“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 rib-cage. 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 worshipped 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 150 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 farther into the den. He did not raise the gun. “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. 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 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 Mulligan’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 drier and pulled out his clothes. The jeans were still damp, but 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.