American Gods (67 page)

“I’m Shadow’s wife.”

“Of course. The lovely Laura,” he said. “I should have recognized
you. He had several photographs of you up above his bed, in the cell that once
we shared. And, if you don’t mind my saying so, you are looking lovelier than
you have any right to look. Shouldn’t you be further along on the whole
road-to-rot-and-ruin business by now?”

“I was,” she said simply. “But those women, in the farm,
they gave me water from their well.”

An eyebrow raised. “Urd’s Well? Surely not.”

She pointed to herself. Her skin was pale, and her eye
sockets were dark, but she was manifestly whole: if she was indeed a walking
corpse, she was freshly dead.

“It won’t last,” said Mr. World. “The Norns gave you a
little taste of the past. It will dissolve into the present soon enough, and
then those pretty blue eyes will roll out of their sockets and ooze down those
pretty cheeks, which will, by then, of course, no longer be so pretty. By the
way, you have my stick. Can I have it, please?”

He pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes, took a cigarette, lit
it with a disposable black Bic.

She said, “Can I have one of those?”

“Sure. I’ll give you a cigarette if you give me my stick.”

“If you want it, it’s worth more than just a cigarette.”

He said nothing.

She said, “I want answers. I want to know things.”

He lit a cigarette and passed it to her. She took it and
inhaled. Then she blinked. “I can almost taste this one,” she said. “I think
maybe I can.” She smiled. “Mm. Nicotine.”

“Yes,” he said. “Why did you go to the women in the farmhouse?”

“Shadow told me to go to them,” she said. “He said to ask
them for water.”

“I wonder if he knew what it would do. Probably not. Still,
that’s the good thing about having him dead on his tree. I know where he is at
all times, now. He’s off the board.”

“You set up my husband,” she said. “You set him up all the
way, you people. He has a good heart, you know that?”

“Yes,” said Mr. World. “I know. When this is all done with,
I guess I’ll sharpen a stick of mistletoe and go down to the ash tree, and ram
it through his eye. Now. My stick, please.”

“Why do you want it?”

“It’s a souvenir of this whole sorry mess,” said Mr. World. “Don’t
worry, it’s not mistletoe.” He flashed a grin. “It symbolizes a spear, and in
this sorry world, the symbol is the thing.”

The noises from outside grew louder.

“Which side are you on?” she asked.

“It’s not about sides,” he told her. “But since you asked, I’m
on the winning side. Always.”

She nodded, and she did not let go of the stick.

She turned away from him, and looked out of the cavern door.
Far below her, in the rocks, she could see something that glowed and pulsed. It
wrapped itself around a thin, mauve-faced bearded man, who was beating at it
with a squeegee stick, the kind of squeegee that people like him use to smear
across car windshields at traffic lights. There was a scream, and they both disappeared
from view.

“Okay. I’ll give you the stick,” she said.

Mr. World’s voice came from behind her. “Good girl,” he said
reassuringly, in a way that struck her as being both patronizing and
indefinably male. It made her skin crawl.

She waited in the rock doorway until she could hear his
breath in her ear. She had to wait until he got close enough. She had that much
figured out.

The ride was more than exhilarating; it was electric.

They swept through the storm like jagged bolts of lightning,
flashing from cloud to cloud; they moved like the thunder’s roar, like the
swell and rip of the hurricane. It was a crackling, impossible journey. There
was no fear: only the power of the storm, unstoppable and all-consuming, and
the joy of the flight.

Shadow dug his fingers into the thunderbird’s feathers, feeling
the static prickle on his skin. Blue sparks writhed across his hands like tiny
snakes. Rain washed his face.

“This is the best,” he shouted, over the roar of the storm.

As if it understood him, the bird began to rise higher,
every wing-beat a clap of thunder, and it swooped and dove and tumbled through
the dark clouds.

“In my dream, I was hunting you,” said Shadow, his words
ripped away by the wind. “In my dream, I had to bring back a feather.”

Yes. The word was a static crackle in the radio of his mind.
They came to us for feathers, to prove that they were men; and they came to us
to cut the stones from our heads, to gift their dead with our lives.

An image filled his mind then: of a thunderbird—a female, he
assumed, for her plumage was brown, not black—lying freshly dead on the side of
a mountain. Beside it was a woman. She was breaking open its skull with a knob
of flint. She picked through the wet shards of bone and the brains until she
found a smooth clear stone the tawny color of garnet, opalescent fires
flickering in its depths. Eagle stones, thought Shadow. She was going to take
iyp her infant son, dead these last three nights, and she would lay it on his
cold breast. By the next sunrise the boy would be alive and laughing, and the
jewel would be gray and clouded and as dead as the bird it had been stolen
from.

“I understand,” he said to the bird.

The bird threw back its head and crowed, and its cry was the
thunder.

The world beneath them flashed past in one strange dream.

Laura adjusted her grip on the stick, and she waited for the
man she knew as Mr. World to come to her. She was facing away from him, looking
out at the storm, and the dark green hills below. In this sorry world, she
thought, the symbol is the thing. Yes.

She felt his hand close softly onto her right shoulder.

Good, she thought. He does not want to alarm me. He is
scared that I will throw his stick out into the storm, that it will tumble down
the mountainside, and he will lose it.

She leaned back, just a little, until she was touching his
chest with her back. His left arm curved around her. It was an intimate
gesture. His left hand was open in front of her. She closed both of her hands
around the top of the stick, exhaled, concentrated.

“Please. My stick,” he said, in her ears.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s yours.” And then, not knowing if it
would mean anything, she said, “I dedicate this death to Shadow,” and she
stabbed the stick into her chest, just below the breastbone, felt it writhe and
change in her hands as the stick became a spear.

The boundary between sensation and pain had diffused since
she had died. She felt the spearhead penetrate her chest, felt it push out
through her back. A moment’s resistance—she pushed harder—and the spear pushed into
Mr. World. She could feel the warm breath of him on the cool skin of her neck,
as he wailed in hurt and surprise, impaled on the spear.

She did not recognize the words he spoke, nor the language
he said them in. She pushed the shaft of the spear farther in, forcing it
through her body, into and through his.

She could feel his hot blood spurting onto her back.

“Bitch,” he said, in English. “You fucking bitch.” There was
a wet gurgling quality to his voice. She guessed that the blade of the spear
must have sliced a lung. Mr.’World was moving now, or trying to move, and every
move he made rocked her too: they were joined by the pole, impaled together
like two fish on a single spear. He now had a knife in one hand, she saw, and
he stabbed her chest and breasts randomly and wildly with the knife, unable to
see what he was doing. She did not care. What are knife cuts to a corpse?

She brought her fist down, hard, on his waving wrist, and
the knife went flying to the floor of the cavern. She kicked it away.

And now he was crying and wailing. She could feel him pushing
against her, his hands fumbling at her back, his hot tears on her neck. His
blood was soaking her back, spurting down the back of her legs.

“This must look so undignified,” she said, in a dead whisper,
not without a certain dark amusement.

She felt Mr. World stumble behind her, and she stumbled too,
and then she slipped in the blood—all of it his—that was puddling on the floor
of the cave, and they both went down.

The thunderbird landed in the Rock City parking lot. Rain
was falling in sheets. Shadow could barely see a dozen feet in front of his
face. He let go of the thunderbird’s feathers and half slipped, half tumbled to
the wet asphalt.

Lightning flashed, and the bird was gone.

Shadow climbed to his feet.

The parking lot was three-quarters empty. Shadow started toward
the entrance. He passed & brown Ford Explorer, parked against a rock wall.
There was something deeply familiar about the car, and he glanced up at it
curiously, noticing the man inside the car, slumped over the steering wheel as
if asleep.

Shadow pulled open the driver’s-side door.

He had last seen Mr. Town standing outside the motel in the
center of America. The expression on his face was one of surprise. His neck had
been expertly broken. Shadow touched the man’s face. Still warm.

Shadow could smell a scent on the air in the car; it was
faint, like the perfume of someone who left a room years before, but Shadow
would have known it anywhere. He slammed the door of the Explorer and made his
way across the parking lot. As he walked he felt a twinge in his side, a sharp,
jabbing pain that lasted for only a second, or less, and then it was gone.

There was nobody selling tickets. He walked through the building
and out into the gardens of Rock City.

Thunder rumbled, and it rattled the branches of the trees
and shook deep inside the huge rocks, and the rain fell with cold violence. It
was late afternoon, but it was dark as night.

A trail of lightning speared across the clouds, and Shadow
wondered if that was the thunderbird returning to its high crags, or just an
atmospheric discharge, or whether the two ideas were, on some level, the same
thing.

And of course they were. That was the point, after all.

Somewhere a man’s voice called out. Shadow heard it. The
only words he recognized or thought he recognized were “... to Odin!”

Shadow hurried across Seven States Flag Court, the
flagstones now running fast with rainwater. Once he slipped on the slick stone.
There was a thick layer of cloud surrounding the mountain, and in the gloom and
the storm beyond the courtyard he could see no states at all.

There was no sound. The place seemed utterly abandoned.

He called out, and imagined he heard something answering. He
walked toward the place from which he thought the sound had come.

Nobody. Nothing. Just a chain marking the entrance to a cave
as off-limits to guests.

Shadow stepped over the chain.

He looked around, peering into the darkness.

His skin prickled.

A voice from behind him, in the shadows, said, very quietly,
“You have never disappointed me.”

Shadow did not turn. “That’s weird,” he said. “I
disappointed myself all the way. Every time.”

“Not at all,” said the voice. “You did everything you were intended
to do, and more. You took everybody’s attention, so they never looked at the
hand with the coin in it. It’s called misdirection. And there’s power in the
sacrifice of a son—power enough, and more than enough, to get the whole ball
rolling. To tell the truth, I’m proud of you.”

“It was crooked,” said Shadow. “All of it. None of it was
for real. It was just a setup for a massacre.”

“Exactly,” said Wednesday’s voice from the shadows. “It was
crooked. But it was the only game in town.”

“I want Laura,” said Shadow. “I want Loki. Where are they?”

There was only silence. A spray of rain gusted at him.
Thunder rumbled somewhere close at hand.

He walked farther in.

Loki Lie-Smith sat on the ground with his back to a metal
cage. Inside the cage, drunken pixies tended their still. He was covered with a
blanket. Only his face showed, and his hands, white and long, came around the
blanket. An electric lantern sat on a chair beside him. The lantern’s batteries
were close to failing, and the light it cast was faint and yellow.

He looked pale, and he looked rough.

His eyes, though. His eyes were still
fiery
,
and they glared at Shadow as he walked through the cavern.

When Shadow was several paces from Loki, he stopped.

“You are too late,” said Loki. His voice was raspy and wet. “I
have thrown the spear. I have dedicated the battle. It has begun.”

“No shit,” said Shadow.

“No shit,” said Loki. “So it does not matter what you do anymore.”

Shadow stopped and thought. Then he said, “The spear you had
to throw to kick off the battle. Like the whole Uppsala thing. This is the battle
you’ll be feeding on. Am I right?”

Silence. He could hear Loki breathing, a ghastly rattling
inhalation.

“I figured it out,” said Shadow. “Kind of. I’m not sure when
I figured it out. Maybe when I was hanging on the tree. Maybe before. It was
from something Wednesday said to me, at Christmas.”

Loki just stared at him from the floor, saying nothing.

“It’s just a two-man con,” said Shadow. “Like the bishop
with the diamond necklace and the cop who arrests him. Like the guy with the
fiddle, and the guy who wants to buy the fiddle. Two men, who appear to be on
opposite sides, playing the same game.”

Loki whispered, “You are ridiculous.”

“Why? I liked what you did at the motel. That was smart. You
needed to be there, to make sure that everything went according to plan. I saw
you. I even realized who you were. And I still never twigged that you were
their Mister World.”

Shadow raised his voice. “You can come out,” he said, to the
cavern. “Wherever you are. Show yourself.”

The wind howled in the opening of the cavern, and it drove a
spray of rainwater in toward them. Shadow shivered.