"Well?"
Her eyes sought his. "I don't know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn't know then I can't put into words."
"Normally people who die stay in their graves," said Shadow.
"Do they? Do they really, puppy? I used to think they did too. Now I'm not so sure. Perhaps." She climbed off the bed and walked over to the window. Her face, in the light of the motel sign, was as beautiful as it had ever been. The face of the woman he had gone to prison for.
His heart hurt in his chest as if someone had taken it in a fist and squeezed. "Laura…?"
She did not look at him. "You've gotten yourself mixed up in some bad things, Shadow. You're going to screw it up, if someone isn't there to watch out for you. I'm watching out for you. And thank you for my present."
"What present?"
She reached into the pocket of her blouse, and pulled out the gold coin he had thrown into the grave earlier that day. There was still black dirt on it. "I may have it put on a chain. It was very sweet of you."
"You're welcome."
She turned then and looked at him with eyes that seemed both to see and not to see him. "I think there are several aspects of our marriage we're going to have to work on."
"Babes," he told her. "You're dead."
"That's one of those aspects, obviously." She paused. "Okay," she said. "I'm going now. It will be better if I go." And, naturally and easily, she turned and put her hands on Shadow's shoulders, and went up on tiptoes to kiss him goodbye, as she had always kissed him goodbye.
Awkwardly he bent to kiss her on the cheek, but she moved her mouth as he did so and pushed her lips against his. Her breath smelled, faintly, of mothballs.
Laura's tongue flickered into Shadow's mouth. It was cold, and dry, and it tasted of cigarettes and of bile. If Shadow had had any doubts as to whether his wife was dead or not, they ended then.
He pulled back.
"I love you," she said, simply. "I'll be looking out for you." She walked over to the motel room door. There was a strange taste in his mouth. "Get some sleep, puppy," she told him. "And stay out of trouble."
She opened the door to the hall. The fluorescent light in the hallway was not kind: beneath it, Laura looked dead, but then, it did that to everyone.
"You could have asked me to stay the night," she said, in her cold-stone voice.
"I don't think I could," said Shadow.
"You will, hon," she said. "Before all this is over. You will." She turned away from him, and walked down the corridor.
Shadow looked out of the doorway. The night clerk kept on reading his John Grisham novel, and barely looked up as she walked past him. There was thick graveyard mud clinging to her shoes. And then she was gone.
Shadow breathed out, a slow sigh. His heart was pounding arrhythmically in his chest. He walked across the hall and knocked on Wednesday's door. As he knocked he got the weirdest notion, that he was being buffeted by black wings, as if an enormous crow was flying through him, out into the hall and the world beyond.
Wednesday opened the door. He had a white motel towel wrapped around his waist, but was otherwise nak*d. "What the hell do you want?" he asked.
"Something you should know," said Shadow. "Maybe it was a dream-but it wasn't-or maybe I inhaled some of the fat kid's synthetic toad-skin smoke, or probably I'm just going mad…"
"Yeah, yeah. Spit it out," said Wednesday. "I'm kind of in the middle of something here."
Shadow glanced into the room. He could see that there was someone in the bed, watching him. A sheet pulled up over small br**sts. Pale blonde hair, something rattish about the face. He lowered his voice. "I just saw my wife," he said. "She was in my room."
"A ghost, you mean? You saw a ghost?"
"No. Not a ghost. She was solid. It was her. She's dead all right, but it wasn't any kind of a ghost. I touched her. She kissed me."
"I see." Wednesday darted a look at the woman in the bed. "Be right back, m'dear," he said.
They crossed the hall to Shadow's room. Wednesday turned on the lamps. He looked at the cigarette butt in the ashtray. He scratched his chest. His n**ples were dark, old-man n**ples, and his chest hair was grizzled. There was a white scar down one side of his torso. He sniffed the air. Then he shrugged.
"Okay," he said. "So your dead wife showed up. You scared?"
"A little."
"Very wise. The dead always give me the screaming mimis. Anything else?"
"I'm ready to leave Eagle Point. Laura's mother can sort out the apartment, all that. She hates me anyway. I'm ready to go when you are."
Wednesday smiled. "Good news, my boy. We'll leave in the morning. Now, you should get some sleep. I have some scotch in my room, if you need help sleeping. Yes?"
"No. I'll be fine."
"Then do not disturb me further. I have a long night ahead of me."
"Good night," said Shadow.
"Exactly," said Wednesday, and he closed the door as he went out.
Shadow sat down on the bed. The smell of cigarettes and preservatives lingered in the air. He wished that he were mourning Laura: it seemed more appropriate than being troubled by her or, he admitted it to himself now that she had gone, just a little scared by her. It was time to mourn. He turned the lights out, and lay on the bed, and thought of Laura as she was before he went to prison. He remembered their marriage when they were young and happy and stupid and unable to keep their hands off each other.
It had been a very long time since Shadow had cried, so long he thought he had forgotten how. He had not even wept when his mother died.
But he began to cry now, in painful, lurching sobs, and for the first time since he was a small boy, Shadow cried himself to sleep.
Coming To America
A.D. 813
They navigated the green sea by the stars and by the shore, and when the shore was only a memory and the night sky was overcast and dark they navigated by faith, and they called on the All-Father to bring them safely to land once more.
A bad journey they had of it, their fingers numb and with a shiver in their bones that not even wine could burn off. They would wake in the morning to see that the hoarfrost had touched their beards, and, until the sun warmed them, they looked like old men, white-bearded before their time.
Teeth were loosening and eyes were deep-sunken in their sockets when they made landfall on the green land to the west. The men said, "We are far, far from our homes and our hearths, far from the seas we know and the lands we love. Here on the edge of the world we will be forgotten by our gods."
Their leader clambered to the top of a great rock, and he mocked them for their lack of faith. "The All-Father made the world," he shouted. "He built it with his hands from the shattered bones and the flesh of Ymir, his grandfather. He placed Ymir's brains in the sky as clouds, and his salt blood became the seas we crossed. If he made the world, do you not realize that he created this land as well? And if we die here as men, shall we not be received into his hall?"
And the men cheered and laughed. They set to, with a will, to build a hall out of split trees and mud, inside a small stockade of sharpened logs, although as far as they knew they were the only men in the new land.
On the day that the hall was finished there was a storm: the sky at midday became as dark as night, and the sky was rent with forks of white flame, and the thunder-crashes were so loud that the men were almost deafened by them, and the ship's cat they had brought with them for good fortune hid beneath their beached longboat. The storm was hard enough and vicious enough that the men laughed and clapped each other on the back, and they said, "The thunderer is here with us, in this distant land," and they gave thanks, and rejoiced, and they drank until they were reeling.
In the smoky darkness of their hall, that night, the bard sang them the old songs. He sang of Odin, the All-Father, who was sacrificed to himself as bravely and as nobly as others were sacrificed to him. He sang of the nine days that the All-Father hung from the world-tree, his side pierced and dripping from the spear-point's wound, and he sang them all the things the All-Father had learned in his agony: nine names, and nine runes, and twice-nine charms. When he told them of the spear piercing Odin's side, the bard shrieked in pain as the All-Father himself had called out in his agony, and all the men shivered, imagining his pain.
They found the scraeling the following day, which was the all-father's own day. He was a small man, his long hair black as a crow's wing, his skin the color of rich red clay. He spoke in words none of them could understand, not even their bard, who had been on a ship that had sailed through the pillars of Hercules and who could speak the trader's pidgin men spoke all across the Mediterranean. The stranger was dressed in feathers and in furs, and there were small bones braided into his long hair.
They led him into their encampment, and they gave him roasted meat to eat, and strong drink to quench his thirst. They laughed riotously at the man as he stumbled and sang, at the way his head rolled and lolled, and this on less than a drinking-horn of mead. They gave him more drink, and soon enough he lay beneath the table with his head curled under his arm.
Then they picked him up, a man at each shoulder, a man at each leg, carried him at shoulder height, the four men making him an eight-legged horse, and they carried him at the head of a procession to an ash tree on the hill overlooking the bay, where they put a rope around his neck and hung him high in the wind, their tribute to the All-Father, the gallows lord. The scraeling's body swung in the wind, his face blackening, his tongue protruding, his eyes popping, his penis hard enough to hang a leather helmet on, while the men cheered and shouted and laughed, proud to be sending their sacrifice to the heavens.
And, the next day, when two huge ravens landed upon the scraeling's corpse, one on each shoulder, and commenced to peck at its cheeks and eyes, the men knew their sacrifice had been accepted.
It was a long winter, and they were hungry, but they were cheered by the thought that, when spring came, they would send the boat back to the northlands, and it would bring settlers, and bring women. As the weather became colder, and the days became shorter, some of the men took to searching for the scraeling village, hoping to find food, and women. They found nothing, save for the places where fires had been, where small encampments had been abandoned.
One midwinter's day, when the sun was as distant and cold as a dull silver coin, they saw that the remains of the scraeling's body had been removed from the ash tree. That afternoon it began to snow, in huge, slow flakes.
The men from the northlands closed the gates of their encampment, retreated behind their wooden wall.
The scraeling war party fell upon them that night: five hundred men to thirty. They climbed the wall, and over the following seven days, they killed each of the thirty men, in thirty different ways. And the sailors were forgotten, by history and their people.
The wall they tore down, the war party, and the village they burned. The longboat, upside down and pulled high on the shingle, they also burned, hoping that the pale strangers had but one boat, and that by burning it they were ensuring that no other Northmen would come to their shores.