by Neil Gaiman
Chief of Police Mulligan excused himself near the middle of this litany. “Looks like they need me back at the office. Good meeting you, Mike,” he said, and he moved Shadow’s shopping bags into the back of Missy Gunther’s station wagon.
Missy drove Shadow back to her place, where, in the drive, he saw an elderly SUV. The blown snow had bleached half of it to a blinding white, while the rest of it was painted the kind of drippy purple that someone would need to be very stoned, very often, to even begin to be able to find attractive.
Still, the car started up on the first try, and the heater worked, although it took almost ten minutes of running the engine with the heater on full before the interior of the car changed from unbearably cold to merely chilly. While this was happening, Missy Gunther took Shadow into her kitchen—excuse the mess, but the little ones just leave their toys all over after Christmas and she just didn’t have the heart, would he care for some leftover turkey dinner? Well, coffee then, won’t take a moment to brew a fresh pot—and Shadow took a large red toy car off a window seat and sat down, while Missy Gunther asked if he had met his neighbors yet, and Shadow confessed that he hadn’t.
There were, he was informed while the coffee dripped, four other inhabitants of his apartment building—back when it was the Pilsen place the Pilsens lived in the downstairs flat and rented out the upper two flats, now their apartment, which was taken by a couple of young men, Mr. Holz and Mr. Neiman, they actually are a couple and when she said couple, Mr. Ainsel, Heavens, we have all kinds here, more than one kind of tree in the forest, although mostly those kind of people wind up in Madison or the Twin Cities, but truth to tell, nobody here gives it a second thought. They’re in Key West for the winter, they’ll be back in April, he’ll meet them then. The thing about Lakeside is that it’s a good town. Now next door to Mr. Ainsel, that’s Marguerite Olsen and her little boy, a sweet lady, sweet, sweet lady, but she’s had a hard life, still sweet as pie, and she works for the Lakeside News. Not the most exciting newspaper in the world, but truth to tell Missy Gunther thought that was probably the way most folk around here liked it.
Oh, she said, and poured him coffee, she just wished that Mr. Ainsel could see the town in the summer or late in the spring, when the lilacs and the apple and the cherry blossoms were out, she thought there was nothing like it for beauty, nothing like it anywhere in the world.
Shadow gave her a five-hundred-dollar deposit, and he climbed up into the car and started to back it up, out of her front yard and onto the driveway proper. Missy Gunther tapped on his front window. “This is for you,” she said. “I nearly forgot.” She handed him a buff envelope. “It’s kind of a gag. We had them printed up a few years back. You don’t have to look at it now.”
He thanked her, and drove, cautiously, back into the town. He took the road that ran around the lake. He wished he could see it in the spring, or the summer, or the fall: it would be very beautiful, he had no doubt of that.
In ten minutes he was home.
He parked the car out on the street and walked up the outside steps to his cold apartment. He unpacked his shopping, put the food into the cupboards and the fridge, and then he opened the envelope Missy Gunther had given him.
It contained a passport. Blue, plasticated cover and, inside, a proclamation that Michael Ainsel (his name handwritten in Missy Gunther’s precise handwriting) was a citizen of Lakeside. There was a map of the town on the next page. The rest of it was filled with discount coupons for various local stores.
“I think I may like it here,” said Shadow, aloud. He looked out of the icy window at the frozen lake. “If it ever warms up.”
There was a bang at the front door at around 2:00 P.M. Shadow had been practicing the Sucker Vanish with a quarter, tossing it from one hand to the other undetectably. His hands were cold enough and clumsy enough that he kept dropping the coin onto the tabletop, and the knock at the door made him drop it again.
He went to the door and opened it.
A moment of pure fear: the man at the door wore a black mask which covered the lower half of his face. It was the kind of mask that a bank robber might wear on TV, or a serial killer from a cheap movie might wear to scare his victims. The top of the man’s head was covered by a black knit cap.
Still, the man was smaller and slighter than Shadow, and he did not appear to be armed. And he wore a bright plaid coat, of the kind that serial killers normally avoid.
“Ih hihelhan,” said the visitor.
“Huh?”
The man pulled the mask downward to reveal Hinzelmann’s cheerful face. “I said, ‘It’s Hinzelmann.’ You know, I don’t know what we did before they came up with these masks. Well, I do remember what we did. Thick knitted caps that went all around your face, and scarves and you don’t want to know what else. I think it’s a miracle what they come up with these days. I may be an old man, but I’m not going to grumble about progress, not me.”
He finished this speech by thrusting a basket at Shadow, filled high with local cheeses, bottles, jars, and several small salamis that proclaimed themselves to be venison summer sausage, and by coming inside. “Merry day after Christmas,” he said. His nose and ears and cheeks were red as raspberries, mask or no mask. “I hear you already ate a whole one of Mabel’s pasties. Brought you a few things.”
“That’s very kind of you,” said Shadow.
“Kind, nothing. I’m going to stick it to you next week for the raffle. The Chamber of Commerce runs it, and I run the Chamber of Commerce. Last year we raised almost seventeen thousand dollars for the children’s ward of Lakeside Hospital.”
“Well, why don’t you put me down for a ticket now?”
“It don’t start until the day the klunker hits the ice,” said Hinzelmann. He looked out of Shadow’s window toward the lake. “Cold out there. Must have dropped fifty degrees last night.”
“It happened really fast,” agreed Shadow.
“We used to pray for freezes like this back in the old days,” said Hinzelmann. “My daddy told me.”
“You’d pray for days like this?”
“Well, yah, it was the only way the settlers survived back then. Weren’t enough food for everyone, and you couldn’t just go down to Dave’s and fill up your shopping cart in the old days, no sir. So my grampaw, he got to figgerin’, and when a really cold day like this come along he’d take my grammaw, and the kids, my uncle and my aunt and my daddy—he was the youngest—and the serving girl and the hired man, and he’d go down with them to the creek, give ’em a little drink of rum and herbs, it was a recipe he’d got from the old country, then he’d pour creek water over them. Course they’d freeze in seconds, stiff and blue as so many Popsicles. He’d haul them to a trench they’d already dug and filled with straw, and he’d stack ’em down there, one by one, like so much cordwood in the trench, and he’d pack straw around them, then he’d cover the top of the trench with two-b’-fours to keep the critters out—in those days there were wolves and bears and all sorts you never see anymore around here, no hodags though, that’s just a story about the hodags and I wouldn’t ever stretch your credulity by telling you no stories, no sir—he’d cover the trench with two-b’-fours and the next snowfall would cover it up completely, save for the flag he’d planted to show him where the trench was.
“Then my grampaw would ride through the winter in comfort and never have to worry about running out of food or out of fuel. And when he saw that the true spring was coming he’d go to the flag, and he’d dig his way down through the snow, and he’d move the two-b’-fours, and he’d carry them in one by one and set the family in front of the fire to thaw. Nobody ever minded except one of the hired men who lost half an ear to a family of mice who nibbled it off one time my grampaw didn’t push those two-b’-fours all the way closed. Of course, in those days we had real winters. You could do that back then. These pussy winters we get nowadays it don’t hardly get cold enough.”
“No?” asked Shadow. He was playing straight
man, and enjoying it enormously.
“Not since the winter of ’49, and you’d be too young to remember that one. That was a winter. I see you bought yourself a vee-hicle.”
“Yup. What do you think?”
“Truth to tell, I never liked that Gunther boy. I had a trout stream down in the woods a way, on back of my property, way back, well it’s town land but I’d put down stones in the river, made little pools and places where the trout liked to live. Caught me some beauties too—one fellow must have been a six-, seven-pound brook trout, and that little Gunther so-and-so he kicked down each of the pools and threatened to report me to the DNR. Now he’s in Green Bay, and soon enough he’ll be back here. If there were any justice in the world he’d’ve gone off into the world as a winter runaway, but nope, sticks like a cockleburr to a woolen vest.” He began to arrange the contents of Shadow’s welcome basket on the counter. “This is Katherine Powdermaker’s crabapple jelly. She’s been giving me a pot for Christmas for longer than you’ve been alive, and the sad truth is I’ve never opened a one. They’re down in my basement, forty, fifty pots. Maybe I’ll open one and discover that I like the stuff. Meantime, here’s a pot for you. Maybe you’ll like it.”
“What’s a winter runaway?”
“Mm.” The old man pushed his woolen cap above his ears, rubbed his temple with a pink forefinger. “Well, it ain’t unique to Lakeside—we’re a good town, better than most, but we’re not perfect. Some winters, well, maybe a kid gets a bit stir crazy, when it gets so cold that you can’t go out, and the snow’s so dry that you can’t make so much as a snowball without it crumbling away . . .”
“They run off?”
The old man nodded, gravely. “I blame the television, showing all the kids things they’ll never have—Dallas and Dynasty, all of that nonsense. I’ve not had a television since the fall of ’83, except for a black-and-white set I keep in a closet for if folk come in from out of town and there’s a big game on.”
“Can I get you anything, Hinzelmann?”
“Not coffee. Gives me heartburn. Just water.” Hinzelmann shook his head. “Biggest problem in this part of the world is poverty. Not the poverty we had in the Depression but something more in . . . what’s the word, means it creeps in at the edges, like cock-a-roaches?”
“Insidious?”
“Yeah. Insidious. Logging’s dead. Mining’s dead. Tourists don’t drive farther north than the Dells, ‘cept for a handful of hunters and some kids going to camp on the lakes—and they aren’t spending their money in the towns.”
“Lakeside seems kind of prosperous, though.”
The old man’s blue eyes blinked. “And believe me, it takes a lot of work,” he said. “Hard work. But this is a good town, and all the work all the people here put into it is worthwhile. Not that my family weren’t poor as kids. Ask me how poor we was as kids.”
Shadow put on his straight-man face and said, “How poor were you as kids, Mister Hinzelmann?”
“Just Hinzelmann, Mike. We were so poor that we couldn’t afford a fire. Come New Year’s Eve my father would suck on a peppermint, and us kids, we’d stand around with our hands outstretched, basking in the glow.”
Shadow made a rimshot noise. Hinzelmann put on his ski mask and did up his huge plaid coat, pulled out his car keys from his pocket, and then, last of all, pulled on his great gloves. “You get too bored up here, you just come down to the store and ask for me. I’ll show you my collection of hand-tied fishing flies. Bore you so much that getting back here will be a relief.” His voice was muffled, but audible.
“I’ll do that,” said Shadow with a smile. “How’s Tessie?”
“Hibernating. She’ll be out in the spring. You take care now, Mr. Ainsel.” And he closed the door behind him as he left.
The apartment grew ever colder.
Shadow put on his coat and his gloves. Then he put on his boots. He could hardly see through the windows now for the ice on the inside of the panes which turned the view of the lake into an abstract image.
His breath was clouding in the air.
He went out of his apartment onto the wooden deck and knocked on the door next door. He heard a woman’s voice shouting at someone to for heaven’s sake shut up and turn that television down—a kid, he thought, adults don’t shout like that at other adults. The door opened and a tired woman with very long, very black hair was staring at him warily.
“Yes?”
“How do you do, ma’am. I’m Mike Ainsel. I’m your next-door neighbor.”
Her expression did not change, not by a hair. “Yes?”
“Ma’am. It’s freezing in my apartment. There’s a little heat coming out of the grate, but it’s not warming the place up, not at all.”
She looked him up and down, then a ghost of a smile touched the edges of her lips and she said, “Come in, then. If you don’t there’ll be no heat in here, either.”
He stepped inside her apartment. Plastic, multicolored toys were strewn all over the floor. There were small heaps of torn Christmas wrapping paper by the wall. A small boy sat inches away from the television set, a video of the Disney Hercules playing, an animated satyr stomping and shouting his way across the screen. Shadow kept his back to the TV set.
“Okay,” she said. “This is what you do. First you seal the windows, you can buy the stuff down at Hennings, it’s just like Saran Wrap but for windows. Tape it to windows, then if you want to get fancy you run a blow-dryer on it, it stays there the whole winter. That stops the heat leaving through the windows. Then you buy a space heater or two. The building’s furnace is old, and it can’t cope with the real cold. We’ve had some easy winters recently, I suppose we should be grateful.” Then she put out her hand. “Marguerite Olsen.”
“Good to meet you,” said Shadow. He pulled off a glove and they shook hands. “You know, ma’am, I’d always thought of Olsens as being blonder than you.”
“My ex-husband was as blond as they come. Pink and blond. Couldn’t tan at gunpoint.”
“Missy Gunther told me you write for the local paper.”
“Missy Gunther tells everybody everything. I don’t see why we need a local paper with Missy Gunther around.” She nodded. “Yes. Some news reporting here and there, but my editor writes most of the news. I write the nature column, the gardening column, an opinion column every Sunday and the ‘News from the Community’ column, which tells, in mind-numbing detail, who went to dinner with who for fifteen miles around. Or is that whom?”
“Whom,” said Shadow, before he could stop himself. “It’s the objective case.”
She looked at him with her black eyes, and Shadow experienced a moment of pure déjà vu. I’ve been here before, he thought.
No, she reminds me of someone.
“Anyway, that’s how you heat up your apartment,” she said.
“Thank you,” said Shadow. “When it’s warm you and your little one must come over.”
“His name’s Leon,” she said. “Good meeting you, Mister . . . I’m sorry . . .”
“Ainsel,” said Shadow. “Mike Ainsel.”
“And what sort of a name is Ainsel?” she asked.
Shadow had no idea. “My name,” he said. “I’m afraid I was never very interested in family history.”
“Norwegian, maybe?” she said.
“We were never close,” he said. Then he remembered Uncle Emerson Borson, and added, “On that side, anyway.”
By the time Mr. Wednesday arrived, Shadow had put clear plastic sheeting across all the windows, and had one space heater running in the main room and one in the bedroom at the back. It was practically cozy.
“What the hell is that purple piece of shit you’re driving?” asked Wednesday, by way of greeting.
“Well,” said Shadow, “you drove off with my white piece of shit. Where is it, by the way?”
“I traded it in in Duluth,” said Wednesday. “You can’t be too careful. Don’t worry—you’ll get your share when all this is done.
”
“What am I doing here?” asked Shadow. “In Lakeside, I mean. Not in the world.”
Wednesday smiled his smile, the one that made Shadow want to hit him. “You’re living here because it’s the last place they’ll look for you. I can keep you out of sight here.”
“By ‘they’ you mean the black hats?”
“Exactly. I’m afraid the House on the Rock is now out of bounds. It’s a little difficult, but we’ll cope. Now it’s just stamping our feet and flag-waving, caracole and saunter until the action starts—a little later than any of us expected. I think they’ll hold off until spring. Nothing big can happen until then.”
“How come?”
“Because they may babble on about micromilliseconds and virtual worlds and paradigm shifts and what-have-you, but they still inhabit this planet and are still bound by the cycle of the year. These are the dead months. A victory in these months is a dead victory.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Shadow. That was not entirely true. He had a vague idea, and he hoped it was wrong.
“It’s going to be a bad winter, and you and I are going to use our time as wisely as we can. We shall rally our troops and pick our battleground.”
“Okay,” said Shadow. He knew that Wednesday was telling him the truth, or a part of a truth. War was coming. No, that was not it: the war had already begun. The battle was coming. “Mad Sweeney said that he was working for you when we met him that first night. He said that before he died.”
