Shadow sat down opposite the man he had known as Wednesday.
“So what’s the trouble?” asked Wednesday, dead for almost two years, or as dead as his kind of creature was going to get. “I’d offer you a beer, but the service here stinks.”
Shadow said that was okay. He didn’t want a beer.
“Well?” asked Wednesday, scratching his beard.
“I’m in a big house in Scotland with a shitload of really rich folks, and they have an agenda. I’m in trouble, and I don’t know what kind of trouble I’m in. But I think it’s pretty bad trouble.”
Wednesday took a swig of his beer. “The rich are different, m’boy,” he said, after a while.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Well,” said Wednesday. “For a start, most of them are probably mortal. Not something you have to worry about.”
“Don’t give me that shit.”
“But you aren’t mortal,” said Wednesday. “You died on the tree, Shadow. You died and you came back.”
“So? I don’t even remember how I did that. If they kill me this time, I’ll still be dead.”
Wednesday finished his beer. Then he waved his beer bottle around, as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra with it, and sang another verse:
“My brother’s a missionary worker,
He saves fallen women from sin
For five bucks he’ll save you a redhead,
My God how the money rolls in.”
“You aren’t helping,” said Shadow. The diner was a train carriage now, rattling through a snowy night.
Wednesday put down his beer bottle, and he fixed Shadow with his real eye, the one that wasn’t glass. “It’s patterns,” he said. “If they think you’re a hero, they’re wrong. After you die, you don’t get to be Beowulf or Perseus or Rama any more. Whole different set of rules. Chess, not checkers. Go, not chess. You understand?”
“Not even a little,” said Shadow, frustrated.
People, in the corridor of the big house, moving loudly and drunkenly, shushing each other as they stumbled and giggled their way down the hall.
Shadow wondered if they were servants, or if they were strays from the other wing, slumming. And the dreams took him once again…
Now he was back in the bothy where he had sheltered from the rain, the day before. There was a body on the floor: a boy, no more than five years old. Naked, on his back, limbs spread. There was a flash of intense light, and someone pushed through Shadow as if he was not there and rearranged the position of the boy’s arms. Another flash of light.
Shadow knew the man taking the photographs. It was Dr. Gaskell, the little steel-haired man from the hotel bar.
Gaskell took a white paper bag from his pocket, and fished about in it for something that he popped into his mouth.
“Dolly mixtures,” he said to the child on the stone floor. “Yum yum. Your favorites.”
He smiled and crouched down, and took another photograph of the dead boy.
Shadow pushed through the stone wall of the cottage, flowing through the cracks in the stones like the wind. He flowed down to the seashore. The waves crashed on the rocks and Shadow kept moving across the water, through gray seas, up the swells and down again, toward the ship made of dead men’s nails.
The ship was far away, out at sea, and Shadow passed across the surface of the water like the shadow of a cloud.
The ship was huge. He had not understood before how huge it was. A hand reached down and grasped his arm, pulled him up from the sea onto the deck.
“Bring us back,” said a voice as loud as the crashing of the sea, urgent and fierce. “Bring us back, or let us go.” Only one eye burned in that bearded face.
“I’m not keeping you here.”
They were giants, on that ship, huge men made of shadows and frozen sea-spray, creatures of dream and foam.
One of them, huger than all the rest, red-bearded, stepped forward. “We cannot land,” he boomed. “We cannot leave.”
“Go home,” said Shadow.
“We came with our people to this southern country,” said the one-eyed man. “But they left us. They sought other, tamer gods, and they renounced us in their hearts, and gave us over.”
“Go home,” repeated Shadow.
“Too much time has passed,” said the red-bearded man. By the hammer at his side, Shadow knew him. “Too much blood has been spilled. You are of our blood, Baldur. Set us free.”
And Shadow wanted to say that he was not theirs, was not anybody’s, but the thin blanket had slipped from the bed, and his feet stuck out at the bottom, and thin moonlight filled the attic room.