American Gods (63 page)

The water of time, which comes from the spring of fate, Urd’s
Well, is not the water of life. Not quite. It feeds the roots of the world
tree, though. And there is no other water like it.

When Laura woke in the empty farmhouse room, she was shivering,
and her breath actually steamed in the morning air. There was a scrape on the
back of her hand, and a wet smear on the scrape, the vivid red of fresh blood.

And she knew where she had to go. She had drunk from the
water of time, which comes from the spring of fate. She could see the mountain
in her mind.

She licked the blood from the back of her hand, marveling at
the film of saliva, and she began to walfe”

It was a wet March day, and it was unseasonably cold, and
the storms of the previous few days had lashed their way across the southern
states, which meant that there were very few real tourists at Rock City on
Lookout Mountain. The Christmas lights had been taken down, the summer visitors
were yet to start coming.

Still, there were people there. There was even a tour bus
that drew up that morning releasing a dozen men and women with perfect tans and
gleaming, reassuring smiles. They looked like news anchors, and one could
almost imagine there was a phosphor-dot quality to them: they seemed to blur
gently as they moved. A black Humvee was parked in the front lot of Rock City.

The TV people walked intently through Rock City, stationing
themselves near the balancing rock, where they talked to each other in
pleasant, reasonable voices.

They were not the only people in this wave of visitors. If
you had walked the paths of Rock City that day, you might have noticed people
who looked like movie stars, and people who looked like aliens, and a number of
people who looked most of all like the idea of a person and nothing like the
reality. You might have seen them, but most likely you would never have noticed
them at all.

They came to Rock City in long limousines and in small
sports cars and in oversized SUVs. Many of them wore the sunglasses of those
who habitually wear sunglasses indoors and out, and do not willingly or
comfortably remove them. There were suntans and suits and shades and smiles and
scowls. They came in all sizes and shapes, all ages and styles.

All they had in common was a look, a very specific look. It
said, you know me; or perhaps, you ought to know me. An instant familiarity
that was also a distance, a look, or an attitude—the confidence that the world
existed for them, and that it welcomed them, and that they were adored.

The fat kid moved among them with the shuffling walk of one
who, despite having no social skills, has still become successful beyond his
dreams. His black coat flapped in the wind.

Something that stood beside the soft drink stand in Mother
Goose Court coughed to attract his attention. It was massive, and scalpel
blades jutted from its face and its fingers. Its face was cancerous. “It will
be a mighty battle,” it told him, in a glutinous voice.

“It’s not going to be a battle,” said the fat kid. “All we’re
facing here is a fucking paradigm shift. It’s a shakedown. Modalities like
battle are so fucking Lao Tzu.”

The cancerous thing blinked at him. “Waiting,” is all it
said in reply.

“Whatever,” said the fat kid. Then, “I’m looking for Mister
World. You seen him?”

The thing scratched itself with a scalpel blade, a tumor-ous
lower lip pushed out in concentration. Then it nodded. “Over there,” it said.

The fat kid walked away, without a thank you, in the
direction indicated. The cancerous thing waited, saying nothing, until the kid
was out of sight.

“It will be a battle,” said the cancerous thing to a woman
whose face was smudged with phosphor dots.

She nodded, and leaned closer to it. “So how does that make
you feel?’ she asked, in a sympathetic voice.

It blinked, and then it began to tell her.

Town’s Ford Explorer had a global positioning system, a little
screen that listened to the satellites and showed the car its location, but he
still got lost once he got south of Blacks-burg and onto the country roads: the
roads he drove seemed to bear little relationship to the tangle of lines on the
map on the screen. Eventually he stopped the car in a country lane, wound down
the window and asked a fal white woman being pulled by a wolfhound on its
eariy-tnorning walk for directions to Ashtree farm.

She nodded, and pointed and said something to him. He could
not understand what she had said, but he—said thanks a million and wound up the
window and drovfe off in the general direction she had indicated.

He kept going for another forty minutes, down country road after
country road, none of them the road he sought. Town began to chew his lower
lip.

“I’m too old for this shit,” he said aloud, relishing the
movie-star world-weariness of the line.

He was pushing fifty. Most of his working life had been
spent in a branch of government that went only by its initials, and whether or
not he had left his government job a dozen years ago for employment by the
private sector was open to debate: some days he thought one way, some days
another. Anyway, it was only the joes on the street that really believed there
was a difference.

He was on the verge of giving up on the farm when he crested
a hill and saw the sign, hand painted, on the gate. It said simply, as he had
been told it would, ASH. He pulled up the Ford Explorer, climbed out, and
untwisted the wire that held the gate closed. He got back in the car and drove
through.

It was like cooking a frog, he thought. You put the frog in
the water, and then you turn on the heat And by the time the frog notices that
there’s anything wrong, it’s already been cooked. The world in which he worked
was all too weird. There was no solid ground beneath his feet; the water in the
pot was bubbling fiercely.

When he’d been transferred to the Agency it had all seemed
so simple. Now it was all so—not complex, he decided; merely bizarre. He had
been sitting in Mr. World’s office at two that morning, and he had been told
what he was to do. “You got it?” said Mr. World, handing him the knife in its
dark leather sheath. “Cut me a stick. It doesn’t have to be longer than a couple
of feet.”

“Affirmative,” he said. And then he said, “Why do I have to
do this, sir?”

“Because I tell you to,” said Mr. World, flatly. “Find the
tree. Do the job. Meet me down in Chattanooga. Don’t waste any time.”

“And what about the asshole?”

“Shadow? If you see him, just avoid him. Don’t touch him.
Don’t even mess with him. I don’t want you turning him into a martyr. There’s
no room for martyrs in the current game plan.” He smiled then, his scarred
smile. Mr. World was easily amused. Mr. Town had noticed this on several
occasions. It had amused him to play chauffeur, in Kansas, after all.

“Look—”

“No martyrs, Town.”

And Town had nodded, and taken the knife in its sheath, and
pushed the rage that welled up inside him down deep and away.

Mr. Town’s hatred of Shadow had become a part of him. As he
was falling asleep he would see Shadow’s solemn face, see that smile that wasn’t
a smile, the way Shadow had of smiling without smiling that made Town want to
sink his fist into the man’s gut, and even as he fell asleep he could feel his
jaws squeeze together, his temples tense, his gullet bum.

He drove the Ford Explorer across the meadow, past an abandoned
farmhouse. He crested a ridge and saw the tree. ‘ He parked the car a little
way past it, and turned off the engine. The clock on the dashboard said it was
6:38. A.M. He left the keys in the car, and walked toward the tree.

The tree was large; it seemed to exist on its own sense of
scale. Town could not have said if it was fifty feet high or two hundred. Its
bark was the gray of a fine silk scarf.

There was a naked man tied to the trunk a little way above
the ground by a webwork of ropes, and there was something wrapped in a sheet at
the foot of the tree. Town’realized what it was as he passed it. He pushed at
the sheet with his foot. Wednesday’s ruined half-a-face stared out at him.

Town reached the tree. He walked a little way around the
thick trunk, away from the sightless eyes of the farmhouse, then he unzipped
his fly and pissed against the trunk of the tree. He did up his fly. He walked back
over to the house, found & wooden extension ladder, carried it back to the
tree. He leaned it carefully against the trunk. Then he climbed up it.

Shadow hung, limply, from the ropes that tied him to the
tree. Town wondered if the man was still alive: his chest did not rise or fall.
Dead or almost dead, it did not matter.

“Hello, asshole,” Town said, aloud. Shadow did not move.

Town reached the top of the ladder, and he pulled out the
knife. He found a small branch that seemed to meet Mr; World’s specifications,
and hacked at the base of it with the knife blade, cutting it half through,
then breaking it off with his hand. It was about thirty inches long.

He put the knife back in its sheath. Then he started to
climb back down the ladder. When he was opposite Shadow, he paused. “God, I
hate you,” he said. He wished he could just have taken out a gun and shot him,
and he knew that he could not. And then he jabbed the stick in the air toward
the hanging man, in a stabbing motion. It was an instinctive gesture,
containing all the frustration and rage inside Town. He imagined that he was
holding a spear and twisting it into Shadow’s guts.

“Come on,” he said, aloud. ‘Time to get moving.” Then he
thought, First sign of madness. Talking to yourself. He climbed down a few more
steps, then jumped the rest of the way to the ground. He looked at the stick he
was holding, and felt like a small boy, holding his stick as a sword or a
spear. / could have cut a stick from any tree, he thought. It didn ‘t have to
be this tree. Who the fuck would have known?

And he thought, Mr. World would have known.

He carried the ladder back to the farmhouse. From the corner
of his eye he thought he saw something move, and he looked in through the
window, into the dark room filled with broken furniture, with the plaster
peeling from the walls, and for a moment, in a half dream, he imagined that he
saw three women sitting in the dark parlor.

One of them was knitting. One of them was staring directly
at him. One of them appeared to be asleep. The woman who was staring at him
began to smile, a huge smile that seemed to split her face lengthwise, a smile
that crossed from ear to ear. Then she raised a finger and touched it to her
neck, and ran it gently from one side of her neck to the other.

That was what he thought he saw, all in a moment, in that empty
room, which contained, he saw at a second glance, nothing more than old rotting
furniture and fly-spotted prints and dry rot. There was nobody there at all.

He rubbed his eyes.

Town walked back to the brown Ford Explorer and climbed in.
He tossed the stick onto the white leather of the passenger seat. He turned the
key in the ignition. The dashboard clock said 6:37 A.M. Town frowned, and
checked his wristwatch, which blinked that it was 13:58.

Great, he thought. / was either up on that tree for eight
hours, or for minus a minute. That was what he thought, but what he believed
was that both timepieces had, coinciden-tally, begun to misbehave.

On the tree, Shadow’s body began to bleed. The wound was in
his side. The blood that came from it was slow and thick and molasses-black.

Clouds covered the top of Lookout Mountain.

Easter sat some distance away from the crowd at the bottom
of the mountain, watching the dawn over the hills to the east. She had a chain
of blue forget-me.-’nots tattooed around her left wrist, and she rubbed them absently,
with her right thumb.

Another night had come and gone, and nothing. The folk were
still coming, by ones and twos. The last night had brought several creatures
from the southwest, including two small boys each the size of an apple tree,
and something that she had only glimpsed, but that had looked like a
disembodied head the size of a VW bug. They had disappeared into the trees at
the base of the mountain.

Nobody bothered them. Nobody from the outside world even
seemed to have noticed they were there: she imagined the tourists at Rock City
staring down at them through their insert-a-quarter binoculars, staring
straight at a ramshackle encampment of things and people at the foot of the
mountain, and seeing nothing but trees and bushes and rocks.

She could smell the smoke from a cooking fire, a smell of
burning bacon on the chilly dawn wind. Someone at the far end of the encampment
began to play the harmonica, which made her, involuntarily, smile and shiver.
She had a paperback book in her backpack, and she waited for the sky to become
light enough for her to read.

There were two dots in the sky, immediately below the
clouds: a small one and a larger one. A spatter of rain brushed her face in the
morning wind.

A barefoot girl came out from the encampment, walking toward
her. She stopped beside a tree, hitched up her skirts, and squatted. When she
had finished, Easter hailed her. The girl walked over.

“Good morning, lady,” she said. “The battle will start soon
now.” The tip of her pink tongue touched her scarlet lips. She had a black crow’s
wing tied with leather onto her shoulder, a crow’s foot on a chain around her
neck. Her arms were blue-tattooed with lines and patterns and intricate knots.

“How do you know?”

The girl grinned. “I am Macha, of the Morrigan. When war
comes, I can smell it in the air. I am a war goddess, and I say, blood shall be
spilled this day.”

“Oh,” said Easter. “Well. There you go.” She was watching
the smaller dot in the sky as it tumbled down toward them, dropping like a
rock.