American Gods (62 page)

Shadow felt a sense of loss. He wanted to call to them, to plead with them to come back, not to give up on him, but everything was becoming formless and without shape: they were gone, and the plains were fading, and everything became void.

 

The pain was intense: it was as if every cell in his body, every nerve, was melting and waking and advertising its presence by burning him and hurting him.

There was a hand at the back of his head, gripping it by the hair, and another hand beneath his chin. He opened his eyes, expecting to find himself in some kind of hospital.

His feet were bare. He was wearing jeans. He was naked from the waist up. There was steam in the air. He could see a shaving mirror on the wall facing him, and a small basin, and a blue toothbrush in a toothpaste-stained glass.

Information was processed slowly, one datum at a time.

His fingers burned. His toes burned.

He began to whimper from the pain.

“Easy now, Mike. Easy there,” said a voice he knew.

“What?” he said, or tried to say. “What's happening?” It sounded strained and strange to his ears.

He was in a bathtub. The water was hot. He thought the water was hot, although he could not be certain. The water was up to his neck.

“Dumbest thing you can do with a fellow freezing to death is to put him in front of a fire. The second dumbest thing you can do is to wrap him in blankets—especially if he's in cold wet clothes already. Blankets insulate him—keep the cold in. The third dumbest thing—and this is my private opinion—is to take the fellow's blood out, warm it up and put it back. That's what doctors do these days. Complicated, expensive. Dumb.” The voice was coming from above and behind his head.

“The smartest, quickest thing you can do is what sailors have done to men overboard for hundreds of years. You put the fellow in hot water. Not too hot. Just hot. Now, just so you know, you were basically dead when I found you on the ice back there. How are you feeling now, Houdini?”

“It hurts,” said Shadow. “Everything hurts. You saved my life.”

“I guess maybe I did, at that. Can you hold your head up on your own now?”

“Maybe.”

“I'm going to let you go. If you start sinking below the water I'll pull you back up again.”

The hands released their grip on his head.

He felt himself sliding forward in the tub. He put out his hands, pressed them against the side of the tub, and leaned back. The bathroom was small. The tub was metal, and the enamel was stained and scratched.

An old man moved into his field of vision. He looked concerned.

“Feeling better?” asked Hinzelmann. “You just lay back and relax. I've got the den nice and warm. You tell me when you're ready, I got a robe you can wear, and I can throw your jeans into the dryer with the rest of your clothes. Sound good, Mike?”

“That's not my name.”

“If you say so.” The old man's goblin face twisted into an expression of discomfort.

Shadow had no real sense of time: he lay in the bathtub until the burning stopped and his toes and fingers flexed without real discomfort. Hinzelmann helped Shadow to his feet and let out the warm water. Shadow sat on the side of the bathtub and together they pulled off his jeans.

He squeezed, without much difficulty, into a terrycloth robe too small for him, and, leaning on the old man, he went into the den and flopped down on an ancient sofa. He was tired and weak: deeply fatigued, but alive. A log fire burned in the fireplace. A handful of surprised-looking deer heads peered down dustily from around the walls, where they jostled for space with several large varnished fish.

Hinzelmann went away with Shadow's jeans, and from the room next door Shadow could hear a brief pause in the rattle of a clothes dryer before it resumed. The old man returned with a steaming mug.

“It's coffee,” he said, “which is a stimulant. And I splashed a little schnapps into it. Just a little. That's what we always did in the old days. A doctor wouldn't recommend it.”

Shadow took the coffee with both hands. On the side of the mug was a picture of a mosquito and the message,
GIVE BLOOD
—
VISIT WISCONSIN
!!

“Thanks,” he said.

“It's what friends are for,” said Hinzelmann. “One day, you can save my life. For now, forget about it.”

Shadow sipped the coffee. “I thought I was dead.”

“You were lucky. I was up on the bridge—I'd pretty much figured that today was going to be the big day, you get a feel for it, when you get to my age—so I was up there with my old pocket watch, and I saw you heading out onto the lake. I shouted, but I sure as heck don't think you coulda heard me. I saw the car go down, and I saw you go down with it, and I thought I'd lost you, so I went out onto the ice. Gave me the heebie-jeebies. You must have been under the water for the best part of two minutes. Then I saw your hand come up through the place where the car went down—it was like seeing a ghost, seeing you there . . .” He trailed off. “We were both damn lucky that the ice took our weight as I dragged you back to the shore.”

Shadow nodded.

“You did a good thing,” he told Hinzelmann, and the old man beamed all over his goblin face.

Somewhere in the house, Shadow heard a door close. He sipped at his coffee.

Now that he was able to think clearly, he was starting to ask himself questions.

He wondered how an old man, a man half his height and perhaps a third his weight, had been able to drag him, unconscious, across the ice, or get him up the bank to a car. He wondered how Hinzelmann had gotten Shadow into the house and the bathtub.

Hinzelmann walked over to the fire, picked up the tongs and placed a thin log, carefully, onto the blazing fire.

“Do you want to know what I was doing out on the ice?”

Hinzelmann shrugged. “None of my business.”

“You know what I don't understand . . .” said Shadow. He hesitated, putting his thoughts in order. “I don't understand why you saved my life.”

“Well,” said Hinzelmann, “the way I was brought up, if you see another fellow in trouble—“

“No,” said Shadow. “That's not what I mean. I mean, you killed all those kids. Every winter. I was the only one to have figured it out. You must have seen me open the trunk. Why didn't you just let me drown?”

Hinzelmann tipped his head on one side. He scratched his nose, thoughtfully, rocked back and forth as if he were thinking. “Well,” he said. “That's a good question. I guess it's because I owed a certain party a debt. And I'm good for my debts.”

“Wednesday?”

“That's the fellow.”

“There was a reason he hid me in Lakeside, wasn't there? There was a reason nobody should have been able to find me here.”

Hinzelmann said nothing. He unhooked a heavy black poker from its place on the wall, and he prodded at the fire with it, sending up a cloud of orange sparks and smoke. “This is my home,” he said, petulantly. “It's a
good
town.”

Shadow finished his coffee. He put the cup down on the floor. The effort was exhausting. “How long have you been here?”

“Long enough.”

“And you made the lake?”

Hinzelmann peered at him, surprised. “Yes,” he said. “I made the lake. They were calling it a lake when I got here, but it weren't nothing more than a spring and a mill pond and a creek.” He paused. “I figured that this country is hell on my kind of folk. It eats us. I didn't want to be eaten. So I made a deal. I gave them a lake, and I gave them prosperity . . .”

“And all it cost them was one child every winter.”

“Good kids,” said Hinzelmann, shaking his old head, slowly. “They were all good kids. I'd only pick ones I liked. Except for Charlie Nelligan. He was a bad seed, that one. He was, what, 1924? 1925? Yeah. That was the deal.”

“The people of the town,” said Shadow. “Mabel. Marguerite. Chad Mulligan. Do they
know
?”

Hinzelmann said nothing. He pulled the poker from the fire: the first six inches at the tip glowed a dull orange. Shadow knew that the handle of the poker must be too hot to hold, but it did not seem to bother Hinzelmann, and he prodded the fire again. He put the poker back into the fire, tip first, and left it there. Then he said, “They know that they live in a good place. While every other town and city in this county, heck, in this part of the state, is crumbling into nothing. They know that.”

“And that's your doing?”

“This town,” said Hinzelmann. “I care for it. Nothing happens here that I don't want to happen. You understand that? Nobody comes here that I don't want to come here. That was why your father sent you here. He didn't want you out there in the world, attracting attention. That's all.”

“And you betrayed him.”

“I did no such thing. He was a crook. But I always pay my debts.”

“I don't believe you,” said Shadow.

Hinzelmann looked offended. One hand tugged at the clump of white hair at his temple. “I keep my word.”

“No. You don't. Laura came here. She said something was calling her here. And what about the coincidence that brought Sam Black Crow and Audrey Burton here, on the same night? I guess I don't believe in coincidence anymore.

“Sam Black Crow and Audrey Burton. Two people who both knew who I really was, and that there were people out there looking for me. I guess if one of them failed, there was always the other. And if all of them had failed, who else was on their way to Lakeside, Hinzelmann? My old prison warden, up here for a weekend's ice fishing? Laura's mother?” Shadow realized that he was angry. “You wanted me out of your town. You just didn't want to have to tell Wednesday that was what you were doing.”

In the firelight, Hinzelmann seemed more like a gargoyle than an imp. “This is a good town,” he said. Without his smile he looked waxen and corpselike. “You could have attracted too much attention. Not good for the town.”

“You should have left me back there on the ice,” said Shadow. “You should have left me in the lake. I opened the trunk of the klunker. Right now Alison is still iced into the trunk. But the ice will melt, and her body'll float out and up to the surface. And then they'll go down and look and see what else they can find down there. Find your whole stash of kids. I guess some of those bodies are pretty well preserved.”

Hinzelmann reached down and picked up the poker. He made no pretense of stirring the fire with it any longer; he held it like a sword, or a baton, the glowing orange-white tip of it waving in the air. It smoked. Shadow was very aware that he was next-to-naked, and he was still tired, and clumsy, and far from able to defend himself.

“You want to kill me?” said Shadow. “Go ahead. Do it. I'm a dead man anyway. I know you own this town—it's your little world. But if you think no one's going to come looking for me, you're living in a dream-world. It's over, Hinzelmann. One way or another, it's done.”

Hinzelmann pushed himself to his feet, using the poker as a walking stick. The carpet charred and smoked where he rested the red-hot tip, as he got up. He looked at Shadow and there were tears in his pale blue eyes. “I love this town,” he said. “I really like being a cranky old man, and telling my stories and driving Tessie and ice-fishing. Remember what I told you? It's not the fish you bring home from a day's fishing. It's the peace of mind.”

He extended the tip of the poker in Shadow's direction: Shadow could feel the heat of it from a foot away.

“I could kill you,” said Hinzelmann, “I could fix it. I've done it before. You're not the first to figure it out. Chad Mulligan's father, he figured it out. I fixed him, and I can fix you.”

“Maybe,” said Shadow. “But for how long, Hinzelmann? Another year? Another decade? They have computers now, Hinzelmann. They aren't stupid. They pick up on patterns. Every year a kid's going to vanish. Sooner or later they'll come sniffing about here. Just like they'll come looking for me. Tell me—how old are you?” He curled his fingers around a sofa cushion, and prepared to pull it over his head: it would deflect a first blow.

Hinzelmann's face was expressionless. “They were giving their children to me before the Romans came to the Black Forest,” he said. “I was a god before ever I was a kobold.”

“Maybe it's time to move on,” said Shadow. He wondered what a kobold was.

Hinzelmann stared at him. Then he took the poker, and pushed the tip of it back into the burning embers. “It's not that simple. What makes you think I can leave this town, even if I want to, Shadow? I'm part of this town. You going to make me go, Shadow? You ready to kill me? So I can leave?”

Shadow looked down at the floor. There were still glimmers and sparks in the carpet, where the poker tip had rested. Hinzelmann followed the look with his own, and crushed the embers out with his foot, twisting. In Shadow's mind came, unbidden, children, more than a hundred of them, staring at him with bone-blind eyes, the hair twisting slowly around their faces like fronds of seaweed. They were looking at him reproachfully.

He knew that he was letting them down. He just didn't know what else to do.

Shadow said, “I can't kill you. You saved my life.”

He shook his head. He felt like crap, in every way he could feel like crap. He didn't feel like a hero or a detective anymore—just another fucking sell-out, waving a stern finger at the darkness before turning his back on it.

“You want to know a secret?” asked Hinzelmann.

“Sure,” said Shadow, with a heavy heart. He was ready to be done with secrets.

“Watch this.”

Where Hinzelmann had been standing stood a male child, no more than five years old. His hair was dark brown, and long. He was perfectly naked, save for a worn leather band around his neck. He was pierced with two swords, one of them going through his chest, the other entering at his shoulder, with the point coming out beneath the rib-cage. Blood flowed through the wounds without stopping and ran down the child's body to pool and puddle on the floor. The swords looked unimaginably old.