And after far too long a time the beating ended.
"We'll see you in a couple of hours, sir," said Stone.
"You know, Woody really hated to have to do that. We're reasonable men. Like I said, we are the good guys. You're on the wrong side. Meantime, why don't you try to get a little sleep?"
"You better start taking us seriously," said Wood.
"Woody's got a point there, sir," said Stone. "Think about it."
The door slammed closed behind them. Shadow wondered if they would turn out the light, but they didn't, and it blazed into the room like a cold eye. Shadow crawled across the floor to the yellow foam-rubber pad and climbed onto it, pulling the thin blanket over himself, and he closed his eyes, and he held onto nothing, and he held onto dreams.
Time passed.
He was fifteen again, and his mother was dying, and she was trying to tell him something very important, and he couldn't understand her. He moved in his sleep and a shaft of pain moved him from half-sleep to half-waking, and he winced.
Shadow shivered under the thin blanket. His right arm covered his eyes, blocking out the light of the bulb. He wondered whether Wednesday and the others were still at liberty, if they were even still alive. He hoped that they were.
The silver dollar remained cold in his left hand. He could feel it there, as it had been during the beating. He wondered idly why it did not warm to his body temperature. Half asleep, now, and half delirious, the coin, and the idea of Liberty, and the moon, and Zorya Polunochnaya somehow became intertwined in one woven beam of silver light that shone from the depths to the heavens, and he rode the silver beam up and away from the pain and the heartache and the fear, away from the pain and, blessedly, back into dreams.
From far away he could hear some kind of noise, but it was too late to think about it: he belonged to sleep now. A half-thought: he hoped it was not people coming to wake him up, to hit him or to shout at him. And then, he noticed with pleasure, he was really asleep, and no longer cold.
Somebody somewhere was calling for help, loudly, in his dream or out of it.
Shadow rolled over on the foam rubber, in his sleep, finding new places that hurt as he rolled.
Someone was shaking his shoulder.
He wanted to ask them not to wake him, to let him sleep and leave him be, but it came out as a grunt.
"Puppy?" said Laura. "You have to wake up. Please wake up, hon."
And there was a moment's gentle relief. He had had such a strange dream, of prisons and con men and down-at-heel gods, and now Laura was waking him to tell him it was time for work, and perhaps there would be time enough before work to steal some coffee and a kiss, or more than a kiss; and he put out his hand to touch her.
Her flesh was cold as ice, and sticky.
Shadow opened his eyes.
"Where did all the blood come from?" he asked.
"Other people," she said. "It's not mine. I'm filled with formaldehyde, mixed with glycerin and lanolin."
"Which other people?" he asked.
"The guards," she said. "It's okay. I killed them. You better move. I don't think I gave anyone a chance to raise the alarm. Take a coat from out there, or you'll freeze your butt off."
"You killed them?"
She shrugged, and half smiled, awkwardly. Her hands looked as if she had been finger-painting, composing a picture that had been executed solely in crimsons, and there were splashes and spatters on her face and clothes (the same blue suit in which she had been buried) that made Shadow think of Jackson Pollock, because it was less problematic to think of Jackson Pollock than to accept the alternative.
"It's easier to kill people, when you're dead yourself," she told him. "I mean, it's not such a big deal. You're not so prejudiced anymore."
"It's still a big deal to me," said Shadow.
"You want to stay here until the morning crew comes?" she said. "You can if you like. I thought you'd like to get out of here."
"They'll think I did it," he said, stupidly.
"Maybe," she said. "Put on a coat, hon. You'll freeze."
He walked out into the corridor. At the end of the corridor was a guardroom. In the guardroom were four dead men: three guards, and the man who had called himself Stone. His friend was nowhere to be seen. From the blood-colored skid marks on the floor, two of them had been dragged into the guardroom and dropped onto the floor.
His own coat was hanging from the coat rack. His wallet was still in the inside pocket, apparently untouched. Laura pulled open a couple of cardboard boxes filled with candy bars.
The guards, now he could see them properly, were wearing dark camouflage uniforms, but there were no official tags on them, nothing to say who they, were working for. They might have been weekend duck hunters, dressed for the shoot.
Laura reached out her cold hand and squeezed Shadow's hand in hers. She had the gold coin he had given her around her neck, on a golden chain.
"That looks nice," he said.
"Thanks." She smiled, prettily.
"What about the others," he asked. "Wednesday, and the rest of them? Where are they?" Laura passed him a handful of candy bars, and he filled his pockets with them.
"There wasn't anybody else here. A lot of empty cells, and one with you in it. Oh, and one of the men had gone into the cell down there to jack off with a magazine. He got such a shock."
"You killed him while he was jerking himself off?"
She shrugged. "I guess," she said, uncomfortably. "I was worried they were hurting you. Someone has to watch out for you, and I told you I would, didn't I? Here, take these." They were chemical hand and foot warmers: thin pads-you broke the seal and they heated up and stayed that way for hours. Shadow pocketed them.
"Look out for me? Yes," he said, "you did."
She reached out a finger, stroked him above his left eyebrow. "You're hurt," she said.
"I'm okay," he said.
He opened a metal door in the wall. It swung open slowly. There was a four-foot drop to the ground, and he swung himself down to what felt like gravel. He picked up Laura by the waist, swung her down, as he used to swing her, easily, without a second thought…
The moon came out from behind a thick cloud. It was low on the horizon, ready to set, but the light it cast onto the snow was enough to see by.
They had emerged from what turned out to be the black-painted metal car of a long freight train, parked or abandoned in a woodland siding. The series of wagon cars went on as far as he could see, into the trees and away. He had been on a train. He should have known.
"How the hell did you find me here?" he asked his dead wife.
She shook her head slowly, amused. "You shine like a beacon in a dark world," she told him. "It wasn't that hard. Now, just go. Go as far and as fast as you can. Don't use your credit cards and you should be fine."
"Where should I go?"
She pushed a hand through her matted hair, flicking it back out of her eyes. "The road's that way," she told him. "Do whatever you can. Steal a car if you have to. Go south."
"Laura," he said, and hesitated. "Do you know what's going on? Do you know who these people are? Who you killed?"
"Yeah," she said. "I think I do know."
"I owe you," said Shadow. "I'd still be in there if it wasn't for you. I don't think they had anything good planned for me."
"No," she said. "I don't think they did."
They walked away from the empty train cars. Shadow wondered about the other trains he'd seen, blank window-less metal cars that went on for mile after mile, hooting their lonely way through the night. His fingers closed around the Liberty dollar in his pocket, and he remembered Zorya Polunochnaya, and the way she had looked at him in the moonlight. Did you ask her what she wanted? It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you.
"Laura…What do you want?" he asked.
"You really want to know?"
"Yes. Please."
Laura looked up at him with dead blue eyes. "I want to be alive again," she said. "Not in this half-life, I want to be really alive. I want to feel my heart pumping in my chest again. I want to feel blood moving through me-hot, and salty, and real. It's weird, you don't think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you'll know." She rubbed her eyes, smudging her face with red from the mess on her hands. "Look, it's hard. You know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because it's easier to pass for real, in the dark. And I don't want to have to pass. I want to be alive."
"I don't understand what you want me to do."
"Make it happen, hon. You'll figure it out. I know you will."
"Okay," he said. "I'll try. And if I do figure it out, how do I find you?"
But she was gone, and there was nothing left in the woodland but a gentle gray in the sky to show him where east was, and on the bitter December wind a lonely wail that might have been the cry of the last nightbird or the call of the first bird of dawn.
Shadow set his face to the south, and he began to walk.
Chapter Seven
As the Hindu gods are "immortal" only in a very particular sense-for they are born and they die-they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details…and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however "archetypal" his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces.
-Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Introduction, Hindu Myths (Penguin Books, 1975)
Shadow had been walking south, or what he hoped was more or less south, for several hours, heading along a narrow and unmarked road through the woods somewhere in, he imagined, southern Wisconsin. A couple of jeeps came down the road toward him at one point, headlights blazing, and he ducked into the trees until they had passed. The early morning mist hung at waist level. The cars were black.
When, thirty minutes later, he heard the noise of distant helicopters coming from the west, he struck out away from the timber trail and into the woods. There were two helicopters, and he lay crouched in a hollow beneath a fallen tree and listened to them pass over. As they moved away, he looked out and looked up for one hasty glance at the gray winter sky. He was satisfied to observe that the helicopters were painted a matte black. He waited beneath the tree until the noise of the helicopters was completely gone.
Under the trees the snow was little more than a dusting, which crunched underfoot. He was deeply grateful for the chemical hand and feet warmers, which kept his extremities from freezing. Beyond that, he was numb: heart-numb, mind-numb, soul-numb. And the, numbness, he realized, went a long way down, and a long way back.
So what do I want? he asked himself. He couldn't answer, so he just kept on walking, a step at a time, on and on through the woods. Trees looked familiar, moments of landscape were perfectly déjà-vued. Could he be walking in circles? Maybe he would just walk and walk and walk until the warmers and the candy bars ran out and then sit down and never get up again.