“I don’t know,” he said. “I think this is maybe another strange dream on the tree. I’ve been having crazy dreams since I got out of prison.”
Her face was silvered by the moonlight (but no moon hung in that plum-black sky, and now, at the foot of the steps, even the single star was lost to view) and she looked both solemn and vulnerable. She said, “All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.”
Beyond her, the path forked. He would have to decide which path to take, he knew that. But there was one thing he had to do first. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and was relieved when he felt the familiar weight of the coin at the bottom of the pocket. He eased it out, held it between finger and thumb: a 1922 Liberty dollar. ‘This is yours,” he said.
He remembered then that his clothes were really at the foot of the tree. The women had placed his clothes in the canvas sack from which they had taken the ropes, and tied the end of the sack, and the biggest of the women had placed a heavy rock on it to stop it from blowing away. And so he knew that, in reality, the Liberty dollar was in a pocket in that sack, beneath the rock. But still, it was heavy in his hand, at the entrance to the underworld.
She took it from his palm with her slim fingers.
“Thank you. It bought you your liberty twice,” she said. “And now it will light your way into dark places.”
She closed her hand around the dollar, then she reached up and placed it in the air, as high as she could reach. Then she let go of it. Instead of falling, the coin floated upward until it was a foot or so above Shadow’s head. It was no longer a silver coin, though. Lady Liberty and her crown of spikes were gone. The face he saw on the coin was the indeterminate face of the moon in the summer sky.
Shadow could not decide whether he was looking at a moon the size of a dollar, a foot above his head, or whether he was looking at a moon the size of the Pacific Ocean, many thousands of miles away. Nor whether there was any difference between the two ideas. Perhaps it was all a matter of the way you looked at it.
He looked at the forking path ahead of him.
“Which path should I take?” he asked. “Which one is safe?”
‘Take one, and you cannot take the other,” she said. “But neither path is safe. Which way would you walk—the way of hard truths or the way of fine lies?”
‘Truths,” he said. “I’ve come too far for more lies.”
She looked sad. “There, will be a price, then,” she said.
“I’ll pay it. What’s the price?”
“Your name,” she said. “Your real name. You will have to give it to me.”
“How?”
“Like this,” she said. She reached a perfect hand toward his head. He felt her fingers brush his skin, then he felt them penetrate his skin, his skull, relt them push deep into his head. Something tickled, in his skull and all down his spine. She pulled her hand out of his head. A flame, like a candle flame but burning with a clear magnesium-white luminance, was flickering on the tip of her forefinger.
“Is that my name?” he asked.
She closed her hand, and the light was gone. “It was,” she said. She extended her hand, and pointed to the right-hand path. “That way,” she said. “For now.”
Nameless, Shadow walked down the right-hand path in the moonlight. When he turned around to thank her, he saw nothing but darkness. It seemed to him that he was deep under the ground, but when he looked up into the darkness above him he still saw the tiny moon.
He turned a corner.
If this was the afterlife, he thought, it was a lot like the House on the Rock: part diorama, part nightmare.
He was looking at himself in prison blues, in the warden’s office, as the warden told him that Laura had died in a car crash. He saw the expression on his own face—he looked like a man who had been abandoned by the world. It hurt him to see it, the nakedness and the fear. He hurried on, pushed through the warden’s gray office, and found himself looking at the VCR repair store on the outskirts of Eagle Point. Three years ago. Yes.