She turned then and looked at him with eyes that seemed both to see and not to see him. “I think there are several aspects of our marriage we’re going to have to work on.”
   “Babes,” he told her. “You’re dead.”
   “That’s one of those aspects, obviously.” She paused. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going now. It will be better if I go.” And, naturally and easily, she turned and put her hands on Shadow’s shoulders, and went up on tiptoes to kiss him goodbye, as she had always kissed him goodbye.
   Awkwardly he bent to kiss her on the cheek, but she moved her mouth as he did so and pushed her lips against his. Her breath smelled, faintly, of mothballs.
   Laura’s tongue flickered into Shadow’s mouth. It was cold, and dry, and it tasted of cigarettes and of bile. If Shadow had had any doubts as to whether his wife was dead or not, they ended then.
   He pulled back.
   “I love you,” she said, simply. “I’ll be looking out for you.” She walked over to the motel room door. There was a strange taste in his mouth. “Get some sleep, puppy,” she told him. “And stay out of trouble.”
   She opened the door to the hall. The fluorescent light in the hallway was not kind: beneath it, Laura looked dead, but then, it did that to everyone.
   “You could have asked me to stay the night,” she said, in her cold-stone voice.
   “I don’t think I could,” said Shadow.
   “You will, hon,” she said. “Before all this is over. You will.” She turned away from him, and walked down the corridor.
   Shadow looked out of the doorway. The night clerk kept on reading his John Grisham novel, and barely looked up as she walked past him. There was thick graveyard mud clinging to her shoes. And then she was gone.
   Shadow breathed out, a slow sigh. His heart was pounding arrhythmically in his chest. He walked across the hall and knocked on Wednesday’s door. As he knocked he got the weirdest notion, that he was being buffeted by black wings, as if an enormous crow was flying through him, out into the hall and the world beyond.
   Wednesday opened the door. He had a white motel towel wrapped around his waist, but was otherwise naked. “What the hell do you want?” he asked.
   “Something you should know,” said Shadow. “Maybe it was a dream—but it wasn’t—or maybe I inhaled some of the fat kid’s synthetic toad-skin smoke, or probably I’m just going mad…”
   “Yeah, yeah. Spit it out,” said Wednesday. “I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”
   Shadow glanced into the room. He could see that there was someone in the bed, watching him. A sheet pulled up over small breasts. Pale blonde hair, something rattish about the face. He lowered his voice. “I just saw my wife,” he said. “She was in my room.”
   “A ghost, you mean? You saw a ghost?”
   “No. Not a ghost. She was solid. It was her. She’s dead all right, but it wasn’t any kind of a ghost. I touched her. She kissed me.”
   “I see.” Wednesday darted a look at the woman in the bed. “Be right back, m’dear,” he said.
   They crossed the hall to Shadow’s room. Wednesday turned on the lamps. He looked at the cigarette butt in the ashtray. He scratched his chest. His nipples were dark, old-man nipples, and his chest hair was grizzled. There was a white scar down one side of his torso. He sniffed the air. Then he shrugged.
   “Okay,” he said. “So your dead wife showed up. You scared?”
   “A little.”
   “Very wise. The dead always give me the screaming mimis. Anything else?”
   “I’m ready to leave Eagle Point. Laura’s mother can sort out the apartment, all that. She hates me anyway. I’m ready to go when you are.”
   Wednesday smiled. “Good news, my boy. We’ll leave in the morning. Now, you should get some sleep. I have some scotch in my room, if you need help sleeping. Yes?”
   “No. I’ll be fine.”
   “Then do not disturb me further. I have a long night ahead of me.”
   “Good night,” said Shadow.
   “Exactly,” said Wednesday, and he closed the door as he went out.
   Shadow sat down on the bed. The smell of cigarettes and preservatives lingered in the air. He wished that he were mourning Laura: it seemed more appropriate than being troubled by her or, he admitted it to himself now that she had gone, just a little scared by her. It was time to mourn. He turned the lights out, and lay on the bed, and thought of Laura as she was before he went to prison. He remembered their marriage when they were young and happy and stupid and unable to keep their hands off each other.
   It had been a very long time since Shadow had cried, so long he thought he had forgotten how. He had not even wept when his mother died.
   But he began to cry now, in painful, lurching sobs, and for the first time since he was a small boy, Shadow cried himself to sleep.


* * *


Coming To America
A.D. 813

   They navigated the green sea by the stars and by the shore, and when the shore was only a memory and the night sky was overcast and dark they navigated by faith, and they called on the All-Father to bring them safely to land once more.
   A bad journey they had of it, their fingers numb and with a shiver in their bones that not even wine could burn off. They would wake in the morning to see that the hoarfrost had touched their beards, and, until the sun warmed them, they looked like old men, white-bearded before their time.
   Teeth were loosening and eyes were deep-sunken in their sockets when they made landfall on the green land to the west. The men said, “We are far, far from our homes and our hearths, far from the seas we know and the lands we love. Here on the edge of the world we will be forgotten by our gods.”
   Their leader clambered to the top of a great rock, and he mocked them for their lack of faith. “The All-Father made the world,” he shouted. “He built it with his hands from the shattered bones and the flesh of Ymir, his grandfather. He placed Ymir’s brains in the sky as clouds, and his salt blood became the seas we crossed. If he made the world, do you not realize that he created this land as well? And if we die here as men, shall we not be received into his hall?”
   And the men cheered and laughed. They set to, with a will, to build a hall out of split trees and mud, inside a small stockade of sharpened logs, although as far as they knew they were the only men in the new land.
   On the day that the hall was finished there was a storm: the sky at midday became as dark as night, and the sky was rent with forks of white flame, and the thunder-crashes were so loud that the men were almost deafened by them, and the ship’s cat they had brought with them for good fortune hid beneath their beached longboat. The storm was hard enough and vicious enough that the men laughed and clapped each other on the back, and they said, “The thunderer is here with us, in this distant land,” and they gave thanks, and rejoiced, and they drank until they were reeling.
   In the smoky darkness of their hall, that night, the bard sang them the old songs. He sang of Odin, the All-Father, who was sacrificed to himself as bravely and as nobly as others were sacrificed to him. He sang of the nine days that the All-Father hung from the world-tree, his side pierced and dripping from the spear-point’s wound, and he sang them all the things the All-Father had learned in his agony: nine names, and nine runes, and twice-nine charms. When he told them of the spear piercing Odin’s side, the bard shrieked in pain as the All-Father himself had called out in his agony, and all the men shivered, imagining his pain.
   They found the scraeling the following day, which was the all-father’s own day. He was a small man, his long hair black as a crow’s wing, his skin the color of rich red clay. He spoke in words none of them could understand, not even their bard, who had been on a ship that had sailed through the pillars of Hercules and who could speak the trader’s pidgin men spoke all across the Mediterranean. The stranger was dressed in feathers and in furs, and there were small bones braided into his long hair.
   They led him into their encampment, and they gave him roasted meat to eat, and strong drink to quench his thirst. They laughed riotously at the man as he stumbled and sang, at the way his head rolled and lolled, and this on less than a drinking-horn of mead. They gave him more drink, and soon enough he lay beneath the table with his head curled under his arm.
   Then they picked him up, a man at each shoulder, a man at each leg, carried him at shoulder height, the four men making him an eight-legged horse, and they carried him at the head of a procession to an ash tree on the hill overlooking the bay, where they put a rope around his neck and hung him high in the wind, their tribute to the All-Father, the gallows lord. The scraeling’s body swung in the wind, his face blackening, his tongue protruding, his eyes popping, his penis hard enough to hang a leather helmet on, while the men cheered and shouted and laughed, proud to be sending their sacrifice to the heavens.
   And, the next day, when two huge ravens landed upon the scraeling’s corpse, one on each shoulder, and commenced to peck at its cheeks and eyes, the men knew their sacrifice had been accepted.
   It was a long winter, and they were hungry, but they were cheered by the thought that, when spring came, they would send the boat back to the northlands, and it would bring settlers, and bring women. As the weather became colder, and the days became shorter, some of the men took to searching for the scraeling village, hoping to find food, and women. They found nothing, save for the places where fires had been, where small encampments had been abandoned.
   One midwinter’s day, when the sun was as distant and cold as a dull silver coin, they saw that the remains of the scraeling’s body had been removed from the ash tree. That afternoon it began to snow, in huge, slow flakes.
   The men from the northlands closed the gates of their encampment, retreated behind their wooden wall.
   The scraeling war party fell upon them that night: five hundred men to thirty. They climbed the wall, and over the following seven days, they killed each of the thirty men, in thirty different ways. And the sailors were forgotten, by history and their people.
   The wall they tore down, the war party, and the village they burned. The longboat, upside down and pulled high on the shingle, they also burned, hoping that the pale strangers had but one boat, and that by burning it they were ensuring that no other Northmen would come to their shores.
   It was more than a hundred years before Leif the Fortunate, son of Erik the Red, rediscovered that land, which he would call Vineland. His gods were already waiting for him when he arrived: Tyr, one-handed, and gray Odin gallows-god, and Thor of the thunders.
   They were there.
   They were waiting.

Chapter 4

   Let the Midnight Special
   Shine its light on me
   Let the Midnight Special
   Shine its ever–lovin’ light on me

“The Midnight Special,” traditional


   Shadow and Wednesday ate breakfast at a Country Kitchen across the street from their motel. It was eight in the morning, and the world was misty and chill.
   “You still ready to leave Eagle Point?” asked Wednesday. “I have some calls to make, if you are. Friday today. Friday’s a free day. A woman’s day. Saturday tomorrow. Much to do on Saturday.”
   “I’m ready,” said Shadow. “Nothing keeping me here.”
   Wednesday heaped his plate high with several kinds of breakfast meats. Shadow took some melon, a bagel, and a packet of cream cheese. They went and sat down in a booth.
   “That was some dream you had last night,” said Wednesday.
   “Yes,” said Shadow. “It was.” Laura’s muddy footprints had been visible on the motel carpet when he got up that morning, leading from his bedroom to the lobby and out the door.
   “So,” said Wednesday. “Why’d they call you Shadow?”
   Shadow shrugged. “It’s a name,” he said. Outside the plate glass the world in the mist had become a pencil drawing executed in a dozen different grays with, here and there, a smudge of electric red or pure white. “How’d you lose your eye?”
   Wednesday shoveled half a dozen pieces of bacon into his mouth, chewed, wiped the fat from his lips with the back of his hand. “Didn’t lose it,” he said. “I still know exactly where it is.”
   “So what’s the plan?”
   Wednesday looked thoughtful. He ate several vivid pink slices of ham, picked a fragment of meat from his beard, dropped it onto his plate. “Plan is as follows. Tomorrow night we shall be meeting with a number of persons preeminent in their respective fields—do not let their demeanor intimidate you. We shall meet at one of the most important places in the entire country. Afterward we shall wine and dine them. I need to enlist them in my current enterprise.”
   “And where is this most important place?”
   “You’ll see, m’boy. I said one of them. Opinions are justifiably divided. I have sent word to my colleagues. We’ll stop off in Chicago on the way, as I need to pick up some money. Entertaining, in the manner we shall need to entertain, will take more ready cash than I currently have available. Then on to Madison.” Wednesday paid and they left, walked back across the road to the motel parking lot. Wednesday tossed Shadow the car keys.
   He drove down to the freeway and out of town.
   “You going to miss it?” asked Wednesday. He was sorting through a folder filled with maps.
   “The town? No. I didn’t really ever have a life here. I was never in one place too long as a kid, and I didn’t get here until I was in my twenties. So this town is Laura’s.”
   “Let’s hope she stays here,” said Wednesday.
   “It was a dream,” said Shadow. “Remember.”
   “That’s good,” said Wednesday. “Healthy attitude to have. Did you fuck her last night?”
   Shadow took a breath. Then, “That is none of your damn business. And no.”
   “Did you want to?”
   Shadow said nothing at all. He drove north, toward Chicago. Wednesday chuckled, and began to pore over his maps, unfolding and refolding them, making occasional notes on a yellow legal pad with a large silver ballpoint pen.
   Eventually he was finished. He put his pen away, put the folder on the backseat. “The best thing about the states we’re heading for,” said Wednesday, “Minnesota, Wisconsin, all around there, is they have the kind of women I liked when I was younger. Pale-skinned and blue-eyed, hair so fair it’s almost white, wine-colored lips, and round, full breasts with the veins running through them like a good cheese.”
   “Only when you were younger?” asked Shadow. “Looked like you were doing pretty good last night.”
   “Yes.” Wednesday smiled. “Would you like to know the secret of my success?”
   “You pay them?”
   “Nothing so crude. No, the secret is charm. Pure and simple.”
   “Charm, huh? Well, like they say, you either got it or you ain’t.”
   “Charms can be learned,” said Wednesday.
   Shadow tuned the radio to an oldies station, and listened to songs that were current before he was born. Bob Dylan sang about a hard rain that was going to fall, and Shadow wondered if that rain had fallen yet, or if it was something that was still going to happen. The road ahead of them was empty and the ice crystals on the asphalt glittered like diamonds in the morning sun.


* * *

   Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.
   They parked outside a squat black brownstone. The sidewalk was clear of snow. They walked to the lobby. Wednesday pressed the top button on the gouged metal intercom box. Nothing happened. He pressed it again. Then, experimentally, he began to press the other buttons, for other tenants, with no response.
   “It’s dead,” said a gaunt old woman, coming down the steps. “Doesn’t work. We call the super, ask him when he going to fix, when he going to mend the heating, he does not care, goes to Arizona for the winter for his chest.” Her accent was thick, Eastern European, Shadow guessed.
   Wednesday bowed low. “Zorya, my dear, may I say how unutterably beautiful you look? A radiant creature. You have not aged.”
   The old woman glared at him. “He don’t want to see you. I don’t want to see you neither. You bad news.”
   “That’s because I don’t come if it isn’t important.”
   The woman sniffed. She carried an empty string shopping bag, and wore an old red coat, buttoned up to her chin. She looked at Shadow suspiciously.
   “Who is the big man?” she asked Wednesday. “Another one of your murderers?”
   “You do me a deep disservice, good lady. This gentleman is called Shadow. He is working for me, yes, but on your behalf. Shadow, may I introduce you to the lovely Miss Zorya Vechernyaya.”
   “Good to meet you,” said Shadow.
   Birdlike, the old woman peered up at him. “Shadow,” she said. “A good name. When the shadows are long, that is my time. And you are the long shadow.” She looked him up and down, then she smiled. “You may kiss my hand,” she said, and extended a cold hand to him.
   Shadow bent down and kissed her thin hand. She had a large amber ring on her middle finger.
   “Good boy,” she said. “I am going to buy groceries. You see, I am the only one of us who brings in any money. The other two cannot make money fortune-telling. This is because they only tell the truth, and the truth is not what people want to hear. It is a bad thing, and it troubles people, so they do not come back. But I can lie to them, tell them what they want to hear. So I bring home the bread. Do you think you will be here for supper?”
   “I would hope so,” said Wednesday.
   “Then you had better give me some money to buy more food,” she said. “I am proud, but I am not stupid. The others are prouder than I am, and he is the proudest of all. So give me money and do not tell them that you give me money.”
   Wednesday opened his wallet, and reached in. He took out a twenty. Zorya Vechernyaya plucked it from his fingers, and waited. He took out another twenty and gave it to her.
   “Is good,” she said. “We will feed you like princes. Now, go up the stairs to the top. Zorya Utrennyaya is awake, but our other sister is still asleep, so do not be making too much noise.”
   Shadow and Wednesday climbed the dark stairs. The landing two stories up was half filled with black plastic garbage bags and it smelled of rotting vegetables.
   “Are they gypsies?” asked Shadow.
   “Zorya and her family? Not at all. They’re not Rom. They’re Russian. Slavs, I believe.”
   “But she does fortune-telling.”
   “Lots of people do fortune-telling. I dabble in it myself.” Wednesday was panting as they went up the final flight of stairs. “I’m out of shape.”
   The landing at the top of the stairs ended in a single door painted red, with a peephole in it.
   Wednesday knocked at the door. There was no response. He knocked again, louder this time.
   “Okay! Okay! I heard you! I heard you!” The sound of locks being undone, of bolts being pulled, the rattle of a chain. The red door opened a crack.
   “Who is it?” A man’s voice, old and cigarette-roughened.
   “An old friend, Czernobog. With an associate.”
   The door opened as far as the security chain would allow. Shadow could see a gray face, in the shadows, peering out at them. “What do you want, Votan?”
   “Initially, simply the pleasure of your company. And I have information to share. What’s that phrase?…Oh yes. You may learn something to your advantage.”
   The door opened all the way. The man in the dusty bathrobe was short, with iron-gray hair and craggy features. He wore gray pinstripe pants, shiny from age, and slippers. He held an unfiltered cigarette with square-tipped fingers, sucking the tip while keeping it cupped in his fist—like a convict, thought Shadow, or a soldier. He extended his left hand to Wednesday. “Welcome then, Votan.”
   “They call me Wednesday these days,” he said, shaking the old man’s hand.
   A narrow smile; a flash of yellow teeth. “Yes,” he said. “Very funny. And this is?”
   “This is my associate. Shadow, meet Mr. Czernobog.”
   “Well met,” said Czernobog. He shook Shadow’s left hand with his own. His hands were rough and callused, and the tips of his fingers were as yellow as if they had been dipped in iodine.
   “How do you do, Mr. Czernobog?”
   “I do old. My guts ache, and my back hurts, and I cough my chest apart every morning.”
   “Why you are standing at the door?” asked a woman’s voice. Shadow looked over Czernobog’s shoulder, at the old woman standing behind him. She was smaller and frailer than her sister, but her hair was long and still golden. “I am Zorya Utrennyaya,” she said. “You must not stand there in the hall. You must go in, sit down. I will bring you coffee.”
   Through the doorway into an apartment that smelted like overboiled cabbage and cat box and unfiltered foreign cigarettes, and they were ushered through a tiny hallway past several closed doors to the sitting room at the far end of the corridor, and were seated on a huge old horsehair sofa, disturbing an elderly gray cat in the process, who stretched, stood up, and walked, stiffly, to a distant part of the sofa, where he lay down, warily stared at each of them in turn, then closed one eye and went back to sleep. Czernobog sat in an armchair across from them.
   Zorya Utrennyaya found an empty ashtray and placed it beside Czernobog. “How you want your coffee?” she asked her guests. “Here we take it black as night, sweet as sin.”
   “That’ll be fine, ma’am,” said Shadow. He looked out of the window, at the buildings across the street.
   Zorya Utrennyaya went out. Czernobog stared at her as she left. “That’s a good woman,” he said. “Not like her sisters. One of them is a harpy, the other, all she does is sleep.” He put his slippered feet up on a long, low coffee table, a chess board inset in the middle, cigarette burns and mug rings on its surface.
   “Is she your wife?” asked Shadow.
   “She’s nobody’s wife.” The old man sat in silence for a moment, looking down at his rough hands. “No. We are all relatives. We come over here together, long time ago.”
   From the pocket of his bathrobe, Czernobog produced a pack of unfiltered cigarettes. Wednesday pulled out a narrow gold lighter and lit the old man’s cigarette. “First we come to New York,” said Czernobog. “All our countrymen go to New York. Then, we come out here, to Chicago. Everything got very bad. Even in the old country, they had nearly forgotten me. Here, I am just a bad memory. You know what I did when I got to Chicago?”
   “No,” said Shadow.
   “I get a job in the meat business. On the kill floor. When the steer comes up the ramp, I was a knocker. You know why we are called knockers? Is because we take the sledgehammer and we knock the cow down with it. Bam! It takes strength in the arms. Yes? Then the shackler chains the beef up, hauls it up, then they cut the throat. They drain the blood first before they cut the head off. We were the strongest, the knockers.” He pushed up the sleeve of his bathrobe, flexed his upper arm to display the muscles still visible under the old skin. “Is not just strong though. There was an art to it. To the blow. Otherwise the cow is just stunned, or angry. Then, in the fifties, they give us the bolt gun. You put it to the forehead, bam! bam! Now you think, anybody can kill. Not so.” He mimed putting a metal bolt through a cow’s head. “It still takes skill.” He smiled at the memory, displaying an iron-colored tooth.
   “Don’t tell them cow-killing stories.” Zorya Utrennyaya carried in their coffee on a red wooden tray, in small brightly enameled cups. She gave them each a cup, then sat beside Czernobog.
   “Zorya Vechernyaya is doing shopping,” she said. “She will be soon back.”
   “We met her downstairs,” said Shadow. “She says she tells fortunes.”
   “Yes,” said her sister. “In the twilight, that is the time for lies. I do not tell good lies, so I am a poor fortune-teller. And our sister, Zorya Polunochnaya, she can’t tell no lies at all.”
   The coffee was even sweeter and stronger than Shadow had expected.
   Shadow excused himself to use the bathroom—a closet-like room, hung with several brown-spotted framed photographs of men and women in stiff Victorian poses. It was early afternoon, but already the daylight was beginning to fade. He heard voices raised from down the hall. He washed his hands in icy-cold water with a sickly-smelling sliver of pink soap.
   Czernobog was standing in the hall as Shadow came out.
   “You bring trouble!” he was shouting. “Nothing but trouble! I will not listen! You will get out of my house!”
   Wednesday was still sitting on the sofa, sipping his coffee, stroking the gray cat. Zorya Utrennyaya stood on the thin carpet, one hand nervously twining in and out of her long yellow hair.
   “Is there a problem?” asked Shadow.
   “He is the problem!” shouted Czernobog. “He is! You tell him that there is nothing will make me help him! I want him to go! I want him out of here! Both of you go!”
   “Please,” said Zorya Utrennyaya. “Please be quiet, you wake up Zorya Polunochnaya.”
   “You are like him, you want me to join his madness!” shouted Czernobog. He looked as if he was on the verge of tears. A pillar of ash tumbled from his cigarette onto the threadbare hall carpet.

   Wednesday stood up, walked over to Czernobog. He rested his hand on Czernobog’s shoulder. “Listen,” he said, peaceably. “Firstly, it’s not madness. It’s the only way. Secondly, everyone will be there. You would not want to be left out, would you?”
   “You know who I am,” said Czernobog. “You know what these hands have done. You want my brother, not me. And he’s gone.”
   A door in the hallway opened, and a sleepy female voice said, “Is something wrong?”
   “Nothing is wrong, my sister,” said Zorya Utrennyaya. “Go back to sleep.” Then she turned to Czernobog. “See? See what you do with all your shouting? You go back in there and sit down. Sit!” Czernobog looked as if he were about to protest; and then the fight went out of him. He looked frail, suddenly: frail, and lonely.
   The three men went back into the shabby sitting room. There was a brown nicotine ring around that room that ended about a foot from the ceiling, like the tide line in an old bathtub.
   “It doesn’t have to be for you,” said Wednesday to Czernobog, unfazed. “If it is for your brother, it’s for you as well. That’s one place you dualistic types have it over the rest of us, eh?”
   Czernobog said nothing.
   “Speaking of Bielebog, have you heard anything from him?”
   Czernobog shook his head. He looked up at Shadow. “Do you have a brother?”
   “No,” said Shadow. “Not that I know of.”
   “I have a brother. They say, you put us together, we are like one person, you know? When we are young, his hair, it is very blond, very light, his eyes are blue, and people say, he is the good one. And my hair it is very dark, darker than yours even, and people say I am the rogue, you know? I am the bad one. And now time passes, and my hair is gray. His hair, too, I think, is gray. And you look at us, you would not know who was light, who was dark.”
   “Were you close?” asked Shadow.
   “Close?” asked Czernobog. “No. How could we be? We cared about such different things.”
   There was a clatter from the end of the hall, and Zorya Vechemyaya came in. “Supper in one hour,” she said. Then she went out.
   Czernobog sighed. “She thinks she is a good cook,” he said. “She was brought up, there were servants to cook. Now, there are no servants. There is nothing.”
   “Not nothing,” said Wednesday. “Never nothing.”
   “You,” said Czernobog. “I shall not listen to you.” He turned to Shadow. “Do you play checkers?” he asked.
   “Yes,” said Shadow.
   “Good. You shall play checkers with me,” he said, taking a wooden box of pieces from the mantelpiece and shaking them out onto the table. “I shall play black.”
   Wednesday touched Shadow’s arm. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” he said.
   “Not a problem. I want to,” said Shadow. Wednesday shrugged, and picked up an old copy of Reader’s Digest from a small pile of yellowing magazines on the windowsill.
   Czernobog’s brown fingers finished arranging the pieces on the squares, and the game began.


* * *

   In the days that were to come, Shadow often found himself remembering that game. Some nights he dreamed of it. His flat, round pieces were the color of old, dirty wood, nominally white. Czernobog’s were a dull, faded black. Shadow was the first to move. In his dreams, there was no conversation as they played, just the loud click as the pieces were put down, or the hiss of wood against wood as they were slid from square to adjoining square.
   For the first half dozen moves each of the men slipped pieces out onto the board, into the center, leaving the back rows untouched. There were pauses between the moves, long, chesslike pauses, while each man watched, and thought.
   Shadow had played checkers in prison: it passed the time. He had played chess, too, but he was not temperamentally suited to planning ahead. He preferred picking the perfect move for the moment. You could win in checkers like that, sometimes.
   There was a click as Czernobog picked up a black piece and jumped it over one of Shadow’s white pieces. The old man picked up Shadow’s white piece and put it on the table at the side of the board.
   “First blood. You have lost,” said Czernobog. “The game is done.”
   “No,” said Shadow. “Game’s got a long way to go yet.”
   “Then would you care for a wager? A little side bet, to make it more interesting?”
   “No,” said Wednesday, without looking up from a “Humor in Uniform” column. “He wouldn’t.”
   “I am not playing with you, old man. I play with him. So, you want to bet on the game, Mister Shadow?”
   “What were you two arguing about, before?” asked Shadow.
   Czernobog raised a craggy eyebrow. “Your master wants me to come with him. To help him with his nonsense. I would rather die.”
   “You want to bet? Okay. If I win, you come with us.”
   The old man pursed his lips. “Perhaps,” he said. “But only if you take my forfeit, when you lose.”
   “And that would be?”
   There was no change in Czernobog’s expression. “If I win, I get to knock your brains out. With the sledgehammer. First you go down on your knees. Then I hit you a blow with it, so you don’t get up again.” Shadow looked at the man’s old face, trying to read him. He was not joking, Shadow was certain of that: there was a hunger there for something, for pain, or death, or retribution.
   Wednesday closed the Reader’s Digest. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “I was wrong to come here. Shadow, we’re leaving.” The gray cat, disturbed, got to its feet and stepped onto the table beside the checkers game. If stared at the pieces, then leapt down onto the floor and, tail held high, it stalked from the room.
   “No,” said Shadow. He was not scared of dying. After all, it was not as if he had anything to live for. ‘It’s fine. I accept. If you win the game, you get the chance to knock my brains out with one blow of your sledgehammer,” and he moved his next white piece to the adjoining square on the edge of the board.
   Nothing more was said, but Wednesday did not pick up his Reader’s Digest again. He watched the game with his glass eye and his true eye, with an expression that betrayed nothing.
   Czernobog took another of Shadow’s pieces. Shadow took two of Czernobog’s. From the corridor came the smell of unfamiliar foods cooking. While not all of the smells were appetizing, Shadow realized suddenly how hungry he was.
   The two men moved their pieces, black and white, turn and turnabout. A flurry of pieces taken, a blossoming of two-piece-high kings: no longer forced to move only forward on the board, a sideways slip at a time, the kings could move forward or back, which made them doubly dangerous. They had reached the farthest row, and could go where they wanted. Czernobog had three kings, Shadow had two.
   Czernobog moved one of his kings around the board, eliminating Shadow’s remaining pieces, while using the other two kings to keep Shadow’s kings pinned down.
   And then Czernobog made a fourth king, and returned down the board to Shadow’s two kings, and, unsmiling, took them both. And that was that.
   “So,” said Czernobog. “I get to knock out your brains. And you will go on your knees willingly. Is good.” He reached out an old hand, and patted Shadow’s arm with it.
   “We’ve still got time before dinner’s ready,” said Shadow. “You want another game? Same terms?”
   Czernobog lit another cigarette, from a kitchen box of matches. “How can it be same terms? You want I should kill you twice?”
   “Right now, you have one blow, that’s all. You told me yourself that it’s not just strength, it’s skill too. This way, if you win this game, you get two blows to my head.”
   Czernobog glowered. “One blow is all it takes, one blow. That is the art.” He patted his upper right arm, where the muscles were, with his left, scattering gray ash from the cigarette in his left hand.
   “It’s been a long time. If you’ve lost your skill you might simply bruise me. How long has it been since you swung a killing hammer in the stockyards? Thirty years? Forty?”
   Czernobog said nothing. His closed mouth was a gray slash across his face. He tapped his fingers on the wooden table, drumming out a rhythm with them. Then he pushed the twenty-four checkers back to their home squares on the board.
   “Play,” he said. “Again, you are light. I am dark.”
   Shadow pushed his first piece out. Czernobog pushed one of his own pieces forward. And it occurred to Shadow that Czernobog was going to try to play the same game again, the one that he had just won, that this would be his limitation.
   This time Shadow played recklessly. He snatched tiny opportunities, moved without thinking, without a pause to consider. And this time, as he played, Shadow smiled; and whenever Czernobog moved a piece, Shadow smiled wider.
   Soon, Czernobog was slamming his pieces down as he moved them, banging them down on the wooden table so hard that the remaining pieces shivered on their black squares.
   “There,” said Czernobog, taking one of Shadow’s men with a crash, slamming the black piece down. “There. What do you say to that?”
   Shadow said nothing: he simply smiled, and jumped the piece that Czernobog had put down, and another, and another, and a fourth, clearing the center of the board of black pieces. He took a white piece from the pile beside the board and kinged his man.
   After that, it was just a mopping-up exercise: another handful of moves, and the game was done.
   Shadow said, “Best of three?”
   Czernobog simply stared at him, his gray eyes like points of steel. And then he laughed, clapped his hands on Shadow’s shoulders. “I like you!” he exclaimed. “You have balls.”
   Then Zorya Utrennyaya put her head around the door to tell them that dinner was ready, and they should clear their game away and put the tablecloth down on the table.
   “We have no dining room,” she said, “I am sorry. We eat in here.”
   Serving dishes were placed on the table. Each of the diners was given a small painted tray on which was some tarnished cutlery, to hold on his or her lap.
   Zorya Vechernyaya took five wooden bowls and placed an unpeeled boiled potato in each, then ladled in a healthy serving of a ferociously crimson borscht. She plopped a spoonful of white sour cream in, and handed the bowls to each of them.
   “I thought there were six of us,” said Shadow.
   “Zorya Polunochnaya is still asleep,” said Zorya Vechernyaya. “We keep her food in the refrigerator. When she wakes, she will eat.”
   The borscht was vinegary, and tasted like pickled beets. The boiled potato was mealy.
   The next course was a leathery pot roast, accompanied by greens of some description—although they had been boiled so long and so thoroughly that they were no longer, by any stretch of the imagination, greens, and were well on their way to becoming browns.
   Then there were cabbage leaves stuffed with ground meat and rice, cabbage leaves of such a toughness that they were almost impossible to cut without spattering ground meat and rice all over the carpet. Shadow pushed his around his plate.
   “We played checkers,” said Czernobog, hacking himself another lump of pot roast. “The young man and me. He won a game, I won a game. Because he won a game, I have agreed to go with him and Wednesday, and help them in their madness. And because I won a game, when this is all done, I get to kill the young man, with a blow of a hammer.”
   The two Zoryas nodded gravely. “Such a pity,” Zorya Vechernyaya told Shadow. “In my fortune for you, I should have said you would have a long life and a happy one, with many children.”
   “That is why you are a good fortune-teller,” said Zorya Utrennyaya. She looked sleepy, as if it were an effort for her to be up so late. “You tell the best lies.”
   At the end of the meal, Shadow was still hungry. Prison food had been pretty bad, and prison food was better than this.
   “Good food,” said Wednesday, who had cleaned his plate with every evidence of enjoyment. “I thank you ladies. And now, I am afraid that it is incumbent upon us to ask you to recommend to us a fine hotel in the neighborhood.”
   Zorya Vechernyaya looked offended at this. “Why should you go to a hotel?” she said. “We are not your friends?”
   “I couldn’t put you to any trouble…” said Wednesday.
   “Is no trouble,” said Zorya Utrennyaya, one hand playing with her incongruously golden hair, and she yawned.
   “You can sleep in Bielebog’s room,” said Zorya Vechernyaya, pointing to Wednesday. “Is empty. And for you, young man, I make up a bed on sofa. You will be more comfortable than in feather bed. I swear.”
   “That would be really kind of you,” said Wednesday. “We accept.”
   “And you pay me only no more than what you pay for hotel,” said Zorya Vechernyaya, with a triumphant toss of her head. “A hundred dollars.”
   “Thirty” said Wednesday.
   “Fifty.”
   “Thirty-five.”
   “Forty-five.”
   “Forty.”
   “Is good. Forty-five dollar.” Zorya Vechernyaya reached across the table and shook Wednesday’s hand. Then she began to clean the pots off the table. Zorya Utrennyaya yawned so hugely Shadow worried that she might dislocate her jaw, and announced that she was going to bed before she fell asleep with her head in the pie, and she said good night to them all.
   Shadow helped Zorya Vechernyaya to take the plates and dishes into the little kitchen. To his surprise there was an elderly dishwashing machine beneath the sink, and he filled it. Zorya Vechernyaya looked over his shoulder, tutted, and removed the wooden borscht bowls. “Those, in the sink,” she told him.
   “Sorry.”
   “Is not to worry. Now, back in there, we have pie,” she said.
   The pie—it was an apple pie—had been bought in a store and oven-warmed, and was very, very good. The four of them ate it with ice cream, and then Zorya Vechernyaya made everyone go out of the sitting room, and made up a very fine-looking bed on the sofa for Shadow.
   Wednesday spoke to Shadow as they stood in the corridor.
   “What you did in there, with the checkers game,” he said.
   “Yes?”
   “That was good. Very, very stupid of you. But good. Sleep safe.”
   Shadow brushed his teeth and washed his face in the cold water of the little bathroom, and then walked back down the hall to the sitting room, turned out the light, and was asleep before his head touched the pillow.


* * *

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

   A bullet punctured his lung, a bullet shattered his spine, another hit his shoulder. He felt each bullet strike. He collapsed across the steering wheel.
   The last explosion ended in darkness.
   I must be dreaming, thought Shadow, alone in the darkness. I think I just died. He remembered hearing and believing, as a child, that if you died in your dreams, you would die in real life. He did not feel dead. He opened his eyes, experimentally.
   There was a woman in the little sitting room, standing against the window, with her back to him. His heart missed a half-beat, and he said, “Laura?”
   She turned, framed by the moonlight. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I did not mean to wake you.” She had a soft, Eastern European accent. “I will go.”
   “No, it’s okay,” said Shadow. “You didn’t wake me. I had a dream.”
   “Yes,” she said. “You were crying out, and moaning. Part of me wanted to wake you, but I thought, no, I should leave him.”
   Her hair was pale and colorless in the moon’s thin light. She wore a white cotton nightgown, with a high lace neck and a hem that swept the ground. Shadow sat up, entirely awake. “You are Zorya Polu…,” he hesitated. “The sister who was asleep.”
   “I am Zorya Polunochnaya, yes. And—you are called Shadow, yes? That was what Zorya Vechernyaya told me, when I woke.”
   “Yes. What were you looking at, out there?”
   She looked at him, then she beckoned him to join her by the window. She turned her back while he pulled on his jeans. He walked over to her. It seemed a long walk, for such a small room.
   He could not tell her age. Her skin was unlined, her eyes were dark, her lashes were long, her hair was to her waist and white. The moonlight drained colors into ghosts of themselves. She was taller than either of her sisters.
   She pointed up into the night sky. “I was looking at that,” she said, pointing to the Big Dipper. “See?”
   “Ursa Major,” he said. “The Great Bear.”
   “That is one way of looking at it,” she said. “But it is not the way from where I come from. I am going to sit on the roof. Would you like to come with me?”
   She lifted the window and clambered, barefoot, out onto the fire escape. A freezing wind blew through the window. Something was bothering Shadow, but he did not know what it was; he hesitated, then pulled on his sweater, stocks, and shoes and followed her out onto the rusting fire escape. She was waiting for him. His breath steamed in the chilly air. He watched her bare feet pad up the icy metal steps, and followed her up to the roof.
   The wind gusted cold, flattening her nightgown against her body, and Shadow became uncomfortably aware that Zorya Polunochnaya was wearing nothing at all underneath.
   “You don’t mind the cold?” he said, as they reached the top of the fire escape, and the wind whipped his words away.
   “Sorry?”
   She bent her face close to his. Her breath was sweet.
   “I said, doesn’t the cold bother you?”
   In reply, she held up a finger: wait. She stepped, lightly, over the side of the building and onto the flat roof. Shadow stepped over a little more clumsily, and followed her across the roof, to the shadow of the water tower. There was a wooden bench waiting for them there, and she sat down on it, and he sat down beside her. The water tower acted as a windbreak, for which Shadow was grateful.
   “No,” she said. “The cold does not bother me. This time is my time: I could no more feel uncomfortable in the night than a fish could feel uncomfortable in the deep water.”
   “You must like the night,” said Shadow, wishing that he had said something wiser, more profound.
   “My sisters are of their times. Zorya Utrennyaya is of the dawn. In the old country she would wake to open the gates, and let our father drive his—uhm, I forget the word, like a car but with horses?”
   “Chariot?’
   “His chariot. Our father would ride it out. And Zorya Vechernyaya, she would open the gates for him at dusk, when he returned to us.”
   “And you?”
   She paused. Her lips were full, but very pale, “I never saw our father. I was asleep.”
   “Is it a medical condition?”
   She did not answer. The shrug, if she shrugged, was imperceptible. “So. You wanted to know what I was looking at.”
   “The Big Dipper.”
   She raised an arm to point to it, and the wind flattened her nightgown against her body. Her nipples, every goose-bump on the areolae, were visible momentarily, dark against the white cotton. Shadow shivered.
   “Odin’s Wain, they call it. And the Great Bear. Where we come from, we believe that is a, a thing, a, not a god, but like a god, a bad thing, chained up in those stars. If it escapes, it will eat the whole of everything. And there are three sisters who must watch the sky, all the day, all the night. If he escapes, the thing in the stars, the world is over. Pf!, like that.”
   “And people believe that?”
   “They did. A long time ago.”
   “And you were looking to see if you could see the monster in the stars?”
   “Something like that. Yes.”
   He smiled. If it were not for the cold, he decided, he would have thought he was dreaming. Everything felt so much like a dream.
   “Can I ask how old you are? Your sisters seem so much older.”
   She nodded her head. “I am the youngest. Zorya Utrennyaya was born in the morning, and Zorya Vechernyaya was born in the evening, and I was born at midnight. I am the midnight sister: Zorya Polunochnaya. Are you married?”
   “My wife is dead. She died last week in a car accident. It was her funeral yesterday.”
   “I’m so sorry.”
   “She came to see me last night.” It was not hard to say, in the darkness and the moonlight; it was not as unthinkable as it was by daylight.
   “Did you ask her what she wanted?”
   “No. Not really.”
   “Perhaps you should. It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you. Zorya Vechernyaya tells me that you played checkers with Czernobog.”
   “Yes. He won the right to knock in my skull with a sledge.”
   “In the old days, they would take people up to the top of the mountains. To the high places. They would smash the back of their skulls with a rock. For Czernobog.”
   Shadow glanced about. No, they were alone on the roof.
   Zorya Polunochnaya laughed. “Silly, he is not here. And you won a game also. He may not strike his blow until this is all over. He said he would not. And you will know. Like the cows he killed. They always know, first. Otherwise, what is the point?”
   “I feel,” Shadow told her, “like I’m in a world with its own sense of logic. Its own rules. Like when you’re in a dream, and you know there are rules you mustn’t break. Even if you don’t know what they mean. I’m just going along with it, you know?”
   “I know,” she said. She held his hand, with a hand that was icy cold. “You were given protection once. You were given the sun itself. But you lost it already. You gave it away. All I can give you is much weaker protection. The daughter, not the father. But all helps. Yes?” Her white hair blew about her face in the chilly wind.
   “Do I have to fight you? Or play checkers?” he asked.
   “You do not even have to kiss me,” she told him. “Just take the moon from me.”
   “How?”
   “Take the moon.”
   “I don’t understand.”
   “Watch,” said Zorya Polunochnaya. She raised her left hand and held it in front of the moon, so that her forefinger and thumb seemed to be grasping it. Then, in one smooth movement, she plucked at it. For a moment, it looked like she had taken the moon from the sky, but then Shadow saw that the moon shone still, and Zorya Polunochnaya opened her hand to display a silver Liberty-head dollar resting between finger and thumb.
   “That was beautifully done,” said Shadow. “I didn’t see you palm it. And I don’t know how you did that last bit.”
   “I did not palm it,” she said. “I took it. And now I give it to you, to keep safe. Here. Don’t give this one away.”
   She placed it in his right hand and closed his fingers around it. The coin was cold in his hand. Zorya Polunochnaya leaned forward, and closed his eyes with her fingers, and kissed him, lightly, once upon each eyelid.


* * *

   Shadow awoke on the sofa, fully dressed. A narrow shaft of sunlight streamed in through the window, making the dust motes dance.
   He got out of bed, and walked over to the window. The room seemed much smaller in the daylight.
   The thing that had been troubling him since last night came into focus as he looked out and down and across the street. There was no fire escape outside this window: no balcony, no rusting metal steps.
   Still, held tight in the palm of his hand, bright and shiny as the day it had been minted, was a 1922 Liberty-head silver dollar.
   “Oh. You’re up,” said Wednesday, putting his head around the door. “That’s good. You want coffee? We’re going to rob a bank.”


* * *


Coming To America
1721

   The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored. For the most part it is uninspected, unimagined, unthought, a representation of the thing, and not the thing itself. It is a fine fiction, he continued, pausing for a moment to dip his pen in the inkwell and collect his thoughts, that America was founded by pilgrims, seeking the freedom to believe as they wished, that they came to the Americas, spread and bred and filled the empty land.
   In truth, the American colonies were as much a dumping ground as an escape, a forgetting place. In the days where you could be hanged in London from Tyburn’s triple-crowned tree for the theft of twelve pennies, the Americas became a symbol of clemency, of a second chance. But the conditions of transportation were such that, for some, it was easier to take the leap from the leafless and dance on nothing until the dancing was done. Transportation, it was called: for five years, for ten years, for life. That was the sentence.
   You were sold to a captain, and would ride in his ship, crowded tight as a slaver’s, to the colonies or to the West Indies; off the boat the captain would sell you on as an indentured servant to one who would take the cost of your skin out in your labor until the years of your indenture were done. But at least you were not waiting to hang in an English prison (for in those days prisons were places where you stayed until you were freed, transported, or hanged: you were not sentenced there for a term), and you were free to make the best of your new world. You were also free to bribe a sea captain to return you to England before the terms of your transportation were over and done. People did. And if the authorities caught you returning from transportation—if an old enemy, or an old friend with a score to settle, saw you and peached on you—then you were hanged without a blink.
   I am reminded,

   he continued, after a short pause, during which he refilled the inkwell on his desk from the bottle of umber ink from the closet and dipped his pen once more,

   of the life of Essie Tregowan, who came from a chilly little cliff-top village in Cornwall, in the southwest of England, where her family had lived from time out of mind. Her father was a fisherman, and it was rumored that he was one of the wreckers—those who would hang their lamps high on the dangerous cliffs when the storm winds raged, luring ships onto the rocks, for the goods on shipboard. Essie’s mother was in service as a cook at the squire’s house, and at the age of twelve Essie began to work there, in the scullery. She was a thin little thing, with wide brown eyes and dark brown hair; and she was not a hard worker but was forever slipping off and away to listen to stories and tales, if there was anyone who would tell them: tales of the piskies and the spriggans, of the black dogs of the moors and the seal-women of the Channel. And, though the squire laughed at such things, the kitchen-folk always put out a china saucer of the creamiest milk at night, put it outside the kitchen door, for the piskies.

   Several years passed, and Essie was no longer a thin little thing: now she curved and billowed like the swell of the green sea, and her brown eyes laughed, and her chestnut hair tossed and curled. Essie’s eyes lighted on Bartholomew, the squire’s eighteen-year-old son, home from Rugby, and she went at night to the standing stone on the edge of the woodland, and she put some bread that Bartholomew had been eating but had left unfinished on the stone, wrapped in a cut strand of her own hair. And on the very next day Bartholomew came and talked to her, and looked on her approvingly with his own eyes, the dangerous blue of a sky when a storm is coming, while she was cleaning out the grate in his bedroom. He had such dangerous eyes, said Essie Tregowan.
   Soon enough Bartholomew went up to Oxford, and, when Essie’s condition became apparent, she was dismissed. But the babe was stillborn, and as a favor to Essie’s mother, who was a very fine cook, the squire’s wife prevailed upon her husband to return the former maiden to her former position in the scullery.
   But Essie’s love for Bartholomew had turned to hatred for his family, and within the year she took for her new beau a man from a neighboring village, with a bad reputation, who went by the name of Josiah Horner. And one night, when the family slept, Essie arose in the night and unbolted the side door, to let her lover in. He rifled the house while the family slept on.
   Suspicion immediately fell upon someone in the house, for it was apparent that someone must have opened the door (which the squire’s wife distinctly remembered having bolted herself), and someone must have known where the squire kept his silver plate, and the drawer in which he kept his coins and his promissory notes. Still, Essie, by resolutely denying everything, was convicted of nothing until Master Josiah Horner was caught, in a chandler’s in Exeter, passing one of the squire’s notes. The squire identified it as his, and Horner and Essie went to trial.

  Horner was convicted at the local assizes, and was, as the slang of the time so cruelly and so casually had it, turned off, but the judge took pity on Essie, because of her age or her chestnut hair, and he sentenced her to seven years’ transportation. She was to be transported on a ship called the Neptune, under the command of one Captain Clarke. So Essie went to the Carolinas; and on the way she conceived an alliance with the selfsame captain, and prevailed upon him to return her to England with him, as his wife, and to take her to his mother’s house in London, where no man knew her. The journey back, when the human cargo had been exchanged for cotton and tobacco, was a peaceful time and a happy one for the captain and his new bride, who were as two lovebirds or courting butterflies, unable to cease from touching each other or giving each other little gifts and endearments.
   When they reached London, Captain Clarke lodged Essie with his mother, who treated her in all ways as her son’s new wife. Eight weeks later, the Neptune set sail again, and the pretty young bride with the chestnut hair waved her husband goodbye from dockside. Then she returned to her mother-in-law’s house, where, the old woman being absent, Essie helped herself to a length of silk, several gold coins, and a silver pot in which the old woman kept her buttons, and pocketing these things Essie vanished into the stews of London.
   Over the following two years Essie became an accomplished shoplifter, her wide skirts capable of concealing a multitude of sins, consisting chiefly of stolen bolts of silk and lace, and she lived life to the full. Essie gave thanks for her escapes from her vicissitudes to all the creatures that she had been told of as a child, to the piskies (whose influence, she was certain, extended as far as London), and she would put a wooden bowl of milk on a window ledge each night, although her friends laughed at her; but she had the last laugh, as her friends got the pox or the clap and Essie remained in the peak of health.
   She was a year shy of her twentieth birthday when fate dealt her an ill blow: she sat in the Crossed Forks Inn off Fleet Street, in Bell Yard, when she saw a young man enter and seat himself near the fireplace, fresh down from the university. Oho! A pigeon ripe for the plucking, thinks Essie to herself, and she sits next to him, and tells him what a fine young man he is, and with one hand she begins to stroke his knee, while her other hand, more carefully, goes in search of his pocket watch. And then he looked her full in the face, and her heart leapt and sank as eyes the dangerous blue of the summer sky before a storm gazed back into hers, and Master Bartholomew said her name.
   She was taken to Newgate and charged with returning from transportation. Found guilty, Essie shocked no one by pleading her belly, although the town matrons, who assessed such claims (which were usually spurious) were surprised when they were forced to agree that Essie was indeed with child; although who the father was, Essie declined to say.
   Her sentence of death was once more commuted to transportation, this time for life.
   She rode out this time on the Sea-Maiden. There were two hundred transportees on that ship, packed into the hold like so many fat hogs on their way to market. Fluxes and fevers ran rampant; there was scarcely room to sit, let alone to lie down; a woman died in childbirth in the back of the hold, and, the people being pushed in too tightly to pass her body forward, she and the infant were forced out of a small porthole in the back, directly into the choppy gray sea. Essie was eight months gone, and it was a wonder she kept the baby, but keep it she did.
   In her life ever after she would have nightmares of her time in that hold, and she would wake up screaming with the taste and stench of the place in her throat.
   The Sea-Maiden landed at Norfolk in Virginia, and Essie’s indenture was bought by a “small planter,” a tobacco farmer named John Richardson, for his wife had died of the childbirth fever a week after giving birth to his daughter, and he had need of a wet nurse and a maid of all work upon his smallholding.
   So Essie’s baby boy, whom she called Anthony, after, she said, her late husband his father (knowing there was none there to contradict her, and perhaps she had known an Anthony once), sucked at Essie’s breast alongside of Phyllida Richardson, and her employer’s child always got first suck, so she grew into a healthy child, tall and strong, while Essie’s son grew weak and rickety on what was left.
   And along with the milk, the children as they grew drank Essie’s tales: of the knockers and the blue-caps who live down the mines; of the Bucca, the trickiest spirit of the land, much more dangerous than the redheaded, snub-nosed piskies, for whom the first fish of the catch was always left upon the shingle, and for whom a fresh-baked loaf of bread was left in the field, at reaping time, to ensure a fine harvest; she told them of the apple-tree men—old apple trees who talked when they had a mind, and who needed to be placated with the first cider of the crop, which was poured onto their roots as the year turned, if they were to give you a fine crop for the next year. She told them, in her mellifluous Cornish drawl, which trees they should be wary of, in the old rhyme:


Elm, he do brood
And oak, he do hate,
But the willow-man goes walking,
If you stays out late.


   She told them all these things, and they believed, because she believed.
   The farm prospered, and Essie Tregowan placed a china saucer of milk outside the back door, each night, for the piskies. And after eight months John Richardson came a—knocking quietly on Essie’s bedroom door, and asked her for favors of the kind a woman shows a man, and Essie told him how shocked and hurt she was, a poor widow woman, and an indentured servant no better than a slave, to be asked to prostitute herself for a man whom she had had so much respect for—and an indentured servant could not marry, so how he could even think to torment an indentured transportee girl so she could not bring herself to think—and her nut-brown eyes filled with tears, such that Richardson found himself apologizing to her, and the upshot of it was that John Richardson wound up, in that corridor, of that hot summer’s night, going down on one knee to Essie Tregowan and proposing an end to her indenture and offering his hand in marriage. Now, although she accepted him, she would not sleep a night with him until it was legal, whereupon she moved from the little room in the attic to the master bedroom in the front of the house; and if some of Farmer Richardson’s friends and their wives cut him when next they saw him in town, many more of them were of the opinion that the new Mistress Richardson was a damn fine-looking woman, and that Johnnie Richardson had done quite well for himself.
   Within a year, she was delivered of another child, another boy, but as blond as his father and his half sister, and they named him John, after his father.
   The three children went to the local church to hear the traveling preacher on Sundays, and they went to the little school to learn their letters and their numbers with the children of the other small fanners; while Essie also made sure they knew the mysteries of the piskies, which were the most important mysteries there were: redheaded men, with eyes and clothes as green as a river and turned-up noses, funny, squinting men who would, if they got a mind to, turn you and twist you and lead you out of your way, unless you had salt in your pocket, or a little bread. When the children went off to school, they each of them carried a little salt in one pocket, a little bread in the other, the old symbols of life and the earth, to make sure they came safely home once more, and they always did.
   The children grew in the lush Virginia hills, grew tall and strong (although Anthony, her first son, was always weaker, paler, more prone to disease and bad airs) and the Richardsons were happy; and Essie loved her husband as best she could. They had been married a decade when John Richardson developed a toothache so bad it made him fall from his horse. They took him to the nearest town, where his tooth was pulled; but it was too late, and the blood poisoning carried him off, black-faced and groaning, and they buried him beneath his favorite willow tree.
   The widow Richardson was left the farm to manage until Richardson’s two children were of age: she managed the indentured servants and the slaves, and brought in the tobacco crop, year in, year out; she poured cider on the roots of the apple trees on New Year’s Eve, and placed a loaf of new-baked bread in the fields at harvest time, and she always left a saucer of milk at the back door. The farm flourished, and the widow Richardson gained a reputation as a hard bargainer, but one whose crop was always good, and who never sold shoddy for better merchandise.
   So all went well for another ten years; but after that was a bad year, for Anthony, her son, slew Johnnie, his half brother, in a furious quarrel over the future of the farm and the disposition of Phyllida’s hand; and some said he had not meant to kill his brother, and that it was a foolish blow that struck too deep, and some said otherwise. Anthony fled, leaving Essie to bury her youngest son beside his father. Now, some said Anthony fled to Boston, and some said he went south, and his mother was of the opinion that he had taken ship to England, to enlist in George’s army and fight the rebel Scots. But with both sons gone the farm was an empty place, and a sad one, and Phyllida pined and plained as if her heart had been broken, while nothing that her stepmother could say or do would put a smile back on her lips again.
   But heartbroken or not, they needed a man about the farm, and so Phyllida married Harry Soames, a ship’s carpenter by profession, who had tired of the sea and who dreamed of a life on land on a farm like the Lincolnshire farm upon which he had grown up. And although the Richardsons’ farm was little enough like that, Harry Soames found correspondences enough to make him happy. Five children were born to Phyllida and Harry, three of whom lived.
   The widow Richardson missed her sons, and she missed her husband, although he was now little more than a memory of a fair man who treated her kindly. Phyllida’s children would come to Essie for tales, and she would tell them of the Black Dog of the Moors, and of Raw-Head and Bloody-Bones, or the Apple Tree Man, but they were not interested; they only wanted tales of Jack—Jack up the Beanstalk, or Jack Giant-killer, or Jack and his Cat and the King. She loved those children as if they were her own flesh and blood, although sometimes she would call them by the names of those long dead.
   It was May, and she took her chair out into the kitchen garden to pick peas and to shuck them in the sunlight, for even in the lush heat of Virginia the cold had entered her bones as the frost had entered her hair, and a little warmth was a fine thing.
   As the widow Richardson shucked the peas with her old hands, she got to thinking about how fine it would be to walk once more on the moors and the salty cliffs of her native Cornwall, and she thought of sitting on the shingle as a little girl, waiting for her father’s ship to return from the gray seas. Her hands, blue-knuckled and clumsy, opened the pea pods, forced the full peas into an earthenware bowl, and dropped the empty pea pods onto her aproned lap. And then she found herself remembering, as she had not remembered for a long time, a life well lost: how she had twitched purses and filched silks with her clever fingers; and now she remembers the warden of Newgate telling her that it will be a good twelve weeks before her case would be heard, and that she could escape the gallows if she could plead her belly, and what a pretty thing she was—and how she had turned to the wall and bravely lifted her skirts, hating herself and hating him, but knowing he was right; and the feel of the life quickening inside her that meant that she could cheat death for a little longer…
   “Essie Tregowan?” said the stranger.
   The widow Richardson looked up, shading her eyes in the May sunshine. “Do I know you?” she asked. She had not heard him approach.
   The man was dressed all in green: dusty green trews, green jacket, and a dark green coat. His hair was a carroty red, and he grinned at her all lopsided. There was something about the man that made her happy to look at him, and something else that whispered of danger. “You might say that you know me,” he said.
   He squinted down at her, and she squinted right back up at him, searching his moon-face for a clue to his identity. He looked as young as one of her own grandchildren, yet he had called her by her old name, and there was a burr in his voice she knew from her childhood, from the rocks and the moors of her home.
   “You’re a Cornishman?” she asked.
   “That I am, a Cousin Jack,” said the red-haired man. “Or rather, that I was, but now I’m here in this new world, where nobody puts out ale or milk for an honest fellow, or a loaf of bread come harvest time.”
   The old woman steadied the bowl of peas upon her lap. “If you’re who I think you are,” she said, “then I’ve no quarrel with you.” In the house, she could hear Phyllida grumbling to the housekeeper.
   “Nor I with you,” said the red-haired fellow, a little sadly, “although it was you that brought me here, you and a few like you, into this land with no time for magic and no place for piskies and such folk.”
   “You’ve done me many a good turn,” she said.
   “Good and ill,” said the squinting stranger. “We’re like the wind. We blows both ways.”
   Essie nodded.
   “Will you take my hand, Essie Tregowan?” And he reached out a hand to her. Freckled it was, and although Essie’s eyesight was going she could see each orange hair on the back of his hand, glowing golden in the afternoon sunlight. She bit her lip. Then, hesitantly, she placed her blue-knotted hand in his.
   She was still warm when they found her, although the life had fled her body and only half the peas were shelled.

Chapter 5

   Madam Life’s apiece in bloom
   Death goes dogging everywhere:
   She’s the tenant of the room,
   He’s the ruffian on the stair.

W. E. Henley, “Madam Life’s a Piece in Bloom”


   Only Zorya Utrennyaya was awake to say goodbye to them, that Saturday morning. She took Wednesday’s forty-five dollars and insisted on writing him out a receipt for it in wide, looping handwriting, on the back of an expired soft-drink coupon. She looked quite doll-like in the morning light, with her old face carefully made up and her golden hair piled high upon her head.
   Wednesday kissed her hand. “Thank you for your hospitality, dear lady,” he said. “You and your lively sisters remain as radiant as the sky itself.”
   “You are a bad old man,” she told him, and shook a finger at him. Then she hugged him. “Keep safe,” she told him. “I would not like to hear that you were gone for good.”
   “It would distress me equally, my dear.”
   She shook hands with Shadow. “Zorya Polunochnaya thinks very highly of you,” she said. “I also.”
   “Thank you,” said Shadow. “Thanks for the dinner.”
   She raised an eyebrow at him. “You liked? You must come again.”
   Wednesday and Shadow walked down the stairs. Shadow put his hands in his jacket pocket. The silver dollar was cold in his hand. It was bigger and heavier than any coins he’d used so far. He classic-palmed it, let his hand hang by his side naturally, then straightened his hand as the coin slipped down to a front-palm position. It felt natural there, held between his forefinger and his little finger by the slightest of pressure.
   “Smoothly done,” said Wednesday.
   “I’m just learning,” said Shadow. “I can do a lot of the technical stuff. The hardest part is making people look at the wrong hand.”
   “Is that so?”
   “Yes,” said Shadow. “It’s called misdirection.” He slipped his middle fingers under the coin, pushing it into a back palm, and fumbled his grip on it, ever so slightly. The coin dropped from his hand to the stairwell with a clatter and bounced down half a flight of stairs. Wednesday reached down and picked it up.
   “You cannot afford to be careless with people’s gifts,” said Wednesday. “Something like this, you need to hang onto it. Don’t go throwing it about.” He examined the coin, looking first at the eagle side, then at the face of Liberty on the obverse. “Ah, Lady Liberty. Beautiful, is she not?” He tossed the coin to Shadow, who picked it from the air, did a slide vanish-seeming to drop it into his left hand while actually keeping it in his right—and then appeared to pocket it with his left hand. The coin sat in the palm of his right hand, in plain view. It felt comforting there.
   “Lady Liberty,” said Wednesday. “Like so many of the gods that Americans hold dear, a foreigner. In this case, a Frenchwoman, although, in deference to American sensibilities, the French covered up her magnificent bosom on that statue they presented to New York. Liberty,” he continued, wrinkling his nose at the used condom that lay on the bottom flight of steps, toeing it to the side of the stairs with distaste—“Someone could slip on that. Break his neck,” he muttered, interrupting himself. “Like a banana peel, only with bad taste and irony thrown in.” He pushed open the door, and the sunlight hit them. “Liberty,” boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, “is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.”
   “Yeah?” said Shadow.
   “Quoting,” said Wednesday. “Quoting someone French. That’s who they have a statue to, in their New York harbor: a bitch who liked to be fucked on the refuse from the tumbrel. Hold your torch as high as you want to, m’dear, there’s still rats in your dress and cold jism dripping down your leg.” He unlocked the car, and pointed Shadow to the passenger seat.
   “I think she’s beautiful,” said Shadow, holding the coin up close. Liberty’s silver face reminded him a little of Zorya Polunochnaya.
   “That,” said Wednesday, driving off, “is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones. Worm food. At night, you’re rubbing yourself against worm food. No offense meant.”
   Shadow had never seen Wednesday quite so expansive. His new boss, he decided, went through phases of extroversion followed by periods of intense quiet. “So you aren’t American?” asked Shadow.
   “Nobody’s American,” said Wednesday. “Not originally. That’s my point.” He checked his watch. “We still have several hours to kill before the banks close. Good job last night with Czernobog, by the way. I would have closed him on coming eventually, but you enlisted him more wholeheartedly than I could ever have.”
   “Only because he gets to kill me afterward.”
   “Not necessarily. As you yourself so wisely pointed out, he’s old, and the killing stroke might merely leave you, well, paralyzed for life, say. A hopeless invalid. So you have much to look forward to, should Mister Czernobog survive the coming difficulties.”
   “And there is some question about this?” said Shadow, echoing Wednesday’s manner, then hating himself for it.
   “Fuck yes,” said Wednesday. He pulled up in the parking lot of a bank. “This,” he said, “is the bank I shall be robbing. They don’t close for another few hours. Let’s go in and say hello.”
   He gestured to Shadow. Reluctantly, Shadow got out of the car. If the old man was going to do something stupid, Shadow could see no reason why his face should be on the camera. But curiosity pulled him and he walked into the bank. He looked down at the floor, rubbed his nose with his hand, doing his best to keep his face hidden.
   “Deposit forms, ma’am?” said Wednesday to the lone teller.
   “Over there.”
   “Very good. And if I were to need to make a night deposit…?”
   “Same forms.” She smiled at him. “You know where the night deposit slot is, hon? Left out the main door, it’s on the wall.”
   “My thanks.”
   Wednesday picked up several deposit forms. He grinned a goodbye at the teller, and he and Shadow walked out.
   Wednesday stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, scratching his beard meditatively. Then he walked over to the ATM machine and to the night safe, set in the side of the wall, and inspected them. He led Shadow across the road to the supermarket, where he bought a chocolate fudge Popsicle for himself and a cup of hot chocolate for Shadow. There was a pay phone set in the wall of the entry way, below a notice board with rooms to rent and puppies and kittens in need of good homes. Wednesday wrote down the telephone number of the pay phone. They crossed the road once more. “What we need,” said Wednesday, suddenly, “is snow. A good, driving, irritating snow. Think ‘snow’ for me, will you?”
   “Huh?”
   “Concentrate on making those clouds—the ones over there, in the west—making them bigger and darker. Think gray skies and driving winds coming down from the arctic. Think snow.”
   “I don’t think it will do any good.”
   “Nonsense. If nothing else, it will keep your mind occupied,” said Wednesday, unlocking the car. “Kinko’s next. Hurry up.”


   Snow,

   thought Shadow, in the passenger seat, sipping his hot chocolate.

   Huge, dizzying clumps and clusters of snow falling through the air, patches of white against an iron-gray sky, snow that touches your tongue with cold and winter, that kisses your face with its hesitant touch before freezing you to death. Twelve cotton-candy inches of snow, creating a fairy-tale world, making everything unrecognizably beautiful…


   Wednesday was talking to him.
   “I’m sorry?” said Shadow.
   “I said we’re here,” said Wednesday. “You were somewhere else.”
   “I was thinking about snow,” said Shadow.
   In Kinko’s, Wednesday set about photocopying the deposit slips from the bank. He had the clerk instant-print him two sets of ten business cards. Shadow’s head had begun to ache, and there was an uncomfortable feeling between his shoulder blades; he wondered if he had slept wrong, if the headache was an awkward legacy of the night before’s sofa.
   Wednesday sat at the computer terminal, composing a letter, and, with the clerk’s help, making several large-sized signs.


   Snow,

   thought Shadow.

   High in the atmosphere, perfect, tiny crystals that form about a minute piece of dust, each a lacelike work of fractal art. And the snow crystals clump together into flakes as they fall, covering Chicago in their white plenty, inch upon inch…


   “Here,” said Wednesday. He handed Shadow a cup of Kinko’s coffee, a half-dissolved lump of nondairy creamer powder floating on the top, “I think that’s enough, don’t you?”
   “Enough what?”
   “Enough snow. Don’t want to immobilize the city, do we?”
   The sky was a uniform battleship gray. Snow was coming. Yes.
   “I didn’t really do that?” said Shadow. “I mean, I didn’t. Did I?”
   “Drink the coffee,” said Wednesday. “It’s foul stuff, but it will ease the headache.” Then he said, “Good work.”
   Wednesday paid the Kinko’s clerk, and he carried his signs and letters and cards outside. He opened the trunk of his car, put the papers in a large black metal case of the kind carried by payroll guards, and closed the trunk. He passed Shadow a business card.
   “Who,” said Shadow, “is A. Haddock, Director of Security, A1 Security Services?”
   “You are.”
   “A. Haddock?”
   “Yes.”
   “What does the A. stand for?”
   “Alfredo? Alphonse? Augustine? Ambrose? Your call entirely.”
   “Oh. I see.”
   “I’m James O’Gorman,” said Wednesday. “Jimmy to my friends. See? I’ve got a card too.”
   They got back in the car. Wednesday said, “If you can think ‘A. Haddock’ as well as you thought ‘snow,’ we should have plenty of lovely money with which to wine and dine my friends of tonight.”
   “I’m not going back to prison.”
   “You won’t be.”
   “I thought we had agreed that I wouldn’t be doing anything illegal.”
   “You aren’t. Possibly aiding and abetting, a little conspiracy to commit, followed of course by receiving stolen money, but, trust me, you’ll come out of this smelling like a rose.”
   “Is that before or after your elderly Slavic Charles Atlas crushes my skull with one blow?”
   “His eyesight’s going,” said Wednesday. “He’ll probably miss you entirely. Now, we still have a little time to kill—the bank closes at midday on Saturdays, after all. Would you like lunch?”
   “Yes,” said Shadow. “I’m starving.”
   “I know just the place,” said Wednesday. He hummed as he drove, some cheerful song that Shadow could not identify. Snowflakes began to fall, just as Shadow had imagined them, and he felt strangely proud. He knew, rationally, that he had nothing to do with the snow, just as he knew the silver dollar he carried in his pocket was not and never had been the moon. But still…
   They stopped outside a large shedlike building. A sign said that the all-U-can-eat lunch buffet was $4.99. “I love this place,” said Wednesday.
   “Good food?” asked Shadow.
   “Not particularly,” said Wednesday. “But the ambience is unmissable.”
   The ambience that Wednesday loved, it turned out, once lunch had been eaten—Shadow had the fried chicken, and enjoyed it—was the business that took up the rear of the shed: it was, the hanging flag across the center of the room announced, a Bankrupt and Liquidated Stock Clearance Depot.
   Wednesday went out to the car and reappeared with a small suitcase, which he took into the men’s room. Shadow figured he’d learn soon enough what Wednesday was up to, whether he wanted to or not, and so he prowled the liquidation aisles, staring at the things for sale: Boxes of coffee “for use in airline filters only,” Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys and Xena: Warrior Princess harem dolls, teddy bears that played patriotic tunes on the xylophone when plugged in, cans of processed meat, galoshes and sundry overshoes, marshmallows, Bill Clinton presidential wristwatches, artificial miniature Christmas trees, salt and pepper shakers in the shapes of animals, body parts, fruit, and nuns, and, Shadow’s favorite, a “just add real carrot” snowman kit with plastic coal eyes, a corncob pipe, and a plastic hat.
   Shadow thought about how one made the moon seem to come out of the sky and become a silver dollar, and what made a woman get out of her grave and walk across town to talk to you.
   “Isn’t it a wonderful place?” asked Wednesday when he came out of the men’s room. His hands were still wet, and he was drying them off on a handkerchief. “They’re out of paper towels in there,” he said. He had changed his clothes. He was now wearing a dark blue jacket, with matching trousers, a blue knit tie, a thick blue sweater, a white shirt, and black shoes. He looked like a security guard, and Shadow said so.
   “What can I possibly say to that, young man,” said Wednesday, picking up a box of floating plastic aquarium fish (“They’ll never fade—and you’ll never have to feed them!!”), “other than to congratulate you on your perspicacity. How about Arthur Haddock? Arthur’s a good name.”
   “Too mundane.”

   “Well, you’ll think of something. There. Let us return to town. We should be in perfect time for our bank robbery, and then I shall have a little spending money.”
   “Most people,” said Shadow, “would simply take it from the ATM.”
   “Which is, oddly enough, more or less exactly what I was planning to do.”
   Wednesday parked the car in the supermarket lot across the street from the bank. From the trunk of the car Wednesday brought out the metal case, a clipboard, and a pair of handcuffs. He handcuffed the case to his left wrist. The snow continued to fall. Then he put a peaked blue cap on, and Velcroed a patch to the breast pocket of his jacket. A1 Security was written on the cap and the patch. He put the deposit slips on his clipboard. Then he slouched. He looked like a retired beat cop, and appeared somehow to have gained himself a paunch.
   “Now,” he said, “you do a little shopping in the food store, then hang out by the phone. If anyone asks, you’re waiting for a call from your girlfriend, whose car has broken down.”
   “So why’s she calling me there?”
   “How the hell should you know?”
   Wednesday put on a pair of faded pink earmuffs. He closed the trunk. Snowflakes settled on his dark blue cap, and on his earmuffs.
   “How do I look?” he asked.
   “Ludicrous,” said Shadow.
   “Ludicrous?”
   “Or goofy, maybe,” said Shadow.
   “Mm. Goofy and ludicrous. That’s good.” Wednesday smiled. The earmuffs made him appear, at the same time, reassuring, amusing, and, ultimately, lovable. He strode across the street and walked along the block to the bank building, while Shadow walked into the supermarket hall and watched.
   Wednesday taped a large red out-of-order notice to the ATM. He put a red ribbon across the night deposit slot, and he taped a photocopied sign up above it. Shadow read it with amusement. It said:


For Your Convenience We Are Working to Make Ongoing Improvements.
We Apologize for the Temporary Inconvenience.

   Then Wednesday turned around and faced the street. He looked cold and put-upon. A young woman came over to use the ATM. Wednesday shook his head, explained that it was out of order. She cursed, apologized for cursing, and ran off.
   A car drew up, and a man got out holding a small gray sack and a key. Shadow watched as Wednesday apologized to the man, then made him sign the clipboard, checked his deposit slip, painstakingly wrote him out a receipt and puzzled over which copy to keep, and, finally, opened his big black metal case and put the man’s sack inside.
   The man shivered in the snow, stamping his feet, waiting for the old security guard to be done with this administrative nonsense, so he could leave his takings and get out of the cold and be on his way, then he took his receipt and got back into his warm car and drove off.
   Wednesday walked across the street carrying the metal case, and bought himself a coffee at the supermarket.
   “Afternoon, young man,” he said, with an avuncular chuckle, as he passed Shadow. “Cold enough for you?”
   He walked back across the street and took gray sacks and envelopes from people coming to deposit their earnings or their takings on this Saturday afternoon, a fine old security man in his funny pink earmuffs.
   Shadow bought some things to read—Turkey Hunting, People, and, because the cover picture of Bigfoot was so endearing, the Weekly World News–and stared out of the window.
   “Anything I can do to help?” asked a middle-aged black man with a white mustache. He seemed to be the manager.
   “Thanks, man, but no. I’m waiting for a phone call. My girlfriend’s car broke down.”
   “Probably the battery,” said the man. “People forget those things only last three, maybe four years. It’s not like they cost a fortune.”
   “Tell me about it,” said Shadow.
   “Hang in there, big guy,” said the manager, and he went back into the supermarket. The snow had turned the street scene into the interior of a snow globe, perfect in all its details.
   Shadow watched, impressed. Unable to hear the conversations across the street, he felt it was like watching a fine silent movie performance, all pantomime and expression: the old security guard was gruff, earnest—a little bumbling perhaps, but enormously well-meaning. Everyone who gave him their money walked away a little happier from having met him.
   And then the cops drew up outside the bank, and Shadow’s heart sank. Wednesday tipped his cap to them, and ambled over to the police car. He said his hellos and shook hands through the open window, and nodded, then hunted through his pockets until he found a business card and a letter, and passed them through the window of the car. Then he sipped his coffee.
   The telephone rang. Shadow picked up the handpiece and did his best to sound bored. “A1 Security Services,” he said.
   “Can I speak to A. Haddock?” asked the cop across the street.
   “This is Andy Haddock speaking,” said Shadow.
   “Yeah, Mister Haddock, this is the police,” said the cop in the car across the street. “You’ve got a man at the First Illinois Bank on the corner of Market and Second.”
   “Uh, yeah. That’s right. Jimmy O’German. And what seems to be the problem, officer? Jim behaving himself? He’s not been drinking?”
   “No problem, sir. Your man is just fine, sir. Just wanted to make certain everything was in order.”
   “You tell Jim that if he’s caught drinking again, officer, he’s fired. You got that? Out of a job. Out on his ass. We have zero tolerance at A1 Security.”
   “I really don’t think it’s my place to tell him that, sir. He’s doing a fine job. We’re just concerned because something like this really ought to be done by two personnel. It’s risky, having one unarmed guard dealing with such large amounts of money.”
   “Tell me about it. Or more to the point, you tell those cheapskates down at the First Illinois about it. These are my men I’m putting on the line, officer. Good men. Men like you.” Shadow found himself warming to this identity. He could feel himself becoming Andy Haddock, chewed cheap cigar in his ashtray, a stack of paperwork to get to this Saturday afternoon, a home in Schaumburg and a mistress in a little apartment on Lake Shore Drive. “Y’know, you sound like a bright young man, officer, uh…”
   “Myerson.”
   “Officer Myerson. You need a little weekend work, or you wind up leaving the force, any reason, you give us a call. We always need good men. You got my card?”
   “Yes sir.”
   “You hang onto it,” said Andy Haddock. “You call me.”
   The police car drove off, and Wednesday shuffled back through the snow to deal with the small line of people who were waiting to give him their money.
   “She okay?” asked the manager, putting his head around the door. “Your girlfriend?”
   “It was the battery,” said Shadow. “Now I just got to wait.”
   “Women,” said the manager. “I hope yours is worth waiting for.”
   Winter darkness descended, the afternoon slowly graying into night. Lights went on. More people gave Wednesday their money. Suddenly, as if at some signal Shadow could not see, Wednesday walked over to the wall, removed the out-of-order signs, and trudged across the slushy road, heading for the parking lot. Shadow waited a minute, then followed him.
   Wednesday was sitting in the back of the car. He had opened the metal case, and was methodically laying everything he had been given out on the backseat in neat piles.
   “Drive,” he said. “We’re heading for the First Illinois Bank over on State Street.”
   “Repeat performance?” asked Shadow. “Isn’t that kind of pushing your luck?”
   “Not at all,” said Wednesday. “We’re going to do a little banking.”
   While Shadow drove, Wednesday sat in the backseat and removed the bills from the deposit bags in handfuls, leaving the checks and the credit card slips, and taking the cash from some, although not all, of the envelopes. He dropped the cash back into the metal case. Shadow pulled up outside the bank, stopping the car about fifty yards down the road, well out of camera range. Wednesday got out of the car and pushed the envelopes through the night deposit slot. Then he opened the night safe, and dropped in the gray bags. He closed it again.
   He climbed into the passenger seat. “You’re heading for I-90,” said Wednesday. “Follow the signs west for Madison.”
   Shadow began to drive.
   Wednesday looked back at the bank they were leaving. “There, my boy,” he said, cheerfully, “that will confuse everything. Now, to get the really big money, you need to do that at about four-thirty on a Sunday morning, when the clubs and the bars drop off their Saturday night’s takings. Hit the right bank, the right guy making the drop-off-they tend to pick them big and honest, and sometimes have a couple of bouncers accompany them, but they aren’t necessarily smart—and you can walk away with a quarter of a million dollars for an evening’s work.”
   “If it’s that easy,” said Shadow, “how come everybody doesn’t do it?”
   “It’s not an entirely risk-free occupation,” said Wednesday, “especially not at four-thirty in the morning.”
   “You mean the cops are more suspicious at four-thirty in the morning?”
   “Not at all. But the bouncers are. And things can get awkward.”
   He flicked through a sheaf of fifties, added a smaller stack of twenties, weighed them in his hand, then passed them over to Shadow. “Here,” he said. “Your first week’s wages.”
   Shadow pocketed the money without counting it. “So, that’s what you do?” he asked. “To make money?”
   “Rarely. Only when a great deal of cash is needed fast. On the whole, I make my money from people who never know they’ve been taken, and who never complain, and who will frequently line up to be taken when I come back that way again.”
   “That Sweeney guy said you were a hustler.”
   “He was right. But that is the least of what I am. And the least of what I need you for, Shadow.”


* * *

   Snow spun through their headlights and into the windshield as they drove through the darkness. The effect was almost hypnotic.
   “This is the only country in the world,” said Wednesday, into the stillness, “that worries about what it is.”
   “What?”
   “The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.”
   “And…?”

   “Just thinking out loud.”
   “So you’ve been to lots of other countries, then?”
   Wednesday said nothing. Shadow glanced at him. “No,” said Wednesday, with a sigh. “No. I never have.”
   They stopped for gas, and Wednesday went into the rest room in his security guard jacket and his suitcase, and came out in a crisp, pale suit, brown shoes, and a knee-length brown coat that looked like it might be Italian.
   “So when we get to Madison, what then?”
   “Take Highway Fourteen west to Spring Green. We’ll be meeting everyone at a place called the House on the Rock. You been there?”
   “No,” said Shadow. “But I’ve seen the signs.”
   The signs for the House on the Rock were all around that part of the world: oblique, ambiguous signs all across Illinois and Minnesota and Wisconsin, probably as far away as Iowa, Shadow suspected, signs alerting you to the existence of the House on the Rock. Shadow had seen the signs, and wondered about them. Did the House balance perilously upon the Rock? What was so interesting about the Rock? About the House? He had given it a passing thought, but then forgotten it. Shadow was not in the habit of visiting roadside attractions.
   They left the interstate at Madison, and drove past the dome of the capitol building, another perfect snow-globe scene in the falling snow, and then they were off the interstate and driving down country roads. After almost an hour of driving through towns with names like Black Earth, they turned down a narrow driveway, past several enormous, snow-dusted flower pots entwined with lizardlike dragons. The tree-lined parking lot was almost empty.
   “They’ll be closing soon,” said Wednesday.
   “So what is this place?” asked Shadow, as they walked through the parking lot toward a low, unimpressive wooden building.
   “This is a roadside attraction,” said Wednesday. “One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.”
   “Come again?”
   “It’s perfectly simple,” said Wednesday. “In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would just be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or…well, you get the idea.”
   “There are churches all across the States, though,” said Shadow.
   “In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists’ offices. No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they’ve never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves being pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that.”
   “You have some pretty whacked-out theories,” said Shadow.
   “Nothing theoretical about it, young man,” said Wednesday. “You should have figured that out by now.”
   There was only one ticket window open. “We stop selling tickets in half an hour,” said the girl. “It takes at least two hours to walk around, you see.”
   Wednesday paid for their tickets in cash.
   “Where’s the rock?” asked Shadow.
   “Under the house,” said Wednesday.
   “Where’s the house?”
   Wednesday put his finger to his lips, and they walked forward. Farther in, a player piano was playing something that was intended to be Ravel’s Bolero. The place seemed to be a geometrically reconfigured 1960s bachelor pad, with open stone work, pile carpeting, and magnificently ugly mushroom-shaped stained-glass lampshades. Up a winding staircase was another room filled with knickknacks.
   “They say this was built by Frank Lloyd Wright’s evil twin,” said Wednesday. “Frank Lloyd Wrong.” He chuckled at his joke.
   “I saw that on a T-shirt,” said Shadow.
   Up and down more stairs, and now they were in a long, long room, made of glass, that protruded, needlelike, out over the leafless black-and-white countryside hundreds of feet below them. Shadow stood and watched the snow tumble and spin.
   “This is the House on the Rock?” he asked, puzzled.
   “More or less. This is the Infinity Room, part of the actual house, although a late addition. But no, my young friend, we have not scratched the tiniest surface of what the house has to offer.”
   “So according to your theory,” said Shadow, “Walt Disney World would be the holiest place in America.”
   Wednesday frowned, and stroked his beard. “Walt Disney bought some orange groves in the middle of Florida and built a tourist town on them. No magic there of any kind. I think there might be something real in the original Disneyland. There may be some power there, although twisted, and hard to access. But some parts of Florida are filled with real magic. You just have to keep your eyes open. Ah, for the mermaids of Weeki Wachee…Follow me, this way.”
   Everywhere was the sound of music: jangling, awkward music, ever so slightly off the beat and out of time. Wednesday took a five-dollar bill and put it into a change machine, receiving a handful of brass-colored metal coins in return. He tossed one to Shadow, who caught it, and, realizing that a small boy was watching him, held it up between forefinger and thumb and vanished it. The small boy ran over to his mother, who was inspecting one of the ubiquitous Santa Clauses—Over Six Thousand on Display! the signs read—and he tugged urgently at the hem of her coat.
   Shadow followed Wednesday outside briefly, and then followed the signs to the Streets of Yesterday.
   “Forty years ago Alex Jordan—his face is on the token you have palmed in your right hand, Shadow—began to build a house on a high jut of rock in a field he did not own, and even he could not have told you why. And people came to see him build it—the curious, and the puzzled, and those who were neither and who could not honestly have told you why they came. So he did what any sensible American male of his generation would do: he began to charge them money—nothing much. A nickel each, perhaps. Or a quarter. And he continued building, and the people kept coming.
   “So he took those quarters and nickels and made something even bigger and stranger. He built these warehouses on the ground beneath the house, and filled them with things for people to see, and then the people came to see them. Millions of people come here every year.”
   “Why?”
   But Wednesday simply smiled, and they walked into the dimly lit, tree-lined Streets of Yesterday. Prim-lipped Victorian china dolls stared in profusion through dusty store windows, like so many props from respectable horror films. Cobblestones under their feet, the darkness of a roof above their heads, jangling mechanical music in the background. They passed a glass box of broken puppets and an overgrown golden music box in a glass case. They passed the dentist’s and the drugstore (“Restore Potency! Use O’Leary’s Magnetical Belt!”).
   At the end of the street was a large glass box with a female mannequin inside it, dressed as a gypsy fortune-teller.
   “Now,” boomed Wednesday, over the mechanical music, “at the start of any quest or enterprise it behooves us to consult the Norns. So let us designate this Sybil our Urd, eh?” He dropped a brass-colored House on the Rock coin into the slot. With jagged, mechanical motions, the gypsy lifted her arm and lowered it once more. A slip of paper chunked out of the slot.
   Wednesday took it, read it, grunted, folded it up, and put it in his pocket.
   “Aren’t you going to show it to me? I’ll show you mine,” said Shadow.
   “A man’s fortune is his own affair,” said Wednesday, stiffly. “I would not ask to see yours.”
   Shadow put his own coin in the slot. He took his slip of paper. He read it.


Every Ending is a New Beginning.
Your Lucky Number is None.
Your Lucky Color is Dead.


Motto:
Like Father, Like Son.

   Shadow made a face. He folded the fortune up and put it in his inside pocket.
   They went farther in, down a red corridor, past rooms filled with empty chairs upon which rested violins and violas and cellos that played themselves, or seemed to, when fed a coin. Keys depressed, cymbals, crashed, pipes blew compressed air into clarinets and oboes. Shadow observed, with a wry amusement, that the bows of the stringed instruments, played by mechanical arms, never actually touched the strings, which were often loose or missing. He wondered whether all the sounds he heard were made by wind and percussion, or whether there were tapes as well.
   They had walked for what felt like several miles when they came to a room called the Mikado, one wall of which was a nineteenth-century pseudo-Oriental nightmare, in which beetle-browed mechanical drummers banged cymbals and drums while staring out from their dragon-encrusted lair. Currently, they were majestically torturing Saint-Saлns’s Danse Macabre.
   Czernobog sat on a bench in the wall facing the Mikado machine, tapping out the time with his fingers. Pipes fluted, bells jangled.
   Wednesday sat next to him. Shadow decided to remain standing. Czernobog extended his left hand, shook Wednesday’s, shook Shadow’s. “Well met,” he said. Then he sat back, apparently enjoying the music.
   The Danse Macabre came to a tempestuous and discordant end. That all the artificial instruments were ever so slightly out of tune added to the otherworldliness of the place. A new piece began.
   “How was your bank robbery?” asked Czernobog. “It went well?” He stood, reluctant to leave the Mikado and its thundering, jangling music.
   “Slick as a snake in a barrel of butter,” said Wednesday.
   “I get a pension from the slaughterhouse,” said Czernobog. “I do not ask for more.”
   “It won’t last forever,” said Wednesday. “Nothing does.”
   More corridors, more musical machines. Shadow became aware that they were not following the path through the rooms intended for tourists, but seemed to be following a different route of Wednesday’s own devising. They were going down a slope, and Shadow, confused, wondered if they had already been that way.
   Czernobog grasped Shadow’s arm. “Quickly, come here,” he said, pulling him over to a large glass box by a wall. It contained a diorama of a tramp asleep in a churchyard in front of a church door. The Drunkard’s Dream, said the label, explaining that it was a nineteenth-century penny-in-the-slot machine, originally from an English railway station. The coin slot had been modified to take the brass House on the Rock coins.
   “Put in the money,” said Czernobog.

   “Why?” asked Shadow.
   “You must see. I show you.”
   Shadow inserted his coin. The drunk in the graveyard raised his bottle to his lips. One of the gravestones flipped over, revealing a grasping corpse; a headstone turned around, flowers replaced by a grinning skull. A wraith appeared on the right of the church, while on the left of the church something with a half-glimpsed, pointed, unsettlingly birdlike face, a pale, Boschian nightmare, glided smoothly from a headstone into the shadows and was gone. Then the church door opened, a priest came out, and the ghosts, haunts, and corpses vanished, and only the priest and the drunk were left alone in the graveyard. The priest looked down at the drunk disdainfully, and backed through the open door, which closed behind him, leaving the drunk on his own.
   The clockwork story was deeply unsettling. Much more unsettling, thought Shadow, than clockwork has any right to be.
   “You know why I show that to you?” asked Czernobog.
   “No.”
   “That is the world as it is. That is the real world. It is there, in that box.”
   They wandered through a blood-colored room filled with old theatrical organs, huge organ pipes, and what appeared to be enormous copper brewing vats, liberated from a brewery.
   “Where are we going?” asked Shadow.
   “The carousel,” said Czernobog.
   “But we’ve passed signs to the carousel a dozen times already.”
   “He goes his way. We travel a spiral. The quickest way is sometimes the longest.”
   Shadow’s feet were beginning to hurt, and he found this sentiment to be extremely unlikely.
   A mechanical machine played “Octopus’s Garden” in a room that went up for many stories, the center of which was filled entirely with a replica of a great black whalelike beast, with a life-sized replica of a boat in its vast fiberglass mouth. They passed on from there to a Travel Hall, where they saw the car covered with tiles and the functioning Rube Goldberg chicken device and the rusting Burma Shave ads on the wall.


Life is Hard
It’s Toil and Trouble
Keep your Jawline
Free from Stubble
Burma Shave

   read one, and


He undertook to overtake
The road was on a bend
From now on the Undertaker
Is his only friend
Burma Shave

   and they were at the bottom of a ramp now, with an ice-cream shop in front of them. It was nominally open, but the girl washing down the surfaces had a closed look on her face, so they walked past it into the pizzeria-cafeteria, empty but for an elderly black man wearing a bright checked suit and canary-yellow gloves. He was a small man, the kind of little old man who looked as if the passing of the years had shrunk him, eating an enormous, many-scooped ice-cream sundae, drinking a supersized mug of coffee. A black cigarillo was burning in the ashtray in front of him.
   “Three coffees,” said Wednesday to Shadow. He went to the rest room.
   Shadow bought the coffees and took them over to Czernobog, who was sitting with the old black man and was smoking a cigarette surreptitiously, as if he were scared of being caught. The other man, happily toying with his sundae, mostly ignored his cigarillo, but as Shadow approached he picked it up, inhaled deeply, and blew two smoke rings—first one large one, then another, smaller one, which passed neatly through the first—and he grinned, as if he were astonishingly pleased with himself.
   “Shadow, this is Mister Nancy,” said Czernobog.
   The old man got to his feet and thrust out his yellow-gloved right hand. “Good to meet you,” he said with a dazzling smile. “I know who you must be. You’re workin’ for the old one-eye bastard, aren’t you?” There was a faint twang in his voice, a hint of a patois that might have been West Indian.
   “I work for Mister Wednesday,” said Shadow. “Yes. Please, sit down.”
   Czernobog inhaled on his cigarette.
   “I think,” he pronounced, gloomily, “that our kind, we like the cigarettes so much because they remind us of the offerings that once they burned for us, the smoke rising up as they sought our approval or our favor.”
   “They never gave me nothin’ like that,” said Nancy. “Best I could hope for was a pile of fruit to eat, maybe curried goat, something slow and cold and tall to drink, and a big old high-titty woman to keep me company.” He grinned white teeth, and winked at Shadow.
   “These days,” said Czernobog, his expression unchanged, “we have nothing.”
   “Well, I don’t get anywhere near as much fruit as I used to,” said Mr. Nancy, his eyes shining. “But there still ain’t nothin’ out there in the world for my money that can beat a big old high-titty woman. Some folk you talk to, they say it’s the booty you got to inspect at first, but I’m here to tell you that it’s the titties that still crank my engine on a cold mornin’.” Nancy began to laugh, a wheezing, rattling, good-natured laugh, and Shadow found himself liking the old man despite himself.
   Wednesday returned from the rest room, and shook hands with Nancy. “Shadow, you want something to eat? A slice of pizza? Or a sandwich?”
   “I’m not hungry,” said Shadow.
   “Let me tell you somethin’,” said Mr. Nancy. “It can be a long time between meals. Someone offers you food, you say yes. I’m no longer young as I was, but I can tell you this, you never say no to the opportunity to piss, to eat, or to get half an hour’s shut-eye. You follow me?”
   “Yes. But I’m really not hungry.”
   “You’re a big one,” said Nancy, staring into Shadow’s light gray eyes with old eyes the color of mahogany, “a tall drink of water, but I got to tell you, you don’t look too bright. I got a son, stupid as a man who bought his stupid at a two-for-one sale, and you remind me of him.”
   “If you don’t mind, I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Shadow.
   “Being called dumb as a man who slept late the mornin’ they handed out brains?”
   “Being compared to a member of your family.”
   Mr. Nancy stubbed out his cigarillo, then he flicked an imaginary speck of ash off his yellow gloves. “You may not be the worst choice old One-Eye could have made, come to that.” He looked up at Wednesday. “You got any idea how many of us there’s goin’ to be here tonight?”
   “I sent the message out to everyone I could find,” said Wednesday. “Obviously not everyone is going to be able to come. And some of them,” with a pointed look at Czernobog, “might not want to. But I think we can confidently expect several dozen of us. And the word will travel.”
   They made their way past a display of suits of armor (“Victorian fake,” pronounced Wednesday as they passed the glassed—in display, “modern fake, twelfth-century helm on a seventeenth-century reproduction, fifteenth-century left gauntlet…”) and then Wednesday pushed through an exit door, circled them around the outside of the building (“I can’t be doin’ with all these ins and outs,” said Nancy, “I’m not as young as I used to be, and I come from warmer climes”) along a covered walkway, in through another exit door, and they were in the carousel room.
   Calliope music played: a Strauss waltz, stirring and occasionally discordant. The wall as they entered was hung with antique carousel horses, hundreds of them, some in need of a lick of paint, others in need of a good dusting; above them hung dozens of winged angels constructed rather obviously from female store-window mannequins; some of them bared their sexless breasts; some had lost their wigs and stared baldly and blindly down from the darkness.
   And then there was the carousel.
   A sign proclaimed it was the largest in the world, said how much it weighed, how many thousand lightbulbs were to be found in the chandeliers that hung from it in Gothic profusion, and forbade anyone from climbing on it or from riding on the animals.
   And such animals! Shadow stared, impressed in spite of himself, at the hundreds of full-sized creatures who circled on the platform of the carousel. Real creatures, imaginary creatures, and transformations of the two: each creature was different. He saw mermaid and merman, centaur and unicorn, elephants (one huge, one tiny), bulldog, frog and phoenix, zebra, tiger, manticore and basilisk, swans pulling a carriage, a white ox, a fox, twin walruses, even a sea serpent, all of them brightly colored and more than real: each rode the platform as the waltz came to an end and a new waltz began. The carousel did not even slow down.
   “What’s it for?” asked Shadow. “I mean, okay, world’s biggest, hundreds of animals, thousands of lightbulbs, and it goes around all the time, and no one ever rides it.”
   “It’s not there to be ridden, not by people,” said Wednesday. “It’s there to be admired. It’s there to be.”
   “Like a prayer wheel goin’ around and round,” said Mr. Nancy. “Accumulating power.”
   “So where are we meeting everyone?” asked Shadow. “I thought you said that we were meeting them here. But the place is empty.”
   Wednesday grinned his scary grin. “Shadow,” he said. “You’re asking too many questions. You are not paid to ask questions.”
   “Sorry.”
   “Now, stand over here and help us up,” said Wednesday, and he walked over to the platform on one side, with a description of the carousel on it, and a warning that the carousel was not to be ridden.

   Shadow thought of saying something, but instead he helped them, one by one, up onto the ledge. Wednesday seemed profoundly heavy, Czernobog climbed up himself, only using Shadow’s shoulder to steady himself, Nancy seemed to weigh nothing at all. Each of the old men climbed out onto the ledge, and then, with a step and a hop, they walked out onto the circling carousel platform.
   “Well?” barked Wednesday. “Aren’t you coming?”
   Shadow, not without a certain amount of hesitation, and a hasty look around for any House on the Rock personnel who might be watching, swung himself up onto the ledge beside the World’s Largest Carousel. Shadow was amused, and a little puzzled, to realize that he was far more concerned about breaking the rules by climbing onto the carousel than he had been aiding and abetting this afternoon’s bank robbery.
   Each of the old men selected a mount. Wednesday climbed onto a golden wolf. Czernobog climbed onto an armored centaur, its face hidden by a metal helmet. Nancy, chuckling, slithered up onto the back of an enormous, leaping lion, captured by the sculptor mid-roar. He patted the side of the lion. The Strauss waltz carried them around, majestically.
   Wednesday was smiling, and Nancy was laughing delightedly, an old man’s cackle, and even the dour Czernobog seemed to be enjoying himself. Shadow felt as if a weight were suddenly lifted from his back: three old men were enjoying themselves, riding the World’s Largest Carousel. So what if they all did get thrown out of the place? Wasn’t it worth it, worth anything, to say that you had ridden on the World’s Largest Carousel? Wasn’t it worth it to have traveled on one of those glorious monsters?
   Shadow inspected a bulldog, and a mer-creature, and an elephant with a golden howdah, and then he climbed on the back of a creature with an eagle’s head and the body of a tiger, and held on tight.
   The rhythm of the “Blue Danube” waltz rippled and rang and sang in his head, the lights of a thousand chandeliers glinted and prismed, and for a heartbeat Shadow was a child again, and all it took to make him happy was to ride the carousel: he stayed perfectly still, riding his eagle-tiger at the center of everything, and the world revolved around him.
   Shadow heard himself laugh, over the sound of the music. He was happy. It was as if the last thirty-six hours had never happened, as if the last three years had not happened, as if his life had evaporated into the daydream of a small child, riding the carousel in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, on his first trip back to the States, a marathon journey by ship and by car, his mother standing there, watching him proudly, and himself sucking his melting Popsicle, holding on tightly, hoping that the music would never stop, the carousel would never slow, the ride would never end. He was going around and around and around again…
   Then the lights went out, and Shadow saw the gods.