American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  “Stay,” he said, in a breath that was almost a whisper, unsure whether or not she could hear him. “Please don’t go.” He started to cough. “Stay the night.”

  “I’ll stop awhile,” she said. And then, like a mother to a child, she said, “Nothing’s gonna hurt you when I’m here. You know that?”

  Shadow coughed once more. He closed his eyes—only for a moment, he thought, but when he opened them again the moon had set and he was alone.

  A crashing and a pounding in his head, beyond the pain of migraine, beyond all pain. Everything dissolved into tiny butterflies which circled him like a multicolored dust storm and then evaporated into the night.

  The white sheet wrapped about the body at the base of the tree flapped noisily in the morning wind.

  The pounding eased. Everything slowed. There was nothing left to make him keep breathing. His heart ceased to beat in his chest.

  The darkness that he entered this time was deep, and lit by a single star, and it was final.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I know it’s crooked. But it’s the only game in town.

  —Canada Bill Jones

  The tree was gone, and the world was gone, and the morning-gray sky above him was gone. The sky was now the color of midnight. There was a single cold star shining high above him, a blazing, twinkling light, and nothing else. He took a single step and almost tripped.

  Shadow looked down. There were steps cut into the rock, going down, steps so huge that he could only imagine that giants had cut them and descended them a long time ago.

  He clambered downward, half jumping, half vaulting from step to step. His body ached, but it was the ache of lack of use, not the tortured ache of a body that has hung on a tree until it was dead.

  He observed, without surprise, that he was now fully dressed, in jeans and a white T-shirt. He was barefoot. He experienced a profound moment of déjà vu: this was what he had been wearing when he stood in Czernobog’s apartment the night when Zorya Polunochnaya had come to him and told him about the constellation called Odin’s Wain. She had taken the moon down from the sky for him.

  He knew, suddenly, what would happen next. Zorya Polunochnaya would be there.

  She was waiting for him at the bottom of the steps. There was no moon in the sky, but she was bathed in moonlight nonetheless: her white hair was moon-pale, and she wore the same lace-and-cotton nightdress she had worn that night in Chicago.

  She smiled when she saw him, and looked down, as if momentarily embarrassed. “Hello,” she said.

  “Hi,” said Shadow.

  “How are you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I think this is maybe another strange dream on the tree. I’ve been having crazy dreams since I got out of prison.”

  Her face was silvered by the moonlight (but no moon hung in that plum-black sky, and now, at the foot of the steps, even the single star was lost to view) and she looked both solemn and vulnerable. She said, “All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.”

  Beyond her, the path forked. He would have to decide which path to take, he knew that. But there was one thing he had to do first. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and was relieved when he felt the familiar weight of the coin at the bottom of the pocket. He eased it out, held it between finger and thumb: a 1922 Liberty dollar. “This is yours,” he said.

  He remembered then that his clothes were really at the foot of the tree. The women had placed his clothes in the canvas sack from which they had taken the ropes, and tied the end of the sack, and the biggest of the women had placed a heavy rock on it to stop it from blowing away. And so he knew that, in reality, the Liberty dollar was in a pocket in that sack, beneath the rock. But still, it was heavy in his hand, at the entrance to the underworld.

  She took it from his palm with her slim fingers.

  “Thank you. It bought you your liberty twice,” she said. “And now it will light your way into dark places.”

  She closed her hand around the dollar, then she reached up and placed it in the air, as high as she could reach. Then she let go of it. Instead of falling, the coin floated upward until it was a foot or so above Shadow’s head. It was no longer a silver coin, though. Lady Liberty and her crown of spikes were gone. The face he saw on the coin was the indeterminate face of the moon in the summer sky.

  Shadow could not decide whether he was looking at a moon the size of a dollar, a foot above his head, or whether he was looking at a moon the size of the Pacific Ocean, many thousands of miles away. Nor whether there was any difference between the two ideas. Perhaps it was all a matter of the way you looked at it.

  He looked at the forking path ahead of him.

  “Which path should I take?” he asked. “Which one is safe?”

  “Take one, and you cannot take the other,” she said. “But neither path is safe. Which way would you walk—the way of hard truths or the way of fine lies?”

  “Truths,” he said. “I’ve come too far for more lies.”

  She looked sad. “There will be a price, then,” she said.

  “I’ll pay it. What’s the price.”

  “Your name,” she said. “Your real name. You will have to give it to me.”

  “How?”

  “Like this,” she said. She reached a perfect hand toward his head. He felt her fingers brush his skin, then he felt them penetrate his skin, his skull, felt them push deep into his head. Something tickled, in his skull and all down his spine. She pulled her hand out of his head. A flame, like a candle flame but burning with a clear magnesium-white luminance, was flickering on the tip of her forefinger.

  “Is that my name?” he asked.

  She closed her hand, and the light was gone. “It was,” she said. She extended her hand, and pointed to the right-hand path. “That way,” she said. “For now.”

  Nameless, Shadow walked down the right-hand path in the moonlight. When he turned around to thank her, he saw nothing but darkness. It seemed to him that he was deep under the ground, but when he looked up into the darkness above him he still saw the tiny moon.

  He turned a corner.

  If this was the afterlife, he thought, it was a lot like the House on the Rock: part diorama, part nightmare.

  He was looking at himself in prison blues, in the warden’s office, as the warden told him that Laura had died in a car crash. He saw the expression on his own face—he looked like a man who had been abandoned by the world. It hurt him to see it, the nakedness and the fear. He hurried on, pushed through the warden’s gray office, and found himself looking at the VCR repair store on the outskirts of Eagle Point. Three years ago. Yes.

  Inside the store, he knew, he was beating the living crap out of Larry Powers and B. J. West, bruising his knuckles in the process: pretty soon he would walk out of there, carrying a brown supermarket bag filled with twenty-dollar bills. The money they could never prove he had taken: his share of the proceeds, and a little more, for they shouldn’t have tried to rip him and Laura off like that. He was only the driver, but he had done his part, done everything that she had asked of him . . .

  At the trial, nobody mentioned the bank robbery, although everybody wanted to. They couldn’t prove a thing, as long as nobody was talking. And nobody was. The prosecutor was forced instead to stick to the bodily damage that Shadow had inflicted on Powers and West. He showed photographs of the two men on their arrival in the local hospital. Shadow barely defended himself in court; it was easier that way. Neither Powers nor West seemed able to remember what the fight had been about, but they each admitted that Shadow had been their assailant.

  Nobody talked about the money.

  Nobody even mentioned Laura, and that was all that Shadow had wanted.

  Shadow wondered whether the path of comforting lies would have been a better one to walk. He walked away from that place, and followed the rock path down into what looked like a hospital room, a public hospital in
Chicago, and he felt the bile rise in his throat. He stopped. He did not want to look. He did not want to keep walking.

  In the hospital bed his mother was dying again, as she’d died when he was sixteen, and, yes, here he was, a large, clumsy sixteen-year-old with acne pocking his cream-and-coffee skin, sitting at her bedside, unable to look at her, reading a thick paperback book. Shadow wondered what the book was, and he walked around the hospital bed to inspect it more closely. He stood between the bed and the chair looking from the one to the other, the big boy hunched into his chair, his nose buried in Gravity’s Rainbow, trying to escape from his mother’s death into London during the blitz, the fictional madness of the book no escape and no excuse.

  His mother’s eyes were closed in a morphine peace: what she had thought was just another sickle-cell crisis, another bout of pain to be endured, had turned out, they had discovered, too late, to be lymphoma. There was a lemonish-gray tinge to her skin. She was in her early thirties, but she looked much older.

  Shadow wanted to shake himself, the awkward boy that he once was, get him to hold her hand, talk to her, do something before she slipped away, as he knew that she would. But he could not touch himself, and he continued to read; and so his mother died while he sat in the chair next to her, reading a fat book.

  After that he had more or less stopped reading. You could not trust fiction. What good were books, if they couldn’t protect you from something like that?

  Shadow walked away from the hospital room, down the winding corridor, deep into the bowels of the earth.

  He sees his mother first and he cannot believe how young she is, not yet twenty-five he guesses, before her medical discharge. They’re in their apartment, another embassy rental somewhere in Northern Europe. He looks around for something to give him a clue, and he sees himself: a shrimp of a kid, big pale gray eyes and dark hair. They are arguing. Shadow knows without hearing the words what they’re arguing about: it was the only thing they quarreled about, after all.

  —Tell me about my father.

  —He’s dead. Don’t ask about him.

  —But who was he?

  —Forget him. Dead and gone and you ain’t missed nothing.

  —I want to see a picture of him.

  —I ain’t got a picture, she’d say, and her voice would get quiet and fierce, and he knew that if he kept asking her questions she would shout, or even hit him, and he knew that he would not stop asking questions, so he turned away and walked on down the tunnel.

  The path he followed twisted and wound and curled back on itself, and it put him in mind of snakeskins and intestines and of deep, deep tree roots. There was a pool to his left; he heard the drip, drip of water into it somewhere at the back of the tunnel, the falling water barely ruffling the mirrored surface of the pool. He dropped to his knees and drank, using his hand to bring the water to his lips. Then he walked on until he was standing in the floating disco-glitter patterns of a mirror ball. It was like being in the exact center of the universe with all the stars and planets circling him, and he could not hear anything, not the music, nor the shouted conversations over the music, and now Shadow was staring at a woman who looked just like his mother never looked in all the years he knew her, she’s little more than a child, after all . . .

  And she is dancing.

  Shadow found that he was completely unsurprised when he recognized the man who dances with her. He had not changed that much in thirty-three years.

  She is drunk: Shadow could see that at a glance. She is not very drunk, but she is unused to drink, and in a week or so she will take a ship to Norway. They have been drinking margaritas, and she has salt on her lips and salt clinging to the back of her hand.

  Wednesday is not wearing a suit and tie, but the pin in the shape of a silver tree he wears over the pocket of his shirt glitters and glints when the mirror-ball light catches it. They make a fine-looking couple, considering the difference in their ages. There is a lupine grace to Wednesday’s movements.

  A slow dance. He pulls her close to him, and his pawlike hand curves around the seat of her skirt possessively, moving her closer to him. His other hand takes her chin, pushes it upward into his face, and the two of them kiss, there on the floor, as the glitter-ball lights circle them into the center of the universe.

  Soon after, they leave. She sways against him, and he leads her from the dance hall.

  Shadow buries his head in his hands, and does not follow them, unable or unwilling to witness his own conception.

  The mirror lights were gone, and now the only illumination came from the tiny moon that burned high above his head.

  He walked on. At a bend in the path he stopped for a moment to catch his breath.

  He felt a hand run gently up his back, and gentle fingers ruffle the hair on the back of his head.

  “Hello,” whispered a smoky feline voice, over his shoulder.

  “Hello,” he said, turning to face her.

  She had brown hair and brown skin and her eyes were the deep golden-amber of good honey. Her pupils were vertical slits. “Do I know you?” he asked, puzzled.

  “Intimately,” she said, and she smiled. “I used to sleep on your bed. And my people have been keeping their eyes on you, for me.” She turned to the path ahead of him, pointed to the three ways he could go. “Okay,” she said. “One way will make you wise. One way will make you whole. And one way will kill you.”

  “I’m already dead, I think,” said Shadow. “I died on the tree.”

  She made a moue. “There’s dead,” she said, “and there’s dead, and there’s dead. It’s a relative thing.” Then she smiled again. “I could make a joke about that, you know. Something about dead relatives.”

  “No,” said Shadow. “It’s okay.”

  “So,” she said. “Which way do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  She tipped her head on one side, a perfectly feline gesture. Suddenly, Shadow remembered the claw marks on his shoulder. He felt himself beginning to blush. “If you trust me,” said Bast, “I can choose for you.”

  “I trust you,” he said, without hesitation.

  “Do you want to know what it’s going to cost you?”

  “I’ve already lost my name,” he told her.

  “Names come and names go. Was it worth it?”

  “Yes. Maybe. It wasn’t easy. As revelations go, it was kind of personal.”

  “All revelations are personal,” she said. “That’s why all revelations are suspect.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No,” she said, “you don’t. I’ll take your heart. We’ll need it later,” and she reached her hand deep inside his chest, and she pulled it out with something ruby and pulsing held between her sharp fingernails. It was the color of pigeon’s blood, and it was made of pure light. Rhythmically it expanded and contracted.

  She closed her hand, and it was gone.

  “Take the middle way,” she said.

  Shadow nodded, and walked on.

  The path was becoming slippery now. There was ice on the rock. The moon above him glittered through the ice crystals in the air: there was a ring about the moon, a moonbow, diffusing the light. It was beautiful, but it made walking harder. The path was unreliable.

  He reached the place where the path divided.

  He looked at the first path with a feeling of recognition. It opened into a vast chamber, or a set of chambers, like a dark museum. He knew it already. He could hear the long echoes of tiny noises. He could hear the noise that the dust makes as it settles.

  It was the place that he had dreamed of, that first night that Laura had come to him, in the motel so long ago; the endless memorial hall to the gods that were forgotten, and the ones whose very existence had been lost.

  He took a step backward.

  He walked to the path on the far side, and looked ahead. There was a Disneyland quality to the corridor: black Plexiglas walls with lights set in them. The colored ligh
ts blinked and flashed in the illusion of order, for no particular reason, like the console lights on a television starship.

  He could hear something there as well: a deep vibrating bass drone, which Shadow could feel in the pit of his stomach.

  He stopped and looked around. Neither way seemed right. Not any longer. He was done with paths. The middle way, the way the cat-woman had told him to walk, that was his way. He moved toward it.

  The moon above him was beginning to fade: the edge of it was pinking and going into eclipse. The path was framed by a huge doorway.

  Shadow walked through the arch, in darkness. The air was warm, and it smelled of wet dust, like a city street after the summer’s first rain.

  He was not afraid.

  Not anymore. Fear had died on the tree, as Shadow had died. There was no fear left, no hatred, no pain. Nothing left but essence.

  Something big splashed, quietly, in the distance, and the splash echoed into the vastness. He squinted, but could see nothing. It was too dark. And then, from the direction of the splashes, a ghost-light glimmered and the world took form: he was in a cavern, and in front of him, mirror-smooth, was water.

  The splashing noises came closer and the light became brighter, and Shadow waited on the shore. Soon enough a low, flat boat came into sight, a flickering white lantern burning at its raised prow, another reflected in the glassy black water several feet below it. The boat was being poled by a tall figure, and the splashing noise Shadow had heard was the sound of the pole being lifted and moved as it pushed the craft across the waters of the underground lake.

  “Hello there!” called Shadow. Echoes of his words suddenly surrounded him: he could imagine that a whole chorus of people were welcoming him and calling to him and each of them had his voice.

  The person poling the boat made no reply.

  The boat’s pilot was tall, and very thin. He—if it was a he—wore an unadorned white robe, and the pale head that topped it was so utterly inhuman that Shadow was certain that it had to be a mask of some sort: it was a bird’s head, small on a long neck, its beak long and high. Shadow was certain he had seen it before, this ghostly, birdlike figure. He grasped at the memory and then, disappointed, realized that he was picturing the clockwork penny-in-the-slot machine in the House on the Rock and the pale, birdlike, half-glimpsed figure that glided out from behind the crypt for the drunkard’s soul.