An American Gods Novella
NEIL GAIMAN
She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself;
her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the window of
her eyes and that is very frightening.
ANGELACARTER,
“The Lady of the House of Love.”
CHAPTER I
“If you ask me,” said the little man to Shadow, “you’re something of a monster. Am I right?”
They were the only two people, apart from the barmaid, in the bar of a hotel in a town on the north coast of Scotland. Shadow had been sitting there on his own, drinking a lager, when the man came over and sat at his table. It was late summer, and it seemed to Shadow that everything was cold, and small, and damp. He had a small book of Pleasant Local Walks in front of him, and was studying the walk he planned to do tomorrow, along the coast, toward Cape Wrath.
He closed the book.
“I’m American,” said Shadow, “if that’s what you mean.”
The little man cocked his head to one side, and he winked, theatrically. He had steel-gray hair, and a gray face, and a gray coat, and he looked like a small-town lawyer. “Well, perhaps that is what I mean, at that,” he said. Shadow had had problems understanding Scottish accents in his short time in the country, all rich burrs and strange words and trills, but he had no trouble understanding this man. Everything the little man said was small and crisp, each word so perfectly enunciated that it made Shadow feel like he himself was talking with a mouthful of oatmeal.
The little man sipped his drink and said, “So you’re American. Oversexed, overpaid, and over here. Eh? D’you work on the rigs?”
“Sorry?”
“An oilman? Out on the big metal platforms. We get oil people up here, from time to time.”
“No. I’m not from the rigs.”
The little man took out a pipe from his pocket, and a small penknife, and began to remove the dottle from the bowl. Then he tapped it out into the ashtray. “They have oil in Texas, you know,” he said, after a while, as if he were confiding a great secret. “That’s in America.”
“Yes,” said Shadow.
He thought about saying something about Texans believing that Texas was actually in Texas, but he suspected that he’d have to start explaining what he meant, so he said nothing.
Shadow had been away from America for the better part of two years. He had been away when the towers fell. He told himself sometimes that he did not care if he ever went back, and sometimes he almost came close to believing himself. He had reached the Scottish mainland two days ago, landed in Thurso on the ferry from the Orkneys, and had traveled to the town he was staying in by bus.
The little man was talking. “So there’s a Texas oilman, down in Aberdeen, he’s talking to an old fellow he meets in a pub, much like you and me meeting actually, and they get talking, and the Texan, he says, Back in Texas I get up in the morning, I get into my car—I won’t try to do the accent, if you don’t mind—I’ll turn the key in the ignition, and put my foot down on the accelerator, what you call the, the—”
“Gas pedal,” said Shadow, helpfully.
“Right. Put my foot down on the gas pedal at breakfast, and by lunchtime I still won’t have reached the edge of my property. And the canny old Scot, he just nods and says, Aye, well, I used to have a car like that myself.”
The little man laughed raucously, to show that the joke was done. Shadow smiled, and nodded, to show that he knew it was a joke.
“What are you drinking? Lager? Same again over here, Jennie love. Mine’s a Lagavulin.” The little man tamped tobacco from a pouch into his pipe. “Did you know that Scotland’s bigger than America?”
There had been no one in the hotel bar when Shadow came downstairs that evening. Just the thin barmaid, reading a newspaper, and smoking her cigarette. He’d come down to sit by the open fire, as his bedroom was cold, and the metal radiators on the bedroom wall were colder than the room. He hadn’t expected company.
“No,” said Shadow, always willing to play straight man. “I didn’t. How’d you reckon that?”
“It’s all fractal,” said the little man. “The smaller you look, the more things unpack. It could take you as long to drive across America as it would to drive across Scotland, if you did it the right way. It’s like, you look on a map, and the coastlines are solid lines. But when you walk them, they’re all over the place. I saw a whole program on it on the telly the other night. Great stuff.”
“Okay,” said Shadow.
The little man’s pipe lighter flamed, and he sucked and puffed and sucked and puffed until he was satisfied that the pipe was burning well, then he put the lighter, the pouch, and the penknife back into his coat pocket.
“Anyway, anyway,” said the little man. “I believe you’re planning on staying here through the weekend.”
“Yes,” said Shadow. “Do you . . . are you with the hotel?”
“No, no. Truth to tell, I was standing in the hall, when you arrived. I heard you talking to Gordon on the reception desk.”
Shadow nodded. He had thought that he had been alone in the reception hall when he had registered, but it was possible that the little man had passed through. But still . . . there was a wrongness to this conversation. There was a wrongness to everything.
Jennie the barmaid put their drinks onto the bar. “Five pounds twenty,” she said. She picked up her newspaper, and started to read once more. The little man went to the bar, paid, and brought back the drinks.
“So how long are you in Scotland?” asked the little man.
Shadow shrugged. “I wanted to see what it was like. Take some walks. See the sights. Maybe a week. Maybe a month.”
Jennie put down her newspaper. “It’s the arse end of nowhere up here,” she said, cheerfully. “You should go somewhere interesting.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said the little man. “It’s only the arse end of nowhere if you look at it wrong. See that map, laddie?” He pointed to a fly-specked map of Northern Scotland on the opposite wall of the bar. “You know what’s wrong with it?”
“No.”
“It’s upside down!” the man said, triumphantly. “North’s at the top. It’s saying to the world that this is where things stop. Go no further. The world ends here. But you see, that’s not how it was. This wasn’t the north of Scotland. This was the southernmost tip of the Viking world. You know what the second most northern county in Scotland is called?”
Shadow glanced at the map, but it was too far away to read. He shook his head.
“Sutherland!” said the little man. He showed his teeth. “The South Land. Not to anyone else in the world it wasn’t, but it was to the Vikings.”
Jennie the barmaid walked over to them. “I won’t be gone long,” she said. “Call the front desk if you need anything before I get back.” She put a log on the fire, then she went out into the hall.
“Are you a historian?” Shadow asked.
“Good one,” said the little man. “You may be a monster, but you’re funny. I’ll give you that.”
“I’m not a monster,” said Shadow.
“Aye, that’s what monsters always say,” said the little man. “I was a specialist once. In Saint Andrews. Now I’m in general practice. Well, I was. I’m semiretired. Go in to the surgery a couple of days a week, just to keep my hand in.”
“Why do you say I’m a monster?” asked Shadow.
“Because,” said the little man, lifting his whiskey glass with the air of one making an irrefutable point, “I am something of a monster myself. Like calls to like. We are all monsters, are we not? Glorious monsters, shambling through the swamps of unreason . . .” He sipped his whiskey, then said, “Tell me, a big man like you, have you ever been a bouncer? ‘Sorry mate, I’m afraid you can’t come in here tonight, private function going on, sling your hook and get on out of it,’ all that?”
“No,” said Shadow.
“But you must have done something like that?”
“Yes,” said Shadow, who had been a bodyguard once, to an old god; but that was in another country.
“You, uh, you’ll pardon me for asking, don’t take this the wrong way, but do you need money?”
“Everyone needs money. But I’m okay.” This was not entirely true; but it was a truth that, when Shadow needed money, the world seemed to go out of its way to provide it.
“Would you like to make a wee bit of spending money? Being a bouncer? It’s a piece of piss. Money for old rope.”
“At a disco?”
“Not exactly. A private party. They rent a big old house near here, come in from all over at the end of the summer. So last year, everybody’s having a grand old time, champagne out of doors, all that, and there was some trouble. A bad lot. Out to ruin everybody’s weekend.”
“These were locals?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Was it political?” asked Shadow. He did not want to be drawn into local politics.
“Not a bit of it. Yobs and hairies and idiots. Anyway. They probably won’t come back this year. Probably off in the wilds of nowhere demonstrating against international capitalism. But just to be on the safe side, the folk up at the house’ve asked me to look out for someone who could do a spot of intimidating. You’re a big lad, and that’s what they want.”
“How much?” asked Shadow.
“Can you handle yourself in a fight, if it came down to it?” asked the man.
Shadow didn’t say anything. The little man looked Shadow up and down, and then he grinned again, showing tobacco-stained teeth.
“Fifteen hundred pounds, for a long weekend’s work. That’s good money. And it’s cash. Nothing you’d ever need to report to the tax man.”
“This weekend coming?” said Shadow.
“Starting Friday morning. It’s a big old house. Part of it used to be a castle. West of Cape Wrath.”
“I don’t know,” said Shadow.
“If you do it,” said the little gray man, “you’ll get a fantastic weekend in a historical house, and I can guarantee you’ll get to meet with all kinds of interesting people. Perfect holiday job. I just wish I was younger. And, uh, a great deal taller, actually.”
Shadow said, “Okay,” and as soon as he said it, wondered if he would regret it.
“Good man. I’ll get you more details as to when.” The little gray man stood up, and gave Shadow’s shoulder a gentle pat as he walked past. Then he went out, leaving Shadow in the bar on his own.
CHAPTER II
Shadow had been on the road for about eighteen months. He had backpacked across Europe and down into northern Africa. He had picked olives, and fished for sardines, and driven a truck, and sold wine from the side of a road. Finally, several months ago, he had hitchhiked his way back to Norway, to Oslo, where he had been born thirty-five years before.
He was not sure what he had been looking for. He only knew that he had not found it, although there were moments, in the high ground, in the crags and waterfalls, when he was certain that whatever he needed was just around the corner: behind a jut of granite, or in the nearest pinewood.
Still, it was a deeply unsatisfactory visit, and when, in Bergen, he was asked if he would be half of the crew of a motor yacht, on its way to meet its owner in Cannes, he said yes.
They had sailed from Bergen to the Shetlands, and then to the Orkneys, where they spent the night in a bed-and-breakfast in Stromness. Next morning, leaving the harbor, the engines had failed, ultimately and irrevocably, and the boat had been towed back to port.
Bjorn, who was the captain and the other half of the crew, stayed with the boat, to talk to the insurers and field the angry calls from the boat’s owner. Shadow saw no reason to stay: he took the ferry to Thurso, on the north coast of Scotland.
He was restless. At night he dreamed of freeways, of entering the neon edges of a city where the people spoke English. Sometimes it was in the Midwest, sometimes it was in Florida, sometimes on the East Coast, sometimes on the West.
When he got off the ferry he bought a book of scenic walks, and picked up a bus timetable, and he set off into the world.
Jennie the barmaid came back, and started to wipe all the surfaces with a cloth. Her hair was so blond it was almost white, and it was tied up at the back in a bun.
“So what is it people do around here for fun?” asked Shadow.
“They drink. They wait to die,” she said. “Or they go south. That pretty much exhausts your options.”
“You sure?”
“Well, think about it. There’s nothing up here but sheep and hills. We feed off the tourists, of course, but there’s never really enough of you. Sad, isn’t it?”
Shadow shrugged.
“Are you from New York?” she asked.
“Chicago, originally. But I came here from Norway.”
“You speak Norwegian?”
“A little.”
“There’s somebody you should meet,” she said, suddenly. Then she looked at her watch. “Somebody who came here from Norway, a long time ago. Come on.”
She put her cleaning cloth down, turned off the bar lights, and walked over to the door. “Come on,” she said, again.
“Can you do that?” asked Shadow.
“I can do whatever I want,” she said. “It’s a free country, isn’t it?”
“I guess.”
She locked the bar with a brass key. They walked into the reception hall. “Wait here,” she said. She went through a door markedprivate , and reappeared several minutes later, wearing a long brown coat. “Okay. Follow me.”
They walked out into the street. “So, is this a village or a small town?” asked Shadow.
“It’s a fucking graveyard,” she said. “Up this way. Come on.”
They walked up a narrow road. The moon was huge and a yellowish brown. Shadow could hear the sea, although he could not yet see it.
“You’re Jennie?” he said.
“That’s right. And you?”
“Shadow.”
“Is that your real name?”
“It’s what they call me.”
“Come on then, Shadow,” she said.
At the top of the hill, they stopped. They were on the edge of the village, and there was a gray stone cottage. Jennie opened the gate, and led Shadow up a path to the front door. He brushed a small bush on the side of the path, and the air filled with the scent of sweet lavender. There were no lights on in the cottage.
“Whose house is this?” asked Shadow. “It looks empty.”
“Don’t worry,” said Jennie. “She’ll be home in a second.”
She pushed open the unlocked front door, and they went inside. She turned on the light switch by the door. Most of the inside of the cottage was taken up by a kitchen sitting room. There was a tiny staircase leading up to what Shadow presumed was an attic bedroom. A CD player sat on the pine counter.
“This is your house,” said Shadow.
“Home sweet home,” she agreed. “You want coffee? Or something to drink?”
“Neither,” said Shadow. He wondered what Jennie wanted. She had barely looked at him, hadn’t even smiled at him.
“So did I hear right? Was Dr. Gaskell asking you to help look after a party on the weekend?”
“I guess.”
“So what are you doing tomorrow and Friday?”
“Walking,” said Shadow. “I’ve got a book. There are some beautiful walks.”
“Some of them are beautiful. Some of them are treacherous,” she told him. “You can still find winter snow here, in the shadows, in the summer. Things last a long time, in the shadows.”
“I’ll be careful,” he told her.
“That was what the Vikings said,” she said, and she smiled. She took off her coat and dropped it on the bright purple sofa. “Maybe I’ll see you out there. I like to go for walks.” She pulled at the bun at the back of her head, and her pale hair fell free. It was longer than Shadow had thought it would be.
“Do you live here alone?”
She took a cigarette from a packet on the counter, lit it with a match. “What’s it to you?” she asked. “You won’t be staying the night, will you?”
Shadow shook his head.
“The hotel’s at the bottom of the hill,” she told him. “You can’t miss it. Thanks for walking me home.”
Shadow said goodnight, and walked back, through the lavender night, out to the lane. He stood there for a little while, staring out at the moon on the sea, puzzled. Then he walked down the hill until he got to the hotel. She was right: you couldn’t miss it. He walked up the stairs, unlocked his room with a key attached to a short stick, and went inside. The room was colder than the corridor.
He took off his shoes, and stretched out on the bed in the dark.
CHAPTER III
The boat was made of the fingernails of dead men, and it lurched through the mist, bucking and rolling hugely and unsteadily on the choppy sea.
There were shadowy shapes on the deck, men as big as hills or houses, and as Shadow got closer he could see their faces: proud men and tall, each one of them. They seemed to ignore the ship’s motion, each man waiting on the deck as if frozen in place.
One of them stepped forward, and he grasped Shadow’s hand with his own huge hand. Shadow stepped onto the gray deck.
“Well come to this accursed place,” said the man holding Shadow’s hand, in a deep, gravel voice.
“Hail!” called the men on the deck. “Hail sun-bringer! Hail Baldur!”
The name on Shadow’s birth certificate was Balder Moon, but he shook his head. “I am not him,” he told them. “I am not the one you are waiting for.”
“We are dying here,” said the gravel-voiced man, not letting go of Shadow’s hand.
It was cold in the misty place between the worlds of waking and the grave. Salt spray crashed on the bows of the gray ship, and Shadow was drenched to the skin.
“Bring us back,” said the man holding his hand. “Bring us back or let us go.”
Shadow said, “I don’t know how.”
At that, the men on the deck began to wail and howl. Some of them crashed the hafts of their spears against the deck, others struck the flats of their short swords against the brass bowls at the center of their leather shields, setting up a rhythmic din accompanied by cries that moved from sorrow to a full-throated berserker ululation . . .
A seagull was screaming in the early-morning air. The bedroom window had blown open in the night, and was banging in the wind. Shadow was lying on the top of his bed in his narrow hotel room. His skin was damp, perhaps with sweat.
Another cold day at the end of the summer had begun.
The hotel packed him a Tupperware box containing several chicken sandwiches, a hard-boiled egg, a small packet of cheese-and-onion crisps, and an apple. Gordon on the reception desk, who handed him the box, asked when he’d be back, explaining that if he was more than a couple of hours late they’d call out the rescue services, and asking for the number of Shadow’s mobile phone.
Shadow did not have a mobile phone.
He set off on the walk, heading toward the coast. It was beautiful, with a desolate beauty that chimed and echoed with the empty places inside Shadow. He had imagined Scotland as being a soft place, all gentle heathery hills, but here on the North Coast everything seemed sharp and jutting, even the gray clouds that scudded across the pale blue sky. He followed the route in his book, across scrubby meadows and past barns, up rocky hills and down.
Sometimes he imagined that he was standing still and the world was moving underneath him, that he was simply pushing it past with his legs.
The route was more tiring than he had expected. He had planned to eat at one o’clock, but by midday his legs were tired and he wanted a break. He followed his path to the side of a hill, where a boulder provided a convenient windbreak, and he crouched to eat his lunch. In the distance, ahead of him, he could see the Atlantic.
He had thought himself alone.
She said, “Will you give me your apple?”
It was Jennie, the barmaid from the hotel. Her too-fair hair gusted about her head.
“Hello, Jennie,” said Shadow. He passed her his apple. She pulled a clasp-knife from the pocket of her brown coat, and sat beside him. “Thanks,” she said.
“So,” said Shadow, “from your accent, you must have come from Norway when you were a kid. I mean, you sound like a local to me.”
“Did I say that I came from Norway?”
“Well, didn’t you?”
She speared an apple slice, and ate it, fastidiously, from the tip of the knife blade, only touching it with her teeth. She glanced at him. “It was a long time ago.”
“Family?”
She moved her shoulders in a shrug, as if any answer she could give him was beneath her.
“So you like it here?”
She looked at him and shook her head. “I feel like ahulder .”
He’d heard of the word before, in Norway. “Aren’t they a kind of troll?”
“No. They are mountain creatures, like the trolls, but they come from the woods, and they are very beautiful. Like me.” She grinned as she said it, as if she knew that she was too pallid, too sulky, and too thin ever to be beautiful. “They fall in love with farmers.”
“Why?”
“Damned if I know,” she said. “But they do. Sometimes the farmer realizes that he is talking to ahulder woman, because she has a cow’s tail hanging down behind, or worse, sometimes from behind there is nothing there, she is just hollow and empty, like a shell. Then the farmer says a prayer, or runs away, flees back to his mother or his farm.
“But sometimes the farmers do not run. Sometimes they throw a knife over her shoulder, or just smile, and they marry thehulder woman. Then her tail falls off. But she is still stronger than any human woman could ever be. And she still pines for her home in the forests and the mountains. She will never be truly happy. She will never be human.”
“What happens to her then?” asked Shadow. “Does she age and die with her farmer?”
She had sliced the apple down to the core. Now, with a flick of the wrist, she sent the apple core arcing off the side of the hill. “When her man dies . . . I think she goes back to the hills and the woods.” She stared out at the hillside. “There’s a story about one of them who was married to a farmer who didn’t treat her well. He shouted at her, wouldn’t help around the farm, he came home from the village drunk and angry. Sometimes he beat her.
“Now, one day she’s in the farmhouse, making up the morning’s fire, and he comes in and starts shouting at her, for his food is not ready, and he is angry, nothing she does is right, he doesn’t know why he married her, and she listens to him for a while, and then, saying nothing, she reaches down to the fireplace, and she picks up the poker. A heavy black iron jobbie. She takes that poker, and, without an effort, she bends it into a perfect circle, just like her wedding ring. She doesn’t grunt or sweat, she just bends it, like you’d bend a reed. And her farmer sees this and he goes white as a sheet, and doesn’t say anything else about his breakfast. He’s seen what she did to the poker and he knows that at any time in the last five years she could have done the same to him. And until he died, he never laid another finger on her, never said one harsh word. Now, you tell me something, Mr. everybody-calls-you-Shadow, if she could do that, why did she let him beat her in the first place? Why would she want to be with someone like that? You tell me.”
“Maybe,” said Shadow. “Maybe she was lonely.”
She wiped the blade of the knife on her jeans.
“Dr. Gaskell kept saying you were a monster,” she said. “Is it true?”
“I don’t think so,” said Shadow.
“Pity,” she said. “You know where you are with monsters, don’t you?”
“You do?”
“Absolutely. At the end of the day, you’re going to be dinner. Talking about which, I’ll show you something.” She stood up, and led him up the hill. “See. Over there? On the far side of that hill, where it drops into the glen, you can just see the house you’ll be working at this weekend. Do you see it, over there?”
“No.”
“Look. I’ll point. Follow the line of my finger.” She stood close to him, held out her hand and pointed to the side of a distant ridge. He could see the overhead sun glinting off something he supposed was a lake—or a loch, he corrected himself, he was in Scotland after all—and above that a gray outcropping on the side of a hill. He had taken it for rocks, but it was too regular to be anything but a building.
“That’s the castle?”
“I’d not call it that. Just a big house in the glen.”
“Have you been to one of the parties there?”
“They don’t invite locals,” she said. “And they wouldn’t ask me. You shouldn’t do it, anyway. You should say no.”
“They’re paying good money,” he told her.
She touched him then, for the first time, placed her pale fingers on the back of his dark hand. “And what good is money to a monster?” she asked, and smiled, and Shadow was damned if he didn’t think that maybe shewas beautiful, at that.
And then she put down her hand and backed away. “Well?” she said. “Shouldn’t you be off on your walk? You’ve not got much longer before you’ll have to start heading back again. The light goes fast when it goes, this time of year.”
And she stood and watched him as he hefted his rucksack, and began to walk down the hill. He turned around when he reached the bottom of the hill, and looked up. She was still looking at him. He waved, and she waved back.
The next time he looked back she was gone.
He took the little ferry across the kyle to the cape, and walked up the lighthouse. There was a minibus back to the ferry, and he took it.
He got back to the hotel at eight that night, exhausted but feeling satisfied. It had rained once, in the late afternoon, but he had taken shelter in a tumbledown bothy, and read a five-year-old newspaper while the rain drummed against the roof. It had ended after half an hour, but Shadow had been glad that he had good boots, for the earth had turned to mud.
He was starving. He went into the hotel restaurant. It was empty. Shadow said, “Hello?”
An elderly woman came to the door between the restaurant and the kitchen and said, “Aye?”
“Are you still serving dinner?”
“Aye.” She looked at him disapprovingly, from his muddy boots to his tousled hair. “Are you a guest?”
“Yes. I’m in room eleven.”
“Well . . . you’ll probably want to change before dinner,” she said. “It’s kinder to the other diners.”
“So youare serving.”
“Aye.”
He went up to his room, dropped his rucksack on the bed, and took off his boots. He put on his sneakers, ran a comb through his hair, and went back downstairs.
The dining room was no longer empty. Two people were sitting at a table in the corner, two people who seemed different in every way that people could be different: a small woman who looked to be in her late fifties, hunched and birdlike at the table, and a young man, big and awkward and perfectly bald. Shadow decided that they were mother and son.
He sat down at a table in the center of the room.
The elderly waitress came in with a tray. She gave both of the other diners a bowl of soup. The man began to blow on his soup, to cool it; his mother tapped him, hard, on the back of his hand, with her spoon. “Stop that,” she said. She began to spoon the soup into her mouth, slurping it noisily.
The bald man looked around the room, sadly. He caught Shadow’s eye, and Shadow nodded at him. The man sighed, and returned to his steaming soup.
Shadow looked at the menu without enthusiasm. He was ready to order, but the waitress had vanished again.
A flash of gray; Dr. Gaskell looked in at the door of the restaurant. He walked into the room, came over to Shadow’s table.
“Do you mind if I join you?”
“Not at all. Please. Sit down.”
He sat down, opposite Shadow. “Have a good day?”
“Very good. I walked.”
“Best way to work up an appetite. So. First thing tomorrow they’re sending a car out here to pick you up. Bring your things. They’ll take you out to the house. Show you the ropes.”
“And the money?” asked Shadow.
“They’ll sort that out. Half at the beginning, half at the end. Anything else you want to know?”
The waitress stood at the edge of the room, watching them, making no move to approach. “Yeah. What do I have to do to get some food around here?”
“What do you want? I recommend the lamb chops. The lamb’s local.”
“Sounds good.”
Gaskell said loudly, “Excuse me, Maura. Sorry to trouble you, but could we both have the lamb chops?”
She pursed her lips, and went back to the kitchen.
“Thanks,” said Shadow.
“Don’t mention it. Anything else I can help you with?”
“Yeah. These folk coming in for the party. Why don’t they hire their own security? Why hire me?”
“They’ll be doing that too, I have no doubt,” said Gaskell. “Bringing in their own people. But it’s good to have local talent.”
“Even if the local talent is a foreign tourist?”
“Just so.”
Maura brought two bowls of soup, put them down in front of Shadow and the doctor. “They come with the meal,” she said. The soup was too hot, and it tasted faintly of reconstituted tomatoes and vinegar. Shadow was hungry enough that he’d finished most of the bowl off before he realized that he did not like it.
“You said I was a monster,” said Shadow to the steel-gray man.
“I did?”
“You did.”
“Well, there’s a lot of monsters in this part of the world.” He tipped his head toward the couple in the corner. The little woman had picked up her napkin, dipped it into her water glass, and was dabbing vigorously at the spots of crimson soup on her son’s mouth and chin with it. He looked embarrassed. “It’s remote. We don’t get into the news unless a hiker or a climber gets lost, or starves to death. Most people forget we’re here.”
The lamb chops arrived, on a plate with overboiled potatoes, underboiled carrots, and something brown and wet that Shadow thought might have started life as spinach. Shadow started to cut at the chops with his knife. The doctor picked his up in his fingers, and began to chew.
“You’ve been inside,” said the doctor.
“Inside?”
“Prison. You’ve been in prison.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“So you know how to fight. You could hurt someone, if you had to.”
Shadow said, “If you need someone to hurt people, I’m probably not the guy you’re looking for.”
The little man grinned, with greasy gray lips. “I’m sure you are. I was just asking. You can’t give a man a hard time for asking. Anyway.He’s a monster,” he said, gesturing across the room with a mostly chewed lamb chop. The bald man was eating some kind of white pudding with a spoon. “So’s his mother.”
“They don’t look like monsters to me,” said Shadow.
“I’m teasing you, I’m afraid. Local sense of humor. They should warn you about mine when you enter the village. Warning, loony old doctor at work. Talking about monsters. Forgive an old man. You mustn’t listen to a word I say.” A flash of tobacco-stained teeth. He wiped his hands and mouth on his napkin. “Maura, we’ll be needing the bill over here. The young man’s dinner is on me.”
“Yes, Dr. Gaskell.”
“Remember,” said the doctor to Shadow. “Eight-fifteen tomorrow morning, be in the lobby. No later. They’re busy people. If you aren’t there, they’ll just move on, and you’ll have missed out on fifteen hundred pounds, for a weekend’s work. A bonus, if they’re happy.”
Shadow decided to have his after-dinner coffee in the bar. There was a log fire there, after all. He hoped it would take the chill from his bones.
Gordon from reception was working behind the bar. “Jennie’s night off?” asked Shadow.
“What? No, she was just helping out. She’ll do it if we’re busy, sometimes.”
“Mind if I put another log on the fire?”
“Help yourself.”
If this is how the Scots treat their summers,thought Shadow, remembering something Oscar Wilde had once said,they don’t deserve to have any.
The bald young man came in. He nodded a nervous greeting to Shadow. Shadow nodded back. The man had no hair that Shadow could see: no eyebrows, no eyelashes. It made him look babyish, and unformed. Shadow wondered if it was a disease, or perhaps a side effect of chemotherapy. He smelled of damp.
“I heard what he said,” stammered the bald man. “He said I was a monster. He said my ma was a monster too. I’ve got good ears on me. I don’t miss much.”
He did have good ears on him. They were a translucent pink, and they stuck out from the side of his head like the fins of some huge fish.
“You’ve got great ears,” said Shadow.
“You taking the mickey?” The bald man’s tone was aggrieved. He looked like he was ready to fight. He was only a little shorter than Shadow, and Shadow was a big man.
“If that means what I think it does, not at all.”
The bald man nodded. “That’s good,” he said. He swallowed, and hesitated. Shadow wondered if he should say something conciliatory, but the bald man continued, “It’s not my fault. Making all that noise. I mean, people come up here to get away from the noise. And the people. Too many damned people up here anyway. Why don’t you just go back to where you came from and stop making all that bluidy noise?”
The man’s mother appeared in the doorway. She smiled nervously at Shadow, then walked hurriedly over to her son. She pulled at his sleeve. “Now then,” she said. “Don’t you get yourself all worked up over nothing. Everything’s all right.” She looked up at Shadow, birdlike, placatory. “I’m sorry. I’m sure he didn’t mean it.” She had a length of toilet paper sticking to the bottom of her shoe, and she hadn’t noticed yet.
“Everything’s all right,” said Shadow. “It’s good to meet people.”
She nodded. “That’s all right then,” she said. Her son looked relieved.He’s scared of her, thought Shadow.
“Come on, pet,” said the woman to her son. She pulled at his sleeve, and he followed her to the door.
Then he stopped, obstinately, and turned. “You tell them,” said the bald young man, “not to make so much noise.”
“I’ll tell them,” said Shadow.
“It’s just that I can hear everything.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Shadow.
“He really is a good boy,” said the bald young man’s mother, and she led her son by the sleeve, into the corridor and away, trailing a tag of toilet paper.
Shadow walked out into the hall. “Excuse me,” he said.
They turned, the man and his mother.
“You’ve got something on your shoe,” said Shadow.
She looked down. Then she stepped on the strip of paper with her other shoe, and lifted her foot, freeing it. Then she nodded at Shadow, approvingly, and walked away.
Shadow went to the reception desk. “Gordon, have you got a good local map?”
“Like an ordnance survey? Absolutely. I’ll bring it in to the lounge for you.”
Shadow went back into the bar and finished his coffee. Gordon brought in a map. Shadow was impressed by the detail: it seemed to show every goat track. He inspected it closely, tracing his walk. He found the hill where he had stopped and eaten his lunch. He ran his finger southwest.
“There aren’t any castles around here are there?”
“I’m afraid not. There are some to the east. I’ve got a guide to the castles of Scotland I could let you look at—”
“No, no. That’s fine. Are there any big houses in this area? The kind people would call castles? Or big estates?”
“Well, there’s the Cape Wrath hotel, just over here,” and he pointed to it on the map. “But it’s a fairly empty area. Technically, for human occupation, what do they call it, for population density, it’s a desert up here. Not even any interesting ruins, I’m afraid. Not that you could walk to.”
Shadow thanked him, then asked him for an early-morning alarm call. He wished he had been able to find the house he had seen from the hill on the map, but perhaps he had been looking in the wrong place. It wouldn’t be the first time.
The couple in the room next door were fighting, or making love. Shadow could not tell, but each time he began to drift off to sleep raised voices or cries would jerk him awake.
Later, he was never certain if it had really happened, if she had really come to him, or if it had been the first of that night’s dreams: but in truth or in dreams, shortly before midnight by the bedside clock radio, there was a knock on his bedroom door. He got up. Called, “Who is it?”
“Jennie.”
He opened the door, winced at the light in the hall.
She was wrapped in her brown coat, and she looked up at him nervously.
“Yes?” said Shadow.
“You’ll be going to the house tomorrow,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I thought I should say goodbye,” she said. “In case I don’t get a chance to see you again. And if you don’t come back to the hotel. And you just go on somewhere. And I never see you.”
“Well, goodbye then,” said Shadow.
She looked him up and down, examining the T-shirt and the boxers he slept in, at his bare feet, then up at his face. She looked worried.
“You know where I live,” she said, at last. “Call me if you need me.”
She reached her index finger out and touched it gently to his lips. Her finger was very cold. Then she took a step back into the corridor and just stood there, facing him, making no move to go.
Shadow closed the hotel room door, and he heard her footsteps walking away down the corridor. He climbed back into bed.
He was sure that the next dream was a dream, though. It was his life, jumbled and twisted: one moment he was in prison, teaching himself coin tricks and telling himself that his love for his wife would get him through this. Then Laura was dead, and he was out of prison; he was working as a bodyguard to an old grifter who had told Shadow to call him Wednesday. And then his dream was filled with gods: old, forgotten gods, unloved and abandoned, and new gods, transient scared things, duped and confused. It was a tangle of improbabilities, a cat’s cradle that became a web that became a net, that became a skein as big as a world . . .
In his dream he died on the tree.
In his dream he came back from the dead.
And after that there was darkness. |
发表于 2007-2-10 21:36:36
发表于 2007-9-6 19:52:54
