by Neil Gaiman
“It was crooked,” said Shadow. “All of it. None of it was for real. It was just a setup for a massacre.”
“Exactly,” said Wednesday’s voice from the shadows. “It was crooked. But it was the only game in town.”
“I want Laura,” said Shadow. “I want Loki. Where are they?”
There was only silence. A spray of rain gusted at him. Thunder rumbled somewhere close at hand.
He walked farther in.
Loki Lie-Smith sat on the ground with his back to a metal cage. Inside the cage, drunken pixies tended their still. He was covered with a blanket. Only his face showed, and his hands, white and long, came around the blanket. An electric lantern sat on a chair beside him. The lantern’s batteries were close to failing, and the light it cast was faint and yellow.
He looked pale, and he looked rough.
His eyes, though. His eyes were still fiery, and they glared at Shadow as he walked through the cavern.
When Shadow was several paces from Loki, he stopped.
“You are too late,” said Loki. His voice was raspy and wet. “I have thrown the spear. I have dedicated the battle. It has begun.”
“No shit,” said Shadow.
“No shit,” said Loki. “So it does not matter what you do anymore.”
Shadow stopped and thought. Then he said, “The spear you had to throw to kick off the battle. Like the whole Uppsala thing. This is the battle you’ll be feeding on. Am I right?”
Silence. He could hear Loki breathing, a ghastly rattling inhalation.
“I figured it out,” said Shadow. “Kind of. I’m not sure when I figured it out. Maybe when I was hanging on the tree. Maybe before. It was from something Wednesday said to me, at Christmas.”
Loki just stared at him from the floor, saying nothing.
“It’s just a two-man con,” said Shadow. “Like the bishop with the diamond necklace and the cop who arrests him. Like the guy with the fiddle, and the guy who wants to buy the fiddle. Two men, who appear to be on opposite sides, playing the same game.”
Loki whispered, “You are ridiculous.”
“Why? I liked what you did at the motel. That was smart. You needed to be there, to make sure that everything went according to plan. I saw you. I even realized who you were. And I still never twigged that you were their Mister World.”
Shadow raised his voice. “You can come out,” he said, to the cavern. “Wherever you are. Show yourself.”
The wind howled in the opening of the cavern, and it drove a spray of rainwater in toward them. Shadow shivered.
“I’m tired of being played for a sucker,” said Shadow. “Just show yourself. Let me see you.”
There was a change in the shadows at the back of the cave. Something became more solid; something shifted. “You know too damned much, m’boy,” said Wednesday’s familiar rumble.
“So they didn’t kill you.”
“They killed me,” said Wednesday, from the shadows. “None of this would have worked if they hadn’t.” His voice was faint—not actually quiet, but there was a quality to it that made Shadow think of an old radio not quite tuned in to a distant station. “If I hadn’t died for real, we could never have got them here,” said Wednesday. “Kali and the Morrigan and the fucking Albanians and—well, you’ve seen them all. It was my death that drew them all together. I was the sacrificial lamb.”
“No,” said Shadow. “You were the Judas Goat.”
The wraith-shape in the shadows swirled and shifted. “Not at all. That implies that I was betraying the old gods for the new. Which was not what we were doing.”
“Not at all,” whispered Loki.
“I can see that,” said Shadow. “You two weren’t betraying either side. You were betraying both sides.”
“I guess we were at that,” said Wednesday. He sounded pleased with himself.
“You wanted a massacre. You needed a blood sacrifice. A sacrifice of gods.”
The wind grew stronger; the howl across the cave door became a screech, as if of something immeasurably huge in pain.
“And why the hell not? I’ve been trapped in this damned land for almost twelve hundred years. My blood is thin. I’m hungry.”
“And you two feed on death,” said Shadow.
He thought he could see Wednesday, now. He was a shape made of darkness, who became more real only when Shadow looked away from him, taking shape in his peripheral vision. “I feed on death that is dedicated to me,” said Wednesday.
“Like my death on the tree,” said Shadow.
“That,” said Wednesday, “was special.”
“And do you also feed on death?” asked Shadow, looking at Loki.
Loki shook his head, wearily.
“No, of course not,” said Shadow. “You feed on chaos.”
Loki smiled at that, a brief pained smile, and orange flames danced in his eyes, and flickered like burning lace beneath his pale skin.
“We couldn’t have done it without you,” said Wednesday, from the corner of Shadow’s eye. “I’d been with so many women . . .”
“You needed a son,” said Shadow.
Wednesday’s ghost-voice echoed. “I needed you, my boy. Yes. My own boy. I knew that you had been conceived, but your mother left the country. It took us so long to find you. And when we did find you, you were in prison. We needed to find out what made you tick. What buttons we could press to make you move. Who you were.” Loki looked, momentarily, pleased with himself. “And you had a wife to go back home to. It was unfortunate, but not insurmountable.”
“She was no good for you,” whispered Loki. “You were better off without her.”
“If it could have been any other way,” said Wednesday, and this time Shadow knew what he meant.
“And if she’d had—the grace—to stay dead,” panted Loki. “Wood and Stone—were good men. You were going—to be allowed to escape—when the train crossed the Dakotas . . .”
“Where is she?” asked Shadow.
Loki reached a pale arm, and pointed to the back of the cavern.
“She went that-a-way,” he said. Then, without warning, he tipped forward, his body collapsing onto the rock floor.
Shadow saw what the blanket had hidden from him; the pool of blood, the hole through Loki’s back, the fawn raincoat soaked black with blood. “What happened?” he said.
Loki said nothing.
Shadow did not think he would be saying anything anymore.
“Your wife happened to him, m’boy,” said Wednesday’s distant voice. He had become harder to see, as if he was fading back into the ether. “But the battle will bring him back. As the battle will bring me back for good. I’m a ghost, and he’s a corpse, but we’ve still won. The game was rigged.”
“Rigged games,” said Shadow, remembering, “are the easiest to beat.”
There was no answer. Nothing moved in the shadows.
Shadow said, “Goodbye,” and then he said, “Father.” But by then there was no trace of anybody else in the cavern. Nobody at all.
Shadow walked back up to the Seven States Flag Court, but saw nobody, and heard nothing but the crack and whip of the flags in the storm-wind. There were no people with swords at the Thousand-Ton Balanced Rock, no defenders of the Swing-A-Long bridge. He was alone.
There was nothing to see. The place was deserted. It was an empty battlefield.
No. Not deserted. Not exactly.
This was Rock City. It had been a place of awe and worship for thousands of years; today the millions of tourists who walked through the gardens and swung their way across the Swing-A-Long bridge had the same effect as water turning a million prayer wheels. Reality was thin here. And Shadow knew where the battle must be taking place.
With that, he began to walk. He remembered how he had felt on the carousel, tried to feel like that . . .
He remembered turning the Winnebago, shifting it at right angles to everything. He tried to capture that sensation—
And then, easily
and perfectly, it happened.
It was like pushing through a membrane, like plunging up from deep water into air. With one step he had moved from the tourist path on the mountain to . . .
To somewhere real. He was Backstage.
He was still on the top of a mountain, that much remained the same. But it was so much more than that. This mountaintop was the quintessence of place, the heart of things as they were. Compared to it, the Lookout Mountain he had left was a painting on a backdrop, or a papier-mâché model seen on a TV screen—merely a representation of the thing, not the thing itself.
This was the true place.
The rock walls formed a natural amphitheater. Paths of stone that wound around and across it, forming twisty natural bridges that Eschered through and across the rock walls.
And the sky . . .
The sky was dark. It was lit, and the world beneath it was illuminated by a burning greenish-white streak, brighter than the sun, which forked crazily across the sky from end to end, like a white rip in the darkened sky.
It was lightning, Shadow realized. Lightning held in one frozen moment that stretched into forever. The light it cast was harsh and unforgiving: it washed out faces, hollowed eyes into dark pits.
This was the moment of the storm.
The paradigms were shifting. He could feel it. The old world, a world of infinite vastness and illimitable resources and future, was being confronted by something else—a web of energy, of opinions, of gulfs.
People believe, thought Shadow. It’s what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.
The mountaintop was an arena; he saw that immediately. And on each side of the arena he could see them arrayed.
They were too big. Everything was too big in that place.
There were old gods in that place: gods with skins the brown of old mushrooms, the pink of chicken flesh, the yellow of autumn leaves. Some were crazy and some were sane. Shadow recognized the old gods. He’d met them already, or he’d met others like them. There were ifrits and piskies, giants and dwarfs. He saw the woman he had met in the darkened bedroom in Rhode Island, saw the writhing green snake-coils of her hair. He saw Mama-ji, from the carousel, and there was blood on her hands and a smile on her face. He knew them all.
He recognized the new ones, too.
There was somebody who had to be a railroad baron, in an antique suit, his watch chain stretched across his vest. He had the air of one who had seen better days. His forehead twitched.
There were the great gray gods of the airplanes, heirs to all the dreams of heavier-than-air travel.
There were car gods there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs. Even they looked uncomfortable. Worlds change.
Others had faces of smudged phosphors; they glowed gently, as if they existed in their own light.
Shadow felt sorry for them all.
There was an arrogance to the new ones. Shadow could see that. But there was also a fear.
They were afraid that unless they kept pace with a changing world, unless they remade and redrew and rebuilt the world in their image, their time would already be over.
Each side faced the other with bravery. To each side, the opposition were the demons, the monsters, the damned.
Shadow could see an initial skirmish had taken place. There was already blood on the rocks.
They were readying themselves for the real battle; for the real war. It was now or never, he thought. If he did not move now, it would be too late.
In America everything goes on forever, said a voice in the back of his head. The 1950s lasted for a thousand years. You have all the time in the world.
Shadow walked in something that was half stroll, half controlled stumble, into the center of the arena.
He could feel eyes on him, eyes and things that were not eyes. He shivered.
The buffalo voice said, You are doing just fine.
Shadow thought, Damn right. I came back from the dead this morning. After that, everything else should be a piece of cake.
“You know,” said Shadow, to the air, in a conversational voice, “This is not a war. This was never intended to be a war. And if any of you think this is a war, you are deluding yourselves.” He heard grumbling noises from both sides. He had impressed nobody.
“We are fighting for our survival,” lowed a minotaur from one side of the arena.
“We are fighting for our existence,” shouted a mouth in a pillar of glittering smoke, from the other.
“This is a bad land for gods,” said Shadow. As an opening statement it wasn’t Friends, Romans, countrymen, but it would do. “You’ve probably all learned that, in your own way. The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing. Either you’ve been forgotten, or you’re scared you’re going to be rendered obsolete, or maybe you’re just getting tired of existing on the whim of people.”
The grumbles were fewer now. He had said something they agreed with. Now, while they were listening, he had to tell them the story.
“There was a god who came here from a far land, and whose power and influence waned as belief in him faded. He was a god who took his power from sacrifice, and from death, and especially from war. The deaths of those who fell in war were dedicated to him—whole battlefields that had given him in the Old Country power and sustenance.
“Now he was old. He made his living as a grifter, working with another god from his pantheon, a god of chaos and deceit. Together they rooked the gullible. Together they took people for all they’d got.
“Somewhere in there—maybe fifty years ago, maybe a hundred, they put a plan into motion, a plan to create a reserve of power they could both tap into. Something that would make them stronger than they had ever been. After all, what could be more powerful than a battlefield covered with dead gods? The game they played was called ‘Let’s You and Him Fight.’
“Do you see?
“The battle you came here for isn’t something that any of you can win or lose. The winning and the losing are unimportant to him, to them. What matters is that enough of you die. Each of you that falls in battle gives him power. Every one of you that dies, feeds him. Do you understand?”
The roaring, whoompfing sound of something catching fire echoed across the arena. Shadow looked to the place the noise came from. An enormous man, his skin the deep brown of mahogany, his chest naked, wearing a top hat, cigar sticking rakishly from his mouth, spoke in a voice as deep as the grave. Baron Samedi said, “Okay. But Odin. He died. At the peace talks. Motherfuckers killed him. He died. I know death. Nobody going to fool me about death.”
Shadow said, “Obviously. He had to die for real. He sacrificed his physical body to make this war happen. After the battle he would have been more powerful than he had ever been.”
Somebody called, “Who are you?”
“I am—I was—I am his son.”
One of the new gods—Shadow suspected it was a drug from the way it smiled and spangled, said, “But Mister World said . . .”
“There was no Mister World. There never was any such person. He was just another one of you bastards trying to feed on the chaos he created.”
They believed him, and he could see the hurt in their eyes.
Shadow shook his head. “You know,” he said. “I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It’s what we do.”
There was silence, in the high place.
And then, with a shocking crack, the lightning bolt frozen in the sky crashed to the mountaintop, and the arena went entirely dark.
They glowed, many of those presences, in the darkness.
Shadow wondered if they were going to argue with him, to attack him, to try to kill him. He waited for some kind of response.
And then Shadow realized that the lights were going out. The gods were leaving that place, first in handfuls, and then by scores, and finally in their hundreds.
A spider the size of a rottweiler scuttled heavily toward him, on seven legs; its cluster of eyes glowed faintly.
Shadow held his ground, although he felt slightly sick.
When the spider got close enough, it said, in Mr. Nancy’s voice, “That was a good job. Proud of you. You done good, kid.”
“Thank you,” said Shadow.
“We should get you back. Too long in this place is goin’ to mess you up.” It rested one brown-haired spider leg on Shadow’s shoulder . . .
. . . and, back on Seven States Flag Court, Mr. Nancy coughed. His right hand rested on Shadow’s shoulder. The rain had stopped. Mr. Nancy held his left hand across his side, as if it hurt. Shadow asked if he was okay.
“I’m tough as old nails,” said Mr. Nancy. “Tougher.” He did not sound happy. He sounded like an old man in pain.
There were dozens of them, standing or sitting on the ground or on the benches. Some of them looked badly injured.
Shadow could hear a rattling noise in the sky, approaching from the south. He looked at Mr. Nancy. “Helicopters?”
Mr. Nancy nodded. “Don’t you worry about them. Not anymore. They’ll just clean up the mess, and leave.”
“Got it.”
Shadow knew that there was one part of the mess he wanted to see for himself, before it was cleaned up. He borrowed a flashlight from a gray-haired man who looked like a retired news anchor and began to hunt.
He found Laura stretched out on the ground in a side cavern, beside a diorama of mining gnomes straight out of Snow White. The floor beneath her was sticky with blood. She was on her side, where Loki must have dropped her after he had pulled the spear out of them both.
One of Laura’s hands clutched her chest. She looked dreadfully vulnerable. She looked dead, but then, Shadow was almost used to that by now.