by Neil Gaiman
Snow spun through their headlights and into the windshield as they drove through the darkness. The effect was almost hypnotic.
“This is the only country in the world,” said Wednesday, into the stillness, “that worries about what it is.”
“What?”
“The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.”
“And . . . ?”
“Just thinking out loud.”
“So you’ve been to lots of other countries, then?”
Wednesday said nothing. Shadow glanced at him. “No,” said Wednesday, with a sigh. “No. I never have.”
They stopped for gas, and Wednesday went into the rest room in his security guard jacket and his suitcase, and came out in a crisp, pale suit, brown shoes, and a knee-length brown coat that looked like it might be Italian.
“So when we get to Madison, what then?”
“Take Highway Fourteen west to Spring Green. We’ll be meeting everyone at a place called the House on the Rock. You been there?”
“No,” said Shadow. “But I’ve seen the signs.”
The signs for the House on the Rock were all around that part of the world: oblique, ambiguous signs all across Illinois and Minnesota and Wisconsin, probably as far away as Iowa, Shadow suspected, signs alerting you to the existence of the House on the Rock. Shadow had seen the signs, and wondered about them. Did the House balance perilously upon the Rock? What was so interesting about the Rock? About the House? He had given it a passing thought, but then forgotten it. Shadow was not in the habit of visiting roadside attractions.
They left the interstate at Madison, and drove past the dome of the capitol building, another perfect snow-globe scene in the falling snow, and then they were off the interstate and driving down country roads. After almost an hour of driving through towns with names like Black Earth, they turned down a narrow driveway, past several enormous, snow-dusted flower pots entwined with lizardlike dragons. The tree-lined parking lot was almost empty.
“They’ll be closing soon,” said Wednesday.
“So what is this place?” asked Shadow, as they walked through the parking lot toward a low, unimpressive wooden building.
“This is a roadside attraction,” said Wednesday. “One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.”
“Come again?”
“It’s perfectly simple,” said Wednesday. “In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would just be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or . . . well, you get the idea.”
“There are churches all across the States, though,” said Shadow.
“In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists’ offices. No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they’ve never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves being pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that.”
“You have some pretty whacked-out theories,” said Shadow.
“Nothing theoretical about it, young man,” said Wednesday. “You should have figured that out by now.”
There was only one ticket window open. “We stop selling tickets in half an hour,” said the girl. “It takes at least two hours to walk around, you see.”
Wednesday paid for their tickets in cash.
“Where’s the rock?” asked Shadow.
“Under the house,” said Wednesday.
“Where’s the house?”
Wednesday put his finger to his lips, and they walked forward. Farther in, a player piano was playing something that was intended to be Ravel’s Bolero. The place seemed to be a geometrically reconfigured 1960s bachelor pad, with open stone work, pile carpeting, and magnificently ugly mushroom-shaped stained-glass lampshades. Up a winding staircase was another room filled with knickknacks.
“They say this was built by Frank Lloyd Wright’s evil twin,” said Wednesday. “Frank Lloyd Wrong.” He chuckled at his joke.
“I saw that on a T-shirt,” said Shadow.
Up and down more stairs, and now they were in a long, long room, made of glass, that protruded, needlelike, out over the leafless black-and-white countryside hundreds of feet below them. Shadow stood and watched the snow tumble and spin.
“This is the House on the Rock?” he asked, puzzled.
“More or less. This is the Infinity Room, part of the actual house, although a late addition. But no, my young friend, we have not scratched the tiniest surface of what the house has to offer.”
“So according to your theory,” said Shadow, “Walt Disney World would be the holiest place in America.”
Wednesday frowned, and stroked his beard. “Walt Disney bought some orange groves in the middle of Florida and built a tourist town on them. No magic there of any kind. I think there might be something real in the original Disneyland. There may be some power there, although twisted, and hard to access. But some parts of Florida are filled with real magic. You just have to keep your eyes open. Ah, for the mermaids of Weeki Wachee . . . Follow me, this way.”
Everywhere was the sound of music: jangling, awkward music, ever so slightly off the beat and out of time. Wednesday took a five-dollar bill and put it into a change machine, receiving a handful of brass-colored metal coins in return. He tossed one to Shadow, who caught it, and, realizing that a small boy was watching him, held it up between forefinger and thumb and vanished it. The small boy ran over to his mother, who was inspecting one of the ubiquitous Santa Clauses—OVER SIX THOUSAND ON DISPLAY! the signs read—and he tugged urgently at the hem of her coat.
Shadow followed Wednesday outside briefly, and then followed the signs to the Streets of Yesterday.
“Forty years ago Alex Jordan—his face is on the token you have palmed in your right hand, Shadow—began to build a house on a high jut of rock in a field he did not own, and even he could not have told you why. And people came to see him build it—the curious, and the puzzled, and those who were neither and who could not honestly have told you why they came. So he did what any sensible American male of his generation would do: he began to charge them money—nothing much. A nickel each, perhaps. Or a quarter. And he continued building, and the people kept coming.
“So he took those quarters and nickels and made something even bigger and stranger. He built these warehouses on the ground beneath the house, and filled them with things for people to see, and then the people came to see them. Millions of people come here every year.”
“Why?”
But Wednesday simply smiled, and they walked into the dimly lit, tree-lined Streets of Yesterday. Prim-lipped Victorian china dolls stared in profusion through dusty store windows, like so many props from respectable horror films. Cobblestones under their feet, the darkness of a roof above their heads, jangling mechanical music in the background. They passed a glass box of broken puppets and an overgrown golden music box in a glass case. They passed the dentist’s and the drugstore (“RESTORE POTENCY! USE O’LEARY’S MAGNETICAL BELT!”).
At the end of the street was a large glass box with a female mannequin inside it, dressed as a gypsy fortune-teller.
“Now,” boomed Wednesday, over the mechanical music, “at the start of any quest or enterprise it behooves us to consult the Norns. So let
us designate this Sybil our Urd, eh?” He dropped a brass-colored House on the Rock coin into the slot. With jagged, mechanical motions, the gypsy lifted her arm and lowered it once more. A slip of paper chunked out of the slot.
Wednesday took it, read it, grunted, folded it up, and put it in his pocket.
“Aren’t you going to show it to me? I’ll show you mine,” said Shadow.
“A man’s fortune is his own affair,” said Wednesday, stiffly. “I would not ask to see yours.”
Shadow put his own coin in the slot. He took his slip of paper. He read it.
EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING.
YOUR LUCKY NUMBER IS NONE.
YOUR LUCKY COLOR IS DEAD.
Motto:
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON.
Shadow made a face. He folded the fortune up and put it in his inside pocket.
They went farther in, down a red corridor, past rooms filled with empty chairs upon which rested violins and violas and cellos that played themselves, or seemed to, when fed a coin. Keys depressed, cymbals crashed, pipes blew compressed air into clarinets and oboes. Shadow observed, with a wry amusement, that the bows of the stringed instruments, played by mechanical arms, never actually touched the strings, which were often loose or missing. He wondered whether all the sounds he heard were made by wind and percussion, or whether there were tapes as well.
They had walked for what felt like several miles when they came to a room called the Mikado, one wall of which was a nineteenth-century pseudo-Oriental nightmare, in which beetle-browed mechanical drummers banged cymbals and drums while staring out from their dragon-encrusted lair. Currently, they were majestically torturing Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre.
Czernobog sat on a bench in the wall facing the Mikado machine, tapping out the time with his fingers. Pipes fluted, bells jangled.
Wednesday sat next to him. Shadow decided to remain standing. Czernobog extended his left hand, shook Wednesday’s, shook Shadow’s. “Well met,” he said. Then he sat back, apparently enjoying the music.
The Danse Macabre came to a tempestuous and discordant end. That all the artificial instruments were ever so slightly out of tune added to the otherworldliness of the place. A new piece began.
“How was your bank robbery?” asked Czernobog. “It went well?” He stood, reluctant to leave the Mikado and its thundering, jangling music.
“Slick as a snake in a barrel of butter,” said Wednesday.
“I get a pension from the slaughterhouse,” said Czernobog. “I do not ask for more.”
“It won’t last forever,” said Wednesday. “Nothing does.”
More corridors, more musical machines. Shadow became aware that they were not following the path through the rooms intended for tourists, but seemed to be following a different route of Wednesday’s own devising. They were going down a slope, and Shadow, confused, wondered if they had already been that way.
Czernobog grasped Shadow’s arm. “Quickly, come here,” he said, pulling him over to a large glass box by a wall. It contained a diorama of a tramp asleep in a churchyard in front of a church door. THE DRUNKARD’S DREAM, said the label, explaining that it was a nineteenth-century penny-in-the-slot machine, originally from an English railway station. The coin slot had been modified to take the brass House on the Rock coins.
“Put in the money,” said Czernobog.
“Why?” asked Shadow.
“You must see. I show you.”
Shadow inserted his coin. The drunk in the graveyard raised his bottle to his lips. One of the gravestones flipped over, revealing a grasping corpse; a headstone turned around, flowers replaced by a grinning skull. A wraith appeared on the right of the church, while on the left of the church something with a half-glimpsed, pointed, unsettlingly birdlike face, a pale, Boschian nightmare, glided smoothly from a headstone into the shadows and was gone. Then the church door opened, a priest came out, and the ghosts, haunts, and corpses vanished, and only the priest and the drunk were left alone in the graveyard. The priest looked down at the drunk disdainfully, and backed through the open door, which closed behind him, leaving the drunk on his own.
The clockwork story was deeply unsettling. Much more unsettling, thought Shadow, than clockwork has any right to be.
“You know why I show that to you?” asked Czernobog.
“No.”
“That is the world as it is. That is the real world. It is there, in that box.”
They wandered through a blood-colored room filled with old theatrical organs, huge organ pipes, and what appeared to be enormous copper brewing vats, liberated from a brewery.
“Where are we going?” asked Shadow.
“The carousel,” said Czernobog.
“But we’ve passed signs to the carousel a dozen times already.”
“He goes his way. We travel a spiral. The quickest way is sometimes the longest.”
Shadow’s feet were beginning to hurt, and he found this sentiment to be extremely unlikely.
A mechanical machine played “Octopus’s Garden” in a room that went up for many stories, the center of which was filled entirely with a replica of a great black whalelike beast, with a life-sized replica of a boat in its vast fiberglass mouth. They passed on from there to a Travel Hall, where they saw the car covered with tiles and the functioning Rube Goldberg chicken device and the rusting Burma Shave ads on the wall.
Life is Hard
It’s Toil and Trouble
Keep your Jawline
Free from Stubble
Burma Shave
read one, and
He undertook to overtake
The road was on a bend
From now on the Undertaker
Is his only friend
Burma Shave
and they were at the bottom of a ramp now, with an ice-cream shop in front of them. It was nominally open, but the girl washing down the surfaces had a closed look on her face, so they walked past it into the pizzeria-cafeteria, empty but for an elderly black man wearing a bright checked suit and canary-yellow gloves. He was a small man, the kind of little old man who looked as if the passing of the years had shrunk him, eating an enormous, many-scooped ice-cream sundae, drinking a supersized mug of coffee. A black cigarillo was burning in the ashtray in front of him.
“Three coffees,” said Wednesday to Shadow. He went to the rest room.
Shadow bought the coffees and took them over to Czernobog, who was sitting with the old black man and was smoking a cigarette surreptitiously, as if he were scared of being caught. The other man, happily toying with his sundae, mostly ignored his cigarillo, but as Shadow approached he picked it up, inhaled deeply, and blew two smoke rings—first one large one, then another, smaller one, which passed neatly through the first—and he grinned, as if he were astonishingly pleased with himself.
“Shadow, this is Mister Nancy,” said Czernobog.
The old man got to his feet and thrust out his yellow-gloved right hand. “Good to meet you,” he said with a dazzling smile. “I know who you must be. You’re workin’ for the old one-eye bastard, aren’t you?” There was a faint twang in his voice, a hint of a patois that might have been West Indian.
“I work for Mister Wednesday,” said Shadow. “Yes. Please, sit down.”
Czernobog inhaled on his cigarette.
“I think,” he pronounced, gloomily, “that our kind, we like the cigarettes so much because they remind us of the offerings that once they burned for us, the smoke rising up as they sought our approval or our favor.”
“They never gave me nothin’ like that,” said Nancy. “Best I could hope for was a pile of fruit to eat, maybe curried goat, something slow and cold and tall to drink, and a big old high-titty woman to keep me company.” He grinned white teeth, and winked at Shadow.
“These days,” said Czernobog, his expression unchanged, “we have nothing.”
“Well, I don’t get anywhere near as much fruit as I used to,” said Mr. Nancy, his eyes shining. “But there st
ill ain’t nothin’ out there in the world for my money that can beat a big old high-titty woman. Some folk you talk to, they say it’s the booty you got to inspect at first, but I’m here to tell you that it’s the titties that still crank my engine on a cold mornin’.” Nancy began to laugh, a wheezing, rattling, good-natured laugh, and Shadow found himself liking the old man despite himself.
Wednesday returned from the rest room, and shook hands with Nancy. “Shadow, you want something to eat? A slice of pizza? Or a sandwich?”
“I’m not hungry,” said Shadow.
“Let me tell you somethin’,” said Mr. Nancy. “It can be a long time between meals. Someone offers you food, you say yes. I’m no longer young as I was, but I can tell you this, you never say no to the opportunity to piss, to eat, or to get half an hour’s shut-eye. You follow me?”
“Yes. But I’m really not hungry.”
“You’re a big one,” said Nancy, staring into Shadow’s light gray eyes with old eyes the color of mahogany, “a tall drink of water, but I got to tell you, you don’t look too bright. I got a son, stupid as a man who bought his stupid at a two-for-one sale, and you remind me of him.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Shadow.
“Being called dumb as a man who slept late the mornin’ they handed out brains?”
“Being compared to a member of your family.”
Mr. Nancy stubbed out his cigarillo, then he flicked an imaginary speck of ash off his yellow gloves. “You may not be the worst choice old One-Eye could have made, come to that.” He looked up at Wednesday. “You got any idea how many of us there’s goin’ to be here tonight?”
“I sent the message out to everyone I could find,” said Wednesday. “Obviously not everyone is going to be able to come. And some of them,” with a pointed look at Czernobog, “might not want to. But I think we can confidently expect several dozen of us. And the word will travel.”
They made their way past a display of suits of armor (“Victorian fake,” pronounced Wednesday as they passed the glassed-in display, “modern fake, twelfth-century helm on a seventeenth-century reproduction, fifteenth-century left gauntlet . . .”) and then Wednesday pushed through an exit door, circled them around the outside of the building (“I can’t be doin’ with all these ins and outs,” said Nancy, “I’m not as young as I used to be, and I come from warmer climes”) along a covered walkway, in through another exit door, and they were in the carousel room.