“An eleventh: if I sing it when a battle rages it can take warriors through the tumult unscathed and unhurt, and bring them safely back to their hearth and their home.
“A twelfth charm I know: if I see a hanged man I can bring him down from the gallows to whisper to us all he remembers.
“A thirteenth: if I sprinkle water on a child’s head, that child will not fall in battle.
“A fourteenth: I know the names of all the gods. Every damned one of them.
“A fifteenth: I have a dream of power, of glory, and of wisdom, and I can make people believe my dreams.”
His voice was so low now that Shadow had to strain to hear it over the plane’s engine noise.
“A sixteenth charm I know: if I need love I can turn the mind and heart of any woman.
“A seventeenth, that no woman I want will ever want another.
“And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell to no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.”
He sighed, and then stopped talking.
Shadow could feel his skin crawl. It was as if he had just seen a door open to another place, somewhere worlds away where hanged men blew in the wind at every crossroads, where witches shrieked overhead in the night.
“Laura,” was all he said.
Wednesday turned his head, stared into Shadow’s pale gray eyes with his own. “I can’t make her live again,” he said. “I don’t even know why she isn’t as dead as she ought to be.”
“I think I did it,” said Shadow. “It was my fault.”
Wednesday raised a bushy eyebrow.
“Mad Sweeney gave me a golden coin, back when he showed me how to do that trick. From what he said, he gave me the wrong coin. What he gave me was something more powerful than what he thought he was giving me. I passed it on to Laura.”
Wednesday grunted, lowered his chin to his chest, frowned. Then he sat back. “That could do it,” he said. “And no, I can’t help you. What you do in your own time is your own affair, of course.”
“What,” asked Shadow, “is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that I can’t stop you from hunting eagle stones or thunderbirds. But I would infinitely prefer that you spend your days quietly sequestered in Lakeside, out of sight, and, I hope, out of mind. When things get hairy we’ll need all hands to the wheel.”
He looked very old as he said this, and fragile, and his skin seemed almost transparent, and the flesh beneath was gray.
Shadow wanted, wanted very much, to reach out and put his hand over Wednesday’s gray hand. He wanted to tell him that everything would be okay—something that Shadow did not feel, but that he knew had to be said. There were men in black trains out there. There was a fat kid in a stretch limo and there were people in the television who did not mean them well.
He did not touch Wednesday. He did not say anything.
Later, he wondered if he could have changed things, if that gesture would have done any good, if it could have averted any of the harm that was to come. He told himself it wouldn’t. He knew it wouldn’t. But still, afterward, he wished that, just for a moment on that slow flight home, he had touched Wednesday’s hand.
The brief winter daylight was already fading when Wednesday dropped Shadow outside his apartment. The freezing temperature when Shadow opened the car door felt even more science fictional when compared to Las Vegas.
“Don’t get into any trouble,” said Wednesday. “Keep your head below the parapet. Make no waves.”
“All at the same time?”
“Don’t get smart with me, m’boy. You can keep out of sight in Lakeside. I pulled in a big favor to keep you here, safe and sound. If you were in a city they’d get your scent in minutes.”
“I’ll stay put and keep out of trouble.” Shadow meant it as he said it. He’d had a lifetime of trouble and he was ready to let it go forever. “When are you coming back?” he asked.
“Soon,” said Wednesday, and he gunned the Lincoln’s engine, slid up the window and drove off into the frigid night.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
—BEN FRANKLIN, POOR RICHARD’S ALMANACK
Three cold days passed. The thermometer never made it up to the zero mark, not even at midday. Shadow wondered how people had survived this weather in the days before electricity, before thermal face masks and lightweight thermal underwear, before easy travel.
He was down at the Video, Tanning, Bait, and Tackle store, being shown Hinzelmann’s hand-tied trout flies. They were more interesting than he had expected: colorful fakes of life, made of feather and thread, each with a hook hidden inside it.
He asked Hinzelmann.
“For real?” asked Hinzelmann.
“For real,” said Shadow.
“Well,” said the older man. “Sometimes they didn’t survive it, and they died. Leaky chimneys and badly ventilated stoves and ranges killed as many people as the cold. But those days were hard—they’d spend the summer and the fall laying up the food and the firewood for the winter. The worst thing of all was the madness. I heard on the radio, they were saying how it was to do with the sunlight, how there isn’t enough of it in the winter. My daddy, he said folk just went stir-crazy—winter madness they called it. Lakeside always had it easy, but some of the other towns around here, they had it hard. There was a saying still had currency when I was a kid, that if the serving girl hadn’t tried to kill you by February she hadn’t any backbone.
“Storybooks were like gold-dust—anything you could read was treasured, back before the town had a lending library. When my grampaw got sent a storybook from his brother in Bavaria, all the Germans in town met up in the town hall to hear him read it, and the Finns and the Irish and the rest of them, they’d make the Germans tell them the stories.
“Twenty miles south of here, in Jibway, they found a woman walking mother-naked in the winter with a dead babe at her breast, and she’d not suffer them to take it from her.” He shook his head meditatively, closed the fly cabinet with a click. “Bad business. You want a video rental card? Eventually they’ll open a Blockbuster here, and then we’ll soon be out of business. But for now we got a pretty fair selection.”
Shadow reminded Hinzelmann that he had no television and no VCR. He enjoyed Hinzelmann’s company—the reminiscences, the tall tales, the goblin grin of the old man. It could make things awkward between them were Shadow to admit that television had made him uncomfortable ever since it had started to talk to him.
Hinzelmann fished in a drawer, and took out a tin box—by the look of it, it had once been a Christmas Box, of the kind that contained chocolates or cookies: a mottled Santa Claus, holding a tray of Coca-Cola bottles, beamed up from its lid. Hinzelmann eased off the metal top of the box, revealing a notebook and books of blank tickets, and said, “How many you want me to put you down for?”
“How many of what?”
“Klunker tickets. She’ll go out onto the ice today, so we’ve started selling tickets. Each ticket is ten dollars, five for forty, ten for seventy-five. One ticket buys you five minutes. Of course we can’t promise it’ll go down in your five minutes, but the person who’s closest stands to win five hundred bucks, and if it goes down in your five minutes, you win a thousand dollars. The earlier you buy your tickets, the more times aren’t spoken for. You want to see the info sheet?”