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. I can fix you.”
“Maybe,” said Shadow. “But for how long, Hinzelmann? Another year? Another decade? They have computers. They aren’t stupid. They pick up on patterns. Every year a kid’s going to vanish. 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. “Maybe it is, at that,” he said. “But 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, hundreds 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 any more—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 ribcage. 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.
The little boy stared up at Shadow with eyes that held only pain.
And Shadow thought to himself, Of course. That’s as good a way as any other of making a tribal god. He did not have to be told. He knew.
You take a baby and you bring it up in the darkness, letting it see no one, touch no one, and you feed it well as the years pass, feed it better than any of the village’s other children, and then, five winters on, when the night is at its longest, you drag the terrified child out of its hut and into the circle of bonfires, and you pierce it with blades of iron and of bronze. Then you smoke the small body over charcoal fires until it is properly dried, and you wrap it in furs and carry it with you from encampment to encampment, deep in the Black Forest, sacrificing animals and children to it, making it the luck of the tribe. When, eventually, the thing falls apart from age, you place its fragile bones in a box, and you worship the box; until one day the bones are scattered and forgotten, and the tribes who worshiped the child-god of the box are long gone; and the child-god, the luck of the village, will be barely remembered, save as a ghost or a brownie, a kobold.
Shadow wondered which of the people who had come to northern Wisconsin a hundred and fifty years ago, a woodcutter, perhaps, or a mapmaker, had crossed the Atlantic with Hinzelmann living in his head.
And then the bloody child was gone, and the blood, and there was only an old man with a fluff of white hair and a goblin smile, his sweater-sleeves still soaked from putting Shadow into the bath that had saved his life.
“Hinzelmann?” The voice came from the doorway of the den.
Hinzelmann turned. Shadow turned too.
“I came over to tell you,” said Chad Mulligan, and his voice was strained, “that the klunker went through the ice. I saw it had gone down when I drove over that way, and thought I’d come over and let you know, in case you’d missed it.”
He was holding his gun. It was pointed at the floor.
“Hey, Chad,” said Shadow.
“Hey, pal,” said Chad Mulligan. “They sent me a note said you’d died in custody. Heart attack.”
“How about that?” said Shadow. “Seems like I’m dying all over the place.”
“He came down here, Chad,” said Hinzelmann. “He threatened me.”
“No,” said Chad Mulligan. “He didn’t. I’ve been here for the last ten minutes, Hinzelmann. I heard everything you said. About my old man. About the lake.” He walked further into the den. He did not raise the gun. “I mean, Jesus, Hinzelmann. You can’t drive through this town without seeing that goddamned lake. It’s at the center of everything. So what the hell am I supposed to do?”
“You got to arrest him. He said he was going to kill me,” said Hinzelmann, a scared old man in a dusty den. “Chad, I’m pleased you’re here.”
“No,” said Chad Mulligan. “You’re not.”
Hinzelmann sighed. He bent down, as if resigned, and he pulled the poker out from the fire. The tip of it was burning bright orange.
“Put that down, Hinzelmann. Just put it down slowly, keep your hands in the air where I can see them, and turn and face the wall.”
There was an expression of pure fear on the old man’s face, and Shadow would have felt sorry for him, but he remembered the frozen tears on the cheeks of Alison McGovern, and could not feel anything. Hinzelmann did not move. He did not put down the poker. He did not turn to the wall. Shadow was about to reach for Hinzelmann, to try to take the poker away from him, when the old man threw the burning poker at Chad Mulligan.
Hinzelmann threw it awkwardly, lobbing it across the room as if for form’s sake, and as he threw it he was already hurrying for the door.
The poker glanced off Chad’s left arm.
The noise of the shot, in the close quarters of the old man’s room, was deafening.
One shot to the head, and that was all.
Mulligan said, “Better get your clothes on.” His voice was dull and dead.
Shadow nodded. He walked to the room next door, opened the door of the clothes dryer and pulled out his clothes. The jeans were still damp. He put them on anyway. By the time he got back to the den, fully dressed—except for his coat, which was somewhere deep in the freezing mud of the lake, and his boots, which he could not find—Mulligan had already hauled several smoldering logs out from the fireplace.
Mulligan said, “It’s a bad day for a cop when he has to commit arson, just to cover up a murder.” Then he looked up at Shadow. “You need boots,” he said.