“Drumsticks,” said Smith.
Smith continued, “They’re old families. That lot downstairs. Very old money. They know who’s boss, but that doesn’t make him one of them. See? They’re the only ones who’ll be at tonight’s party. They’d not want Mr. Alice. See?”
And Shadow did see. He wished that Smith hadn’t spoken to him about Mr. Alice. He didn’t think Smith would have said anything to anyone he thought would live to talk about it.
But all he said was, “Heavy drumsticks.”
VIII
A small helicopter took Mr. Alice away late that afternoon. Land Rovers took away the staff. Smith drove the last one. Only Shadow was left behind, and the guests, with their smart clothes and their smiles.
They stared at Shadow as if he were a captive lion who had been brought for their amusement, but they did not talk to him.
The dark-haired woman, the one who had smiled at Shadow as she had arrived, brought him food to eat: a steak, almost rare. She brought it to him on a plate, without cutlery, as if she expected him to eat it with his fingers and his teeth, and he was hungry, and he did.
“I am not your hero,” he told them, but they would not meet his gaze. Nobody spoke to him, not directly. He felt like an animal.
And then it was dusk. They led Shadow to the inner courtyard, by the rusty fountain, and they stripped him naked, at gunpoint, and the women smeared his body with some kind of thick yellow grease, rubbing it in.
They put a knife on the grass in front of him. A gesture with a gun, and Shadow picked the knife up. The hilt was black metal, rough and easy to hold. The blade looked sharp.
Then they threw open the great door, from the inner courtyard to the world outside, and two of the men lit the two high bonfires: they crackled and blazed.
They opened the leather bags, and each of the guests took out a single carved black stick, like a cudgel, knobbly and heavy. Shadow found himself thinking of Sawney Beane’s children, swarming up from the darkness holding clubs made of human thigh-bones…
Then the guests arranged themselves around the edge of the courtyard, and they began to beat the drums with the sticks.
They started slow, and they started quietly, a deep, throbbing pounding, like a heartbeat. Then they began to crash and slam into strange rhythms, staccato beats that wove and wound, louder and louder, until they filled Shadow’s mind and his world. It seemed to him that the firelight flickered to the rhythms of the drums.
And then, from outside the house, the howling began.
There was pain in the howling, and anguish, and it echoed across the hills above the drumbeats, a wail of pain and loss and hate.
The figure that stumbled through the doorway to the courtyard was clutching its head, covering its ears, as if to stop the pounding of the drumbeats.
The firelight caught it.
It was huge, now: bigger than Shadow, and naked. It was perfectly hairless, and dripping wet.
It lowered its hands from its ears, and it stared around, its face twisted into a mad grimace. “Stop it!” it screamed. “Stop making all that noise!”
And the people in their pretty clothes beat their drums harder, and faster, and the noise filled Shadow’s head and chest.
The monster stepped into the center of the courtyard. It looked at Shadow. “You,” it said. “I told you. I told you about the noise,” and it howled, a deep throaty howl of hatred and challenge.
The creature edged closer to Shadow. It saw the knife, and stopped. “Fight me!” it shouted. “Fight me fair! Not with cold iron! Fight me!”
“I don’t want to fight you,” said Shadow. He dropped the knife on the grass, raised his hands to show them empty.
“Too late,” said the bald thing that was not a man. “Too late for that.”
And it launched itself at Shadow.
Later, when Shadow thought of that fight, he remembered only fragments: he remembered being slammed to the ground, and throwing himself out of the way. He remembered the pounding of the drums, and the expressions on the faces of the drummers as they stared, hungrily, between the bonfires, at the two men in the firelight.
They fought, wrestling and pounding each other.
Salt tears ran down the monster’s face as it wrestled with Shadow. They were equally matched, it seemed to Shadow.
The monster slammed its arm into Shadow’s face, and Shadow could taste his own blood. He could feel his own anger beginning to rise, like a red wall of hate.
He swung a leg out, hooking the monster behind the knee, and as it stumbled back Shadow’s fist crashed into its gut, making it cry out and roar with anger and pain.