“You sure?”
“Well, think about it. There’s nothing up here but sheep and hills. We feed off the tourists, of course, but there’s never really enough of you. Sad, isn’t it?” Shadow shrugged.
“Are you from New York?” she asked.
“Chicago, originally. But I came here from Norway.”
“You speak Norwegian?”
“A little.”
“There’s somebody you should meet,” she said, suddenly. Then she looked at her watch. “Somebody who came here from Norway, a long time ago. Come on.”
She put her cleaning cloth down, turned off the bar lights, and walked over to the door. “Come on,” she said, again.
“Can you do that?” asked Shadow.
“I can do whatever I want,” she said. “It’s a free country, isn’t it?”
“I guess.”
She locked the bar with a brass key. They walked into the reception hall. “Wait here,” she said. She went through a door marked PRIVATE, and reappeared several minutes later, wearing a long brown coat. “Okay. Follow me.”
They walked out into the street. “So, is this a village or a small town?” asked Shadow.
“It’s a fucking graveyard,” she said. “Up this way. Come on.”
They walked up a narrow road. The moon was huge and a yellowish brown. Shadow could hear the sea, although he could not yet see it. “You’re Jennie?” he said.
“That’s right. And you?”
“Shadow.”
“Is that your real name?”
“It’s what they call me.”
“Come on, then, Shadow,” she said.
At the top of the hill, they stopped. They were on the edge of the village, and there was a gray stone cottage. Jennie opened the gate and led Shadow up a path to the front door. He brushed a small bush at the side of the path, and the air filled with the scent of sweet lavender. There were no lights on in the cottage.
“Whose house is this?” asked Shadow. “It looks empty.”
“Don’t worry,” said Jennie. “She’ll be home in a second.”
She pushed open the unlocked front door, and they went inside. She turned on the light switch by the door. Most of the inside of the cottage was taken up by a kitchen sitting room. There was a tiny staircase leading up to what Shadow presumed was an attic bedroom. A CD player sat on the pine counter.
“This is your house,” said Shadow.
“Home sweet home,” she agreed. “You want coffee? Or something to drink?”
“Neither,” said Shadow. He wondered what Jennie wanted. She had barely looked at him, hadn’t even smiled at him.
“Did I hear right? Was Doctor Gaskell asking you to help look after a party on the weekend?”
“I guess.”
“So what are you doing tomorrow and Friday?”
“Walking,” said Shadow. “I’ve got a book. There are some beautiful walks.”
“Some of them are beautiful. Some of them are treacherous,” she told him. “You can still find winter snow here, in the shadows, in the summer. Things last a long time, in the shadows.”
“I’ll be careful,” he told her.
“That was what the Vikings said,” she said, and she smiled. She took off her coat and dropped it on the bright purple sofa. “Maybe I’ll see you out there. I like to go for walks.” She pulled at the bun at the back of her head, and her pale hair fell free. It was longer than Shadow had thought it would be.
“Do you live here alone?”
She took a cigarette from a packet on the counter, lit it with a match. “What’s it to you?” she asked. “You won’t be staying the night, will you?”
Shadow shook his head.
“The hotel’s at the bottom of the hill,” she told him. “You can’t miss it. Thanks for walking me home.”
Shadow said good night, and walked back, through the lavender night, out to the lane. He stood there for a little while, staring at the moon on the sea, puzzled. Then he walked down the hill until he got to the hotel. She was right: you couldn’t miss it. He walked up the stairs, unlocked his room with a key attached to a short stick, and went inside. The room was colder than the corridor.
He took off his shoes, and stretched out on the bed in the dark.
III
The ship was made of the fingernails of dead men, and it lurched through the mist, bucking and rolling hugely and unsteadily on the choppy sea.
There were shadowy shapes on the deck, men as big as hills or houses, and as Shadow got closer he could see their faces: proud men and tall, each one of them. They seemed to ignore the ship’s motion, each man waiting on the deck as if frozen in place.