American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  “And you betrayed him.”

  “I did no such thing. He was a crook. But I always pay my debts.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Shadow.

  Hinzelmann looked offended. One hand tugged at the clump of white hair at his temple. “I keep my word.”

  “No. You don’t. Laura came here. She said something was calling her here. And what about the coincidence that brought Sam Black Crow and Audrey Burton here, on the same night? I guess I don’t believe in coincidence anymore.

  “Sam Black Crow and Audrey Burton. Two people who both knew who I really was, and that there were people out there looking for me. I guess if one of them failed, there was always the other. And if all of them had failed, who else was on their way to Lakeside, Hinzelmann? My old prison warden, up here for a weekend’s ice fishing? Laura’s mother?” Shadow realized that he was angry. “You wanted me out of your town. You just didn’t want to have to tell Wednesday that was what you were doing.”

  In the firelight, Hinzelmann seemed more like a gargoyle than an imp. “This is a good town,” he said. Without his smile he looked waxen and corpselike. “You could have attracted too much attention. Not good for the town.”

  “You should have left me back there on the ice,” said Shadow. “You should have left me in the lake. I opened the trunk of the klunker. Right now Alison is still iced into the trunk. But the ice will melt, and her body’ll float out and up to the surface. And then they’ll go down and look and see what else they can find down there. Find your whole stash of kids. I guess some of those bodies are pretty well preserved.”

  Hinzelmann reached down and picked up the poker. He made no pretense of stirring the fire with it any longer; he held it like a sword, or a baton, the glowing orange-white tip of it waving in the air. It smoked. Shadow was very aware that he was next-to-naked, and he was still tired, and clumsy, and far from able to defend himself.

  “You want to kill me?” said Shadow. “Go ahead. Do it. I’m a dead man anyway. I know you own this town—it’s your little world. But if you think no one’s going to come looking for me, you’re living in a dream-world. It’s over, Hinzelmann. One way or another, it’s done.”

  Hinzelmann pushed himself to his feet, using the poker as a walking stick. The carpet charred and smoked where he rested the red-hot tip, as he got up. He looked at Shadow and there were tears in his pale blue eyes. “I love this town,” he said. “I really like being a cranky old man, and telling my stories and driving Tessie and ice-fishing. Remember what I told you? It’s not the fish you bring home from a day’s fishing. It’s the peace of mind.”

  He extended the tip of the poker in Shadow’s direction: Shadow could feel the heat of it from a foot away.

  “I could kill you,” said Hinzelmann, “I could fix it. I’ve done it before. You’re not the first to figure it out. Chad Mulligan’s father, he figured it out. I fixed him, and I can fix you.”

  “Maybe,” said Shadow. “But for how long, Hinzelmann? Another year? Another decade? They have computers now, Hinzelmann. They aren’t stupid. They pick up on patterns. Every year a kid’s going to vanish. Sooner or later they’ll come sniffing about here. Just like they’ll come looking for me. Tell me—how old are you?” He curled his fingers around a sofa cushion, and prepared to pull it over his head: it would deflect a first blow.

  Hinzelmann’s face was expressionless. “They were giving their children to me before the Romans came to the Black Forest,” he said. “I was a god before ever I was a kobold.”

  “Maybe it’s time to move on,” said Shadow. He wondered what a kobold was.

  Hinzelmann stared at him. Then he took the poker, and pushed the tip of it back into the burning embers. “It’s not that simple. What makes you think I can leave this town, even if I want to, Shadow? I’m part of this town. You going to make me go, Shadow? You ready to kill me? So I can leave?”

  Shadow looked down at the floor. There were still glimmers and sparks in the carpet, where the poker tip had rested. Hinzelmann followed the look with his own, and crushed the embers out with his foot, twisting. In Shadow’s mind came, unbidden, children, more than a hundred of them, staring at him with bone-blind eyes, the hair twisting slowly around their faces like fronds of seaweed. They were looking at him reproachfully.

  He knew that he was letting them down. He just didn’t know what else to do.

  Shadow said, “I can’t kill you. You saved my life.”

  He shook his head. He felt like crap, in every way he could feel like crap. He didn’t feel like a hero or a detective anymore—just another fucking sell-out, waving a stern finger at the darkness before turning his back on it.

  “You want to know a secret?” asked Hinzelmann.

  “Sure,” said Shadow, with a heavy heart. He was ready to be done with secrets.

  “Watch this.”

  Where Hinzelmann had been standing stood a male child, no more than five years old. His hair was dark brown, and long. He was perfectly naked, save for a worn leather band around his neck. He was pierced with two swords, one of them going through his chest, the other entering at his shoulder, with the point coming out beneath the rib-cage. Blood flowed through the wounds without stopping and ran down the child’s body to pool and puddle on the floor. The swords looked unimaginably old.

  The little boy stared up at Shadow with eyes that held only pain.

  And Shadow thought to himself, of course. That’s as good a way as any other of making a tribal god. He did not have to be told. He knew.

  You take a baby and you bring it up in the darkness, letting it see no one, touch no one, and you feed it well as the years pass, feed it better than any of the village’s other children, and then, five winters on, when the night is at its longest, you drag the terrified child out of its hut and into the circle of bonfires, and you pierce it with blades of iron and of bronze. Then you smoke the small body over charcoal fires until it is properly dried, and you wrap it in furs and carry it with you from encampment to encampment, deep in the Black Forest, sacrificing animals and children to it, making it the luck of the tribe. When, eventually, the thing falls apart from age, you place its fragile bones in a box, and you worship the box; until one day the bones are scattered and forgotten, and the tribes who worshipped the child-god of the box are long gone; and the child-god, the luck of the village, will be barely remembered, save as a ghost or a brownie: a kobold.

  Shadow wondered which of the people who had come to northern Wisconsin 150 years ago, a woodcutter, perhaps, or a mapmaker, had crossed the Atlantic with Hinzelmann living in his head.

  And then the bloody child was gone, and the blood, and there was only an old man with a fluff of white hair and a goblin smile, his sweater-sleeves still soaked from putting Shadow into the bath that had saved his life.

  “Hinzelmann?” the voice came from the doorway of the den.

  Hinzelmann turned. Shadow turned too.

  “I came over to tell you,” said Chad Mulligan, and his voice was strained, “that the klunker went through the ice. I saw it had gone down when I drove over that way, and thought I’d come over and let you know, in case you’d missed it.”

  He was holding his gun. It was pointed at the floor.

  “Hey, Chad,” said Shadow.

  “Hey, pal,” said Chad Mulligan. “They sent me a note said you’d died in custody. Heart attack.”

  “How about that?” said Shadow. “Seems like I’m dying all over the place.”

  “He came down here, Chad,” said Hinzelmann. “He threatened me.”

  “No,” said Chad Mulligan. “He didn’t. I’ve been here for the last ten minutes, Hinzelmann. I heard everything you said. About my old man. About the lake.” He walked farther into the den. He did not raise the gun. “Jesus, Hinzelmann. You can’t drive through this town without seeing that goddamned lake. It’s at the center of everything. So what the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “You got to arrest him. He said he was going to kill
me,” said Hinzelmann, a scared old man in a dusty den. “Chad, I’m pleased you’re here.”

  “No,” said Chad Mulligan. “You’re not.”

  Hinzelmann sighed. He bent down, as if resigned, and he pulled the poker out from the fire. The tip of it was burning bright orange.

  “Put that down, Hinzelmann. Just put it down slowly, keep your hands in the air where I can see them, and turn and face the wall.”

  There was an expression of pure fear on the old man’s face, and Shadow would have felt sorry for him, but he remembered the frozen tears on the cheeks of Alison McGovern. Hinzelmann did not move. He did not put down the poker. He did not turn to the wall. Shadow was about to reach for Hinzelmann, to try to take the poker away from him, when the old man threw the burning poker at Mulligan.

  Hinzelmann threw it awkwardly—lobbing it across the room as if for form’s sake—and as he threw it he was already hurrying for the door.

  The poker glanced off Mulligan’s left arm.

  The noise of the shot, in the close quarters of the old man’s room, was deafening.

  One shot to the head, and that was all.

  Mulligan said, “Better get your clothes on.” His voice was dull and dead.

  Shadow nodded. He walked to the room next door, opened the door of the clothes drier and pulled out his clothes. The jeans were still damp, but he put them on anyway. By the time he got back to the den, fully dressed—except for his coat, which was somewhere deep in the freezing mud of the lake, and his boots, which he could not find—Mulligan had already hauled several smoldering logs out from the fireplace.

  Mulligan said, “It’s a bad day for a cop when he has to commit arson, just to cover up a murder.” Then he looked up at Shadow. “You need boots,” he said.

  “I don’t know where he put them,” said Shadow.

  “Hell,” said Mulligan. Then he said, “Sorry about this, Hinzelmann,” and he picked the old man up by the collar and by the belt buckle, and he swung him forward, dropped the body with its head resting in the open fireplace. The white hair crackled and flared, and the room began to fill with the smell of charring flesh.

  “It wasn’t murder. It was self-defense,” said Shadow.

  “I know what it was,” said Mulligan, flatly. He had already turned his attention to the smoking logs he had scattered about the room. He pushed one of them to the edge of the sofa, picked up an old copy of the Lakeside News and pulled it into its component pages, which he crumpled up and dropped onto the log. The newspaper pages browned and then burst into flame.

  “Get outside,” said Chad Mulligan.

  He opened the windows as they walked out of the house, and he sprang the lock on the front door to lock it before he closed it.

  Shadow followed him out to the police car in his bare feet. Mulligan opened the front passenger door for him, and Shadow got in and wiped his feet off on the mat. Then he put on his socks, which were pretty much dry by now.

  “We can get you some boots at Hennings Farm and Home,” said Chad Mulligan.

  “How much did you hear in there?” asked Shadow.

  “Enough,” said Mulligan. Then he said, “Too much.”

  They drove to Hennings Farm and Home in silence. When they got there the police chief said, “What size feet?”

  Shadow told him.

  Mulligan walked into the store. He returned with a pair of thick woolen socks, and a pair of leather farm-boots. “All they had left in your size,” he said. “Unless you wanted gumboots. I figured you didn’t.”

  Shadow pulled on the socks and the boots. They fitted fine. “Thanks,” he said.

  “You got a car?” asked Mulligan.

  “It’s parked by the road down to the lake. Near the bridge.”

  Mulligan started the car and pulled out of the Hennings parking lot.

  “What happened to Audrey?” asked Shadow.

  “Day after they took you away, she said she liked me as a friend, but it would never work out between us, us being family and all, and she went back to Eagle Point. Broke my gosh-darn heart.”

  “Makes sense,” said Shadow. “And it wasn’t personal. Hinzelmann didn’t need her here anymore.”

  They drove back past Hinzelmann’s house. A thick plume of white smoke was coming up from the chimney.

  “She only came to town because he wanted her here. She helped him get me out of town. I was bringing attention he didn’t need.”

  “I thought she liked me.”

  They pulled up beside Shadow’s rental car. “What are you going to do now?” asked Shadow.

  “I don’t know,” said Mulligan. His normally harassed face was starting to look more alive than it had at any point since Hinzelmann’s den. It also looked more troubled. “I figure, I got a couple of choices. Either I’ll”—he made a gun of his first two fingers, put the fingertips into his open mouth, and removed them—“put a bullet through my brain. Or I’ll wait another couple of days until the ice is mostly gone, and tie a concrete block to my leg and jump off the bridge. Or pills. Sheesh. Maybe I should just drive a while, out to one of the forests. Take pills out there. I don’t want to make one of my guys have to do the cleanup. Leave it for the county, huh?” He sighed, and shook his head.

  “You didn’t kill Hinzelmann, Chad. He died a long time ago, a long way from here.”

  “Thanks for saying that, Mike. But I killed him. I shot a man in cold blood, and I covered it up. And if you asked me why I did it, why I really did it, I’m darned if I could tell you.”

  Shadow put out a hand, touched Mulligan on the arm. “Hinzelmann owned this town,” he said. “I don’t think you had a lot of choice about what happened back there. I think he brought you there. He wanted you to hear what you heard. He set you up. I guess it was the only way he could leave.”

  Mulligan’s miserable expression did not change. Shadow could see that the police chief had barely heard anything that he had said. He had killed Hinzelmann, and built him a pyre, and now, obeying the last of Hinzelmann’s desires, he would commit suicide.

  Shadow closed his eyes, remembering the place in his head that he had gone when Wednesday had told him to make snow: that place that pushed, mind to mind, and he smiled a smile he did not feel and he said, “Chad. Let it go.” There was a cloud in the man’s mind, a dark, oppressive cloud, and Shadow could almost see it and, concentrating on it, imagined it fading away like a fog in the morning. “Chad,” he said, fiercely, trying to penetrate the cloud, “this town is going to change now. It’s not going to be the only good town in a depressed region anymore. It’s going to be a lot more like the rest of this part of the world. There’s going to be a lot more trouble. People out of work. People out of their heads. More people getting hurt. More bad shit going down. They are going to need a police chief with experience. The town needs you.” And then he said, “Marguerite needs you.”

  Something shifted in the storm cloud that filled the man’s head. Shadow could feel it change. He pushed then, envisioning Marguerite Olsen’s practical brown hands and her dark eyes, and her long, long black hair. He pictured the way she tipped her head on one side and half smiled when she was amused. “She’s waiting for you,” said Shadow, and he knew it was true as he said it.

  “Margie?” said Chad Mulligan.

  And at that moment, although he could never tell you how he had done it, and he doubted that he could ever do it again, Shadow reached into Chad Mulligan’s mind, easy as anything, and he plucked the events of that afternoon out from it as precisely and dispassionately as a raven picks an eye from roadkill.

  The creases in Chad’s forehead smoothed, and he blinked, sleepily.

  “Go see Margie,” said Shadow. “It’s been good seeing you, Chad. Take care of yourself.”

  “Sure,” yawned Chad Mulligan.

  A message crackled over the police radio, and Chad reached out for the handset. Shadow got out of the car.

  Shadow walked over to his rental car. He could see the gray flat
ness of the lake at the center of the town. He thought of the dead children who waited at the bottom of the water.

  Soon, Alison would float to the surface . . .

  As Shadow drove past Hinzelmann’s place he could see the plume of smoke had already turned into a blaze. He could hear a siren wail.

  He drove south, heading for Highway 51. He was on his way to keep his final appointment. But before that, he thought, he would stop off in Madison, for one last goodbye.

  Best of everything, Samantha Black Crow liked closing up the Coffee House at night. It was a perfectly calming thing to do: it gave her a feeling that she was putting order back into the world. She would put on an Indigo Girls CD, and she would do her final chores of the night at her own pace and in her own way. First, she would clean the espresso machine. Then she would do the final rounds, ensuring that any missed cups or plates were deposited back in the kitchen, and that the newspapers that were always scattered around the Coffee House by the end of each day were collected together and piled neatly by the front door, all ready for recycling.

  She loved the Coffee House. It was a long, winding series of rooms filled with armchairs and sofas and low tables, on a street lined with secondhand bookstores.

  She covered the leftover slices of cheesecake and put them into the large refrigerator for the night, then she took a cloth and wiped the last of the crumbs away. She enjoyed being alone.

  A tapping on the window jerked her attention from her chores back to the real world. She went to the door and opened it to admit a woman of about Sam’s age, with pigtailed magenta hair. Her name was Natalie.

  “Hello,” said Natalie. She went up on tiptoes and kissed Sam, depositing the kiss snugly between Sam’s cheek and the corner of her mouth. You can say a lot of things with a kiss like that. “You done?”

  “Nearly.”

  “You want to see a movie?”

  “Sure. Love to. I’ve got a good five minutes left here, though. Why don’t you sit and read the Onion?”