American Gods (16 page)

“You have some pretty whacked-out theories,” said Shadow.

“Nothing theoretical about it, young man,” said Wednesday. “You
should have figured that out by now.”

There was only one ticket window open. “We stop selling tickets
in half an hour,” said the girl. “It takes at least two hours to walk around,
you see.”

Wednesday paid for their tickets in cash.

“Where’s the rock?” asked Shadow.

“Under the house,” said Wednesday.

“Where’s the house?”

Wednesday put his finger to his lips, and they walked
forward. Farther in, a player piano was playing something that was intended to
be Ravel’s Bolero. The place seemed to be a geometrically reconfigured 1960s
bachelor pad, with open stone work, pile carpeting, and magnificently ugly
mushroom-shaped stained-glass lampshades. Up a winding staircase was another
room filled with knickknacks.

“They say this was built by Frank Lloyd Wright’s evil twin,”
said Wednesday. “Frank Lloyd Wrong.” He chuckled at his joke.

“I saw that on a T-shirt,” said Shadow.

Up and down more stairs, and now they were in a long, long
room, made of glass, mat protruded, needlelike, out over the leafless
black-and-white countryside hundreds of feet below them. Shadow stood and
watched the snow tumble and spin.

‘This is the House on the Rock?” he asked, puzzled.

“More or less. This is the Infinity Room, part of the actual
house, although a late addition. But no, my young friend, we have not scratched
the tiniest surface of what the house has to offer.”

“So according to your theory,” said Shadow, “Walt Disney
World would be the holiest place in America.”

Wednesday frowned, and stroked his beard. “Walt Disney
bought some orange groves in the middle—of Florida and built a tourist town on
them. No magicMftere of any kind. I think there might be something real in the
original Disneyland. There may be some power there, although twisted, and hard
to access. But some parts of Florida are filled with real magic. You just have
to keep your eyes open. Ah, for the mermaids of Weeki Wachee ... Follow me,
this way.”

Everywhere was the sound of music: jangling, awkward music,
ever so slightly off the beat and out of time. Wednesday took a five-dollar
bill and put it into a change machine, receiving a handful of brass-colored
metal coins in return. He tossed one to Shadow, who caught it, and, realizing
that a small boy was watching him, held it up between forefinger and thumb and
vanished it. The small boy ran over to his mother, who was inspecting one of
the ubiquitous Santa Clauses—OVER six THOUSAND ON DISPLAY! the signs read—and
he tugged urgently at the hem of her coat.

Shadow followed Wednesday outside briefly, and then followed
the signs to the Streets of Yesterday.

“Forty years ago Alex Jordan—his face is on the token you
have palmed in your right hand, Shadow—began to build a house on a high jut of
rock in a field he did not own, and even he could not have told you why. And
people came to see him build it—the curious, and the puzzled, and those who
were neither and who could not honestly have told you why they came. So he did
what any sensible American male of his generation would do: he began to charge
them money—nothing much. A nickel each, perhaps. Or a quarter. And he continued
building, and the people kept coming.

“So he took those quarters and nickels and made something
even bigger and stranger. He built these warehouses on the ground beneath the
house, and filled them with things for people to see, and then the people came
to see them. Millions of people come here every year.”

“Why?”

But Wednesday simply smiled, and they walked into the dimly
lit, tree-lined Streets of Yesterday. Prim-lipped Victorian china dolls stared
in profusion through dusty store windows, like so many props from respectable
horror films. Cobblestones under their feet, the darkness of a roof above their
heads, jangling mechanical music in the background. They passed a glass box of
broken puppets and an overgrown golden music box in a glass case. They passed
the dentist’s and the drugstore (“RESTORE POTENCY! USE O’LEARY’S MAGNETICAL
BELT!”).

At the end of the street was a large glass box with a female
mannequin inside it, dressed as a gypsy fortune-teller.

“Now,” boomed Wednesday, over the mechanical music, “at the
start of any quest or enterprise it behooves us to consult the Norns. So let us
designate this Sybil our Urd, eh?” He dropped a brass-colored House on the Rock
coin into the slot. With jagged, mechanical motions, the gypsy lifted her arm
and lowered it once more. A slip of paper chunked out of the slot.

Wednesday took it, read it, grunted, folded it up, and put
it in his pocket.

“Aren’t you going to show it to me? I’ll show you mine,”
said Shadow.

“A man’s fortune is his own affair,” said Wednesday,
stiffly. “I would not ask to see yours.”

Shadow put his own coin in the slot. He took his slip of
paper. He read it.

EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING.

YOUR LUCKY NUMBER IS NONE.

YOUR LUCKY COLOR IS DEAD.

Motto: LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON.

Shadow made a face. He folded the fortune up and put it in
his inside pocket.

They went farther in, down a red corridor, past rooms filled
with empty chairs upon which rested’violins and violas and cellos that played
themselves, or seemed to, when fed a coin. Keys depressed, cymbals, crashed,
pipes blew compressed air into clarinets and obojss. Shadow observed, with a
wry amusement, that the bows of the stringed instruments, played by mechanical
arms, never actually touched the strings, which were often loose or missing. He
wondered whether all the sounds he heard were made by wind and percussion, or
whether there were tapes as well.

They had walked for what felt like several miles when they
came to a room called the Mikado, one wall of which was a nineteenth-century
pseudo-Oriental nightmare, in which beetle-browed mechanical drummers banged
cymbals and drums while staring out from their dragon-encrusted lair.
Currently, they were majestically torturing Saint-Saens’s Danse Macabre.

Czernobog sat on a bench in the wall facing the Mikado machine,
tapping out the time with his fingers. Pipes fluted, bells jangled.

Wednesday sat next to him. Shadow decided to remain standing.
Czernobog extended his left hand, shook Wednesday’s, shook Shadow’s. “Well met,”
he said. Then he sat back, apparently enjoying the music.

The Danse Macabre came to a tempestuous and discordant end.
That all the artificial instruments were ever so slightly out of tune added to
the otherworldliness of the place. A new piece began.

“How was your bank robbery?” asked Czernobog. “It went well?”
He stood, reluctant to leave the Mikado and its thundering, jangling music.

“Slick as a snake in a barrel of butter,” said Wednesday.

“I get a pension from the slaughterhouse,” said Czernobog. “I
do not ask for more.”

“It won’t last forever,” said Wednesday. “Nothing does.”

More corridors, more musical machines. Shadow became aware
that they were not following the path through the rooms intended for tourists,
but seemed to be following a different route of Wednesday’s own devising. They
were going down a slope, and Shadow, confused, wondered if they had already
been that way.

Czernobog grasped Shadow’s arm. “Quickly, come here,” he
said, pulling him over to a large glass box by a wall. It contained a diorama
of a tramp asleep in a churchyard in front of a church door. THE DRUNKARD’S
DREAM, said the label, explaining that it was a nineteenth-century
penny-in-the-slot machine, originally from an English railway station. The coin
slot had been modified to take the brass House on the Rock coins.

“Put in the money,” said Czernobog.

“Why?” asked Shadow.

“You must see. I show you.”

Shadow inserted his coin. The drunk in the graveyard raised
his bottle to his lips. One of the gravestones flipped over, revealing a
grasping corpse; a headstone turned around, flowers replaced by a grinning
skull. A wraith appeared on the right of the church, while on the left of the
church something with a half-glimpsed, pointed, unset-tlingly birdlike face, a
pale, Boschian nightmare, glided smoothly from a headstone into the shadows and
was gone. Then the church door opened, a priest came out, and the ghosts,
haunts, and corpses vanished, and only the priest and the drunk were left alone
in the graveyard. The priest looked down at the drunk disdainfully, and backed
through the open door, which closed behind him, leaving the drunk on his own.

The clockwork story was deeply unsettling. Much more unsettling,
thought Shadow, than clockwork has any right to be.

“You know why I show that to you?’! asked Czernobog.

“No.”  —

“That is the world as it is. That is thejreal world. It is
there, in that box.”

They wandered through a blood-colored room filled with old
theatrical organs, huge organ pipes, and what appeared to be enormous copper
brewing vats, liberated from a brewery.

“Where are we going?” asked Shadow.

“The carousel,” said Czernobog.

“But we’ve passed signs to the carousel a dozen times already.”

“He goes his way. We travel a spiral. The quickest way is
sometimes the longest.”

Shadow’s feet were beginning to hurt, and he found this sentiment
to be extremely unlikely.

A mechanical machine played “Octopus’s Garden” in a room
that went up for many stories, the center of which was filled entirely with a
replica of a great black whalelike beast, with a life-sized replica of a boat
in its vast fiberglass mouth. They passed on from there to a Travel Hall, where
they saw the car covered with tiles and the functioning Rube Goldberg chicken
device and the rusting Burma Shave ads on the wall.

Life is Hard

It’s Toil and Trouble

Keep your Jawline

Free from Stubble

Burma Shave

read one, and

He undertook to overtake

The road was on a bend

From now on the Undertaker

Is his only friend

Burma Shave

and they were at the bottom of a ramp now, with an icecream shop
in front of them. It was nominally open, but the girl washing down the surfaces
had a closed look on her face, so they walked past it into the
pizzeria-cafeteria, empty but for an elderly black man wearing a bright checked
suit and canary-yellow gloves. He was a small man, the kind of little old man
who looked as if the passing of the years had shrunk him, eating an enormous,
many-scooped ice-cream sundae, drinking a supersized mug of coffee. A black
cigarillo was burning in the ashtray in front of him.

“Three coffees,” said Wednesday to Shadow. He went to the
rest room.

Shadow bought the coffees and took them over to Czer-nobog,
who was sitting with the old black man and was smoking a cigarette
surreptitiously, as if he were scared of being caught. The other man, happily
toying with his sundae, mostly ignored his cigarillo, but as Shadow approached
he picked it up, inhaled deeply, and blew two smoke rings—first one large one,
then another, smaller one, which passed neatly through the first—and he
grinned, as if he were astonishingly pleased with himself.

“Shadow, this is Mister Nancy,” said Czernobog.

The old man got to his feet and thrust out his yellow-gloved
right hand. “Good to meet you,” he said with a dazzling smile. “I know who you
must be. You’re workin’ for the old one-eye bastard, aren’t you?” There was a
faint twang in his voice, a hint of a patois that might have been West Indian.

“I work for Mister Wednesday,” said Shadow. “Yes. Please,
sit down.”

Czernobog inhaled on his cigarette.

“I think,” he pronounced, gloomily, “that our kind, we like
the cigarettes so much because they remind us of the offerings that once they
burned for us, the smoke rising up as they sought our approval or our favor.”

‘They never gave me nothin’ like that,” saM Nancy. “Best I
could hope for was a pile of fruit to eat, maybe curried goat, something slow
and cold and tall to drink, and a big old high-titty woman to keep me compajiy.”
He grinned white teeth, and winked at Shadow.

‘These days,” said Czernobog, his expression unchanged, “we have
nothing.”

“Well, I don’t get anywhere near as much fruit as I used to,”
said Mr. Nancy, his eyes shining. “But there still ain’t nothin’ out there in
the world for my money that can beat a big old high-titty woman. Some folk you
talk to, they say it’s the booty you got to inspect at first, but I’m here to
tell you that it’s the titties that still crank my engine on a cold mornin’.”
Nancy began to laugh, a wheezing, rattling, good-natured laugh, and Shadow
found himself liking the old man despite himself.

Wednesday returned from the rest room, and shook hands with
Nancy. “Shadow, you want something to eat? A slice of pizza? Or a sandwich?”

“I’m not hungry,” said Shadow.

“Let me tell you somethin’,” said Mr. Nancy. “It can be a
long time between meals. Someone offers you food,, you say yes. I’m no longer
young as I was, but I can tell you this, you never say no to the opportunity to
piss, to eat, or to get half an hour’s shut-eye. You follow me?”

“Yes. But I’m really not hungry.”

“You’re a big one,” said Nancy, staring into Shadow’s light
gray eyes with old eyes the color of mahogany, “a tall drink of water, but I
got to tell you, you don’t look too bright. I got a son, stupid as a man who
bought his stupid at a two-for-one sale, and you remind me of him.”

“If you don’t mind, I’ll take that as a compliment,” said
Shadow.

“Being called dumb as a man who slept late the mornin’ they
handed out brains?”

“Being compared to a member of your family.”

Mr. Nancy stubbed out his cigarillo, then he flicked an imaginary
speck of ash off his yellow gloves. “You may not be the worst choice old
One-Eye could have made, come to that.” He looked up at Wednesday. “You got any
idea how many of us there’s goin’ to be here tonight?”