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

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

They changed cars at five in the morning, in Minneapolis, in the airport’s long-term parking lot. They drove to the top floor, where the parking building was open to the sky.

Shadow took the orange uniform and the handcuffs and leg hobbles, put them in the brown paper bag that had briefly held his possessions, folded the whole thing up and dropped it into a parking lot garbage can. They had been waiting for ten minutes when a barrel-chested young man came out of an airport door and walked over to them. He was eating a packet of Burger King french fries. Shadow recognized him immediately: he had sat in the back of the car when they had left the House on the Rock, and hummed so deeply the car had vibrated. He now sported a white-streaked winter beard he had not had when they had met at the House on the Rock. It made him look older.

The man wiped the grease from his hands onto his sweater, extended one huge hand to Shadow. “I heard of the all-father’s death,” he said. “They will pay, and they will pay dearly.”

“Wednesday was your father?” asked Shadow.

“He was the all-father,” said the man. His deep voice caught in his throat. “You tell them, tell them all, that when we are needed my people will be there.”

Czernobog picked at a flake of tobacco between his teeth and spat it out onto the frozen slush. “And how many of you is that? Ten? Twenty?”

The barrel-chested man’s beard bristled. “And aren’t ten of us worth a hundred of them? Who would stand against even one of my folk, in a battle? But there are more of us than that, at the edges of the cities. There are a few in the mountains. Some in the Catskills, a few living in the carny towns in Florida. They keep their axes sharp. They will come if I call them.”

“You do that, Elvis,” said Mr. Nancy. Shadow thought he said Elvis, anyway, but he couldn’t be sure. Nancy had exchanged the deputy’s uniform for a thick brown cardigan, corduroy trousers, and brown loafers. “You call them. It’s what the old bastard would have wanted.”

“They betrayed him. They killed him. I laughed at Wednesday, but I was wrong. None of us are safe any longer,” said the man who might have been named Elvis. “But you can rely on us.” He gently patted Shadow on the back and almost sent him sprawling. It was like being gently patted on the back by a wrecking ball.

Czernobog had been looking around the parking lot. Now he said, “You will pardon me asking, but our new vehicle is which?”

The barrel-chested man pointed. “There she is,” he said.

Czernobog snorted. “That?”

It was a 1970 VW bus. There was a rainbow decal in the rear window.

“It’s a fine vehicle. And it’s the last thing that they’ll be expecting you to be driving. The last thing they’ll be looking for.”

Czernobog walked around the vehicle. Then he started to cough, a lung-rumbling, old-man, five-in-the-morning, smoker’s cough. He hawked, and spat, and put his hand to his chest, massaging away the pain. “Yes. The last car they will suspect. So what happens when the police pull us over, looking for the hippies, and the dope? Eh? We are not here to ride the magic bus. We are to blend in.”

The bearded man unlocked the door of the bus. “So they take a look at you, they see you aren’t hippies, they wave you goodbye. It’s the perfect disguise. And it’s all I could find at no notice.”

Czernobog seemed to be ready to argue it further, but Mr. Nancy intervened smoothly. “Elvis, you come through for us. We are very grateful. Now, that car needs to get back to Chicago.”

“We’ll leave it in Bloomington,” said the bearded man. “The wolves will take care of it. Don’t give it another thought.” He turned back to Shadow. “Again, you have my sympathy and I share your pain. Good luck. And if the vigil falls to you, my admiration, and my sympathy.” He squeezed Shadow’s hand in sympathy and in friendship with his own catcher’s-mitt fist. It hurt. “You tell his corpse when you see it. Tell him that Alviss son of Vindalf will keep the faith.”

The VW bus smelled of patchouli, of old incense and rolling tobacco. There was a faded pink carpet glued to the floor and to the walls.

“Who was that?” asked Shadow, as he drove them down the ramp, grinding the gears.

“Just like he said, Alviss son of Vindalf. He’s the king of the dwarfs. The biggest, mightiest, greatest of all the dwarf folk.”

“But he’s not a dwarf,” pointed out Shadow. “He’s what, five eight? Five nine?”

“Which makes him a giant among dwarfs,” said Czernobog from behind him. “Tallest dwarf in America.”

“What was that about the vigil?” asked Shadow.

The two old men said nothing. Shadow glanced to his right. Mr. Nancy was staring out of the window.

“Well? He was talking about a vigil. You heard him.”

Czernobog spoke up from the back seat. “You will not have to do it,” he said.

“Do what?”

“The vigil. He talks too much. All the dwarfs talk and talk and talk. And sing. All the time, sing, sing, sing. Is nothing to think of. Better you put it out of your mind.”

They drove south, keeping off the freeways (“We must assume,” said Mr. Nancy, “that they are in enemy hands. Or that they are perhaps enemy hands in their own right”). Driving south was like driving forward in time. The snows erased, slowly, and were completely gone by the following morning when the bus reached Kentucky. Winter was already over in Kentucky, and spring was on its way. Shadow began to wonder if there were some kind of equation to explain it—perhaps every fifty miles he drove south he was driving a day into the future.

He would have mentioned his idea to his passengers, but Mr. Nancy was asleep in the passenger seat in the front, while Czernobog snored unceasingly in the back.

Time seemed a flexible construct at that moment, an illusion he was imagining as he drove. He found himself becoming painfully aware of birds and animals: he saw the crows on the side of the road, or in the bus’s path, picking at roadkill; flights of birds wheeled across the skies in patterns that almost made sense; cats stared at them from front lawns and fence-posts.

Czernobog snorted and woke, sitting up slowly. “I dreamed a strange dream,” he said. “I dreamed that I am truly Bielebog. That forever the world imagines that there are two of us, the light god and the dark, but that now we are both old, I find it was only me all the time, giving them gifts, taking my gifts away.” He broke the filter from a Lucky Strike, put it between his lips and lit it with his lighter.

Shadow wound down his window.

“Aren’t you worried about lung cancer?” he said.

“I am cancer,” said Czernobog. “I do not frighten myself.” He chuckled, and then the chuckle became a wheeze and the wheeze turned into a cough.

Nancy spoke. “Folk like us don’t get cancer. We don’t get arteriosclerosis or Parkinson’s disease or syphilis. We’re kind of hard to kill.”

“They killed Wednesday,” said Shadow.

He pulled over for gas, and then parked next door at a restaurant, for an early breakfast. As they entered, the payphone in the entrance began to jangle. They walked past it without answering it, and it stopped ringing.

They gave their orders to an elderly woman with a worried smile, who had been sitting reading a paperback copy of What My Heart Meant by Jenny Kerton. The telephone began to ring once more. The woman sighed, then walked back and over to the phone, picked it up, said, “Yes.” Then she looked back at the room, said, “Yep. Looks like they are. You just hold the line now,” and walked over to Mr. Nancy.

“It’s for you,” she said.

“Okay,” said Mr. Nancy. “Now, ma’am, you make sure those fries are real crisp now. Think burnt.” He walked over to the payphone.

“This is he,” he said.

“And what makes you think I’m dumb enough to trust you?” he said.

“I can find it,” he said. “I know where it is.”

“Yes,” he said. “We want it. You know we want it. And I know you want to get rid of it. So don’t give me any shit.”

He put down the telephone, came back to the table.

“Who was it?” asked Shadow.

“Didn’t say.”

“What did they want?”

“They were offerin’ us a truce, while they hand over the body.”

“They lie,” said Czernobog. “They want to lure us in, and then they will kill us. What they did to Wednesday. Is what I always used to do,” he added, with gloomy pride. “Promise them anything, but do what you will.”

“It’s on neutral territory,” said Nancy. “Truly neutral.”

Czernobog chuckled. It sounded like a metal ball rattling in a dry skull. “I used to say that also. Come to a neutral place, I would say, and then in the night we would rise up and kill them all. Those were the good days.”

Mr. Nancy shrugged. He crunched down on his dark brown french fries, grinned his approval. “Mm-mm. These are fine fries,” he said.

“We can’t trust those people,” said Shadow.

“Listen, I’m older than you and I’m smarter than you and I’m better lookin’ than you,” said Mr. Nancy, thumping the bottom of the ketchup bottle, blobbing ketchup over his burnt fries. “I can get more pussy in an afternoon than you’ll get in a year. I can dance like an angel, fight like a cornered bear, plan better than a fox, sing like a nightingale…”

“And your point here is…?”

Nancy’s brown eyes gazed into Shadow’s. “And they need to get rid of the body as much as we need to take it.”

Czernobog said, “There is no such neutral place.”

“There’s one,” said Mr. Nancy. “It’s the center.”

Czernobog shook his head abruptly. “No. They would not meet us there. They can do nothing to us, there. It is a bad place for all of us.”

“That’s just why they’ve proposed to make the handover at the center.”

Czernobog seemed to think about this for a while. And then he said, “Perhaps.”

“When we get back on the road,” said Shadow, “you can drive. I need to sleep.”

Determining the exact center of anything can be problematic at best. With living things—people, for example, or continents—the problem becomes one of intangibles: What is the center of a man? What is the center of a dream? And in the case of the continental United States, should one count Alaska when one attempts to find the center? Or Hawaii?

As the twentieth century began, they made a huge model of the USA, the lower forty-eight states, out of cardboard, and to find the center they balanced it on a pin, until they found the single place it balanced.

Near as anyone could figure it out, the exact center of the continental United States was several miles from Lebanon, in Smith County, Kansas, on Johnny Grib’s hog farm. By the 1930s, the people of Lebanon were all ready to put a monument up in the middle of the hog farm, but Johnny Grib said that he didn’t want millions of tourists coming in and tramping all over and upsetting the hogs, and the locals figured he had a point, so they put the monument to the geographical center of the United States two miles north of the town. They built a park, and a stone monument to put in the park, and put a brass plaque to go on the monument to tell you that you were indeed looking at the exact geographic center of the United States of America. They blacktopped the road from the town to the little park, and, certain of the influx of tourists just waiting to come to Lebanon, they even built a motel by the monument. They brought in a little mobile chapel as well, and took off the wheels. Then they waited for the tourists and the holidaymakers to come: all the people who wanted to tell the world they’d been at the center of America, and marveled, and prayed.

The tourists did not come. Nobody came.

It’s a sad little park, now, with a mobile chapel in it a little bigger than an ice-fishing hut that wouldn’t fit a small funeral party, and a motel whose windows look like dead eyes.

“Which is why,” concluded Mr. Nancy, as they drove into Humansville, Missouri (pop. 1,084), “the exact center of America is a tiny run-down park, an empty church, a pile of stones, and a derelict motel.”

“Hog farm,” said Czernobog. “You just said that the real center of America was a hog farm.”

“This isn’t about what is,” said Mr. Nancy. “It’s about what people think is. It’s all imaginary anyway. That’s why it’s important. People only fight over imaginary things.”

“My kind of people?” asked Shadow. “Or your kind of people?”

Nancy said nothing. Czernobog made a noise that might have been a chuckle, might have been a snort.

Shadow tried to get comfortable in the back of the bus. He had slept a little, but only a little. He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Worse than the feeling he had had in prison, worse than the feeling he had had back when Laura had come to him and told him about the robbery. This was bad. The back of his neck prickled, he felt sick and, several times, in waves, he felt scared.

Mr. Nancy pulled over in Humansville, parked outside a supermarket. Mr. Nancy went inside, and Shadow followed him in. Czernobog waited in the parking lot, stretching his legs, smoking his cigarette.

There was a young fair-haired man, little more than a boy, restocking the breakfast cereal shelves.

“Hey,” said Mr. Nancy.

“Hey,” said the young man. “It’s true, isn’t it? They killed him?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Nancy. “They killed him.”

The young man banged several boxes of Cap’n Crunch down on the shelf. “They think they can crush us like cockroaches,” he said. He had an eruption of acne across one cheek and over his forehead. He had a silver bracelet high on one forearm. “We don’t crush that easy, do we?”

“No,” said Mr. Nancy. “We don’t.”

“I’ll be there, sir,” said the young man, his pale blue eyes blazing.

“I know you will, Gwydion,” said Mr. Nancy.

Mr. Nancy bought several large bottles of RC Cola, a six-pack of toilet paper, a pack of evil-looking black cigarillos, a bunch of bananas and a pack of Doublemint chewing gum. “He’s a good boy. Came over in the seventh century. Welsh.”

The bus meandered first to the west and then to the north. Spring faded back into the dead end of winter. Kansas was the cheerless gray of lonesome clouds, empty windows and lost hearts. Shadow had become adept at hunting for radio stations, negotiating between Mr. Nancy, who liked talk radio and dance music, and Czernobog, who favored classical music, the gloomier the better, leavened with the more extreme evangelical religious stations. For himself, Shadow liked oldies stations.

Toward the end of the afternoon they stopped, at Czernobog’s request, on the outskirts of Cherryvale, Kansas (pop. 2,464). Czernobog led them to a meadow outside the town. There were still traces of snow in the shadows of the trees, and the grass was the color of dirt.

“Wait here,” said Czernobog.

He walked, alone, to the center of the meadow. He stood there, in the winds of the end of February, for some time. At first he hung his head, then he began gesticulating.

“He looks like he’s talking to someone,” said Shadow.

“Ghosts,” said Mr. Nancy. “They worshiped him here, over a hundred years ago. They made blood-sacrifice to him, libations spilled with the hammer. After a time, the townsfolk figured out why so many of the strangers who passed through the town didn’t ever come back. This was where they hid some of the bodies.”

Czernobog came back from the middle of the field. His moustache seemed darker now, and there were streaks of black in his gray hair. He smiled, showing his iron tooth. “I feel good, now. Ahh. Some things linger, and blood lingers longest.”

They walked back across the meadow to where they had parked the VW bus. Czernobog lit a cigarette, but did not cough. “They did it with the hammer,” he said. “Grimnir, he would talk of the gallows and the spear, but for me, it is one thing…” He reached out a nicotine-colored finger and tapped it, hard, in the center of Shadow’s forehead.

“Please don’t do that,” said Shadow, politely.

“Please don’t do that,” mimicked Czernobog. “One day I will take my hammer and do much worse than that to you, my friend, remember?”

“Yes,” said Shadow. “But if you tap my head again, I’ll break your hand.”

Czernobog snorted. Then he said, “They should be grateful, the people here. There was such power raised. Even thirty years after they forced my people into hiding, this land, this very land, gave us the greatest movie star of all time. She was the greatest there ever was.”

“Judy Garland?” asked Shadow.

Czernobog shook his head curtly.

“He’s talking about Louise Brooks,” said Mr. Nancy.

Shadow decided not to ask who Louise Brooks was. Instead he said, “So, look, when Wednesday went to talk to them, he did it under a truce.”

“Yes.”

“And now we’re going to get Wednesday’s body from them, as a truce.”

“Yes.”

“And we know that they want me dead or out of the way.”

“They want all of us dead,” said Nancy.

“So what I don’t get is, why do we think they’ll play fair this time, when they didn’t for Wednesday?”

“That,” said Czernobog, overenunciating each word, as he would for a deaf foreign idiot child, “is why we are meeting at the center. Is…” He frowned. “What is the word for it? The opposite of sacred?”

“Profane,” said Shadow, without thinking.

“No,” said Czernobog. “I mean, when a place is less sacred than any other place. Of negative sacredness. Places where they can build no temples. Places where people will not come, and will leave as soon as they can. Places where gods only walk if they are forced to.”

“I don’t know,” said Shadow. “I don’t think there is a word for it.”

“All of America has it, a little,” said Czernobog. “That is why we are not welcome here. But the center,” said Czernobog. “The center is worst. Is like a minefield. We all tread too carefully there to dare break the truce.”

“I told you all this already,” said Mr. Nancy.

“Whatever,” said Shadow.

They had reached the bus. Czernobog patted Shadow’s upper arm. “You don’t worry,” he said, with gloomy reassurance. “Nobody else is going to kill you. Nobody but me.”

Shadow found the center of America at evening that same day, before it was fully dark. It was on a slight hill to the northwest of Lebanon. He drove around the little hillside park, past the tiny mobile chapel and the stone monument, and when Shadow saw the one-story 1950s motel at the edge of the park his heart sank. There was a huge black car parked in front of it—a Humvee, which looked like a jeep reflected in a fun-house mirror, as squat and pointless and ugly as an armored car. There were no lights on in the building

They parked beside the motel, and as they did so, a man in a chauffeur’s uniform and cap walked out of the motel and was illuminated by the headlights of the bus. He touched his cap to them, politely, got into the Humvee, and drove off.

“Big car, tiny dick,” said Mr. Nancy.

“Do you think they’ll even have beds here?” asked Shadow. “It’s been days since I slept in a bed. This place looks like it’s just waiting to be demolished.”

“It’s owned by hunters from Texas,” said Mr. Nancy. “Come up here once a year. Damned if I know what they’re huntin’. It stops the place being condemned and destroyed.”

They climbed out of the bus. Waiting for them in front of the motel was a woman Shadow did not recognize. She was perfectly made-up, perfectly coiffed. She reminded him of every newscaster he’d ever seen on morning television sitting in a studio that didn’t really resemble a living room, smiling at the good morning crowd.

“Lovely to see you,” she said. “Now, you must be Czernobog. I’ve heard a lot about you. And you’re Anansi, always up to mischief, eh? You jolly old man. And you, you must be Shadow. You’ve certainly led us a merry chase, haven’t you?” A hand took his, pressed it firmly, looked him straight in the eye. “I’m Media. Good to meet you. I hope we can get this evening’s business done as pleasantly as possible.”

The main doors opened. “Somehow, Toto,” said the fat kid Shadow had last seen sitting in a limo, “I don’t believe we’re in Kansas any more.”

“We’re in Kansas,” said Mr. Nancy. “I think we must have driven through most of it today. Damn but this country is flat.”

“This place has no lights, no power, and no hot water,” said the fat kid. “And, no offense, you people really need the hot water. You just smell like you’ve been in that bus for a week.”

“I don’t think there’s any need to go there,” said the woman, smoothly. “We’re all friends here. Come on in. We’ll show you to your rooms. We took the first four rooms. Your late friend is in the fifth. All the ones beyond room five are empty—you can take your pick. I’m afraid it’s not the Four Seasons, but then, what is?”

She opened the door to the motel lobby for them. It smelled of mildew, of damp and dust and of decay.

There was a man sitting in the lobby, in the near darkness. “You people hungry?” he asked.

“I can always eat,” said Mr. Nancy.

“Driver’s gone out for a sack of hamburgers,” said the man. “He’ll be back soon.” He looked up. It was too dark to see faces, but he said, “Big guy. You’re Shadow, huh? The asshole who killed Woody and Stone?”

“No,” said Shadow. “That was someone else. And I know who you are.” He did. He had been inside the man’s head. “You’re Town. Have you slept with Wood’s widow yet?”

Mr. Town fell off his chair. In a movie, it would have been funny; in real life it was simply clumsy. He stood up quickly, came toward Shadow. Shadow looked down at him, and said, “Don’t start anything you’re not prepared to finish.”

Mr. Nancy rested his hand on Shadow’s upper arm. “Truce, remember?” he said. “We’re at the center.”

Mr. Town turned away, leaned over to the counter and picked up three keys. “You’re down at the end of the hall,” he said. “Here.”

He handed the keys to Mr. Nancy and walked away, into the shadows of the corridor. They heard a motel room door open, and they heard it slam.

Mr. Nancy passed a key to Shadow, another to Czernobog. “Is there a flashlight on the bus?” asked Shadow.

“No,” said Mr. Nancy. “But it’s just dark. You mustn’t be afraid of the dark.”

“I’m not,” said Shadow. “I’m afraid of the people in the dark.”

“Dark is good,” said Czernobog. He seemed to have no difficulty seeing where he was going, leading them down the darkened corridor, putting the keys into the locks without fumbling. “I will be in room ten,” he told them. And then he said, “Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn’t she the one who killed her children?”

“Different woman,” said Mr. Nancy. “Same deal.”

Mr. Nancy was in room eight, and Shadow opposite the two of them, in room nine. The room smelled damp, and dusty, and deserted. There was a bed-frame in there, with a mattress on it, but no sheets. A little light entered the room from the gloaming outside the window. Shadow sat down on the mattress, pulled off his shoes, and stretched out at full length. He had driven too much in the last few days.

Perhaps he slept.

He was walking.

A cold wind tugged at his clothes. The tiny snowflakes were little more than a crystalline dust which gusted and flurried in the wind.

There were trees, bare of leaves in the winter. There were high hills on each side of him. It was late on a winter’s afternoon: the sky and the snow had attained the same deep shade of purple. Somewhere ahead of him—in this light, distances were impossible to judge—the flames of a bonfire flickered, yellow and orange.

A gray wolf padded through the snow before him.

Shadow stopped. The wolf stopped also, and turned, and waited. One of its eyes glinted yellowish-green. Shadow shrugged and walked toward the flames and the wolf ambled ahead of him.

The bonfire burned in the middle of a grove of trees. There must have been a hundred trees, planted in two rows. There were shapes hanging from the trees. At the end of the rows was a building that looked a little like an overturned boat. It was carved of wood, and it crawled with wooden creatures and wooden faces—dragons, gryphons, trolls and boars—all of them dancing in the flickering light of the fire.

The bonfire was so high, and burning so hard, that Shadow could barely approach it. The wolf seemed unfazed, and it padded around the crackling fire.

He waited for it to return, but in place of the wolf a man walked back around the fire. He was leaning on a tall stick.

“You are in Uppsala, in Sweden,” said the man, in a familiar, gravelly voice. “About a thousand years ago.”

“Wednesday?” said Shadow.

The man who might have been Wednesday continued to talk, as if Shadow was not there. “First every year, then, later, when the rot set in, and they became lax, every nine years, they would sacrifice here. A sacrifice of nines. Each day, for nine days, they would hang nine animals from trees in the grove. One of those animals was always a man.”

He strode away from the firelight, toward the trees, and Shadow followed him. As he approached the trees the shapes that hung from them resolved: legs and eyes and tongues and heads. Shadow shook his head: there was something about seeing a bull hanging by its neck from a tree that was darkly sad, and at the same time surreal enough almost to be funny. Shadow passed a hanging stag, a wolfhound, a brown bear, and a chestnut horse with a white mane, little bigger than a pony. The dog was still alive: every few seconds it would kick spasmodically, and it was making a strained whimpering noise, as it dangled from the rope.

The man he was following took his long stick, which Shadow realized now, as it moved, was actually a spear, and he slashed at the dog’s stomach with it, in one knife-like cut downward. Steaming entrails tumbled onto the snow. “I dedicate this death to Odin,” said the man, formally.

“It is only a gesture,” he said, turning back to Shadow. “But gestures mean everything. The death of one dog symbolizes the death of all dogs. Nine men they gave to me, but they stood for all the men, all the blood, all the power. It just wasn’t enough. One day, the blood stopped flowing. Belief without blood only takes us so far. The blood must flow.”

“I saw you die,” said Shadow.

“In the god business,” said the figure—and now Shadow was certain it was Wednesday, nobody else had that rasp, that deep cynical joy in words, “it’s not the death that matters. It’s the opportunity for resurrection. And when the blood flows…” He gestured at the animals, at the people, hanging from the trees.

Shadow could not decide whether the dead humans they walked past were more or less horrifying than the animals: at least the humans had known the fate they were going to. There was a deep, boozy smell about the men that suggested that they had been allowed to anaesthetize themselves on their way to the gallows, while the animals would simply have been lynched, hauled up alive and terrified. The faces of the men looked so young: none of them was older than twenty.

“Who am I?” asked Shadow.

“You are a diversion,” said the man. “You were an opportunity. You gave the whole affair an air of credibility I would have been hard put to deliver solo. Although both of us are committed enough to the affair to die for it. Eh?”

“Who are you?” asked Shadow.

“The hardest part is simply surviving,” said the man. The bonfire—and Shadow realized with a strange horror that it truly was a bone-fire: ribcages and fire-eyed skulls stared and stuck and jutted from the flames, sputtering trace-element colors into the night, greens and yellows and blues—was flaring and crackling and burning hotly. “Three days on the tree, three days in the underworld, three days to find my way back.”

The flames sputtered and flared too brightly for Shadow to look at directly. He looked down into the darkness beneath the trees.

There was no fire, no snow. There were no trees, no hanged bodies, no bloody spear.

A knock on the door—and now there was moonlight coming in the window. Shadow sat up with a start. “Dinner’s served,” said Media’s voice.

Shadow put his shoes back on, walked over to the door, went out into the corridor. Someone had found some candles, and a dim yellow light illuminated the reception hall. The driver of the Humvee came in through the swing doors holding a cardboard tray and a paper sack. He wore a long black coat and a peaked chauffeur’s cap.

“Sorry about the delay,” he said, hoarsely. “I got everybody the same: a couple of burgers, large fries, large Coke, and apple pie. I’ll eat mine out in the car.” He put the food down, then walked back outside. The smell of fast food filled the lobby. Shadow took the paper bag and passed out the food, the napkins, the packets of ketchup.

They ate in silence while the candles flickered and the burning wax hissed.

Shadow noticed that Town was glaring at him. He turned his chair a little, so his back was to the wall. Media ate her burger with a napkin poised by her lips to remove crumbs.

“Oh. Great. These burgers are nearly cold,” said the fat kid. He was still wearing his shades, which Shadow thought pointless and foolish, given the darkness of the room.

“Sorry about that. The guy had to drive a way to find them,” said Town. “The nearest McDonald’s is in Nebraska.”

They finished their lukewarm hamburgers and cold fries. The fat kid bit into his single-person apple pie, and the filling spurted down his chin. Unexpectedly, the filling was still hot. “Ow,” he said. He wiped at it with his hand, licking his fingers to get them clean. “That stuff burns!” he said. “Those pies are a class action suit waiting to fucking happen.”

Shadow realized he wanted to hit the kid. He’d wanted to hit him since the kid had his goons hurt him in the limo, after Laura’s funeral. He knew it was not a wise thing to be thinking, not here, not now. “Can’t we just take Wednesday’s body and get out of here?” he asked.

“Midnight,” said Mr. Nancy and the fat kid, at the same time.

“These things must be done according to the rules,” said Czernobog. “All things have rules.”

“Yeah,” said Shadow. “But nobody tells me what they are. You keep talking about the goddamn rules, I don’t even know what game you people are playing.”

“It’s like breaking the street date,” said Media, brightly. “You know. When things are allowed to be on sale.”

Town said, “I think the whole thing’s a crock of shit. But if their rules make them happy, then my agency is happy and everybody’s happy.” He slurped his Coke. “Roll on midnight. You take the body, you go away. We’re all lovey-fucking-dovey and we wave you goodbye. And then we can get on with hunting you down like the rats you are.”

“Hey,” said the fat kid to Shadow. “Reminds me. I told you to tell your boss he was history. Did you ever tell him?”

“I told him,” said Shadow. “And you know what he said to me? He said to tell the little snot, if ever I saw him again, to remember that today’s future is tomorrow’s yesterday.” Wednesday had never said any such thing, but Shadow delivered it as Wednesday would have done. These people seemed to like clichés. The black sunglasses reflected the flickering candle-flames back at him, like eyes.

The fat kid said, “This place is such a fucking dump. No power. Out of wireless range. I mean, when you got to be wired, you’re already back in the Stone Age.” He sucked the last of his Coke through the straw, dropped the cup on the table and walked away down the corridor.

Shadow reached over and placed the fat kid’s garbage back into the paper sack. “I’m going to see the center of America,” he announced. He got up and walked outside, into the night. Mr. Nancy followed him. They strolled together, across the little park, saying nothing until they reached the stone monument. The wind gusted at them, fitfully, first from one direction, then from another. “So,” he said. “Now what?”

The half-moon hung pale in the dark sky.

“Now,” said Nancy, “you should go back to your room. Lock the door. You try to get some more sleep. At midnight they give us the body. And then we get the hell out of here. The center is not a stable place for anybody.”

“If you say so.”

Mr. Nancy inhaled on his cigarillo. “This should never have happened,” he said. “None of this should have happened. Our kind of people, we are…” he waved the cigarillo about, as if using it to hunt for a word, then stabbing forward with it, “…exclusive. We’re not social. Not even me. Not even Bacchus. Not for long. We walk by ourselves or we stay in our own little groups. We do not play well with others. We like to be adored and respected and worshiped—me, I like them to be tellin’ tales about me, tales showing my cleverness. It’s a fault, I know, but it’s the way I am. We like to be big. Now, in these shabby days, we are small. The new gods rise and fall and rise again. But this is not a country that tolerates gods for long. Brahma creates, Vishnu preserves, Shiva destroys, and the ground is clear for Brahma to create once more.”

“So what are you saying?” asked Shadow. “The fighting’s over, now? The battle’s done?”

Mr. Nancy snorted. “Are you out of your mind? They killed Wednesday. They killed him and they bragged about it. They spread the word. They’ve showed it on every channel to those with eyes to see it. No, Shadow. It’s only just begun.”

He bent down at the foot of the stone monument, stubbed out his cigarillo on the earth, and left it there, like an offering.

“You used to make jokes,” said Shadow. “You don’t any more.”

“It’s hard to find the jokes these days. Wednesday’s dead. Are you comin’ inside?”

“Soon.”

Nancy walked away, toward the motel. Shadow reached out his hand and touched the monument’s stones. He dragged his big fingers across the cold brass plate. Then he turned and walked over to the tiny white church, walked through the open doorway, into the darkness. He sat down in the nearest pew and closed his eyes and lowered his head, and thought about Laura, and about Wednesday, and about being alive.

There was a click from behind him, and a scuff of shoe against earth. Shadow sat up, and turned. Someone stood just outside the open doorway, a dark shape against the stars. Moonlight glinted from something metal.

“You going to shoot me?” asked Shadow.

“Jesus—I wish,” said Mr. Town. “It’s only for self-defense. So, you’re praying? Have they got you thinking that they’re gods? They aren’t gods.”

“I wasn’t praying,” said Shadow. “Just thinking.”

“The way I figure it,” said Town, “they’re mutations. Evolutionary experiments. A little hypnotic ability, a little hocus-pocus, and they can make people believe anything. Nothing to write home about. That’s all. They die like men, after all.”

“They always did,” said Shadow. He got up, and Town took a step back. Shadow walked out of the little chapel, and Mr. Town kept his distance. “Hey,” Shadow said. “Do you know who Louise Brooks was?”

“Friend of yours?”

“Nope. She was a movie star from south of here.”

Town paused. “Maybe she changed her name, and became Liz Taylor or Sharon Stone or someone,” he suggested, helpfully.

“Maybe.” Shadow started to walk back to the motel. Town kept pace with him.

“You should be back in prison,” said Mr. Town. “You should be on fucking death row.”

“I didn’t kill your associates,” said Shadow. “But I’ll tell you something a guy once told me, back when I was in prison. Something I’ve never forgotten.”

“And that is?”

“There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don’t knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don’t.”

The driver stood by the Humvee. “G’night, gentlemen,” he said, as they passed.

“Night,” said Mr. Town. And then he said, to Shadow, “I personally don’t give a fuck about any of this. What I do, is what Mr. World says. It’s easier that way.”

Shadow walked down the corridor to room nine.

He unlocked the door, went inside. He said, “Sorry. I thought this was my room.”

“It is,” said Media. “I was waiting for you.” He could see her hair in the moonlight, and her pale face. She was sitting on his bed, primly.

“I’ll find another room.”

“I won’t be here for long,” she said. “I just thought it might be an appropriate time to make you an offer.”

“Okay. Make the offer.”

“Relax,” she said. There was a smile in her voice. “You have such a stick up your butt. Look, Wednesday’s dead. You don’t owe anyone anything. Throw in with us. Time to Come Over to the Winning Team.”

Shadow said nothing.

“We can make you famous, Shadow. We can give you power over what people believe and say and wear and dream. You want to be the next Cary Grant? We can make that happen. We can make you the next Beatles.”

“I think I preferred it when you were offering to show me Lucy’s tits,” said Shadow. “If that was you.”

“Ah,” she said.

“I need my room back. Good night.”

“And then of course,” she said, not moving, as if he had not spoken, “we can turn it all around. We can make it bad for you. You could be a bad joke forever, Shadow. Or you could be remembered as a monster. You could be remembered forever, but as a Manson, a Hitler…how would you like that?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m kind of tired,” said Shadow. “I’d be grateful if you’d leave now.”

“I offered you the world,” she said. “When you’re dying in a gutter, you remember that.”

“I’ll make a point of it,” he said.

After she had gone her perfume lingered. He lay on the bare mattress and thought about Laura, but whatever he thought about—Laura playing Frisbee, Laura eating a root-beer float without a spoon, Laura giggling, showing off the exotic underwear she had bought when she attended a travel agents’ convention in Anaheim—always morphed, in his mind, into Laura sucking Robbie’s cock as a truck slammed them off the road and into oblivion. And then he heard her words, and they hurt every time.

You’re not dead, said Laura in her quiet voice, in his head. But I’m not sure that you’re alive, either.

There was a knock. Shadow got up and opened the door. It was the fat kid. “Those hamburgers,” he said. “They were just icky. Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonald’s. I didn’t think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonald’s.”

“This place is turning into Grand Central Station,” said Shadow. “Okay, so I guess you’re here to offer me the freedom of the Internet if I come over to your side of the fence. Right?”

The fat kid was shivering. “No. You’re already dead meat,” he said. “You-you’re a fucking illuminated gothic black-letter manuscript. You couldn’t be hypertext if you tried. I’m…I’m synaptic, while, while you’re synoptic…” He smelled strange, Shadow realized. There was a guy in the cell across the way, whose name Shadow had never known. He had taken off all his clothes in the middle of the day and told everyone that he had been sent to take them away, the truly good ones, like him, in a silver spaceship to a perfect place. That had been the last time Shadow had seen him. The fat kid smelled like that guy.

“Are you here for a reason?”

“Just wanted to talk,” said the fat kid. There was a whine in his voice. “It’s creepy in my room. That’s all. It’s creepy in there. Fifty miles to a McDonald’s, can you believe that? Maybe I could stay in here with you.”

“What about your friends from the limo? The ones who hit me? Shouldn’t you ask them to stay with you?”

“The children wouldn’t operate out here. We’re in a dead zone.”

Shadow said, “It’s a while until midnight, and it’s longer to dawn. I think maybe you need rest. I know I do.”

The fat kid said nothing for a moment, then he nodded, and walked out of the room.

Shadow closed his door, and locked it with the key. He lay back on the mattress.

After a few moments the noise began. It took him a few moments to figure out what it had to be, then he unlocked his door and walked out into the hallway. It was the fat kid, now back in his own room. It sounded like he was throwing something huge against the walls of the room. From the sounds, Shadow guessed that what he was throwing was himself. “It’s just me!” he was sobbing. Or perhaps, “It’s just meat.” Shadow could not tell.

“Quiet!” came a bellow from Czernobog’s room, down the hall.

Shadow walked down to the lobby and out of the motel. He was tired.

The driver still stood beside the Humvee, a dark shape in a peaked cap.

“Couldn’t sleep, sir?” he asked.

“No,” said Shadow.

“Cigarette, sir?”

“No, thank you.”

“You don’t mind if I do?”

“Go right ahead.”

The driver used a Bic disposable lighter, and it was in the yellow light of the flame that Shadow saw the man’s face, actually saw it for the first time, and recognized him, and began to understand.

Shadow knew that thin face. He knew that there would be close-cropped orange hair beneath the black driver’s cap, cut close to the scalp like the embers of a fire. He knew that when the man’s lips smiled they would crease into a network of rough scars.

“You’re looking good, big guy,” said the driver.

“Low Key?” Shadow stared at his old cellmate warily.

Prison friendships are good things: they get you through bad places and through dark times. But a prison friendship ends at the prison gates, and a prison friend who reappears in your life is at best a mixed blessing.

“Jesus. Low Key Lyesmith,” said Shadow, and then he heard what he was saying and he understood. “Loki,” he said. “Loki Lie-Smith.”

“You’re slow,” said Loki, “but you get there in the end.” And his lips twisted into a crooked smile and embers danced in the shadows of his eyes.

They sat in Shadow’s room in the abandoned motel, sitting on the bed, at opposite ends of the mattress. The sounds from the fat kid’s room had pretty much stopped.

“You lied to me,” said Shadow.

“It’s one of the things I’m good at,” said Loki. “But you were lucky we were inside together. You would never have survived your first year without me.”

“You couldn’t have walked out if you wanted?”

“It’s easier just to do the time. You got to understand the god thing. It’s not magic. Not exactly. It’s about focus. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief, all the prayers, and they become a kind of certainty, something that lets you become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize.” He paused. “And then one day they forget about you, and they don’t believe in you, and they don’t sacrifice, and they don’t care, and the next thing you know you’re running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third.”

“Why were you in my cell?”

“Coincidence. Pure and simple. That was where they put me. You don’t believe me? It’s true.”

“And now you’re a driver?”

“I do other stuff too.”

“Driving for the opposition.”

“If you want to call them that. It depends where you’re standing. The way I figure it, I’m driving for the winning team.”

“But you and Wednesday, you were from the same, you’re both—”

“Norse pantheon. We’re both from the Norse pantheon. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Yeah.”

“So?”

Shadow hesitated. “You must have been friends. Once.”

“No. We were never friends. I’m not sorry he’s dead. He was just holding the rest of us back. With him gone, the rest of them are going to have to face up to the facts: it’s change or die, evolve or perish. I’m all for evolution—it’s the old change-or-die game. He’s dead. War’s over.”

Shadow looked at him, puzzled. “You aren’t that stupid,” he said. “You were always so sharp. Wednesday’s death isn’t going to end anything. It’s just pushed all of the ones who were on the fence over the edge.”

“Mixing metaphors, Shadow. Bad habit.”

“Whatever,” said Shadow. “It’s still true. Jesus. His death did in an instant what he’d spent the last few months trying to do. It united them. It gave them something to believe in.”

“Perhaps.” Loki shrugged. “As far as I know, the thinking on this side of the fence was that with the troublemaker out of the way, the trouble would also be gone. It’s not any of my business, though. I just drive.”

“So tell me,” said Shadow, “why does everyone care about me? They act like I’m important. Why does it matter what I do.”

“You’re an investment,” said Loki. “You were important to us because you were important to Wednesday. As for the why of it…I don’t think any of us know. He did. He’s dead. Just another one of life’s little mysteries.”

“I’m tired of mysteries.”

“Yeah? I think they add a kind of zest to the world. Like salt in a stew.”

“So you’re their driver. You drive for all of them?”

“Whoever needs me,” said Loki. “It’s a living.”

He raised his wristwatch to his face, pressed a button: the dial glowed a gentle blue, which illuminated his face, giving it a haunting, haunted appearance. “Five to midnight. Time,” said Loki. “Time to light the candles. Say a few words about the dearly departed. Do the formalities. You coming?”

Shadow took a deep breath. “I’m coming,” he said.

They walked down the dark motel corridor. “I bought some candles for this, but there were plenty of old ones around too,” said Loki. “Old stumps and stubs and candle-ends in the rooms, and in a box in a closet. I don’t think I missed any. And I got a box of matches. You start lighting candles with a lighter, the end gets too hot.”

They reached room five.

“You want to come in?” asked Loki.

Shadow didn’t want to enter that room. “Okay,” he said. They went in.

Loki took a box of matches from his pocket, and thumb-nailed a match into flame. The momentary flare hurt Shadow’s eyes. A candlewick flickered and caught. And another. Loki lit a new match, and continued to light candles: they were on the windowsills and on the headboard of the bed and on the sink in the corner of the room. They showed him the room by candlelight.

The bed had been hauled from its position against the wall into the middle of the motel room, leaving a few feet of space between the bed and the wall on each side. There were sheets draped over the bed, old motel sheets, moth-holed and stained, which Loki must have found in a closet somewhere. On top of the sheets lay Wednesday, perfectly still.

He was fully dressed, in the pale suit he had been wearing when he was shot. The right side of his face was untouched, perfect, unmarred by blood. The left side of his face was a ragged mess, and the left shoulder and front of the suit was spattered with dark spots, a pointillist mess. His hands were at his sides. The expression on that wreck of a face was far from peaceful: it looked hurt—a soul-hurt, a real down deep hurt, filled with hatred and anger and raw craziness. And, on some level, it looked satisfied.

Shadow imagined Mr. Jacquel’s practiced hands smoothing that hatred and pain away, rebuilding a face for Wednesday with mortician’s wax and make-up, giving him a final peace and dignity that even death had denied him.

Still, the body seemed no smaller in death. It had not shrunk. And it still smelled faintly of Jack Daniel’s.

The wind from the plains was rising: he could hear it howling around the old motel at the exact imaginary center of America. The candles on the windowsill guttered and flickered.

He could hear footsteps in the hallway. Someone knocked on a door, called, “Hurry up please, it’s time,” and they began to shuffle in, heads lowered.

Town came in first, followed by Media and Mr. Nancy and Czernobog. Last of all came the fat kid: he had fresh red bruises on his face, and his lips were moving all the time, as if he were reciting some words to himself, but he was making no sound. Shadow found himself feeling sorry for him.

Informally, without a word being spoken, they ranged themselves about the body, each an arm’s length away from the next. The atmosphere in the room was religious—deeply religious, in a way that Shadow had never previously experienced. There was no sound but the howling of the wind and the crackling of the candles.

“We are come together, here in this godless place,” said Loki, “to pass on the body of this individual to those who will dispose of it properly according to the rites. If anyone would like to say something, say it now.”

“Not me,” said Town. “I never properly met the guy. And this whole thing makes me feel uncomfortable.”

Czernobog said, “These actions will have consequences. You know that? This can only be the start of it all.”

The fat kid started to giggle, a high-pitched, girlish noise. He said, “Okay. Okay I’ve got it.” And then, all on one note, he recited:

and then he broke off, his brow creasing. He said, “Shit. I used to know the whole thing,” and he rubbed his temples and made a face and was quiet.

And then they were all looking at Shadow. The wind was screaming now. He didn’t know what to say. He said, “This whole thing is pitiful. Half of you killed him or had a hand in his death. Now you’re giving us his body. Great. He was an irascible old fuck but I drank his mead and I’m still working for him. That’s all.”

Media said, “In a world where people die every day, I think the important thing to remember is that for each moment of sorrow we get when people leave this world there’s a corresponding moment of joy when a new baby comes into this world. That first wail is—well, it’s magic, isn’t it? Perhaps it’s a hard thing to say, but joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies. That’s how well they go together. I think we should all take a moment to meditate on that.”

And Mr. Nancy cleared his throat and said, “So. I got to say it, because nobody else here will. We are at the center of this place: a land that has no time for gods, and here at the center it has less time for us than anywhere. It is a no-man’s land, a place of truce, and we observe our truces, here. We have no choice. So. You give us the body of our friend. We accept it. You will pay for this, murder for murder, blood for blood.”

Town said, “Whatever. You could save yourselves a lot of time and effort by going back to your homes and shooting yourselves in the heads. Cut out the middleman.”

“Fuck you,” said Czernobog. “Fuck you and fuck your mother and fuck the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. You will not even die in battle. No warrior will taste your blood. No one alive will take your life. You will die a soft, poor death. You will die with a kiss on your lips and a lie in your heart.”

“Leave it, old man,” said Town.

“The blood-dimmed tide is loose,” said the fat kid. “I think that comes next.”

The wind howled.

“Okay,” said Loki. “He’s yours. We’re done. Take the old bastard away.”

He made a gesture with his fingers, and Town, Media and the fat kid left the room. He smiled at Shadow. “Call no man happy, huh, kid?” he said. And then he, too, walked away.

“What happens now?” asked Shadow.

“Now we wrap him up,” said Anansi. “And we take him away from here.”

They wrapped the body in the motel sheets, wrapped it well in its impromptu shroud, so there was no body to be seen, and they could carry it. The two old men walked to each end of the body, but Shadow said, “Let me see something,” and he bent his knees and slipped his arms around the white-sheeted figure, pushed him up and over his shoulder. He straightened his knees, until he was standing, more or less easily. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got him. Let’s put him into the back of the car.”

Czernobog looked as if he were about to argue, but he closed his mouth. He spat on his forefinger and thumb and began to snuff the candles between his fingertips. Shadow could hear them fizz as he walked from the darkening room.

Wednesday was heavy, but Shadow could cope, if he walked steadily. He had no choice. Wednesday’s words were in his head with every step he took along the corridor, and he could taste the sour-sweetness of mead in the back of his throat. 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…

A deal was a deal, and this one was in his blood and in his bones.

Mr. Nancy opened the motel lobby door for him, then hurried over and opened the back of the bus. The other four were already standing by their Humvee, watching them as if they could not wait to be off. Loki had put his driver’s cap back on. The cold wind whipped at the sheets, tugged at Shadow as he walked.

He placed Wednesday down as gently as he could in the back of the bus.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned. Town stood there with his hand out. He was holding something.

“Here,” said Mr. Town, “Mister World wanted you to have this.” It was a glass eye. There was a hairline crack down the middle of it, and a tiny chip gone from the front. “We found it in the Masonic hall, when we were cleaning up. Keep it for luck. God knows you’ll need it.”

Shadow closed his hand around the eye. He wished he could come back with something smart and sharp and clever, but Town was already back at the Humvee, and climbing up into the car; and Shadow still couldn’t think of anything clever to say.

Czernobog was the last person out of the motel. As he locked the building he watched the Humvee pull out of the park and head off down the blacktop. He put the key to the motel beneath a rock by the lobby door, and he shook his head. “I should have eaten his heart,” he said to Shadow, conversationally. “Not just cursed his death. He needs to be taught respect.” He climbed into the back of the bus.

“You ride shotgun,” said Mr. Nancy to Shadow. “I’ll drive a while.”

He drove east.

Dawn found them in Princeton, Missouri. Shadow had not slept yet.

Nancy said, “Anywhere you want us to drop you? If I were you, I’d rustle up some ID and head for Canada. Or Mexico.”

“I’m sticking with you guys,” said Shadow. “It’s what Wednesday would have wanted.”

“You aren’t working for him any more. He’s dead. Once we drop his body off, you are free to go.”

“And do what?”

“Keep out of the way, while the war is on. Like I say, you should leave the country,” said Nancy. He flipped his turn signal, and took a left.

“Hide yourself, for a little time,” said Czernobog. “Then, when this is over, you will come back to me, and I will finish the whole thing. With my hammer.”

Shadow said, “Where are we taking the body?”

“Virginia. There’s a tree,” said Nancy.

“A world tree,” said Czernobog with gloomy satisfaction. “We had one in my part of the world. But ours grew under the world, not above it.”

“We put him at the foot of the tree,” said Nancy. “We leave him there. We let you go. We drive south. There’s a battle. Blood is shed. Many die. The world changes, a little.”

“You don’t want me at your battle? I’m pretty big. I’m good in a fight.”

Nancy turned his head to Shadow and smiled—the first real smile Shadow had seen on Mr. Nancy’s face since he had rescued Shadow from the Lumber County Jail. “Most of this battle will be fought in a place you cannot go, and you cannot touch.”

“In the hearts and the minds of the people,” said Czernobog. “Like at the big roundabout.”

“Huh?”

“The carousel,” said Mr. Nancy.

“Oh,” said Shadow. “Backstage. I got it. Like the desert with all the bones in it.”

Mr. Nancy raised his head. “Backstage. Yes. Every time I figure you don’t have enough sense to bring guts to a bear, you surprise me. That’s right. Backstage. That’s where the real battle will happen. Everything else will just be flash and thunder.”

“Tell me about the vigil,” said Shadow.

“Someone has to stay with the body. It’s a tradition. One of our people will do it.”

“He wanted me to do it.”

“No,” said Czernobog. “It will kill you. Bad, bad, bad idea.”

“Yeah? It’ll kill me? To stay with his body?”

“It’s what happens when the all-father dies,” said Mr. Nancy. “It wouldn’t be true for me. When I die, I just want them to plant me somewhere warm. And then when pretty women walk over my grave I would grab their ankles, like in that movie.”

“I never saw that movie,” said Czernobog.

“Of course you did. It’s right at the end. It’s the high school movie. All the children going to the prom.”

Czernobog shook his head.

Shadow said, “The film’s called Carrie, Mister Czernobog. Okay, one of you tell me about the vigil.”

Nancy said, “You tell him. I’m drivin’.”

“I never heard of no film called Carrie. You tell him.”

Nancy said, “The person on the vigil—gets tied to the tree. Just like Wednesday was. And then they hang there for nine days and nine nights. No food, no water. All alone. At the end they cut the person down, and if they lived…well, it could happen. And Wednesday will have had his vigil.”

Czernobog said, “Maybe Alviss will send us one of his people. A dwarf could survive it.”

“I’ll do it,” said Shadow.

“No,” said Mr. Nancy.

“Yes,” said Shadow.

The two old men were silent. Then Nancy said, “Why?”

“Because it’s the kind of thing a living person would do,” said Shadow.

“You are crazy,” said Czernobog.

“Maybe. But I’m going to hold Wednesday’s vigil.”

When they stopped for gas Czernobog announced he felt sick, and wanted to ride in the front. Shadow didn’t mind moving to the back of the bus. He could stretch out more, and sleep.

They drove on in silence. Shadow felt that he’d done something very big and very strange, and he wasn’t certain exactly what it was.

“Hey. Czernobog,” said Mr. Nancy, after a while. “You check out the technical boy back at the motel? He was not happy. He’s been screwin’ with something that screwed him right back. That’s the biggest trouble with the new kids—they figure they know everythin’, and you can’t teach them nothin’ but the hard way.”

“Good,” said Czernobog.

Shadow was stretched out full length on the seat in the back. He felt like two people, or more than two. There was part of him that felt gently exhilarated: he had done something. He had moved. It wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t wanted to live, but he did want to live, and that made all the difference. He hoped he would live through this, but he was willing to die, if that was what it took to be alive. And, for a moment he thought that the whole thing was funny, just the funniest thing in the world; and he wondered if Laura would appreciate the joke.

There was another part of him—maybe it was Mike Ainsel, he thought, vanished off into nothing at the press of a button in the Lakeside Police Department—who was still trying to figure it all out, trying to see the big picture.

“Hidden Indians,” he said out loud.

“What?” came Czernobog’s irritated croak from the front seat.

“The pictures you’d get to color in as kids. ‘Can you see the hidden Indians in this picture? There are ten Indians in this picture, can you find them all?’ And at first glance you could only see the waterfall and the rocks and the trees, then you see that if you just tip the picture on its side that shadow is an Indian…” He yawned.

“Sleep,” suggested Czernobog.

“But the big picture,” said Shadow. Then he slept, and dreamed of hidden Indians.

The tree was in Virginia. It was a long way away from anywhere, on the back of an old farm. To get to the farm they had had to drive for almost an hour south from Blacksburg, to drive roads with names like Pennywinkle Branch and Rooster Spur. They got turned around twice and Mr. Nancy and Czernobog both lost their tempers with Shadow and with each other.

They stopped to get directions at a tiny general store, set at the bottom of the hill in the place where the road forked. An old man came out of the back of the store and stared at them: he wore OshKosh B’gosh denim overalls and nothing else, not even shoes. Czernobog bought a pickled hog’s foot from the huge jar of hogs’ feet on the counter, and went outside to eat it on the deck, while Nancy and the man in the overalls took turns drawing each other maps on the back of napkins, marking off turnings and local landmarks.

They set off once more, with Mr. Nancy driving, and they were there in ten minutes. A sign on the gate said ASH.

Shadow got out of the bus, and opened the gate. The bus drove through, jolting through the meadowland. Shadow closed the gate. He walked a little behind the bus, stretching his legs, jogging when the bus got too far in front of him. Enjoying the sensation of moving his body.

He had lost all sense of time on the drive from Kansas. Had they been driving for two days? Three days? He did not know.

The body in the back of the bus did not seem to be rotting. He could smell it—a faint odor of Jack Daniel’s, overlaid with something that might have been sour honey. But the smell was not unpleasant. From time to time he would take out the glass eye from his pocket and look at it: it was shattered deep inside, fractured from what he imagined was the impact of a bullet, but apart from a chip to one side of the iris the surface was unmarred. Shadow would run it through his hands, palming it, rolling it, pushing it along with his fingers. It was a ghastly souvenir, but oddly comforting: and he suspected that it would have amused Wednesday to know that his eye had wound up in Shadow’s pocket.

The farmhouse was dark and shut up. The meadows were overgrown and seemed abandoned. The building’s roof was crumbling at the back; it was covered in black plastic sheeting. They jolted over a ridge and Shadow saw the tree.

It was silver-gray and it was higher than the farmhouse. It was the most beautiful tree Shadow had ever seen: spectral and yet utterly real and almost perfectly symmetrical. It also looked instantly familiar: he wondered if he had dreamed it, then realized that no, he had seen it before, or a representation of it, many times. It was Wednesday’s silver tiepin.

The VW bus jolted and bumped across the meadow, and came to a stop about twenty feet from the trunk of the tree.

There were three women standing by the tree. At first glance Shadow thought that they were the Zorya, but he realized in moments that he was mistaken. They were three women he did not know. They looked tired and bored, as if they had been standing there for a long time. Each of them held a wooden ladder. The biggest one of them also carried a brown sack. They looked like a set of Russian dolls: a tall one—she was Shadow’s height, or even taller—a middle-sized one, and a woman so short and hunched that at first glance Shadow wrongly supposed her to be a child. Still, they looked so much alike—something in the forehead, or the eyes, or the set of the chin—that Shadow was certain that the women must be sisters.

The smallest of the women dropped to a curtsy when the bus drew up. The other two just stared. They were sharing a cigarette, and they smoked it down to the filter before one of them stubbed it out against a root.

Czernobog opened the back of the bus and the biggest of the women pushed past him, and, easily as if it were a sack of flour, she lifted Wednesday’s body out of the back and carried it to the tree. She laid it in front of the tree, put it down about ten feet from the trunk. She and her sisters unwrapped Wednesday’s body. He looked worse by daylight than he had by candlelight in the motel room, and after one quick glance Shadow looked away. The women arranged his clothes, tidied his suit, then placed him at the corner of the sheet, and wound it around him once more.

Then the women came over to Shadow.

— You are the one? the biggest of them asked.

— The one who will mourn the all-father? asked the middle-sized one.

— You have chosen to take the vigil? asked the smallest.

Shadow nodded. Afterward, he was unable to remember whether he had actually heard their voices. Perhaps he had simply understood what they had meant from their looks and their eyes.

Mr. Nancy, who had gone back to the house to use the bathroom, came walking back to the tree. He was smoking a cigarillo. He looked thoughtful.

“Shadow,” he called. “You really don’t have to do this. We can find somebody more suited. You ain’t ready for this.”

“I’m doing it,” said Shadow, simply.

“You don’t have to,” said Mr. Nancy. “You don’t know what you’re lettin’ yourself in for.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Shadow.

“And if you die?” asked Mr. Nancy. “If it kills you?”

“Then,” said Shadow, “it kills me.”

Mr. Nancy flicked his cigarillo into the meadow, angrily. “I said you had shit for brains, and you still have shit for brains. Can’t see when somebody’s tryin’ to give you an out?”

“I’m sorry,” said Shadow. He didn’t say anything else. Nancy walked back to the bus.

Czernobog walked over to Shadow. He did not look pleased. “You must come through this alive,” he said. “Come through this safely for me.” And then he tapped his knuckle gently against Shadow’s forehead and said, “Bam!” He squeezed Shadow’s shoulder, patted his arm, and walked back to the bus.

The biggest woman, whose name seemed to be Urtha or Urder—Shadow could not repeat it back to her to her satisfaction—told him, in pantomime, to take off his clothes.

“All of them?”

The big woman shrugged. Shadow stripped to his briefs and T-shirt. The women propped the ladders against the tree. One of the ladders—it was painted by hand, with little flowers and leaves twining up the struts—they pointed out to him.

He climbed the nine steps. Then, at their urging, he stepped onto a low branch.

The middle woman tipped out the contents of the sack onto the meadow-grass. It was filled with a tangle of thin ropes, brown with age and dirt, and the woman began to sort them out into lengths, and to lay them carefully on the ground beside Wednesday’s body.

They climbed their own ladders now, and they began to knot the ropes, intricate and elegant knots, and they wrapped the ropes first about the tree, and then about Shadow. Unembarrassed, like midwives or nurses or those who lay out corpses, they removed his T-shirt and briefs, then they bound him, never tightly, but firmly and finally. He was amazed at how comfortably the ropes and the knots bore his weight. The ropes went under his arms, between his legs, around his waist, his ankles, his chest, binding him to the tree.

The final rope was tied, loosely, about his neck. It was initially uncomfortable, but his weight was well distributed and none of the ropes cut his flesh.

His feet were five feet above the ground. The tree was leafless and huge, its branches black against the gray sky, its bark a smooth silvery gray.

They took the ladders away. There was a moment of panic as he dropped a few inches, as all his weight was taken by the ropes. He made no sound.

He was entirely naked by that point.

The women placed the body, wrapped in its motel-sheet shroud, at the foot of the tree, and they left him there.

They left him there alone.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The first day that Shadow hung from the tree he experienced only discomfort, that edged slowly into pain and fear and, occasionally, an emotion that was somewhere between boredom and apathy: a gray acceptance, a waiting.

He hung.

The wind was still.

After several hours fleeting bursts of color started to explode across his vision in blossoms of crimson and gold, throbbing and pulsing with a life of their own.

The pain in his arms and legs became, by degrees, intolerable. If he relaxed them, let his body go slack and dangle, if he flopped forward, then the rope around his neck would take up the slack and the world would shimmer and swim. So he pushed himself back against the trunk of the tree. He could feel his heart laboring in his chest, a pounding arrhythmic tattoo as it pumped the blood through his body…

Emeralds and sapphires and rubies crystallized and burst in front of his eyes. His breath came in shallow gulps. The bark of the tree was rough against his back. The chill of the afternoon on his naked skin made him shiver, made his flesh prickle and goose.

It’s easy, said someone in the back of his head. There’s a trick to it. Either you do it, or you die.

It was a wise thing to have thought, he decided. He was pleased with it, and repeated it over and over in the back of his head, part mantra, part nursery rhyme, rattling along to the drumbeat of his heart.

Time passed. The chanting continued. He could hear it. Someone was repeating the words, only stopping when Shadow’s mouth began to dry out, when his tongue turned dry and skin-like in his mouth. He pushed himself up and away from the tree with his feet, trying to support his weight in a way that would still allow him to fill his lungs.

He breathed until he could hold himself up no more, and then he fell back into the bonds, and hung from the tree.

When the chattering started—an angry, laughing chattering noise—he closed his mouth, concerned that it was he himself making it; but the noise continued. It’s the world laughing at me, then, thought Shadow. His head lolled to one side. Something ran down the tree-trunk beside him, stopping beside his head. It chittered loudly in his ear, one word, which sounded a lot like “ratatosk.” Shadow tried to repeat it, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He turned, slowly, and stared into the gray-brown face and pointed ears of a squirrel.

In close-up, he learned, a squirrel looks a lot less cute than it does from a distance. The creature was rat-like, and dangerous, not sweet or charming. And its teeth looked sharp. He hoped that it would not perceive him as a threat, or as a food source. He did not think that squirrels were carnivorous…but then, so many things he had not thought had turned out to be so…

He slept.

The pain woke him several times in the next few hours. It pulled him from a dark dream in which dead children rose and came to him, their eyes peeling, swollen pearls, and they reproached him for failing them and it pulled him from another dream, in which he was staring up at a mammoth, hairy and dark, as it lumbered toward him from the mist, but—awake for a moment, a spider edging across his face, and he shook his head, dislodging or frightening it—now the mammoth was an elephant-headed man, pot-bellied, one tusk broken, and he was riding toward Shadow on the back of a huge mouse. The elephant-headed man curled his trunk towards Shadow and said, “If you had invoked me before you began this journey, perhaps some of your troubles might have been avoided.” Then the elephant took the mouse, which had, by some means that Shadow could not perceive, become tiny while not changing in size at all, and passed it from hand to hand to hand, fingers curling about it as the little brown creature scampered from palm to palm, and Shadow was not at all surprised when the elephant-headed god finally opened all four of his hands to reveal them perfectly empty. He shrugged arm after arm after arm in a peculiar fluid motion, and looked at Shadow, his face unreadable.

“It’s in the trunk,” Shadow told the elephant man, who had seen the flickering tail vanish.

The elephant man nodded his huge head, and said, “Yes. In the trunk. You will forget many things. You will give many things away. You will lose many things. But do not lose this.” And then the rains began, and Shadow was awake once more. He tumbled, shivering and wet, from deep sleep to wakefulness in moments. The shivering intensified, until it scared Shadow: he was shivering more violently than he had ever imagined possible, a series of convulsive shudders which built upon each other. He willed himself to stop shaking, but still he shivered, his teeth banging together, his limbs twitching and jerking beyond his control. There was real pain there, too, a deep, knife-like pain that covered his body with tiny, invisible wounds, intimate and unbearable.

He opened his mouth to catch the rain as it fell, moistening his cracked lips and his dry tongue, wetting the ropes that bound him to the trunk of the tree. There was a flash of lightning so bright it felt like a blow to his eyes, transforming the world into an intense panorama of image and after-image. Then the thunder, a crack and a boom and a rumble, and, as the thunder echoed, the rain redoubled. In the rain and the night the shivering abated; the knife-blades were put away. Shadow no longer felt the cold, or rather, he felt only the cold, but the cold had now become part of himself, it belonged to him and he belonged to it.

Shadow hung from the tree while the lightning flickered and forked across the sky, and the thunder subsided into an omnipresent rumbling, with occasional bangs and roars like distant bombs exploding in the night, and the wind tugged at Shadow, trying to pull him from the tree, flaying his skin, cutting to the bone; and at the height of the storm—and Shadow knew in his soul that the real storm had truly begun, the true storm, and that now it was here there was nothing any of them could do but ride it out: none of them, old gods or new, spirits, powers, women or men…

A strange joy rose within Shadow then, and he started laughing, as the rain washed his naked skin and the lightning flashed and thunder rumbled so loudly that he could barely hear himself. He laughed and exulted.

He was alive. He had never felt like this. Ever.

If he did die, he thought, if he died right now, here on the tree, it would be worth it to have had this one, perfect, mad moment.

“Hey!” he shouted, at the storm. “Hey! It’s me! I’m here!”

He trapped some water between his bare shoulder and the trunk of the tree, and he twisted his head over and drank the trapped rainwater, sucking and slurping at it, and he drank more and he laughed, laughed with joy and delight, not madness, until he could laugh no more, until he hung there, too exhausted to move.

At the foot of the tree, on the ground, the rain had made the sheet partly transparent, and had lifted it and pushed it forward so that Shadow could see Wednesday’s dead hand, waxy and pale, and the shape of his head, and he thought of the shroud of Turin and he remembered the open girl on Jacquel’s slab in Cairo, and then, as if to spite the cold, he observed that he was feeling warm and comfortable, and the bark of the tree felt soft, and he slept once more, and if he dreamed any dreams in the darkness this time he could not remember them.

By the following morning the pain was omnipresent. It was no longer local, not confined to the places where the ropes cut into his flesh, or where the bark scraped his skin. Now the pain was everywhere.

And he was hungry, with empty pangs down in the pit of him. His head was pounding. Sometimes he imagined that he had stopped breathing, that his heart had ceased to beat. Then he would hold his breath until he could hear his heart pounding an ocean in his ears and he was forced to suck air like a diver surfacing from the depths.

It seemed to him that the tree reached from hell to heaven, and that he had been hanging there forever. A brown hawk circled the tree, landed on a broken branch near to him, and then took to the wing, flying west.

The storm, which had abated at dawn, began to return as the day passed. Gray, roiling clouds stretched from horizon to horizon; a slow drizzle began to fall. The body at the base of the tree seemed to have become less, in its stained motel winding sheet, crumbling into itself like a sugar cake left in the rain.

Sometimes Shadow burned, sometimes he froze.

When the thunder started once more he imagined that he heard drums beating, kettledrums in the thunder and the thump of his heart, inside his head or outside, it did not matter.

He perceived the pain in colors: the red of a neon bar-sign, the green of a traffic light on a wet night, the blue of an empty video screen.

The squirrel dropped from the bark of the trunk onto Shadow’s shoulder, sharp claws digging into his skin. “Ratatosk!” it chattered. The tip of its nose touched his lips. “Ratatosk.” It sprang back onto the tree.

His skin was on fire with pins and needles, a pricking covering his whole body. The sensation was intolerable.

His life was laid out below him, on the motel sheet shroud, literally laid out, like the items at some Dada picnic, a surrealist tableau: he could see his mother’s puzzled stare, the American embassy in Norway, Laura’s eyes on their wedding day…

He chuckled through dry lips.

“What’s so funny, puppy?” asked Laura.

“Our wedding day,” he said. “You bribed the organist to change from playing the ‘Wedding March’ to the theme-song from Scooby-Doo as you walked toward me down the aisle. Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember, darling. I would have made it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.”

“I loved you so much,” said Shadow.

He could feel her lips on his, and they were warm and wet and living, not cold and dead, so he knew that this was another hallucination. “You aren’t here, are you?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “But you are calling me, for the last time. And I am coming.”

Breathing was harder now. The ropes cutting his flesh were an abstract concept, like free will or eternity.

“Sleep, puppy,” she said, although he thought it might have been his own voice he heard, and he slept.

The sun was a pewter coin in a leaden sky. Shadow was, he realized slowly, awake, and he was cold. But the part of him that understood that seemed very far away from the rest of him. Somewhere in the distance he was aware that his mouth and throat were burning, painful and cracked. Sometimes, in the daylight, he would see stars fall; other times he saw huge birds, the size of delivery trucks, flying toward him. Nothing reached him; nothing touched him.

“Ratatosk. Ratatosk.” The chattering had become a scolding.

The squirrel landed, heavily, with sharp claws, on his shoulder and stared into his face. He wondered if he were hallucinating: the animal was holding a walnut-shell, like a doll’s-house cup, in its front paws. The animal pressed the shell to Shadow’s lips. Shadow felt the water, and, involuntarily, he sucked it into his mouth, drinking from the tiny cup. He ran the water around his cracked lips, his dry tongue. He wet his mouth with it, and swallowed what was left, which was not much.

The squirrel leapt back to the tree, and ran down it, towards the roots, and then, in seconds, or minutes, or hours, Shadow could not tell which (all the clocks in his mind were broken, he thought, and their gears and cogs and springs were simply a jumble down there in the writhing grass), the squirrel returned with its walnut-shell cup, climbing carefully, and Shadow drank the water it brought to him.

The muddy-iron taste of the water filled his mouth, cooled his parched throat. It eased his fatigue and his madness.

By the third walnut-shell, he was no longer thirsty.

He began to struggle, then, pulling at the ropes, flailing his body, trying to get down, to get free, to get away. He moaned.

The knots were good. The ropes were strong, and they held, and soon he exhausted himself once more.

In his delirium, Shadow became the tree. Its roots went deep into the loam of the earth, deep down into time, into the hidden springs. He felt the spring of the woman called Urd, which is to say, Past. She was huge, a giantess, an underground mountain of a woman, and the waters she guarded were the waters of time. Other roots went to other places. Some of them were secret. Now, when he was thirsty, he pulled water from his roots, pulled them up into the body of his being.

He had a hundred arms which broke into a hundred thousand fingers, and all of his fingers reached up into the sky. The weight of the sky was heavy on his shoulders.

It was not that the discomfort was lessened, but the pain belonged to the figure hanging from the tree, rather than to the tree itself, and Shadow in his madness was now so much more than the man on the tree. He was the tree, and he was the wind rattling the bare branches of the world tree; he was the gray sky and the tumbling clouds; he was Ratatosk the squirrel running from the deepest roots to the highest branches; he was the mad-eyed hawk who sat on a broken branch at the top of the tree surveying the world; he was the worm in the heart of the tree.

The stars wheeled, and he passed his hundred hands over the glittering stars, palming them, switching them, vanishing them…

A moment of clarity, in the pain and the madness: Shadow felt himself surfacing. He knew it would not be for long. The morning sun was dazzling him. He closed his eyes, wishing he could shade them.

There was not long to go. He knew that, too.

When he opened his eyes, Shadow noticed that there was a young man in the tree with him.

His skin was dark brown. His forehead was high and his dark hair was tightly curled. He was sitting on a branch high above Shadow’s head. Shadow could see him clearly by craning his head. And the man was mad. Shadow could see that at a glance.

“You’re naked,” confided the madman, in a cracked voice. “I’m naked, too.”

“I see that,” croaked Shadow.

The madman looked at him, then he nodded and twisted his head down and around, as if he were trying to remove a crick from his neck. Eventually he said, “Do you know me?”

“No,” said Shadow.

“I know you. I watched you in Cairo. I watched you after. My sister likes you.”

“You are…” The name escaped him. Eats roadkill. Yes. “You are Horus.”

The madman nodded. “Horus,” he said. “I am the falcon of the morning, the hawk of the afternoon. I am the sun. As you are the sun. And I know the true name of Ra. My mother told me.”

“That’s great,” said Shadow, politely.

The madman stared at the ground below them intently, saying nothing. Then he dropped from the tree.

A hawk fell like a stone to the ground, pulled out of its plummet into a swoop, beat its wings heavily and flew back to the tree, a baby rabbit in its talons. It landed on a branch closer to Shadow.

“Are you hungry?” asked the madman.

“No,” said Shadow. “I guess I should be, but I’m not.”

“I’m hungry,” said the madman. He ate the rabbit rapidly, pulling it apart, sucking, tearing, rending. As he finished with them, he dropped the gnawed bones and the fur to the ground. He walked further down the branch until he was only an arm’s length from Shadow. Then he peered at Shadow unselfconsciously, inspecting him with care and caution, from his feet to his head. There was rabbit-blood on the man’s chin and his chest, and he wiped it off with the back of his hand.

Shadow felt he had to say something. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” said the madman. He stood up on the branch, turned away from Shadow and let a stream of dark urine arc out into the meadow below. It went on for a long time. When he had finished he crouched down again on the branch.

“What do they call you?” asked Horus.

“Shadow,” said Shadow.

The madman nodded. “You are the shadow. I am the light,” he said. “Everything that is, casts a shadow.” Then he said, “They will fight soon. I was watching them as they started to arrive. I was high in the sky, and none of them saw me, although some of them have keen eyes.”

And then the madman said, “You are dying. Aren’t you?”

But Shadow could no longer speak. Everything was very far away. A hawk took wing, and circled slowly upward, riding the updrafts into the morning.

Moonlight.

A cough shook Shadow’s frame, a racking painful cough that stabbed his chest and his throat. He gagged for breath.

“Hey, puppy,” called a voice that he knew.

He looked down.

The moonlight burned whitely through the branches of the tree, bright as day, and there was a woman standing in the moonlight on the ground below him, her face a pale oval. The wind rattled in the branches of the tree.

“Hi, puppy,” she said.

He tried to speak, but he coughed instead, deep in his chest, for a long time.

“You know,” she said, helpfully, “that doesn’t sound good.”

He croaked, “Hello, Laura.”

She looked up at him with dead eyes, and she smiled.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

She was silent, for a while, in the moonlight. Then she said, “You are the nearest thing I have to life. You are the only thing I have left, the only thing that isn’t bleak and flat and gray. I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.”

He looked down at the woman in the moonlight, and his eyes stung with tears.

“I’ll cut you down,” she said, after a while. “I spend too much time rescuing you, don’t I?”

He coughed again. Then, “No, leave me. I have to do this.”

She looked up at him, and shook her head. “You’re crazy,” she said. “You’re dying up there. Or you’ll be crippled, if you aren’t already.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I’m alive.”

“Yes,” she said, after a moment. “I guess you are.”

“You told me,” he said. “In the graveyard.”

“It seems like such a long time ago, puppy,” she said. Then she said, “I feel better, here. It doesn’t hurt as much. You know what I mean? But I’m so dry.”

The wind let up, and he could smell her now: a stink of rotten meat and sickness and decay, pervasive and unpleasant.

“I lost my job,” she said. “It was a night job, but they said people had complained. I told them I was sick, and they said they didn’t care. I’m so thirsty.”

“The women,” he told her. “They have water. The house.”

“Puppy…” she sounded scared.

“Tell them…tell them I said to give you water…”

The white face stared up at him. “I should go,” she told him. Then she hacked, and made a face, and spat a mass of something white onto the grass. It broke up when it hit the ground and wriggled away.

It was almost impossible to breathe. His chest felt heavy, and his head was swaying.

“Stay,” he said, in a breath that was almost a whisper, unsure whether or not she could hear him. “Please don’t go.” He started to cough. “Stay the night.”

“I’ll stop a while,” she said. And then, like a mother to a child she said, “Nothing’s gonna hurt you when I’m here. You know that?”

Shadow coughed once more. He closed his eyes—only for a moment, he thought, but when he opened them again the moon had set and he was alone.

A crashing and a pounding in his head, beyond the pain of migraine, beyond all pain. Everything dissolved into tiny butterflies which circled him like a multicolored dust storm and then evaporated into the night.

The white sheet wrapped about the body at the base of the tree flapped noisily in the morning wind.

The pounding eased. Everything slowed. There was nothing left to make him keep breathing. His heart ceased to beat in his chest.

The darkness that he entered this time was deep, and lit by a single star, and it was final.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The tree was gone, and the world was gone, and the morning-gray sky above him was gone. The sky was now the color of midnight. There was a single cold star shining high above him, a blazing, twinkling light, and nothing else. He took a single step and almost tripped.

Shadow looked down. There were steps cut into the rock, going down, steps so huge that he could only imagine that giants had cut them and descended them a long time ago.

He clambered downward, half jumping, half vaulting from step to step. His body ached, but it was the ache of lack of use, not the tortured ache of a body that has hung on a tree until it was dead.

He observed, without surprise, that he was now fully dressed, in jeans and a white T-shirt. He was barefoot. He experienced a profound moment of déjà vu: this was what he had been wearing when he stood in Czernobog’s apartment the night when Zorya Polunochnaya had come to him and told him about the constellation called Odin’s Wain. She had taken the moon down from the sky for him.

He knew, suddenly, what would happen next. Zorya Polunochnaya would be there.

She was waiting for him at the bottom of the steps. There was no moon in the sky, but she was bathed in moonlight nonetheless: her white hair was moon-pale, and she wore the same lace-and-linen nightdress she had worn that night in Chicago.

She smiled when she saw him, and looked down, as if momentarily embarrassed. “Hello,” she said.

“Hi,” said Shadow.

“How are you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think this is maybe another strange dream on the tree. I’ve been having crazy dreams since I got out of prison.”

Her face was silvered by the moonlight (but no moon hung in that plum-black sky, and now, at the foot of the steps, even the single star was lost to view) and she looked both solemn and vulnerable. She said, “All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them. You have to understand that.”

“I got it,” he said.

Beyond her, the path forked. He would have to decide which path to take, he knew that. But there was one thing he had to do first. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and was relieved when he felt the familiar weight of the coin at the bottom of the pocket. He eased it out, held it between finger and thumb: a 1922 Liberty dollar. “This is yours,” he said.

He remembered then that his clothes were really at the foot of the tree. The women had placed his clothes in the canvas sack from which they had taken the ropes, and tied the end of the sack, and the biggest of the women had placed a heavy rock on it to stop it from blowing away. And so he knew that, in reality, the Liberty dollar was in a pocket in that sack, beneath the rock. But still, it was heavy in his hand, at the entrance to the underworld.

She took it from his palm with her slim fingers.

“Thank you. It bought you your liberty twice,” she said. “And now it will light your way into dark places.”

She closed her hand around the dollar, then she reached up and placed it in the air, as high as she could reach. She let go of it. Shadow knew, then, that this was another dream, for instead of falling, the coin floated upward until it was a foot or so above Shadow’s head. It was no longer a silver coin, though. Lady Liberty and her crown of spikes were gone. The face he saw on the coin was the indeterminate face of the moon in the summer sky, the face that was only visible until you stared at it, whereupon it would become dark seas and shapes on the moon’s cratered surface, the pattern and the face replaced by shadows of pure randomness and chance.

Shadow could not decide whether he was looking at a moon the size of a dollar, a foot above his head; or whether he was looking at a moon the size of the Pacific Ocean, many thousands of miles away. Nor whether there was any difference between the two ideas. Perhaps it was all a matter of perspective. Perhaps it was all a matter of point of view.

He looked at the forking path ahead of him.

“Which path should I take?” he asked. “Which one is safe?”

“Take one, and you cannot take the other,” she said. “But neither path is safe. Which way would you walk—the way of hard truths or the way of fine lies?”

Shadow hesitated. “Truths,” he said. “I’ve come too far for more lies.”

She looked sad. “There will be a price,” she said.

“I’ll pay it. What’s the price?”

“Your name,” she said. “Your real name. You will have to give it to me.”

“How?”

“Like this,” she said. She reached a perfect hand toward his head. He felt her fingers brush his skin, then he felt them penetrate his skin, his skull, felt them push deep into his head. Something tickled, in his skull and all down his spine. She pulled her hand out of his head. A flame, like a candle-flame but burning with a clear magnesium-white luminance, was flickering on the tip of her forefinger.

“Is that my name?” he asked.

She closed her hand, and the light was gone. “It was,” she said. She extended her hand, and pointed to the right-hand path. “That way,” she said. “For now.”

Nameless, Shadow walked down the right-hand path in the moonlight. When he turned around to thank her, he saw nothing but darkness. It seemed to him that he was deep under the ground, but when he looked up into the darkness above him he still saw the tiny moon.

He turned a corner.

If this was the afterlife, he thought, it was a lot like the House on the Rock: part diorama, part nightmare.

He was looking at himself in prison blues, in the warden’s office, as the warden told him that Laura had died in a car crash. He saw the expression on his own face—he looked like a man who had been abandoned by the world. It hurt him to see it, the nakedness and the fear. He hurried on, pushed through the warden’s gray office, and found himself looking at the VCR repair store on the outskirts of Eagle Point. Three years ago. Yes.

Inside the store, he knew, he was beating the living crap out of Larry Powers and B. J. West, bruising his knuckles in the process: pretty soon he would walk out of there, carrying a brown supermarket bag filled with twenty-dollar bills. The money they could never prove he had taken: his share of the proceeds, and a little more, for they shouldn’t have tried to rip him and Laura off like that. He was only the driver, but he had done his part, done everything that she had asked of him…

At the trial, nobody mentioned the bank robbery, although he was certain everybody wanted to. They couldn’t prove a thing, as long as nobody was talking. And nobody was. The prosecutor was forced instead to stick to the bodily damage that Shadow had inflicted on Powers and West. He showed photographs of the two men on their arrival in the local hospital. Shadow barely defended himself in court; it was easier that way. Neither Powers nor West seemed able to remember what the fight had been about, but they each admitted that Shadow had been their assailant.

Nobody talked about the money.

Nobody even mentioned Laura, and that was all that Shadow had wanted.

Shadow wondered whether the path of comforting lies would have been a better one to walk. He walked away from that place, and followed the rock path down into what looked like a hospital room, a public hospital in Chicago, and he felt the bile rise in his throat. He stopped. He did not want to look. He did not want to keep walking.

In the hospital bed his mother was dying again, as she’d died when he was sixteen, and, yes, here he was, a large, clumsy sixteen-year-old with acne pocking his cream-and-coffee skin, sitting at her bedside, unable to look at her, reading a thick paperback book. Shadow wondered what the book was, and he walked around the hospital bed to inspect it more closely. He stood between the bed and the chair looking from the one to the other, the big boy hunched into his chair, his nose buried in Gravity’s Rainbow, trying to escape from his mother’s death into London during the blitz, the fictional madness of the book no escape and no excuse.

His mother’s eyes were closed in a morphine peace: what she had thought was just another sickle-cell crisis, another bout of pain to be endured, had turned out, they had discovered, too late, to be lymphoma. There was a lemonish-gray tinge to her skin. She was in her early thirties, but she looked much older.

Shadow wanted to shake himself, the awkward boy that he once was, get him to hold her hand, talk to her, do something before she slipped away, as he knew that she would. But he could not touch himself, and he continued to read; and so his mother died while he sat in the chair next to her, reading a fat book.

After that he had more or less stopped reading. You could not trust fiction. What good were books, if they couldn’t protect you from something like that?

Shadow walked away from the hospital room, down the winding corridor, deep into the bowels of the earth.

He sees his mother first and he cannot believe how young she is, not yet twenty-five he guesses, before her medical discharge and they’re in their apartment, another embassy rental somewhere in Northern Europe, he looks around for something to give him a clue, and he’s just a shrimp of a kid now, big pale-gray eyes and straight dark hair. They are arguing. Shadow knows without hearing the words what they’re arguing about: it was the only thing they quarreled about, after all.

— Tell me about my father.

— He’s dead. Don’t ask about him.

— But who was he?

— Forget him. Dead and gone and you ain’t missed nothing.

— I want to see a picture of him.

— I ain’t got a picture, she’d say, and her voice would get quiet and fierce, and he knew that if he kept asking her questions she would shout, or even hit him, and he knew that he could not stop asking questions, so he turned away and walked on down the tunnel.

The path he followed twisted and wound and curled back on itself, and it put him in mind of snakeskins and intestines and of deep, deep tree roots. There was a pool to his left; he heard the drip, drip of water into it somewhere at the back of the tunnel, the falling water barely ruffling the mirrored surface of the pool. He dropped to his knees and drank, using his hand to bring the water to his lips. Then he walked on until he was standing in the floating disco-glitter patterns of a mirror-ball. It was like being in the exact center of the universe with all the stars and planets circling him, and he could not hear anything, not the music, nor the shouted conversations over the music, and now Shadow was staring at a woman who looked just like his mother never looked in all the years he knew her, she’s little more than a child, after all…

And she is dancing.

Shadow found that he was completely unsurprised when he recognized the man who dances with her. He had not changed that much in thirty-three years.

She is drunk: Shadow could see that at a glance. She is not very drunk, but she is unused to drink, and in a week or so she will take a ship to Norway. They have been drinking margaritas, and she has salt on her lips and salt clinging to the back of her hand.

Wednesday is not wearing a suit and tie, but the pin in the shape of a silver tree he wears over the pocket of his shirt glitters and glints when the mirror-ball light catches it. He does not dance badly; they make a fine-looking couple, considering the difference in their ages. There is a lupine grace to his movements.

A slow dance. He pulls her close to him, and his paw-like hand curves around the seat of her skirt possessively, moving her closer to him. His other hand takes her chin, pushes it upward into his face, and the two of them kiss, there on the floor, as the glitter-ball lights circle them into the center of the universe.

Soon after, they leave. She sways against him, and he leads her from the dance hall. Shadow buries his head in his hands, and does not follow them, unable or unwilling to witness his own conception.

The mirror lights were gone, and now the only illumination came from the tiny moon that burned high above his head.

He walked on. At a bend in the path he stopped for a moment, to catch his breath.

He felt a hand run gently up his back, and gentle fingers ruffle the hair on the back of his head.

“Hello, hon,” whispered a smoky female voice, over his shoulder.

“Hello,” he said, turning to face her.

She had brown hair and brown skin and her eyes were the deep golden-amber of good honey. Her pupils were vertical slits. “Do I know you?” he asked, puzzled.

“Intimately,” she said, and she smiled. “I used to sleep on your bed. And my people have been keeping their eyes on you, for me.” She turned to the path ahead of him, pointed to the three ways he could go. “Okay,” she said. “One way will make you wise. One way will make you whole. And one way will kill you.”

“I’m already dead, I think,” said Shadow. “I died on the tree.”

She made a moue. “There’s dead,” she said, “and there’s dead, and there’s dead. It’s a relative thing.” Then she smiled again. “I could make a joke about that, you know. Something about dead relatives.”

“No,” said Shadow. “It’s okay.”

“So,” she said. “Which way do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

She tipped her head on one side, a perfectly feline gesture. Suddenly, Shadow knew exactly who she was, and where he knew her from. He felt himself beginning to blush. “If you trust me,” said Bast, “I can choose for you.”

“I trust you,” he said, without hesitation.

“Do you want to know what it’s going to cost you?”

“I’ve already lost my name,” he told her.

“Names come and names go. Was it worth it?”

“Yes. Maybe. It wasn’t easy. As revelations go, it was kind of personal.”

“All revelations are personal,” she said. “That’s why all revelations are suspect.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No,” she said, “you don’t. I’ll take your heart. We’ll need it later,” and she reached her hand deep inside his chest, and she pulled it out with something ruby and pulsing held between her sharp fingernails. It was the color of pigeon’s blood, and it was made of pure light. Rhythmically it expanded and contracted.

She closed her hand, and it was gone.

“Take the middle way,” she said.

Shadow hesitated. “Are you really here?” he asked.

She tipped her head on one side, regarded him gravely, said nothing at all.

“What are you?” he asked. “What are you people?”

She yawned, showing a perfect, dark-pink tongue. “Think of us as symbols—we’re the dream that humanity creates to make sense of the shadows on the cave wall. Now go on, keep moving. Your body is already growing cold. The fools are gathering on the mountain. The clock is ticking.”

Shadow nodded, and walked on.

The path was becoming slippery now. There was ice on the rock. Shadow stumbled and skidded as he walked down the rock path, toward the place where it divided, scraping his knuckles on a jut of rock at chest height. He edged forward as slowly as he could. The moon above him glittered through the ice-crystals in the air: there was a ring about the moon, a moonbow, diffusing the light. It was beautiful, but it made walking harder. The path was unreliable.

He reached the place where the path divided.

He looked at the first path with a feeling of recognition. It opened into a vast chamber, or a set of chambers, like a dark museum. He knew it already. He had been there once, although for several moments he was unable to remember where or when. He could hear the long echoes of tiny noises. He could hear the noise that the dust makes as it settles.

It was the place that he had dreamed of, that first night that Laura had come to him, in the motel, so long ago; the endless memorial hall to the gods that were forgotten, and the ones whose very existence had been lost.

He took a step backward.

He walked to the path on the far side, and looked ahead. There was a Disneyland quality to the corridor: black Plexiglas walls with lights set in them. The colored lights blinked and flashed in the illusion of order, for no particular reason, like the console lights on a television starship.

He could hear something there as well: a deep vibrating bass drone which Shadow could feel in the pit of his stomach.

He stopped and looked around. Neither way seemed right. Not any longer. He was done with paths. The middle way, the way the cat-woman had told him to walk, that was his way. He moved toward it.

The moon above him was beginning to fade: the edge of it was pinking and going into eclipse. The path was framed by a huge doorway.

There were no deals to make any more, no more bargains. There was nothing to do but enter. So Shadow walked through the doorway, in darkness. The air was warm, and it smelled of wet dust, like a city street after the summer’s first rain.

He was not afraid.

Not any more. Fear had died on the tree, as Shadow had died. There was no fear left, no hatred, no pain. Nothing left but essence.

Something big splashed, quietly, in the distance, and the splash echoed into the vastness. He squinted, but could see nothing. It was too dark. And then, from the direction of the splashes, a ghost-light glimmered and the world took form: he was in a cavern, and in front of him, mirror-smooth, was water.

The splashing noises came closer and the light became brighter, and Shadow waited on the shore. Soon enough a low, flat boat came into sight, a flickering white lantern burning at its raised prow, another reflected in the glassy black water several feet below it. The boat was being poled by a tall figure, and the splashing noise Shadow had heard was the sound of the pole being lifted and moved as it pushed the craft across the waters of the underground lake.

“Hello there!” called Shadow. Echoes of his words suddenly surrounded him: he could imagine that a whole chorus of people were welcoming him, and calling to him, and each of them had his voice.

The person poling the boat made no reply.

The boat’s pilot was tall, and very thin. He—if it was a he—wore an unadorned white robe, and the pale head that topped it was so utterly inhuman that Shadow was certain that it had to be a mask of some sort: it was a bird’s head, small on a long neck, its beak long and high. Shadow was certain he had seen it before, this ghostly, bird-like figure. He grasped at the memory and then, disappointed, realized that he was picturing the clockwork penny-in-the-slot machine in the House on the Rock, and the pale, bird-like, half-glimpsed figure that glided out from behind the crypt for the drunkard’s soul.

Water dripped and echoed from the pole and the prow, and the ship’s wake rippled the glassy waters. The boat was made of reeds, bound and tied.

The boat came close to the shore. The pilot leaned on its pole. Its head turned slowly, until it was facing Shadow. “Hello,” it said, without moving its long beak. The voice was male, and, like everything else in Shadow’s afterlife so far, familiar. “Come on board. You’ll get your feet wet, I’m afraid, but there’s not a thing can be done about that. These are old boats, and if I come in closer I could rip out the bottom.”

Shadow took off the shoes he had not been aware he was wearing, and stepped out into the water. It came halfway up his calves, and was, after the initial shock of wetness, surprisingly warm. He reached the boat, and the pilot put down a hand, and pulled him aboard. The reed boat rocked a little, and water splashed over the low sides of it, and then it steadied.

The pilot poled off away from the shore. Shadow stood there and watched, his pants-legs dripping.

“I know you,” he said to the creature at the prow.

“You do indeed,” said the boatman. The oil lamp which hung at the front of the boat burned more fitfully, and the smoke from the lamp made Shadow cough. “You worked for me. I’m afraid we had to inter Lila Goodchild without you.” The voice was fussy and precise.

The smoke stung Shadow’s eyes. He wiped the tears away with his hand, and, through the smoke, he thought he saw a tall man, in a suit, with gold-rimmed spectacles. The smoke cleared and the boatman was once more a half-human creature with the head of a river-bird.

“Mister Ibis?”

“Good to see you, Shadow,” said the creature, with Mr. Ibis’s voice. “Do you know what a psychopomp is?”

Shadow thought he knew the word, but it had been a long time. He shook his head.

“It’s a fancy term for an escort,” said Mr. Ibis. “We all have so many functions, so many ways of existing. In my own vision of myself, I am a scholar who lives quietly, and pens his little tales, and dreams about a past that may or may not ever have existed. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I am also, in one of my capacities, like so many of the people you have chosen to associate with, a psychopomp. I escort the living to the world of the dead.”

“I thought this was the world of the dead,” said Shadow.

“No. Not per se. It’s more of a preliminary.”

The boat slipped and slid across the mirror-surface of the underground pool. The bird-head of the creature at the prow stared ahead. And then Mr. Ibis said, without moving its beak, “You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color.”

“You can’t,” said Shadow. “Can you?” The echoes whispered his words back at him from across the pool.

“What you have to remember,” said Mr. Ibis, testily, “is that life and death are different sides of the same coin. Like the heads and tails of a quarter.”

“And if I had a double-headed quarter?”

“You don’t. They only belong to fools, and gods.”

Shadow had a frisson, then, as they crossed the dark water. He imagined he could see the faces of children staring up at him reproachfully from beneath the water’s glassy surface: their faces were waterlogged and softened, their blind eyes clouded. There was no wind in that underground cavern to disturb the black surface of the lake.

“So I’m dead,” said Shadow. He was getting used to the idea. “Or I’m going to be dead.”

“We are on our way to the Hall of the Dead. I requested that I be the one to come for you.”

“Why?”

“I’m a psychopomp. I like you. You were a hard worker. Why not?”

“Because…” Shadow marshaled his thoughts. “Because I never believed in you. Because I don’t know much about Egyptian mythology. Because I didn’t expect this. What happened to Saint Peter and the Pearly Gates?”

The long-beaked white head shook from side to side, gravely. “It doesn’t matter that you didn’t believe in us,” said Mr. Ibis. “We believed in you.”

The boat touched bottom. Mr. Ibis stepped off the side, into the pool, and told Shadow to do the same. Mr. Ibis took a line from the prow of the boat, and passed Shadow the lantern to carry. It was in the shape of a crescent moon. They walked ashore, and Mr. Ibis tied the boat to a metal ring set in the rock floor. Then he took the lamp from Shadow and walked swiftly forward, holding the lamp high as he walked, throwing vast shadows across the rock floor and the high rock walls.

“Are you scared?” asked Mr. Ibis.

“Not really.”

“Well, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror, as we walk. They are the appropriate feelings for the situation at hand.”

Shadow was not scared. He was interested, and apprehensive, but no more. He was not scared of the shifting darkness, nor of being dead, nor even of the dog-headed creature the size of a grain silo who stared at them as they approached. It growled, deep in its throat, and Shadow felt his neck-hairs prickle.

“Shadow,” it said. “Now is the time of judgment.”

Shadow looked up at the creature. “Mister Jacquel?” he said.

The hands of Anubis came down, huge dark hands, and they picked Shadow up and brought him close.

The jackal head examined him with bright and glittering eyes; examined him as dispassionately as Mr. Jacquel had examined the dead girl on the slab. Shadow knew that all his faults, all his failings, all his weaknesses were being taken out and weighed and measured; that he was, in some way, being dissected, and sliced, and tasted.

We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them. He was as naked and as open as a corpse on a table, and dark Anubis the jackal god was his prosector and his prosecutor and his persecutor.

“Please,” said Shadow. “Please stop.”

But the examination did not stop. Every lie he had ever told, every object he had stolen, every hurt he had inflicted on another person, all the little crimes and the tiny murders that make up the day, each of these things and more were extracted and held up to the light by the jackal-headed judge of the dead.

Shadow began to weep, painfully, in the palm of the dark god’s hand. He was a tiny child again, as helpless and as powerless as he had ever been.

And then, without warning, it was over. Shadow panted, and sobbed, and snot streamed from his nose; he still felt helpless, but the hands placed him, carefully, almost tenderly, down on the rock floor.

“Who has his heart?” growled Anubis.

“I do,” purred a woman’s voice. Shadow looked up. Bast was standing there beside the thing that was no longer Mr. Ibis, and she held Shadow’s heart in her right hand. It lit her face with a ruby light.

“Give it to me,” said Thoth, the ibis-headed god, and he took the heart in his hands, which were not human hands, and he glided forward.

Anubis placed a pair of golden scales in front of him.

“So is this where we find out what I get?” whispered Shadow to Bast. “Heaven? Hell? Purgatory?”

“If the feather balances,” she said, “you get to choose your own destination.”

“And if not?”

She shrugged, as if the subject made her uncomfortable. Then she said, “Then we feed your heart and your soul to Ammet, the Eater of Souls…”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I can get some kind of a happy ending.”

“Not only are there no happy endings,” she told him. “There aren’t even any endings.”

On one of the pans of the scales, carefully, reverently, Anubis placed a feather.

Anubis put Shadow’s heart on the other pan of the scales. Something moved in the shadows under the scale, something it made Shadow uncomfortable to examine too closely.

It was a heavy feather, but Shadow had a heavy heart, and the scales tipped and swung worryingly.

But they balanced, in the end, and the creature in the shadows skulked away, unsatisfied.

“So that’s that,” said Bast, wistfully. “Just another skull for the pile. It’s a pity. I had hoped that you would do some good, in the current troubles. It’s like watching a slow-motion car crash and being powerless to prevent it.”

“You won’t be there?”

She shook her head. “I don’t like other people picking my battles for me,” she said.

There was silence then, in the vasty hall of death, where it echoed of water and the dark.

Shadow said, “So now I get to choose where I go next?”

“Choose,” said Thoth. “Or we can choose for you.”

“No,” said Shadow. “It’s okay. It’s my choice.”

“Well?” roared Anubis.

“I want to rest now,” said Shadow. “That’s what I want. I want nothing. No heaven, no hell, no anything. Just let it end.”

“You’re certain?” asked Thoth.

“Yes,” said Shadow.

Mr. Jacquel opened the last door for Shadow, and behind that door there was nothing. Not darkness. Not even oblivion. Only nothing.

Shadow accepted it, completely and without reservation, and he walked through the door into nothing with a strange fierce joy.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The most important place in the southeastern United States is advertised on hundreds of aging barn-roofs across Georgia and Tennessee and up into Kentucky. On a winding road through a forest a driver will pass a rotting red barn, and see, painted on its roof

and on the roof of a tumbledown milking shed nearby, painted in white block letters,

The driver is led by this to believe that Rock City is surely just around the nearest corner instead of being a day’s drive away, on Lookout Mountain, a hair over the state line, in Georgia, just southwest of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Lookout Mountain is not much of a mountain. It resembles an impossibly high and commanding hill, brown from a distance, green with trees and houses from up close. The Chickamauga, a branch of the Cherokee, lived there when the white men came; they called the mountain Chattotonoogee, which has been translated as the mountain that rises to a point.

In the 1830s Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act forced them all from their land—all the Choctaw and Chickamauga and Cherokee and Chickasaw—and U.S. troops forced every one of them they could find and catch to walk over a thousand miles to the new Indian Territories in what would one day be Oklahoma, down the Trail of Tears: a cheerful gesture of casual genocide. Thousands of men, women, and children died on the way. When you’ve won, you’ve won, and nobody can argue with that.

For whoever controlled Lookout Mountain controlled the land; that was the legend. It was a sacred site, after all, and it was a high place. In the Civil War, the War Between the States, there was a battle there: the Battle Above the Clouds, that was the first day’s fighting, and then the Union forces did the impossible, and, without orders, swept up Missionary Ridge and took it. The troops of General Grant won the day, and the North took Lookout Mountain and the North took the war.

There are tunnels and caves, some very old, beneath Lookout Mountain. For the most part they are blocked off now, although a local businessman excavated an underground waterfall, which he called Ruby Falls. It can be reached by elevator. It’s a tourist attraction, although the biggest tourist attraction of all is at the top of Lookout Mountain. That is Rock City.

Rock City begins as an ornamental garden on a mountainside: its visitors walk a path that takes them through rocks, over rocks, between rocks. They throw corn into a deer enclosure, cross a hanging bridge and peer out through a-quarter-a-throw binoculars at a view that promises them seven states on the rare sunny days when the air is perfectly clear. And from there, like a drop into some strange hell, the path takes the visitors, millions upon millions of them every year, down into caverns, where they stare at black-lit dolls arranged into nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale dioramas. When they leave, they leave bemused, uncertain of why they came, of what they have seen, of whether they had a good time or not.

They came to Lookout Mountain from all across the United States. They were not tourists. They came by car and they came by plane and by bus and by railroad and on foot. Some of them flew—they flew low, and they flew only in the dark of the night, but still, they flew. Several of them traveled their own ways beneath the earth. Many of them hitchhiked, cadging rides from nervous motorists or from truck drivers. Those who had cars or trucks would see the ones who had not walking beside the roads or at rest stations and in diners on the way, and, recognizing them for what they were, would offer them rides.

They arrived dust-stained and weary at the foot of Lookout Mountain. Looking up to the heights of the tree-covered slope they could see, or imagine that they could see, the paths and gardens and streams of Rock City.

They started arriving early in the morning. A second wave of them arrived at dusk. And for several days they simply kept coming.

A battered U-Haul truck pulled up, disgorging several travel-weary vila and rusalka, their make-up smudged, runs in their stockings, their expressions heavy-lidded and tired.

In a clump of trees at the bottom of the hill, an elderly wampyr offered a Marlboro to a huge naked ape-like creature covered with a tangle of orange fur. It accepted graciously, and they smoked in silence, side by side.

A Toyota Previa pulled up by the side of the road, and seven Chinese men and women got out of it. They looked, above all, clean, and they wore the kind of dark suits that, in some countries, are worn by minor government officials. One of them carried a clipboard, and he checked the inventory as they unloaded large golf-bags from the back of the car: the bags contained ornate swords with lacquer handles, and carved sticks, and mirrors. The weapons were distributed, checked off, signed for.

A once-famous comedian, believed to have died in the 1920s, climbed out of his rusting car, and proceeded to remove his clothing: his legs were goat-legs, and his tail was short and goatish.

Four Mexicans arrived, all smiles, their hair black and very shiny: they passed among themselves a beer bottle which they kept out of sight in a brown paper bag, its contents a bitter mixture of powdered chocolate, liquor, and blood.

A small, dark-bearded man with a dusty black derby on his head, curling payess at his temples, and a ragged fringed prayer shawl came to them walking across the fields. He was several feet in front of his companion, who was twice his height and was the blank gray color of good Polish clay: the word inscribed on his forehead meant truth.

They kept coming. A cab drew up and several rakshasas, the demons of the Indian subcontinent, climbed out and milled around, staring at the people at the bottom of the hill without speaking, until they found Mama-ji, her eyes closed, her lips moving in prayer. She was the only thing here that was familiar to them, but still, they hesitated to approach her, remembering old battles. Her hands rubbed the necklace of skulls about her neck. Her brown skin became slowly black, the glassy black of jet, of obsidian: her lips curled and her long white teeth were very sharp. She opened all her eyes, and beckoned the rakshasas to her, and greeted them as she would have greeted her own children.

The storms of the last few days, to the north and the east, had done nothing to ease the feeling of pressure and discomfort in the air. Local weather forecasters had begun to warn of cells that might spawn tornados, of high-pressure areas that did not move. It was warm by day there, but the nights were cold.

They clumped together in informal companies, banding together sometimes by nationality, by race, by temperament, even by species. They looked apprehensive. They looked tired.

Some of them were talking. There was laughter, on occasion, but it was muted and sporadic. Six-packs of beer were handed around.

Several local men and women came walking over the meadows, their bodies moving in unfamiliar ways: their voices, when they spoke, were the voices of the loa who rode them: a tall, black man spoke in the voice of Papa Legba who opens the gates; while Baron Samedi, the voudon lord of death, had taken over the body of a teenage Goth girl from Chattanooga, possibly because she possessed her own black silk top hat, which sat on her dark hair at a jaunty angle. She spoke in the baron’s own deep voice, smoked a cigar of enormous size, and commanded three of the Gédé, the Loa of the dead. The Gédé inhabited the bodies of three middle-aged brothers. They carried shotguns and told continual jokes of such astounding filthiness that only they were willing to laugh at them, which they did, raucously and repeatedly.

Two ageless Chickamauga women, in oil-stained blue jeans and battered leather jackets, walked around, watching the people and the preparations for battle. Sometimes they pointed and laughed; they did not intend to take part in the coming conflict.

The moon swelled and rose in the east, a day away from full. It seemed half as big as the sky as it rose, a deep reddish-orange, immediately above the hills. As it crossed the sky it seemed to shrink and pale until it hung high in the sky like a lantern.

There were so many of them waiting there, in the moonlight, at the foot of Lookout Mountain.

Laura was thirsty.

Sometimes living people burned steadily in her mind like candles and sometimes they flamed like torches. It made them easy to avoid, and it made them easy, on occasion, to find. Shadow had burned so strangely, with his own light, up on that tree.

She had chided him once, on that day when they had walked and held hands, for not being alive. She had hoped, perhaps, to see a spark of raw emotion, something that would show her that the man she had once been married to was a real man, a live one. And she had seen nothing at all.

She remembered walking beside him, wishing that he could understand what she was trying to say.

Now, dying on the tree, Shadow was utterly alive. She had watched him as the life had faded, and he had been focused and real. And he had asked her to stay with him, to stay the whole night. He had forgiven her…perhaps he had forgiven her. It did not matter. He had changed; that was all she knew.

Shadow had told her to go to the farmhouse, that they would give her water to drink there. There were no lights burning in the farm building, and she could feel nobody at home. But he had told her that they would care for her. She pushed against the door of the farmhouse and it opened, rusty hinges protesting the whole while.

Something moved in her left lung, something that pushed and squirmed and made her cough.

She found herself in a narrow hallway, her way almost blocked by a tall and dusty piano. The inside of the building smelled of old damp. She squeezed past the piano, pushed open a door and found herself in a dilapidated drawing room, filled with ramshackle furniture. An oil lamp burned on the mantelpiece. There was a coal fire burning in the fireplace beneath it, although she had neither seen nor smelled smoke outside the house. The coal fire did nothing to lift the chill she felt in that room, although, Laura was willing to concede, that might not be the fault of the room.

Death hurt Laura, although the hurt consisted mostly of absences, of things that were not there: a parching thirst that drained every cell of her, a cold in her bones that no heat could lift. Sometimes she would catch herself wondering whether the crisp and crackling flames of a pyre would warm her, or the soft brown blanket of the earth; whether the cold sea would quench her thirst…

The room, she realized, was not empty.

Three women sat on an elderly couch, as if they had come as a matched set in some outlandish artistic exhibition. The couch was upholstered in threadbare velvet, a faded brown that might, once, a hundred years ago, have been a bright canary yellow. The women were dressed in identical fog-gray skirts and sweaters. Their eyes were too deeply set, their skin the white of fresh bone. The one on the left of the sofa was a giantess, or almost, the one on the right was little more than a dwarf, and, between them, was a woman Laura was certain would be her own height. They followed her with their eyes as she entered the room, and they said nothing.

Laura had not known they would be there.

Something wriggled and fell in her nasal cavity. Laura fumbled in her sleeve for a tissue, and she blew her nose into it. She crumpled the tissue and flung it and its contents onto the coals of the fire, watched it crumple and blacken and become orange lace. She watched the maggots shrivel and brown and burn.

This done, she turned back to the women on the couch. They had not moved since she had entered, not a muscle, not a hair. They stared at her.

“Hello. Is this your farm?” she asked.

The largest of the women nodded. Her hands were very red, and her expression was impassive.

“Shadow—that’s the guy hanging on the tree. He’s my husband. He said I should tell you that he wants you to give me water.” Something large shifted in her bowels. It squirmed, and then was still.

The smallest woman nodded. She clambered off the couch. Her feet had not previously touched the floor. She scurried from the room.

Laura could hear doors opening and closing, through the farmhouse. Then, from outside, she could hear a series of loud creaks. Each was followed by a splash of water.

Soon enough, the small woman returned. She was carrying a brown earthenware jug of water. She put it down, carefully, on the table, and retreated to the couch. She pulled herself up, with a wriggle and a shiver, and was seated beside her sisters once again.

“Thank you.” Laura walked over to the table, looked around for a cup or a glass, but there was nothing like that to be seen. She picked up the jug. It was heavier than it looked. The water in it was perfectly clear.

She raised the jug to her lips and began to drink.

The water was colder than she had ever imagined liquid water could be. It froze her tongue and her teeth and her gullet. Still, she drank, unable to stop drinking, feeling the water freezing its way into her stomach, her bowels, her heart, her veins.

The water flowed into her. It was like drinking liquid ice.

She realized that the jug was empty and, surprised, she put it down on the table.

The women were observing her, dispassionately. Since her death, Laura had not thought in metaphors: things were, or they were not. But now, as she looked at the women on the sofa, she found herself thinking of juries, of scientists observing a laboratory animal.

She shook, suddenly and convulsively. She reached out a hand to the table to steady herself, but the table was slipping and lurching, and it almost avoided her grasp. As she put her hand on the table she began to vomit. She brought up bile and formalin, centipedes, and maggots. And then she felt herself starting to void, and to piss: stuff was being pushed violently, wetly, from her body. She would have screamed if she could; but then the dusty floorboards came up to meet her so fast and so hard that, had she been breathing, they would have knocked the breath from her body.

Time rushed over her and into her, swirling like a dust-devil. A thousand memories began to play at once: she was wet and stinking on the floor of the farmhouse; and she was lost in a department store the week before Christmas and her father was nowhere to be seen; and now she was sitting in the bar at Chi-Chi’s, ordering a strawberry daiquiri and checking out her blind date, the big, grave man-child, and wondering how he kissed; and she was in the car as, sickeningly, it rolled and jolted, and Robbie was screaming at her until the metal post finally stopped the car, but not its contents, from moving…

The water of time, which comes from the spring of fate, Urd’s Well, is not the water of life. Not quite. It feeds the roots of the world tree, though. And there is no other water like it.

When Laura woke in the empty farmhouse room, she was shivering, and her breath actually steamed in the morning air. There was a scrape on the back of her hand, and a wet smear on the scrape, the red-orange of fresh blood.

And she knew where she had to go. She had drunk from the water of time, which comes from the spring of fate. She could see the mountain in her mind. She licked the blood from the back of her hand, marveling at the film of saliva, and she began to walk.

It was a wet March day, and it was unseasonably cold, and the storms of the previous few days had lashed their way across the southern states, which meant that there were very few real tourists at Rock City on Lookout Mountain. The Christmas lights had been taken down, the summer visitors were yet to start arriving.

Still, there were a number of people there. There was even a tour bus that drew up that morning, releasing a dozen men and women with perfect tans and gleaming, reassuring smiles. They looked like news anchors, and one could almost imagine there was a phosphor-dot quality to them: they seemed to blur gently as they moved. A black Humvee was parked in the front lot of Rock City, near to Rocky the animatronic gnome.

The TV people walked intently through Rock City, stationing themselves near the balancing rock, where they talked to each other in pleasant, reasonable voices.

They were not the only visitors. If you had walked the paths of Rock City that day, you might have noticed people who looked like movie stars, and people who looked like aliens and a number of people who looked most of all like the idea of a person and nothing like the reality. You might have seen them, but most likely you would never have noticed them at all.

They came to Rock City in long limousines and in small sports cars and in oversized SUVs. Many of them wore the sunglasses of those who habitually wear sunglasses indoors and out, and do not willingly or comfortably remove them. There were suntans and suits and shades and smiles and scowls. They came in all sizes and shapes, all ages and styles.

All they had in common was a look, a very specific look. It said, You know me; or perhaps, You ought to know me. An instant familiarity that was also a distance, a look, or an attitude—the confidence that the world existed for them, and that it welcomed them, and that they were adored.

The fat kid moved among them with the shuffling walk of one who, despite having no social skills, has still become successful beyond his dreams. His black coat flapped in the wind.

Something that stood beside the soft drink stand in Mother Goose Court coughed to attract his attention. It was massive, and scalpel-blades jutted from its face and its fingers. Its face was cancerous. “It will be a mighty battle,” it told him, in a glutinous voice.

“It’s not going to be a battle,” said the fat kid. “All we’re facing here is a fucking paradigm shift. It’s a shakedown. Modalities like battle are so fucking Lao Tzu.”

The cancerous thing blinked at him. “Waiting,” is all it said in reply.

“Whatever,” said the fat kid. Then, “I’m looking for Mister World. You seen him?”

The thing scratched itself with a scalpel-blade, a tumorous lower lip pushed out in concentration. Then it nodded. “Over there,” it said.

The fat kid walked away, without a thank-you, in the direction indicated. The cancerous thing waited, saying nothing, until the kid was out of sight.

“It will be a battle,” said the cancerous thing to a woman whose face was smudged with phosphor-dots.

She nodded, and leaned closer to it. “So how does that make you feel?” she asked, in a sympathetic voice.

It blinked, and then it began to tell her.

Town’s Ford Explorer had a global positioning system, a little silver box that listened to the satellites and whispered back to the car its location, but he still got lost once he got south of Blacksburg and onto the country roads: the roads he drove seemed to bear little relationship to the tangle of lines on the map on the screen. Eventually he stopped the car in a country lane, wound down the window and asked a fat white woman being pulled by a wolfhound on its early morning walk for directions to Ashtree farm.

She nodded, and pointed and said something to him. He could not understand what she had said, but he said thanks a million and wound up the window and drove off in the general direction she had indicated.

He kept going for another forty minutes, down country road after country road, each of them promising, none of them the road he sought. Town began to chew his lower lip.

“I’m too old for this shit,” he said aloud, relishing the movie-star world-weariness of the line.

He was pushing fifty. Most of his working life had been spent in a branch of government which went only by its initials, and whether or not he had left his government job a dozen years ago for employment by the private sector was a matter of opinion: some days he thought one way, some days another. Anyway, it was only when you got down to the joes on the street that anyone seemed to assume there was a difference.

He was on the verge of giving up on the farm when he drove up a hill and saw the sign, hand painted, on the gate. It said simply, as he had been told it would, ASH. He pulled up the Ford Explorer, climbed out and untwisted the wire that held the gate closed. He got back in the car and drove through.

It was like cooking a frog, he thought. You put the frog in the water, and then you turn on the heat. And by the time the frog notices that there’s anything wrong, it’s already been cooked. The world in which he worked was all too weird. There was no solid ground beneath his feet; the water in the pot was bubbling fiercely.

When he’d been transferred to the Agency it had all seemed so simple. Now it was all so—not complex, he decided; merely bizarre. He had been sitting in Mr. World’s office at two that morning, and he had been told what he was to do. “You got it?” said Mr. World, handing him the knife in its dark leather sheath. “Cut me a stick. It doesn’t have to be longer than a couple of feet.”

“Affirmative,” he said. And then he said, “Why do I have to do this, sir?”

“Because I tell you to,” said Mr. World, flatly. “Find the tree. Do the job. Meet me down in Chattanooga. Don’t waste any time.”

“And what about the asshole?”

“Shadow? If you see him, just avoid him. Don’t touch him. Don’t even mess with him. I don’t want you turning him into a martyr. There’s no room for martyrs in the current game-plan.” He smiled then, his scarred smile. Mr. World was easily amused. Mr. Town had noticed this on several occasions. It had amused him to play chauffeur, in Kansas, after all.

“Look—”

“No martyrs, Town.”

And Town had nodded, and taken the knife in its sheath, and pushed the rage that welled up inside him down deep and away.

Mr. Town’s hatred of Shadow had become a part of him. As he was falling asleep he would see Shadow’s solemn face, see that smile that wasn’t a smile, the way Shadow had of smiling without smiling that made Town want to sink his fist into the man’s gut, and even as he fell asleep he could feel his jaws squeeze together, his temples tense, his gullet burn.

He drove the Ford Explorer across the meadow, past an abandoned farmhouse. He crested a ridge and saw the tree. He parked the car a little way past it, and turned off the engine. The clock on the dashboard said it was 6:38 A.M. He left the keys in the car, and walked toward the tree.

The tree was large; it seemed to exist on its own sense of scale. Town could not have said if it was fifty feet high or two hundred. Its bark was the gray of a fine silk scarf.

There was a naked man tied to the trunk a little way above the ground by a webwork of ropes, and there was something wrapped in a sheet at the foot of the tree. Town realized what it was as he passed it. He pushed at the sheet with his foot. Wednesday’s ruined half-a-face stared out at him. He would have expected it to be alive with maggots and flies, but it was untouched by insects. It didn’t even smell bad. It looked just as it had when he had taken it to the motel.

Town reached the tree. He walked a little way around the thick trunk, away from the sightless eyes of the farmhouse, then he unzipped his fly and pissed against the trunk of the tree. He did up his fly. He walked back over to the house, found a wooden extension ladder, carried it back to the tree. He leaned it carefully against the trunk. Then he climbed up it.

Shadow hung, limply, from the ropes that tied him to the tree. Town wondered if the man were still alive: his chest did not rise or fall. Dead or almost dead, it did not matter.

“Hello, asshole,” Town said, aloud. Shadow did not move.

Town reached the top of the ladder, and he pulled out the knife. He found a small branch which seemed to meet Mr. World’s specifications, and hacked at the base of it with the knife-blade, cutting it half-through, then breaking it off with his hand. It was about thirty inches long.

He put the knife back in its sheath. Then he started to climb back down the ladder. When he was opposite Shadow, he paused. “God, I hate you,” he said. He wished he could just have taken out a gun and shot him, and he knew that he could not. And then he jabbed the stick in the air toward the hanging man, in a stabbing motion. It was an instinctive gesture, containing all the frustration and rage inside Town. He imagined that he was holding a spear and twisting it into Shadow’s guts.

“Come on,” he said, aloud. “Time to get moving.” Then he thought, First sign of madness. Talking to yourself. He climbed down a few more steps, then jumped the rest of the way to the ground. He looked at the stick he was holding, and felt like a small boy, holding his stick as a sword or a spear. I could have cut a stick from any tree, he thought. It didn’t have to be this tree. Who the fuck would have known?

And he thought, Mr. World would have known.

He carried the ladder back to the farmhouse. From the corner of his eye he thought he saw something move, and he looked in through the window, into the dark room filled with broken furniture, with the plaster peeling from the walls, and for a moment, in a half-dream, he imagined that he saw three women sitting in the dark parlor.

One of them was knitting. One of them was staring directly at him. One of them appeared to be asleep. The woman who was staring at him began to smile, a huge smile that seemed to split her face lengthwise, a smile that crossed from ear to ear. Then she raised a finger and touched it to her neck, and ran it gently from one side of her neck to the other.

That was what he thought he saw, all in a moment, in that empty room, which contained, he saw at a second glance, nothing more than old rotting furniture and fly-spotted prints and dry rot. There was nobody there at all.

He rubbed his eyes.

Town walked back to the brown Ford Explorer and climbed in. He tossed the stick onto the white leather of the passenger seat. He turned the key in the ignition. The dashboard clock said 6:37 A.M. Town frowned, and checked his wristwatch, which blinked that it was 13:58.

Great, he thought. I was either up on that tree for eight hours, or for minus a minute. That was what he thought, but what he believed was that both timepieces had, coincidentally, begun to misbehave.

On the tree, Shadow’s body began to bleed. The wound was in his side. The blood that came from it was slow and thick and molasses-black.

He did not move. If he was sleeping, he did not wake.

Clouds covered the top of Lookout Mountain.

Easter sat some distance away from the crowd at the bottom of the mountain, watching the dawn over the hills to the east. She had a chain of blue forget-me-nots tattooed around her left wrist, and she rubbed them, absently, with her right thumb.

Another night had come and gone, and nothing. The folk were still coming, by ones and twos. The last night had brought several creatures from the southwest, including two young boys each the size of an apple tree, and something which she had only glimpsed, but which had looked like a disembodied head the size of a VW Bug. They had disappeared into the trees at the base of the mountain.

Nobody bothered them. Nobody from the outside world even seemed to have noticed they were there: she imagined the tourists at Rock City staring down at them through their insert-a-quarter binoculars, staring straight at a ramshackle encampment of things and people at the foot of the mountain, and seeing nothing but trees and bushes and rocks.

She could smell the smoke from a cooking fire, a smell of burning bacon on the chilly dawn wind. Someone at the far end of the encampment began to play the harmonica, which made her, involuntarily, smile and shiver. She had a paperback book in her backpack, and she waited for the sky to become light enough for her to read.

There were two dots in the sky, immediately below the clouds: a small one and a larger one. A spatter of rain brushed her face in the morning wind.

A barefoot girl came out from the encampment, walking toward her. She stopped beside a tree, hitched up her skirts, and squatted. When she had finished, Easter hailed her. The girl walked over.

“Good morning, lady,” she said. “The battle will start soon now.” The tip of her pink tongue touched her scarlet lips. She had a black crow’s wing tied with leather onto her shoulder, a crow’s foot on a chain around her neck. Her arms were blue-tattooed with lines and patterns and intricate knots.

“How do you know?”

The girl grinned. “I am Macha, of the Morrigan. When war comes, I can smell it in the air. I am a war goddess, and I say, blood shall be spilled this day.”

“Oh,” said Easter. “Well. There you go.” She was watching the smaller dot in the sky as it tumbled down toward them, dropping like a rock.

“And we shall fight them, and we shall kill them, every one,” said the girl. “And we shall take their heads as trophies, and the crows shall have their eyes and their corpses.” The dot had become a bird, its wings outstretched, riding the gusty morning winds above them.

Easter cocked her head on one side. “Is that some hidden war goddess knowledge?” she asked. “The whole ‘who’s going to win’ thing? Who gets whose head?”

“No,” said the girl. “I can smell the battle, but that’s all. But we’ll win. Won’t we? We have to. I saw what they did to the all-father. It’s them or us.”

“Yeah,” said Easter. “I suppose it is.”

The girl smiled again, in the half-light, and made her way back to the camp. Easter put her hand down and touched a green shoot which stabbed up from the earth like a knife blade. As she touched it it grew, and opened, and twisted, and changed, until she was resting her hand on a green tulip head. When the sun was high the flower would open.

Easter looked up at the hawk. “Can I help you?” she said.

The hawk circled about fifteen feet above Easter’s head, slowly, then it glided down to her, and landed on the ground nearby. It looked up at her with mad eyes.

“Hello, cutie,” she said. “Now, what do you really look like, eh?”

The hawk hopped toward her, uncertainly, and then it was no longer a hawk, but a young man. He looked at her, and then looked down at the grass. “You?” he said. His glance went everywhere, to the grass, to the sky, to the bushes. Not to her.

“Me,” she said. “What about me?”

“You.” He stopped. He seemed to be trying to muster his thoughts; strange expressions flitted and swam across his face. He spent too long a bird, she thought. He has forgotten how to be a man. She waited patiently. Eventually, he said, “Will you come with me?”

“Maybe. Where do you want me to go?”

“The man on the tree. He needs you. A ghost hurt, in his side. The blood came, then it stopped. I think he is dead.”

“There’s a war on. I can’t just go running away.”

The naked man said nothing, just moved from one foot to another as if he were uncertain of his weight, as if he were used to resting on the air or on a swaying branch, not on the solid and unchanging earth. Then he said, “If he is gone forever, it is all over.”

“But the battle—”

“If he is lost, it will not matter who wins.” He looked like he needed a blanket, and a cup of sweet coffee, and someone to take him somewhere he could shiver and babble until he got his mind back. He held his arms stiffly against his sides.

“Where is this? Nearby?”

He stared at the tulip plant, and shook his head. “Way away.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m needed here. And I can’t just leave. How do you expect me to get there? I can’t fly, like you, you know.”

“No,” said Horus. “You can’t.” Then he looked up, gravely, and pointed to the other dot that circled them, as it dropped from the darkening clouds, growing in size. “He can.”

Another several hours’ pointless driving, and by now Town hated the GPS almost as much as he hated Shadow. There was no passion in the hate, though. He had thought finding his way to the farm, to the great silver ash tree, had been hard; finding his way away from the farm was much harder. It did not seem to matter which road he took, which direction he drove down the narrow country lanes—the twisting Virginia back roads which must have begun, he was sure, as deer trails and cow paths—eventually he would find himself passing the farm once more, and the hand-painted sign, ASH.

This was crazy, wasn’t it? He simply had to retrace his way, take a left turn for every right he had taken on his way here, a right turn for every left.

Only that was what he had done last time, and now here he was, back at the farm once more. There were heavy storm clouds coming in, it was getting dark fast, it felt like night, not morning, and he had a long drive ahead of him: he would never get to Chattanooga before afternoon at this rate.

His cell phone gave him only a No Service message. The fold-out map in the car’s glove compartment showed the main roads, all the interstates and the real highways, but as far as it was concerned nothing else existed.

Nor was there anyone around that he could ask. The houses were set back from the roads; there were no welcoming lights. Now the fuel gauge was nudging Empty. He heard a rumble of distant thunder, and a single drop of rain splashed heavily onto his windshield.

So when Town saw the woman walking along the side of the road, he found himself smiling, involuntarily. “Thank God,” he said, aloud, and he drew up beside her. He thumbed down her window. “Ma’am? I’m sorry. I’m kind of lost. Can you tell me how to get to Highway 81 from here?”

She looked at him through the open passenger-side window and said, “You know, I don’t think I can explain it. But I can show you, if you like.” She was pale and her wet hair was long and dark.

“Climb in,” said Town. He didn’t even hesitate. “First thing, we need to buy some gas.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I needed a ride.” She got in. Her eyes were astonishingly blue. “There’s a stick here, on the seat,” she said, puzzled.

“Just throw it in the back. Where are you heading?” he asked. “Lady, if you can get me to a gas station, and back to a freeway, I’ll take you all the way to your own front door.”

She said, “Thank you. But I think I’m going further than you are. If you can get me to the freeway, that will be fine. Maybe a trucker will give me a ride.” And she smiled, a crooked, determined smile. It was the smile that did it.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I can give you a finer ride than any trucker.” He could smell her perfume. It was heady and heavy, a cloying scent, like magnolias or lilacs, but he did not mind.

“I’m going to Georgia,” she said. “It’s a long way.”

“I’m going to Chattanooga. I’ll take you as far as I can.”

“Mmm,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“They call me Mack,” said Mr. Town. When he was talking to women in bars, he would sometimes follow that up with “And the ones that know me really well call me Big Mack.” That could wait. They would have many hours in each other’s company to get to know each other, after all. “What’s yours?”

“Laura,” she told him.

“Well, Laura,” he said, “I’m sure we’re going to be great friends.”

The fat kid found Mr. World in the Rainbow Room—a walled section of the path, its window glass covered in clear plastic sheets of green and red and yellow film. He was walking impatiently from window to window, staring out, in turn, at a golden world, a red world, a green world. His hair was reddish-orange and close-cropped to his skull. He wore a Burberry raincoat.

The fat kid coughed. Mr. World looked up.

“Excuse me? Mister World?”

“Yes? Is everything on schedule?”

The fat kid’s mouth was dry. He licked his lips, and said, “I’ve set up everything. I don’t have confirmation on the choppers.”

“The helicopters will be here when we need them.”

“Good,” said the fat kid. “Good.” He stood there, not saying anything, not going away. There was a bruise on his forehead.

After a while Mr. World said, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

A pause. The boy swallowed and nodded. “Something else,” he said. “Yes.”

“Would you feel more comfortable discussing it in private?”

The boy nodded again.

Mr. World walked with the kid back to his operations center: a damp cave containing a diorama of drunken pixies making moonshine with a still. A sign outside warned tourists away during renovations. The two men sat down on plastic chairs.

“How can I help you?” asked Mr. World.

“Yes. Okay. Right, two things, Okay. One. What are we waiting for? And two. Two is harder. Look. We have the guns. Right. We have the firepower. They have fucking swords and knives and fucking hammers and stone axes. And like, tire irons. We have fucking smart bombs.”

“Which we will not be using,” pointed out the other man.

“I know that. You said that already. I know that. And that’s doable. But. Look, ever since I did the job on that bitch in L.A. I’ve been…” He stopped, made a face, seemed unwilling to go on.

“You’ve been troubled?”

“Yes. Good word. Troubled. Yes. Like a home for troubled teens. Funny. Yes.”

“And what exactly is troubling you?”

“Well, we fight, we win.”

“And that is a source of trouble? I find it a matter of triumph and delight, myself.”

“But. They’ll die out anyway. They are passenger pigeons and thylacines. Yes? Who cares? This way, it’s going to be a bloodbath. If we just wait them out, we get the whole thing.”

“Ah.” Mr. World nodded.

He was following. That was good. The fat kid said, “Look, I’m not the only one who feels this way. I’ve checked with the crew at Radio Modern, and they’re all for settling this peacefully; and the Intangibles are pretty much in favor of letting market forces take care of it. I’m being. You know. The voice of reason here.”

“You are indeed. Unfortunately, there is information you do not have.” The smile that followed was twisted and scarred.

The boy blinked. He said, “Mister World? What happened to your lips?”

World sighed. “The truth of the matter,” he said, “is that somebody sewed them together. A long time ago.”

“Whoa,” said the fat kid. “Serious omertà shit.”

“Yes. You want to know what we’re waiting for? Why we didn’t strike last night?”

The fat kid nodded. He was sweating, but it was a cold sweat.

“We didn’t strike yet, because I’m waiting for a stick.”

“A stick?”

“That’s right. A stick. And do you know what I’m going to do with the stick?”

A head shake. “Okay. I’ll bite. What?”

“I could tell you,” said Mr. World, soberly. “But then I’d have to kill you.” He winked, and the tension in the room evaporated.

The fat kid began to giggle, a low, snuffling laugh in the back of his throat and in his nose. “Okay,” he said. “Hee. Hee. Okay. Hee. Got it. Message received on Planet Technical. Loud and clear. Ixnay on the estionsquay.”

Mr. World shook his head. He rested a hand on the fat kid’s shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “You really want to know?”

“Sure.”

“Well,” said Mr. World, “seeing that we’re friends, here’s the answer: I’m going to take the stick, and I’m going to throw it over the armies as they come together. As I throw it, it will become a spear. And then, as the spear arcs over the battle, I’m going to shout, ‘I dedicate this battle to Odin.’”

“Huh?” said the fat kid. “Why?”

“Power,” said Mr. World. He scratched his chin. “And food. A combination of the two. You see, the outcome of the battle is unimportant. What matters is the chaos, and the slaughter.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Let me show you. It’ll be just like this,” said Mr. World. “Watch!” He took the wooden-bladed hunter’s knife from the pocket of his Burberry and, in one fluid movement, he slipped the blade of it into the soft flesh beneath the fat kid’s chin, and pushed hard upward, toward the brain. “I dedicate this death to Odin,” he said, as the knife sank in.

There was a leakage onto his hand of something that was not actually blood, and a sputtering sparking noise behind the fat kid’s eyes. The smell on the air was that of burning insulation wire, as if somewhere a plug was overloading.

The fat kid’s hand twitched spastically, and then he fell. The expression on his face was one of puzzlement, and misery. “Look at him,” said Mr. World, conversationally, to the air. “He looks as if he just saw a sequence of zeroes and ones turn into a cluster of brightly colored birds, and then just fly away.”

There was no reply from the empty rock corridor.

Mr. World shouldered the body as if it weighed very little, and he opened the pixie diorama and dropped the body beside the still, covering it with its long black raincoat. He would dispose of it that evening, he decided, and he grinned his scarred grin: hiding a body on a battlefield would almost be too easy. Nobody would ever notice. Nobody would care.

For a little while there was silence in that place. And then a gruff voice which was not Mr. World’s cleared its throat in the shadows, and said, “Good start.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you—even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers and triumphs over all opposition.

Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.

So, none of this is happening. Such things could not occur in this day and age. Never a word of it is literally true, although it all happened, and the next thing that happened, happened like this:

At the foot of Lookout Mountain, which is scarcely more than a very high hill, men and women were gathered around a small bonfire in the rain. They stood beneath the trees, which provided poor cover, and they were arguing.

The lady Kali, with her ink-black skin and white, sharp teeth, said, “It is time.”

Anansi, with lemon-yellow gloves and silvering hair, shook his head. “We can wait,” he said. “While we can wait, we should wait.”

There was a murmur of disagreement from the crowd.

“No, listen. He’s right,” said an old man with iron-gray hair: Czernobog. He was holding a small sledgehammer, resting the head of it on his shoulder. “They have the high ground. The weather is against us. This is madness, to begin this now.”

Something that looked a little like a wolf and a little more like a man grunted and spat on the forest floor. “When better to attack them, dedushka? Shall we wait until the weather clears, when they expect it? I say we go now. I say we move.”

“There are clouds, between us and them,” pointed out Isten of the Hungarians. He had a fine black moustache, a large, dusty black hat, and the grin of a man who makes his living selling aluminum siding and new roofs and gutters to senior citizens but who always leaves town the day after the checks clear whether the work is done or not.

A man in an elegant suit, who had until now said nothing, put his hands together, stepped into the firelight, and made his point succinctly and clearly. There were nods and mutters of agreement.

A voice came from one of three warrior-women who comprised the Morrigan, standing so close together in the shadows that they had become an arrangement of blue-tattooed limbs and dangling crow’s wings. She said, “It doesn’t matter whether this is a good time or a bad time. This is the time. They have been killing us. They will continue to kill us, whether we fight or not. Perhaps we will triumph. Perhaps we will die. Better to die together, on the attack, like gods, than to die fleeing and singly, like rats in a cellar.”

Another murmur, this time one of deep agreement. She had said it for all of them. Now was the time.

“The first head is mine,” said a very tall Chinese man, with a rope of tiny skulls around his neck. He began to walk, slowly and intently, up the mountain, shouldering a staff with a curved blade at the end of it, like a silver moon.

Even Nothing cannot last forever.

He might have been there, been Nowhere, for ten minutes or for ten thousand years. It made no difference. Time was an idea for which he no longer had any need.

He could no longer remember his real name. He felt empty and cleansed, in that place that was not a place.

He was without form, and void.

He was nothing.

And into that nothing a voice said, “Ho-hoka, cousin. We got to talk.”

And something that might once have been Shadow said, “Whiskey Jack?”

“Yeah,” said Whiskey Jack, in the darkness. “You are a hard man to hunt down, when you’re dead. You didn’t go to any of the places I figured. I had to look all over before I thought of checking here. Say, you ever find your tribe?”

Shadow remembered the man and the girl in the disco beneath the spinning mirror-ball. “I guess I found my family. But no, I never found my tribe.”

“Sorry to have to disturb you.”

“No. You aren’t sorry. Let me be. I got what I wanted. I’m done.”

“They are coming for you,” said Whiskey Jack. “They are going to revive you.”

“But I’m done,” said Shadow. “It was all over and done.”

“No such thing,” said Whiskey Jack. “Never any such thing. We’ll go to my place. You want a beer?”

He guessed he would like a beer, at that. “Sure.”

“Get me one too. There’s a cooler outside the door,” said Whiskey Jack, and he pointed. They were in his shack.

Shadow opened the door to the shack with hands it seemed to him he had not possessed moments before. There was a plastic cooler filled with chunks of river-ice out there, and, in the ice, a dozen cans of Budweiser. He pulled out a couple of cans of beer and then sat in the doorway and looked out over the valley.

They were at the top of a hill, near a waterfall, swollen with melting snow and runoff. It fell, in stages, maybe seventy feet below them, maybe a hundred. The sun reflected from the ice which sheathed the trees that overhung the waterfall basin. The churning noise as the water crashed and fell filled the air.

“Where are we?” asked Shadow.

“Where you were last time,” said Whiskey Jack. “My place. You planning on holding on to my Bud till it warms up? They aren’t good like that.”

Shadow stood up and passed him the can of beer. “You didn’t have a waterfall outside your place last time I was here,” he said.

Whiskey Jack said nothing. He popped the top of the Bud, and drank half the can in one long slow swallow. Then he said, “You remember my nephew? Harry Bluejay? The poet? He traded his Buick for your Winnebago. Remember?”

“Sure. I didn’t know he was a poet.”

Whiskey Jack raised his chin and looked proud. “Best damn poet in America,” he said.

He drained the rest of his can of beer, belched, and got another can, while Shadow popped open his own can of beer, and the two men sat outside on a rock, by the pale green ferns, in the morning sun, and they watched the falling water and they drank their beer. There was still snow on the ground, in the places where the shadows never lifted.

The earth was muddy and wet.

“Harry was diabetic,” continued Whiskey Jack. “It happens. Too much. You people came to America, you take our sugar cane, potatoes and corn, then you sell us potato chips and caramel popcorn, and we’re the ones who get sick.” He sipped his beer, reflecting. “He’d won a couple of prizes for his poetry. There were people in Minnesota who wanted to put his poems into a book. He was driving to Minnesota in a sports car to talk to them. He had traded your ’Bago for a yellow Miata. The doctors said they think he went into a coma while he was driving, went off the road, ran the car into one of your road signs. Too lazy to look at where you are, to read the mountains and the clouds, you people need road signs everywhere. And so Harry Bluejay went away forever, went to live with brother Wolf. So I said, nothing keeping me there any longer. I came north. Good fishing up here.”

“I’m sorry about your nephew.”

“Me too. So now I’m living here in the north. Long way from white man’s diseases. White man’s roads. White man’s road signs. White man’s yellow Miatas. White man’s caramel popcorn.”

“White man’s beer?”

Whiskey Jack looked at the can. “When you people finally give up and go home, you can leave us the Budweiser breweries,” he said.

“Where are we?” asked Shadow. “Am I on the tree? Am I dead? Am I here? I thought everything was finished. What’s real?”

“Yes,” said Whiskey Jack.

“Yes? What kind of an answer is Yes?”

“It’s a good answer. True answer, too.”

Shadow said, “Are you a god as well?”

Whiskey Jack shook his head. “I’m a culture hero,” he said. “We do the same shit gods do, we just screw up more and nobody worships us. They tell stories about us, but they tell the ones which make us look bad along with the ones where we came out fairly okay.”

“I see,” said Shadow. And he did see, more or less.

“Look,” said Whiskey Jack. “This is not a good country for gods. My people figured that out early on. There are creator spirits who found the earth or made it or shit it out, but you think about it: who’s going to worship Coyote? He made love to Porcupine Woman and got his dick shot through with more needles than a pincushion. He’d argue with rocks and the rocks would win.

“So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there’s something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it’s always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn’t need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it. It gave us salmon and corn and buffalo and passenger pigeons. It gave us wild rice and walleye. It gave us melon and squash and turkey. And we were the children of the land, just like the porcupine and the skunk and the blue jay.”

He finished his second beer and gestured toward the river at the bottom of the waterfall. “You follow that river for a way, you’ll get to the lakes where the wild rice grows. In wild rice time, you go out in your canoe with a friend, and you knock the wild rice into your canoe, and cook it, and store it, and it will keep you for a long time. Different places grow different foods. Go far enough south there are orange trees, lemon trees, and those squashy green guys, look like pears—”

“Avocados.”

“Avocados,” agreed Whiskey Jack. “That’s them. They don’t grow up this way. This is wild rice country. Moose country. What I’m trying to say is that America is like that. It’s not good growing country for gods. They don’t grow well here. They’re like avocados trying to grow in wild rice country.”

“They may not grow well,” said Shadow, remembering, “but they’re going to war.”

That was the only time he ever saw Whiskey Jack laugh. It was almost a bark, and it had little humor in it. “Hey, Shadow,” said Whiskey Jack. “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too?”

“Maybe.” Shadow felt good. He didn’t think it was just the beer. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so alive, and so together.

“It’s not going to be a war.”

“Then what is it?”

Whiskey Jack crushed the beer can between his hands, pressing it until it was flat. “Look,” he said, and pointed to the waterfall. The sun was high enough that it caught the waterfall spray: a rainbow nimbus hung in the air. Shadow thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

“It’s going to be a bloodbath,” said Whiskey Jack, flatly.

Shadow saw it then. He saw it all, stark in its simplicity. He shook his head, then he began to chuckle, and he shook his head some more, and the chuckle became a full-throated laugh.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine,” said Shadow. “I just saw the hidden Indians. Not all of them. But I saw them anyhow.”

“Probably Ho Chunk, then. Those guys never could hide worth a damn.” He looked up at the sun. “Time to go back,” he said. He stood up.

“It’s a two-man con,” said Shadow. “It’s not a war at all, is it?”

Whiskey Jack patted Shadow’s arm. “You’re not so dumb,” he said.

They walked back to Whiskey Jack’s shack. He opened the door. Shadow hesitated. “I wish I could stay here with you,” he said. “This seems like a good place.”

“There are a lot of good places,” said Whiskey Jack. “That’s kind of the point. Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land’s still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn’t going anywhere. And neither am I.”

Shadow closed the door. Something was pulling at him. He was alone in the darkness once more, but the darkness became brighter and brighter until it was burning like the sun.

And then the pain began.

There was a woman who walked through a meadow, and spring flowers blossomed where she had passed. In this place and at this time, she called herself Easter.

She passed a place where, long ago, a farmhouse had stood. Even today several walls were still standing, jutting out of the weeds and the meadow-grass like rotten teeth. A thin rain was falling. The clouds were dark and low, and it was cold.

A little way beyond the place where the farmhouse had been there was a tree, a huge silver-gray tree, winter-dead to all appearances, and leafless, and in front of the tree, on the grass, were frayed clumps of colorless fabric. The woman stopped at the fabric, and bent down, and picked up something brownish-white: it was a much-gnawed fragment of bone which might, once, have been a part of a human skull. She tossed it back down onto the grass.

Then she looked at the man on the tree and she smiled wryly. “They just aren’t as interesting naked,” she said. “It’s the unwrapping that’s half the fun. Like with gifts, and eggs.”

The hawk-headed man who walked beside her looked down at his penis and seemed, for the first time, to become aware of his own nakedness. He said, “I can look at the sun without even blinking.”

“That’s very clever of you,” Easter told him, reassuringly. “Now, let’s get him down from there.”

The wet ropes that held Shadow to the tree had long ago weathered and rotted, and they parted easily as the two people pulled on them. The body on the tree slipped and slid down toward the roots. They caught him as he fell, and they took him up, carrying him easily, although he was a very big man, and they put him down in the gray meadow.

The body on the grass was cold, and it did not breathe. There was a patch of dried black blood on its side, as if it had been stabbed with a spear.

“What now?”

“Now,” she said, “we warm him. You know what you have to do.”

“I know. I cannot.”

“If you are not willing to help, then you should not have called me here.”

“But it has been too long.”

“It has been too long for all of us.”

“And I am quite mad.”

“I know.” She reached out a white hand to Horus, and she touched his black hair. He blinked at her, intently. Then he shimmered, as if in a heat haze.

The hawk eye that faced her glinted orange, as if a flame had just been kindled inside it; a flame that had been long extinguished.

The hawk took to the air, and it swung upward, circling and ascending in a rising gyre, circling the place in the gray clouds where the sun might conceivably be, and as the hawk rose it became first a dot and then a speck, and then, to the naked eye, nothing at all, something that could only be imagined. The clouds began to thin and to evaporate, creating a patch of blue sky through which the sun glared. The single bright sunbeam penetrating the clouds and bathing the meadow was beautiful, but the image faded as more clouds vanished. Soon the morning sun was blazing down on that meadow like a summer sun at noon, burning the water vapor from the morning’s rain into mists and burning the mist off into nothing at all.

The golden sun bathed the body on the floor of the meadow with its radiance and its heat. Shades of pink and of warm brown touched the dead thing.

The woman dragged the fingers of her right hand lightly across the body’s chest. She imagined she could feel a shiver in his breast—something that was not a heartbeat, but still…She let her hand remain there, on his chest, just above his heart.

She lowered her lips to Shadow’s lips, and she breathed into his lungs, a gentle in and out, and then the breath became a kiss. Her kiss was gentle, and it tasted of spring rains and meadow flowers.

The wound in his side began to flow with liquid blood once more—a scarlet blood, which oozed like liquid rubies in the sunlight, and then the bleeding stopped.

She kissed his cheek and his forehead. “Come on,” she said. “Time to get up. It’s all happening. You don’t want to miss it.”

His eyes fluttered, and then they opened, two eyes of a gray so deep it was colorless, the gray of evening, and he looked at her.

She smiled, and then she removed her hand from his chest.

He said, “You called me back.” He said it slowly, as if he had forgotten how to speak English. There was hurt in his voice, and puzzlement.

“Yes.”

“I was done. I was judged. It was over. You called me back. You dared.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes.”

He sat up, slowly. He winced, and touched his side. Then he looked puzzled: there was a beading of wet blood there, but there was no wound beneath it.

He reached out a hand, and she put her arm around him and helped him to his feet. He looked across the meadow as if he was trying to remember the names of the things he was looking at: the flowers in the long grass, the ruins of the farmhouse, the haze of green buds that fogged the branches of the huge silver tree.

“Do you remember?” she asked. “Do you remember what you learned?”

“Yes. It will fade though. Like a dream. I know that. I lost my name, and I lost my heart. And you brought me back.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, for the second time. “They are going to fight, soon. The old gods and the new ones.”

“You want me to fight for you? You wasted your time.”

“I brought you back because that was what I had to do,” she said. “It’s what I can do. It’s what I’m best at. What you do now is whatever you have to do. Your call. I did my part.” Suddenly, she became aware of his nakedness, and she blushed a burning scarlet flush, and she looked down and away.

In the rain and the cloud, shadows moved up the side of the mountain, up to the rock pathways.

White foxes padded up the hill in company with red-haired men in green jackets. There was a bull-headed minotaur walking beside an iron-fingered dactyl. A pig, a monkey, and a sharp-toothed ghoul clambered up the hillside, in company with a blue-skinned man holding a flaming bow, a bear with flowers twined into its fur, and a man in golden chain mail holding his sword of eyes.

Beautiful Antinous, who was the lover of Hadrian, walked up the hillside at the head of a company of leather queens, their arms and chests steroid-swollen and sculpted into perfect shapes.

A gray-skinned man, his one cyclopean eye a huge cabochon emerald, walked stiffly up the hill, ahead of several squat and swarthy men, their impassive faces as regular as Aztec carvings: they knew the secrets that the jungles had swallowed.

A sniper at the top of the hill took careful aim at a white fox, and fired. There was an explosion, and a puff of cordite, gunpowder scent on the wet air. The corpse was a young Japanese woman with her stomach blown away, and her face all bloody. Slowly, the corpse began to fade.

The people continued up the hill, on two legs, on four legs, on no legs at all.

The drive through the Tennessee mountain country had been startlingly beautiful whenever the storm had eased, and nerve-wracking whenever the rain had pelted down. Town and Laura had talked and talked and talked the whole way. He was so glad he had met her. It was like meeting an old friend, a really good old friend you’d simply never met before. They talked history and movies and music, and she turned out to be the only person, and I mean the only other person, he had ever met who had seen a foreign film (Mr. Town was sure it was Spanish, while Laura was just as certain it was Polish) from the sixties called The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, a film he had been starting to believe he had hallucinated.

When Laura pointed out the first SEE ROCK CITY barn to him he chuckled and admitted that that was where he was headed. She said that was so cool. She always wanted to visit those kinds of places, but she never made the time, and always regretted it later. That was why she was on the road right now. She was having an adventure.

She was a travel agent, she told him. Separated from her husband. She admitted that she didn’t think they could ever get back together, and said it was her fault.

“I can’t believe that.”

She sighed. “It’s true, Mack. I’m just not the woman he married anymore.”

Well, he told her, people change, and before he could think he was telling her everything he could tell her about his life, he was even telling her about Woody and Stoner, how the three of them were the three musketeers, and the two of them were killed, you think you’d get hardened to that kind of thing in government work, but you never did. It never happened.

And she reached out one hand—it was cold enough that he turned up the car’s heating—and squeezed his hand tightly in hers.

Lunchtime, they ate bad Japanese food while a thunderstorm lowered on Knoxville, and Town didn’t care that the food was late, that the miso soup was cold, or that the sushi was warm.

He loved the fact that she was out, with him, having an adventure.

“Well,” confided Laura, “I hated the idea of getting stale. I was just rotting away where I was. So I set off without my car and without my credit cards. I’m just relying on the kindness of strangers. And I’ve had the best time. People have been so good to me.”

“Aren’t you scared?” he asked. “I mean, you could be stranded, you could be mugged, you could starve.”

She shook her head. Then she said, with a hesitant smile, “I met you, didn’t I?” and he couldn’t find anything to say.

When the meal was over they ran through the storm to his car holding Japanese-language newspapers to cover their heads, and they laughed as they ran, like schoolchildren in the rain.

“How far can I take you?” he asked, when they made it back into the car. “I’ll go as far as you’re going, Mack,” she told him, shyly.

He was glad he hadn’t used the Big Mack line. This woman wasn’t a bar-room one-nighter, Mr. Town knew that in his soul. It might have taken him fifty years to find her, but this was finally it, this was the one, this wild, magical woman with the long dark hair.

This was love.

“Look,” he said, as they approached Chattanooga. The wipers slooshed the rain across the windshield, blurring the gray of the city. “How about I find a motel for you tonight? I’ll pay for it. And once I make my delivery, we can. Well, we can take a hot bath together, for a start. Warm you up.”

“That sounds wonderful,” said Laura. “What are you delivering?”

“That stick,” he told her, and chuckled. “The one on the back seat.”

“Okay,” she said, humoring him. “Then don’t tell me, Mister Mysterious.”

He told her it would be best if she waited in the car in the Rock City parking lot while he made his delivery. He drove up the side of Lookout Mountain in the gusting rain, never breaking thirty miles per hour, with his headlights burning.

They parked at the back of the parking lot. He turned off the engine.

“Hey. Mack. Before you get out of the car, don’t I get a hug?” asked Laura with a smile.

“You surely do,” said Mr. Town, and he put his arms around her, and she snuggled close to him while the rain pattered a tattoo on the roof of the Ford Explorer. He could smell her hair. There was a faintly unpleasant scent beneath the perfume. Travel would do it, every time. That bath, he decided, was a real must for both of them. He wondered if there was anyplace in Chattanooga where he could get those scented bath bombs his first wife had loved so much. Laura raised her head against his, and her hand stroked the line of his neck, absently.

“Mack…I keep thinking. You must really want to know what happened to those friends of yours,” she said. “Woody and Stone. Do you?”

“Yeah,” he said, moving his lips down to hers, for their first kiss. “Sure I do.”

So she showed him.

Shadow walked the meadow, making his own slow circles around the trunk of the tree, gradually widening his circle. Sometimes he would stop and pick something up: a flower, or a leaf, or a pebble, or a twig, or a blade of grass. He would examine it minutely, as if concentrating entirely on the twigness of the twig, the leafness of the leaf, as if he were seeing it for the first time.

Easter found herself reminded of the gaze of a baby, at the point where it learns to focus.

She did not dare to talk to him. At that moment, it would have been sacrilegious. She watched him, exhausted as she was, and she wondered.

About twenty feet out from the base of the tree, half-overgrown with long meadow-grass and dead creepers, he found a canvas bag. Shadow picked it up, untied the knots at the top of the bag, loosened the draw-string.

The clothes he pulled out were his own. They were old, but still serviceable. He turned the shoes over in his hands. He stroked the fabric of the shirt, the wool of the sweater, stared at them as if he were looking at them across a million years.

For some time he looked at them, then, one by one, he put them on.

He put his hands into his pockets, and looked puzzled as he pulled one hand out holding what looked to Easter like a white and gray marble.

He said, “No coins.” It was the first thing he had said in several hours.

“No coins?” echoed Easter.

He shook his head. “It was good to have the coins,” he said. “They gave me something to do with my hands.” He bent down to pull on his shoes.

Once he was dressed, he looked more normal. Grave, though. She wondered how far he had traveled, and what it had cost him to return. He was not the first whose return she had initiated, and she knew that, soon enough, the million-year stare would fade, and the memories and the dreams that he had brought back from the tree would be elided by the world of things you could touch. That was the way it always went.

She led their way to the rear of the meadow. Her mount waited in the trees.

“It can’t carry both of us,” she told him. “I’ll make my own way home.”

Shadow nodded. He seemed to be trying to remember something. Then he opened his mouth, and he screeched a cry of welcome and of joy.

The thunderbird opened its cruel beak, and it screeched a welcome back at him.

Superficially, at least, it resembled a condor. Its feathers were black, with a purplish sheen, and its neck was banded with white. Its beak was black and cruel: a raptor’s beak, made for tearing. At rest, on the ground, with its wings folded away, it was the size of a black bear, and its head was on a level with Shadow’s own.

Horus said, proudly, “I brought him. They live in the mountains.”

Shadow nodded. “I had a dream of thunderbirds once,” he said. “Damnedest dream I ever had.”

The thunderbird opened its beak and made a surprisingly gentle noise, Crawroo? “You heard my dream too?” asked Shadow.

He reached out a hand and rubbed it gently against the bird’s head. The thunderbird pushed up against him like an affectionate pony. He scratched it behind where the ears must have been.

Shadow turned to Easter. “You rode him here?”

“Yes,” she said. “You can ride him back, if he lets you.”

“How do you ride him?”

“It’s easy,” she said. “If you don’t fall. Like riding the lightning.”

“Will I see you back there?”

She shook her head. “I’m done, honey,” she told him. “You go do what you need to do. I’m tired. Bringing you back like that…it took a lot out of me. I need to rest, to save up my energies until my festival begins. I’m sorry. Good luck.”

Shadow nodded. “Whiskey Jack. I saw him. After I passed on. He came and found me. We drank beer together.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure you did.”

“Will I ever see you again?” asked Shadow.

She looked at him with eyes the green of ripening corn. She said nothing. Then, abruptly, she shook her head. “I doubt it,” she said.

Shadow clambered awkwardly onto the thunderbird’s back. He felt like a mouse on the back of a hawk. There was an ozone taste in his mouth, metallic and blue. Something crackled. The thunderbird extended its wings, and began to flap them, hard.

As the ground fell away beneath them, Shadow clung on, his heart pounding in his chest like a wild thing.

It was exactly like riding the lightning.

Laura took the stick from the back seat of the car. She left Mr. Town in the front seat of the Ford Explorer, and climbed out of the car, and walked through the rain to Rock City. The ticket office was closed. The door to the gift shop was not locked and she walked through it, past the rock candy and the display of SEE ROCK CITY birdhouses, into the Eighth Wonder of the World.

Nobody challenged her, although she passed several men and women on the path, in the rain. Many of them looked faintly artificial; several of them were translucent. She walked across a swinging rope bridge. She passed the white deer gardens, and pushed herself through the Fat Man’s Squeeze, where the path ran between two rock walls.

And, in the end, she stepped over a chain, with a sign on it telling her that this part of the attraction was closed, and she went into a cavern, and she saw a man sitting on a plastic chair, in front of a diorama of drunken gnomes. He was reading the Washington Post by the light of a small electric lantern. When he saw her he folded the paper and placed it beneath his chair. He stood up, a tall man with close-cropped orange hair in an expensive raincoat, and he gave her a small bow.

“I shall assume that Mister Town is dead,” he said. “Welcome, spear-carrier.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry about Mack,” she said. “Were you friends?”

“Not at all. He should have kept himself alive, if he wanted to keep his job. But you brought his stick.” He looked her up and down with eyes that glimmered like the orange embers of a dying fire. “I am afraid you have the advantage of me. They call me Mister World, here at the top of the hill.”

“I’m Shadow’s wife.”

“Of course. The lovely Laura,” he said. “I should have recognized you. He had several photographs of you up above his bed, in the cell that once we shared. And, if you don’t mind my saying so, you are looking lovelier than you have any right to look. Shouldn’t you be further along on the whole road-to-rot-and-ruin business by now?”

“I was,” she said simply. “I was much further along. I’m not sure what changed. I know when I started feeling better. It was this morning. Those women, in the farm, they gave me water from their well.”

An eyebrow raised. “Urd’s Well? Surely not.”

She pointed to herself. Her skin was pale, and her eye-sockets were dark, but she was manifestly whole: if she was indeed a walking corpse, she was freshly dead.

“It won’t last,” said Mr. World. “The Norns gave you a little taste of the past. It will dissolve into the present soon enough, and then those pretty blue eyes will roll out of their sockets and ooze down those pretty cheeks, which will, by then, of course, no longer be so pretty. By the way, you have my stick. Can I have it, please?”

He pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes, took a cigarette, lit it with a disposable black Bic.

She said, “Can I have one of those?”

“Sure. I’ll give you a cigarette if you give me my stick.”

“No,” she said. “If you want it, it’s worth more than just a cigarette.”

He said nothing.

She said, “I want answers. I want to know things.”

He lit a cigarette and passed it to her. She took it and inhaled. Then she blinked. “I can almost taste this one,” she said. “I think maybe I can.” She smiled. “Mm. Nicotine.”

“Yes,” he said. “Why did you go to the women in the farmhouse?”

“Shadow told me to go to them,” she said. “He said to ask them for water.”

“I wonder if he knew what it would do. Probably not. Still, that’s the good thing about having him dead on his tree. I know where he is at all times, now. He’s off the board.”

“You set up my husband,” she said. “You set him up all the way, you people. He has a good heart, you know that?”

“Yes,” said Mr. World. “I know.”

“Why did you want him?”

“Patterns, and distraction,” said Mr. World. “When this is all done with, I guess I’ll sharpen a stick of mistletoe and go down to the ash tree, and ram it through his eye. That’s what those morons fighting out there have never been able to grasp. It’s never a matter of old and new. It’s only about patterns. Now. My stick, please.”

“Why do you want it?”

“It’s a souvenir of this whole sorry mess,” said Mr. World. “Don’t worry, it’s not mistletoe.” He flashed a grin. “It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world, the symbol is the thing.”

The noises from outside grew louder.

“Which side are you on?” she asked.

“It’s not about sides,” he told her. “But since you asked, I’m on the winning side. Always. That’s what I do best.”

She nodded, and she did not let go of the stick. “I can see that,” she said.

She turned away from him, and looked out of the cavern door. Far below her, in the rocks, she could see something that glowed and pulsed. It wrapped itself around a thin, mauve-faced bearded man, who was beating at it with a squeegee stick, the kind of squeegee that people like him use to smear across car windshields at traffic lights. There was a scream, and they both disappeared from view.

“Okay. I’ll give you the stick,” she said.

Mr. World’s voice came from behind her. “Good girl,” he said reassuringly, in a way that struck her as being both patronizing and indefinably male. It made her skin crawl.

She waited in the rock doorway until she could hear his breath in her ear. She had to wait until he got close enough. She had that much figured out.

The ride was more than exhilarating; it was electric.

They swept through the storm like jagged bolts of lightning, flashing from cloud to cloud; they moved like the thunder’s roar, like the swell and rip of the hurricane. It was a crackling, impossible journey, and Shadow forgot to be scared almost immediately. You cannot be afraid when you ride the thunderbird. There is no fear: only the power of the storm, unstoppable and all-consuming, and the joy of the flight.

Shadow dug his fingers into the thunderbird’s feathers, feeling the static prickle on his skin. Blue sparks writhed across his hands like tiny snakes. Rain washed his face.

“This is the best,” he shouted, over the roar of the storm.

As if it understood him, the bird began to rise higher, every wing-beat a clap of thunder, and it swooped and dove and tumbled through the dark clouds.

“In my dream, I was hunting you,” said Shadow, his words ripped away by the wind. “In my dream. I had to bring back a feather.”

Yes. The word was a static crackle in the radio of his mind. They came to us for feathers, to prove that they were men; and they came to us to cut the stones from our heads, to give their dead our lives.

An image filled his mind then: of a thunderbird—a female, he assumed, for her plumage was brown, not black—lying freshly dead on the side of a mountain. Beside it was a woman. She was breaking open its skull with a knob of flint. She picked through the wet shards of bone and the brains until she found a smooth clear stone the tawny color of garnet, opalescent fires flickering in its depths. Eagle stones, thought Shadow. She was going to take it to her infant son, dead these last three nights, and she would lay it on his cold breast. By the next sunrise the boy would be alive and laughing, and the jewel would be gray and clouded and, like the bird it had been stolen from, quite dead.

“I understand,” he said to the bird.

The bird threw back its head and crowed, and its cry was the thunder.

The world beneath them flashed past in one strange dream.

Laura adjusted her grip on the stick, and she waited for the man she knew as Mr. World to come to her. She was facing away from him, looking out at the storm, and the dark green hills below.

In this sorry world, she thought, the symbol is the thing. Yes.

She felt his hand close softly onto her right shoulder.

Good, she thought. He does not want to alarm me. He is scared that I will throw his stick out into the storm, that it will tumble down the mountainside, and he will lose it.

She leaned back, just a little, until she was touching his chest with her back. His left arm curved around her. It was an intimate gesture. His left hand was open in front of her. She closed both of her hands around the top of the stick, exhaled, concentrated.

“Please. My stick,” he said, in her ears.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s yours.” And then, not knowing if it would mean anything, she said, “I dedicate this death to Shadow,” and she stabbed the stick into her chest, just below the breastbone, felt it writhe and change in her hands as the stick became a spear.

The boundary between sensation and pain had diffused since she had died. She felt the spear head penetrate her chest, felt it push out through her back. A moment’s resistance—she pushed harder—and the spear thrust into Mr. World. She could feel the warm breath of him on the cool skin of her neck, as he wailed in hurt and surprise, impaled on the spear.

She did not recognize the words he spoke, nor the language he said them in. She pushed the shaft of the spear further in, forcing it through her body, into and through his.

She could feel his hot blood spurting onto her back.

“Bitch,” he said, in English. “You fucking bitch.” There was a wet gurgling quality to his voice. She guessed that the blade of the spear must have sliced a lung. Mr. World was moving now, or trying to move, and every move he made rocked her too: they were joined by the pole, impaled together like two fish on a single spear. He now had a knife in one hand, she saw, and he stabbed her chest and breasts randomly and wildly with the knife, unable to see what he was doing.

She did not care. What are knife-cuts to a corpse?

She brought her fist down, hard, on his waving wrist, and the knife went flying to the floor of the cavern. She kicked it away.

And now he was crying and wailing. She could feel him pushing against her, his hands fumbling at her back, his hot tears on her neck. His blood was soaking her back, spurting down the back of her legs.

“This must look so undignified,” she said, in a dead whisper which was not without a certain dark amusement.

She felt Mr. World stumble behind her, and she stumbled too, and then she slipped in the blood—all of it his—that was puddling on the floor of the cave, and they both went down.

The thunderbird landed in the Rock City parking lot. Rain was falling in sheets. Shadow could barely see a dozen feet in front of his face. He let go of the thunderbird’s feathers and half-slipped, half-tumbled to the wet tarmac.

The bird looked at him. Lightning flashed, and the bird was gone.

Shadow climbed to his feet.

The parking lot was three-quarters empty. Shadow started toward the entrance. He passed a brown Ford Explorer, parked against a rock wall. There was something deeply familiar about the car, and he glanced up at it curiously, noticing the man inside the car, slumped over the steering wheel as if asleep.

Shadow pulled open the driver’s door.

He had last seen Mr. Town standing outside the motel in the center of America. The expression on his face was one of surprise. His neck had been expertly broken. Shadow touched the man’s face. Still warm.

Shadow could smell a scent on the air in the car; it was faint, like the perfume of someone who left a room years before, but Shadow would have known it anywhere. He slammed the door of the Explorer and made his way across the parking lot.

As he walked he felt a twinge in his side, a sharp, jabbing pain that must have only existed in his head, as it lasted for only a second, or less, and then it was gone.

There was nobody in the gift shop, nobody selling tickets. He walked through the building and out into the gardens of Rock City.

Thunder rumbled, and it rattled the branches of the trees and shook deep inside the huge rocks, and the rain fell with cold violence. It was late afternoon, but it was dark as night.

A trail of lightning speared across the clouds, and Shadow wondered if that was the thunderbird returning to its high crags, or just an atmospheric discharge, or whether the two ideas were, on some level, the same thing.

And of course they were. That was the point, after all.

Somewhere a man’s voice called out. Shadow heard it. The only words he recognized or thought he recognized were “…to Odin!”

Shadow hurried across Seven States Flag Court, the flagstones now running fast with a dangerous amount of rainwater. Once he slipped on the slick stone. There was a thick layer of cloud surrounding the mountain, and in the gloom and the storm beyond the courtyard he could see no states at all.

There was no sound. The place seemed utterly abandoned.

He called out, and imagined he heard something answering. He walked toward the place from which he thought the sound had come.

Nobody. Nothing. Just a chain marking the entrance to a cave as off-limits to guests.

Shadow stepped over the chain.

He looked around, peering into the darkness.

His skin prickled.

A voice from behind him, in the shadows, said, very quietly, “You have never disappointed me.”

Shadow did not turn. “That’s weird,” he said. “I disappointed myself all the way. Every time.”

“Not at all,” chuckled the voice. “You did everything you were meant to do, and more. You took everybody’s attention, so they never looked at the hand with the coin in it. It’s called misdirection. And there’s power in the sacrifice of a son—power enough, and more than enough, to get the whole ball rolling. To tell the truth, I’m proud of you.”

“It was crooked,” said Shadow. “All of it. None of it was for real. It was just a set-up for a massacre.”

“Exactly,” said Wednesday’s voice from the shadows. “It was crooked. But it was the only game in town.”

“I want Laura,” said Shadow. “I want Loki. Where are they?”

There was only silence. A spray of rain gusted at him. Thunder rumbled somewhere close at hand.

He walked further in.

Loki Lie-Smith sat on the ground with his back to a metal cage. Inside the cage, drunken pixies tended their still. He was covered with a blanket. Only his face showed, and his hands, white and long, came around the blanket. An electric lantern sat on a chair beside him. The lantern’s batteries were close to failing, and the light it cast was faint and yellow.

He looked pale, and he looked rough.

His eyes, though. His eyes were still fiery, and they glared at Shadow as he walked through the cavern.

When Shadow was several paces from Loki, he stopped.

“You are too late,” said Loki. His voice was raspy and wet. “I have thrown the spear. I have dedicated the battle. It has begun.”

“No shit,” said Shadow.

“No shit,” said Loki. “It does not matter what you do any more. It is too late.”

“Okay,” said Shadow. He stopped and thought. Then he said, “You say there’s some spear you had to throw to kick off the battle. Like the whole Uppsala thing. This is the battle you’ll be feeding on. Am I right?”

Silence. He could hear Loki breathing, a ghastly rattling inhalation.

“I figured it out,” said Shadow. “Kind of. I’m not sure when I figured it out. Maybe when I was hanging on the tree. Maybe before. It was from something Wednesday said to me, at Christmas.”

Loki just stared at him, saying nothing.

“It’s just a two-man con,” said Shadow. “Like the bishop and the diamond necklace and the cop. Like the guy with the fiddle, and the guy who wants to buy the fiddle, and the poor sap in between them who pays for the fiddle. Two men, who appear to be on opposite sides, playing the same game.”

Loki whispered, “You are ridiculous.”

“Why? I liked what you did at the motel. That was smart. You needed to be there, to make sure that everything went according to plan. I saw you. I even realized who you were. And I still never twigged that you were their Mister World. Or maybe I did, somewhere down deep. I knew I knew your voice, anyway.”

Shadow raised his voice. “You can come out,” he said, to the cavern. “Wherever you are. Show yourself.”

The wind howled in the opening of the cavern, and it drove a spray of rainwater in toward them. Shadow shivered.

“I’m tired of being played for a sucker,” said Shadow. “Show yourself. Let me see you.”

There was a change in the shadows at the back of the cave. Something became more solid; something shifted. “You know too damned much, m’boy,” said Wednesday’s familiar rumble.

“So they didn’t kill you.”

“They killed me,” said Wednesday, from the shadows. “None of this would have worked if they hadn’t.” His voice was faint—not actually quiet, but there was a quality to it that made Shadow think of an old radio not quite tuned in to a distant station. “If I hadn’t died for real, we could never have got them here,” said Wednesday. “Kali and the Morrigan and the Loa and the fucking Albanians and—well, you’ve seen them all. It was my death that drew them all together. I was the sacrificial lamb.”

“No,” said Shadow. “You were the Judas Goat.”

The wraith-shape in the shadows swirled and shifted. “Not at all. That implies that I was betraying the old gods for the new. Which was not what we were doing.”

“Not at all,” whispered Loki.

“I can see that,” said Shadow. “You two weren’t betraying either side. You were betraying both sides.”

“I guess we were at that,” said Wednesday. He sounded pleased with himself.

“You wanted a massacre. You needed a blood sacrifice. A sacrifice of gods.”

The wind grew stronger; the howl across the cave door became a screech, as if of something immeasurably huge in pain.

“And why the hell not? I’ve been trapped in this damned land for almost twelve hundred years. My blood is thin. I’m hungry.”

“And you two feed on death,” said Shadow.

He thought he could see Wednesday, now, standing in the shadows. Behind him—through him—were the bars of a cage which held what looked like plastic leprechauns. He was a shape made of darkness, who became more real the more Shadow looked away from him, allowed him to take shape in his peripheral vision.

“I feed on death that is dedicated to me,” said Wednesday.

“Like my death on the tree,” said Shadow.

“That,” said Wednesday, “was special.”

“And do you also feed on death?” asked Shadow, looking at Loki.

Loki shook his head, wearily.

“No, of course not,” said Shadow. “You feed on chaos.”

Loki smiled at that, a brief pained smile, and orange flames danced in his eyes, and flickered like burning lace beneath his pale skin.

“We couldn’t have done it without you,” said Wednesday, from the corner of Shadow’s eye. “I’d been with so many women…”

“You needed a son,” said Shadow.

Wednesday’s ghost-voice echoed. “I needed you, my boy. Yes. My own boy. I knew that you had been conceived, but your mother left the country. It took us so long to find you. And when we did find you, you were in prison. We needed to find out what made you tick. What buttons we could press to make you move. Who you were.” Loki looked, momentarily, pleased with himself. Shadow wanted to hit him. “And you had a wife to go back home to. It was unfortunate. Not insurmountable.”

“She was no good for you,” whispered Loki. “You were better off without her.”

“If it could have been any other way,” said Wednesday, and this time Shadow knew what he meant.

“And if she’d had—the grace—to stay dead,” panted Loki. “Wood and Stone—were good men. You were going—to be allowed to escape—when the train crossed the Dakotas…”

“Where is she?” asked Shadow.

Loki reached a pale arm, and pointed to the back of the cavern.

“She went that-a-way,” he said. Then, without warning, he tipped forward, his body collapsing onto the rock floor.

Shadow saw what the blanket had hidden from him; the pool of blood, the hole through Loki’s back, the fawn raincoat soaked black with blood. “What happened?” he said.

Loki said nothing.

Shadow did not think he would be saying anything any more.

“Your wife happened to him, m’boy,” said Wednesday’s distant voice. He had become harder to see, as if he was fading back into the ether. “But the battle will bring him back. As the battle will bring me back for good. I’m a ghost, and he’s a corpse, but we’ve still won. The game was rigged.”

“Rigged games,” said Shadow, remembering, “are the easiest to beat.”

There was no answer. Nothing moved in the shadows.

Shadow said, “Goodbye,” and then he said, “Father.” But by then there was no trace of anybody else in the cavern. Nobody at all.

Shadow walked back up to the Seven States Flag Court, but saw nobody, and heard nothing but the crack and whip of the flags in the storm-wind. There were no people with swords at the Thousand-Ton Balanced Rock, no defenders of the Swing-A-Long Bridge. He was alone.

There was nothing to see. The place was deserted. It was an empty battlefield.

No. Not deserted. Not exactly.

He was just in the wrong place.

This was Rock City. It had been a place of awe and worship for thousands of years; today the millions of tourists who walked through the gardens and swung their way across the Swing-A-Long Bridge had the same effect as water turning a million prayer wheels. Reality was thin here. And Shadow knew where the battle must be taking place.

With that, he began to walk. He remembered how he had felt on the Carousel, tried to feel like that, but in a new moment of time…

He remembered turning the Winnebago, shifting it at right angles to everything. He tried to capture that sensation—

And then, easily and perfectly, it happened.

It was like pushing through a membrane, like plunging up from deep water into air. With one step he had moved from the tourist path on the mountain to…

To somewhere real. He was Backstage.

He was still on the top of a mountain. That much remained the same. But it was so much more than that. This mountaintop was the quintessence of place, the heart of things as they were. Compared to it, the Lookout Mountain he had left was a painting on a backdrop, or a papiermâché model seen on a TV screen—merely a representation of the thing, not the thing itself.

This was the true place.

The rock walls formed a natural amphitheater. Paths of stone wound around and across it, forming twisty natural bridges that Eschered through and across the rock walls.

And the sky…

The sky was dark. It was lit, and the world beneath it was illuminated, by a burning greenish-white streak, brighter than the sun, which forked crazily across the sky from end to end, like a white rip in the darkened sky.

It was lightning, Shadow realized. Lightning held in one frozen moment that stretched into forever. The light it cast was harsh and unforgiving: it washed out faces, hollowed eyes into dark pits.

This was the moment of the storm.

The paradigms were shifting. He could feel it. The old world, a world of infinite vastness and illimitable resources and future, was being confronted by something else—a web of energy, of opinions, of gulfs.

People believe, thought Shadow. It’s what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.

The mountaintop was an arena; he saw that immediately. And on each side of the arena he could see them arrayed.

They were too big. Everything was too big in that place.

There were old gods in that place: gods with skins the brown of old mushrooms, the pink of chicken-flesh, the yellow of autumn leaves. Some were crazy and some were sane. Shadow recognized the old gods. He’d met them already, or he’d met others like them. There were ifrits and piskies, giants and dwarfs. He saw the woman he had met in the darkened bedroom in Rhode Island, saw the writhing green snake-coils of her hair. He saw Mama-ji, from the Carousel, and there was blood on her hands and a smile on her face. He knew them all.

He recognized the new ones, too.

There was somebody who had to be a railroad baron, in an antique suit, his watch-chain stretched across his vest. He had the air of one who had seen better days. His forehead twitched.

There were the great gray gods of the airplanes, heirs to all the dreams of heavier-than-air travel.

There were car gods there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs. Even they looked uncomfortable. Worlds change.

Others had faces of smudged phosphors; they glowed gently, as if they existed in their own light.

Shadow felt sorry for them all.

There was an arrogance to the new ones. Shadow could see that. But there was also a fear.

They were afraid that unless they kept pace with a changing world, unless they remade and redrew and rebuilt the world in their image, their time would already be over.

Each side faced the other with bravery. To each side, the opposition were the demons, the monsters, the damned.

Shadow could see an initial skirmish had taken place. There was already blood on the rocks.

They were readying themselves for the real battle; for the real war. It was now or never, he thought. If he did not move now, it would be too late.

In America everything goes on forever, said a voice in the back of his head. The 1950s lasted for a thousand years. You have all the time in the world.

Shadow walked in something that was half a stroll, half a controlled stumble, into the center of the arena.

He could feel eyes on him, eyes and things that were not eyes. He shivered.

The buffalo voice said, You are doing just fine.

Shadow thought, Damn right. I came back from the dead this morning. After that, everything else should be a piece of cake.

“You know,” said Shadow, to the air, in a conversational voice, “this is not a war. This was never intended to be a war. And if any of you think this is a war, you are deluding yourselves.” He heard grumbling noises from both sides. He had impressed nobody.

“We are fighting for our survival,” lowed a minotaur from one side of the arena.

“We are fighting for our existence,” shouted a mouth in a pillar of glittering smoke, from the other.

“This is a bad land for gods,” said Shadow. As an opening statement it wasn’t Friends, Romans, Countrymen, but it would do. “You’ve probably all learned that, in your own way. The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing. Either you’ve been forgotten, or you’re scared you’re going to be rendered obsolete, or maybe you’re just getting tired of existing on the whim of people.”

The grumbles were fewer now. He had said something they agreed with. Now, while they were listening, he had to tell them the story.

“There was a god who came here from a far land, and whose power and influence waned as belief in him faded. He was a god who took his power from sacrifice, and from death, and especially from war. He would have deaths of those who fell in war dedicated to him—whole battlefields which, in the old country, gave him power and sustenance.

“Now he was old. He made his living as a grifter, working with another god from his pantheon, a god of chaos and deceit. Together they rooked the gullible. Together they took people for all they’d got.

“Somewhere in there—maybe fifty years ago, maybe a hundred—they put a plan into motion, a plan to create a reserve of power they could both tap into. Something that would make them stronger than they had ever been. After all, what could be more powerful than a battlefield covered with dead gods? The game they played was called ‘Let’s You and Him Fight.’

“Do you see?

“The battle you’re here to fight isn’t something that any of you can win or lose. The winning and the losing are unimportant to him, to them. What matters is that enough of you die. Each of you that falls in battle gives him power. Every one of you that dies, feeds him. Do you understand?”

The roaring, whoompfing sound of something catching on fire echoed across the arena. Shadow looked to the place the noise came from. An enormous man, his skin the deep brown of mahogany, his chest naked, wearing a top hat, cigar sticking rakishly from his mouth, spoke in a voice as deep as the grave. Baron Samedi said, “Okay. But Odin. He died. At the peace talks. Motherfuckers killed him. He died. I know death. Nobody goin’ to fool me about death.”

Shadow said, “Obviously. He had to die for real. He sacrificed his physical body to make this war happen. After the battle he would have been more powerful than he had ever been.”

Somebody called, “Who are you?”

“I am—I was—I am his son.”

One of the new gods—Shadow suspected it was a drug from the way it smiled and spangled and shivered—said, “But Mister World said—”

“There was no Mister World. There never was. He was just another one of you bastards trying to feed on the chaos he created.” He could see that they believed him, and he could see the hurt in their eyes.

Shadow shook his head. “You know,” he said, “I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It’s what we do.”

There was silence, in the high place.

And then, with a shocking crack, the lightning bolt frozen in the sky crashed to the mountaintop, and the arena went entirely dark.

They glowed, many of those presences, in the darkness.

Shadow wondered if they were going to argue with him, to attack him, to try to kill him. He waited for some kind of response.

And then Shadow realized that the lights were going out. The gods were leaving that place, first in handfuls, and then by scores, and finally in their hundreds.

A spider the size of a rottweiler scuttled heavily toward him, on seven legs; its cluster of eyes glowed faintly.

Shadow held his ground, although he felt slightly sick.

When the spider got close enough, it said, in Mr. Nancy’s voice, “That was a good job. Proud of you. You done good, kid.”

“Thank you,” said Shadow.

“We should get you back. Too long in this place is goin’ to mess you up.” It rested one brown-haired spider-leg on Shadow’s shoulder…

… and, back on Seven States Flag Court, Mr. Nancy coughed. His right hand rested on Shadow’s shoulder. The rain had stopped. Mr. Nancy held his left hand across his side, as if it hurt. Shadow asked if he was okay.

“I’m tough as old nails,” said Mr. Nancy. “Tougher.” He did not sound happy. He sounded like an old man in pain.

There were dozens of them, standing or sitting on the ground or on the benches. Some of them looked badly injured.

Shadow could hear a rattling noise in the sky, approaching from the south. He looked at Mr. Nancy. “Helicopters?”

Mr. Nancy nodded. “Don’t you worry about them. Not any more. They’ll just clean up the mess, and leave. They’re good at it.”

“Got it.”

Shadow knew that there was one part of the mess he wanted to see for himself, before it was cleaned up. He borrowed a flashlight from a gray-haired man who looked like a retired news anchor and began to hunt.

He found Laura stretched out on the ground in a side-cavern, beside a diorama of mining gnomes straight out of Snow White. The floor beneath her was sticky with blood. She was on her side, where Loki must have dropped her after he had pulled the spear out of them both.

One of Laura’s hands clutched her chest. She looked dreadfully vulnerable. She also looked dead, but then Shadow was almost used to that by now.

Shadow squatted beside her, and he touched her cheek with his hand, and he said her name. Her eyes opened, and she lifted her head and turned it until she was looking at him.

“Hello, puppy,” she said. Her voice was thin.

“Hi, Laura. What happened here?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Just stuff. Did they win?”

“I don’t know,” said Shadow. “I think these things are kind of relative. But I stopped the battle they were trying to start.”

“My clever puppy,” she said. “That man, Mister World, he said he was going to put a stick through your eye. I didn’t like him at all.”

“He’s dead. You killed him, hon.”

She nodded. She said, “That’s good.”

Her eyes closed. Shadow’s hand found her cold hand, and he held it in his. In time she opened her eyes again.

“Did you ever figure out how to bring me back from the dead?” she asked.

“I guess,” he said. “I know one way, anyway.”

“That’s good,” she said. She squeezed his hand with her cold hand. And then she said, “And the opposite? What about that?”

“The opposite?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I think I must have earned it.”

“I don’t want to do that.”

She said nothing. She simply waited.

Shadow said, “Okay.” Then he took his hand from hers and put it to her neck.

She said, “That’s my husband.” She said it proudly.

“I love you, babes,” said Shadow.

“Love you, puppy,” she whispered.

He closed his hand around the golden coin that hung around her neck. He tugged, hard, at the chain, which snapped easily. Then he took the gold coin between his finger and thumb, and blew on it, and opened his hand wide.

The coin was gone.

Her eyes were still open, but they did not move.

He bent down then, and kissed her, gently, on her cold cheek, but she did not respond. He did not expect her to. Then he got up and walked out of the cavern, to stare into the night.

The storms had cleared. The air felt fresh and clean and new once more.

Tomorrow, he had no doubt, would be one hell of a beautiful day.