by Neil Gaiman
“Hey. Mack. Before you get out of the car, don’t I get a hug?” asked Laura with a smile.
“You surely do,” said Mr. Town, and he put his arms around her, and she snuggled close to him while the rain pattered a tattoo on the roof of the Ford Explorer. He could smell her hair. There was a faintly unpleasant scent beneath the smell of the perfume. Travel would do it, every time. That bath, he decided, was a real must for both of them. He wondered if there was anyplace in Chattanooga where he could get those lavender bath-bombs his first wife had loved so much. Laura raised her head against his, and her hand stroked the line of his neck, absently.
“Mack . . . I keep thinking. You must really want to know what happened to those friends of yours?” she asked. “Woody and Stone. Do you?”
“Yeah,” he said, moving his lips down to hers, for their first kiss. “Sure I do.”
So she showed him.
Shadow walked the meadow, making his own slow circles around the trunk of the tree, gradually widening his circle. Sometimes he would stop and pick something up: a flower, or a leaf, or a pebble, or a twig, or a blade of grass. He would examine it minutely, as if concentrating entirely on the twigness of the twig, the leafness of the leaf.
Easter found herself reminded of the gaze of a baby, at the point where it learns to focus.
She did not dare to talk to him. At that moment, it would have been sacrilegious. She watched him, exhausted as she was, and she wondered.
About twenty feet out from the base of the tree, half-overgrown with long meadow grass and dead creepers, he found a canvas bag. Shadow picked it up, untied the knots at the top of the bag, loosened the drawstring.
The clothes he pulled out were his own. They were old, but still serviceable. He turned the shoes over in his hands. He stroked the fabric of the shirt, the wool of the sweater, stared at them as if he were looking at them across a million years.
One by one, he put them on.
He put his hands into his pockets, and looked puzzled as he pulled one hand out, holding what looked to Easter like a white-and-gray marble.
He said, “No coins.” It was the first thing he had said in several hours.
“No coins?” echoed Easter.
He shook his head. “They gave me something to do with my hands.” He bent down to pull on his shoes.
Once he was dressed, he looked more normal. Grave, though. She wondered how far he had traveled, and what it had cost him to return. He was not the first whose return she had initiated; and she knew that, soon enough, the million-year stare would fade, and the memories and the dreams that he had brought back from the tree would be elided by the world of things you could touch. That was the way it always went.
She led their way to the rear of the meadow. Her mount waited in the trees.
“It can’t carry both of us,” she told him. “I’ll make my own way home.”
Shadow nodded. He seemed to be trying to remember something. Then he opened his mouth, and he screeched a cry of welcome and of joy.
The thunderbird opened its cruel beak, and it screeched a welcome back at him.
Superficially, at least, it resembled a condor. Its feathers were black, with a purplish sheen, and its neck was banded with white. Its beak was black and cruel: a raptor’s beak, made for tearing. At rest, on the ground, with its wings folded away, it was the size of a black bear, and its head was on a level with Shadow’s own.
Horus said, proudly, “I brought him. They live in the mountains.”
Shadow nodded. “I had a dream of thunderbirds once,” he said. “Damndest dream I ever had.”
The thunderbird opened its beak and made a surprisingly gentle noise, crawroo? “You heard my dream too?” asked Shadow.
He reached out a hand and rubbed it gently against the bird’s head. The thunderbird pushed up against him like an affectionate pony. He scratched it from the nape of its neck up to the crown.
Shadow turned to Easter. “You rode him here?”
“Yes,” she said. “You can ride him back, if he lets you.”
“How do you ride him?”
“It’s easy,” she said. “If you don’t fall. Like riding the lightning.”
“Will I see you back there?”
She shook her head. “I’m done, honey,” she told him. “You go do what you need to do. I’m tired. Good luck.”
Shadow nodded. “Whiskey Jack. I saw him. After I passed on. He came and found me. We drank beer together.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure you did.”
“Will I ever see you again?” asked Shadow.
She looked at him with eyes the green of ripening corn. She said nothing. Then, abruptly, she shook her head. “I doubt it,” she said.
Shadow clambered awkwardly onto the thunderbird’s back. He felt like a mouse on the back of a hawk. There was an ozone taste in his mouth, metallic and blue. Something crackled. The thunderbird extended its wings, and began to flap them, hard.
As the ground fell away beneath them, Shadow clung on, his heart pounding in his chest like a wild thing.
It was exactly like riding the lightning.
Laura took the stick from the backseat of the car. She left Mr. Town in the front seat of the Ford Explorer, climbed out of the car, and walked through the rain to Rock City. The ticket office was closed. The door to the gift shop was not locked and she walked through it, past the rock candy and the display of SEE ROCK CITY birdhouses, into the Eighth Wonder of the World.
Nobody challenged her, although she passed several men and women on the path, in the rain. Many of them looked faintly artificial; several of them were translucent. She walked across a swinging rope bridge. She passed the white deer gardens, and pushed herself through the Fat Man’s Squeeze, where the path ran between two rock walls.
And, in the end, she stepped over a chain, with a sign on it telling her that this part of the attraction was closed, she went into a cavern, and she saw a man sitting on a plastic chair, in front of a diorama of drunken gnomes. He was reading the Washington Post by the light of a small electric lantern. When he saw her he folded the paper and placed it beneath his chair. He stood up, a tall man with close-cropped orange hair in an expensive raincoat, and he gave her a small bow.
“I shall assume that Mister Town is dead,” he said. “Welcome, spear-carrier.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry about Mack,” she said. “Were you friends?”
“Not at all. He should have kept himself alive, if he wanted to keep his job. But you brought his stick.” He looked her up and down with eyes that glimmered like the orange embers of a dying fire. “I am afraid you have the advantage of me. They call me Mister World, here at the top of the hill.”
“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 it to 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 a 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 Explor
er 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.”
