by Neil Gaiman
He ran into Police Chief Chad Mulligan in George’s Barber Shop in the town square. Shadow always had high hopes for haircuts, but they never lived up to his expectations. After every haircut he looked more or less the same, only with shorter hair. Chad, seated in the barber’s chair beside Shadow’s, seemed surprisingly concerned about his own appearance. When his haircut was finished he gazed grimly at his reflection, as if he were preparing to give it a speeding ticket.
“It looks good,” Shadow told him.
“Would it look good to you if you were a woman?”
“I guess.”
They went across the square to Mabel’s together, ordered mugs of hot chocolate. Chad said, “Hey. Mike. Have you ever thought about a career in law enforcement?”
Shadow shrugged. “I can’t say I have,” he said. “Seems like there’s a whole lot of things you got to know.”
Chad shook his head. “You know the main part of police work, somewhere like this? It’s just keeping your head. Something happens, somebody’s screaming at you, screaming blue murder, you simply have to be able to say that you’re sure that it’s all a mistake, and you’ll just sort it all out if they just step outside quietly. And you have to be able to mean it.”
“And then you sort it out?”
“Mostly, that’s when you put handcuffs on them. But yeah, you do what you can to sort it out. Let me know if you want a job. We’re hiring. And you’re the kind of guy we want.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, if the thing with my uncle falls through.”
They sipped their hot chocolate. Mulligan said, “Say, Mike, what would you do if you had a cousin. Like a widow. And she started calling you?”
“Calling you how?”
“On the phone. Long distance. She lives out of state.” His cheeks crimsoned. “I saw her last year at a family wedding. She was married, back then, though, I mean, her husband was still alive, and she’s family. Not a first cousin. Pretty distant.”
“You got a thing for her?”
Blush. “I don’t know about that.”
“Well then, put it another way. Does she have a thing for you?”
“Well, she’s said a few things, when she called. She’s a very fine-looking woman.”
“So . . . what are you going to do about it?”
“I could ask her out here. I could do that, couldn’t I? She’s kind of said she’d like to come up here.”
“You’re both adults. I’d say go for it.”
Chad nodded, and blushed, and nodded again.
The telephone in Shadow’s apartment was silent and dead. He thought about getting it connected, but could think of no one he wanted to call. Late one night he picked it up and listened, and was convinced that he could hear a wind blowing and a distant conversation between a group of people talking in voices too low to properly make out. He said, “Hello?” and “Who’s there?” but there was no reply, only a sudden silence and then the faraway sound of laughter, so faint he was not certain he was not imagining it.
Shadow made more journeys with Wednesday in the weeks that followed.
He waited in the kitchen of a Rhode Island cottage, and listened while Wednesday sat in a darkened bedroom and argued with a woman who would not get out of bed, nor would she let Wednesday or Shadow look at her face. In the refrigerator was a plastic bag filled with crickets, and another filled with the corpses of baby mice.
In a rock club in Seattle, Shadow watched Wednesday shout his greeting, over the noise of the band, to a young woman with short red hair and blue-spiral tattoos. That talk must have gone well, for Wednesday came away from it grinning delightedly.
Five days later Shadow was waiting in the rental when Wednesday walked, scowling, from the lobby of an office building in Dallas. Wednesday slammed the car door when he got in, and sat there in silence, his face red with rage. He said, “Drive.” Then he said, “Fucking Albanians. Like anybody cares.”
Three days after that they flew to Boulder, where they had a pleasant lunch with five young Japanese women. It was a meal of pleasantries and politeness, and Shadow walked away from it unsure of whether anything had been agreed to or decided. Wednesday, though, seemed happy enough.
Shadow had begun to look forward to returning to Lakeside. There was a peace there, and a welcome, that he appreciated.
Each morning when he was not traveling he would drive across the bridge to the town square. He would buy two pasties at Mabel’s; he would eat one pasty then and there, and drink a coffee. If someone had left a newspaper out he would read it, although he was never interested enough in the news to purchase a newspaper himself.
He would pocket the second pasty, wrapped in its paper bag, and eat it for his lunch.
He was reading USA Today one morning when Mabel said, “Hey, Mike. Where you going today?”
The sky was pale blue. The morning mist had left the trees covered with hoarfrost. “I don’t know,” said Shadow. “Maybe I’ll walk the wilderness trail again.”
She refilled his coffee. “You ever gone east on County Q? It’s kind of pretty out thataway. That’s the little road that starts acrost from the carpet store on Twentieth Avenue.”
“No. Never have.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s kind of pretty.”
It was extremely pretty. Shadow parked his car at the edge of town, and walked along the side of the road, a winding, country road that curled around the hills to the east of the town. Each of the hills was covered with leafless maple trees, bone-white birches, dark firs and pines.
At one point a small dark cat kept pace with him beside the road. It was the color of dirt, with white forepaws. He walked over to it. It did not run away.
“Hey cat,” said Shadow, unselfconsciously.
The cat put its head on one side, looked up at him with emerald eyes. Then it hissed—not at him, but at something over on the side of the road, something he could not see.
“Easy,” said Shadow. The cat stalked away across the road, and vanished into a field of old unharvested corn.
Around the next bend in the road Shadow came upon a tiny graveyard. The headstones were weathered, although several of them had sprays of fresh flowers resting against them. There was no wall about the graveyard, and no fence, only low mulberry trees, planted at the margins, bent over with ice and age. Shadow stepped over the piled-up ice and slush at the side of the road. There were two stone gateposts marking the entry to the graveyard, although there was no gate between them. He walked into the graveyard between the two posts.
He wandered around the graveyard, looking at the headstones. There were no inscriptions later than 1969. He brushed the snow from a solid-looking granite angel, and he leaned against it.
He took the paper bag from his pocket, and removed the pasty from it. He broke off the top: it breathed a faint wisp of steam into the wintry air. It smelled really good, too. He bit into it.
Something rustled behind him. He thought for a moment it was the cat, but then he smelled perfume, and under the perfume, the scent of something rotten.
“Please don’t look at me,” she said, from behind him.
“Hello, Laura,” said Shadow.
Her voice was hesitant, perhaps, he thought, even a little scared. She said, “Hello, puppy.”
He broke off some pasty. “Would you like some?” he asked.
She was standing immediately behind him, now. “No,” she said. “You eat it. I don’t eat food anymore.”
He ate his pasty. It was good. “I want to look at you,” he said.
“You won’t like it,” she told him.
“Please?”
She stepped around the stone angel. Shadow looked at her, in the daylight. Some things were different and some things were the same. Her eyes had not changed, nor had the crooked hopefulness of her smile. And she was, very obviously, very dead. Shadow finished his pasty. He stood up and tipped the crumbs out of the paper bag, then folded it up and put it back into his pocket.
Her cold hand sought his, and he squeezed it gently. He could feel his heart beating in his chest. He was scared, and what scared him was the normality of the moment. He felt so comfortable with her at his side that he would have been willing to stand there forever.
“I miss you,” he admitted.
“I’m here,” she said.
“That’s when I miss you most. When you’re here. When you aren’t here, when you’re just a ghost from the past or a dream from another life, it’s easier then.”
She squeezed his fingers.
“So,” he asked. “How’s death?”
“Hard,” she said. “It just keeps going.”
She rested her head on his shoulder, and it almost undid him. He said, “You want to walk for a bit?”
“Sure.” She smiled up at him, a nervous, crooked smile in a dead face.
They walked out of the little graveyard, and made their way back down the road, toward the town, hand in hand. “Where have you been?” she asked.
“Here,” he said. “Mostly.”
“Since Christmas,” she said, “I kind of lost you. Sometimes I would know where you were, for a few hours, for a few days. You’d be all over. Then you’d fade away again.”
“I was in this town,” he said. “Lakeside. It’s a good little town.”
“Oh,” she said.
She no longer wore the blue suit in which she had been buried. Now she wore several sweaters, a long, dark, skirt, and high, burgundy boots. Shadow commented on them.
Laura ducked her head. She smiled. “Aren’t they great boots? I found them in this great shoe store in Chicago.”
“So what made you decide to come up from Chicago?”
“Oh, I’ve not been in Chicago for a while, puppy. I was heading south. The cold was bothering me. You’d think I’d welcome it. But it’s something to do with being dead, I guess. You don’t feel it as cold. You feel it as a sort of nothing, and when you’re dead I guess the only thing that you’re scared of is nothing. I was going to go to Texas. I planned to spend the winter in Galveston. I think I used to winter in Galveston, when I was a kid.”
“I don’t think you did,” said Shadow. “You’ve never mentioned it before.”
“No? Maybe it was someone else, then. I don’t know. I remember seagulls—throwing bread in the air for seagulls, hundreds of them, the whole sky becoming nothing but seagulls as they flapped their wings and snatched the bread from the air.” She paused. “If I didn’t see it, I guess someone else did.”
A car came around the corner. The driver waved them hello. Shadow waved back. It felt wonderfully normal to walk with his wife.
“This feels good,” said Laura, as if she was reading his mind.
“Yes,” said Shadow.
“When the call came I had to hurry back. I was barely into Texas.”
“Call?”
She looked up at him. Around her neck the gold coin glinted. “It felt like a call,” she said. “I started to think about you. About how much I needed to see you. It was like a hunger.”
“You knew I was here, then?”
“Yes.” She stopped. She frowned, and her upper teeth pressed into her blue lower lip, biting it gently. She put her head on one side and said, “I did. Suddenly, I did. I thought you were calling me, but it wasn’t you, was it?”
“No.”
“You didn’t want to see me.”
“It wasn’t that.” He hesitated. “No. I didn’t want to see you. It hurts too much.”
The snow crunched beneath their feet and it glittered diamonds as the sunlight caught it.
“It must be hard,” said Laura, “not being alive.”
“You mean it’s hard for you to be dead? Look, I’m still going to figure out how to bring you back, properly. I think I’m on the right track—“
“No,” she said. “I mean, I’m grateful. And I hope you really can do it. I did a lot of bad stuff . . .” She shook her head. “But I was talking about you.”
“I’m alive,” said Shadow. “I’m not dead. Remember?”
“You’re not dead,” she said. “But I’m not sure that you’re alive, either. Not really.”
This isn’t the way this conversation goes, thought Shadow. This isn’t the way anything goes.
“I love you,” she said, dispassionately. “You’re my puppy. But when you’re really dead you get to see things clearer. It’s like there isn’t anyone there. You know? You’re like this big, solid, man-shaped hole in the world.” She frowned. “Even when we were together. I loved being with you. You adored me, and you would do anything for me. But sometimes I’d go into a room and I wouldn’t think there was anybody in there. And I’d turn the light on, or I’d turn the light off, and I’d realize that you were in there, sitting on your own, not reading, not watching TV, not doing anything.”
She hugged him then, as if to take the sting from her words, and she said, “The best thing about Robbie was that he was somebody. He was a jerk sometimes, and he could be a joke, and he loved to have mirrors around when we made love so he could watch himself fucking me, but he was alive, puppy. He wanted things. He filled the space.” She stopped, looked up at him, tipped her head a little to one side. “I’m sorry. Did I hurt your feelings?”
He did not trust his voice not to betray him, so he simply shook his head.
“Good,” she said. “That’s good.”
They were approaching the rest area where he had parked his car. Shadow felt that he needed to say something: I love you, or please don’t go, or I’m sorry. The kind of words you use to patch a conversation that had lurched, without warning, into the dark places. Instead he said, “I’m not dead.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “But are you sure you’re alive?”
“Look at me,” he said.
“That’s not an answer,” said his dead wife. “You’ll know it, when you are.”
“What now?” he said.
“Well,” she said, “I’ve seen you now. I’m going south again.”
“Back to Texas?”
“Somewhere warm. I don’t care.”
“I have to wait here,” said Shadow. “Until my boss needs me.”
“That’s not living,” said Laura. She sighed; and then she smiled, the same smile that had been able to tug at his heart no matter how many times he saw it. Every time she smiled at him had been the first time all over again.
He went to put his arm around her, but she shook her head and pulled out of his reach. She sat down on the edge of a snow-covered picnic table, and she watched him drive away.
INTERLUDE
The war had begun and nobody saw it. The storm was lowering and nobody knew it.
A falling girder in Manhattan closed a street for two days. It killed two pedestrians, an Arab taxi driver and the taxi driver’s passenger.
A trucker in Denver was found dead in his home. The murder instrument, a rubber-gripped claw-headed hammer, had been left on the floor beside his corpse. His face was untouched, but the back of his head was completely destroyed, and several words in a foreign alphabet were written on the bathroom mirror in brown lipstick.
In a postal sorting station in Phoenix, Arizona, a man went crazy, went postal as they said on the evening news, and shot Terry “The Troll” Evensen, a morbidly obese, awkward man who lived alone in a trailer. Several other people in the sorting station were fired on, but only Evensen was killed. The man who fired the shots—first thought to be a disgruntled postal worker—was not caught, and was never identified.
“Frankly,” said Terry “The Troll” Evensen’s supervisor, on the News at Five, “if anyone around here was gonna go postal, we would have figured it was gonna be the Troll. Okay worker, but a weird guy. I mean, you never can tell, huh?”
That interview was cut when the segment was repeated, later that even
ing.
A community of nine anchorites in Montana was found dead. Reporters speculated that it was a mass suicide, but soon the cause of death was reported as carbon monoxide poisoning from an elderly furnace.
A crypt was defiled in the Key West graveyard.
An Amtrak passenger train hit a UPS truck in Idaho, killing the driver of the truck. None of the passengers were seriously injured.
It was still a cold war at this stage, a phony war, nothing that could be truly won or lost.
The wind stirred the branches of the tree. Sparks flew from the fire. The storm was coming.
The Queen of Sheba, half-demon, they said, on her father’s side, witch woman, wise woman, and queen, who ruled Sheba when Sheba was the richest land there ever was, when its spices and its gems and scented woods were taken by boat and camel-back to the corners of the earth, who was worshiped even when she was alive, worshiped as a living goddess by the wisest of kings, stands on the sidewalk of Sunset Boulevard at 2:00 A.M. staring blankly out at the traffic like a slutty plastic bride on a black-and-neon wedding cake. She stands as if she owns the sidewalk and the night that surrounds her.
When someone looks straight at her, her lips move, as if she is talking to herself. When men in cars drive past her she makes eye contact and she smiles.
It’s been a long night.
It’s been a long week, and a long four thousand years.
She is proud that she owes nothing to anyone. The other girls on the street, they have pimps, they have habits, they have children, they have people who take what they make. Not her.
There is nothing holy left in her profession. Not anymore.
A week ago the rains began in Los Angeles, slicking the streets into road accidents, crumbling the mud from the hillsides and toppling houses into canyons, washing the world into the gutters and storm drains, drowning the bums and the homeless camped down in the concrete channel of the river. When the rains come in Los Angeles they always take people by surprise.
