“You don’t mind if I do?”
   “Go right ahead.”
   The driver used a Bic disposable lighter, and it was in the yellow light of the flame that Shadow saw the man’s face, actually saw it for the first time, and recognized him, and began to understand.
   Shadow knew that thin face. He knew that there would be close-cropped orange hair beneath the black driver’s cap, cut close to the scalp. He knew that when the man’s lips smiled they would crease into a network of rough scars.
   “You’re looking good, big guy,” said the driver.
   “Low Key?” Shadow stared at his old cellmate warily.
   Prison friendships are good things: they get you through bad places and through dark times. But a prison friendship ends at the prison gates, and a prison friend who reappears in your life is at best a mixed blessing.
   “Jesus. Low Key Lyesmith,” said Shadow, and then he heard what he was saying and he understood. “Loki,” he said. “Loki Lie-Smith.”
   “You’re slow,” said Loki, “but you get there in the end.” And his lips twisted into a scarred smile and embers danced in the shadows of his eyes.


* * *

   They sat in Shadow’s room in the abandoned motel, sitting on the bed, at opposite ends of the mattress. The sounds from the fat kid’s room had pretty much stopped.
   “You were lucky we were inside together,” said Loki. “You would never have survived your first year without me.”
   “You couldn’t have walked out if you wanted.”
   “It’s easier just to do the time.” He paused. Then, “You got to understand the god thing. It’s not magic. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified, essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize.” He paused. “And then one day they forget about you, and they don’t believe in you, and they don’t sacrifice, and they don’t care, and the next thing you know you’re running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third.”
   “Why were you in my cell?”
   “Coincidence. Pure and simple.”
   “And now you’re driving for the opposition.”
   “If you want to call them that. It depends where you’re standing. The way I figure it, I’m driving for the winning team.”
   “But you and Wednesday, you were from the same, you’re both-”
   “Norse pantheon. We’re both from the Norse pantheon. Is that what you’re trying to say?”
   “Yeah.”
   “So?”
   Shadow hesitated. “You must have been friends. Once.”
   “No. We were never friends. I’m not sorry he’s dead. He was just holding the rest of us back. With him gone, the rest of them are going to have to face up to the facts: it’s change or die, evolve or perish. He’s gone. War’s over.”
   Shadow looked at him, puzzled. “You aren’t that stupid,” he said. “You were always so sharp. Wednesday’s death isn’t going to end anything. It’s just pushed all of the ones who were on the fence over the edge.”
   “Mixing metaphors, Shadow. Bad habit.”
   “Whatever,” said Shadow. “It’s still true. Jesus. His death did in an instant what he’d spent the last few months trying to do. It united them. It gave them something to believe in.”
   “Perhaps.” Loki shrugged. “As far as I know, the thinking on this side of the fence was that with the troublemaker out of the way, the trouble would also be gone. It’s not any of my business, though. I just drive.”
   “So tell me,” said Shadow, “why does everyone care about me? They act like I’m important. Why does it matter what I do?”
   “Damned if I know. You were important to us because you were important to Wednesday. As for the why of it…I guess it’s just another one of life’s little mysteries.”
   “I’m tired of mysteries.”
   “Yeah? I think they add a kind of zest to the world. Like salt in a stew.”
   “So you’re their driver. You drive for all of them?”
   “Whoever needs me,” said Loki. “It’s a living.”
   He raised his wristwatch to his face, pressed a button: the dial glowed a gentle blue, which illuminated his face, giving it a haunting, haunted appearance. “Five to midnight. Time,” said Loki. “You coming?”
   Shadow took a deep breath. “I’m coming,” he said.
   They walked down the dark motel corridor until they reached room 5.
   Loki took a box of matches from his pocket and thumb-nailed a match into flame. The momentary flare hurt Shadow’s eyes. A candle wick flickered and caught. And another. Loki lit a new match, and continued to light the candle stubs: they were on the windowsills and on the headboard of the bed and on the sink in the corner of the room.
   The bed had been hauled from its position against the wall into the middle of the motel room, leaving a few feet of space between the bed and the wall on each side. There were sheets draped over the bed, old motel sheets, moth-holed and stained. On top of the sheets lay Wednesday, perfectly still.
   He was dressed in the pale suit he had been wearing when he was shot. The right side of his face was untouched, perfect, unmarred by blood. The left side of his face was a ragged mess, and the left shoulder and front of the suit was spattered with dark spots. His hands were at his side’s. The expression on that wreck of a face was far from peaceful: it looked hurt-a soul-hurt, a real down-deep hurt, filled with hatred and anger and raw craziness. And, on some level, it looked satisfied.
   Shadow imagined Mr. Jacquel’s practiced hands smoothing that hatred and pain away, rebuilding a face for Wednesday with mortician’s wax and makeup, giving him a final peace and dignity that even death had denied him.
   Still, the body seemed no smaller in death. And it still smelled faintly of Jack Daniel’s.
   The wind from the plains was rising: he could hear it howling around the old motel at the imaginary center of America. The candles on the windowsill guttered and flickered.
   He could hear footsteps in the hallway. Someone knocked on a door, called “Hurry up please, it’s time,” and they began to shuffle in, heads lowered.
   Town came in first, followed by Media and Mr. Nancy and Czernobog. Last of all came the fat kid: he had fresh red bruises on his face, and his lips were moving all the time, as if he were reciting some words to himself, but he was making no sound. Shadow found himself feeling sorry for him.
   Informally, without a word being spoken, they ranged themselves about the body, each an arm’s length away from the next. The atmosphere in the room was religious-deeply religious, in a way that Shadow had never previously experienced. There was no sound but the howling of the wind and the crackling of the candles.
   “We are come together, here in this godless place,” said Loki, “to pass on the body of this individual to those who will dispose of it properly according to the rites. If anyone would like to say something, say it now.”
   “Not me,” said Town. “I never properly met the guy. And this whole thing makes me feel uncomfortable.”
   Czernobog said, “These actions will have consequences. You know that? This can only be the start of it all.”
   The fat kid started to giggle, a high-pitched, girlish noise. He said, “Okay. Okay, I’ve got it.” And then, all on one note, he recited:


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…


   And then he broke off, his brow creasing. He said, “Shit. I used to know the whole thing,” and he rubbed his temples and made a face and was quiet.
   And then they were all looking at Shadow. The wind was screaming now. He didn’t know what to say. He said, “This whole thing is pitiful. Half of you killed him or had a hand in his death. Now you’re giving us his body. Great. He was an irascible old fuck but I drank his mead and I’m still working for him. That’s all.”
   Media said, “In a world where people die every day, I think the important thing to remember is that for each moment of sorrow we get when people leave this world there’s a corresponding moment of joy when a new baby comes into this world. That first wail is-well, it’s magic, isn’t it? Perhaps it’s a hard thing to say, but joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies. That’s how well they go together. I think we should all take a moment to meditate on that.”
   And Mr. Nancy cleared his throat and said, “So. I got to say it, because nobody else here will. We are at the center of this place: a land that has no time for gods, and here at the center it has less time for us than anywhere. It is a no-man’s-land, a place of truce, and we observe our truces, here. We have no choice. So. You give us the body of our friend. We accept it. You will pay for this, murder for murder, blood for blood.”
   Town said, “Whatever. You could save yourselves a lot of time and effort by going home and shooting yourselves in the heads. Cut out the middleman.”
   “Fuck you,” said Czernobog. “Fuck you and fuck your mother and fuck the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. You will not even die in battle. No warrior will taste your blood. No one alive will take your life. You will die a soft, poor death. You will die with a kiss on your lips and a lie in your heart.”
   “Leave it, old man,” said Town.
   “The blood-dimmed tide is loose,” said the fat kid. “I think that comes next.”
   The wind howled.
   “Okay,” said Loki. “He’s yours. We’re done. Take the old bastard away.”
   He made a gesture with his fingers, and Town, Media, and the fat kid left the room. He smiled at Shadow. “Call no man happy, huh, kid?” he said. And then he, too, walked away.
   “What happens now?” asked Shadow.
   “Now we wrap him up,” said Anansi. “And we take him away from here.”
   They wrapped the body in the motel sheets, wrapped it well in its impromptu shroud, so there was no body to be seen, and they could carry it. The two old men walked to each end of the body, but Shadow said, “Let me see something,” and he bent his knees and slipped his arms around the white-sheeted figure, pushed him up and over his shoulder. He straightened his knees, until he was standing, more or less easily. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got him. Let’s put him into the back of the car.”
   Czernobog looked as if he were about to argue, but he closed his mouth. He spat on his forefinger and thumb and began to snuff the candles between his fingertips. Shadow could hear them fizz as he walked from the darkening room.
   Wednesday was heavy, but Shadow could cope, if he walked steadily. He had no choice. Wednesday’s words were in his head with every step he took along the corridor, and he could taste the sour-sweetness of mead in the back of his throat. You protect me. You transport me from place to place. You run errands. In an emergency, but only in an emergency, you hurt people who need to be hurt. In the unlikely event of my death, you will hold my vigil…
   Mr. Nancy opened the motel lobby door for him, then hurried over and opened the back of the bus. The other four were already standing by their Humvee, watching them as if they could not wait to be off. Loki had put his driver’s cap back on. The cold wind tugged at Shadow as he walked, whipped at the sheets.
   He placed Wednesday down as gently as he could in the back of the bus.

   Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned. Town stood there with his hand out. He was holding something.
   “Here,” said Mr. Town, “Mister World wanted you to have this.”
   It was a glass eye. There was a hairline crack down the middle of it, and a tiny chip gone from the front.
   “We found it in the Masonic Hall, when we were cleaning up. Keep it for luck. God knows you’ll need it.”
   Shadow closed his hand around the eye. He wished he could come back with something smart and sharp, but Town was already back at the Humvee, and climbing up into the car; and Shadow still couldn’t think of anything clever to say.


* * *

   They drove east. Dawn found them in Princeton, Missouri. Shadow had not slept yet.
   Nancy said, “Anywhere you want us to drop you? If I were you, I’d rustle up some ID and head for Canada. Or Mexico.”
   “I’m sticking with you guys,” said Shadow. “It’s what Wednesday would have wanted.”
   “You aren’t working for him anymore. He’s dead. Once we drop his body off, you are free to go.”
   “And do what?”
   “Keep out of the way, while the war is on,” said Nancy. He flipped his turn signal, and took a left.
   “Hide yourself, for a little time,” said Czernobog. “Then, when this is over, you will come back to me, and I will finish the whole thing.”
   Shadow said, “Where are we taking the body?”
   “Virginia. There’s a tree,” said Nancy.
   “A world tree,” said Czernobog with gloomy satisfaction. “We had one in my part of the world. But ours grew under the world, not above it.”
   “We put him at the foot of the tree,” said Nancy. “We leave him there. We let you go. We drive south. There’s a battle. Blood is shed. Many die. The world changes, a little.”
   “You don’t want me at your battle? I’m pretty big. I’m good in a fight.”
   Nancy turned his head to Shadow and smiled-the first real smile Shadow had seen on Mr. Nancy’s face since he had rescued Shadow from the Lumber County Jail. “Most of this battle will be fought in a place you cannot go, and you cannot touch.”
   “In the hearts and the minds of the people,” said Czernobog. “Like at the big roundabout.”
   “Huh?”
   “The carousel,” said Mr. Nancy.
   “Oh,” said Shadow. “Backstage. I got it. Like the desert with the bones in.”
   Mr. Nancy raised his head. “Every time I figure you don’t have enough sense to bring guts to a bear, you surprise me. Yeah, that’s where the real battle will happen. Everythin’ else will just be flash and thunder.”
   “Tell me about the vigil,” said Shadow.
   “Someone has to stay with the body. It’s a tradition. We’ll find somebody.”
   “He wanted me to do it.”
   “No,” said Czernobog. “It will kill you. Bad, bad, bad idea.”
   “Yeah? It’ll kill me? To stay with his body?”
   “It’s not what I’d want at my funeral,” said Mr. Nancy. “When I die, I just want them to plant me somewhere warm. And then when pretty women walk over my grave I would grab their ankles, like in that movie.”
   “I never saw that movie,” said Czernobog.
   “Of course you did. It’s right at the end. It’s the high school movie. All the children goin’ to the prom.”
   Czernobog shook his head.
   Shadow said, “The film’s called Carrie, Mr. Czernobog. Okay, one of you tell me about the vigil.”
   Nancy said, “You tell him. I’m drivin’.”
   “I never heard of no film called Carrie. You tell him.”
   Nancy said, “The person on the vigil-gets tied to the tree. Just like Wednesday was. And then they hang there for nine days and nine nights. No food, no water. All alone. At the end they cut the person down, and if they lived…well, it could happen. And Wednesday will have had his vigil.”
   Czernobog said, “Maybe Alviss will send us one of his people. A dwarf could survive it.”
   “I’ll do it,” said Shadow.
   “No,” said Mr. Nancy.
   “Yes,” said Shadow.
   The two old men were silent Then Nancy said, “Why?”
   “Because it’s the kind of thing a living person would do,” said Shadow.
   “You are crazy,” said Czernobog.
   “Maybe. But I’m going to hold Wednesday’s vigil.”
   When they stopped for gas Czernobog announced he felt sick and wanted to ride in the front. Shadow didn’t mind moving to the back of the bus. He could stretch out more, and sleep.
   They drove on in silence. Shadow felt that he’d made a decision; something big and strange.
   “Hey. Czernobog,” said Mr. Nancy, after a while. “You check out the technical boy back at the motel? He was not happy. He’s been screwin’ with something that screwed him right back. That’s the biggest trouble with the new kids-they figure they know every thin’, and you can’t teach them nothin’ but the hard way.”
   “Good,” said Czernobog.
   Shadow was stretched out full length on the seat in the back. He felt like two people, or more than two. There was part of him that felt gently exhilarated: he had done something. He had moved. It wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t wanted to live, but he did want to live, and that made all the difference. He hoped he would live through this, but he was willing to die, if that was what it took to be alive. And, for a moment he thought that the whole thing was funny, just the funniest thing in the world; and he wondered if Laura would appreciate the joke.
   There was another part of him-maybe it was Mike Ainsel, he thought, vanished off into nothing at the press of a button in the Lakeside Police Department-who was still trying to figure it all out, trying to see the big picture..
   “Hidden Indians,” he said out loud.
   “What?” came Czernobog’s irritated croak from the front seat.
   “The pictures you’d get to color in as kids. ‘Can you see the hidden Indians in this picture? There are ten Indians in this picture, can you find them all?’ And at first glance you could only see the waterfall and the rocks and the trees, then you see that if you just tip the picture on its side that shadow is an Indian…” He yawned.
   “Sleep,” suggested Czernobog.
   “But the big picture,” said Shadow. Then he slept, and dreamed of hidden indians.


* * *

   The tree was in Virginia. It was a long way away from anywhere, on the back of an old farm. To get to the farm they had had to drive for almost an hour south from Blacksburg, to drive roads with names like Pennywinkle Branch and Rooster Spur. They got turned around twice and Mr. Nancy and Czernobog both lost their tempers with Shadow and with each other.
   They stopped to get directions at a tiny general store, set at the bottom of the hill in the place where the road forked. An old man came out of the back of the store and stared at them: he wore Oshkosh B’Gosh denim overalls and nothing else, not even shoes. Czernobog selected a pickled hog’s foot from a jar on the counter and went outside to eat it on the deck, while the man in the overalls drew Mr. Nancy maps on the back of napkins, marking off turnings and local landmarks. They set off once more, with Mr. Nancy driving, and they were there in ten minutes. A sign on the gate said ASH.
   Shadow got out of the bus and opened the gate. The bus drove through, jolting through the meadowland. Shadow closed the gate. He walked a little behind the bus, stretching his legs, jogging when the bus got too far in front of him, enjoying the sensation of moving his body.
   He had lost all sense of time on the drive from Kansas. Had they been driving for two days? Three days? He did not know.
   The body in the back of the bus did not seem to be rotting. He could smell it-a faint odor of Jack Daniel’s, overlaid with something that might have been sour honey. But the smell was not unpleasant. From time to time he would take out the glass eye from his pocket and look at it: it was shattered deep inside, fractured from what he imagined was the impact of a bullet, but apart from a chip to one side of the iris the surface was unmarred. Shadow would run it through his hands, palming it, rolling it, pushing it along with his fingers. It was a ghastly souvenir, but oddly comforting: and he suspected that it would have amused Wednesday to know that his eye had wound up in Shadow’s pocket.
   The farmhouse was dark and shut up. The meadows were overgrown and seemed abandoned. The farm roof was crumbling at the back; it was covered in black plastic sheeting. They jolted over a ridge and Shadow saw the tree.
   It was silver-gray and it was higher than the farmhouse. It was the most beautiful tree Shadow had ever seen: spectral and yet utterly real and almost perfectly symmetrical. It also looked instantly familiar: he wondered if he had dreamed it, then realized that no, he had seen it before, or a representation of it, many times. It was Wednesday’s silver tie pin.
   The VW bus jolted and bumped across the meadow, and came to a stop about twenty feet from the trunk of the tree. There were three women standing by the tree. At first glance Shadow thought that they were the Zorya, but no, they were three women he did not know. They looked tired and bored, as if they had been standing there for a long time. Each of them held a wooden ladder. The biggest also carried a brown sack. They looked like a set of Russian dolls: a tall one-she was Shadow’s height, or even taller-a middle-sized one, and a woman so short and hunched that at first glance Shadow wrongly supposed her to be a child. They looked so much alike that Shadow was certain that the women must be sisters.
   The smallest of the women dropped to a curtsy when the bus drew up. The other two just stared. They were sharing a cigarette, and they smoked it down to the filter before one of them stubbed it out against a root.
   Czernobog opened the back of the bus and the biggest of the women pushed past him, and, as easily as if it were a sack of flour, she lifted Wednesday’s body out of the back and carried it to the tree. She laid it in front of the tree, about ten feet from the trunk. She and her sisters unwrapped Wednesday’s body. He looked worse by daylight than he had by candlelight in the motel room, and after one quick glance Shadow looked away. The women arranged his clothes, tidied his suit, then placed him at the corner of the sheet and wound it around him once more.
   Then the women came over to Shadow.
   –You are the one? the biggest of them asked.
   –The one who will mourn the All-Father? asked the middle-sized one.
   –You have chosen to take the vigil? asked the smallest.
   Shadow nodded. Afterward, he was unable to remember whether he had actually heard their voices. Perhaps he had simply understood what they had meant from their looks and their eyes.
   Mr. Nancy, who had gone back to the house to use the bathroom, came walking back to the tree. He was smoking a cigarillo. He looked thoughtful.
   “Shadow,” he called. “You really don’t have to do this. We can find somebody more suited.”
   “I’m doing it,” said Shadow, simply.
   “And if you die?” asked Mr. Nancy. “If it kills you?”
   “Then,” said Shadow, “it kills me.”
   Mr. Nancy flicked his cigarillo into the meadow, angrily. “I said you had shit for brains, and you still have shit for brains. Can’t see when somebody’s tryin’ to give you an out?”
   “I’m sorry,” said Shadow. He didn’t say anything else. Nancy walked back to the bus.
   Czernobog walked over to Shadow. He did not look pleased. “You must come through this alive,” he said. “Come through this safely for me.” And then he tapped his knuckle gently against Shadow’s forehead and said, “Bam!” He squeezed Shadow’s shoulder, patted his arm, and went to join Mr. Nancy.
   The biggest woman, whose name seemed to be Urtha or Urder-Shadow could not repeat it back to. her to her satisfaction-told him, in pantomime, to take off the clothes.
   “All of them?”
   The big woman shrugged. Shadow stripped to his briefs and T-shirt. The women propped the ladders against the tree. One of the ladders-it was painted by hand, with little flowers and leaves twining up the struts-they pointed out to him.
   He climbed the nine steps. Then, at their urging, he stepped onto a low branch.
   The middle woman tipped out the contents of the sack onto the meadow-grass. It was filled with a tangle of thin ropes, brown with age and dirt, and the woman began to sort them out into lengths, and to lay them carefully on the ground beside Wednesday’s body.
   They climbed their own ladders now, and they began to knot the ropes, intricate and elegant knots, and they wrapped the ropes first about the tree, and then about Shadow. Unembarrassed, like midwives or nurses or those who lay out corpses, they removed his T-shirt and briefs, then they bound him, never tightly, but firmly and finally. He was amazed at how comfortably the ropes and the knots bore his weight. The ropes went under his arms, between his legs, around his waist, his ankles, his chest, binding him to the tree.
   The final rope was tied, loosely, about his neck. It was, initially, uncomfortable, but his weight was well distributed, and none of the ropes cut his flesh.
   His feet were five feet above the ground. The tree was leafless and huge, its branches black against the gray sky, its bark a smooth silvery gray.
   They took the ladders away. There was a moment of panic as all his weight was taken by the ropes, and he dropped a few inches. Still, he made no sound.
   The women placed the body, wrapped in its motel-sheet shroud, at the foot of the tree, and they left him there.
   They left him there alone.

Chapter 15

   Hang me, O hang me, and I’ll be dead and gone,
   Hang me, O hang me, and I’ll be dead and gone,
   I wouldn’t mind the hangin’, it’s bein’ gone so long,
   It’s lyin’ in the grave so long.

Old song


   The first day that Shadow hung from the tree he experienced only discomfort that edged slowly into pain, and fear, and, occasionally, an emotion that was somewhere between boredom and apathy: a gray acceptance, a waiting.
   He hung.
   The wind was still.
   After several hours fleeting bursts of color started to explode across his vision in blossoms of crimson and gold, throbbing and pulsing with a life of their own.
   The pain in his arms and legs became, by degrees, intolerable. If he relaxed them, let his body go slack and dangle, if he flopped forward, then the rope around his neck would take up the slack and the world would shimmer and swim. So he pushed himself back against the trunk of the tree. He could feel his heart laboring in his chest, a pounding arrhythmic tattoo as it pumped the blood through his body…
   Emeralds and sapphires and rubies crystallized and burst in front of his eyes. His breath came in shallow gulps. The bark of the tree was rough against his back. The chill of the afternoon on his naked skin made him shiver, made his flesh prickle and goose.
   It’s easy, said someone in the back of his head. There’s a trick to it. You do it or you die.
   He was pleased with the thought, and repeated it over and over in the back of his head, part mantra, part nursery rhyme, rattling along to the drumbeat of his heart.


It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.
It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.
It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.
It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.


   Time passed. The chanting continued. He could hear it. Someone was repeating the words, only stopping when Shadow’s mouth began to dry out, when his tongue turned dry and skinlike in his mouth. He pushed himself up and away from the tree with his feet, trying to support his weight in a way that would still allow him to fill his lungs.
   He breathed until he could hold himself up no more, and then he fell back into the bonds, and hung from the tree.
   When the chattering started-an angry, laughing chattering noise-he closed his mouth, concerned that it was he himself making it; but the noise continued. It’s the world laughing at me, then, thought Shadow. His head lolled to one side. Something ran down the tree trunk beside him, stopping beside his head; It cluttered loudly in his ear, one word, which sounded a lot like “ratatosk.” Shadow tried to repeat it, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He turned, slowly, and stared into the gray-brown face and pointed ears of a squirrel.
   In close-up, he learned, a squirrel looks a lot less cute than it does from a distance. The creature was ratlike and dangerous, not sweet or charming. And its teeth looked sharp. He hoped that it would not perceive him as a threat, or as a food source. He did not think that squirrels were carnivorous…but then, so many things he had thought were not had turned out to be so…
   He slept.
   The pain woke him several times in the next few hours. It pulled him from a dark dream in which dead children rose and came to him, their eyes peeling, swollen pearls, and they reproached him for failing them. A spider edged across his face, and he woke. He shook his head, dislodging or frightening it, and returned to his dreams-and now an elephant-headed man, potbellied, one tusk broken, was riding toward him on the back of a huge mouse. The elephant-headed man curled his trunk toward Shadow and said, “If you had invoked me before you began this journey, perhaps some of your troubles might have been avoided.” Then the elephant took the mouse, which had, by some means that Shadow could not perceive, become tiny while not changing in size at all, and passed it from hand to hand to hand, fingers curling about it as the little creature scampered from palm to palm, and Shadow was not at all surprised when the elephant-headed god finally opened all four of his hands to reveal them perfectly empty. He shrugged arm after arm after arm in a peculiar fluid motion, and looked at Shadow, his face unreadable.
   “It’s in the trunk,” Shadow told the elephant man. He had been watching as the flickering tail vanished.
   The elephant man nodded his huge head, and said, “Yes. In the trunk. You will forget many things. You will give many things away. You will lose many things. But do not lose this,” and then the rain began, and Shadow was tumbled, shivering and wet, from deep sleep into full wakefulness. The shivering intensified until it scared Shadow: he was shivering more violently than he had ever imagined possible, a series of convulsive shudders that built upon each other. He willed himself to stop, but still he shivered, his teeth banging together, his limbs twitching and jerking beyond his control. There was real pain there, too, a deep, knifelike pain that covered his body with tiny, invisible wounds, intimate and unbearable.


* * *

   He opened his mouth to catch the rain as it fell, moistening his cracked lips and his dry tongue, wetting the ropes that bound him to the trunk of the tree. There was a flash of lightning so bright it felt like a blow to his eyes, transforming the world into an intense panorama of image and afterimage. Then the thunder, a crack and a boom and a rumble, and, as the thunder echoed, the rain redoubled. In the rain and the night the shivering abated; the knife blades were put away. Shadow no longer felt the cold, or rather, he felt only the cold, but the cold had how become part of himself.
   Shadow hung from the tree while the lightning flickered and forked across the sky, and the thunder subsided into an omnipresent rumbling, with occasional bangs and roars like distant bombs exploding in the night. The wind tugged at Shadow, trying to pull him from the tree, flaying him, cutting to the bone; and Shadow knew in his soul that the real storm had truly begun.
   A strange joy rose within Shadow then, and he started laughing as the rain washed his naked skin and the lightning flashed and thunder rumbled so loudly that he could barely hear himself laugh. He exulted.
   He was alive. He had never felt like this. Ever.
   If he did die, he thought, if he died right now, here on the tree, it would be worth it to have had this one, perfect, mad moment.
   “Hey!” he shouted at the storm. “Hey! It’s me! I’m here!”
   He trapped some water between his bare shoulder and the trunk of the tree, and he twisted his head over and drank the trapped rainwater, sucking and slurping at it, and he drank more and he laughed, laughed with joy and delight, not madness, until he could laugh no more, until he hung there too exhausted to move.
   At the foot of the tree, on the ground, the rain had made the sheet partly transparent, and had lifted it and pushed it forward so that Shadow could see Wednesday’s dead hand, waxy and pale, and the shape of his head, and he thought of the shroud of Turin and he remembered the open girl on Jacquel’s table in Cairo, and then, as if to spite the cold, he observed that he was feeling warm and comfortable, and the bark of the tree felt soft, and he slept once more, and if he dreamed any dreams this time he could not remember them.


* * *

   By the following morning the pain was no longer local, not confined to the places where the ropes cut into his flesh, or where the bark scraped his skin. Now the pain was everywhere.
   And he was hungry, with empty pangs down in the pit of him. His head was pounding. Sometimes he imagined that he had stopped breathing, that his heart had ceased to beat. Then he would hold his breath until he could hear his heart pounding an ocean in his ears and he was forced to suck air like a diver surfacing from the depths.
   It seemed to him that the tree reached from-hell to heaven, and that he had been hanging there forever. A brown hawk circled the tree, landed on a broken branch near to him, and then took to the wing, flying west.
   The storm, which had abated at dawn, began to return as the day passed. Gray, roiling clouds stretched from horizon to horizon; a slow drizzle began to fall. The body at the base of the tree seemed to have become less, in its stained motel winding sheet, crumbling into itself like a sugar cake left in the rain.
   Sometimes Shadow burned, sometimes he froze.
   When the thunder started once more he imagined that he heard drums beating, kettledrums in the thunder and the thump of his heart, inside his head or outside, it did not matter. He perceived the pain in colors: the red of a neon bar sign, the green of a traffic light on a wet night, the blue of an empty video screen.
   The squirrel dropped from the bark of the trunk onto Shadow’s shoulder, sharp claws digging into his skin. “Ratatosk!” it chattered. The tip of its nose touched his lips. “Ratatosk.” It sprang back onto the tree.
   His skin was on fire with pins and needles, a pricking covering his whole body. The sensation was intolerable.
   His life was laid out below him, on the motel-sheet shroud: literally laid out, like the items at some Dada picnic, a surrealist tableau: he could see his mother’s puzzled stare, the American embassy in Norway, Laura’s eyes on their wedding day…
   He chuckled through dry lips.
   “What’s so funny, puppy?” asked Laura.
   “Our wedding day,” he said. “You bribed the organist to change from playing the Wedding March to the theme song from Scooby-Doo as you walked toward me down the aisle. Do you remember?”
   “Of course I remember, darling. ‘I would have made it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.’ ”
   “I loved you so much,” said Shadow.
   He could feel her lips on his, and they were warm and wet and living, not cold and dead, so he knew that this was another hallucination. “You aren’t here, are you?” he asked.
   “No,” she said. “But you are calling me, for the last time. And I am coming.”
   Breathing was harder now. The ropes cutting his flesh were an abstract concept, like free will or eternity.
   “Sleep, puppy,” she said, although he thought it might have been his own voice he heard, and he slept.

* * *

   The sun was a pewter coin in a leaden sky. Shadow was, he realized slowly, awake, and he was cold. But the part of him that understood that seemed very far away from the rest of him. Somewhere in the distance he was aware that his mouth and throat were burning, painful, and cracked. Sometimes, in the daylight, he would see stars fall; other times he saw huge birds, the size of delivery trucks, flying toward him. Nothing reached him; nothing touched him.
   “Ratatosk. Ratatosk.” The chattering had become a scolding.
   The squirrel landed, heavily, with sharp claws, on his shoulder and stared into his face. He wondered if he were hallucinating: the animal was holding a walnut shell, like a doll’s-house cup, in its front paws. The animal pressed the shell to Shadow’s lips. Shadow felt the water, and, involuntarily, he sucked it into his mouth, drinking from the tiny cup. He ran the water around his cracked lips, his dry tongue. He wet his mouth with it, and swallowed what was left, which was not much.
   The squirrel leapt back to the tree, and ran down it, toward the roots, and then, in seconds, or minutes, or hours, Shadow could not tell which (all the clocks in his mind were broken, he thought, and their gears and cogs and springs were simply a jumble down there in the writhing grass), the squirrel returned with its walnut-shell cup, climbing carefully, and Shadow drank the water it brought to him.
   The muddy-iron taste of the water filled his mouth, cooled his parched throat. It eased his fatigue and his madness.
   By the third walnut shell, he was no longer thirsty.
   He began to struggle, then, pulling at the ropes, flailing his body, trying to get down, to get free, to get away. He moaned.
   The knots were good. The ropes were strong, and they held, and soon he exhausted himself once more.


* * *

   In his delirium, Shadow became the tree. Its roots went deep into the loam of the earth, deep down into time, into the hidden springs. He felt the spring of the woman called Urd, which is to say, Past. She was huge, a giantess, an underground mountain of a woman, and the waters she guarded were the waters of time. Other roots went to other places. Some of them were secret. Now, when he was thirsty, he pulled water from his roots, pulled them up into the body of his being.
   He had a hundred arms that broke into a hundred thousand fingers, and all of his fingers reached up into the sky. The weight of the sky was heavy on his shoulders.
   It was not that the discomfort was lessened, but the pain belonged to the figure hanging from the tree, rather than to the tree itself. Shadow in his madness was now so much more than the man on the tree. He was the tree, and he was the wind rattling the bare branches of the world tree; he was the gray sky and the tumbling clouds; he was Ratatosk the squirrel running from the deepest roots to the highest branches; he was the mad-eyed hawk who sat on a broken branch at the top of the tree surveying the world; he was the worm in the heart of the tree.
   The stars wheeled, and he passed his hundred hands over the glittering stars, palming them, switching them, vanishing them…


* * *

   A moment of clarity, in the pain and the madness: Shadow felt himself surfacing. He knew it would not be for long. The morning sun was dazzling him. He closed his eyes, wishing he could shade them.
   There was not long to go. He knew that, too.
   When he opened his eyes, Shadow saw that there was a young man in the tree with him.
   His skin was dark brown. His forehead was high and his dark hair was tightly curled. He was sitting on a branch high above Shadow’s head. Shadow could see him clearly by craning his head. And the man was mad. Shadow could see that at a glance.
   “You’re naked,” confided the madman, in a cracked voice. “I’m naked too.”
   “I see that,” croaked Shadow.
   The madman looked at him, then he nodded and twisted his head down and around, as if he were trying to remove a crick from his neck. Eventually he said, “Do you know me?”
   “No,” said Shadow.
   “I know you. I watched you in Cairo. I watched you after. My sister likes you.”
   “You are….” the name escaped him. Eats roadkill. Yes. “You are Horus.”
   The madman nodded. “Horus,” he said. “I am the falcon of the morning, the hawk of the afternoon. I am the sun, as you are. And I know the true name of Ra. My mother told me.”
   “That’s great,” said Shadow, politely.
   The madman stared at the ground below them intently, saying nothing. Then he dropped from the tree.
   A hawk fell like a stone to the ground, pulled out of its plummet into a swoop, beat its wings heavily and flew back to the tree, a baby rabbit in its talons. It landed on a branch closer to Shadow.
   “Are you hungry?” asked the madman.
   “No,” said Shadow. “I guess I should be, but I’m not.”
   “I’m hungry,” said the madman. He ate the rabbit rapidly, pulling it apart, sucking, tearing, rending. At he finished with them, he dropped the gnawed bones and the fur to the ground. He walked farther down the branch until he was only an arm’s length from Shadow. Then he peered at Shadow unselfconsciously, inspecting him with care and caution, from his feet to his head. There was rabbit blood on his chin and his chest, and he wiped it off with the back of his hand.
   Shadow felt he had to say something. “Hey,” he said.
   “Hey,” said the madman. He stood up on the branch, turned away from Shadow and let a stream of dark urine arc out into the meadow below. It went on for a long time. When he had finished he crouched down again on the branch.
   “What do they call you?” asked Horus.
   “Shadow,” said Shadow.
   The madman nodded. “You are the shadow. I am the light,” he said. “Everything that is, casts a shadow.” Then he said, “They will fight soon. I was watching them as they started to arrive.”
   And then the madman said, “You are dying. Aren’t you?’
   But Shadow could no longer speak. A hawk took wing, and circled slowly upward, riding the updrafts into the morning.


* * *

   Moonlight.
   A cough shook Shadow’s frame, a racking painful cough that stabbed his chest and his throat. He gagged for breath.
   “Hey, puppy,” called a voice that he knew.
   He looked down.
   The moonlight burned whitely through the branches of the tree, bright as day, and there was a woman standing in the moonlight on the ground below him, her face a pale oval. The wind rattled in the branches of the tree.
   “Hi, puppy,” she said.
   He tried to speak, but he coughed instead, deep in his chest, for a long time.
   “You know,” she said, helpfully, “that doesn’t sound good.”
   He croaked, “Hello, Laura.”
   She looked up at him with dead eyes, and she smiled.
   “How did you find me?” he asked.
   She was silent, for a while, in the moonlight. Then she said, “You are the nearest thing I have to life. You are the only thing I have left, the only thing that isn’t bleak and flat and gray. I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.”
   He looked down at the woman in the moonlight, and his eyes stung with tears.
   “I’ll cut you down,” she said, after a while. “I spend too much time rescuing you, don’t I?”
   He coughed again. Then, “No, leave me. I have to do this.”
   She looked up at him, and shook her head. “You’re crazy,” she said. “You’re dying up there. Or you’ll be crippled, if you aren’t already.”
   “Maybe,” he said. “But I’m alive.”
   “Yes,” she said, after a moment. “I guess you are.”
   “You told me,” he said. “In the graveyard.”
   “It seems like such a long time ago, puppy,” she said. Then she said, “I feel better, here. It doesn’t hurt as much. You know what I mean? But I’m so dry.”
   The wind let up, and he could smell her now: a stink of rotten meat and sickness and decay, pervasive and unpleasant.
   “I lost my job,” she said. “It was a night job, but they said people had complained. I told them I was sick, and they said they didn’t care. I’m so thirsty.”
   “The women,” he told her. “They have water. The house.”
   “Puppy…” she sounded scared.
   “Tell them…tell them I said to give you water…”
   The white face stared up at him. “I should go,” she told him. Then she hacked, and made a face, and spat a mass of something white onto the grass. It broke up when it hit the ground, and wriggled away.
   It was almost impossible to breathe. His chest felt heavy, and his head was swaying.
   “Stay” he said, in a breath that was almost a whisper, unsure whether or not she could hear him. “Please don’t go.” He started to cough. “Stay the night.”
   “I’ll stop awhile,” she said. And then, like a mother to a child, she said, “Nothing’s gonna hurt you when I’m here. You know that?”
   Shadow coughed once more. He closed his eyes-only for a moment, he thought, but when he opened them again the moon had set and he was alone.

* * *

   A crashing and a pounding in his head, beyond the pain of migraine, beyond all pain. Everything dissolved into tiny butterflies which circled him like a multicolored dust storm and then evaporated into the night.
   The white sheet wrapped about the body at the base of the tree flapped noisily in the morning wind.
   The pounding eased. Everything slowed. There was nothing left to make him keep breathing. His heart ceased to beat in his chest.
   The darkness that he entered this time was deep, and lit by a single star, and it was final.

Chapter 16

   I know it’s crooked. But it’s the only game in town.

Canada Bill Jones


   The tree was gone, and the world was gone, and the morning-gray sky above him was gone. The sky was now the color of midnight. There was a single cold star shining high above him, a blazing, twinkling light, and nothing else. He took a single step and almost tripped.
   Shadow looked down. There were steps cut into the rock, going down, steps so huge that he could only imagine that giants had cut them and descended them a long time ago.
   He clambered downward, half jumping, half vaulting from step to step. His body ached, but it was the ache of lack of use, not the tortured ache of a body that has hung on a tree until it was dead.
   He observed, without surprise, that he was now fully dressed, in jeans and a white T-shirt. He was barefoot. He experienced a profound moment of dйjа vu: this was what he had been wearing when he stood in Czernobog’s apartment the night when Zorya Polunochnaya had come to him and told him about the constellation called Odin’s Wain. She had taken the moon down from the sky for him.
   He knew, suddenly, what would happen next. Zorya Polunochnaya would be there. She was waiting for him at the bottom of the steps. There was no moon in the sky, but she was bathed in moonlight nonetheless: her white hair was moon-pale, and she wore the same lace-and-cotton nightdress she had worn that night in Chicago.
   She smiled when she saw him, and looked down, as if momentarily embarrassed. “Hello,” she said.
   “Hi,” said Shadow.
   “How are you?”
   “I don’t know,” he said. “I think this is maybe another strange dream on the tree. I’ve been having crazy dreams since I got out of prison.”
   Her face was silvered by the moonlight (but no moon hung in that plum-black sky, and now, at the foot of the steps, even the single star was lost to view) and she looked both solemn and vulnerable. She said, “All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.”
   Beyond her, the path forked. He would have to decide which path to take, he knew that. But there was one thing he had to do first. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and was relieved when he felt the familiar weight of the coin at the bottom of the pocket. He eased it out, held it between finger and thumb: a 1922 Liberty dollar. “This is yours,” he said.
   He remembered then that his clothes were really at the foot of the tree. The women had placed his clothes in the canvas sack from which they had taken the ropes, and tied the end of the sack, and the biggest of the women had placed a heavy rock on it to stop it from blowing away. And so he knew that, in reality, the Liberty dollar was in a pocket in that sack, beneath the rock. But still, it was heavy in his hand, at the entrance to the underworld.
   She took it from his palm with her slim fingers.
   “Thank you. It bought you your liberty twice,” she said. “And now it will light your way into dark places.”
   She closed her hand around the dollar, then she reached up and placed it in the air, as high as she could reach. Then she let go of it. Instead of falling, the coin floated upward until it was a foot or so above Shadow’s head. It was no longer a silver coin, though. Lady Liberty and her crown of spikes were gone. The face he saw on the coin was the indeterminate face of the moon in the summer sky.
   Shadow could not decide whether he was looking at a moon the size of a dollar, a foot above his head, or whether he was looking at a moon the size of the Pacific Ocean, many thousands of miles away. Nor whether there was any difference between the two ideas. Perhaps it was all a matter of the way you looked at it.
   He looked at the forking path ahead of him.
   “Which path should I take?” he asked. “Which one is safe?”
   “Take one, and you cannot take the other,” she said. “But neither path is safe. Which way would you walk-the way of hard truths or the way of fine lies?”
   “Truths,” he said. “I’ve come too far for more lies.”
   She looked sad. “There, will be a price, then,” she said.
   “I’ll pay it. What’s the price?”
   “Your name,” she said. “Your real name. You will have to give it to me.”
   “How?”
   “Like this,” she said. She reached a perfect hand toward his head. He felt her fingers brush his skin, then he felt them penetrate his skin, his skull, felt them push deep into his head. Something tickled, in his skull and all down his spine. She pulled her hand out of his head. A flame, like a candle flame but burning with a clear magnesium-white luminance, was flickering on the tip of her forefinger.
   “Is that my name?” he asked.
   She closed her hand, and the light was gone. “It was,” she said. She extended her hand, and pointed to the right-hand path. “That way,” she said. “For now.”
   Nameless, Shadow walked down the right-hand path in the moonlight. When he turned around to thank her, he saw nothing but darkness. It seemed to him that he was deep under the ground, but when he looked up into the darkness above him he still saw the tiny moon.
   He turned a corner.
   If this was the afterlife, he thought, it was a lot like the House on the Rock: part diorama, part nightmare.
   He was looking at himself in prison blues, in the warden’s office, as the warden told him that Laura had died in a car crash. He saw the expression on his own face-he looked like a man who had been abandoned by the world. It hurt him to see it, the nakedness and the fear. He hurried on, pushed through the warden’s gray office, and found himself looking at the VCR repair store on the outskirts of Eagle Point. Three years ago. Yes.
   Inside the store, he knew, he was beating the living crap out of Larry Powers and B. J. West, bruising his knuckles in the process: pretty soon he would walk out of there, carrying a brown supermarket bag filled with twenty-dollar bills. The money they could never prove he had taken: his share of the proceeds, and a little more, for they shouldn’t have tried to rip him and Laura off like that. He was only the driver, but he had done his part, done everything that she had asked of him…
   At the trial, nobody mentioned the bank robbery, although everybody wanted to. They couldn’t prove a thing, as long as nobody was talking. And nobody was. The prosecutor was forced instead to stick to the bodily damage that Shadow had inflicted on Powers and West. He showed photographs of the two men on their arrival in the local hospital. Shadow barely defended himself in court; it was easier that way. Neither Powers nor West seemed able to remember what the fight had been about, but they each admitted that Shadow had been their assailant.
   Nobody talked about the money.
   Nobody even mentioned Laura, and that was all that Shadow had wanted.
   Shadow wondered whether the path of comforting lies would have been a better one to walk. He walked away from that place, and followed the rock path down into what looked like a hospital room, a public hospital in Chicago, and he felt the bile rise in his throat. He stopped. He did not want to look. He did not want to keep walking.
   In the hospital bed his mother was dying again, as she’d died when he was sixteen, and, yes, here he was, a large, clumsy sixteen-year-old with acne pocking his cream-and-coffee skin, sitting at her bedside, unable to look at her, reading a thick paperback book. Shadow wondered what the book was, and he walked around the hospital bed to inspect it more closely. He stood between the bed and the chair looking from the one to the other, the big boy hunched into his chair, his nose buried in Gravity’s Rainbow, trying to escape from his mother’s death into London during the blitz, the fictional madness of the book no escape and no excuse.
   His mother’s eyes were closed in a morphine peace: what she had thought was just another sickle-cell crisis, another bout of pain to be endured, had turned out, they had discovered, too late, to be lymphoma. There was a lemonish-gray tinge to her skin. She was in her early thirties, but she looked much older.
   Shadow wanted to shake himself, the awkward boy that he once was, get him to hold her hand, talk to her, do something before she slipped away, as he knew that she would. But he could not touch himself, and he continued to read; and so his mother died while he sat in the chair next to her, reading a fat book.
   After that he had more or less stopped reading. You could not trust fiction. What good were books, if they couldn’t protect you from something like that?
   Shadow walked away from the hospital room, down the winding corridor, deep into the bowels of the earth.
   He sees his mother first and he cannot believe how young she is, not yet twenty-five he guesses, before her medical discharge. They’re in their apartment, another embassy rental somewhere in Northern Europe. He looks around for something to give him a clue, and he sees himself: a shrimp of a kid, big pale gray eyes and dark hair. They are arguing. Shadow knows without hearing the words what they’re arguing about: it was the only thing they quarreled about, after all.


   –Tell me about my father.
   –He’s dead. Don’t ask about him.
   –But who was he?
   –Forget him. Dead and gone and you ain’t missed nothing.
   –I want to see a picture of him.
   –I ain’t got a picture, she’d say, and her voice would get quiet and fierce, and he knew that if he kept asking her questions she would shout, or even hit him, and he knew that he would not stop asking questions, so he turned away and walked on down the tunnel.


   The path he followed twisted and wound and curled back on itself, and it put him in mind of snakeskins and intestines and of deep, deep tree roots. There was a pool to his left; he heard the drip, drip of water into it somewhere at the back of the tunnel, the falling water barely ruffling the mirrored surface of the pool. He dropped to his knees and drank, using his hand to bring the water to his lips. Then he walked on until he was standing in the floating disco-glitter patterns of a mirror ball. It was like being in the exact center of the universe with all the stars and planets circling him, and he could not hear anything, not the music, nor the shouted conversations over the music, and now Shadow was staring at a woman who looked just like his mother never looked in all the years he knew her, she’s little more than a child, after all…
   And she is dancing.
   Shadow found that he was completely unsurprised when he recognized the man who dances with her. He had not changed that much in thirty-three years.
   She is drunk: Shadow could see that at a glance. She is not very drunk, but she is unused to drink, and in a week or so she will take a ship to Norway. They have been drinking margaritas, and she has salt on her lips and salt clinging to the back of her hand.
   Wednesday is not wearing a suit and tie, but the pin in the shape of a silver tree he wears over the pocket of his shirt glitters and glints when the mirror-ball light catches it. They make a fine-looking couple, considering the difference in their ages. There is a lupine grace to Wednesday’s movements.
   A slow dance. He pulls her close to him, and his pawlike hand curves around the seat of her skirt possessively, moving her closer to him. His other hand takes her chin, pushes it upward into his face, and the two of them kiss, there on the floor, as the glitter-ball lights circle them into the center of the universe.
   Soon after, they leave. She sways against him, and he leads her from the dance hall.
   Shadow buried his head in his hands, and did not follow them, unable or unwilling to witness his own conception.
   The mirror lights were gone, and now the only illumination came from the tiny moon that burned high above his head.
   He walked on. At a bend in the path he stopped for a moment to catch his breath.
   He felt a hand run gently up his back, and gentle fingers ruffle the hair on the back of his head.
   “Hello,” whispered a smoky feline voice, over his shoulder.
   “Hello,” he said, turning to face her.

   She had brown hair and brown skin and her eyes were the deep golden-amber of good honey. Her pupils were vertical slits. “Do I know you?” he asked, puzzled.
   “Intimately,” she said, and she smiled. “I used to sleep on your bed. And my people have been keeping their eyes on you, for me.” She turned to the path ahead of him, pointed to the three ways he could go. “Okay,” she said. “One way will make you wise. One way will make you whole. And one way will kill you.”
   “I’m already dead, I think,” said Shadow. “I died on the tree.”
   She made a moue. “There’s dead,” she said, “and there’s dead, and there’s dead. It’s a relative thing.” Then she smiled again. “I could make a joke about that, you know. Something about dead relatives.”
   “No,” said Shadow. “It’s okay.”
   “So,” she said. “Which way do you want to go?”
   “I don’t know,” he admitted.
   She tipped her head on one side, a perfectly feline gesture. Suddenly, Shadow remembered the claw marks on his shoulder. He felt himself beginning to blush. “If you trust me,” said Bast, “I can choose for you.”
   “I trust you,” he said, without hesitation.
   “Do you want to know what it’s going to cost you?”
   “I’ve already lost my name,” he told her.
   “Names come and names go. Was it worth it?”
   “Yes. Maybe. It wasn’t easy. As revelations go, it was kind of personal.”
   “All revelations are personal,” she said. “That’s why all revelations are suspect.”
   “I don’t understand.”
   “No,” she said, “you don’t. I’ll take your heart. We’ll need it later,” and she reached her hand deep inside his chest, and she pulled it out with something ruby and pulsing held between her sharp fingernails. It was the color of pigeon’s blood, and it was made of pure light. Rhythmically it expanded and contracted.
   She closed her hand, and it was gone.
   “Take the middle way,” she said.
   Shadow nodded, and walked on.
   The path was becoming slippery now. There was ice on the rock. The moon above him glittered through the ice crystals in the air: there was a ring about the moon, a moon-bow, diffusing the light. It was beautiful, but it made walking harder. The path was unreliable.
   He reached the place where the path divided.
   He looked at the first path with a feeling of recognition. It opened into a vast chamber, or a set of chambers, like a dark museum. He knew it already. He could hear the long echoes of tiny noises. He could hear the noise that the dust makes as it settles.
   It was the place that he had dreamed of, that first night that Laura had come to him, in the motel so long ago; the endless memorial hall to the gods that were forgotten, and the ones whose very existence had been lost.
   He took a step backward.
   He walked to the path on the far side, and looked ahead. There was a Disneyland quality to the corridor: black Plexiglas walls with lights set in them. The colored lights blinked and flashed in the illusion of order, for no particular reason, like the console lights on a television starship.
   He could hear something there as well: a deep vibrating bass drone, which Shadow could feel in the pit of his stomach.
   He stopped and looked around. Neither way seemed right. Not any longer. He was done with paths. The middle way, the way the cat-woman had told him to walk, that was his way. He moved toward it.
   The moon above him was beginning to fade: the edge of it was pinking and going into eclipse. The path was framed by a huge doorway. Shadow walked through the arch, in darkness. The air was warm, and it smelled of wet dust, like a city street after the summer’s first rain.
   He was not afraid.
   Not anymore. Fear had died on the tree, as Shadow had died. There was no fear left, no hatred, no pain. Nothing left but essence.
   Something big splashed, quietly, in the distance, and the splash echoed into the vastness. He squinted, but could see nothing. It was too dark. And then, from the direction of the splashes, a ghost-light glimmered and the world took form: he was in a cavern, and in front of him, mirror-smooth, was water.
   The splashing noises came closer and the light became brighter, and Shadow waited on the shore. Soon enough a low, flat boat came into sight, a flickering white lantern burning at its raised prow, another reflected in the glassy black water several feet below it. The boat was being poled by a tall figure, and the splashing noise Shadow had heard was the sound of the pole being lifted and moved as it pushed the craft across the waters of the underground lake.
   “Hello there!” called Shadow. Echoes of his words suddenly surrounded him: he could imagine that a whole chorus of people were welcoming him and calling to him and each of them had his voice.
   The person poling the boat made no reply.
   The boat’s pilot was tall, and very thin. He-if it was a he-wore an unadorned white robe, and the pale head that topped it was so utterly inhuman that Shadow was certain that it had to be a mask of some sort: it was a bird’s head, small on a long neck, its beak long and high. Shadow was certain he had seen it before, this ghostly, birdlike figure. He grasped at the memory and then, disappointed, realized that he was picturing the clockwork penny-in-the-slot machine in the House on the Rock and the pale, birdlike, half-glimpsed figure that glided out from behind the crypt for the drunkard’s soul.
   Water dripped and echoed from the pole and the prow, and the ship’s wake rippled the glassy waters. The boat was made of reeds, bound and tied.
   The boat came close to the shore. The pilot leaned on its pole. Its head turned slowly, until it was facing Shadow. “Hello,” it said, without moving its long beak. The voice was male, and, like everything else in Shadow’s afterlife so far, familiar. “Come on board. You’ll get your feet wet, I’m afraid, but there’s not a thing can be done about that. These are old boats, and if I come in closer I could rip out the bottom.”
   Shadow took off his shoes and stepped out into the water. It came halfway up his calves, and was, after the initial shock of wetness, surprisingly warm. He reached the boat, and the pilot put down a hand and pulled him aboard. The reed boat rocked a little, and water splashed over the low sides of it, and then it steadied.
   The pilot poled off away from the shore. Shadow stood there and watched, his pants legs dripping.
   “I know you,” he said to the creature at the prow.
   “You do indeed,” said the boatman. The oil lamp that hung at the front of the boat burned more fitfully, and the smoke from the lamp made Shadow cough. “You worked for me. I’m afraid we had to inter Lila Goodchild without you.” The voice was fussy and precise.
   The smoke stung Shadow’s eyes. He wiped the tears away with his hand, and, through the smoke, he thought he saw a tall man in a suit, with gold-rimmed spectacles. The smoke cleared and the boatman was once more a half-human creature with the head of a river bird.
   “Mister Ibis?”
   “Good to see you,” said the creature, with Mr. Ibis’s voice. “Do you know what a psychopomp is?”
   Shadow thought he knew the word, but it had been a long time. He shook his head.
   “It’s a fancy term for an escort,” said Mr. Ibis. “We all have so many functions, so many ways of existing. In my own vision of myself, I am a scholar who lives quietly, and pens his little tales, and dreams about a past that may or may not ever have existed. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I am also, in one of my capacities, like so many of the people you have chosen to associate with, a psychopomp. I escort the living to the world of the dead.”
   “I thought this was the world of the dead,” said Shadow.
   “No. Not per se. It’s more of a preliminary.”
   The boat slipped and slid across the mirror-surface of the underground pool. And then Mr. Ibis said, without moving its beak, “You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color.”
   “You can’t,” said Shadow. “Can you?” The echoes whispered his words back at him from across the pool.
   “What you have to remember,” said Mr. Ibis, testily, “is that life and death are different sides of the same coin. Like the heads and tails of a quarter.”
   “And if I had a double-headed quarter?”
   “You don’t.”
   Shadow had a frisson, then, as they crossed the dark water. He imagined he could see the faces of children staring up at him reproachfully from beneath the water’s glassy surface: their faces were waterlogged and softened, their blind eyes clouded. There was no wind in that underground cavern to disturb the black surface of the lake.
   “So I’m dead,” said Shadow. He was getting used to the idea. “Or I’m going to be dead.”
   “We are on our way to the Hall of the Dead. I requested that I be the one to come for you.”
   “Why?”
   “You were a hard worker. Why not?”
   “Because…” Shadow marshaled his thoughts. “Because I never believed in you. Because I don’t know much about Egyptian mythology. Because I didn’t expect this. What happened to Saint Peter and the Pearly Gates?”
   The long-beaked white head shook from side to side, gravely. “It doesn’t matter that you didn’t believe in us,” said Mr. Ibis. “We believed in you.”
   The boat touched bottom. Mr. Ibis stepped off the side, into the pool, and told Shadow to do the same. Mr. Ibis took a line from the prow of the boat, and passed Shadow the lantern to carry. It was in the shape of a crescent moon. They walked ashore, and Mr. Ibis tied the boat to a metal ring set in the rock floor. Then he took the lamp from Shadow and walked swiftly forward, holding the lamp high as he walked, throwing vast shadows across the rock floor and the high rock walls.
   “Are you scared?” asked Mr. Ibis.
   “Not really.”
   “Well, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror, as we walk. They are the appropriate feelings for the situation at hand.”
   Shadow was not scared. He was interested, and apprehensive, but no more. He was not scared of the shifting darkness, nor of being dead, nor even of the dog-headed creature the size of a grain silo who stared at them as they approached. It growled, deep in its throat, and Shadow felt his neck hairs prickle.
   “Shadow,” it said. “Now is the time of judgment.”
   Shadow looked up at the creature. “Mr. Jacquel?” he said.
   The hands of Anubis came down, huge dark hands, and they picked Shadow up and brought him close.
   The jackal head examined him with bright and glittering eyes; examined him as dispassionately as Mr. Jacquel had examined the dead girl on the slab. Shadow knew that all his faults, all his failings, all his weaknesses were being taken out and weighed and measured; that he was, in some way, being dissected, and sliced, and tasted.
   We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them. He was as naked and as open as a corpse on a table, and dark Anubis the jackal god was his prosector and his prosecutor and his persecutor.
   “Please,” said Shadow. “Please stop.”
   But the examination did not stop. Every lie he had ever told, every object he had stolen, every hurt he had inflicted on another person, all the little crimes and the tiny murders that make up the day, each of these things and more were extracted and held up to the light by the jackal-headed judge of the dead.
   Shadow began to weep, painfully, in the palm of the dark god’s hand. He was a tiny child again, as helpless and as powerless as he had ever been.
   And then, without warning, it was over. Shadow panted, and sobbed, and snot streamed from his nose; he still felt helpless, but the hands placed him, carefully, almost tenderly, down on the rock floor.
   “Who has his heart?” growled Anubis.
   “I do,” purred a woman’s voice. Shadow looked up. Bast was standing there beside the thing that was no longer Mr. Ibis, and she held Shadow’s heart in her right hand. It lit her face with a ruby light.
   “Give it to me,” said Thoth, the Ibis-headed god, and he took the heart in his hands, which were not human hands, and he glided forward.
   Anubis placed a pair of golden scales in front of him.
   “So is this where we find out what I get?” whispered Shadow to Bast. “Heaven? Hell? Purgatory?”
   “If the feather balances,” she said, “you get to choose your own destination.”
   “And if not?”
   She shrugged, as if the subject made her uncomfortable. Then she said, “Then we feed your heart and your soul to Ammet, the Eater of Souls…”
   “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I can get some kind of a happy ending.”
   “Not only are there no happy endings,” she told him, “there aren’t even any endings.”
   On one of the pans of the scales, carefully, reverently, Anubis placed a feather.
   Anubis put Shadow’s heart on the other pan of the scales. Something moved in the shadows under the scale, something it made Shadow uncomfortable to examine too closely.
   It was a heavy feather, but Shadow had a heavy heart, and the scales tipped and swung worryingly.
   But they balanced, in the end, and the creature in the shadows skulked away, unsatisfied.
   “So that’s that,” said Bast, wistfully. “Just another skull for the pile. It’s a pity. I had hoped that you would do some good, in the current troubles. It’s like watching a slow-motion car crash and being powerless to prevent it.”
   “You won’t be there?”
   She shook her head. “I don’t like other people picking my battles for me,” she said.
   There was silence then, in the vast hall of death, where it echoed of water and the dark.
   Shadow said, “So now I get to choose where I go next?”
   “Choose,” said Thoth. “Or we can choose for you.”
   “No,” said Shadow. “It’s okay. It’s my choice.”
   “Well?” roared Anubis.
   “I want to rest now,” said Shadow. “That’s what I want. I want nothing. No heaven, no hell, no anything. Just let it end.”
   “You’re certain?” asked Thoth.
   “Yes,” said Shadow.
   Mr. Jacquel opened the last door for Shadow, and behind that door there was nothing. Not darkness. Not even oblivion. Only nothing.
   Shadow accepted it, completely and without reservation, and he walked through the door into nothing with a strange fierce joy.

Chapter 17

   Everything is upon a great scale upon this continent. The rivers are immense, the climate violent in heat and cold, the prospects magnificent, the thunder and lightning tremendous. The disorders incident to the country make every constitution tremble. Our own blunders here, our misconduct, our losses, our disgraces, our ruin, are on a great scale.

Lord Carlisle, to George Selwyn, 1778


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


See Rock City
The Eighth Wonder of the World

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


See Seven States from Rock City
The World’s Wonder

   The driver is led by this to believe that Rock City is surely just around the nearest corner, instead of being a day’s drive away, on Lookout Mountain, a hair over the state line, in Georgia, just southwest of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
   Lookout Mountain is not much of a mountain. It resembles an impossibly high and commanding hill. The Chickamauga, a branch of the Cherokee, lived there when the white men came; they called the mountain Chattotonoogee, which has been translated as the mountain that rises to a point.
   In the 1830s Andrew Jackson’s Indian Relocation Act exiled them from their land-all the Choctaw and Chickamauga and Cherokee and Chickasaw-and U.S. troops forced every one of them they could catch to walk over a thousand miles to the new Indian Territories in what would one day be Oklahoma, down the trail of tears: an act of casual genocide. Thousands of men, women, and children died on the way. When you’ve won, you’ve won, and nobody can argue with that.
   For whoever controlled Lookout Mountain controlled the land; that was the legend. It was a sacred site, after all, and it was a high place. In the Civil War, the War Between the States, there was a battle there: the Battle Above the Clouds, that was the first day’s fighting, and then the Union forces did the impossible and, without orders, swept up Missionary Ridge and took it. The North took Lookout Mountain and the North took the war.
   There are tunnels and caves, some very old, beneath Lookout Mountain. For the most part they are blocked off now, although a local businessman excavated an underground waterfall, which he called Ruby Falls. It can be reached by elevator. It’s a tourist attraction, although the biggest tourist attraction of all is at the top of Lookout Mountain. That is Rock City.
   Rock City begins as an ornamental garden on a mountainside: its visitors walk a path that takes them through rocks, over rocks, between rocks. They throw corn into a deer enclosure, cross a hanging bridge and peer out through a quarter-a-throw binoculars at a view that promises them seven states on the rare sunny days when the air is perfectly clear. And from there, like a drop into some strange hell, the path takes the visitors, millions upon millions of them every year, down into caverns, where they stare at back-lit dolls arranged into nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale dioramas. When they leave, they leave bemused, uncertain of why they came, of what they have seen, of whether they had a good time or not.


* * *

   They came to Lookout Mountain from all across the United States. They were not tourists. They came by car and they came by plane and by bus and by railroad and on foot. Some of them flew-they flew low, and they flew only in the dark of the night. Several of them traveled their own ways beneath the earth. Many of them hitchhiked, cadging rides from nervous motorists or from truck drivers. Those who had cars or trucks would see the ones who had not walking beside the roads or at rest stations and in diners on the way, and, recognizing them for what they were, would offer them rides.
   They arrived dust-stained and weary at the foot of Lookout Mountain. Looking up to the heights of the tree-covered slope they could see, or imagine that they could see, the paths and gardens and waterfall of Rock City.
   They started arriving early in the morning. A second wave of them arrived at dusk. And for several days they simply kept coming.
   A battered U-Haul truck pulled up, disgorging several travel-weary vila and rusalka, their makeup smudged, runs in their stockings, their expressions heavy-lidded and tired.
   In a clump of trees at the bottom of the hill, an elderly wampyr offered a Marlboro to a naked apelike creature covered with a tangle of orange fur. It accepted graciously, and they smoked in silence, side by side.
   A Toyota Previa pulled over by the side of the road, and seven Chinese men and women got out of it. They looked, above all, clean, and they wore the kind of dark suits that, in some countries, are worn by minor government officials. One of them carried a clipboard, and he checked the inventory as they unloaded large golf bags from the back of the car: the bags contained ornate swords with lacquer handles, and carved sticks, and mirrors. The weapons were distributed, checked off, signed for.
   A once-famous comedian, believed to have died in the 1920s, climbed out of his rusting car and proceeded to remove his clothing: his legs were goat legs, and his tail was short and goatish.
   Four Mexicans arrived, all smiles, their hair black and very shiny: they passed among themselves a bottle that they kept out of sight in a brown paper bag, its contents a bitter mixture of powdered chocolate, liquor, and blood.
   A small, dark-bearded man with a dusty black derby on his head, curling payess at his temples, and a ragged fringed prayer shawl came to them walking across the fields. He was several feet in front of his companion, who was twice his height and was the blank gray color of good Polish clay: the word inscribed on his forehead meant truth.
   They kept coming. A cab drew up and several Rakshasas, the demons of the Indian subcontinent, climbed out and milled around, staring at the people at the bottom of the hill without speaking, until they found Mama-ji, her eyes closed, her lips moving in prayer. She was the only thing here that was familiar to them, but still, they hesitated to approach her, remembering old battles. Her hands rubbed the necklace of skulls about her neck. Her brown skin became slowly black, the glassy black of jet, of obsidian: her lips curled and her long white teeth were very sharp. She opened all her eyes, beckoned the Rakshasas to her, and greeted them as she would have greeted her own children.
   The storms of the last few days, to the north and the east, had done nothing to ease the feeling of pressure and discomfort in the air. Local weather forecasters had begun to warn of cells that might spawn tornados, of high-pressure areas that did not move. It was warm by day there, but the nights were cold.
   They clumped together in informal companies, banding together sometimes by nationality, by race, by temperament, even by species. They looked apprehensive. They looked tired.
   Some of them were talking. There was laughter, on occasion, but it was muted and sporadic. Six-packs of beer were handed around.
   Several local men and women came walking over the meadows, their bodies moving in unfamiliar ways: their voices, when they spoke, were the voices of the Loa who rode them: a tall black man spoke in the voice of Papa Legba who opens the gates; while Baron Samedi, the voudon lord of death, had taken over the body of a teenage goth girl from Chattanooga, possibly because she possessed her own black silk top hat, which sat on her dark hair at a jaunty angle. She spoke in the Baron’s own deep voice, smoked a cigar of enormous size, and commanded three of the Gйdй, the Loa of the dead. The Gйdй inhabited the bodies of three middle-aged brothers. They carried shotguns and told jokes of such astounding filthiness that only they were willing to laugh at them, which they did, raucously.
   Two ageless Chickamauga women, in oil-stained blue jeans and battered leather jackets, walked around, watching the people and the preparations for battle. Sometimes they pointed and shook their heads. They did not intend to take part in the coming conflict.
   The moon swelled and rose in the east, a day away from full. It seemed half as big as the sky, as it rose, a deep reddish-orange, immediately above the hills. As it crossed the sky it seemed to shrink and pale until it hung high in the sky like a lantern. There were so many of them waiting there, in the moonlight, at the foot of Lookout Mountain.


* * *

   Laura was thirsty.
   Sometimes living people burned steadily in her mind like candles and sometimes they flamed like torches. It made them easy to avoid, and it made them easy, on occasion, to find. Shadow had burned so strangely, with his own light, up on that tree. She had chided him once, when they had walked and held hands, for not being alive. She had hoped, then, to see a spark of raw emotion. To have seen anything.
   She remembered walking beside him, wishing that he could understand what she was trying to say.
   But dying on the tree, Shadow had been utterly alive. She had watched him as the life had faded, and he had been focused and real. And he had asked her to stay with him, to stay the whole night. He had forgiven her…perhaps he had forgiven her. It did not matter. He had changed; that was all she knew.
   Shadow had told her to go to the farmhouse, that they would give her water to drink there. There were no lights burning in the farm building, and she could feel nobody at home. But he had told her that they would care for her. She pushed against the door of the farmhouse and it opened, rusty hinges protesting the whole while.
   Something moved in her left lung, something that pushed and squirmed and made her cough.
   She found herself in a narrow hallway, her way almost blocked by a tall and dusty piano. The inside of the building smelled of old damp. She squeezed past the piano, pushed open a door and found herself in a dilapidated drawing room, filled with ramshackle furniture. An oil lamp burned on the mantelpiece. There was a coal fire burning in the fireplace beneath it, although she had neither seen nor smelled smoke outside the house. The coal fire did nothing to lift the chill she felt in that room, although, Laura was willing to concede, that might not be the fault of the room.
   Death hurt Laura, although the hurt consisted mostly of things that were not there: a parching thirst that drained every cell of her, an absence of heat in her bones that was absolute. Sometimes she would catch herself wondering whether the crisp and crackling flames of a pyre would warm her, or the soft brown blanket of the earth; whether the cold sea would quench her thirst…

  The room, she realized, was not empty.
   Three women sat on, an elderly couch, as if they had come as a matched set in some peculiar artistic exhibition. The couch was upholstered in threadbare velvet, a faded brown that might, once, a hundred years ago, have been a bright canary yellow. They followed her with their eyes as she entered the room, and they said nothing.
   Laura had not known they would be there.
   Something wriggled and fell in her nasal cavity. Laura fumbled in her sleeve for a tissue, and she blew her nose into it. She crumpled the tissue and flung it and its contents onto the coals of the fire, watched it crumple and blacken and become orange lace. She watched the maggots shrivel and brown and burn.
   This done, she turned back to the women on the couch. They had not moved since she had entered, not a muscle, not a hair. They stared at her.
   “Hello. Is this your farm?” she asked.
   The largest of the women nodded. Her hands were very red, and her expression was impassive.
   “Shadow-that’s the guy hanging on the tree. He’s my husband-he said I should tell you that he wants you to give me water.” Something large shifted in her bowels. It squirmed, and then was still.
   The smallest woman clambered off the couch. Her feet had not previously reached the floor. She scurried from the room.
   Laura could hear doors opening and closing, through the farmhouse. Then, from outside, she could hear a series of loud creaks. Each was followed by a splash of water.
   Soon enough, the small woman returned. She was carrying a brown earthenware jug of water. She put it down, carefully, on the table, and retreated to the couch. She pulled herself up, with a wriggle and a shiver, and was seated beside her sisters once again.
   “Thank you.” Laura walked over to the table, looked around for a cup or a glass, but there was nothing like that to be seen. She picked up the jug. It was heavier than it looked. The water in it was perfectly clear.
   She raised the jug to her lips and began to drink.
   The water was colder than she had ever imagined liquid water could be. It froze her tongue and her teeth and her gullet. Still, she drank, unable to stop, feeling the water freezing its way into her stomach, her bowels, her heart, her veins.
   The water flowed into her. It was like liquid ice.
   She realized that the jug was empty and, surprised, she put it down on the table.
   The women were observing her, dispassionately. Since her death, Laura had not thought in metaphors: things were, or they were not. But now, as she looked at the women on the sofa, she found herself thinking of juries, of scientists observing a laboratory animal.
   She shook, suddenly and convulsively. She reached out a hand to the table to steady herself, but the table was slipping and lurching, and it almost avoided her grasp. As she put her hand on the table she began to vomit. She brought up bile and formalin, centipedes, and maggots. And then she felt herself starting to void, and to piss: stuff was being pushed violently, wetly, from her body. She would have screamed if she could; but then the dusty floorboards came up to meet her so fast and so hard that, had she been breathing, they would have knocked the breath from her body.
   Time rushed over her and into her, swirling like a dust devil. A thousand memories began to play at once: she was lost in a department store the week before Christmas and her father was nowhere to be seen; and now she was sitting in the bar at Chi-Chi’s, ordering a strawberry daiquiri and checking out her blind date, the big, grave man-child, and wondering how he kissed; and she was in the car as, sickeningly, it rolled and jolted, and Robbie was screaming at her until the metal post finally stopped the car, but not its contents, from moving…
   The water of time, which comes from the spring of fate, Urd’s Well, is not the water of life. Not quite. It feeds the roots of the world tree, though. And there is no other water like it.
   When Laura woke in the empty farmhouse room, she was shivering, and her breath actually steamed in the morning air. There was a scrape on the back of her hand, and a wet smear on the scrape, the vivid red of fresh blood.
   And she knew where she had to go. She had drunk from the water of time, which comes from the spring of fate. She could see the mountain in her mind.
   She licked the blood from the back of her hand, marveling at the film of saliva, and she began to walk.


* * *

   It was a wet March day, and it was unseasonably cold, and the storms of the previous few days had lashed their way across the southern states, which meant that there were very few real tourists at Rock City on Lookout Mountain. The Christmas lights had been taken down, the summer visitors were yet to start coming.
   Still, there were people there. There was even a tour bus that drew up that morning releasing a dozen men and women with perfect tans and gleaming, reassuring smiles. They looked like news anchors, and one could almost imagine there was a phosphor-dot quality to them: they seemed to blur gently as they moved. A black Humvee was parked in the front lot of Rock City.
   The TV people walked intently through Rock City, stationing themselves near the balancing rock, where they talked to each other in pleasant, reasonable voices.
   They were not the only people in this wave of visitors. If you had walked the paths of Rock City that day, you might have noticed people who looked like movie stars, and people who looked like aliens, and a number of people who looked most of all like the idea of a person and nothing like the reality. You might have seen them, but most likely you would never have noticed them at all.
   They came to Rock City in long limousines and in small sports cars and in oversized SUVs. Many of them wore the sunglasses of those who habitually wear sunglasses indoors and out, and do not willingly or comfortably remove them. There were suntans and suits and shades and smiles and scowls. They came in all sizes and shapes, all ages and styles.
   All they had in common was a look, a very specific look. It said, you know me; or perhaps, you ought to know me. An instant familiarity that was also a distance, a look, or an attitude-the confidence that the world existed for them, and that it welcomed them, and that they were adored.
   The fat kid moved among them with the shuffling walk of one who, despite having no social skills, has still become successful beyond his dreams. His black coat flapped in the wind.
   Something that stood beside the soft drink stand in Mother Goose Court coughed to attract his attention. It was massive, and scalpel blades jutted from its face and its fingers. Its face was cancerous. “It will be a mighty battle,” it told him, in a glutinous voice.
   “It’s not going to be a battle,” said the fat kid. “All we’re facing here is a fucking paradigm shift. It’s a shakedown. Modalities like battle are so fucking Lao Tzu.”
   The cancerous thing blinked at him. “Waiting,” is all it said in reply.
   “Whatever,” said the fat kid. Then, “I’m looking for Mister World. You seen him?”
   The thing scratched itself with a scalpel blade, a tumorous lower lip pushed out in concentration. Then it nodded. “Over there,” it said.
   The fat kid walked away, without a thank you, in the direction indicated. The cancerous thing waited, saying nothing, until the kid was out of sight.
   “It will be a battle,” said the cancerous thing to a woman whose face was smudged with phosphor dots.
   She nodded, and leaned closer to it. “So how does that make you feel?” she asked, in a sympathetic voice.
   It blinked, and then it began to tell her.


* * *

   Town’s Ford Explorer had a global positioning system, a little screen that listened to the satellites and showed the car its location, but he still got lost once he got south of Blacksburg and onto the country roads: the roads he drove seemed to bear little relationship to the tangle of lines on the map on the screen. Eventually he stopped the car in a country lane, wound down the window and asked a fat white woman being pulled by a wolfhound on its early-morning walk for directions to Ashtree farm.
   She nodded, and pointed and said something to him. He could not understand what she had said, but he said thanks a million and wound up the window and drove off in the general direction she had indicated.
   He kept going for another forty minutes, down country road after country road, none of them the road he sought. Town began to chew his lower lip.
   “I’m too old for this shit,” he said aloud, relishing the movie-star world-weariness of the line.
   He was pushing fifty. Most of his working life had been spent in a branch of government that went only by its initials, and whether or not he had left his government job a dozen years ago for employment by the private sector was open to debate: some days he thought one way, some days another. Anyway, it was only the joes on the street that really believed there was a difference.
   He was on the verge of giving up on the farm when he crested a hill and saw the sign, hand painted, on the gate. It said simply, as he had been told it would, ASH. He pulled up the Ford Explorer, climbed out, and untwisted the wire that held the gate closed. He got back in the car and drove through.
   It was like cooking a frog, he thought. You put the frog in the water, and then you turn on the heat. And by the time the frog notices that there’s anything wrong, it’s already been cooked. The world in which he worked was all too weird. There was no solid ground beneath his feet; the water in the pot was bubbling fiercely.
   When he’d been transferred to the Agency it had all seemed so simple. Now it was all so-not complex, he decided; merely bizarre. He had been sitting in Mr. World’s office at two that morning, and he had been told what he was to do. “You got it?” said Mr. World, handing him the knife in its dark leather sheath. “Cut me a stick. It doesn’t have to be longer than a couple of feet.”
   “Affirmative,” he said. And then he said, “Why do I have to do this, sir?”
   “Because I tell you to,” said Mr. World, flatly. “Find the tree. Do the job. Meet me down in Chattanooga. Don’t waste any time.”
   “And what about the asshole?”

  “Shadow? If you see him, just avoid him. Don’t touch him. Don’t even mess with him. I don’t want you turning him into a martyr. There’s no room for martyrs in the current game plan.” He smiled then, his scarred smile. Mr. World was easily amused. Mr. Town had noticed this on several occasions. It had amused him to play chauffeur, in Kansas, after all.
   “Look-”
   “No martyrs, Town.”
   And Town had nodded, and taken the knife in its sheath, and pushed the rage that welled up inside him down deep and away.
   Mr. Town’s hatred of Shadow had become a part of him. As he was falling asleep he would see Shadow’s solemn face, see that smile that wasn’t a smile, the way Shadow had of smiling without smiling that made Town want to sink his fist into the man’s gut, and even as he fell asleep he could feel his jaws squeeze together, his temples tense, his gullet burn.
   He drove the Ford Explorer across the meadow, past an abandoned farmhouse. He crested a ridge and saw the tree. He parked the car a little way past it, and turned off the engine. The clock on the dashboard said it was 6:38. A.M. He left the keys in the car, and walked toward the tree.
   The tree was large; it seemed to exist on its own sense of scale. Town could not have said if it was fifty feet high or two hundred. Its bark was the gray of a fine silk scarf.
   There was a naked man tied to the trunk a little way above the ground by a webwork of ropes, and there was something wrapped in a sheet at the foot of the tree. Town realized what it was as he passed it. He pushed at the sheet with his foot. Wednesday’s ruined half-a-face stared out at him.
   Town reached the tree. He walked a little way around the thick trunk, away from the sightless eyes of the farmhouse, then he unzipped his fly and pissed against the trunk of the tree. He did up his fly. He walked back over to the house, found a wooden extension ladder, carried it back to the tree. He leaned it carefully against the trunk. Then he climbed up it.
   Shadow hung, limply, from the ropes that tied him to the tree. Town wondered if the man was still alive: his chest did not rise or fall. Dead or almost dead, it did not matter.
   “Hello, asshole,” Town said, aloud. Shadow did not move.
   Town reached the top of the ladder, and he pulled out the knife. He found a small branch that seemed to meet Mr. World’s specifications, and hacked at the base of it with the knife blade, cutting it half through, then breaking it off with his hand. It was about thirty inches long.
   He put the knife back in its sheath. Then he started to climb back down the ladder. When he was opposite Shadow, he paused. “God, I hate you,” he said. He wished he could just have taken out a gun and shot him, and he knew that he could not. And then he jabbed the stick in the air toward the hanging man, in a stabbing motion. It was an instinctive gesture, containing all the frustration and rage inside Town. He imagined that he was holding a spear and twisting it into Shadow’s guts.
   “Come on,” he said, aloud. “Time to get moving.” Then he thought, First sign of madness. Talking to yourself. He climbed down a few more steps, then jumped the rest of the way to the ground. He looked at the stick he was holding, and felt like a small boy, holding his stick as a sword or a spear. I could have cut a stick from any tree, he thought. It didn’t have to be this tree. Who the fuck would have known?
   And he thought, Mr. World would have known.
   He carried the ladder back to the farmhouse. From the corner of his eye he thought he saw something move, and he looked in through the window, into the dark room filled with broken furniture, with the plaster peeling from the walls, and for a moment, in a half dream, he imagined that he saw three women sitting in the dark parlor.
   One of them was knitting. One of them was staring directly at him. One of them appeared to be asleep. The woman who was staring at him began to smile, a huge smile that seemed to split her face lengthwise, a smile that crossed from ear to ear. Then she raised a finger and touched it to her neck, and ran it gently from one side of her neck to the other.
   That was what he thought he saw, all in a moment, in that empty room, which contained, he saw at a second glance, nothing more than old rotting furniture and fly-spotted prints and dry rot. There was nobody there at all.
   He rubbed his eyes.
   Town walked back to the brown Ford Explorer and climbed in. He tossed the stick onto the white leather of the passenger seat. He turned the key in the ignition. The dashboard clock said 6:37 A.M. Town frowned, and checked his wristwatch, which blinked that it was 13:58.
   Great, he thought. I was either up on that tree for eight hours, or for minus a minute. That was what he thought, but what he believed was that both timepieces had, coincidentally, begun to misbehave.
   On the tree, Shadow’s body began to bleed. The wound was in his side. The blood that came from it was slow and thick and molasses-black.


* * *

   Clouds covered the top of Lookout Mountain.
   Easter sat some distance away from the crowd at the bottom of the mountain, watching the dawn over the hills to the east. She had a chain of blue forget-me-nots tattooed around her left wrist, and she rubbed them absently, with her right thumb.
   Another night had come and gone, and nothing. The folk were still coming, by ones and twos. The last night had brought several creatures from the southwest, including two small boys each the size of an apple tree, and something that she had only glimpsed, but that had looked like a disembodied head the size of a VW bug. They had disappeared into the trees at the base of the mountain.
   Nobody bothered them. Nobody from the outside world even seemed to have noticed they were there: she imagined the tourists at Rock City staring down at them through their insert-a-quarter binoculars, staring straight at a ramshackle encampment of things and people at the foot of the mountain, and seeing nothing but trees and bushes and rocks.
   She could smell the smoke from a cooking fire, a smell of burning bacon on the chilly dawn wind. Someone at the far end of the encampment began to play the harmonica, which made her, involuntarily, smile and shiver. She had a paperback book in her backpack, and she waited for the sky to become light enough for her to read.
   There were two dots in the sky, immediately below the clouds: a small one and a larger one. A spatter of rain brushed her face in the morning wind.
   A barefoot girl came out from the encampment, walking toward her. She stopped beside a tree, hitched up her skirts, and squatted. When she had finished, Easter hailed her. The girl walked over.
   “Good morning, lady,” she said. “The battle will start soon now.” The tip of her pink tongue touched her scarlet lips. She had a black crow’s wing tied with leather onto her shoulder, a crow’s foot on a chain around her neck. Her arms were blue-tattooed with lines and patterns and intricate knots.
   “How do you know?”
   The girl grinned. “I am Macha, of the Morrigan. When war comes, I can smell it in the air. I am a war goddess, and I say, blood shall be spilled this day.”
   “Oh,” said Easter. “Well. There you go.” She was watching the smaller dot in the sky as it tumbled down toward them, dropping like a rock.
   “And we shall fight them, and we shall kill them, every one,” said the girl. “And we shall take their heads as trophies, and the crows shall have their eyes and their corpses.” The dot had become a bird, its wings outstretched, riding the gusty morning winds above them.
   Easter cocked her head on one side. “Is that some hidden war goddess knowledge?” she asked. “The whole who’s-going-to-win thing? Who gets whose head?”
   “No,” said the girl, “I can smell the battle, but that’s all. But we’ll win. Won’t we? We have to. I saw what they did to the All-Father. It’s them or us.”
   “Yeah,” said Easter. “I suppose it is.”
   The girl smiled again, in the half-light, and made her way back to the camp. Easter put her hand down and touched a green shoot that stabbed up from the earth like a knife blade. As she touched it it grew, and opened, and twisted, and changed, until she was resting her hand on a green tulip head. When the sun was high the flower would open.
   Easter looked up at the hawk. “Can I help you?” she said.
   The hawk circled about fifteen feet above Easter’s head, slowly, then it glided down to her, and landed on the ground nearby. It looked up at her with mad eyes.
   “Hello, cutie,” she said. “Now, what do you really look like, eh?”
   The hawk hopped toward her, uncertainly, and then it was no longer a hawk, but a young man. He looked at her, and then looked down at the grass. “You?” he said. His glance went everywhere, to the grass, to the sky, to the bushes. Not to her.
   “Me,” she said. “What about me?”
   “You.” He stopped. He seemed to be trying to muster his thoughts; strange expressions flitted and swam across his face. He spent too long a bird, she thought. He has forgotten how to be a man. She waited patiently. Eventually, he said, “Will you come with me?”
   “Maybe. Where do you want me to go?”
   “The man on the tree. He needs you. A ghost hurt, in his side. The blood came, then it stopped. I think he is dead.”
   “There’s a war on. I can’t just go running away.”
   The naked man said nothing, just moved from one foot to another as if he were uncertain of his weight, as if he were used to resting on the air or on a swaying branch, not on the solid earth. Then he said, “If he is gone forever, it is all over.”
   “But the battle-”
   “If he is lost, it will not matter who wins.” He looked like he needed a blanket, and a cup of sweet coffee, and someone to take him somewhere he could just shiver and babble until he got his mind back. He held his arms stiffly against his sides.
   “Where is this? Nearby?”
   He stared at the tulip plant, and shook his head. “Way away.”
   “Well,” she said, “I’m needed here. And I can’t just leave. How do you expect me to get there? I can’t fly, like you, you know.”
   “No,” said Horus, “You can’t.” Then he looked up, gravely, and pointed to the other dot that circled them, as it dropped from the darkening clouds, growing in size. “He can.”


* * *

   Another several hours’ pointless driving, and by now Town hated the global positioning system almost as much as he hated Shadow. There was no passion in the hate, though. He had thought finding his way to the farm, to the great silver ash tree, had been hard; finding his way away from the farm was much harder. It did not seem to matter which road he took, which direction he drove down the narrow country lanes-the twisting Virginia back roads that must have begun, he was sure, as deer trails and cowpaths-eventually he would find himself passing the farm once more, and the hand-painted sign, ASH.
   This was crazy, wasn’t it? He simply had to retrace his way, take a left turn for every right he had taken on his way here, a right turn for every left.
   Only that was what he had done last time, and now here he was, back at the farm once more. There were heavy storm clouds coming in, it was getting dark fast, it felt like night, not morning, and he had a long drive ahead of him: he would never get to Chattanooga before afternoon at this rate.
   His cell phone gave him only a No Service message. The fold-out map in the car’s glove compartment showed the main roads, all the interstates and the real highways, but as far as it was concerned nothing else existed.
   Nor was there anyone around that he could ask. The houses were set back from the roads; there were no welcoming lights. Now the fuel gauge was nudging Empty. He heard a rumble of distant thunder, and a single drop of rain splashed heavily onto his windshield.
   So when Town saw the woman, walking along the side of the road, he found himself smiling, involuntarily. “Thank God,” he said, aloud, and he drew up beside her. He thumbed down the window. “Ma’am? I’m sorry. I’m kind of lost. Can you tell me how to get to Highway Eighty-one from here?”
   She looked at him through the open passenger-side window and said, “You know. I don’t think I can explain it. But I can show you, if you like.” She was pale, and her wet hair was long and dark.
   “Climb in,” said Town. He didn’t even hesitate. “First thing, we need to buy some gas.”
   “Thanks,” she said. “I needed a ride.” She got in. Her eyes were astonishingly blue. “There’s a stick here, on the seat,” she said, puzzled.
   “Just throw it in the back. Where are you heading?” he asked. “Lady, if you can get me to a gas station, and back to a freeway, I’ll take you all the way to your own front door.”
   She said, “Thank you. But I think I’m going farther than you are. If you can get me to the freeway, that will be fine. Maybe a trucker will give me a ride.” And she smiled, a crooked, determined smile. It was the smile that did it.
   “Ma’am,” he said, “I can give you a finer ride than any trucker.” He could smell her perfume. It was heady and heavy, a cloying scent, like magnolias or lilacs, but he did not mind