by Neil Gaiman
Shadow turned onto the street where the houses were, all but one of them, dead, their windows blind and boarded. “Take the back alley,” said Jacquel.
He backed the hearse up until it was almost touching the double doors at the rear of the house. Ibis opened the hearse, and the mortuary doors, and Shadow unbuckled the gurney and pulled it out. The wheeled supports rotated and dropped as they cleared the bumper. He wheeled the gurney to the embalming table. He picked up Lila Goodchild, cradling her in her opaque bag like a sleeping child, and placed her carefully on the table in the chilly mortuary, as if he were afraid to wake her.
“You know, I have a transfer board,” said Jacquel. “You don’t have to carry her.”
“Ain’t nothing,” said Shadow. He was starting to sound more like Jacquel. “I’m a big guy. It doesn’t bother me.”
As a kid Shadow had been small for his age, all elbows and knees. The only photograph of Shadow as a kid that Laura had liked enough to frame showed a solemn child with unruly hair and dark eyes standing beside a table laden high with cakes and cookies. Shadow thought the picture might have been taken at an embassy Christmas party, as he had been dressed in a bow tie and his best clothes.
They had moved too much, his mother and Shadow, first around Europe, from embassy to embassy, where his mother had worked as a communicator in the Foreign Service, transcribing and sending classified telegrams across the world, and then, when he was eight years old, back to the United States, where his mother, now too sporadically sick to hold down a steady job, had moved from city to city restlessly, spending a year here or a year there, temping when she was well enough. They never spent long enough in any place for Shadow to make friends, to feel at home, to relax. And Shadow had been a small child . . .
He had grown so fast. In the spring of his thirteenth year the local kids had been picking on him, goading him into fights they knew they could not fail to win and after which Shadow would run, angry and often weeping, to the boys’ room to wash the mud or the blood from his face before anyone could see it. Then came summer, a long, magical thirteenth summer, which he spent keeping out of the way of the bigger kids, swimming in the local pool, reading library books at poolside. At the start of the summer he could barely swim. By the end of August he was swimming length after length in an easy crawl, diving from the high board, ripening to a deep brown from the sun and the water. In September, he returned to school to discover that the boys who had made him miserable were small, soft things no longer capable of upsetting him. The two who tried it were taught better manners, hard and fast and painfully, and Shadow found that he had redefined himself: he could no longer be a quiet kid, doing his best to remain unobtrusively at the back of things. He was too big for that, too obvious. By the end of the year he was on the swimming team and the weight-lifting team, and the coach was courting him for the triathlon team. He liked being big and strong. It gave him an identity. He’d been a shy, quiet, bookish kid, and that had been painful; now he was a big dumb guy, and nobody expected him to be able to do anything more than move a sofa into the next room on his own.
Nobody until Laura, anyway.
Mr. Ibis had prepared dinner: rice and boiled greens for himself and Mr. Jacquel. “I am not a meat eater,” he explained, “While Jacquel gets all the meat he needs in the course of his work.” Beside Shadow’s place was a carton of chicken pieces from KFC and a bottle of beer.
There was more chicken than Shadow could eat, and he shared the leftovers with the cat, removing the skin and crusty coating, then shredding the meat for her with his fingers.
“There was a guy in prison named Jackson,” said Shadow, as he ate, “worked in the prison library. He told me that they changed the name from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC because they don’t serve real chicken anymore. It’s become this genetically modified mutant thing, like a giant centipede with no head, just segment after segment of legs and breasts and wings. It’s fed through nutrient tubes. This guy said the government wouldn’t let them use the word chicken.”
Mr. Ibis raised his eyebrows. “You think that’s true?”
“Nope. Now, my old cellmate, Low Key, he said they changed the name because the word ‘fried’ had become a bad word. Maybe they wanted people to think that the chicken cooked itself.”
After dinner Jacquel excused himself and went down to the mortuary. Ibis went to his study to write. Shadow sat in the kitchen for a little longer, feeding fragments of chicken breast to the little brown cat, sipping his beer. When the beer and the chicken were gone, he washed up the plates and cutlery, put them on the rack to dry, and went upstairs.
By the time he reached the bedroom the little brown cat was once more asleep at the bottom of the bed, curled into a fur crescent. In the middle drawer of the vanity he found several pairs of striped cotton pajamas. They looked seventy years old, but smelled fresh, and he pulled on a pair that, like the black suit, fitted him as if they had been tailored for him.
There was a small stack of Reader’s Digests on the little table beside the bed, none of them dated later than March 1960. Jackson, the library guy—the same one who had sworn to the truth of the Kentucky Fried Mutant Chicken Creature story, who had told him the story of the black freight trains that the government uses to haul political prisoners off to Secret Northern Californian Concentration Camps, moving across the country in the dead of the night—Jackson had also told him that the CIA used the Reader’s Digest as a front for their branch offices around the world. He said that every Reader’s Digest office in every country was really CIA.
“A joke,” said the late Mr. Wood, in Shadow’s memory. “How can we be sure the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assassination?”
Shadow cracked the window open a few inches—enough for fresh air to get in, enough for the cat to be able to get out onto the balcony outside.
He turned on the bedside lamp, climbed into bed, and read for a little, trying to turn off his mind, to get the last few days out of his head, picking the dullest-looking articles in the dullest-looking Digests. He noticed he was falling asleep halfway through “I Am Joe’s Pancreas.” He barely had time enough to turn out the bedside light and put his head down on the pillow before his eyes closed for the night.
Later he was never able to recollect the sequence and details of that dream: attempts to remember it produced nothing more than a tangle of dark images. There was a girl. He had met her somewhere, and now they were walking across a bridge. It spanned a small lake, in the middle of a town. The wind was ruffling the surface of the lake, making waves tipped with whitecaps, which seemed to Shadow to be tiny hands reaching for him.
—Down there, said the woman. She was wearing a leopard-print skirt, which flapped and tossed in the wind, and the flesh between the top of her stockings and her skirt was creamy and soft and in his dream, on the bridge, before God and the world, Shadow went down to his knees in front of her, burying his head in her crotch, drinking in the intoxicating jungle female scent of her. He became aware, in his dream, of his erection in real life, a rigid, pounding, monstrous thing as painful in its hardness as the erections he’d had as a boy, when he was crashing into puberty.
He pulled away and looked upward, and still he could not see her face. But his mouth was seeking hers and her lips were soft against his, and his hands were cupping her breasts, and then they were running across the satin smoothness of her skin, pushing into and parting the furs that hid her waist, sliding into the wonderful cleft of her, which warmed and wetted and parted for him, opening to his hand like a flower.
The woman purred against him ecstatically, her hand moving down to the hardness of him and squeezing it. He pushed the bedsheets away and rolled on top of her, his hand parting her thighs, her hand guiding him between her legs, where one thrust, one magical push . . .
Now he was back in his old prison cell with her, and he was kissing her deeply. She wrapped her arms tightly around him, clamped her legs about his legs to hold him tight, so he cou
ld not pull out, not even if he wanted to.
Never had he kissed lips so soft. He had not known that there were lips so soft in the whole world. Her tongue, though, was sandpaper-rough as it slipped against his.
—Who are you? he asked.
She made no answer, just pushed him onto his back and, in one lithe movement, straddled him and began to ride him. No, not to ride him: to insinuate herself against him in series of silken-smooth waves, each more powerful than the one before, strokes and beats and rhythms that crashed against his mind and his body just as the wind-waves on the lake splashed against the shore. Her nails were needle-sharp and they pierced his sides, raking them, but he felt no pain, only pleasure, everything was transmuted by some alchemy into moments of utter pleasure.
He struggled to find himself, struggled to talk, his head now filled with sand dunes and desert winds.
—Who are you? he asked again, gasping for the words.
She stared at him with eyes the color of dark amber, then lowered her mouth to his and kissed him with a passion, kissed him so completely and so deeply that there, on the bridge over the lake, in his prison cell, in the bed in the Cairo funeral home, he almost came. He rode the sensation like a kite riding a hurricane, willing it not to crest, not to explode, wanting it never to end. He pulled it under control. He had to warn her.
—My wife, Laura. She will kill you.
—Not me, she said.
A fragment of nonsense bubbled up from somewhere in his mind: In medieval days it was said that a woman on top during coitus would conceive a bishop. That was what they called it: trying for a bishop. . . .
He wanted to know her name, but he dared not ask her a third time, and she pushed her chest against his, and he could feel the hard nubs of her nipples against his chest, and she was squeezing him, somehow squeezing him down there deep inside her and this time he could not ride it or surf it, this time it picked him up and spun and tumbled him away, and he was arching up, pushing into her as deeply as he could imagine, as if they were, in some way, part of the same creature, tasting, drinking, holding, wanting . . .
—Let it happen, she said, her voice a throaty feline growl. Give it to me. Let it happen.
And he came, spasming and dissolving, the back of his mind itself liquefying then sublimating slowly from one state to the next.
Somewhere in there, at the end of it, he took a breath, a clear draught of air he felt all the way down to the depths of his lungs, and he knew that he had been holding his breath for a long time now. Three years, at least. Perhaps even longer.
—Now rest, she said, and she kissed his eyelids with her soft lips. Let it go. Let it all go.
The sleep he slept after that was deep and dreamless and comforting, and Shadow dived deep and embraced it.
The light was strange. It was, he checked his watch, 6:45 A.M., and still dark outside, although the room was filled with a pale blue dimness. He climbed out of bed. He was certain that he had been wearing pajamas when he went to bed, but now he was naked, and the air was cold on his skin. He walked to the window and closed it.
There had been a snowstorm in the night: six inches had fallen, perhaps more. The corner of the town that Shadow could see from his window, dirty and run-down, had been transformed into somewhere clean and different: these houses were not abandoned and forgotten, they were frosted into elegance. The streets had vanished completely, lost beneath a white field of snow.
There was an idea that hovered at the edge of his perception. Something about transience. It flickered and was gone.
He could see as well as if it were full daylight.
In the mirror, Shadow noticed something strange. He stepped closer, and stared, puzzled. All his bruises had vanished. He touched his side, pressing firmly with his fingertips, feeling for one of the deep pains that told him he had encountered Mr. Stone and Mr. Wood, hunting for the greening blossoms of bruise that Mad Sweeney had gifted him with, and finding nothing. His face was clear and unmarked. His sides, however, and his back (he twisted to examine it) were scratched with what looked like claw marks.
He hadn’t dreamed it, then. Not entirely.
Shadow opened the drawers, and put on what he found: an ancient pair of blue-denim Levi’s, a shirt, a thick blue sweater, and a black undertaker’s coat he found hanging in the wardrobe at the back of the room.
He wore his own old shoes.
The house was still asleep. He crept through it, willing the floorboards not to creak, and then he was outside, and he walked through the snow, his feet leaving deep prints on the sidewalk. It was lighter out than it had seemed from inside the house, and the snow reflected the light from the sky.
After fifteen minutes of walking, Shadow came to a bridge with a big sign on the side of it warning him he was now leaving historical Cairo. A man stood under the bridge, tall and gangling, sucking on a cigarette and shivering continually. Shadow thought he recognized the man.
And then, under the bridge in the winter darkness, he was close enough to see the purple smudge of bruise around the man’s eye, and he said, “Good morning, Mad Sweeney.”
The world was so quiet. Not even cars disturbed the snowbound silence.
“Hey, man,” said Mad Sweeney. He did not look up. The cigarette had been rolled by hand.
“You keep hanging out under bridges, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow, “people gonna think you’re a troll.”
This time Mad Sweeney looked up. Shadow could see the whites of his eyes all around his irises. The man looked scared. “I was lookin’ for you,” he said. “You gotta help me, man. I fucked up big time.” He sucked on his hand-rolled cigarette, pulled it away from his mouth. The cigarette paper stuck to his lower lip, and the cigarette fell apart, spilling its contents onto his ginger beard and down the front of his filthy T-shirt. Mad Sweeney brushed it off, convulsively, with blackened hands, as if it were a dangerous insect.
“My resources are pretty much tapped out, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow. “But why don’t you tell me what it is you need. You want me to get you a coffee?”
Mad Sweeney shook his head. He took out a tobacco pouch and papers from the pocket of his denim jacket and began to roll himself another cigarette. His beard bristled and his mouth moved as he did this, although no words were said aloud. He licked the adhesive side of the cigarette paper and rolled it between his fingers. The result looked only distantly like a cigarette. Then he said, “ ‘M not a troll. Shit. Those bastards’re fucken mean.”
“I know you’re not a troll, Sweeney,” said Shadow, gently. “How can I help you?”
Mad Sweeney flicked his brass Zippo, and the first inch of his cigarette flamed and then subsided to ash. “You remember I showed you how to get a coin? You remember?”
“Yes,” said Shadow. He saw the gold coin in his mind’s eye, watched it tumble into Laura’s casket, saw it glitter around her neck. “I remember.”
“You took the wrong coin, man.”
A car approached the gloom under the bridge, blinding them with its lights. It slowed as it passed them, then stopped, and a window slid down. “Everything okay here, gentlemen?”
“Everything’s just peachy, thank you, officer,” said Shadow. “We’re just out for a morning walk.”
“Okay now,” said the cop. He did not look as if he believed that everything was okay. He waited. Shadow put a hand on Mad Sweeney’s shoulder, and walked him forward, out of town, away from the police car. He heard the window hum closed, but the car remained where it was.
Shadow walked. Mad Sweeney walked, and sometimes he staggered.
The police car cruised past them slowly, then turned and went back into the city, accelerating down the snowy road.
“Now, why don’t you tell me what’s troubling you,” said Shadow.
“I did it like he said. I did it all like he said, but I gave you the wrong coin. It wasn’t meant to be that coin. That’s for royalty. You see? I shouldn’t even have been able to take it. That’s the coin y
ou’d give to the king of America himself. Not some pissant bastard like you or me. And now I’m in big trouble. Just give me the coin back, man. You’ll never see me again, if you do, I sweartofuckenBran, okay? I swear by the years I spent in the fucken trees.”
“You did it like who said, Sweeney?”
“Grimnir. The dude you call Wednesday. You know who he is? Who he really is?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
There was a panicked look in the Irishman’s crazy blue eyes. “It was nothing bad. Nothing you can—nothing bad. He just told me to be there at that bar and to pick a fight with you. He said he wanted to see what you were made of.”
“He tell you do anything else?”
Sweeney shivered and twitched; Shadow thought it was the cold for a moment, then knew where he’d seen that shuddering shiver before. In prison: it was a junkie shiver. Sweeney was in withdrawal from something, and Shadow would have been willing to bet it was heroin. A junkie leprechaun? Mad Sweeney pinched off the burning head of his cigarette, dropped it on the ground, put the unfinished yellowing rest of it into his pocket. He rubbed his dirt-black fingers together, breathed on them to try and rub warmth into them. His voice was a whine now, “Listen, just give me the fucken coin, man. I’ll give you another, just as good. Hell, I’ll give you a shitload of the fuckers.”
He took off his greasy baseball cap, then, with his right hand, he stroked the air, producing a large golden coin. He dropped it into his cap. And then he took another from a wisp of breath steam, and another, catching and grabbing them from the still morning air until the baseball cap was brimming with them and Sweeney was forced to hold it with both hands.