The response was immediate. The rocks and the earth that had surrounded him began to push down on Shadow, squeezed him so hard that the last ounce of air in his lungs was crushed out of him. The pressure became pain, pushing him on every side. He reached the zenith of pain and hung there, cresting, knowing that he could take no more, at that moment the spasm eased and Shadow could breathe again. The light above him had grown larger.
He was being pushed toward the surface.
As the next earth-spasm hit, Shadow tried to ride with it. This time he felt himself being pushed upward.
The pain, on that last awful contraction, was impossible to believe, as he felt himself being squeezed, crushed, and pushed through an unyielding rock gap, his bones shattering, his flesh becoming something shapeless. As his mouth and ruined head cleared the hole he began to scream, in fear and pain.
He wondered, as he screamed, whether, back in the waking world, he was also screaming-if he was screaming in his sleep back on the darkened bus.
And as that final spasm ended Shadow was on the ground, his fingers clutching the red earth.
He pulled himself into a sitting position, wiped the earth from his face with his hand and looked up at the sky. It was twilight, a long, purple twilight, and the stars were coming out, one by one, stars so much brighter and more vivid than any stars he had ever seen or imagined.
"Soon," said the crackling voice of the flame, coming from behind him, "they will fall. Soon they will fall and the star people will meet the earth people. There will be heroes among them, and men who will slay monsters and bring knowledge, but none of them will be gods. This is a poor place for gods."
A blast of air, shocking in its coldness, touched his face. It was like being doused in ice water. He could hear the driver's voice saying that they were in Pinewood, "anyone who needs a cigarette or wants to stretch their legs, we'll be stopping here for ten minutes, then we'll be back on the road."
Shadow stumbled off the bus. They were parked outside another rural gas station, almost identical to the one they had left. The driver was helping a couple of teenage girls onto the bus, putting their suitcases away in the luggage compartment.
"Hey," the driver said, when she saw Shadow. "You're getting off at Lakeside, right?"
Shadow agreed, sleepily, that he was.
"Heck, that's a good town," said the bus driver. "I think sometimes that if I were just going to pack it all in, I'd move to Lakeside. Prettiest town I've ever seen. You've lived there long?"
"My first visit."
"You have a pasty at Mabel's for me, you hear?"
Shadow decided not to ask for clarification. "Tell me," said Shadow, "was I talking in my sleep?"
"If you were, I didn't hear you." She looked at her watch. "Back on the bus. I'll call you when we get to Lakeside."
The two girls-he doubted that either of them was much more than fourteen years old-who had got on in Pinewood were now in the seat in front of him. They were friends, Shadow decided, eavesdropping without meaning to, not sisters. One of them knew almost nothing about sex, but knew a lot about animals, helped out or spent a lot of time at some kind of animal shelter, while the other was not interested in animals, but, armed with a hundred tidbits gleaned from the Internet and from daytime television, thought she knew a great deal about human sexuality. Shadow listened with a horrified and amused fascination to the one who thought she was wise in the ways of the world detail the precise mechanics of using Alka-Seltzer tablets to enhance or*l s*x.
Shadow started to tune them out, blanked everything except the noise of the road, and now only fragments of conversation would come back every now and again.
Goldie is, like, such a good dog, and he was a purebred retriever, if only my dad would say okay, he wags his tail whenever he sees me.
It's Christmas, he has to let me use the snowmobile.
You can write your name with your tongue on the side of his thing.
I miss Sandy.
Yeah, I miss Sandy too.
Six inches tonight they said, but they just make it up, they make up the weather and nobody ever calls them on it…
And then the brakes of the bus were hissing and the driver was shouting "Lakeside!" and the doors clunked open. Shadow followed the girls out into the floodlit parking lot of a video store and tanning salon that functioned, Shadow guessed, as Lakeside's Greyhound station. The air was dreadfully cold, but it was a fresh cold. It woke him up. He stared at the lights of the town to the south and the west, and pale expanse of a frozen lake to the east.
The girls were standing in the lot, stamping and blowing on their hands dramatically. One of them, the younger one, snuck a look at Shadow, smiled awkwardly when she realized that he had seen her do so.
"Merry Christmas," said Shadow.
"Yeah," said the other girl, perhaps a year or so older than the first, "Merry Christmas to you too." She had carroty red hair and a snub nose covered with a hundred thousand freckles.
"Nice town you got here," said Shadow.
"We like it," said the younger one. She was the one who liked animals. She gave Shadow a shy grin, revealing blue rubber-band braces stretching across her front teeth. "You look like somebody," she told him, gravely. "Are you somebody's brother or somebody's son or something?"
"You are such a spaz, Alison," said her friend. "Everybody's somebody's son or brother or something."
"That wasn't what I meant," said Alison. Headlights framed them all for one brilliant white moment. Behind the headlights was a station wagon with a mother in it, and in moments it took the girls and their bags away, leaving Shadow standing alone in the parking lot.
"Young man? Anything I can do for you?" The old man was locking up the video store. He pocketed his keys. "Store ain't open Christmas," he told Shadow cheerfully. "But I come down to meet the bus. Make sure everything was okay. Couldn't live with myself if some poor soul'd found 'emselves stranded on Christmas Day." He was close enough that Shadow could see his face: old but contented, the face of a man who had sipped life's vinegar and found it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that.
"Well, you could give me the number of the local taxi company," said Shadow.
"I could," said the old man, doubtfully, "but Tom'll be in his bed this time of night, and even if you could rouse him you'll get no satisfaction-I saw him down at the Buck Stops Here earlier this evening, and he was very merry. Very merry indeed. Where is it you're aiming to go?"
Shadow showed him the address tag on the door key.
"Well," he said, "that's a ten-, mebbe a twenty-minute walk over the bridge and around. But it's no fun when it's this cold, and when you don't know where you're going it always seems longer-you ever notice that? First time takes forever, and then ever after it's over in a flash?"
"Yes," said Shadow. "I've never thought of it like that. But I guess it's true."
The old man nodded. His face cracked into a grin. "What the heck, it's Christmas. I'll run you over there in Tessie."
Shadow followed the old man to the road, where a huge old roadster was parked. It looked like something that gangsters might have been proud to drive in the Roaring Twenties, running boards and all. It was a deep dark color under the sodium lights that might have been red and might have been green. "This is Tessie," the old man said. "Ain't she a beaut?" He patted her proprietorially, where the hood curved up and arched over the front nearside wheel.
"What make is she?" asked Shadow.
"She's a Wendt Phoenix. Wendt went under in '31, name was bought by Chrysler, but they never made any more Wendts. Harvey Wendt, who founded the company, was a local boy. Went out to California, killed himself in, oh, 1941, '42. Great tragedy."
The car smelled of leather and old cigarette smoke-not a fresh smell, but as if enough people had smoked enough cigarettes and cigars in the car over the years that the smell of burning tobacco had become part of the fabric of the car. The old man turned the key in the ignition and Tessie started first time.
"Tomorrow," he told Shadow, "she goes into the garage. I'll cover her with a dust sheet, and that's where she'll stay until spring. Truth of the matter is I shouldn't be driving her right now, with the snow on the ground."
"Doesn't she ride well in snow?"
"Rides just fine. It's the salt they put on the roads. Rusts these old beauties faster than you could believe. You want to go door to door, or would you like the moonlight grand tour of the town?"
"I don't want to trouble you-"
"It's no trouble. You get to be my age, you're grateful for the least wink of sleep. I'm lucky if I get five hours a night nowadays-wake up and my mind is just turning and turning. Where are my manners? My name's Hinzelmann. I'd say, call me Richie, but around here folks who know me just call me plain Hinzelmann. I'd shake your hand, but I need two hands to drive Tessie. She knows when I'm not paying attention."
"Mike Ainsel," said Shadow. "Pleased to meet you, Hinzelmann."
"So we'll go around the lake. Grand tour," said Hinzelmann.
Main Street, which they were on, was a pretty street, even at night, and it looked old-fashioned in the best sense of the word-as if, for a hundred years, people had been caring for that street and they had not been in a hurry to lose anything they liked.
Hinzelmann pointed out the town's two restaurants as they passed them (a German restaurant and what he described as "part Greek, part Norwegian, and a popover at every plate"); he pointed out the bakery and the bookstore ("What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore, it knows it's not fooling a soul"). He slowed Tessie as they passed the library so Shadow could get a good look at it. Antique gaslights flickered over the doorway-Hinzelmann proudly called Shadow's attention to them. "Built in the 1870s by John Henning, local lumber baron. He wanted it called the Henning Memorial Library, but when he died they started calling it the Lakeside Library, and I guess it'll be the Lakeside Library now until the end of time. Isn't it a dream?" He couldn't have been prouder of it if he had built it himself. The building reminded Shadow of a castle, and he said so. "That's right," agreed Hinzelmann. "Turrets and all. Henning wanted it to look like that on the outside. Inside they still have all the original pine shelving. Miriam Shultz wants to tear the insides out and modernize, but it's on some register of historic places, and there's not a damn thing she can do."
They drove around the south side of the lake. The town circled the lake, which was a thirty-foot drop below the level of the road. Shadow could see the patches of white ice dulling the surface of the lake with, here and there, a shiny patch of water reflecting the lights of the town.
"Looks like it's freezing over," he said.
"It's been frozen over for a month now," said Hinzelmann. "The dull spots are snowdrifts and the shiny spots are ice. It froze just after Thanksgiving in one cold night, froze smooth as glass. You do much ice-fishing, Mr. Ainsel?"
"Never."