I was watching them as they started to arrive. I was high in the sky, and none of them saw me, although some of them have keen eyes.”
And then the madman said, “You are dying. Aren’t you?”
But Shadow could no longer speak. Everything was very far away. A hawk took wing, and circled slowly upward, riding the updrafts into the morning.
Moonlight.
A cough shook Shadow’s frame, a racking painful cough that stabbed his chest and his throat. He gagged for breath.
“Hey, puppy,” called a voice that he knew.
He looked down.
The moonlight burned whitely through the branches of the tree, bright as day, and there was a woman standing in the moonlight on the ground below him, her face a pale oval. The wind rattled in the branches of the tree.
“Hi, puppy,” she said.
He tried to speak, but he coughed instead, deep in his chest, for a long time.
“You know,” she said, helpfully, “that doesn’t sound good.”
He croaked, “Hello, Laura.”
She looked up at him with dead eyes, and she smiled.
“How did you find me?” he asked.
She was silent, for a while, in the moonlight. Then she said, “You are the nearest thing I have to life. You are the only thing I have left, the only thing that isn’t bleak and flat and gray. I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.”
He looked down at the woman in the moonlight, and his eyes stung with tears.
“I’ll cut you down,” she said, after a while. “I spend too much time rescuing you, don’t I?”
He coughed again. Then, “No, leave me. I have to do this.”
She looked up at him, and shook her head. “You’re crazy,” she said. “You’re dying up there. Or you’ll be crippled, if you aren’t already.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But I’m alive.”
“Yes,” she said, after a moment. “I guess you are.”
“You told me,” he said. “In the graveyard.”
“It seems like such a long time ago, puppy,” she said. Then she said, “I feel better, here. It doesn’t hurt as much. You know what I mean? But I’m so dry.”
The wind let up, and he could smell her now: a stink of rotten meat and sickness and decay, pervasive and unpleasant.
“I lost my job,” she said. “It was a night job, but they said people had complained. I told them I was sick, and they said they didn’t care. I’m so thirsty.”
“The women,” he told her. “They have water. The house.”
“Puppy…” She sounded scared.
“Tell them…tell them I said to give you water…”
The white face stared up at him. “I should go,” she told him. Then she hacked, and made a face, and spat a mass of something white onto the grass. It broke up when it hit the ground and wriggled away.
It was almost impossible to breathe. His chest felt heavy, and his head was swaying.
“Stay,” he said, in a breath that was almost a whisper, unsure whether or not she could hear him. “Please don’t go.” He started to cough. “Stay the night.”
“I’ll stop a while,” she said. And then, like a mother to a child she said, “Nothing’s gonna hurt you when I’m here. You know that?”
Shadow coughed once more. He closed his eyes—only for a moment, he thought, but when he opened them again the moon had set and he was alone.
A crashing and a pounding in his head, beyond the pain of migraine, beyond all pain. Everything dissolved into tiny butterflies which circled him like a multicolored dust storm and then evaporated into the night.
The white sheet wrapped about the body at the base of the tree flapped noisily in the morning wind.
The pounding eased. Everything slowed. There was nothing left to make him keep breathing. His heart ceased to beat in his chest.
The darkness that he entered this time was deep, and lit by a single star, and it was final.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I know it’s crooked. But it’s the only game in town.
—CANADA BILL JONES
The tree was gone, and the world was gone, and the morning-gray sky above him was gone. The sky was now the color of midnight. There was a single cold star shining high above him, a blazing, twinkling light, and nothing else. He took a single step and almost tripped.
Shadow looked down. There were steps cut into the rock, going down, steps so huge that he could only imagine that giants had cut them and descended them a long