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

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The two of them were driving the VW bus down to Florida on I-75. They’d been driving since dawn, or rather, Shadow had driven, and Mr. Nancy had sat up front in the passenger seat and, from time to time, and with a pained expression on his face, offered to drive. Shadow always said no.

“Are you happy?” asked Mr. Nancy, suddenly. He had been staring at Shadow for several hours. Whenever Shadow glanced over to his right, Mr. Nancy was looking at him with his earth-brown eyes.

“Not really,” said Shadow. “But I’m not dead yet.”

“Huh?”

“Call no man happy until he is dead. Herodotus.”

Mr. Nancy raised a white eyebrow, and he said, “I’m not dead yet, and, mostly because I’m not dead yet, I’m happy as a clamboy.”

“The Herodotus thing. It doesn’t mean that the dead are happy,” said Shadow. “It means that you can’t judge the shape of someone’s life until it’s over and done.”

“I don’t even judge then,” said Mr. Nancy. “And as for happiness, there’s a lot of different kinds of happiness, just as there’s a hell of a lot of different kinds of dead. Me, I’ll just take what I can get when I can get it.”

Shadow changed the subject. “Those helicopters,” he said. “The ones that took away the bodies, and the injured.”

“What about them?”

“Who sent them? Where did they come from?”

“You shouldn’t worry yourself about that. They’re like valkyries or buzzards. They come because they have to come.”

“If you say so.”

“The dead and the wounded will be taken care of. You ask me, old Jacquel’s going to be very busy for the next month or so. Tell me somethin’, Shadow-boy.”

“Okay.”

“You learn anythin’ from all this?”

Shadow shrugged. “I don’t know. Most of what I learned on the tree I’ve already forgotten,” he said. “I think I met some people. But I’m not certain of anything any more. It’s like one of those dreams that changes you. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things down deep inside yourself, because it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they kind of just slip out of your head.”

“Yeah,” said Mr. Nancy. And then he said, grudgingly, “You’re not so dumb.”

“Maybe not,” said Shadow. “But I wish I could have kept more of what passed through my hands, since I got out of prison. I was given so many things, and I lost them again.”

“Maybe,” said Mr. Nancy, “you kept more than you think.”

“No,” said Shadow.

They crossed the border into Florida, and Shadow saw his first palm tree. He wondered if they’d planted it there on purpose, at the border, just so that you knew you were in Florida now.

Mr. Nancy began to snore, and Shadow glanced over at him. The old man still looked very gray, and his breath was rasping. Shadow wondered, not for the first time, if he had sustained some kind of chest or lung injury in the fight. Nancy had refused any medical attention.

Florida went on for longer than Shadow had imagined, and it was late by the time he pulled up outside a small, one-story wooden house, its windows tightly shuttered, on the outskirts of Fort Pierce. Nancy, who had directed him through the last five miles, invited him to stay the night.

“I can get a room in a motel,” said Shadow. “It’s not a problem.”

“You could do that, and I’d be hurt. Obviously I wouldn’t say anythin’. But I’d be real hurt, real bad,” said Mr. Nancy. “So you better stay here, and I’ll make you a bed up on the couch.”

Mr. Nancy unlocked the hurricane shutters, and pulled open the windows. The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.

Shadow agreed, reluctantly, to stay the night there, just as he agreed, even more reluctantly, to walk with Mr. Nancy to the bar at the end of the road, for just one late-night drink while the house aired out.

“Did you see Czernobog?” asked Nancy, as they strolled through the muggy Floridian night. The air was alive with whirring palmetto bugs and the ground crawled with creatures that scuttled and clicked. Mr. Nancy lit a cigarillo, and coughed and choked on it. Still, he kept right on smoking.

“He was gone when I came out of the cave.”

“He will have headed home. He’ll be waitin’ for you there, you know.”

“Yes.”

They walked in silence to the end of the road. It wasn’t much of a bar, but it was open.

“I’ll buy the first beers,” said Mr. Nancy.

“We’re only having one beer, remember,” said Shadow.

“What are you?” asked Mr. Nancy. “Some kind of cheapskate?”

Mr. Nancy bought them their first beers, and Shadow bought the second round. He stared in horror as Mr. Nancy talked the barman into turning on the karaoke machine, and then watched in fascinated embarrassment as the old man belted his way through “What’s New Pussycat?” before crooning out a moving, tuneful version of “The Way You Look Tonight.” He had a fine voice, and by the end the handful of people still in the bar were cheering and applauding him.

When he came back to Shadow at the bar he was looking brighter. The whites of his eyes were clear, and the gray pallor that had touched his skin was gone. “Your turn,” he said.

“Absolutely not,” said Shadow.

But Mr. Nancy had ordered more beers and was handing Shadow a stained printout of songs from which to choose. “Just pick a song you know the words to.”

“This is not funny,” said Shadow. The world was beginning to swim, a little, but he couldn’t muster the energy to argue, and then Mr. Nancy was putting on the backing tape to “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” and pushing—literally pushing—Shadow up onto the tiny makeshift stage at the end of the bar.

Shadow held the mike as if it was probably live, and then the backing music started and he croaked out the initial “Baby…” Nobody in the bar threw anything in his direction. And it felt good. “Can you understand me now?” His voice was rough but melodic, and rough suited the song just fine. “Sometimes I feel a little mad. Don’t you know that no one alive can always be an angel…”

And he was still singing it as they walked home through the busy Florida night, the old man and the young, stumbling and happy.

“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good,” he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. “Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.”

Mr. Nancy showed him to the couch. It was much smaller than Shadow, who decided to sleep on the floor, but by the time he had finished deciding to sleep on the floor he was already fast asleep, half-sitting, half-lying, on the tiny sofa.

At first, he did not dream. There was just the comforting darkness. And then he saw a fire burning in the darkness and he walked toward it.

“You did well,” whispered the buffalo man without moving his lips.

“I don’t know what I did,” said Shadow.

“You made peace,” said the buffalo man. “You took our words and made them your own. They never understood that they were here—and the people who worshiped them were here—because it suits us that they are here. But we can change our minds. And perhaps we will.”

“Are you a god?” asked Shadow.

The buffalo-headed man shook his head. Shadow thought, for a moment, that the creature was amused. “I am the land,” he said.

And if there was more to that dream then Shadow did not remember it.

He heard something sizzling. His head was aching, and there was a pounding behind his eyes.

Mr. Nancy was already cooking breakfast: a pile of pancakes, sizzling bacon, perfect eggs, and coffee. He looked in the peak of health.

“My head hurts,” said Shadow.

“You get a good breakfast inside you, you’ll feel like a new man.”

“I’d rather feel like the same man, just with a different head,” said Shadow.

“Eat,” said Mr. Nancy.

Shadow ate.

“How do you feel now?”

“Like I’ve got a headache, only now I’ve got some food in my stomach and I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Come with me.” Beside the sofa, on which Shadow had spent the night, covered with an African blanket, was a trunk, made of some dark wood, which looked like an undersized pirate chest. Mr. Nancy undid the padlock, and opened the lid. Inside the trunk there were a number of boxes. Nancy rummaged among the boxes. “It’s an ancient African herbal remedy,” he said. “It’s made of ground willow bark, things like that.”

“Like aspirin?”

“Yup,” said Mr. Nancy. “Just like that.” From the bottom of the trunk he produced a giant economy-sized bottle of generic aspirin. He unscrewed the top, and shook out a couple of white pills. “Here.”

“Nice trunk,” said Shadow. He took the bitter pills, swallowed them with a glass of water.

“My son sent it to me,” said Mr. Nancy. “He’s a good boy. I don’t see him as much as I’d like.”

“I miss Wednesday,” said Shadow. “Despite everything he did. I keep expecting to see him. But I look up and he’s not there.” He kept staring at the pirate trunk, trying to figure out what it reminded him of.

You will lose many things. Do not lose this. Who said that?

“You miss him? After what he put you through? Put us all through?”

“Yes,” said Shadow. “I guess I do. Do you think he’ll be back?”

“I think,” said Mr. Nancy, “that wherever two men are gathered together to sell a third man a twenty-dollar violin for ten thousand dollars, he will be there in spirit.”

“Yes, but—”

“We should get back into the kitchen,” said Mr. Nancy, his expression becoming stony. “Those pans won’t wash themselves.”

Mr. Nancy washed the pans and the dishes. Shadow dried them, and put them away. Somewhere in there the headache began to ease. They went back into the sitting room.

Shadow stared at the old trunk some more, willing himself to remember. “If I don’t go to see Czernobog,” he said, “what would happen?”

“You’ll see him,” said Mr. Nancy flatly. “Maybe he’ll find you. Or maybe he’ll bring you to him. But one way or another, you’ll see him.”

Shadow nodded. Something started to fall into place. “Hey,” he said. “Is there a god with an elephant’s head?”

“Ganesh? He’s a Hindu god. He removes obstacles and makes journeys easier. Good cook, too.”

Shadow looked up. “…it’s in the trunk,” he said. “I knew it was important, but I didn’t know why. I thought maybe it meant the trunk of the tree. But he wasn’t talking about that at all, was he?”

Mr. Nancy frowned. “You lost me.”

“It’s in the trunk,” said Shadow. He knew it was true. He did not know why it should be true, not quite. But of that he was completely certain.

He got to his feet. “I got to go,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Mr. Nancy raised an eyebrow. “Why the hurry?”

“Because,” said Shadow, “the ice is melting.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Shadow was driving a rental, and he came out of the forest slowly, about 8:30 in the morning, drove down the hill doing under forty-five miles per hour, and entered the town of Lakeside three weeks after he was certain he had left it for good.

He drove through the city, surprised at how little it had changed in the last few weeks, which were a lifetime, and he parked halfway down the driveway that led to the lake. Then he got out of the car.

There were no more ice-fishing huts on the frozen lake any longer, no SUVs, nobody sitting at a fishing hole with a line and a twelve-pack. The lake was dark: no longer covered with a blind white layer of snow, now there were reflective patches of water on the surface of the ice, and the water beneath the ice was dark, and the ice itself was clear enough that the darkness beneath showed through. The sky was gray, but the icy lake was bleak and empty.

Almost empty.

There was one car remaining on the ice, parked out on the frozen lake almost beneath the bridge, so that anyone driving through the town, anyone crossing the town, could not help but see it. It was a dirty green in color; the sort of car that people abandon in parking lots, the kind that they just park and leave because it’s just not worth coming back for. It had no engine. It was a symbol of a wager, waiting for the ice to become rotten enough, and soft enough, and dangerous enough to allow the lake to take it forever.

There was a chain across the short driveway that led down to the lake, and a warning sign forbidding entrance to people or to vehicles. THIN ICE, it said. Beneath it was a hand-painted sequence of pictograms with lines through them: no cars, no pedestrians, no snowmobiles. Danger.

Shadow ignored the warnings and scrambled down the bank. It was slippery—the snow had already melted, turning the earth to mud under his feet, and the brown grass barely offered traction. He skidded and slid down to the lake and walked, carefully, out onto a short wooden jetty, and from there he stepped down onto the ice.

The layer of water on the ice, made up of melted ice and melted snow, was deeper than it had looked from above, and the ice beneath the water was slicker and more slippery than any skating rink, so that Shadow was forced to fight to keep his footing. He splashed through the water, as it covered his boots to the laces and seeped inside. Ice water. It numbed where it touched. He felt strangely distant as he trudged across the frozen lake, as if he were watching himself on a movie screen—a movie in which he was the hero, a detective, perhaps: there was a feeling of inevitability, now, as if everything that was going to happen would play itself out, and there was nothing he could have done to change a moment of it.

He walked toward the klunker, painfully aware that the ice was too rotten for this, and that the water beneath the ice was as cold as water could be without freezing. He felt very exposed, out on the ice alone. He kept walking, and he slipped and slid. Several times he fell.

He passed empty beer bottles and cans left to litter the ice, and he passed circular holes cut into the ice, for fishing, holes that had not frozen again, each hole filled with black water.

The klunker seemed further away than it had looked from the road. He heard a loud crack from the south of the lake, like a stick breaking, followed by the sound of something huge thrumming, as if a bass string the size of a lake was vibrating. Massively, the ice creaked and groaned, like an old door protesting being opened. Shadow kept walking, as steadily as he could.

This is suicide, whispered a sane voice in the back of his mind. Can’t you just let it go?

“No,” he said, aloud. “I have to know.” And he kept right on walking.

He arrived at the klunker, and even before he reached it he knew that he had been right. There was a miasma that hung about the car, something that was at the same time a faint, foul smell and was also a bad taste in the back of his throat. He walked around the car, looking inside. The seats were stained, and ripped. The car was obviously empty. He tried the doors. They were locked. He tried the trunk. Also locked.

He wished that he had brought a crowbar.

He made a fist of his hand inside his glove. He counted to three, then smashed his hand, hard, against the driver’s-side window-glass.

His hand hurt. The side-window was undamaged.

He thought about running at it—he could kick the window in, he was certain, if he didn’t skid and fall on the wet ice. But the last thing he wanted to do was to disturb the klunker enough that the ice beneath it would crack.

He looked at the car. Then he reached for the radio antenna—it was the kind which was meant to go up and down, but which had stopped going down a decade ago, and had remained in the up position ever since—and, with a little waggling, he broke it off at the base. He took the thin end of the antenna—it had once had a metal button on the end, but that was lost in time, and, with strong fingers, he bent it back up into a makeshift hook.

Then he rammed the extended metal antenna down between the rubber and the glass of the front window, deep into the mechanism of the door. He fished in the mechanism, twisting, moving, pushing the metal antenna about until it caught: and then he pulled up.

He felt the improvised hook sliding from the lock, uselessly.

He sighed. Fished again, slower, more carefully. He could imagine the ice grumbling beneath his feet as he shifted his weight. And slow…and…

He had it. He pulled up on the aerial and the front door locking mechanism popped up. Shadow reached down one gloved hand and took the door handle, pressed the button, and pulled. The door did not open.

It’s stuck, he thought, iced up. That’s all.

He tugged, sliding on the ice, and suddenly the door of the klunker flew open, ice scattering everywhere.

The miasma was worse inside the car, a stench of rot and illness. Shadow felt sick.

He reached under the dashboard, found the black plastic handle that opened the trunk, and tugged on it, hard.

There was a thunk from behind him as the trunk door released.

Shadow walked out onto the ice, slipped and splashed around the car, holding on to the side of it as he went.

It’s in the trunk, he thought.

The trunk was open an inch. He reached down and opened it the rest of the way, pulling it up.

The smell was bad, but it could have been much worse: the bottom of the trunk was filled with an inch or so of half-melted ice. There was a girl in the trunk. She wore a scarlet snowsuit, now stained, and her mousy hair was long and her mouth was closed, so Shadow could not see the blue rubber-band braces, but he knew that they were there. The cold had preserved her, kept her as fresh as if she had been in a freezer.

Her eyes were wide open, and she looked as if she had been crying when she died, and the tears that had frozen on her cheeks had still not melted. Her gloves were bright green.

“You were here all the time,” said Shadow to Alison McGovern’s corpse. “Every single person who drove over that bridge saw you. Everyone who drove through the town saw you. The ice fishermen walked past you every day. And nobody knew.” And then he realized how foolish that was.

Somebody knew.

Somebody had put her here.

He reached into the trunk—to see if he could pull her out. He had found her, after all. Now he had to get her out. He put his weight on the car, as he leaned in. Perhaps that was what did it.

The ice beneath the front wheels went at that moment, perhaps from his movements, perhaps not. The front of the car lurched downward several feet into the dark water of the lake. Water began to pour into the car through the open driver’s door. Water splashed about Shadow’s ankles, although the ice he stood on was still solid. He looked around urgently, wondering how to get away—and then it was too late, and the ice tipped precipitously, throwing him against the car and the dead girl in the trunk; and the back of the car went down, and Shadow went down with it, into the cold waters of the lake. It was ten past nine in the morning, on March the twenty-third.

He took a deep breath before he went under, closing his eyes, but the cold of the lake water hit him like a wall, knocking the breath from his body.

He tumbled downward, into the murky ice water, pulled down by the car.

He was under the lake, down in the darkness and the cold, weighed down by his clothes and his gloves and his boots, trapped and swathed in his coat, which seemed to have become heavier and bulkier than he could have imagined.

He was falling, still. He tried to push away from the car, but it was pulling him with it, and then there was a bang which he could hear with his whole body, not his ears, and his left foot was wrenched at the ankle, the foot twisted and trapped beneath the car as it settled on the lake bottom, and panic took him.

He opened his eyes.

He knew it was dark down there: rationally, he knew it was too dark to see anything, but still, he could see; he could see everything. He could see Alison McGovern’s white face staring at him from the open trunk. He could see other cars as well—the klunkers of bygone years, rotten hulk shapes in the darkness, half-buried in the lake mud. And what else would they have dragged out onto the lake, thought Shadow, before there were cars?

Each one, he knew, without any question, had a dead child in the trunk. There were scores of them down there. Each had sat out on the ice, in front of the eyes of the world, all through the cold winter. Each had tumbled into the cold waters of the lake, when the winter was done.

This was where they rested: Lemmi Hautala and Jessie Lovat and Sandy Olsen and Jo Ming and Sarah Lindquist and all the rest of them. Down where it was silent and cold…

He pulled at his foot. It was stuck fast, and the pressure in his lungs was becoming unbearable. There was a sharp, terrible, hurt in his ears. He exhaled slowly, and the air bubbled around his face.

Soon, he thought, soon I’ll have to breathe. Or I’ll choke.

He reached down, put both hands around the bumper of the klunker, and pushed, with everything he had, leaning into it. Nothing happened.

It’s only the shell of a car, he told himself. They took out the engine. That’s the heaviest part of the car. You can do it. Just keep pushing.

He pushed.

Agonizingly slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, the car slipped forward in the mud, and Shadow pulled his foot from the mud beneath the car, and kicked, and tried to push himself out into the cold lake water. He didn’t move. The coat, he told himself. It’s the coat. It’s stuck, or caught on something. He pulled his arms from his coat, fumbled with numb fingers at the frozen zipper. Then he pulled both hands on each side of the zipper, felt the coat give and rend. Hastily, he freed himself from its embrace, and pushed upward, away from the car.

There was a rushing sensation but no sense of up, no sense of down, and he was choking and the pain in his chest and in his head was too much to bear, so that he was certain that he was going to have to inhale, to breathe in the cold water, to die. And then his head hit something solid.

Ice. He was pushing against the ice on the top of the lake. He hammered at it with his fists, but there was no strength left in his arms, nothing to hold on to, nothing to push against. The world had dissolved into the chill blackness beneath the lake. There was nothing left but cold.

This is ridiculous, he thought. And he thought, remembering some old Tony Curtis film he’d seen as a kid, I should roll onto my back and push the ice upward and press my face to it, and find some air, I could breathe again, there’s air there somewhere, but he was just floating and freezing and he could no longer move a muscle, not if his life depended on it, which it did.

The cold became bearable. Became warm. And he thought, I’m dying. There was anger there this time, a deep fury, and he took the pain and the anger and reached with it, flailed, forced muscles to move that were resigned never to move again.

He pushed up with his hand, and felt it scrape the edge of the ice and move up into the air. He flailed for a grip, and felt another hand take his own, and pull.

His head banged against the ice, his face scraped the underneath of the ice, and then his head was up in the air, and he could see that he was coming up through a hole in the ice, and for a moment all he could do was breathe, and let the black lake water run from his nose and his mouth, and blink his eyes, which could see nothing more than a blinding daylight, and shapes, and someone was pulling him, now, forcing him out of the water, saying something about how he’d freeze to death, so come on, man, pull, and Shadow wriggled and shook like a bull seal coming ashore, shaking and coughing and shuddering.

He breathed deep gasps of air, stretched flat out on the creaking ice, and even that would not hold for long, he knew, but it was no good. His thoughts were coming with difficulty, treacle-slow.

“Just leave me,” he tried to say. “I’ll be fine.” His words were a slur, and everything was drawing to a halt.

He just needed to rest for a moment, that was all, just rest, and then he would get up and move on, for obviously he could not just lie there forever.

There was a jerk; water splashed his face. His head was lifted up. Shadow felt himself being hauled across the ice, sliding on his back across the slick surface, and he wanted to protest, to explain that he just needed a little rest—maybe a little sleep, was that asking for so much? —and he would be just fine. If they just left him alone.

He did not believe that he had fallen asleep, but he was standing on a vast plain, and there was a man there with the head and shoulders of a buffalo, and a woman with the head of an enormous condor, and there was Whiskey Jack standing between them, looking at him sadly, shaking his head.

Whiskey Jack turned and walked slowly away from Shadow. The Buffalo man walked away beside him. The thunderbird woman also walked, and then she ducked and kicked and she was gliding out into the skies.

Shadow felt a sense of loss. He wanted to call to them, to plead with them to come back, not to give up on him, but everything was becoming formless and devoid of shape: they were gone, and the plains were fading, and everything became void.

The pain was intense: it was as if every cell in his body, every nerve, was melting and waking and advertising its presence by burning him and hurting him.

There was a hand at the back of his head, gripping it by the hair, and another hand beneath his chin. He opened his eyes, expecting to find himself in some kind of hospital.

His feet were bare. He was wearing jeans. He was naked from the waist up. There was steam in the air. He could see a shaving mirror on the wall facing him, and a small basin, and a blue toothbrush in a toothpaste-stained glass.

Information was processed slowly, one datum at a time.

His fingers burned. His toes burned.

He began to whimper from the pain.

“Easy now, Mike. Easy there,” said a voice he knew.

“What?” he said, or tried to say. “What’s happening?” It sounded strained and strange to his ears.

He was in a bathtub. The water was hot. He thought the water was hot, although he could not be certain. The water was up to his neck.

“Dumbest thing you can do with a fellow freezing to death is to put him in front of a fire. The second-dumbest thing you can do is to wrap him in blankets—especially if he’s in cold wet clothes already. Blankets insulate him—keep the cold in. The third-dumbest thing—and this is my private opinion—is to take the fellow’s blood out, warm it up, and put it back. That’s what doctors do these days. Complicated, expensive. Dumb.” The voice was coming from above and behind his head.

“The smartest, quickest thing you can do is what sailors have done to men overboard for hundreds of years. You put the fellow in hot water. Not too hot. Just hot. Now, just so you know, you were basically dead, when I found you on the ice back there. How are you feeling now, Houdini?”

“It hurts,” said Shadow. “Everything hurts. You saved my life.”

“I guess maybe I did, at that. Can you hold your head up on your own now?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m going to let you go. If you start sinking below the water I’ll pull you back up again.”

The hands released their grip on his head.

He felt himself sliding forward in the bathtub. He put out his hands, pressed them against the sides of the tub, and leaned back. The bathroom was small. The tub was metal, and the enamel was stained and scratched.

An old man moved into his field of vision. He looked concerned.

“Feeling better?” asked Hinzelmann. “You just lay back and relax. I’ve got the den nice and warm. You tell me when you’re ready, I got a robe you can wear, and I can throw your jeans into the dryer with the rest of your clothes. Sound good, Mike?”

“That’s not my name.”

“If you say so.” The old man’s goblin face twisted into an expression of discomfort.

Shadow had no real sense of time: he lay in the bath until the burning stopped and his toes and fingers flexed without real discomfort. Hinzelmann helped Shadow to his feet and let out the warm water. Shadow sat on the side of the bath and together they pulled off his jeans.

He squeezed, without much difficulty, into a terrycloth robe too small for him, and, leaning on the old man, he went through to the den, and flopped down on an ancient sofa. He was tired and weak: deeply fatigued, but alive. A log fire burned in the fireplace. A handful of surprised-looking deer heads peered down dustily from around the walls, where they jostled for space with several large varnished fish.

Hinzelmann went away with Shadow’s jeans, and from the room next door Shadow could hear a brief pause in the rattle of a clothes dryer, before it resumed. The old man returned with a steaming mug.

“It’s coffee,” he said, “which is a stimulant. And I splashed a little schnapps into it. Just a little. That’s what we always did in the old days. A doctor wouldn’t recommend it.”

Shadow took the coffee with both hands. On the side of the mug was a picture of a mosquito and the message, GIVE BLOOD—VISIT WISCONSIN!!

“Thanks,” he said.

“It’s what friends are for,” said Hinzelmann. “One day, you can save my life. For now, forget about it.”

Shadow sipped the coffee. “I thought I was dead.”

“You were lucky. I was up on the bridge—I’d pretty much figured that today was going to be the big day, you get a feel for it, when you get to my age—so I was up there with my old pocket watch, and I saw you heading out onto the lake. I shouted, but I sure as heck don’t think you coulda heard me. I saw the car go down, and I saw you go down with it, and I thought I’d lost you, so I went out onto the ice. Gave me the heebie-jeebies. You must have been under the water for the best part of two minutes. Then I saw your hand come up through the place where the car went down—it was like seeing a ghost, seeing you there…” He trailed off. “We were both damn lucky that the ice took our weight as I dragged you back to the shore.”

Shadow nodded.

“You did a good thing,” he told Hinzelmann, and the old man beamed all over his goblin face.

Somewhere in the house, Shadow heard a door close. He sipped at his coffee.

Now that he was able to think clearly, he was starting to ask himself questions.

He wondered how an old man, a man half his height and perhaps a third his weight, had been able to drag him, unconscious, across the ice, or get him up the bank to a car. He wondered how Hinzelmann had gotten Shadow into the house and the bath.

Hinzelmann walked over to the fire, picked up the tongs and placed a thin log, carefully, onto the blazing fire.

“Do you want to know what I was doing out on the ice?”

Hinzelmann shrugged. “None of my business.”

“You know what I don’t understand…,” said Shadow. He hesitated, putting his thoughts in order. “I don’t understand why you saved my life.”

“Well,” said Hinzelmann, “the way I was brought up, if you see another fellow in trouble—”

“No,” said Shadow. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, you killed all those kids. Every winter. I was the only one to have figured it out. You must have seen me open the trunk. Why didn’t you just let me drown?”

Hinzelmann tipped his head on one side. He scratched his nose, thoughtfully, rocked back and forth as if he were thinking. “Well,” he said. “That’s a good question. I guess it’s because I owed a certain party a debt. And I’m good for my debts.”

“Wednesday?”

“That’s the fellow.”

“There was a reason he hid me in Lakeside, wasn’t there? There was a reason nobody should have been able to find me here.”

Hinzelmann said nothing. He unhooked a heavy black poker from its place on the wall, and he prodded at the fire with it, sending up a cloud of orange sparks and smoke. “This is my home,” he said, petulantly. “It’s a good town.”

Shadow finished his coffee. He put the cup down on the floor. The effort was exhausting. “How long have you been here?”

“Long enough.”

“And you made the lake?”

Hinzelmann peered at him, surprised. “Yes,” he said. “I made the lake. They were calling it a lake when I got here, but it weren’t nothing more than a spring and a mill-pond and a creek.” He paused. “I figured that this country is hell on my kind of folk. It eats us. I didn’t want to be eaten. So I made a deal. I gave them a lake, and I gave them prosperity…”

“And all it cost them was one child every winter.”

“Good kids,” said Hinzelmann, shaking his old head, slowly. “They were all good kids. I’d only pick ones I liked. Except for Charlie Nelligan. He was a bad seed, that one. He was, what, 1924? 1925? Yeah. That was the deal.”

“The people of the town,” said Shadow. “Mabel. Marguerite. Chad Mulligan. Do they know?”

Hinzelmann said nothing. He pulled the poker from the fire: the first six inches at the tip glowed a dull orange. Shadow knew that the handle of the poker must be too hot to hold, but it did not seem to bother Hinzelmann, and he prodded the fire again. He put the poker back into the fire, tip first, and left it there. Then he said, “They know that they live in a good place. While every other town and city in this county, heck, in this part of the state, is crumbling into nothing. They know that.”

“And that’s your doing?”

“This town,” said Hinzelmann. “I care for it. Nothing happens here that I don’t want to happen. You understand that? Nobody comes here that I don’t want to come here. That was why your father sent you here. He didn’t want you out there in the world, attracting attention. That’s all.”

“And you betrayed him.”

“I did no such thing. He was a crook. But I always pay my debts.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Shadow.

Hinzelmann looked offended. One hand tugged at the clump of white hair at his temple. “I keep my word.”

“No. You don’t. Laura came here. She said something was calling her here. And what about the coincidence that brought Sam Black Crow and Audrey Burton here, on the same night? I don’t believe in coincidence any more.

“Sam Black Crow and Audrey Burton. Two people who both knew who I really was, and that there were people out there looking for me. I guess if one of them failed, there was always the other. And if all of them had failed, who else was on their way to Lakeside, Hinzelmann? My old prison warden, up here for a weekend’s ice-fishing? Laura’s mother?” Shadow realized that he was angry. “You wanted me out of your town. You just didn’t want to have to tell Wednesday that was what you were doing.”

In the firelight, Hinzelmann seemed more like a gargoyle than an imp. “This is a good town,” he said. Without his smile he looked waxen and corpse-like. “You could have attracted too much attention. Not good for the town.”

“You should have left me back there on the ice,” said Shadow. “You should have left me in the lake. I opened the trunk of the klunker. Right now Alison is still iced into the trunk. But the ice will melt, and her body’ll float out and up to the surface. And then they’ll go down and look and see what else they can find down there. Find your whole stash of kids. I guess some of those bodies are pretty well preserved.”

Hinzelmann reached down and picked up the poker. He made no pretense of stirring the fire with it any longer; he held it like a sword, or a baton, the glowing orange-white tip of it waving in the air. It smoked. Shadow was very aware that he was next-to-naked, and he was still tired, and clumsy, and far from able to defend himself.

“You want to kill me?” said Shadow. “Go ahead. Do it. I’m a dead man anyway. I know you own this town—it’s your little world. But if you think no one’s going to come looking for me, you’re living in a dream world. It’s over, Hinzelmann. One way or another, it’s done.”

Hinzelmann pushed himself to his feet, using the poker as a walking stick. The carpet charred and smoked where he rested the red-hot tip as he got up. He looked at Shadow and there were tears in his pale blue eyes. “I love this town,” he said. “I really like being a cranky old man, and telling my stories and driving Tessie and ice-fishing. Remember what I told you, it’s not the fish you bring home from a day’s fishing. It’s the peace of mind.”

He extended the tip of the poker in Shadow’s direction: Shadow could feel the heat of it from a foot away.

“I could kill you,” said Hinzelmann, “I could fix it. I’ve done it before. You’re not the first to figure it out. Chad Mulligan’s father, he figured it out. I fixed him. I can fix you.”

“Maybe,” said Shadow. “But for how long, Hinzelmann? Another year? Another decade? They have computers. They aren’t stupid. They pick up on patterns. Every year a kid’s going to vanish. They’ll come sniffing about here. Just like they’ll come looking for me. Tell me—how old are you?” He curled his fingers around a sofa cushion, and prepared to pull it over his head: it would deflect a first blow.

Hinzelmann’s face was expressionless. “They were giving their children to me before the Romans came to the Black Forest,” he said. “I was a god before ever I was a kobold.”

“Maybe it’s time to move on,” said Shadow. He wondered what a kobold was.

Hinzelmann stared at him. Then he took the poker, and pushed the tip of it back into the burning embers. “Maybe it is, at that,” he said. “But it’s not that simple. What makes you think I can leave this town, even if I want to, Shadow? I’m part of this town. You going to make me go, Shadow? You ready to kill me? So I can leave?”

Shadow looked down at the floor. There were still glimmers and sparks in the carpet, where the poker-tip had rested. Hinzelmann followed the look with his own, and crushed the embers out with his foot, twisting. In Shadow’s mind came, unbidden, children, hundreds of them, staring at him with bone-blind eyes, the hair twisting slowly around their faces like fronds of seaweed. They were looking at him reproachfully.

He knew that he was letting them down. He just didn’t know what else to do.

Shadow said, “I can’t kill you. You saved my life.”

He shook his head. He felt like crap, in every way he could feel like crap. He didn’t feel like a hero or a detective any more—just another fucking sell-out, waving a stern finger at the darkness before turning his back on it.

“You want to know a secret?” asked Hinzelmann.

“Sure,” said Shadow, with a heavy heart. He was ready to be done with secrets.

“Watch this.”

Where Hinzelmann had been standing stood a male child, no more than five years old. His hair was dark brown, and long. He was perfectly naked, save for a worn leather band around his neck. He was pierced with two swords, one of them going through his chest, the other entering at his shoulder, with the point coming out beneath the ribcage. Blood flowed through the wounds without stopping and ran down the child’s body to pool and puddle on the floor. The swords looked unimaginably old.

The little boy stared up at Shadow with eyes that held only pain.

And Shadow thought to himself, Of course. That’s as good a way as any other of making a tribal god. He did not have to be told. He knew.

You take a baby and you bring it up in the darkness, letting it see no one, touch no one, and you feed it well as the years pass, feed it better than any of the village’s other children, and then, five winters on, when the night is at its longest, you drag the terrified child out of its hut and into the circle of bonfires, and you pierce it with blades of iron and of bronze. Then you smoke the small body over charcoal fires until it is properly dried, and you wrap it in furs and carry it with you from encampment to encampment, deep in the Black Forest, sacrificing animals and children to it, making it the luck of the tribe. When, eventually, the thing falls apart from age, you place its fragile bones in a box, and you worship the box; until one day the bones are scattered and forgotten, and the tribes who worshiped the child-god of the box are long gone; and the child-god, the luck of the village, will be barely remembered, save as a ghost or a brownie, a kobold.

Shadow wondered which of the people who had come to northern Wisconsin a hundred and fifty years ago, a woodcutter, perhaps, or a mapmaker, had crossed the Atlantic with Hinzelmann living in his head.

And then the bloody child was gone, and the blood, and there was only an old man with a fluff of white hair and a goblin smile, his sweater-sleeves still soaked from putting Shadow into the bath that had saved his life.

“Hinzelmann?” The voice came from the doorway of the den.

Hinzelmann turned. Shadow turned too.

“I came over to tell you,” said Chad Mulligan, and his voice was strained, “that the klunker went through the ice. I saw it had gone down when I drove over that way, and thought I’d come over and let you know, in case you’d missed it.”

He was holding his gun. It was pointed at the floor.

“Hey, Chad,” said Shadow.

“Hey, pal,” said Chad Mulligan. “They sent me a note said you’d died in custody. Heart attack.”

“How about that?” said Shadow. “Seems like I’m dying all over the place.”

“He came down here, Chad,” said Hinzelmann. “He threatened me.”

“No,” said Chad Mulligan. “He didn’t. I’ve been here for the last ten minutes, Hinzelmann. I heard everything you said. About my old man. About the lake.” He walked further into the den. He did not raise the gun. “I mean, Jesus, Hinzelmann. You can’t drive through this town without seeing that goddamned lake. It’s at the center of everything. So what the hell am I supposed to do?”

“You got to arrest him. He said he was going to kill me,” said Hinzelmann, a scared old man in a dusty den. “Chad, I’m pleased you’re here.”

“No,” said Chad Mulligan. “You’re not.”

Hinzelmann sighed. He bent down, as if resigned, and he pulled the poker out from the fire. The tip of it was burning bright orange.

“Put that down, Hinzelmann. Just put it down slowly, keep your hands in the air where I can see them, and turn and face the wall.”

There was an expression of pure fear on the old man’s face, and Shadow would have felt sorry for him, but he remembered the frozen tears on the cheeks of Alison McGovern, and could not feel anything. Hinzelmann did not move. He did not put down the poker. He did not turn to the wall. Shadow was about to reach for Hinzelmann, to try to take the poker away from him, when the old man threw the burning poker at Chad Mulligan.

Hinzelmann threw it awkwardly, lobbing it across the room as if for form’s sake, and as he threw it he was already hurrying for the door.

The poker glanced off Chad’s left arm.

The noise of the shot, in the close quarters of the old man’s room, was deafening.

One shot to the head, and that was all.

Mulligan said, “Better get your clothes on.” His voice was dull and dead.

Shadow nodded. He walked to the room next door, opened the door of the clothes dryer and pulled out his clothes. The jeans were still damp. He put them on anyway. By the time he got back to the den, fully dressed—except for his coat, which was somewhere deep in the freezing mud of the lake, and his boots, which he could not find—Mulligan had already hauled several smoldering logs out from the fireplace.

Mulligan said, “It’s a bad day for a cop when he has to commit arson, just to cover up a murder.” Then he looked up at Shadow. “You need boots,” he said.

“I don’t know where he put them,” said Shadow.

“Hell,” said Mulligan. Then he said, “Sorry about this, Hinzelmann,” and he picked the old man up by the collar and by the belt buckle, and he swung him forward, dropped the body with its head resting in the open fireplace. The white hair crackled and flared, and the room began to fill with the smell of charring flesh.

“It wasn’t murder. It was self-defense,” said Shadow.

“I know what it was,” said Mulligan, flatly. He had already turned his attention to the smoking logs he had scattered about the room. He pushed one of them to the edge of the sofa, picked up an old copy of the Lakeside News and pulled it into its component pages, which he crumpled up and dropped onto the log. The newspaper pages browned and then burst into flame.

“Get outside,” said Chad Mulligan.

He opened the windows as they walked out of the house, and he sprang the lock on the front door to lock it before he closed it.

Shadow followed him out to the police car in his bare feet. Mulligan opened the front passenger door for him, and Shadow got in and wiped his feet off on the mat. Then he put on his socks, which were pretty much dry by now.

“We can get you some boots at Henning’s Farm and Home,” said Chad Mulligan.

“How much did you hear in there?” asked Shadow.

“Enough,” said Mulligan. Then he said, “Too much.”

They drove to Henning’s Farm and Home in silence. When they got there the police chief said, “What size feet?”

Shadow told him.

Mulligan walked into the store. He returned with a pair of thick woolen socks, and a pair of leather farm boots. “All they had left in your size,” he said. “Unless you wanted gumboots. I figured you didn’t.”

Shadow pulled on the socks and the boots. They fitted fine. “Thanks,” he said.

“You got a car?” asked Mulligan.

“It’s parked by the road down to the lake. Near the bridge.”

Mulligan started the car and pulled out of the Henning’s parking lot.

“What happened to Audrey?” asked Shadow.

“Day after they took you away, she said she liked me as a friend, but it would never work out between us, us being family and all, and she went back to Eagle Point. Broke my gosh-darn heart.”

“Makes sense,” said Shadow. “And it wasn’t personal. Hinzelmann didn’t need her here any more.”

They drove back past Hinzelmann’s house. A thick plume of white smoke was coming up from the chimney.

“She only came to town because he wanted her here. She was something to help him to get me out of town. I was bringing attention he didn’t need.”

“I thought she liked me.”

They pulled up beside Shadow’s rental car. “What are you going to do now?” asked Shadow.

“I don’t know,” said Mulligan. His normally harassed face was starting to look more alive than it had at any point since Hinzelmann’s den. It also looked more troubled. “I figure, I got a couple of choices. Either I’ll…” And he made a gun of his first two fingers, and put the fingertips into his open mouth, and removed them. “…put a bullet through my brain. Or I’ll wait another couple of days until the ice is mostly gone, and tie a concrete block to my leg and jump off the bridge. Or pills. Sheesh. Maybe I should just drive a while, out to one of the forests. Take pills out there. I don’t want to make one of my guys have to do the clean-up. Leave it for the county, huh?” He sighed, and shook his head.

“You didn’t kill Hinzelmann, Chad. He died a long time ago, a long way from here.”

“Thanks for saying that, Mike. But I killed him. I shot a man in cold blood, and I covered it up. And if you asked me why I did it, why I really did it, I’m darned if I could tell you.”

Shadow put out a hand, touched Mulligan on the arm. “Hinzelmann owned this town,” he said. “I don’t think you had a lot of choice about what happened back there. I think he brought you there. He wanted you to hear what you heard. He set you up. I guess it was the only way he could leave.”

Mulligan’s miserable expression did not change. Shadow could see that the police chief had barely heard anything that he had said. He had killed Hinzelmann and built him a pyre, and now, obeying the last of Hinzelmann’s desires, or simply because it was the only thing he could do to live with himself, he would commit suicide.

Shadow closed his eyes, remembering the place in his head that he had gone when Wednesday had told him to make snow: that place that pushed, mind to mind, and he smiled a smile he did not feel and he said, “Chad. Let it go.” There was a cloud in the man’s mind, a dark, oppressive cloud, and Shadow could almost see it and, concentrating on it, imagined it fading away like a fog in the morning. “Chad,” he said, fiercely, trying to penetrate the cloud, “this town is going to change now. It’s not going to be the only good town in a depressed region any more. It’s going to be a lot more like the rest of this part of the world. There’s going to be a lot more trouble. People out of work. People out of their heads. More people getting hurt. More bad shit going down. They are going to need a police chief with experience. The town needs you.” And then he said, “Marguerite needs you.”

Something shifted in the storm cloud that filled the man’s head. Shadow could feel it change. He pushed then, envisioning Marguerite Olsen’s practical brown hands and her dark eyes, and her long, long black hair. He pictured the way she tipped her head on one side and half-smiled when she was amused. “She’s waiting for you,” said Shadow, and he knew it was true as he said it.

“Margie?” said Chad Mulligan.

And at that moment, although he could never tell you how he had done it, and he doubted that he could ever do it again, Shadow reached in to Chad Mulligan’s mind, easy as anything, and he plucked the events of that afternoon from it as precisely and dispassionately as a raven picking an eye from roadkill.

The creases in Chad’s forehead smoothed, and he blinked, sleepily.

“Go see Margie,” said Shadow. “It’s been good seeing you, Chad. Take care of yourself.”

“Sure,” yawned Chad Mulligan.

A message crackled over the police radio, and Chad reached out for the handset. Shadow got out of the car.

Shadow walked over to his rental car. He could see the gray flatness of the lake at the center of the town. He thought of the dead children who waited at the bottom of the water.

Soon, Alison would float to the surface…

As Shadow drove past Hinzelmann’s place he could see the plume of smoke had already turned into a blaze. He could hear a siren wail.

He drove south, heading for Highway 51. He was on his way to keep his final appointment. But before that, he thought, he would stop off in Madison, for one last goodbye.

Best of everything, Samantha Black Crow liked closing up the Coffee House at night. It was a perfectly calming thing to do: it gave her a feeling that she was putting order back into the world. She would put on an Indigo Girls CD, and she would do her final chores of the night at her own pace and in her own way. First, she would clean the espresso machine. Then she would do the final rounds, ensuring that any missed cups or plates were deposited back in the kitchen, and that the newspapers that were always scattered around the Coffee House by the end of each day were collected together and piled neatly by the front door, all ready for recycling.

She loved the Coffee House. She’d gone there as a customer for six months before she talked Jeff, the manager, into giving her a job. It was a long, winding series of rooms filled with armchairs and sofas and low tables, on a street lined with second-hand bookstores.

She covered the leftover slices of cheesecake and put them into the large refrigerator for the night, then she took a cloth and wiped the last of the crumbs away. She enjoyed being alone.

As she worked she would sing along with the Indigo Girls. Sometimes she would break into a dance for a step or two, before catching herself, and stopping, smiling wryly at herself.

A tapping on the window jerked her attention from her chores back to the real world. She went to the door, opened it, to admit a woman of about Sam’s age, with pigtailed magenta hair. Her name was Natalie.

“Hello,” said Natalie. She went up on tiptoes and kissed Sam, depositing the kiss snugly between Sam’s cheek and the corner of her mouth. You can say a lot of things with a kiss like that. “You done?”

“Nearly.”

“You want to see a movie?”

“Sure. Love to. I’ve got a good five minutes left here, though. Why don’t you sit and read the Onion?”

“I saw this week’s already.” She sat on a chair near the door, ruffled through the pile of newspapers put aside for recycling until she found something, and she read it, while Sam bagged up the last of the money in the till and put it in the safe.

They had been sleeping together for a week now. Sam wondered if this was it, the relationship she’d been waiting for all her life. She told herself that it was just brain chemicals and pheromones that made her happy when she saw Natalie, and perhaps that was what it was; still, all she knew for sure was that she smiled when she saw Natalie, and that when they were together she felt comfortable and comforted.

“This paper,” said Natalie, “has another one of those articles in it. ‘Is America Changing?’”

“Well, is it?”

“They don’t say. They say that maybe it is, but they don’t know how and they don’t know why, and maybe it isn’t happening at all.”

Sam smiled broadly. “Well,” she said, “that covers every option, doesn’t it?”

“I guess.” Natalie’s brow creased and she went back to her newspaper.

Sam washed the dishcloth and folded it. “I think it’s just that, despite the government and whatever, everything just feels suddenly good right now. Maybe it’s just spring coming a little early. It was a long winter, and I’m glad it’s over.”

“Me, too.” A pause. “It says in the article that lots of people have been reporting weird dreams. I haven’t really had any weird dreams. Nothing weirder than normal.”

Sam looked around to see if there was anything she had missed. Nope. It was a good job well done. She took off her apron, hung it back in the kitchen. Then she came back and started to turn off the lights. “I’ve had some weird dreams recently,” she said. “They got weird enough that I actually started keeping a dream journal. They seem to mean so much while I’m dreaming them. I write them down when I wake up. And then when I read them, they don’t mean anything at all.”

She put on her street coat, and her one-size-fits-all gloves.

“I did some dream work,” said Natalie. Natalie had done a little of everything, from arcane self-defense disciplines and sweat lodges to feng shui and jazz dancing. “Tell me. I’ll tell you what they mean.”

“Okay.” Sam unlocked the door and turned the last of the lights off. She let Natalie out, and she walked out onto the street and locked the door to the Coffee House firmly behind her. “Sometimes I have been dreaming of people who fell from the sky. Sometimes I’m underground, talking to a woman with a buffalo head. And sometimes I dream about this guy I kissed once in a bar.”

Natalie made a noise. “Something you should have told me about?”

“Maybe. But not like that. It was a Fuck-Off Kiss.”

“You were telling him to fuck off?”

“No, I was telling everyone else they could fuck off. You had to be there, I guess.”

Natalie’s shoes clicked down the sidewalk. Sam padded on next to her. “He owns my car,” said Sam.

“That purple thing you got at your sister’s?”

“Yup.”

“What happened to him? Why doesn’t he want his car?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s in prison. Maybe he’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“I guess.” Sam hesitated. “A few weeks back, I was certain he was dead. ESP. Or whatever. Like, I knew. But then, I started to think maybe he wasn’t. I don’t know. I guess my ESP isn’t that hot.”

“How long are you going to keep his car?”

“Until someone comes for it. I think it’s what he would have wanted.”

Natalie looked at Sam, then she looked again. Then she said, “Where did you get those from?”

“What?”

“The flowers. The ones you’re holding, Sam. Where did they come from? Did you have them when we left the Coffee House? I would have seen them.”

Sam looked down. Then she grinned. “You are so sweet. I should have said something when you gave them to me, shouldn’t I?” she said. “They are lovely. Thank you so much. But wouldn’t red have been more appropriate?”

They were roses, their stems wrapped in paper. Six of them, and white.

“I didn’t give them to you,” said Natalie, her lips firming.

And neither of them said another word until they reached the movie theater.

When she got home that night Sam put the roses in an improvised vase. Later, she cast them in bronze, and she kept to herself the tale of how she got them, although she told Caroline, who came after Natalie, the story of the ghost-roses one night when they were both very drunk, and Caroline agreed with Sam that it was a really, really strange and a spooky story, and, deep down, did not actually believe a word of it, so that was all right.

Shadow had parked near the capitol building, and walked slowly around the square, stretching his legs after the long drive. His clothes were uncomfortable, although they had dried on his body, and the new boots were still tight. He passed a payphone. He called information, and they gave him the number.

No, he was told. She isn’t here. She’s not back yet. She’s probably still at the Coffee House.

He stopped on the way to the Coffee House to buy flowers.

He found the Coffee House, then he crossed the road and stood in the doorway of a used bookstore, and waited, and watched.

The place closed at eight, and at ten past eight Shadow saw Sam Black Crow walk out of the Coffee House in the company of a smaller woman whose pigtailed hair was a peculiar shade of red. They were holding hands tightly, as if simply holding hands could keep the world at bay, and they were talking—or rather, Sam was doing most of the talking while her friend listened. Shadow wondered what Sam was saying. She smiled as she talked.

The two women crossed the road, and they walked past the place where Shadow was standing. The pigtailed girl passed within a foot of him; he could have reached out and touched her, and they didn’t see him at all.

He watched them walking away from him down the street, and felt a pang, like a minor chord being played inside him.

It had been a good kiss, Shadow reflected, but Sam had never looked at him the way she was looking at the pigtailed girl, and she never would.

“What the hell. We’ll always have Peru,” he said, under his breath, as Sam walked away from him. “And El Paso. We’ll always have that.”

Then he ran after her, and put the flowers into Sam’s hands. He hurried away, so she could not give them back.

Then he walked up the hill back to his car, and he took Highway 90 south to Chicago. He drove at or slightly under the speed limit.

It was the last thing he had to do.

He was in no hurry.

He spent the night in a Motel 6. He got up the next morning, and realized his clothes still smelled like the bottom of the lake. He put them on anyway. He figured he wouldn’t need them much longer.

Shadow paid his bill. He drove to the brownstone apartment building. He found it without any difficulty. It was smaller than he remembered.

He walked up the stairs steadily, not fast, that would have meant he was eager to go to his death, and not slow, that would have meant he was afraid. Someone had cleaned the stairwell: the black garbage bags had gone. The place smelled of the chlorine-smell of bleach, no longer of rotting vegetables.

The red-painted door at the top of the stairs was wide open: the smell of old meals hung in the air. Shadow hesitated, then he pressed the doorbell.

“I come!” called a woman’s voice, and, dwarf-small and dazzlingly blonde, Zorya Utrennyaya came out of the kitchen and bustled towards him, wiping her hands on her apron. She looked different, Shadow realized. She looked happy. Her cheeks were rouged red, and there was a sparkle in her old eyes. When she saw him her mouth became an O and she called out, “Shadow? You came back to us?” and she hurried toward him with her arms outstretched. He bent down and embraced her, and she kissed his cheek. “So good to see you!” she said. “Now you must go away.”

Shadow stepped into the apartment. All the doors in the apartment (except, unsurprisingly, Zorya Polunochnaya’s) were wide open, and all the windows he could see were open as well. A gentle breeze blew fitfully through the corridor.

“You’re spring cleaning,” he said to Zorya Utrennyaya.

“We have a guest coming,” she told him. “Now, you must go away. First, you want coffee?”

“I came to see Czernobog,” said Shadow. “It’s time.”

Zorya Utrennyaya shook her head violently. “No, no,” she said. “You don’t want to see him. Not a good idea.”

“I know,” said Shadow. “But you know, the only thing I’ve really learned about dealing with gods is that if you make a deal, you keep it. They get to break all the rules they want. We don’t. Even if I tried to walk out of here, my feet would just bring me back.”

She pushed up her bottom lip, then said, “Is true. But go today. Come back tomorrow. He will be gone then.”

“Who is it?” called a woman’s voice, from further down the corridor. “Zorya Utrennyaya, to who are you talking? This mattress, I cannot turn on my own, you know.”

Shadow walked down the corridor, and said, “Good morning, Zorya Vechernyaya. Can I help?” which made the woman in the room squeak with surprise and drop her corner of the mattress.

The bedroom was thick with dust: it covered every surface, the wood and the glass, and motes of it floated and danced through the beams of sunshine coming through the open window, disturbed by occasional breezes and the lazy flapping of the yellowed lace curtains.

He remembered this room. This was the room they had given to Wednesday, that night. Bielebog’s room.

Zorya Vechernyaya eyed him uncertainly. “The mattress,” she said. “It needs to be turned.”

“Not a problem,” said Shadow. He reached out and took the mattress, lifted it with ease and turned it over. It was an old wooden bed, and the feather mattress weighed almost as much as a man. Dust flew and swirled as the mattress went down.

“Why are you here?” asked Zorya Vechernyaya. It was not a friendly question, the way she asked it.

“I’m here,” said Shadow, “because back in December a young man played a game of checkers with an old god, and he lost.”

The old woman’s gray hair was up on the top of her head in a tight bun. She pursed her lips. “Come back tomorrow,” said Zorya Vechernyaya.

“I can’t,” he said, simply.

“Is your funeral. Now, you go and sit down. Zorya Utrennyaya will bring you coffee. Czernobog will be back soon.”

Shadow walked along the corridor to the sitting room. It was just as he remembered, although now the window was open. The gray cat slept on the arm of the sofa. It opened an eye as Shadow came in and then, unimpressed, it went back to sleep.

This was where he had played checkers with Czernobog; this was where he had wagered his life to get the old man to join them on Wednesday’s last doomed grift. The fresh air came in through the open window, blowing the stale air away.

Zorya Utrennyaya came in with a red wooden tray. A small enameled cup of steaming black coffee sat on the tray, beside a saucer filled with small chocolate-chip cookies. She put it down on the table in front of him.

“I saw Zorya Polunochnaya again,” he said. “She came to me under the world, and she gave me the moon to light my way. And she took something from me. But I don’t remember what.”

“She likes you,” said Zorya Utrennyaya. “She dreams so much. And she guards us all. She is so brave.”

“Where’s Czernobog?”

“He says the spring-cleaning makes him uncomfortable. He goes out to buy newspaper, sit in the park. Buy cigarettes. Perhaps he will not come back today. You do not have to wait. Why don’t you go? Come back tomorrow.”

“I’ll wait,” said Shadow. This was no geas, forcing him to wait, he knew that. This was him. It was one last thing that needed to happen, and if it was the last thing that happened, well, he was going there of his own volition. After this there would be no more obligations, no more mysteries, no more ghosts.

He sipped the hot coffee, as black and as sweet as he remembered.

He heard a deep male voice in the corridor, and he sat up straighter. He was pleased to see that his hand was not trembling. The door opened.

“Shadow?”

“Hi,” said Shadow. He stayed sitting down.

Czernobog walked into the room. He was carrying a folded copy of the Chicago Sun-Times, which he put down on the coffee table. He stared at Shadow, then he put his hand out, tentatively. The two men shook hands.

“I came,” said Shadow. “Our deal. You came through with your part of it. This is my part.”

Czernobog nodded. His brow creased. The sunlight glinted on his gray hair and moustache, making them appear almost golden. “Is…” He frowned. “Is not…” He broke off. “Maybe you should go. Is not a good time.”

“Take as long as you need,” said Shadow. “I’m ready.”

Czernobog sighed. “You are a very stupid boy. You know that?”

“I guess.”

“You are a stupid boy. And on the mountaintop, you did a very good thing.”

“I did what I had to do.”

“Perhaps.”

Czernobog walked to the old wooden sideboard, and, bending down, pulled an attaché case from underneath it. He flipped the catches on the case. Each one sprang back with a satisfying thump. He opened the case. He took a hammer out, and hefted it, experimentally. The hammer looked like a scaled-down sledgehammer; its wooden haft was stained.

Then he stood up. He said, “I owe you much. More than you know. Because of you, things are changing. This is spring time. The true spring.”

“I know what I did,” said Shadow. “I didn’t have a lot of choice.”

Czernobog nodded. There was a look in his eyes that Shadow did not remember seeing before. “Did I ever tell you about my brother?”

“Bielebog?” Shadow walked to the center of the ash-stained carpet. He went down on his knees. “You said you hadn’t seen him in a long time.”

“Yes,” said the old man, raising the hammer. “It has been a long winter, boy. A very long winter. But the winter is ending, now.” And he shook his head, slowly, as if he were remembering something. And he said, “Close your eyes.”

Shadow closed his eyes and raised his head, and he waited.

The head of the sledgehammer was cold, icy cold, and it touched his forehead as gently as a kiss.

“Pock! There,” said Czernobog. “Is done.” There was a smile on his face that Shadow had never seen before, an easy, comfortable smile, like sunshine on a summer’s day. The old man walked over to the case, and he put the hammer away, and closed the bag, and pushed it back under the sideboard.

“Czernobog?” asked Shadow. Then, “Are you Czernobog?”

“Yes. For today,” said the old man. “By tomorrow, it will all be Bielebog. But today, is still Czernobog.”

“Then why? Why didn’t you kill me when you could?”

The old man took out an unfiltered cigarette from a pack in his pocket. He took a large box of matches from the mantelpiece and lit the cigarette with a match. He seemed deep in thought. “Because,” said the old man, after some time, “there is blood. But there is also gratitude. And it has been a long, long winter.”

Shadow got to his feet. There were dusty patches on the knees of his jeans, where he had knelt, and he brushed the dust away.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” said the old man. “Next time you want to play checkers, you know where to find me. This time, I play white.”

“Thanks. Maybe I will,” said Shadow. “But not for a while.” He looked into the old man’s twinkling eyes, and he wondered if they had always been that cornflower shade of blue. They shook hands, and neither of them said goodbye.

Shadow kissed Zorya Utrennyaya on the cheek on his way out, and he kissed Zorya Vechernyaya on the back of her hand, and he took the stairs out of that place two at a time.