seems self-evident,” said the old woman, pointing (as behind her, through her, above her, a black finger, sharp-taloned, pointed in echo), “is your own desire for glory. We’ve lived in peace in this country for a long time. Some of us do better than others, I agree. I do well. Back in India, there is an incarnation of me who does much better, but so be it. I am not envious. I’ve watched the new ones rise, and I’ve watched them fall again.” Her hand fell to her side. Shadow saw that the others were looking at her, a mixture of expressions—respect, amusement, embarrassment—in their eyes. “They worshiped the railroads here, only a blink of an eye ago. And now the iron gods are as forgotten as the emerald hunters…”

“Make your point, Mama-ji,” said Wednesday.

“My point?” Her nostrils flared. The corners of her mouth turned down. “I—and I am obviously only a child—say that we wait. We do nothing. We don’t know that they mean us harm.”

“And will you still counsel waiting when they come in the night and they kill you, or they take you away?”

Her expression was disdainful and amused: it was all in the lips and the eyebrows and the set of the nose. “If they try such a thing,” she said, “they will find me hard to catch, and harder still to kill.”

A squat young man sitting on the bench behind her harrumphed for attention, then said, with a booming voice, “All-Father, my people are comfortable. We make the best of what we have. If this war of yours goes against us, we could lose everything.”

Wednesday said, “You have already lost everything. I am offering you the chance to take something back.”

The fire blazed high as he spoke, illuminating the faces of the audience.

I don’t really believe, Shadow thought. I don’t believe any of this. Maybe I’m still fifteen. Mom’s still alive and I haven’t even met Laura yet. Everything that’s happened so far has been some kind of especially vivid dream. And yet he could not believe that either. All we have to believe with is our senses: the tools we use to perceive the world, our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

Then the fire burned out, and there was darkness in Valaskjalf, Odin’s Hall.

“Now what?” whispered Shadow.

“Now we go back to the Carousel room,” muttered Mr. Nancy, “and old One-Eye buys us all dinner, greases some palms, kisses some babies, and no one says the G-word any more.”

“G-word?”

“Gods. What were you doin’ the day they handed out brains, boy, anyway?”

“Someone was telling a story about stealing a tiger’s balls, and I had to stop and find out how it ended.”

Mr. Nancy chuckled.

“But nothing was resolved. Nobody agreed to anything.”

“He’s working them slowly. He’ll land ’em one at a time. You’ll see. They’ll come around in the end.”

Shadow could feel that a wind was coming up from somewhere, stirring his hair, touching his face, pulling at him.

They were standing in the room of the biggest Carousel in the world, listening to “The Emperor Waltz.”

There was a group of people, tourists by the look of them, talking with Wednesday over at the other side of the room, by the wall covered with all the wooden carousel horses: as many people as there had been shadowy figures in Wednesday’s Hall. “Through here,” boomed Wednesday, and he led them through the only exit, formed to look like the gaping mouth of a huge monster, its sharp teeth ready to rend them all to slivers. He moved among them like a politician, cajoling, encouraging, smiling, gently disagreeing, pacifying.

“Did that happen?” asked Shadow.

“Did what happen, shit-for-brains?” asked Mr. Nancy.

“The hall. The fire. Tiger balls. Riding the Carousel.”

“Heck, nobody’s allowed to ride the Carousel. Didn’t you see the signs? Now hush.”

The monster’s mouth led to the Organ Room, which puzzled Shadow—hadn’t they already come through that way? It was no less strange the second time. Wednesday led them all up some stairs, past life-sized models of the four horsemen of the apocalypse hanging from the ceiling, and they followed the signs to an early exit.

Shadow and Nancy brought up the rear. And then they were out of the House on the Rock, walking past the gift store and heading back into the parking lot.

“Pity we had to leave before the end,” said Mr. Nancy. “I was kind of hoping to see the biggest artificial orchestra in the whole world.”

“I’ve seen it,” said Czernobog. “It’s not so much.”

The restaurant was a big and barn-like structure, ten minutes up the road. Wednesday had told each of his guests that tonight’s dinner was on him, and had organized rides to the restaurant for any of them that didn’t have their own transportation.

Shadow wondered how they had gotten to the House on the Rock without their own transportation, and how they were going to get away again, but he said nothing. It seemed the smartest thing to say.

Shadow had a carful of Wednesday’s guests to ferry to the restaurant: the woman in the red sari sat in the front seat beside him. There were two men in the back seat: a peculiar-looking young man whose name Shadow had not properly caught, but thought might be Elvis, and another man, in a dark suit, who Shadow could not remember.

He had stood beside the man as he got into the car, had opened and closed the door for him, and was unable to remember anything about him. He turned around in the driver’s seat and looked at him, carefully noting his face, his hair, his clothes, making certain he would know him if he met him again, and turned back to start the car, to find that the man had slipped from his mind. An impression of wealth was left behind, but nothing more.

I’m tired, thought Shadow. He glanced to his right and snuck a glance at the Indian woman. He noted the tiny silver necklace of skulls that circled her neck, her charm bracelet of heads and hands that jangled, like tiny bells, when she moved. There was a dark blue jewel on her forehead. She smelled of spices, of cardamom and nutmeg and flowers. Her hair was pepper-and-salt, and she smiled when she saw him look at her.

“You call me Mama-ji,” she said.

“I am Shadow, Mama-ji,” said Shadow.

“And what do you think of your employer’s plans, Mister Shadow?”

He slowed, as a large black truck sped past, overtaking them with a spray of slush. “I don’t ask, he don’t tell,” he said.

“If you ask me, he wants a last stand. He wants us to go out in a blaze of glory. That’s what he wants. And we are old enough, or stupid enough, that maybe some of us will say yes.”

“It’s not my job to ask questions, Mama-ji,” said Shadow. The inside of the car filled with her tinkling laughter.

The man in the back seat—not the peculiar-looking young man, the other one—said something, and Shadow replied to him, but a moment later he was damned if he could remember what had been said.

The peculiar-looking young man had said nothing, but now he started to hum to himself, a deep, melodic, bass humming that made the interior of the car vibrate and rattle and buzz.

The peculiar-looking man was of average height, but of an odd shape: Shadow had heard of men who were barrel-chested before, but had no image to accompany the metaphor. This man was barrel-chested, and he had legs like, yes, like tree-trunks, and hands like, exactly, ham-hocks. He wore a black parka with a hood, several sweaters, thick dungarees, and, incongruously, in the winter and with those clothes, a pair of white tennis shoes, which were the same size and shape as shoe boxes. His fingers resembled sausages, with flat, squared-off fingertips.

“That’s some hum you got,” said Shadow from the driver’s seat.

“Sorry,” said the peculiar young man, in a deep, deep voice, embarrassed. He stopped humming.

“No, I enjoyed it,” said Shadow. “Don’t stop.”

The peculiar young man hesitated, then commenced to hum once more, his voice as deep and reverberant as before. This time there were words interspersed in the humming. “Down down down,” he sang, so deeply that the windows rattled. “Down down down, down down, down down.”

Christmas lights were draped across the eaves of every house and building that they drove past. They ranged from discreet golden lights that dripped twinkles to giant displays of snowmen and teddy bears and multicolored stars.

Shadow pulled up at the restaurant and he let his passengers off by the front door, then he got back into the car. He would park it at the back of the parking lot. He wanted to make the short walk back to the restaurant on his own, in the cold, to clear his head.

He parked the car beside a black truck. He wondered if it was the same one that had sped past him earlier.

He closed the car door, and stood there in the parking lot, his breath steaming.

Inside the restaurant, Shadow could imagine Wednesday already sitting all his guests down around a big table, working the room. Shadow wondered whether he had really had Kali in the front of his car, wondered what he had been driving in the back…

“Hey, bud, you got a match?” said a voice that was half-familiar, and Shadow turned to apologize and say no, he didn’t have a match, but the gun barrel hit him over the left eye, and he started to fall. He put out an arm to steady himself as he went down. Someone pushed something soft into his mouth, to stop him crying out, and taped it into position: easy, practiced moves, like a butcher gutting a chicken.

Shadow tried to shout, to warn Wednesday, to warn them all, but nothing came out of his mouth but a muffled noise.

“The quarry are all inside,” said the half-familiar voice. “Everyone in position?” A crackle of a voice, half-audible through a radio. “Let’s move in and round them all up.”

“What about the big guy?” said another voice.

“Package him up, take him out,” said the first voice.

They put a bag-like hood over Shadow’s head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape, and put him in the back of a truck, and drove him away.

There were no windows in the tiny room in which they had locked Shadow. There was a plastic chair, a lightweight folding table, and a bucket with a cover on it, which served Shadow as a makeshift toilet. There was also a six-foot-long strip of yellow foam on the floor, and a thin blanket with a long-since-crusted brown stain in the center: blood or shit or food, Shadow didn’t know and didn’t care to investigate. There was a naked bulb behind a metal grille high in the room, but no light switch that Shadow had been able to find. The light was always on. There was no door handle on his side of the door.

He was hungry.

The first thing he had done, when the spooks had pushed him into the room, after they’d ripped off the tape from his ankles and wrists and mouth and left him alone, was to walk around the room and inspect it, carefully. He tapped the walls. They sounded dully metallic. There was a small ventilation grid at the top of the room. The door was soundly locked.

He was bleeding above the left eyebrow in a slow ooze. His head ached.

The floor was uncarpeted. He tapped it. It was made of the same metal as the walls.

He took the top off the bucket, pissed in it, and covered it once more. According to his watch only four hours had passed since the raid on the restaurant.

His wallet was gone, but they had left him his coins.

He sat on the chair, at the card-table. The table was covered with a cigarette-burned green baize. Shadow practiced appearing to push coins through the table. Then he took two quarters and made up a Pointless Coin Trick.

He concealed a quarter in his right palm, and openly displayed the other quarter in his left hand, between finger and thumb. Then he appeared to take the quarter from his left hand, while actually letting it drop back into his left hand. He opened his right hand to display the quarter that had been there all along.

The thing about coin manipulation was that it took all Shadow’s head to do it; or rather, he could not do it if he was angry or upset, so the action of practicing an illusion, even one with no possible use on its own—consider, he had expended an enormous amount of effort and skill to make it appear that he had moved a quarter from one hand to the other, something that it takes no skill whatever to do for real—calmed him, cleared his mind of turmoil and fear.

He began a trick even more pointless: a one-handed half-dollar-to-penny transformation, but with his two quarters. Each of the coins was alternately concealed and revealed as the trick progressed: he began with one quarter visible, held between the tips of his forefingers, the other hidden horizontally in the fork of his thumb, a Downs palm. He raised his hand to his mouth and blew on the coin, while slipping the visible quarter onto the tip of his third finger and pushing it into a classic palm, as the first two fingers took the hidden quarter out of the Downs palm and presented it. The effect was that he displayed a quarter in his hand, raised it to his mouth, blew on it, and lowered it again, displaying the same quarter all the while.

He did it over and over and over again.

He wondered if they were going to kill him, and his hand trembled, just a little, and one of the quarters dropped from his fingertip onto the stained green baize of the card table.

And then, because he just couldn’t do it any more, he put the coins away, and took out the Liberty-head dollar that Zorya Polunochnaya had given him, and held on to it tightly, and waited.

At three in the morning, by his watch, the spooks returned to interrogate him. Two men in dark suits, with dark hair and shiny black shoes. Spooks. One was square-jawed, wide-shouldered, great hair, looked like he had played football in high school, badly bitten fingernails, the other had a receding hairline, silver-rimmed round glasses, manicured nails. While they looked nothing alike, Shadow found himself suspecting that, on some level, possibly cellular, the two men were identical. They stood on each side of the card table, looking down at him.

“How long have you been working for Cargo, sir?” asked one.

“I don’t know what that is,” said Shadow.

“He calls himself Wednesday. Grimm. Olfather. Old guy. You’ve been seen with him, sir.”

“I’ve been working for him for three days.”

“Don’t lie to us, sir,” said the spook with the glasses.

“Okay,” said Shadow. “I won’t. But it’s still three days.”

The clean-jawed spook reached down and twisted Shadow’s ear between finger and thumb. He squeezed as he twisted. The pain was intense. “We told you not to lie to us, sir,” he said, mildly. Then he let go.

Each of the spooks had a gun-bulge under his jacket. Shadow did not hit the man back. He pretended he was back in prison. Do your own time, thought Shadow. Don’t tell them anything they don’t know already. Don’t ask questions.

“These are dangerous people you’re palling around with, sir,” said the spook with glasses. “You will be doing your country a service by turning state’s evidence.” He smiled, sympathetically: I’m the good cop, said the smile.

“I see,” said Shadow.

“And if you don’t want to help us, sir,” said the clean-jawed spook, “you can see what we’re like when we’re not happy.” He hit Shadow in the stomach again, with his fist. It wasn’t torture, Shadow thought, just punctuation: I’m the bad cop. He retched in pain.

“I would like to make you happy,” said Shadow, as soon as he could speak.

“All we ask is your cooperation, sir.”

“Can I ask…” gasped Shadow (Don’t ask questions, he thought, but it was too late, the words were already spoken), “can I ask who I’ll be cooperating with?”

“You want us to tell you our names?” asked the clean-jawed spook. “You have to be out of your mind.”

“No, he’s got a point,” said the spook with glasses. “It may make it easier for him to relate to us.” He looked at Shadow and smiled like a man advertising toothpaste. “Hi. I’m Mister Stone, sir. My colleague is Mister Wood.”

“Actually,” said Shadow, “I meant, what agency are you with? CIA? FBI?”

Stone shook his head. “Chee. It’s not as easy as that, any more, sir. Things just aren’t that simple.”

“The private sector,” said Wood, “the public sector. You know. There’s a lot of interplay these days.”

“But I can assure you,” said Stone, with another smiley smile, “we are the good guys. Are you hungry, sir?” He reached into a pocket of his jacket, pulled out a Snickers bar. “Here. A gift.”

“Thanks,” said Shadow. He unwrapped the Snickers bar and ate it.

“I guess you’d like something to drink with that. Coffee? Beer?”

“Water, please,” said Shadow.

Stone walked to the door, knocked on it. He said something to the guard on the other side of the door, who nodded and returned a minute later with a polystyrene cup filled with cold water.

“CIA,” said Wood. He shook his head, ruefully. “Those bozos. Hey, Stone. I heard a new CIA joke. Okay: how can we be sure the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assassination?”

“I don’t know,” said Stone. “How can we be sure?”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” said Wood.

They both laughed.

“Feeling better now, sir?” asked Stone.

“I guess.”

“So why don’t you tell us what happened this evening, sir?”

“We did some tourist stuff. Went to the House on the Rock. Went out for some food. You know the rest.”

Stone sighed, heavily. Wood shook his head, as if disappointed, and kicked Shadow in the kneecap. The pain was excruciating. Then Wood pushed a fist slowly into Shadow’s back, just above the right kidney, and he twisted his fist, and the pain was worse for Shadow than the pain in his knee.

I’m bigger than either of them, he thought. I can take them. But they were armed; and even if he—somehow—killed or subdued them both, he’d still be locked in the cell with them. (But he’d have a gun. He’d have two guns.) (No.)

Wood was keeping his hands away from Shadow’s face. No marks. Nothing permanent: just fists and feet on his torso and knees. It hurt, and Shadow clutched the Liberty dollar tight in the palm of his hand, and waited for it to be over.

And after far too long a time the beating ended.

“We’ll see you in a couple of hours, sir,” said Stone. “You know, Woody really hated to have to do that. We’re reasonable men. Like I said, we are the good guys. You’re on the wrong side. Meantime, why don’t you try to get a little sleep?”

“You better start taking us seriously,” said Wood.

“Woody’s got a point there, sir,” said Stone. “Think about it.”

The door slammed closed behind them. Shadow wondered if they would turn out the light, but they didn’t, and it blazed into the room like a cold eye. Shadow crawled across the floor to the yellow foam-rubber pad and climbed onto it, pulling the thin blanket over himself, and he closed his eyes, and he held on to nothing, and he held on to dreams.

Time passed.

He was fifteen again, and his mother was dying, and she was trying to tell him something very important, and he couldn’t understand her. He moved in his sleep and a shaft of pain moved him from half-sleep to half-waking, and he winced.

Shadow shivered under the thin blanket. His right arm covered his eyes, blocking out the light of the bulb. He wondered whether Wednesday and the others were still at liberty, if they were even still alive. He hoped that they were.

The silver dollar remained cold in his left hand. He could feel it there, as it had been during the beating. He wondered idly why it did not warm to his body temperature. Half-asleep, now, and half-delirious, the coin, and the idea of Liberty, and the moon, and Zorya Polunochnaya somehow became intertwined in one woven beam of silver light that shone from the depths to the heavens, and he rode the silver beam up and away from the heartache and the fear, away from the pain and, blessedly, back into dreams…

From far away he could hear some kind of noise, but it was too late to think about it: he belonged to sleep now.

A half-thought: he hoped it was not people coming to wake him up, to hit him or to shout at him. And then, he noticed with pleasure, he was really asleep, and no longer cold.

Somebody somewhere was shouting for help, in his dream or out of it.

Shadow rolled over on the foam rubber, finding new places that hurt as he rolled, hoping that he had not woken fully and relieved to find sleep was enfolding him once more.

Someone was shaking his shoulder.

He wanted to ask them not to wake him, to let him sleep and leave him be, but it came out as a grunt.

“Puppy?” said Laura. “You have to wake up. Please wake up, hon.”

And there was a moment’s gentle relief. He had had such a strange dream, of prisons and con-men and down-at-heel gods, and now Laura was waking him to tell him it was time for work, and perhaps there would be time enough before work to steal some coffee and a kiss, or more than a kiss; and he put out his hand to touch her.

Her flesh was cold as ice, and sticky.

Shadow opened his eyes.

“Where did all the blood come from?” he asked.

“Other people,” she said. “It’s not mine. I’m filled with formaldehyde, mixed with glycerin and lanolin.”

“Which other people?” he asked.

“The guards,” she said. “It’s okay. I killed them. You better move. I don’t think I gave anyone a chance to raise the alarm. Take a coat from out there, or you’ll freeze your butt off.”

“You killed them?”

She shrugged, and half-smiled, awkwardly. Her hands looked as if she had been finger-painting, composing a picture that had been executed solely in crimsons, and there were splashes and spatters on her face and clothes (the same blue suit in which she had been buried) that made Shadow think of Jackson Pollock, because it was less problematic to think of Jackson Pollock than to accept the alternative.

“It’s easier to kill people, when you’re dead yourself,” she told him. “I mean, it’s not such a big deal. You’re not so prejudiced any more.”

“It’s still a big deal to me,” said Shadow.

“You want to stay here until the morning crew comes?” she said. “You can if you like. I thought you’d like to get out of here.”

“They’ll think I did it,” he said, stupidly.

“Maybe,” she said. “Put on a coat, hon. You’ll freeze.”

He walked out into the corridor. At the end of the corridor was a guardroom. In the guardroom were four dead men: three guards, and the man who had called himself Stone. His friend was nowhere to be seen. From the blood-colored skid-marks on the floor, two of them had been dragged into the guardroom, and dropped onto the floor.

Shadow’s coat was hanging from the coat rack. His wallet was still in the inside pocket, apparently untouched. Laura pulled open a couple of cardboard boxes, filled with candy bars.

The guards, now he could see them properly, were wearing dark camouflage uniforms, but there were no official tags on them, nothing to say for whom they were working. They might have been weekend duck hunters, dressed for the shoot.

Laura reached out her cold hand, and squeezed Shadow’s hand in hers. She had the gold coin he had given her around her neck, on a golden chain.

“That looks nice,” he said.

“Thanks.” She smiled, prettily.

“What about the others?” he asked. “Wednesday, and the rest of them? Where are they?” Laura passed him a handful of candy bars, and he filled his pockets with them.

“There wasn’t anybody else here. A lot of empty cells, and one with you in it. Oh, and one of the men had gone into the cell down there to jack off with a magazine. He got such a shock.”

“You killed him while he was jerking himself off?”

She shrugged. “I guess,” she said, uncomfortably. “I was worried they were hurting you. Someone has to watch out for you, and I told you I would, didn’t I? Here, take these.” They were chemical hand- and footwarmers: thin pads—you broke the seal and they heated up to a little above body temperature and stayed that way for hours. Shadow pocketed them.

“Look out for me. Yes,” he said, “you did.”

She reached out a finger, stroked him above his left eyebrow. “You’re hurt,” she said.

“I’m okay,” he said.

He opened a metal door in the wall. It swung open slowly. There was a four-foot drop to the ground, and he swung himself down to what felt like gravel. He picked up Laura by the waist, swung her down, as he used to swing her, easily, without a second thought…

The moon came out from behind a thick cloud. It was low on the horizon, ready to set, but the light it cast onto the snow was enough to see by.

They had emerged from what turned out to be the black-painted metal car of a long freight train, parked or abandoned in a woodland siding. The series of cars went on as far as he could see, into the trees and away. Of course he had been on a train. He should have known.

“How the hell did you find me here?” he asked his dead wife.

She shook her head slowly, amused. “You shine like a beacon in a dark world,” she told him. “It wasn’t that hard. Now,” she told him, “you need to go. Just go. Go as far and as fast as you can. Don’t use your credit cards and you should be fine.”

“Where should I go?”

She pushed a hand through her matted hair, flicking it back out of her eyes. “The road’s that way,” she told him. “Do whatever you can. Steal a car if you have to. Go south.”

“Laura,” he said, and hesitated. “Do you know what’s going on? Do you know who these people are? Who did you kill?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think I know.”

“I owe you,” said Shadow. “I’d still be in there if it wasn’t for you. I don’t think they had anything good planned for me.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think they did.”

They walked away from the empty train cars. Shadow wondered about the other trains he’d seen, blank windowless metal cars which went on for mile after mile hooting their lonely way through the night. His fingers closed around the Liberty dollar in his pocket, and he remembered Zorya Polunochnaya, and the way she had looked at him in the moonlight. Did you ask her what she wanted?…It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you.

“Laura…What do you want?” he asked.

“You really want to know?”

“Yes. Please.”

Laura looked up at him with dead blue eyes. “I want to be alive again,” she said. “Not in this half-life. I want to be really alive. I want to feel my heart pumping in my chest again. I want to feel blood moving through me—hot, and salty, and real. It’s weird, you don’t think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you’ll know.” She rubbed her eyes, smudging her face with red from the mess on her hands. “Look, I don’t know why this happened to me. But it’s hard. You know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because it’s easier to pass for real, in the dark. And I don’t want to have to pass. I want to be alive.”

“I don’t understand what you want me to do.”

“Make it happen, hon. You’ll figure it out. I know you will.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try. And if I do figure it out, how do I find you?”

But she was gone, and there was nothing left in the woodland but a gentle gray in the sky to show him where east was, and on the bitter December wind a lonely wail that might have been the cry of the last night bird or the call of the first bird of dawn.

Shadow set his face to the south, and he began to walk.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Shadow had been walking south, or what he hoped was more or less south, for several hours, heading along a narrow and unmarked road through the woods somewhere in, he imagined, southern Wisconsin. Several jeeps came down the road toward him at one point, headlights blazing, and he ducked well back into the trees until they had passed. The early morning mist hung at waist level. The cars were black.

When, thirty minutes later, he heard the noise of distant helicopters coming from the west, he struck out away from the timber trail and into the woods. There were two helicopters, and he lay, crouched in a hollow beneath a fallen tree, and listened to them pass over. As they moved away, he looked out and looked up, for one hasty glance at the gray winter sky. He was satisfied to observe that the helicopters were painted a matte black. He waited beneath the tree until the noise of the helicopters was completely gone.

Under the trees the snow was little more than a dusting, which crunched underfoot. He was deeply grateful for the chemical hand- and feetwarmers, which kept his extremities from freezing. Beyond that, he was numb: heart-numb, mind-numb, soul-numb. And the numbness, he realized, went a long way down, and a long way back.

So what do I want? he asked himself. He couldn’t answer, so he just kept on walking, a step at a time, on and on through the woods. Trees looked familiar, moments of landscape were perfectly déjà-vued. Could he be walking in circles? Maybe he would just walk and walk and walk until the warmers and the candy bars ran out and then sit down and never get up again.

He reached a large stream, of the kind the locals called a creek and pronounced crick, and decided to follow it. Streams led to rivers, rivers all led to the Mississippi, and if he kept walking, or stole a boat or built a raft, eventually he’d get to New Orleans, where it was warm, an idea which seemed both comforting and unlikely.

There were no more helicopters. He had the feeling that the ones that had passed overhead had been cleaning up the mess at the freight train siding, not hunting for him, otherwise they would have returned; there would have been tracker dogs and sirens and the whole paraphernalia of pursuit. Instead, there was nothing.

What did he want? Not to get caught. Not to get blamed for the deaths of the men on the train. “It wasn’t me,” he heard himself saying, “it was my dead wife.” He could imagine the expressions on the faces of the law officers. Then people could argue about whether he was crazy or not while he went to the chair…

He wondered whether Wisconsin had the death penalty. He wondered whether that would matter. He wanted to understand what was going on—and to find out how it was all going to end. And finally, producing a half-rueful grin, he realized that most of all he wanted everything to be normal. He wanted never to have gone to prison, for Laura to still be alive, for none of this ever to have happened.

“I’m afraid that’s not exactly an option, m’boy,” he thought to himself, in Wednesday’s gruff voice, and he nodded agreement. Not an option. You burned your bridges. So keep walking. Do your own time…

A distant woodpecker drummed against a rotten log.

Shadow became aware of eyes on him: a handful of red cardinals stared at him from a skeletal elder bush, then returned to pecking at the clusters of black elderberries. They looked like the illustrations in the Songbirds of North America calendar. He heard the birds’ video-arcade trills and zaps and whoops follow him along the side of the creek. Eventually, they faded away.

The dead fawn lay in a glade in the shadow of a hill, and a black bird the size of a small dog was picking at its side with a large, wicked beak, rending and tearing gobbets of red meat from the corpse. Its eyes were gone, but its head was untouched, and white fawn-spots were visible on its rump. Shadow wondered how it had died.

The black bird cocked its head onto one side, and then said, in a voice like stones being struck, “You shadow man.”

“I’m Shadow,” said Shadow. The bird hopped up onto the fawn’s rump, raised its head, ruffled its crown and neck feathers. It was enormous and its eyes were black beads. There was something intimidating about a bird that size, this close.

“Says he will see you in Kay-ro,” tokked the raven. Shadow wondered which of Odin’s ravens this was: Huginn or Muninn: Memory or Thought.

“Kay-ro?” he asked.

“In Egypt.”

“How am I going to go to Egypt?”

“Follow Mississippi. Go south. Find Jackal.”

“Look,” said Shadow, “I don’t want to seem like I’m…Jesus, look…” He paused. Regrouped. He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently brunching on Bambi. “Okay. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t want mysteries.”

“Mysteries,” agreed the bird, helpfully.

“What I want is explanations. Jackal in Kay-ro. This does not help me. It’s a line from a bad spy thriller.”

“Jackal. Friend. Tok. Kay-ro.”

“So you said. I’d like a little more information than that.”

The bird half-turned, and pulled another bloody strip of raw venison from the fawn’s ribs. Then it flew off into the trees, the red strip dangling from its beak like a long, bloody worm.

“Hey! Can you at least get me back to a real road?” called Shadow.

The raven flew up and away. Shadow looked at the corpse of the baby deer. He decided that if he were a real woodsman, he would slice off a steak and grill it over a wood fire. Instead, he sat on a fallen tree and ate a Snickers bar and knew that he really wasn’t a real woodsman.

The raven cawed from the edge of the clearing.

“You want me to follow you?” asked Shadow. “Or has Timmy fallen down another well?” The bird cawed again, impatiently. Shadow started walking toward it. It waited until he was close, then flapped heavily into another tree, heading somewhat to the left of the way Shadow had originally been going.

“Hey,” said Shadow. “Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are.”

The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.

“Say ‘Nevermore,’” said Shadow.

“Fuck you,” said the raven. It said nothing else as they went through the woodland together, the raven in the lead and flying from tree to tree, the man stomping heavily through the undergrowth trying to catch up.

The sky was a uniform gray. It was almost midday.

In half an hour they reached a blacktop road on the edge of a town, and the raven flew back into the wood. Shadow observed a Culver’s Frozen Custard ButterBurgers sign, and, next to it, a gas station. He went into the Culver’s, which was empty of customers. There was a keen young man with a shaven head behind the cash register. Shadow ordered two ButterBurgers and french fries. Then he went into the restroom to clean up. He looked a real mess. He did an inventory of the contents of his pockets: he had a few coins, including the silver Liberty dollar, a disposable toothbrush and toothpaste, three Snickers bars, five chemical heater pads, a wallet (with nothing more in it than his driver’s license and a credit card—he wondered how much longer the credit card had to live), and in the coat’s inside pocket, a thousand dollars in fifties and twenties, his take from yesterday’s bank job. He washed his face and hands in hot water, slicked down his dark hair, then went back into the restaurant and ate his burgers and fries, and drank his coffee.

He went back to the counter. “You want frozen custard?” asked the keen young man.

“No. No thanks. Is there anywhere around here I could rent a car? My car died, back down the road a way.”

The young man scratched his head-stubble. “Not around here, mister. If your car died you could call Triple-A. Or talk to the gas station next door about a tow.”

“A fine idea,” said Shadow. “Thanks.”

He walked across the melting snow, from the Culver’s parking lot to the gas station. He bought candy bars and beef jerky sticks and more chemical hand-and feetwarmers.

“Anywhere hereabouts I could rent a car?” he asked the woman behind the cash register. She was immensely plump, and bespectacled, and was delighted to have someone to talk to.

“Let me think,” she said. “We’re kind of out of the way here. They do that kind of thing over in Madison. Where you going?”

“Kay-ro,” he said. “Wherever that is.”

“I know where that is,” she said. “Hand me that map from that rack over there.” Shadow passed her a plastic-coated map of Illinois. She unfolded it, then pointed in triumph to the bottommost corner of the state. “There it is.”

“Cairo?”

“That’s how they pronounce the one in Egypt. The one in Little Egypt, they call that one Kayro. They got a Thebes down there, all sorts. My sister-in-law comes from Thebes. I asked her about the one in Egypt, she looked at me as if I had a screw loose.” The woman chuckled like a drain.

“Any pyramids?” The city was five hundred miles away, almost directly south.

“Not that they ever told me. They call it Little Egypt because back, oh, mebbe a hundred, hundred and fifty years back, there was a famine all over. Crops failed. But they didn’t fail down there. So everyone went there to buy food. Like in the Bible. Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. Off we go to Egypt, bad-a-boom.”

“So if you were me, and you needed to get there, how would you go?” asked Shadow.

“Drive.”

“Car died a few miles down the road. It was a pieceashit if you’ll pardon my language,” said Shadow.

“Pee-Oh-Esses,” she said. “Yup. That’s what my brother-in-law calls ’em. He buys and sells cars in a small way. He’ll call me up, say, ‘Mattie, I just sold another Pee-Oh-Ess.’ Say, maybe he’d be interested in your old car. For scrap or something.”

“It belongs to my boss,” said Shadow, surprising himself with the fluency and ease of his lies. “I need to call him, so he can come pick it up.” A thought struck him. “Your brother-in-law, is he around here?”

“He’s in Muscoda. Ten minutes south of here. Just over the river. Why?”

“Well, does he have a Pee-Oh-Ess he’d like to sell me for, mm, five, six hundred bucks?”

She smiled sweetly. “Mister, he doesn’t have a car on that back lot you couldn’t buy with a full tank of gas for five hundred dollars. But don’t you tell him I said so.”

“Would you call him?” asked Shadow.

“I’m way ahead of you,” she told him, and she picked up the phone. “Hon? It’s Mattie. You get over here this minute. I got a man here wants to buy a car.”

The piece of shit he chose was a 1983 Chevy Nova, which he bought, with a full tank of gas, for four hundred and fifty dollars. It had almost a quarter of a million miles on the clock, and smelled faintly of bourbon, tobacco, and more strongly of something that reminded Shadow of bananas. He couldn’t tell what color it was, under the dirt and the snow. Still, of all the vehicles in Mattie’s brother-in-law’s back lot, it was the only one that looked like it might take him five hundred miles.

The deal was done in cash, and Mattie’s brother-in-law never asked for Shadow’s name or social security number or for anything except the money.

Shadow drove west, then south, with five hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket, keeping off the interstate. The piece of shit had a radio, but nothing happened when he turned it on. A sign said he’d left Wisconsin and was now in Illinois. He passed a strip-mining works, huge blue arc lights burning in the dim midwinter daylight.

He stopped and ate lunch at a place called Mom’s, catching them just before they closed for the afternoon. The food was okay.

Each town he passed through had an extra sign up beside the sign telling him that he was now entering Our Town (pop. 720). The extra sign announced that the town’s Under-14s team was the third runner-up in the interstate Hundred-Yard Sprint, or that the town was the home of the Illinois Girls’ Under-16s Wrestling semifinalist.

He drove on, head nodding, feeling more drained and exhausted with every minute that passed. He ran a stoplight, and was nearly sideswiped by a woman in a Dodge. As soon as he got out into open country he pulled off onto an empty tractor path on the side of the road, and he parked by a snow-spotted stubbly field in which a slow procession of fat black wild turkeys walked like a line of mourners; he turned off the engine, stretched out in the back seat, and fell asleep.

Darkness; a sensation of falling—as if he were tumbling down a great hole, like Alice. He fell for a hundred years into darkness. Faces passed him, swimming out of the black, then each face was ripped up and away before he could touch it…

Abruptly, and without transition, he was not falling. Now he was in a cave, and he was no longer alone. Shadow stared into familiar eyes: huge, liquid black eyes. They blinked.

Under the earth: yes. He remembered this place. The stink of wet cow. Firelight flickered on the wet cave walls, illuminating the buffalo head, the man’s body, skin the color of brick clay.

“Can’t you people leave me be?” asked Shadow. “I just want to sleep.”

The buffalo man nodded, slowly. His lips did not move, but a voice in Shadow’s head said, “Where are you going, Shadow?”

“Cairo.”

“Why?”

“Where else have I got to go? It’s where Wednesday wants me to go. I drank his mead.” In Shadow’s dream, with the power of dream-logic behind it, the obligation seemed unarguable: he drank Wednesday’s mead three times, and sealed the pact—what other choice of action did he have?

The buffalo-headed man reached a hand into the fire, stirring the embers and the broken branches into a blaze. “The storm is coming,” he said. Now there was ash on his hands, and he wiped it onto his hairless chest, leaving soot-black streaks.

“So you people keep telling me. Can I ask you a question?”

There was a pause. A fly settled on the furry forehead. The buffalo man flicked it away. “Ask.”

“Is this true? Are these people really gods? It’s all so…” He paused. Then he said, “Unlikely,” which was not exactly the word he had been going for but seemed to be the best he could do.

“What are gods?” asked the buffalo man.

“I don’t know,” said Shadow.

There was a tapping, relentless and dull. Shadow waited for the buffalo man to say something more, to explain what gods were, to explain the whole tangled nightmare that his life seemed to have become. He was cold. The fire no longer burned.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Shadow opened his eyes, and, groggily, sat up. He was freezing, and the sky outside the car was the deep luminescent purple that divides the dusk from the night.

Tap. Tap. Someone said, “Hey, mister,” and Shadow turned his head. The someone was standing beside the car, no more than a darker shape against the darkling sky. Shadow reached out a hand and cranked down the window a few inches. He made several waking-up noises, and then he said, “Hi.”

“You all right? You sick? You been drinking?” The voice was high—a woman’s or a boy’s.

“I’m fine,” said Shadow. “Hold on.” He opened the door, and got out, stretching his aching limbs and neck as he did so. Then he rubbed his hands together, to get the blood circulating and to warm them up.

“Whoa. You’re pretty big.”

“That’s what they tell me,” said Shadow. “Who are you?”

“I’m Sam,” said the voice.

“Boy Sam or girl Sam?”

“Girl-Sam. I used to be Sammi with an i, and I’d do a smiley face over the i, but then I got completely sick of it because like absolutely everybody was doing it, so I stopped.”

“Okay, girl-Sam. You go over there, and look out at the road.”

“Why? Are you a crazed killer or something?”

“No,” said Shadow, “I need to take a leak and I’d like just the smallest amount of privacy.”

“Oh. Right. Okay. Got it. No problem. I am so with you. I can’t even pee if there’s someone in the next stall. Major shy bladder syndrome.”

“Now, please.”

She walked to the far side of the car, and Shadow took a few steps closer to the field, unzipped his jeans, and pissed against a fencepost for a very long time. He walked back to the car. The last of the gloaming had become night.

“You still there?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time.”

“Thank you. Do you want something?”

“Well, I wanted to see if you were okay. I mean, if you were dead or something I would have called the cops. But the windows were kind of fogged up so I thought, well, he’s probably still alive.”

“You live around here?”

“Nope. Hitchhiking down from Madison.”

“That’s not safe.”

“I’ve done it five times a year for three years now. I’m still alive. Where are you headed?”

“I’m going as far as Cairo.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m going to El Paso. Staying with my aunt for the holidays.”

“I can’t take you all the way,” said Shadow.

“Not El Paso, Texas. The other one, in Illinois. It’s a few hours south. You know where you are now?”

“No,” said Shadow. “I have no idea. Somewhere on Highway Fifty-two?”

“The next town’s Peru,” said Sam. “Not the one in Peru. The one in Illinois. Let me smell you. Bend down.” Shadow bent down, and the girl sniffed his face. “Okay. I don’t smell booze. You can drive. Let’s go.”

“What makes you think I’m giving you a ride?”

“Because I’m a damsel in distress,” she said, “and you are a knight in whatever. A really dirty car. You know someone wrote Wash Me! on your rear windshield?” Shadow got into the car and opened the passenger door. The light that goes on in cars when the front door is opened did not go on in this car.

“No,” he said, “I didn’t.”

She climbed in. “It was me,” she said. “I wrote it. While there was still enough light to see.”

Shadow started the car, turned on the headlights, and headed back onto the road. “Left,” said Sam helpfully. Shadow turned left, and he drove. After several minutes the heater started to work, and blessed warmth filled the car.

“You haven’t said anything yet,” said Sam. “Say something.”

“Are you human?” asked Shadow. “An honest-to-goodness, born-of-man-and-woman, living breathing human being?”

“Sure,” she said.

“Okay. Just checking. So what would you like me to say?”

“Something to reassure me, at this point. I suddenly have that oh shit I’m in the wrong car with a crazy man feeling.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve had that one. What would you find reassuring?”

“Just tell me you’re not an escaped convict or a mass murderer or something.”

He thought for a moment. “You know, I’m really not.”

“You had to think about it though, didn’t you?”

“Done my time. Never killed anybody.”

“Oh.”

They entered a small town, lit up by streetlights and blinking Christmas decorations, and Shadow glanced to his right. The girl had a tangle of short dark hair and a face that was both attractive and, he decided, faintly mannish: her features might have been chiseled out of rock. She was looking at him.

“What were you in prison for?”

“I hurt a couple of people real bad. I got angry.”

“Did they deserve it?”

Shadow thought for a moment. “I thought so at the time.”

“Would you do it again?”

“Hell, no. I lost three years of my life in there.”

“Mm. You got Indian blood in you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You looked like it, was all.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“S’okay. You hungry?”

Shadow nodded. “I could eat,” he said.

“There’s a good place just past the next set of lights. Good food. Cheap, too.”

Shadow pulled up in the parking lot. They got out of the car. He didn’t bother to lock it, although he pocketed the keys. He pulled out some coins to buy a newspaper. “Can you afford to eat here?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, raising her chin. “I can pay for myself.”

Shadow nodded. “Tell you what. I’ll toss you for it,” he said. “Heads you pay for my dinner, tails, I pay for yours.”

“Let me see the coin first,” she said, suspiciously. “I had an uncle had a double-headed quarter.”

She inspected it, satisfied herself there was nothing strange about the quarter. Shadow placed the coin head-up on his thumb and cheated the toss, so it wobbled and looked like it was spinning, then he caught it and flipped it over onto the back of his left hand, and uncovered it with his right, in front of her.

“Tails,” she said, happily. “Dinner’s on you.”

“Yup,” he said. “You can’t win them all.”

Shadow ordered the meatloaf, Sam ordered lasagna. Shadow flipped through the newspaper to see if there was anything in it about dead men in a freight train. There wasn’t. The only story of interest was on the cover: crows in record numbers were infesting the town. Local farmers wanted to hang dead crows around the town on public buildings to frighten the others away; ornithologists said that it wouldn’t work, that the living crows would simply eat the dead ones. The locals were implacable. “When they see the corpses of their friends,” said a spokesman, “they’ll know that we don’t want them here.”

The food was good, and it came mounded on steaming plates, more than any one person could eat.

“So what’s in Cairo?” asked Sam, with her mouth full.

“No idea. I got a message from my boss saying he needs me down there.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m an errand boy.”

She smiled. “Well,” she said, “you aren’t Mafia, not looking like that and driving that piece of shit. Why does your car smell like bananas, anyway?”

He shrugged, carried on eating.

Sam narrowed her eyes. “Maybe you’re a banana smuggler,” she said. “You haven’t asked me what I do yet.”

“I figure you’re at school.”

“UW Madison.”

“Where you are undoubtedly studying art history, women’s studies, and probably casting your own bronzes. And you probably work in a coffee house to help cover the rent.”

She put down her fork, nostrils flaring, eyes wide. “How the fuck did you do that?”

“What? Now you say, no, actually I’m studying Romance languages and ornithology.”

“So you’re saying that was a lucky guess or something?”

“What was?”

She stared at him with dark eyes. “You are one peculiar guy, Mister…I don’t know your name.”

“They call me Shadow,” he said.

She twisted her mouth wryly, as if she were tasting something she disliked. She stopped talking, put her head down, finished her lasagna.

“Do you know why it’s called Egypt?” asked Shadow, when Sam finished eating.

“Down Cairo way? Yeah. It’s in the delta of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Like Cairo in Egypt, in the Nile delta.”

“That makes sense.”

She sat back in her chair, ordered coffee and chocolate cream pie, ran a hand through her black hair. “You married, Mr. Shadow?” And then, as he hesitated, “Gee. I just asked another tricky question, didn’t I?”

“They buried her on Thursday,” he said, picking his words with care. “She was killed in a car crash.”

“Oh. God. Jesus. I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

An awkward pause. “My half-sister lost her kid, my nephew, end of last year. It’s rough.”

“Yeah. It is. What did he die of?”

She sipped her coffee. “We don’t know. We don’t even really know that he’s dead. He just vanished. But he was only thirteen. It was the middle of last winter. My sister was pretty broken up about it.”

“Were there any, any clues?” He sounded like a TV cop. He tried again. “Did they suspect foul play?” That sounded worse.

“They suspected my non-custodial asshole brother-in-law, his father. Who was asshole enough to have stolen him away. Probably did. But this is in a little town in the Northwoods. Lovely, sweet, pretty little town where no one ever locks their doors.” She sighed, shook her head. She held her coffee cup in both hands. Then she looked up at him, changing the subject. “How did you know I cast bronzes?”

“Lucky guess. It was just something to say.”

“Are you sure you aren’t part Indian?”

“Not that I know. It’s possible. I never met my father. I guess my ma would have told me if he was Native American, though. Maybe.”

Again the mouth-twist. Sam gave up halfway through her chocolate cream pie: the slice was half the size of her head. She pushed the plate across the table to Shadow. “You want?” He smiled, said, “Sure,” and finished it off.

The waitress handed them the check, and Shadow paid.

“Thanks,” said Sam.

It was getting colder now. The car coughed a couple of times before it started. Shadow drove back onto the road, and kept going south. “You ever read a guy named Herodotus?” he asked.

“Jesus. What?”

“Herodotus. You ever read his Histories?”

“You know,” she said, dreamily, “I don’t get it. I don’t get how you talk, or the words you use or anything. One moment you’re a big dumb guy, the next you’re reading my friggin’ mind, and the next we’re talking about Herodotus. So no. I have not read Herodotus. I’ve heard about him. Maybe on NPR. Isn’t he the one they call the father of lies?”

“I thought that was the Devil.”

“Yeah, him too. But they were talking about Herodotus saying there were giant ants and gryphons guarding gold mines, and how he made this stuff up.”

“I don’t think so. He wrote what he’d been told. It’s like, he’s writing these histories. And they’re mostly pretty good histories. Loads of weird little details—like, did you know, in Egypt, if a particularly beautiful girl, or the wife of a lord or whatever, died, they wouldn’t send her to the embalmer for three days? They’d let her body spoil in the heat first.”

“Why? Oh, hold on. Okay, I think I know why. Oh, that’s disgusting.”

“And there’re battles in there, all sorts of normal things. And then there are the gods. Some guy is running back to report on the outcome of a battle and he’s running and running, and he sees Pan in a glade. And Pan says, ‘Tell them to build me a temple here.’ So he says okay, and runs the rest of the way back. And he reports the battle news, and then says, ‘Oh, and by the way, Pan wants you to build him a temple.’ It’s really matter-of-fact, you know?”

“So there are stories with gods in them. What are you trying to say? That these guys had hallucinations?”

“No,” said Shadow. “That’s not it.”

She chewed a hangnail. “I read some book about brains,” she said. “My roommate had it and she kept waving it around. It was like, how five thousand years ago the lobes of the brain fused and before that people thought when the right lobe of the brain said anything it was the voice of some god telling them what to do. It’s just brains.”

“I like my theory better,” said Shadow.

“What’s your theory?”

“That back then people used to run into the gods from time to time.”

“Oh.” Silence: only the rattling of the car, the roar of the engine, the growling of the muffler—which did not sound healthy. Then, “Do you think they’re still there?”

“Where?”

“Greece. Egypt. The islands. Those places. Do you think if you walked where those people walked you’d see the gods?”

“Maybe. But I don’t think people’d know that was what they’d seen.”

“I bet it’s like space aliens,” she said. “These days, people see space aliens. Back then they saw gods. Maybe the space aliens come from the right side of the brain.”

“I don’t think the gods ever gave rectal probes,” said Shadow. “And they didn’t mutilate cattle themselves. They got people to do it for them.”

She chuckled. They drove in silence for a few minutes, and then she said, “Hey, that reminds me of my favorite god story, from Comparative Religion 101. You want to hear it?”

“Sure,” said Shadow.

“Okay. This is one about Odin. The Norse god. You know? There was some Viking king on a Viking ship—this was back in the Viking times, obviously—and they were becalmed, so he says he’ll sacrifice one of his men to Odin if Odin will send them a wind, and get them to land. Okay. The wind comes up, and they get to land. So, on land, they draw lots to figure out who gets sacrificed—and it’s the king himself. Well, he’s not happy about this, but they figure out that they can hang him in effigy and not hurt him. They take a calf’s intestines and loop them loosely around the guy’s neck, and they tie the other end to a thin branch, and they take a reed instead of a spear and poke him with it and go, ‘Okay, you’ve been hung’—hanged? —whatever—‘you’ve been sacrificed to Odin.’”

The road curved: Another Town, pop. 300, home of the runner-up to the State Under-12s speed-skating championship, two huge giant economy-sized funeral parlors on each side of the road, and how many funeral parlors do you need, Shadow wondered, when you only have three hundred people…?

“Okay. As soon as they say Odin’s name, the reed transforms into a spear and stabs the guy in the side, the calf intestines become a thick rope, the branch becomes a bough of a tree, and the tree pulls up, and the ground drops away, and the king is left hanging there to die with a wound in his side and his face going black. End of story. White people have some fucked-up gods, Mister Shadow.”

“Yes,” said Shadow. “You’re not white?”

“I’m a Cherokee,” she said.

“Full-blooded?”

“Nope. Only four pints. My mom was white. My dad was a real reservation Indian. He came out this way, eventually married my mom, had me, then when they split he went back to Oklahoma.”

“He went back to the reservation?”

“No. He borrowed money and opened a Taco Bell knock-off called Taco Bill’s. He does okay. He doesn’t like me. Says I’m half-breed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He’s a jerk. I’m proud of my Indian blood. It helps pay my college tuition. Hell, one day it’ll probably help get me a job, if I can’t sell my bronzes.”

“There’s always that,” said Shadow.

He stopped in El Paso, IL (pop. 2,500), to let Sam out at a down-at-heel house on the edge of the town. A large wire-framed model of a reindeer covered in twinkling lights stood in the front yard. “You want to come in?” she asked. “My aunt would give you a coffee.”

“No,” he said. “I’ve got to keep moving.”

She smiled at him, looking suddenly, and for the first time, vulnerable. She patted him on the arm. “You’re fucked up, mister. But you’re cool.”

“I believe that’s what they call the human condition,” said Shadow. “Thanks for the company.”

“No problem,” she said. “If you see any gods on the road to Cairo, you make sure and say hi to them from me.” She got out of the car, and went to the door of the house. She pressed a doorbell and stood there at the door, without looking back. Shadow waited until the door was opened and she was safely inside before he put his foot down and headed back for the highway. He passed through Normal, and Bloomington, and Lawndale.

At eleven that night Shadow started shaking. He was just entering Middletown. He decided he needed sleep, or just not to drive any longer, and he pulled up in front of a Night’s Inn, paid thirty-five dollars, cash in advance, for his ground-floor room, and went into the bathroom. A sad cockroach lay on its back in the middle of the tiled floor. Shadow took a towel and cleaned off the inside of the tub with it, then ran a bath. In the main room he took off his clothes and put them on the bed. The bruises on his torso were dark and vivid. He sat in the bath, watching the color of the bathwater change. Then, naked, he washed his socks and briefs and T-shirt in the basin, wrung them out and hung them on the clothesline that pulled out from the wall above the bathtub. He left the cockroach where it was, out of respect for the dead.

Shadow climbed into the bed. He wondered about watching an adult movie, but the pay-per-view device by the phone needed a credit card. Then again, he was not convinced that it would make him feel any better to watch other people have sex that he wasn’t having. He turned on the TV for company, pressed the Sleep button on the remote three times, which would make the TV set turn itself off automatically in forty-five minutes, by which time he figured he’d be fast asleep. It was a quarter to midnight.

The picture was motel-fuzzy, and the colors swam across the screen. He flipped from late show to late show in the televisual wasteland, unable to focus. Someone was demonstrating something that did something in the kitchen, and replaced a dozen other kitchen utensils, none of which Shadow possessed. Flip. A man in a suit explained that these were the end times and that Jesus—a four- or five-syllable word the way the man pronounced it—would make Shadow’s business prosper and thrive if Shadow sent him money. Flip: an episode of M*A*S*H ended and a Dick Van Dyke episode began.

Shadow hadn’t seen an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show for years, but there was something comforting about the 1965 black-and-white world it painted, and he put the channel changer down beside the bed, and turned off the bedside light. He watched the show, eyes slowly closing, aware that something was odd. He had not seen many episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, so he was not surprised that it was an episode he could not remember seeing before. What he found strange was the tone.

All the regulars were concerned about Rob’s drinking: he was missing days at work. They went to his home: he had locked himself in the bedroom, and had to be persuaded to come out: he was staggering drunk, but still pretty funny. His friends, played by Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie, left after getting some good gags in. Then, when Rob’s wife went to remonstrate with him, he hit her, hard, in the face. She sat down on the floor and began to cry, not in that famous Mary Tyler Moore wail, but in small, helpless sobs, hugging herself and whispering, “Don’t hit me, please, I’ll do anything, just don’t hit me any more.”

“What the fuck is this?” said Shadow, aloud.

The picture dissolved into phosphor-dot fuzz. When it came back, The Dick Van Dyke Show had, inexplicably, become I Love Lucy. Lucy was trying to persuade Ricky to let her replace their old icebox with a new refrigerator. When he left, however, she walked over to the couch and sat down, crossing her ankles, resting her hands in her lap, and staring out patiently in black and white across the years.

“Shadow?” she said. “We need to talk.”

Shadow said nothing. She opened her purse and took out a cigarette, lit it with an expensive silver lighter, put the lighter away. “I’m talking to you,” she said. “Well?”

“This is crazy,” said Shadow.

“Like the rest of your life is sane? Give me a fucking break.”

“Whatever. Lucille Ball talking to me from the TV is weirder by several orders of magnitude than anything that’s happened to me so far,” said Shadow.

“It’s not Lucille Ball. It’s Lucy Ricardo. And you know something—I’m not even her. It’s just an easy way to look, given the context. That’s all.” She shifted uncomfortably on the sofa.

“Who are you?” asked Shadow.

“Okay,” she said. “Good question. I’m the idiot box. I’m the TV. I’m the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I’m the boob tube. I’m the little shrine the family gathers to adore.”

“You’re the television? Or someone in the television?”

“The TV’s the altar. I’m what people are sacrificing to.”

“What do they sacrifice?” asked Shadow.

“Their time, mostly,” said Lucy. “Sometimes each other.” She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gun smoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.

“You’re a god?” said Shadow.

Lucy smirked, and took a lady-like puff of her cigarette. “You could say that,” she said.

“Sam says hi,” said Shadow.

“What? Who’s Sam? What are you talking about?”

Shadow looked at his watch. It was twenty-five past twelve. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “So, Lucy-on-the-TV. What do we need to talk about? Too many people have needed to talk recently. Normally it ends with someone hitting me.”

The camera moved in for a close-up: Lucy looked concerned, her lips pursed. “I hate that. I hate that people were hurting you, Shadow. I’d never do that, honey. No, I want to offer you a job.”

“Doing what?”

“Working for me. I’m really sorry. I heard about the trouble you had with the Spookshow, and I was impressed with how you dealt with it. Efficient, no-nonsense, effective. Who’d’ve thought you had it in you? They are really pissed.”

“Really?”

“They underestimated you, sweetheart. Not a mistake I’m going to make. I want you in my camp.” She stood up, walked toward the camera. “Look at it like this, Shadow: we are the coming thing. We’re shopping malls—your friends are crappy roadside attractions. Hell, we’re online malls, while your friends are sitting by the side of the highway selling homegrown produce from a garden cart. No—they aren’t even fruit sellers. Buggy-whip vendors. Whalebone-corset repairers. We are now and tomorrow. Your friends aren’t even yesterday any more.”

It was a strangely familiar speech. Shadow asked, “Did you ever meet a fat kid in a limo?”

She spread her hands and rolled her eyes comically, funny Lucy Ricardo washing her hands of a disaster. “The technical boy? You met the technical boy? Look, he’s a good kid. He’s one of us. He’s just not good with people he doesn’t know. When you’re working for us, you’ll see how amazing he is.”

“And if I don’t want to work for you, I–Love-Lucy?”

There was a knock on the door of Lucy’s apartment, and Ricky’s voice could be heard off-stage, asking Loo-cy what was keepin’ her so long, they was due down at the club in the next scene; a flash of irritation touched Lucy’s cartoonish face. “Hell,” she said. “Look, whatever the old guys are paying you, I can pay you double. Treble. A hundred times. Whatever they’re giving you, I can give you so much more.” She smiled, a perfect, roguish, Lucy Ricardo smile. “You name it, honey. What do you need?” She began to undo the buttons of her blouse. “Hey,” she said. “You ever wanted to see Lucy’s tits?”

The screen went black. The sleep function had kicked in and the set turned itself off. Shadow looked at his watch: it was half past midnight. “Not really,” said Shadow.

He rolled over in bed and closed his eyes. It occurred to him that the reason he liked Wednesday and Mr. Nancy and the rest of them better than their opposition was pretty straightforward: they might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn’t speak in clichés.

And he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall, any day.

Morning found Shadow back on the road, driving through a gently undulating brown landscape of winter grass and leafless trees. The last of the snow had vanished. He filled up the tank of the piece of shit in a town which was home to the runner-up of the State Women’s Under-16s three-hundred-meter dash, and, hoping that the dirt wasn’t all that was holding it together, he ran the car through the gas station car wash, and was surprised to discover that the car was, when clean, against all reason, white, and pretty much free of rust. He drove on.

The sky was impossibly blue, and white industrial smoke rising from factory chimneys was frozen in the sky, like a photograph. A hawk launched itself from a dead tree and flew toward him, wings strobing in the sunlight like a series of stop-motion photographs.

At some point he found himself heading into East St. Louis. He attempted to avoid it and instead found himself driving through what appeared to be a red-light district in an industrial park. Eighteen-wheelers and huge rigs were parked outside buildings that looked like temporary warehouses, that claimed to be 24 HOUR NITE CLUBs and, in one case, THE BEST PEAP SHOW IN TOWN. Shadow shook his head, and drove on. Laura had loved to dance, clothed or naked (and, on several memorable evenings, moving from one state to the other), and he had loved to watch her.

Lunch was a sandwich and a can of Coke in a town called Red Bud.

He passed a valley filled with the wreckage of thousands of yellow bulldozers, tractors and Caterpillars. He wondered if this was the bulldozers’ graveyard, where the bulldozers went to die.

He drove past the Pop-a-Top Lounge. He drove through Chester (“Home of Popeye”). He noticed that the houses had started to gain pillars out front, that even the shabbiest, thinnest house now had its white pillars, proclaiming it, in someone’s eyes, a mansion. He drove over a big, muddy river, and laughed out loud when he saw that the name of it, according to the sign, was the Big Muddy River. He saw a covering of brown kudzu over three winter-dead trees, twisting them into strange, almost human shapes: they could have been witches, three bent old crones ready to reveal his fortune.

He drove alongside the Mississippi. Shadow had never seen the Nile, but there was a blinding afternoon sun burning on the wide brown river which made him think of the muddy expanse of the Nile: not the Nile as it is now, but as it was long ago, flowing like an artery through the papyrus marshes, home to cobra and jackal and wild cow…

A road sign pointed to Thebes.

The road was built up about twelve feet, so he was driving above the marshes. Clumps and clusters of birds in flight were questing back and forth, black dots against the blue sky, moving in some kind of desperate Brownian motion.

In the late afternoon the sun began to lower, gilding the world in elf-light, a thick warm custardy light that made the world feel unearthly and more than real, and it was in this light that Shadow passed the sign telling him he was Now Entering Historical Cairo. He drove under a bridge and found himself in a small port town. The imposing structure of the Cairo courthouse and the even more imposing customs house looked like enormous freshly baked cookies in the syrupy gold of the light at the end of the day.

He parked his car in a side street and walked to the embankment at the edge of a river, unsure whether he was gazing at the Ohio or the Mississippi. A small brown cat nosed and sprang among the trashcans at the back of a building, and the light made even the garbage magical.

A lone seagull was gliding along the river’s edge, flipping a wing to correct itself as it went.

Shadow realized that he was not alone. A small girl, wearing old tennis shoes on her feet and a man’s gray woolen sweater as a dress, was standing on the sidewalk, ten feet away from him, staring at him with the somber gravity of a six-year-old. Her hair was black, and straight, and long; her skin was as brown as the river.

He grinned at her. She stared back at him, defiantly.

There was a squeal and a yowl from the waterfront, and the little brown cat shot away from a spilled garbage can, pursued by a long-muzzled black dog. The cat scurried under a car.

“Hey,” said Shadow to the girl. “You ever seen invisible powder before?”

She hesitated. Then she shook her head.

“Okay,” said Shadow. “Well, watch this.” Shadow pulled out a quarter with his left hand, held it up, tilting it from one side to another, then appeared to toss it into his right hand, closing his hand hard on nothing, and putting the hand forward. “Now,” he said, “I just take some invisible powder from my pocket”—and he reached his left hand into his breast pocket, dropping the quarter into the pocket as he did so—“and I sprinkle it on the hand with the coin”—and he mimed sprinkling, —“and look—now the quarter’s invisible too.” He opened his empty right hand, and, in astonishment, his empty left hand as well.

The little girl just stared.

Shadow shrugged and put his hands back in his pockets, loading a quarter in one hand, a folded-up five-dollar bill in the other. He was going to produce them from the air, and then give the girl the five bucks: she looked like she needed it. “Hey,” he said, “we’ve got an audience.”

The black dog and the little brown cat were watching him as well, flanking the girl, looking up at him intently. The dog’s huge ears were pricked up, giving it a comically alert expression. A crane-like man with gold-rimmed spectacles was coming up the sidewalk toward them, peering from side to side as if he were looking for something. Shadow wondered if he was the dog’s owner.

“What did you think?” Shadow asked the dog, trying to put the little girl at her ease. “Was that cool?”

The black dog licked its long snout. Then it said, in a deep, dry voice, “I saw Harry Houdini once, and believe me, man, you are no Harry Houdini.”

The little girl looked at the animals, she looked up at Shadow, and then she ran off, her feet pounding the sidewalk as if all the powers of hell were after her. The two animals watched her go. The crane-like man had reached the dog. He leaned down and scratched its high, pointed ears.

“Come on,” said the man in the gold-rimmed spectacles to the dog. “It was only a coin trick. It’s not like he was doing an underwater escape.”

“Not yet,” said the dog. “But he will.” The golden light was done, and the gray of twilight had begun.

Shadow dropped the coin and the folded bill back into his pocket. “Okay,” he said. “Which one of you is Jackal?”

“Use your eyes,” said the black dog with the long snout. “This way.” It began to amble along the sidewalk, beside the man in the gold-rimmed glasses, and, after a moment’s hesitation, Shadow followed them. The cat was nowhere to be seen. They reached a large old building on a row of boarded-up houses.

The sign beside the door said IBIS AND JACQUEL. A FAMILY FIRM. FUNERAL PARLOR. SINCE 1863.

“I’m Mister Ibis,” said the man in the gold-rimmed glasses. “I think I should buy you a spot of supper. I’m afraid my friend here has some work that needs doing.”

New York scares Salim, and so he clutches his sample case protectively with both hands, holding it to his chest. He is scared of black people, the way they stare at him, and he is scared of the Jews, the ones dressed all in black with hats and beards and side curls he can identify and how many others that he cannot; he is scared of the sheer quantity of the people, all shapes and sizes of people, as they spill from their high, high, filthy buildings onto the sidewalks; he is scared of the honking hullabaloo of the traffic, and he is even scared of the air, which smells both dirty and sweet, and nothing at all like the air of Oman.

Salim has been in New York, in America, for a week. Each day he visits two, perhaps three different offices, opens his sample case, shows them the copper trinkets, the rings and bottles and tiny flashlights, the models of the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, gleaming in copper inside; each night he writes a fax to his brother-in-law, Fuad, at home in Muscat, telling him that he has taken no orders, or, on one happy day, that he had taken several orders (but, as Salim is painfully aware, not yet enough even to cover his airfare and hotel bill).

For reasons Salim does not understand, his brother-in-law’s business partners have booked him into the Paramount Hotel on Forty-sixth Street. He finds it confusing, claustrophobic, expensive, alien.

Fuad is Salim’s sister’s husband. He is not a rich man, but he is the co-owner of a small trinket factory, making knickknacks from copper, brooches and rings and bracelets and statues. Everything is made for export, to other Arab countries, to Europe, to America.

Salim has been working for Fuad for six months. Fuad scares him a little. The tone of Fuad’s faxes is becoming harsher. In the evening, Salim sits in his hotel room, reading his Qur’an, telling himself that this will pass, that his stay in this strange world is limited and finite.

His brother-in-law gave him a thousand dollars for miscellaneous traveling expenses and the money, which seemed so huge a sum when first he saw it, is evaporating faster than Salim can believe. When he first arrived, scared of being seen as a cheap Arab, he tipped everyone, handing extra dollar bills to everyone he encountered; and then he decided that he was being taken advantage of, that perhaps they were even laughing at him, and he stopped tipping entirely.

On his first and only journey by subway he got lost and confused, and missed his appointment; now he takes taxis only when he has to, and the rest of the time he walks. He stumbles into overheated offices, his cheeks numb from the cold outside, sweating beneath his coat, shoes soaked by slush; and when the winds blow down the avenues (which run from north to south, as the streets run west to east, all so simple, and Salim always knows where to face Mecca) he feels a cold on his exposed skin that is so intense it is like being struck.

He never eats at the hotel (for while the hotel bill is being covered by Fuad’s business partners, he must pay for his own food); instead he buys food at falafel houses and at little food stores, smuggles it up to the hotel beneath his coat for days before he realizes that no one cares. And even then he feels strange about carrying the bags of food into the dimly lit elevators (Salim always has to bend and squint to find the button to press to take him to his floor) and up to the tiny white room in which he stays.

Salim is upset. The fax that was waiting for him when he woke this morning was curt, and alternately chiding, stern, and disappointed: Salim was letting them down—his sister, Fuad, Fuad’s business partners, the Sultanate of Oman, the whole Arab world. Unless he was able to get the orders, Fuad would no longer consider it his obligation to employ Salim. They depended upon him. His hotel was too expensive. What was Salim doing with their money, living like a sultan in America? Salim read the fax in his room (which has always been too hot and stifling, so last night he opened a window, and was now too cold) and sat there for a time, his face frozen into an expression of complete misery.

Then Salim walked downtown, holding his sample case as if it contained diamonds and rubies, trudging through the cold for block after block until, on Broadway and Nineteenth Street, he finds a squat building over a Laundromat and walks up the stairs to the fourth floor, to the office of Panglobal Imports.

The office is dingy, but he knows that Panglobal handles almost half of the ornamental souvenirs that enter the U.S. from the Far East. A real order, a significant order, from Panglobal could redeem Salim’s journey, could make the difference between failure and success, so Salim sits on an uncomfortable wooden chair in an outer office, his sample case balanced on his lap, staring at the middle-aged woman with her hair dyed too bright a red who sits behind the desk, blowing her nose on Kleenex after Kleenex. After she blows her nose she wipes it, and drops the Kleenex into the trash.

Salim got there at 10:30 A.M., half an hour before his appointment. Now he sits there, flushed and shivering, wondering if he is running a fever. The time ticks by so slowly.

Salim looks at his watch. Then he clears his throat.

The woman behind the desk glares at him. “Yes?” she says. It sounds like Yed.

“It is eleven thirty-five,” says Salim.

The woman glances at the clock on the wall, and says, “Yed,” again. “Id id.”

“My appointment was for eleven,” says Salim with a placating smile.

“Mister Blanding knows you’re here,” she tells him, reprovingly. Bidter Bladdig dode you’re here.

Salim picks up an old copy of the New York Post from the table. He speaks English better than he reads it, and he puzzles his way through the stories like a man doing a crossword puzzle. He waits, a plump young man with the eyes of a hurt puppy, glancing from his watch to his newspaper to the clock on the wall.

At twelve thirty several men come out from the inner office. They talk loudly, jabbering away to each other in American. One of them, a big, paunchy man, has a cigar, unlit, in his mouth. He glances at Salim as he comes out. He tells the woman behind the desk to try the juice of a lemon, and zinc, as his sister swears by zinc, and vitamin C. She promises him that she will, and gives him several envelopes. He pockets them and then he, and the other men, go out into the hall. The sound of their laughter disappears down the stairwell.

It is one o’clock. The woman behind the desk opens a drawer and takes out a brown paper bag, from which she removes several sandwiches, an apple, and a Milky Way. She also takes out a small plastic bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice.

“Excuse me,” says Salim, “but can you perhaps call Mister Blanding and tell him that I am still waiting?”

She looks up at him as if surprised to see that he is still there, as if they have not been sitting five feet apart for two and a half hours. “He’s at lunch,” she says. He’d ad dudge.

Salim knows, knows deep down in his gut, that Blanding was the man with the unlit cigar. “When will he be back?”

She shrugs, takes a bite of her sandwich. “He’s busy with appointments for the rest of the day,” she says. He’d biddy wid abboidmeds for the red ob the day.

“Will he see me, then, when he comes back?” asks Salim.

She shrugs, and blows her nose.

Salim is hungry, increasingly so, and frustrated, and powerless.

At three o’clock the woman looks at him and says, “He wode be gubbig bag.”

“Excuse?”

“Bidder Bladdig. He wode be gubbig bag today.”

“Can I make an appointment for tomorrow?”

She wipes her nose. “You hab to teddephode. Appoidbeds odly by teddephode.”

“I see,” says Salim. And then he smiles: a salesman, Fuad had told him many times before he left Muscat, is naked in America without his smile. “Tomorrow I will telephone,” he says. He takes his sample case, and he walks down the many stairs to the street, where the freezing rain is turning to sleet. Salim contemplates the long, cold walk back to the Forty-sixth Street hotel, and the weight of the sample case, then he steps to the edge of the sidewalk and waves at every yellow cab that approaches, whether the light on top is on or off, and every cab drives past him.

One of them accelerates as it passes; a wheel dives into a water-filled pothole, spraying freezing muddy water over Salim’s pants and coat. For a moment, he contemplates throwing himself in front of one of the lumbering cars, and then he realizes that his brother-in-law would be more concerned with the fate of the sample case than that of Salim himself, and that he would bring grief to no one but his beloved sister, Fuad’s wife (for Salim had always been a slight embarrassment to his father and mother, and his romantic encounters had always, of necessity, been both brief and relatively anonymous): also, he doubts that any of the cars is going fast enough actually to end his life.

A battered yellow taxi draws up beside him and, grateful to be able to abandon his train of thought, Salim gets in.

The back seat is patched with gray duct tape; the half-open Plexiglas barrier is covered with notices warning him not to smoke, telling him how much to pay to the various airports. The recorded voice of somebody famous he has never heard of tells him to remember to wear his seatbelt.

“The Paramount Hotel, please,” says Salim.

The cab driver grunts, and pulls away from the curb, into the traffic. He is unshaven, and he wears a thick, dust-colored sweater, and black plastic sunglasses. The weather is gray, and night is falling: Salim wonders if the man has a problem with his eyes. The wipers smear the street scene into grays and smudged lights.

From nowhere, a truck pulls out in front of them, and the cab driver swears in Arabic, by the beard of the Prophet.

Salim stares at the name on the dashboard, but he cannot make it out from here. “How long have you been driving a cab, my friend?” he asks the man, in Arabic.

“Ten years,” says the driver, in the same language. “Where are you from?”

“Muscat,” says Salim. “In Oman.”

“From Oman. I have been in Oman. It was a long time ago. Have you heard of the city of Ubar?” asks the taxi driver.

“Indeed I have,” says Salim. “The Lost City of Towers. They found it in the desert five, ten years ago, I do not remember exactly. Were you with the expedition that excavated it?”

“Something like that. It was a good city,” says the taxi driver. “On most nights there would be three, maybe four thousand people camped there: every traveler would rest at Ubar, and the music would play, and the wine would flow like water and the water would flow as well, which was why the city existed.”

“That is what I have heard,” says Salim. “And it perished, what, a thousand years ago? Two thousand?”

The taxi driver says nothing. They are stopped at a red traffic light. The light turns green, but the taxi driver does not move, despite the immediate discordant blare of horns behind them. Hesitantly, Salim reaches through the hole in the Plexiglas and he touches the driver on the shoulder. The man’s head jerks up, with a start, and he puts his foot down on the gas, lurching them across the intersection.

“Fuckshitfuckfuck,” he says, in English.

“You must be very tired, my friend,” says Salim.

“I have been driving this Allah-forgotten taxi for thirty hours,” says the driver. “It is too much. Before that, I sleep for five hours, and I drove fourteen hours before that. We are shorthanded, before Christmas.”

“I hope you have made a lot of money,” says Salim.

The driver sighs. “Not much. This morning I drove a man from Fifty-first Street to Newark airport. When we got there, he ran off into the airport, and I could not find him again. A fifty-dollar fare gone, and I had to pay the tolls on the way back myself.”

Salim nods. “I had to spend today waiting to see a man who will not see me. My brother-in-law hates me. I have been in America for a week, and it has done nothing but eat my money. I sell nothing.”

“What do you sell?”

“Shit,” says Salim. “Worthless gewgaws and baubles and tourist trinkets. Horrible, cheap, foolish, ugly shit.”

The taxi driver wrenches the wheel to the right, swings around something, drives on. Salim wonders how he can see to drive, between the rain, the night, and the thick sunglasses.

“You try to sell shit?”

“Yes,” says Salim, thrilled and horrified that he has spoken the truth about his brother-in-law’s samples.

“And they will not buy it?”

“No.”

“Strange. You look at the stores here, that is all they sell.”

Salim smiles nervously.

A truck is blocking the street in front of them: a red-faced cop standing in front of it waves and shouts and points them down the nearest street.

“We will go over to Eighth Avenue, come uptown that way,” says the taxi driver. They turn onto the street, where the traffic has stopped completely. There is a cacophony of horns, but the cars do not move.

The driver sways in his seat. His chin begins to descend to his chest, one, two, three times. Then he begins, gently, to snore. Salim reaches out to wake the man, hoping that he is doing the right thing. As he shakes his shoulder the driver moves, and Salim’s hand brushes the man’s face, knocking the man’s sunglasses from his face onto his lap.

The taxi driver opens his eyes and reaches for, and replaces, the black plastic sunglasses, but it is too late. Salim has seen his eyes.

The car crawls forward in the rain. The numbers on the meter increase.

“Are you going to kill me?” asks Salim.

The taxi driver’s lips are pressed together. Salim watches his face in the driver’s mirror.

“No,” says the driver.

The car stops again. The rain patters on the roof.

Salim begins to speak. “My grandmother swore that she had seen an ifrit, or perhaps a marid, late one evening, on the edge of the desert. We told her that it was just a sandstorm, a little wind, but she said no, she saw its face, and its eyes, like yours, were burning flames.”

The driver smiles, but his eyes are hidden behind the black plastic glasses, and Salim cannot tell whether there is any humor in that smile or not. “The grandmothers came here too,” he says.

“Are there many jinn in New York?” asks Salim.

“No. Not many of us.”

“There are the angels, and there are men, who Allah made from mud, and then there are the people of the fire, the jinn,” says Salim.

“People know nothing about my people here,” says the driver. “They think we grant wishes. If I could grant wishes do you think I would be driving a cab?”

“I do not understand.”

The taxi driver seems gloomy. Salim watches his face in the mirror as he speaks, staring at the ifrit’s dark lips.

“They believe that we grant wishes. Why do they believe that? I sleep in one stinking room in Brooklyn. I drive this taxi for any stinking freak who has the money to ride in it, and for some who don’t. I drive them where they need to go, and sometimes they tip me. Sometimes they pay me.” His lower lip began to tremble. The ifrit seemed on edge. “One of them shat on the back seat once. I had to clean it before I could take the cab back. How could he do that? I had to clean the wet shit from the seat. Is that right?”

Salim puts out a hand, pats the ifrit’s shoulder. He can feel solid flesh through the wool of the sweater. The ifrit raises his hand from the wheel, rests it on Salim’s hand for a moment.

Salim thinks of the desert then: red sands blow a dust-storm through his thoughts, and the scarlet silks of the tents that surrounded the lost city of Ubar flap and billow through his mind.

They drive up Eighth Avenue.

“The old believe. They do not piss into holes, because the Prophet told them that jinn live in holes. They know that the angels throw flaming stars at us when we try to listen to their conversations. But even for the old, when they come to this country we are very, very far away. Back there, I did not have to drive a cab.”

“I am sorry,” says Salim.

“It is a bad time,” says the driver. “A storm is coming. It scares me. I would do anything to get away.”

The two of them say nothing more on their way back to the hotel.

When Salim gets out of the cab he gives the ifrit a twenty-dollar bill, tells him to keep the change. Then, with a sudden burst of courage, he tells him his room number. The taxi driver says nothing in reply. A young woman clambers into the back of the cab, and it pulls out into the cold and the rain.

Six o’clock in the evening. Salim has not yet written the fax to his brother-in-law. He goes out into the rain, buys himself this night’s kebab and french fries. It has only been a week, but he feels that he is becoming heavier, rounder, softening in this country of New York.

When he comes back to the hotel he is surprised to see the taxi driver standing in the lobby, hands deep into his pockets. He is staring at a display of black-and-white postcards. When he sees Salim he smiles, self-consciously. “I called your room,” he says, “but there was no answer. So I thought I would wait.”

Salim smiles also, and touches the man’s arm. “I am here,” he says.

Together they enter the dim, green-lit elevator, ascend to the fifth floor holding hands. The ifrit asks if he may use Salim’s bathroom. “I feel very dirty,” he says. Salim nods. He sits on the bed, which fills most of the small white room, and listens to the sound of the shower running. Salim takes off his shoes, his socks, and then the rest of his clothes.

The taxi driver comes out of the shower, wet, with a towel wrapped about his mid-section. He is not wearing his sunglasses, and in the dim room his eyes burn with scarlet flames.

Salim blinks back tears. “I wish you could see what I see,” he says.

“I do not grant wishes,” whispers the ifrit, dropping his towel and pushing Salim gently, but irresistibly, down onto the bed.

It is an hour or more before the ifrit comes, thrusting and grinding into Salim’s mouth. Salim has already come twice in this time. The jinn’s semen tastes strange, fiery, and it burns Salim’s throat.

Salim goes to the bathroom, washes out his mouth. When he returns to the bedroom the taxi driver is already asleep in the white bed, snoring peacefully. Salim climbs into the bed beside him, cuddles close to the ifrit, imagining the desert on his skin.

As he starts to fall asleep he realizes that he still has not written his fax to Fuad, and he feels guilty. Deep inside he feels empty and alone: he reaches out, rests his hand on the ifrit’s tumescent cock and, comforted, he sleeps.

They wake in the small hours, moving against each other, and they make love again. At one point Salim realizes that he is crying, and the ifrit is kissing away his tears with burning lips. “What is your name?” Salim asks the taxi driver.

“There is a name on my driving permit, but it is not mine,” the ifrit says.

Afterward, Salim could not remember where the sex had stopped and the dreams began.

When Salim wakes, the cold sun creeping into the white room, he is alone.

Also, he discovers, his sample case is gone, all the bottles and rings and souvenir copper flashlights, all gone, along with his suitcase, his wallet, his passport, and his air tickets back to Oman.

He finds a pair of jeans, the T-shirt, and the dust-colored woolen sweater discarded on the floor. Beneath them he finds a driver’s license in the name of Ibrahim bin Irem, a taxi permit in the same name, and a ring of keys with an address written on a piece of paper attached to them in English. The photographs on the license and the permit ID do not look much like Salim, but then, they did not look much like the ifrit.

The telephone rings: it is the front desk calling to point out that Salim has already checked out, and his guest needs to leave soon so that they can service the room, to get it ready for another occupant.

“I do not grant wishes,” says Salim, tasting the way the words shape themselves in his mouth.

He feels strangely light-headed as he dresses.

New York is very simple: the avenues run north to south, the streets run west to east. How hard can it be? he asks himself.

He tosses the car keys into the air and catches them. Then he puts on the black plastic sunglasses he found in the pockets, and leaves the hotel room to go and look for his cab.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The week before Christmas is often a quiet one in a funeral parlor, Shadow learned, over supper. Mr. Ibis explained it to him. “The lingering ones are holding on for one final Christmas,” said Mr. Ibis, “or even for New Year’s, while the others, the ones for whom other people’s jollity and celebration will prove too painful, have not yet been tipped over the edge by that last showing of It’s a Wonderful Life, have not quite encountered the final straw, or should I say, the final sprig of holly that breaks not the camel’s but the reindeer’s back.” And he made a little noise as he said it, half smirk, half snort, which suggested that he had just uttered a well-honed phrase of which he was particularly fond.

Ibis and Jacquel was a small, family-owned funeral home: one of the last truly independent funeral homes in the area, or so Mr. Ibis maintained. “Most fields of human merchandising value nationwide brand identities,” he said. Mr. Ibis spoke in explanations: a gentle, earnest lecturing that put Shadow in mind of a college professor who used to work out at the Muscle Farm and who could not talk, could only discourse, expound, explain. Shadow had figured out within the first few minutes of meeting Mr. Ibis that his expected part in any conversation with the funeral director was to say as little as possible. They were sitting in a small restaurant, two blocks from Ibis and Jacquel’s funeral home. Shadow’s supper consisted of an all-day full breakfast—it came with hush puppies—while Mr. Ibis picked and pecked at a slice of coffeecake. “This, I believe, is because people like to know what they are getting ahead of time. Thus McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, F. W. Woolworth (of blessed memory): store-brands maintained and visible across the entire country. Wherever you go, you will get something that is, with small regional variations, the same.

“In the field of funeral homes, however, things are, perforce, different. You need to feel that you are getting small-town personal service from someone who has a calling to the profession. You want personal attention to you and your loved one in a time of great loss. You wish to know that your grief is happening on a local level, not on a national one. But in all branches of industry—and death is an industry, my young friend, make no mistake about that—one makes one’s money from operating in bulk, from buying in quantity, from centralizing one’s operations. It’s not pretty, but it’s true. Trouble is, no one wants to know that their loved ones are traveling in a cooler-van to some big old converted warehouse where they may have twenty, fifty, a hundred cadavers on the go. No, sir. Folks want to think they’re going to a family concern, somewhere they’ll be treated with respect by someone who’ll tip his hat to them if he sees them in the street.”

Mr. Ibis wore a hat. It was a sober brown hat that matched his sober brown blazer and his sober brown face. Small gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. In Shadow’s memory Mr. Ibis was a short man; whenever he would stand beside him, Shadow would rediscover that Mr. Ibis was well over six feet in height, with a crane-like stoop.

“So when the big companies come in they buy the name of the company, they pay the funeral directors to stay on, they create the apparency of diversity. But that is merely the tip of the gravestone. In reality, they are as local as Burger King. Now, for our own reasons, we are truly an independent. We do all our own embalming, and it’s the finest embalming in the country, although nobody knows it but us. We don’t do cremations, though. We could make more money if we had our own crematorium, but it goes against what we’re good at. What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent or a skill, you have an obligation to use it as best you can. Don’t you agree?”

“Sounds good to me,” said Shadow.

“The Lord gave my business partner dominion over the dead, just as he gave me skill with words. Fine things, words. I write books of tales, you know. Nothing literary. Just for my own amusement. Accounts of lives.” He paused. By the time Shadow realized that he should have asked if he might be allowed to read one, the moment had passed. “Anyway, what we give them here is continuity: there’s been an Ibis and Jacquel in business here for almost two hundred years. We weren’t always funeral directors, though. We used to be morticians, and before that, undertakers.”

“And before that?”

“Well,” said Mr. Ibis, smiling just a little smugly, “we go back a very long way. Of course, it wasn’t until after the War Between the States that we found our niche here. That was when we became the funeral parlor for the colored folks hereabouts. Before that no one thought of us as colored—foreign maybe, exotic and dark, but not colored. Once the war was done, pretty soon, no one could remember a time when we weren’t perceived as black. My business partner, he’s always had darker skin than mine. It was an easy transition. Mostly you are what they think you are. It’s just strange when they talk about African-Americans. Makes me think of the people from Punt, Ophir, Nubia. We never thought of ourselves as Africans—we were the people of the Nile.”

“So you were Egyptians,” said Shadow.

Mr. Ibis pushed his lower lip upward, then let his head bob from side to side, as if it were on a spring, weighing the pluses and minuses, seeing things from both points of view. “Well, yes and no. ‘Egyptians’ makes me think of the folk who live there now. The ones who built their cities over our graveyards and palaces. Do they look like me?”

Shadow shrugged. He’d seen black guys who looked like Mr. Ibis. He’d seen white guys with tans who looked like Mr. Ibis.

“How was your coffee-cake?” asked the waitress, refilling their coffees.

“Best I ever had,” said Mr. Ibis. “You give my best to your ma.”

“I’ll do that,” she said, and bustled away.

“You don’t want to ask after the health of anyone, if you’re a funeral director. They think maybe you’re scouting for business,” said Mr. Ibis, in an undertone. “Shall we see if your room is ready?”

Their breath steamed in the night air. Christmas lights twinkled in the windows of the stores they passed. “It’s good of you, putting me up,” said Shadow. “I appreciate it.”

“We owe your employer a number of favors. And Lord knows, we have the room. It’s a big old house. There used to be more of us, you know. Now it’s just the three of us. You won’t be in the way.”

“Any idea how long I’m meant to stay with you?”

Mr. Ibis shook his head. “He didn’t say. But we are happy to have you here, and we can find you work. If you are not squeamish. If you treat the dead with respect.”

“So,” asked Shadow, “what are you people doing here in Cairo? Was it just the name or something?”

“No. Not at all. Actually this region takes its names from us, although people barely know it. It was a trading post back in the old days.”

“Frontier times?”

“You might call it that,” said Mr. Ibis. “Evening, Mizz Simmons! And a merry Christmas to you too! The folk who brought me here came up the Mississippi a long time back.”

Shadow stopped in the street, and stared. “Are you trying to tell me that ancient Egyptians came here to trade five thousand years ago?”

Mr. Ibis said nothing, but he smirked loudly. Then he said, “Three thousand five hundred and thirty years ago. Give or take.”

“Okay,” said Shadow. “I’ll buy it, I guess. What were they trading?”

“Not much,” said Mr. Ibis. “Animal skins. Some food. Copper from the mines in the upper peninsula. The whole thing was rather a disappointment. Not worth the effort. They stayed here long enough to believe in us, to sacrifice to us, and for a handful of the traders to die of fever and be buried here, leaving us behind them.” He stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, turned around slowly, arms extended. “This country has been Grand Central Station for ten thousand years or more. You say to me, what about Columbus?”

“Sure,” said Shadow, obligingly. “What about him?”

“Columbus did what people had been doing for thousands of years. There’s nothing special about coming to America. I’ve been writing stories about it, from time to time.” They began to walk again.

“True stories?”

“Up to a point, yes. I’ll let you read one or two, if you like. It’s all there for anyone who has eyes to see it. Personally—and this is speaking as a subscriber to Scientific American, here—I feel very sorry for the professionals whenever they find another confusing skull, something that belonged to the wrong sort of people, or whenever they find statues or artifacts that confuse them—for they’ll talk about the odd, but they won’t talk about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not. I mean, here’s a skull that shows the Ainu, the Japanese aboriginal race, were in America nine thousand years ago. Here’s another that shows there were Polynesians in California nearly two thousand years later. And all the scientists mutter and puzzle over who’s descended from whom, missing the point entirely. Heaven knows what’ll happen if they ever actually find the Hopi emergence tunnels. That’ll shake a few things up, you just wait.

“Did the Irish come to America in the dark ages, you ask me? Of course they did, and the Welsh, and the Vikings, while the Africans from the west coast—what in later days they called the slave coast or the ivory coast—they were trading with South America, and the Chinese visited Oregon a couple of times: they called it Fu Sang. The Basque established their secret sacred fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland twelve hundred years back. Now, I suppose you’re going to say, but, Mister Ibis, these people were primitives, they didn’t have radio controls and vitamin pills and jet airplanes.”

Shadow hadn’t said anything, and hadn’t planned to say anything, but he felt it was required of him, so he said, “Well, weren’t they?” The last dead leaves of the autumn crackled underfoot, winter-crisp.

“The misconception is that men didn’t travel long distances in boats before the days of Columbus. Yet New Zealand and Tahiti and countless Pacific islands were settled by people in boats whose navigation skills would have put Columbus to shame; and the wealth of Africa was from trading, although that was mostly to the East, to India and China. My people, the Nile folk, we discovered early on that a reed boat will take you around the world, if you have the patience and enough jars of sweet water. You see, the biggest problem with coming to America in the old days was that there wasn’t a lot here that anyone wanted to trade, and it was much too far away.”

They had reached a large house, built in the style people called Queen Anne. Shadow wondered who Queen Anne was, and why she had been so fond of Addams Family—style houses. It was the only building on the block that wasn’t locked up with boarded-over windows. They went through the gate and walked around the back of the building.

Through large double doors, which Mr. Ibis unlocked with a key from his keychain, and they were in a large, unheated room, occupied by two people: a very tall, dark-skinned man, holding a large metal scalpel, and a dead girl in her late teens, lying on a long, porcelain object that resembled both a table and a sink.

There were several photographs of the dead girl pinned up on a cork-board on the wall above the body. She was smiling in one, a high school head shot. In another she was standing in a line with three other girls; they were wearing what might have been prom dresses, and her black hair was tied above her head in an intricate knot-work.

Cold on the porcelain, her hair was down, loose around her shoulders, and matted with dried blood.

“This is my partner, Mister Jacquel,” said Ibis.

“We met already,” said Jacquel. “Forgive me if I don’t shake hands.”

Shadow looked down at the girl on the table. “What happened to her?” he asked.

“Poor taste in boyfriends,” said Jacquel.

“It’s not always fatal,” said Mr. Ibis, with a sigh. “This time it was. He was drunk, and he had a knife, and she told him that she thought she was pregnant. He didn’t believe it was his.”

“She was stabbed…,” said Mr. Jacquel, and he counted. There was a click as he stepped on a footswitch, turning on a small Dictaphone on a nearby table. “Five times. There are three knife wounds in the left anterior chest wall. The first is between the fourth and fifth intercostal spaces at the medial border of the left breast, two point two centimeters in length; the second and third are through the inferior portion of the left mid-breast penetrating at the sixth interspace, overlapping, and measuring three centimeters. There is one wound two centimeters long in the upper anterior left chest in the second interspace, and one wound five centimeters long and a maximum of one point six centimeters deep in the anteromedial left deltoid, a slashing injury. All the chest wounds are deep penetrating injuries. There are no other visible wounds externally.” He released pressure from the foot switch. Shadow noticed a small microphone dangling above the embalming table by its cord.

“So you’re the coroner as well?” asked Shadow.

“Coroner’s a political appointment around here,” said Ibis. “His job is to kick the corpse. If it doesn’t kick him back, he signs the death certificate. Jacquel’s what they call a prosector. He works for the county medical examiner. He does autopsies, and saves tissue samples for analysis. He’s already photographed her wounds.”

Jacquel ignored them. He took a big scalpel and made a deep incision in a large V which began at both collarbones and met at the bottom of her breastbone, and then he turned the V into a Y, another deep incision that continued from her breastbone to her pubis. He picked up what looked like a small, heavy chrome drill with a medallion-sized round saw blade at the business end. He turned it on, and cut through the ribs at both sides of her breastbone.

The girl opened like a purse.

Shadow suddenly was aware of a mild but unpleasantly penetrating, pungent, meaty smell.

“I thought it would smell worse,” said Shadow.

“She’s pretty fresh,” said Jacquel. “And the intestines weren’t pierced, so it doesn’t smell of shit.”

Shadow found himself looking away, not from revulsion, as he would have expected, but from a strange desire to give the girl some privacy. It would be hard to be nakeder than this open thing.

Jacquel tied off the intestines, glistening and snakelike in her belly, below the stomach and deep in the pelvis. He ran them through his fingers, foot after foot of them, described them as “normal” to the microphone, put them in a bucket on the floor. He sucked all the blood out of her chest with a vacuum pump, and measured the volume. Then he inspected the inside of her chest. He said to the microphone, “There are three lacerations in the pericardium, which is filled with clotted and liquefied blood.”

Jacquel grasped her heart, cut it at its top, turned it about in his hand, examining it. He stepped on his switch and said, “There are two l acerations of the myocardium; a one-point-five-centimeter laceration in the right ventricle and a one-point-eight-centimeter laceration penetrating the left ventricle.”

Jacquel removed each lung. The left lung had been stabbed and was half collapsed. He weighed them, and the heart, and he photographed the wounds. From each lung he sliced a small piece of tissue, which he placed into a jar.

“Formaldehyde,” whispered Mr. Ibis, helpfully.

Jacquel continued to talk to the microphone, describing what he was doing, what he saw, as he removed the girl’s liver, the stomach, spleen, pancreas, both kidneys, the uterus and the ovaries.

He weighed each organ, reported them as normal and uninjured. From each organ he took a small slice and put it into a jar of formaldehyde.

From the heart, the liver, and from one of the kidneys, he cut an additional slice. These pieces he chewed, slowly, making them last, and ate while he worked.

Somehow it seemed to Shadow a good thing for him to do: respectful, not obscene.

“So you want to stay here with us for a spell?” said Jacquel, masticating the slice of the girl’s heart.

“If you’ll have me,” said Shadow.

“Certainly we’ll have you,” said Mr. Ibis. “No reasons why not and plenty of reasons why. You’ll be under our protection as long as you’re here.”

“I hope you don’t mind sleeping under the same roof as the dead,” said Jacquel.

Shadow thought of the touch of Laura’s lips, bitter and cold. “No,” he said. “Not as long as they stay dead, anyhow.”

Jacquel turned and looked at him with dark brown eyes as quizzical and cold as a desert dog’s. “They stay dead here,” was all he said.

“Seems to me,” said Shadow. “Seems to me that the dead come back pretty easy.”

“Not at all,” said Ibis. “Even zombies, they make them out of the living, you know. A little powder, a little chanting, a little push, and you have a zombie. They live, but they believe they are dead. But to truly bring the dead back to life, in their bodies. That takes power.” He hesitates, then, “In the old land, in the old days, it was easier then.”

“You could bind the ka of a man to his body for five thousand years,” said Jacquel. “Binding or loosing. But that was a long time ago.” He took all the organs that he had removed and replaced them, respectfully, in the body cavity. He replaced the intestines and the breastbone and pulled the skin edges near each other. Then he took a thick needle and thread and, with deft, quick strokes, he sewed it up, like a man stitching a baseball: the cadaver transformed from meat into girl once again.

“I need a beer,” said Jacquel. He pulled off his rubber gloves and dropped them into the bin. He dropped his dark brown overalls into a hamper. Then he took the cardboard tray of jars filled with little red and brown and purple slices of the organs. “Coming?”

They walked up the back stairs to the kitchen. It was brown and white, a sober and respectable room that looked to Shadow as if it had last been decorated in 1920. There was a huge Kelvinator rattling to itself by one wall. Jacquel opened the Kelvinator’s door, put the plastic jars with their slivers of spleen, of kidney, of liver, of heart, inside. He took out three brown bottles. Ibis opened a glass-fronted cupboard, removed three tall glasses. Then he gestured for Shadow to sit down at the kitchen table.

Ibis poured the beer and passed a glass to Shadow, a glass to Jacquel. It was a fine beer, bitter and dark.

“Good beer,” said Shadow.

“We brew it ourselves,” said Ibis. “In the old days the women did the brewing. They were better brewers than we are. But now it is only the three of us here. Me, him, and her.” He gestured toward the small brown cat, fast asleep in a cat-basket in the corner of the room. “There were more of us, in the beginning. But Set left us to explore, what, two hundred years ago? Must be, by now. We got a postcard from him from San Francisco in 1905, 1906. Then nothing. While poor Horus…” He trailed off, in a sigh, and shook his head.

“I still see him, on occasion,” said Jacquel. “On my way to a pickup.” He sipped his beer.

“I’ll work for my keep,” said Shadow. “While I’m here. You tell me what you need doing, and I’ll do it.”

“We’ll find work for you,” agreed Jacquel.

The small brown cat opened her eyes and stretched to her feet. She padded across the kitchen floor and pushed at Shadow’s boot with her head. He put down his left hand and scratched her forehead and the back of her ears and the scruff of her neck. She arched ecstatically, then sprang into his lap, pushed herself up against his chest, and touched her cold nose to his. Then she curled up in his lap and went back to sleep. He put his hand down to stroke her: her fur was soft, and she was warm and pleasant in his lap: she acted like she was in the safest place in the world, and Shadow felt comforted.

The beer left a pleasant buzz in Shadow’s head.

“Your room is at the top of the stairs, by the bathroom,” said Jacquel. “Your work clothes will be hanging in the closet—you’ll see. You’ll want to wash up and shave first, I guess.”

Shadow did. He showered standing in the cast-iron tub and he shaved, very nervously, with a straight razor that Jacquel loaned him. It was obscenely sharp, and had a mother-of-pearl handle, and Shadow suspected it was usually used to give dead men their final shave. He had never used a straight razor before, but he did not cut himself. He washed off the shaving cream, looked at himself naked in the fly-specked bathroom mirror. He was bruised: fresh bruises on his chest and arms overlaying the fading bruises that Mad Sweeney had left him. He looked at his wet, black hair and the dark gray eyes which looked back mistrustfully from the mirror at him, looked at the marks on his coffee-colored skin.

And then, as if someone else were holding his hand, he raised the straight razor, placed it, blade open, against his throat.

It would be a way out, he thought. An easy way out. And if there’s anyone who’d simply take it in their stride, who’d just clean up the mess and get on with things, it’s the two guys sitting downstairs at the kitchen table drinking their beer. No more worries. No more Laura. No more mysteries and conspiracies. No more bad dreams. Just peace and quiet and rest forever. One clean slash, ear to ear. That’s all it’ll take.

He stood there with the razor against his throat. A tiny smudge of blood came from the place where the blade touched the skin. He had not even noticed a cut. See, he told himself, and he could almost hear the words being whispered in his ear. It’s painless. Too sharp to hurt. I’ll be gone before I know it.

Then the door to the bathroom swung open, just a few inches, enough for the little brown cat to put her head around the doorframe and “Mrr?” up at him, curiously.

“Hey,” he said to the cat. “I thought I locked that door.”

He closed the cut-throat razor, put it down on the side of the sink, dabbed at his tiny cut with a toilet paper swab. Then he wrapped a towel around his waist and went into the bedroom next door.

His bedroom, like the kitchen, seemed to have been decorated some time in the 1920s: there was a washstand and a pitcher beside the chest of drawers and mirror. The room itself smelled faintly musty, as if it was too infrequently aired, and the sheets of the bed seemed faintly damp when he touched them.

Someone had already laid out clothes for him on the bed: a black suit, white shirt, black tie, white undershirt and underpants, black socks. Black shoes sat on the worn Persian carpet beside the bed.

He dressed himself. The clothes were of good quality, although none of them were new. He wondered who they had belonged to. Was he wearing a dead man’s socks? Would he be stepping into a dead man’s shoes? Then he put the clothes on and looked at himself in the mirror. The clothes fit perfectly: there was not even the stretching around the chest or the shortness in the arms he had expected. He adjusted the tie in the mirror and now it seemed to him that his reflection was smiling at him, sardonically. He scratched the side of his nose, was actually relieved when his reflection did the same.

Now it seemed inconceivable to him that he had ever thought of cutting his throat. His reflection continued to smile as he adjusted his tie.

“Hey,” he said to it, “you know something that I don’t?” and immediately felt foolish.

The door creaked open and the cat slipped between the doorpost and the door and padded across the room, then up on the windowsill. “Hey,” he said to the cat. “I did shut that door. I know I shut that door.” She looked at him, interested. Her eyes were dark yellow, the color of amber. Then she jumped down from the sill, onto the bed, where she wrapped herself into a curl of fur and went back to sleep, a circle of cat upon the old counterpane.

Shadow left the bedroom door open, so the cat could leave and the room air a little, and he walked downstairs. The stairs creaked and grumbled as he walked down them, protesting his weight, as if they just wanted to be left in peace.

“Damn you look good,” said Jacquel. He was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and was now himself dressed in a black suit, similar to Shadow’s. “You ever driven a hearse?”

“No.”

“First time for everything, then,” said Jacquel. “It’s parked out front.”

An old woman had died. Her name had been Lila Goodchild. At Mr. Jacquel’s direction, Shadow carried the folded aluminum gurney up the narrow stairs to her bedroom and unfolded it next to her bed. He took out a translucent blue plastic body bag, laid it next to the dead woman on the bed, and unzipped it open. She wore a pink nightgown and a quilted robe. Shadow lifted her and wrapped her, fragile and almost weightless, in a blanket, and placed it onto the bag. He zipped the bag shut and put it on the gurney. While Shadow did this, Jacquel talked to a very old man who had, when she was alive, been married to Lila Goodchild. Or rather, Jacquel listened while the old man talked. As Shadow had zipped Mrs. Goodchild away the old man had been explaining how ungrateful his children had been, and grandchildren too, though that wasn’t their fault, that was their parents’, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, and he thought he’d raised them better than that.

Shadow and Jacquel wheeled the loaded gurney to the narrow flight of stairs. The old man followed them, still talking, mostly about money, and greed, and ingratitude. He wore bedroom slippers. Shadow carried the heavier bottom end of the gurney down the stairs and out onto the street, then he wheeled it along the icy sidewalk to the hearse. Jacquel opened the hearse’s rear door. Shadow hesitated, and Jacquel said, “Just push it on in there. The supports’ll fold up out of the way.” Shadow pushed the gurney, and the supports snapped up, the wheels rotated, and the gurney rolled right on to the floor of the hearse. Jacquel showed him how to strap it in securely, and Shadow closed up the hearse while Jacquel listened to the old man who had been married to Lila Goodchild, unmindful of the cold, an old man in his slippers and his bathrobe out on the wintry sidewalk telling Jacquel how his children were vultures, no better than hovering vultures, waiting to take what little he and Lila had scraped together, and how the two of them had fled to St. Louis, to Memphis, to Miami, and how they wound up in Cairo, and how relieved he was that Lila had not died in a nursing home, how scared he was that he would.

They walked the old man back into the house, up the stairs to his room. A small TV set droned from one corner of the couple’s bedroom. As Shadow passed it he noticed that the newsreader was grinning and winking at him. When he was sure that no one was looking in his direction he gave the set the finger.

“They’ve got no money,” said Jacquel when they were back in the hearse. “He’ll come in to see Ibis tomorrow. He’ll choose the cheapest funeral. Her friends will persuade him to do her right, give her a proper sendoff in the front room, I expect. But he’ll grumble. Got no money. Nobody around here’s got money these days. Anyway, he’ll be dead in six months. A year at the outside.”

Snowflakes tumbled and drifted in front of the headlights. The snow was coming south. Shadow said, “Is he sick?”

“It ain’t that. Women survive their men. Men—men like him—don’t live long when their women are gone. You’ll see—he’ll just start wandering, all the familiar things are going to be gone with her. He gets tired and he fades and then he gives up and then he’s gone. Maybe pneumonia will take him or maybe it’ll be cancer, or maybe his heart will stop. Old age, and all the fight gone out of you. Then you die.”

Shadow thought. “Hey, Jacquel?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you believe in the soul?” It wasn’t quite the question he had been going to ask, and it took him by surprise to hear it coming from his mouth. He had intended to say something less direct, but there was nothing less direct that he could say.

“Depends. Back in my day, we had it all set up. You line up when you die, and you answer for your evil deeds and for your good deeds, and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, we’d feed your soul and your heart to Ammet, the Eater of Souls.”

“He must have eaten a lot of people.”

“Not as many as you’d think. It was a really heavy feather. We had it made special. You had to be pretty damn evil to tip the scales on that baby. Stop here, that gas station. We’ll put in a few gallons.”

The streets were quiet, in the way that streets only are when the first snow falls. “It’s going to be a white Christmas,” said Shadow as he pumped the gas.

“Yup. Shit. That boy was one lucky son of a virgin.”

“Jesus?”

“Lucky, lucky guy. He could fall in a cesspit and come up smelling like roses. Hell, it’s not even his birthday, you know that? He took it from Mithras. You run into Mithras yet? Red cap. Nice kid.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well…I’ve never seen Mithras around here. He was an army brat. Maybe he’s back in the Middle East, taking it easy, but I expect he’s probably gone by now. It happens. One day every soldier in the empire has to shower in the blood of your sacrificial bull. The next they don’t even remember your birthday.”

Swish went the windshield wipers, pushing the snow to the side, bunching the flakes up into knots and swirls of clear ice.

A traffic light turned momentarily yellow and then red, and Shadow put his foot on the brake. The hearse fishtailed and swung around on the empty road before it stopped.

The light turned green. Shadow took the hearse up to ten miles per hour, which seemed enough on the slippery roads. It was perfectly happy cruising in second gear: he guessed it must have spent a lot of its time at that speed, holding up traffic.

“That’s good,” said Jacquel. “So, yeah, Jesus does pretty good over here. But I met a guy who said he saw him hitchhiking by the side of the road in Afghanistan and nobody was stopping to give him a ride. You know? It all depends on where you are.”

“I think a real storm’s coming,” said Shadow. He was talking about the weather.

Jacquel, when, eventually, he began to answer, wasn’t talking about the weather at all. “You look at me and Ibis,” he said. “We’ll be out of business in a few years. We got savings put aside for the lean years, but the lean years have been here for a long while, and every year they just get leaner. Horus is crazy, really bugfuck crazy, spends all his time as a hawk, eats roadkill, what kind of a life is that? You’ve seen Bast. And we’re in better shape than most of them. At least we’ve got a little belief to be going along with. Most of the suckers out there have barely got that. It’s like the funeral business—the big guys are going to buy you up one day, like it or not, because they’re bigger and more efficient and because they work. Fighting’s not going to change a damned thing, because we lost this particular battle when we came to this green land a hundred years ago or a thousand or ten thousand. We arrived and America just didn’t care that we’d arrived. So we get bought out, or we press on, or we hit the road. So, yes. You’re right. The storm’s coming.”

Shadow turned onto the street where the houses were, all but one of them, dead, their windows blind and boarded. “Take the back alley,” said Jacquel.

He backed the hearse up until it was almost touching the double doors at the rear of the house. Ibis opened the hearse, and the mortuary doors, and Shadow unbuckled the gurney and pulled it out. The wheeled supports rotated and dropped as they cleared the bumper. He wheeled the gurney to the embalming table. He picked up Lila Goodchild, cradling her in her opaque bag like a sleeping child, and placed her carefully on the table in the chilly mortuary, as if he were afraid to wake her.

“You know, I have a transfer board,” said Jacquel. “You don’t have to carry her.”

“Ain’t nothing,” said Shadow. He was starting to sound more like Jacquel. “I’m a big guy. It doesn’t bother me.”

As a kid Shadow had been small for his age, all elbows and knees. The only photograph of Shadow as a kid that Laura had liked enough to frame showed a serious child with unruly hair and dark eyes standing beside a table, laden high with cakes and cookies. Shadow thought the picture might have been taken at an embassy Christmas party, as he had been dressed in a bowtie and his best clothes, as one might dress a doll. He was looking solemnly out at the adult world that surrounded him.

They had moved too much, his mother and Shadow, first around Europe, from embassy to embassy, where his mother had worked as a communicator in the Foreign Service, transcribing and sending classified telegrams across the world, and then, when he was eight years old, back to the U.S., where his mother, now too sporadically sick to hold down a steady job, had moved from city to city restlessly spending a year here or a year there, temping when she was well enough. They never spent long enough in any place for Shadow to make friends, to feel at home, to relax. And Shadow had been a small child…

He had grown so fast. In the spring of his thirteenth year the local kids had been picking on him, goading him into fights they knew they could not fail to win and after which Shadow would run, angry and often weeping, to the boys’ room to wash the mud or the blood from his face before anyone could see it. Then came summer, a long, magical, thirteenth summer, which he spent keeping out of the way of the bigger kids, swimming in the local pool, reading library books at poolside. At the start of the summer he could barely swim. By the end of August he was swimming length after length in an easy crawl, diving from the high board, ripening to a deep brown from the sun and the water. In September, he had returned to school to discover that the boys who had made him miserable were small, soft things no longer capable of upsetting him. The two who tried it were taught better manners, hard and fast and painfully, and Shadow found that he had redefined himself: he could no longer be a quiet kid, doing his best to remain unobtrusively at the back of things. He was too big for that, too obvious. By the end of the year he was on the swimming team and on the weight-lifting team, and the coach was courting him for the triathlon team. He liked being big and strong. It gave him an identity. He’d been a shy, quiet, bookish kid, and that had been painful; now he was a big dumb guy, and nobody expected him to be able to do anything more than move a sofa into the next room on his own.

Nobody until Laura, anyway.

Mr. Ibis had prepared dinner: rice and boiled greens for himself and Mr. Jacquel. “I am not a meat eater,” he explained, “while Jacquel gets all the meat he needs in the course of his work.” Beside Shadow’s place was a carton of chicken pieces from KFC, and a bottle of beer.

There was more chicken than Shadow could eat, and he shared the leftovers with the cat, removing the skin and crusty coating then shredding the meat for her with his fingers.

“There was a guy in prison named Jackson,” said Shadow, as he ate, “worked in the prison library. He told me that they changed the name from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC because they don’t serve real chicken any more. It’s become this genetically modified mutant thing, like a giant centipede with no head, just segment after segment of legs and breasts and wings. It’s fed through nutrient tubes. This guy said the government wouldn’t let them use the word chicken.”

Mr. Ibis raised his eyebrows. “You think that’s true?”

“Nope. Now, my old cellmate, Low Key, he said they changed the name because the word fried had become a bad word. Maybe they wanted people to think that the chicken cooked itself.”

After dinner Jacquel excused himself and went down to the mortuary. Ibis went to his study to write. Shadow sat in the kitchen for a little longer, feeding fragments of chicken breast to the little brown cat, sipping his beer. When the beer and the chicken were gone, he washed up the plates and cutlery, put them on the rack to dry, and went upstairs.

He took a bath in the claw-footed bathtub, brushed his teeth with his disposable toothbrush and toothpaste. Tomorrow, he decided, he would buy a new toothbrush.

When he returned to the bedroom the little brown cat was once more asleep at the bottom of the bed, curled into a fur crescent. In the middle drawer of the vanity he found several pairs of striped cotton pajamas. They looked seventy years old, but smelled fresh, and he pulled on a pair which, like the black suit, fitted him as if they had been tailored for him.

There was a small stack of Reader’s Digests on the little table beside the bed, none of them dated later than March 1960. Jackson, the library guy—the same one who had sworn to the truth of the Kentucky Fried Mutant Chicken Creature story, who had told him the story of the black freight trains that the government uses to haul political prisoners off to Secret Northern Californian Concentration Camps, moving across the country in the dead of the night—Jackson had also told him that the CIA used the Reader’s Digest as a front for their branch offices around the world. He said that every Reader’s Digest office in every country was really CIA.

“A joke,” said the late Mr. Wood, in Shadow’s memory. “How can we be sure the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assassination?” Shadow cracked the window open a few inches—enough for fresh air to get in, enough for the cat to be able to get out onto the balcony outside.

He turned on the bedside lamp, climbed into bed and read for a little, trying to turn off his mind, to get the last few days out of his head, picking the dullest-looking articles in the dullest-looking Digests. He noticed he was falling asleep halfway through “I Am John’s Pancreas.” He barely had time enough to turn out the bedside light and put his head down on the pillow before his eyes closed for the night.

Later he was never able to recollect the sequences and details of that dream: attempts to remember it produced nothing more than a tangle of dark images, underexposed in the darkroom of his mind. There was a girl. He had met her somewhere, and now they were walking across a bridge. It spanned a small lake, in the middle of a town. The wind was ruffling the surface of the lake, making waves tipped with whitecaps, which seemed to Shadow to be tiny hands reaching for him.

— Down there, said the woman. She was wearing a leopard-print skirt which flapped and tossed in the wind, and the flesh between the top of her stockings and her skirt was creamy and soft and in his dream, on the bridge, before God and the world, Shadow went down to his knees in front of her, burying his head in her crotch, drinking in the intoxicating jungle female scent of her. He became aware, in his dream, of his erection in real life, a rigid, pounding, monstrous thing as painful in its hardness as the erections he’d had as a boy, when he was crashing into puberty with no idea of what the unprompted rigidities were, knowing only that they scared him.

He pulled away and looked upward, and still he could not see her face. But his mouth was seeking hers and her lips were soft against his, and his hands were cupping her breasts, and then they were running across the satin smoothness of her skin, pushing into and parting the furs that hid her waist, sliding into the wonderful cleft of her which warmed and wetted and parted for him, opening to his hand like a flower.

The woman purred against him ecstatically, her hand moving down to the hardness of him and squeezing it. He pushed the bed sheets away and rolled on top of her, his hand parting her thighs, her hand guiding him between her legs, where one thrust, one magical push…

Now he was back in his old prison cell with her, and he was kissing her deeply. She wrapped her arms tightly around him, clamped her legs about his legs to hold him tight, so he could not pull out, not even if he wanted to.

Never had he kissed lips so soft. He had not known that there were lips so soft in the whole world. Her tongue, though, was sandpaper-rough as it slipped against his.

— Who are you? he asked.

She made no answer, just pushed him onto his back and, in one lithe movement, straddled him and began to ride him. No, not to ride him: to insinuate herself against him in series of silken-smooth waves, each more powerful than the one before, strokes and beats and rhythms which crashed against his mind and his body just as the wind-waves on the lake splashed against the shore. Her nails were needle-sharp and they pierced his sides, raking them, but he felt no pain, only pleasure, everything was transmuted by some alchemy into moments of utter pleasure.

He struggled to find himself, struggled to talk, his head now filled with sand dunes and desert winds.

— Who are you? he asked again, gasping for the words.

She stared at him with eyes the color of dark amber, then lowered her mouth to his and kissed him with a passion, kissed him so completely and so deeply that there, on the bridge over the lake, in his prison cell, in the bed in the Cairo funeral home, he almost came. He rode the sensation like a kite riding a hurricane, willing it not to crest, not to explode, wanting it never to end. He pulled it under control. He had to warn her.

— My wife, Laura. She will kill you.

— Not me, she said.

A fragment of nonsense bubbled up from somewhere in his mind: in medieval days it was said that a woman on top during coitus would conceive a bishop. That was what they called it: trying for a bishop…

He wanted to know her name, but he dared not ask her a third time, and she pushed her chest against his, and he could feel the hard nubs of her nipples against his chest, and she was squeezing him, somehow squeezing him down there deep inside her and this time he could not ride it or surf it, this time it picked him up and spun and tumbled him away, and he was arching up, pushing into her as deeply as he could imagine, as if they were, in some way, part of the same creature, tasting, drinking, holding, wanting…

— Let it happen, she said, her voice a throaty feline growl. Give it to me. Let it happen. And he came, spasming and dissolving, the back of his mind itself liquefying then sublimating slowly from one state to the next.

Somewhere in there, at the end of it, he took a breath, a clear draught of air he felt all the way down to the depths of his lungs, and he knew that he had been holding his breath for a long time now. Three years, at least. Perhaps even longer.

— Now rest, she said, and she kissed his eyelids with her soft lips. Let it go. Let it all go.

The sleep he slept after that was deep and dreamless and comforting, and Shadow dived deep and embraced it.

The light was strange. It was—he checked his watch—six forty-five A.M., and still dark outside, but the room was filled with a pale blue dimness. He climbed out of bed. He was certain that he had been wearing pajamas when he went to bed, but now he was naked, and the air was cold on his skin. He walked to the window and closed it.

There had been a snowstorm in the night: six inches had fallen, perhaps more. The corner of the town that Shadow could see from his window, dirty and run-down, had been transformed into somewhere clean and different: these houses were not abandoned and forgotten, they were frosted into elegance. The streets had vanished completely, lost beneath a white field of snow.

There was an idea that hovered at the edge of his perception. Something about transience. It flickered and was gone.

He could see as well as if it were full daylight.

In the mirror, Shadow noticed something strange. He stepped closer, and stared, puzzled. All his bruises had vanished. He touched his side, pressing firmly with his fingertips, feeling for one of the deep pains that told him he had encountered Mr. Stone and Mr. Wood, hunting for the greening blossoms of bruise that Mad Sweeney had gifted him with, and finding nothing. His face was clear and unmarked. His sides, however, and his back (he twisted to examine it) were scratched with what looked like claw marks.

He hadn’t dreamed it, then. Not entirely.

Shadow opened the drawers, and put on what he found: an ancient pair of blue-denim Levis, a shirt, a thick blue sweater, and a black undertaker’s coat he found hanging in the wardrobe at the back of the room. He wondered again who the clothes had belonged to.

He wore his own old shoes.

The house was still asleep. He crept through it, willing the floorboards not to creak, and then he was outside (out through the front door, not the mortuary, not this morning, not when he didn’t have to), and he walked through the snow, his feet leaving deep prints in the virgin snow, his steps crunching as they pushed the soft snow deep onto the sidewalk. It was lighter out than it had seemed from inside the house, and the snow reflected the light from the sky.

After fifteen minutes walking, Shadow came to a bridge, with a big sign on the side of it warning him he was now leaving historical Cairo. A man stood under the bridge, tall and gangling, sucking on a cigarette and shivering continually. Shadow thought he recognized the man, but the light on the snow was playing tricks on his eyes, and he walked closer and closer in order to be sure. The man wore a patched denim jacket and a baseball cap.

And then, under the bridge in the winter darkness he was close enough to see the purple smudge of bruise around the man’s eye, and he said, “Good morning, Mad Sweeney.”

The world was so quiet. Not even cars disturbed the snowbound silence.

“Hey, man,” said Mad Sweeney. He did not look up. The cigarette had been rolled by hand. Shadow wondered if the man was smoking a joint. No, the smell was tobacco.

“You keep hanging out under bridges, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow, “people gonna think you’re a troll.”

This time Mad Sweeney looked up. Shadow could see the whites of his eyes all around his irises. The man looked scared. “I was lookin’ for you,” he said. “You gotta help me, man. I fucked up big-time.” He sucked on his hand-rolled cigarette, pulled it away from his mouth. The cigarette paper stuck to his lower lip, and the cigarette fell apart, spilling its contents onto his ginger beard and down the front of his filthy T-shirt. Mad Sweeney brushed it off, convulsively, with blackened hands, as if it were a dangerous insect.

“My resources are pretty much tapped out, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow. “But why don’t you tell me what it is you need. You want me to get you a coffee?”

Mad Sweeney shook his head. He took out a tobacco pouch and papers from the pocket of his denim jacket and began to roll himself another cigarette. His beard bristled and his mouth moved as he did this, although no words were said aloud. He licked the adhesive side of the cigarette paper and rolled it between his fingers. The result looked only distantly like a cigarette. Then he said, “’M not a troll. Shit. Those bastards’re fucken mean.”

“I know you’re not a troll, Sweeney,” said Shadow, gently, hoping that he did not sound as if he were patronizing the man. “How can I help you?”

Mad Sweeney flicked his Zippo, and the first inch of his cigarette flamed and then subsided to ash. “You remember I showed you how to get a coin? You remember?”

“Yes,” said Shadow. He saw the gold coin in his mind’s eye, watched it tumble into Laura’s casket, saw it glitter around her neck. “I remember.”

“You took the wrong coin, man.”

A car approached the gloom beneath the bridge, blinding them with its lights. It slowed as it passed them, then stopped, and a window slid down. “Everything okay here, gentlemen?”

“Everything’s just peachy thank you, officer,” said Shadow. “Just out for a morning walk.”

“Okay now,” said the cop. He did not look as if he believed that everything was okay. He waited. Shadow put a hand on Mad Sweeney’s shoulder, and walked him forward, out of town, away from the police car. He heard the window hum closed, but the car remained where it was.

Shadow walked. Mad Sweeney walked, and sometimes he staggered. They passed a sign saying FUTURE CITY. Shadow imagined a city of spires and Frank R. Paul towers, all gleaming in gentle primary colors, bubble-domed air-cars flitting from tower to tower like glittering hoverflies. That was Future City and somehow Shadow didn’t think it was ever going to be built in Cairo.

The police car cruised past them slowly, then turned, and went back into the city, accelerating down the snowy road.

“Now, why don’t you tell me what’s troubling you,” said Shadow.

“I did it like he said. I did it all like he said, but I gave you the wrong coin. It wasn’t meant to be that coin. That’s for royalty. You see? I shouldn’t even have been able to take it. That’s the coin you’d give to the King of America himself. Not some pissant bastard like you or me. And now I’m in big trouble. Just give me the coin back, man. You’ll never see me again, if you do, I sweartofuckenBran, okay? I swear by the years I spent in the fucken trees.”

“You did it like who said, Sweeney?”

“Grimnir. The dude you call Wednesday. You know who he is? Who he really is?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

There was a panicked look in the Irishman’s crazy blue eyes. “It was nothing bad. Nothing you can—nothing bad. He just told me to be there at that bar and to pick a fight with you. He said he wanted to see what you were made of.”

“He tell you to do anything else?”

Sweeney shivered and twitched; Shadow thought it was the cold for a moment, then knew where he’d seen that shuddering shiver before. In prison: it was a junkie shiver. Sweeney was in withdrawal from something, and Shadow would have been willing to bet it was heroin. A junkie leprechaun? Mad Sweeney pinched off the burning head of his cigarette, dropped it on the ground, put the unfinished yellowing rest of it into his pocket. He rubbed his filthy fingers together, breathed on them to try and rub warmth into them. His voice was a whine now. “Listen, just give me the fucken coin, man. What do you want it for? Huh? Hey, you know there’s more where that came from. I’ll give you another, just as good. Hell, I’ll give you a shitload, man.”

He took off his filthy baseball cap—then, with his right hand, he stroked the air, producing a large golden coin. He dropped it into his cap. And then he took another from a wisp of breath steam, and another, catching and grabbing them from the still morning air until the baseball cap was brimming with them and Sweeney was forced to hold it with both hands.

He extended the baseball cap filled with gold to Shadow. “Here,” he said. “Take them, man. Just give me back the coin I gave to you.” Shadow looked down at the cap, wondered how much its contents would be worth.

“Where am I going to spend those coins, Mad Sweeney?” Shadow asked. “Are there a lot of places you can turn your gold into cash?”

He thought the Irishman was going to hit him for a moment, but the moment passed and Mad Sweeney just stood there, holding out his gold-filled cap with both hands like Oliver Twist. And then tears swelled in his blue eyes and began to spill down his cheeks. He took the cap and put it—now empty of everything except a greasy sweatband—back over his thinning scalp. “You gotta, man,” he was saying. “Didn’t I show you how to do it? I showed you how to take coins from the hoard. I showed you where the hoard was. The treasure of the sun. Just give me that first coin back. It didn’t belong to me.”

“I don’t have it any more.”

Mad Sweeney’s tears stopped, and spots of color appeared in his cheeks. “You, you fucken—” he said, and then the words failed him and his mouth opened and closed, soundlessly.

“I’m telling you the truth,” said Shadow. “I’m sorry. If I had it, I’d give it back to you. But I gave it away.”

Sweeney’s filthy hands clamped on Shadow’s shoulders, and the pale blue eyes stared into his. The tears had made streaks in the dirt on Mad Sweeney’s face. “Shit,” he said. Shadow could smell tobacco and stale beer and whiskey-sweat. “You’re telling the truth, you fucker. Gave it away and freely and of your own will. Damn your dark eyes, you gave it a-fucken-way.”

“I’m sorry.” Shadow remembered the whispering thump the coin had made as it landed in Laura’s casket.

“Sorry or not, I’m damned and I’m doomed.” The tears were flowing once more, and clear snot began to run from the man’s nose. His words dissolved, then, into syllables which never quite congealed together into words. “Bah-bah-bah-bah-bah,” he said. “Muh-muh-muh-muh-muh.” He wiped his nose and his eyes on his sleeves, muddying his face into strange patterns, wiping the snot all over his beard and moustache.

Shadow squeezed Mad Sweeney’s upper arm in an awkward male gesture. I’m here, it said.

“’Twere better I had never been conceived,” said Mad Sweeney, at length. Then he looked up. “The fellow you gave it to. Would he give it back?”

“It’s a woman. And I don’t know where she is. But no, I don’t believe she would.”

Sweeney sighed, mournfully. “When I was but a young pup,” he said, “there was a woman I met, under the stars, who let me play with her bubbies, and she told me my fortune. She told me that I would be undone and abandoned west of the sunrise, and that a dead woman’s bauble would seal my fate. And I laughed and poured more barley wine and played with her bubbies some more, and I kissed her full on her pretty lips. Those were the good days—the first of the gray monks had not yet come to our land, nor had they ridden the green sea to westward. And now.” He stopped, mid-sentence. His head turned and he focused on Shadow. “You shouldn’t trust him,” he said, reproachfully.

“Who?”

“Wednesday. You mustn’t trust him.”

“I don’t have to trust him. I work for him.”

“Do you remember how to do it?”

“What?” Shadow felt he was having a conversation with half a dozen different people. The self-styled leprechaun sputtered and jumped from persona to persona, from theme to theme, as if the remaining clusters of brain cells were igniting, flaming, and then going out for good.

“The coins, man. The coins. I showed you, remember?” He raised two fingers to his face, stared at them, then pulled a gold coin from his mouth. He tossed the coin to Shadow, who stretched out a hand to catch it, but no coin reached him.

“I was drunk,” said Shadow. “I don’t remember.”

Sweeney stumbled across the road. It was light now and the world was white and gray. Shadow followed him. Sweeney walked in a long, loping stride, as if he were always falling, but his legs were there to stop him, to propel him into another stumble. When they reached the bridge, he held on to the bricks with one hand, and turned and said, “You got a few bucks? I don’t need much. Just enough for a ticket out of this place. Twenty bucks will do me fine. You got a twenty? Just a lousy twenty?”

“Where can you go on a twenty-dollar bus-ticket?” asked Shadow.

“I can get out of here,” said Sweeney. “I can get away before the storm hits. Away from a world in which opiates have become the religion of the masses. Away from.” He stopped, wiped his nose on the side of his hand, then wiped his hand on his sleeve.

Shadow reached into his jeans, pulled out a twenty and passed it to Sweeney. “Here.”

Sweeney crumpled it up and pushed it deep into the breast pocket of his oil-stained denim jacket, under the sew-on patch showing two vultures on a dead branch and, barely legible beneath them, the words PATIENCE MY ASS! I’M GOING TO KILL SOMETHING! He nodded. “That’ll get me where I need to go,” he said.

He leaned against the brick, fumbled in his pockets until he found the unfinished stub of cigarette he had abandoned earlier. He lit it carefully, trying not to burn his fingers or his beard. “I’ll tell you something,” he said, as if he had said nothing that day. “You’re walking on gallows ground, and there’s a hempen rope around your neck and a raven-bird on each shoulder, waiting for your eyes, and the gallows tree has deep roots, for it stretches from heaven to hell, and our world is only the branch from which the rope is swinging.” He stopped. “I’ll rest here a spell,” he said, crouching down, his back resting against the black brickwork.

“Good luck,” said Shadow.

“Hell, I’m fucked,” said Mad Sweeney. “Whatever. Thanks.”

Shadow walked back toward the town. It was 8:00 A.M. and Cairo was waking like a tired beast. He glanced back to the bridge, and saw Sweeney’s pale face, striped with tears and dirt, watching him go.

It was the last time Shadow saw Mad Sweeney alive.

The brief winter days leading up to Christmas were like moments of light between the winter darknesses, and they fled fast in the house of the dead.

It was the twenty-third of December, and Jacquel and Ibis’s played host to a wake for Lila Goodchild. Bustling women filled the kitchen with tubs and with saucepans and with skillets and with Tupperware, and the deceased was laid out in her casket in the funeral home’s front room with hothouse flowers around her. There was a table on the other side of the room laden high with coleslaw and beans and cornmeal hush puppies and chicken and ribs and black-eyed peas, and by mid-afternoon the house was filled with people weeping and laughing and shaking hands with the minister, everything being quietly organized and overseen by the sober-suited Messrs. Jacquel and Ibis. The burial would be on the following morning.

When the telephone in the hall rang (it was Bakelite and black and had an honest-to-goodness rotary dial on the front) Mr. Ibis answered. Then he took Shadow aside. “That was the police,” he said. “Can you make a pickup?”

“Sure.”

“Be discreet. Here.” He wrote down an address on a slip of paper, then passed it to Shadow, who read the address, written in perfect copperplate handwriting, and then folded it up and put it in his pocket. “There’ll be a police car,” Ibis added.

Shadow went out back and got the hearse. Mr. Jacquel and Mr. Ibis had each made a point, individually, of explaining that, really, the hearse should only be used for funerals, and they had a van that they used to collect bodies, but the van was being repaired, had been for three weeks now, and could he be very careful with the hearse? Shadow drove carefully down the street. The snowplows had cleaned the roads by now, but he was comfortable driving slowly. It seemed right to go slow in a hearse, although he could barely remember the last time he had seen a hearse on the streets. Death had vanished from the streets of America, thought Shadow; now it happened in hospital rooms and in ambulances. We must not startle the living, thought Shadow. Mr. Ibis had told him that they move the dead about in some hospitals on the lower level of apparently empty covered gurneys, the deceased traveling their own paths in their own covered ways.

A dark blue police cruiser was parked on a side street, and Shadow pulled up the hearse behind it. There were two cops inside the cruiser, drinking their coffee from thermos tops. They had the engine running to keep warm. Shadow tapped on the side window.

“Yeah?”

“I’m from the funeral home,” said Shadow.

“We’re waiting for the medical examiner,” said the cop. Shadow wondered if it was the same man who had spoken to him under the bridge. The cop, who was black, got out of the car, leaving his colleague in the driver’s seat, and walked Shadow back to a Dumpster. Mad Sweeney was sitting in the snow beside the Dumpster. There was an empty green bottle in his lap, a dusting of snow and ice on his face and baseball cap and shoulders. He didn’t blink.

“Dead wino,” said the cop.

“Looks like it,” said Shadow.

“Don’t touch anything yet,” said the cop. “Medical examiner should be here any time now. You ask me, the guy drank himself into a stupor and froze his ass.”

“Yes,” agreed Shadow. “That’s certainly what it looks like.”

He squatted down and looked at the bottle in Mad Sweeney’s lap. Jameson Irish whiskey: a twenty-dollar ticket out of this place. A small green Nissan pulled up, and a harassed middle-aged man with sandy hair and a sandy moustache got out, walked over. He touched the corpse’s neck. He kicks the corpse, thought Shadow, and if it doesn’t kick him back…

“He’s dead,” said the medical examiner. “Any ID?”

“He’s a John Doe,” said the cop.

The medical examiner looked at Shadow. “You working for Jacquel and Ibis?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Shadow.

“Tell Jacquel to get dentals and prints for ID and identity photos. We don’t need a post. He should just draw blood for toxicology. Got that? Do you want me to write it down for you?”

“No,” said Shadow. “It’s fine. I can remember.”

The man scowled fleetingly, then pulled a business card from his wallet, scribbled on it, and gave it to Shadow, saying, “Give this to Jacquel.” Then the medical examiner said “Merry Christmas” to everyone, and was on his way. The cops kept the empty bottle.

Shadow signed for the John Doe and put it on the gurney. The body was pretty stiff, and Shadow couldn’t get it out of a sitting position. He fiddled with the gurney, and found out that he could prop up one end. He strapped John Doe, sitting, to the gurney and put him in the back of the hearse, facing forward. Might as well give him a good ride. He closed the rear curtains. Then he drove back to the funeral home.

The hearse was stopped at a traffic light—the same lights he’d fishtailed at, several nights earlier—when Shadow heard a voice croak, “And it’s a fine wake I’ll be wanting, with the best of everything, and beautiful women shedding tears and their clothes in their distress, and brave men lamenting and telling fine tales of me in my great days.”

“You’re dead, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow. “You take what you’re given when you’re dead.”

“Aye, that I shall,” sighed the dead man sitting in the back of the hearse. The junkie whine had vanished from his voice now, replaced with a resigned flatness, as if the words were being broadcast from a long, long way away, dead words being sent out on a dead frequency.

The light turned green and Shadow put his foot gently down on the gas.

“But give me a wake tonight, nonetheless,” said Mad Sweeney. “Set me a place at table, and give me a stinking drunk wake tonight. You killed me, Shadow, you owe me that much.”

“I never killed you, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow. It’s twenty dollars, he thought, for a ticket out of here. “It was the drink and the cold killed you, not me.”

There was no reply, and there was silence in the car for the rest of the journey. After he parked at the back, Shadow wheeled the gurney out of the hearse and into the mortuary. He manhandled Mad Sweeney onto the embalming table as if he were hauling a side of beef.

He covered the John Doe with a sheet and left him there, with the paperwork beside him. As he went up the back stairs he thought he heard a voice, quiet and muted, like a radio playing in a distant room, which said, “And what would drink or cold be doing killing me, a leprechaun of the blood? No, it was you losing the little golden sun killed me, Shadow, killed me dead as sure as water’s wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.”

Shadow wanted to point out to Mad Sweeney that that was a kind of bitter philosophy, but he suspected it was the being dead that made you bitter.

He went upstairs to the main house, where a number of middle-aged women were putting Saran wrap on casserole dishes, popping the Tupperware tops onto plastic pots of cooling fried potatoes and macaroni and cheese.

Mr. Goodchild, the husband of the deceased, had Mr. Ibis against a wall, and was telling him how he knew none of his children would come out to pay their respects to their mother. The apple don’t fall far from the tree, he told anyone who would listen to him. The apple don’t fall far from the tree.

That evening Shadow laid an extra place at the table. He put a glass at each place, and a new bottle of Jameson Gold in the middle of the table. It was the most expensive Irish whiskey they sold at the liquor store. After they ate (a large platter of leftovers left for them by the middle-aged women) Shadow poured a generous tot into each glass—his, Ibis’s, Jacquel’s and Mad Sweeney’s.

“So what if he’s sitting on a gurney in the cellar,” said Shadow, as he poured, “on his way to a pauper’s grave? Tonight we’ll toast him, and give him the wake he wanted.”

Shadow raised his glass to the empty place at the table. “I only met Mad Sweeney twice, alive,” he said. “The first time I thought he was a world-class jerk with the devil in him. The second time I thought he was a major fuckup and I gave him the money to kill himself. He showed me a coin trick I don’t remember how to do, gave me some bruises, and claimed he was a leprechaun. Rest in peace, Mad Sweeney.” He sipped the whiskey, letting the smoky taste evaporate in his mouth. The other two drank, toasting the empty chair along with him.

Mr. Ibis reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a notebook, which he flipped through until he found the appropriate page, and he read out a summarized version of Mad Sweeney’s life.

According to Mr. Ibis, Mad Sweeney had started his life as the guardian of a sacred rock in a small Irish glade, over three thousand years ago. Mr. Ibis told them of Mad Sweeney’s love affairs, his enmities, the madness that gave him his power (“a later version of the tale is still told, although the sacred nature, and the antiquity, of much of the verse has long been forgotten”), the worship and adoration in his own land that slowly transmuted into a guarded respect and then, finally, into amusement; he told them the story of the girl from Bantry who came to the New World, and who brought her belief in Mad Sweeney the leprechaun with her, for hadn’t she seen him of a night, down by the pool, and hadn’t he smiled at her and called her by her own true name? She had become a refugee, in the hold of a ship of people who had watched their potatoes turn to black sludge in the ground, who had watched friends and lovers die of hunger, who dreamed of a land of full stomachs. The girl from Bantry Bay dreamed, specifically, of a city where a girl would be able to earn enough to bring her family over to the New World. Many of the Irish coming in to America thought of themselves as Catholics, even if they knew nothing of the catechism, even if all they knew of religion was the Bean Sidhe, the banshee, who came to wail at the walls of a house where death soon would be, and Saint Bride, who was once Bridget of the two sisters (each of the three was a Brigid, each was the same woman), and tales of Finn, of Oisín, of Conan the Bald—even of the leprechauns, the little people (and was that not the biggest joke of the Irish, for the leprechauns in their day were the tallest of the mound folk)…

All this and more Mr. Ibis told them in the kitchen that night. His shadow on the wall was stretched and bird-like, and as the whiskey flowed Shadow imagined it the head of a huge waterfowl, beak long and curved, and it was somewhere in the middle of the second glass that Mad Sweeney himself began to throw both details and irrelevancies into Ibis’s narrative (“…such a girl she was, with breasts cream-colored and spackled with freckles, with the tips of them the rich reddish pink of the sunrise on a day when it’ll be bucketing down before noon but glorious again by supper…”) and then Sweeney was trying, with both hands, to explain the history of the gods in Ireland, wave after wave of them as they came in from Gaul and from Spain and from every damn place, each wave of them transforming the last gods into trolls and fairies and every damn creature until Holy Mother Church herself arrived and every god in Ireland was transformed into a fairy or a saint or a dead king without so much as a by-your-leave…

Mr. Ibis polished his gold-rimmed spectacles and explained—enunciating even more clearly and precisely than usual, so Shadow knew he was drunk (his words and the sweat that beaded on his forehead in that chilly house were the only indications of this)—with forefinger wagging, explained that he was an artist and that his tales should not be seen as literal constructs but as imaginative re-creations, truer than the truth, and Mad Sweeney said, “I’ll show you an imaginative re-creation, my fist imaginatively re-creating your fucken face for starters,” and Mr. Jacquel bared his teeth and growled at Sweeney, the growl of a huge dog who’s not looking for a fight but can always finish one by ripping out your throat, and Sweeney took the message and sat down and poured himself another glass of whiskey.

“Have you remembered how I do my little coin trick?” he asked Shadow with a grin.

“I have not.”

“If you can guess how I did it,” said Mad Sweeney, his lips purple, his blue eyes beclouded, “I’ll tell you if you get warm.”

“It’s not a palm is it?” asked Shadow.

“It is not.”

“Is it a gadget of some kind? Something up your sleeve or elsewhere that shoots the coins up for you to catch? Or a coin on a wire that swings in front of and behind your hand?”

“It is not that neither. More whiskey, anybody?”

“I read in a book about a way of doing the Miser’s Dream with latex covering the palm of your hand, making a skin-colored pouch for the coins to hide behind.”

“This is a sad wake for Great Sweeney who flew like a bird across all of Ireland and ate watercress in his madness: to be dead and unmourned save for a bird, a dog, and an idiot. No, it is not a pouch.”

“Well, that’s pretty much it for ideas,” said Shadow. “I expect you just take them out of nowhere.” It was meant to be sarcasm, but then he saw the expression on Sweeney’s face. “You do,” he said. “You do take them from nowhere.”

“Well, not exactly nowhere,” said Mad Sweeney. “But now you’re getting the idea. You take them from the hoard.”

“The hoard,” said Shadow, starting to remember. “Yes.”

“You just have to hold it in your mind, and it’s yours to take from. The sun’s treasure. It’s there in those moments when the world makes a rainbow. It’s there in the moment of eclipse and the moment of the storm.”

And he showed Shadow how to do the thing.

This time Shadow got it.

Shadow’s head ached and pounded, and his tongue tasted and felt like flypaper. He squinted at the glare of the daylight. He had fallen asleep with his head on the kitchen table. He was fully dressed, although he had at some point taken off his black tie.

He walked downstairs, to the mortuary, and was relieved but unsurprised to see that John Doe was still on the embalming table. Shadow pried the empty bottle of Jameson Gold from the corpse’s rigor-mortised fingers, and threw it away. He could hear someone moving about in the house above.

Mr. Wednesday was sitting at the kitchen table when Shadow went upstairs. He was eating leftover potato salad from a Tupperware container with a plastic spoon. He wore a dark gray suit, a white shirt and a deep gray tie: the morning sun glittered on the silver tiepin in the shape of a tree. He smiled at Shadow when he saw him.

“Ah, Shadow m’boy, good to see you’re up. I thought you were going to sleep forever.”

“Mad Sweeney’s dead,” said Shadow.

“So I heard,” said Wednesday. “A great pity. Of course it will come to all of us, in the end.” He tugged on an imaginary rope, somewhere on the level of his ear, and then jerked his neck to one side, tongue protruding, eyes bulging. As quick pantomimes went, it was disturbing. And then he let go of the rope and smiled his familiar grin. “Would you like some potato salad?”

“I would not.” Shadow darted a look around the kitchen and out into the hall. “Do you know where Ibis and Jacquel are?”

“Indeed I do. They are burying Mrs. Lila Goodchild—something that they would probably have liked your help in doing, but I asked them not to wake you. You have a long drive ahead of you.”

“We’re leaving?”

“Within the hour.”

“I should say goodbye.”

“Goodbyes are overrated. You’ll see them again, I have no doubt, before this affair is done with.”

For the first time since that first night, Shadow observed, the small brown cat was curled up in her basket. She opened her incurious amber eyes and watched him go.

So Shadow left the house of the dead. Ice sheathed the winter-black bushes and trees as if they’d been insulated, made into dreams. The path was slippery.

Wednesday led the way to Shadow’s white Chevy Nova, parked out on the road. It had been recently cleaned, and the Wisconsin plates had been removed, replaced with Minnesota plates. Wednesday’s luggage was already stacked in the back seat. Wednesday unlocked the car with keys that were duplicates of the ones Shadow had in his own pocket.

“I’ll drive,” said Wednesday. “It’ll be at least an hour before you’re good for anything.”

They drove north, the Mississippi on their left, a wide silver stream beneath a gray sky. Shadow saw, perched on a leafless gray tree beside the road, a huge brown and white hawk, which stared down at them with mad eyes as they drove toward it, then took to the wing and rose in slow and powerful circles and, in moments, was out of sight.

Shadow realized it had only been a temporary reprieve, his time in the house of the dead; and already it was beginning to feel like something that happened to somebody else, a long time ago.