Shadow turned a corner, and knew himself to be in another room, even vaster than the first. It went on farther than the eye could see. Close to him was the skull of a mammoth, polished and brown, and a hairy ocher cloak, being worn by a small woman with a deformed left hand. Next to that were three women, each carved from the same granite boulder, joined at the waist: their faces had an unfinished, hasty look to them, although their breasts and genitalia had been carved with elaborate care; and there was a flightless bird which Shadow did not recognize, twice his height, with a beak like a vulture’s, but with human arms: and on, and on.
The voice spoke once more, as if it were addressing a class, saying, “These are the gods who have passed out of memory. Even their names are lost. The people who worshiped them are as forgotten as their gods. Their totems are long since broken and cast down. Their last priests died without passing on their secrets.
“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”
There was a whispering noise that began then to run through the hall, a low susurrus that caused Shadow, in his dream, to experience a chilling and inexplicable fear. An all-engulfing panic took him, there in the halls of the gods whose very existence had been forgotten—octopus-faced gods and gods who were only mummified hands or falling rocks or forest fires ...
Shadow woke with his heart jackhammering in his chest, his forehead clammy, entirely awake. The red numerals on the bedside clock told him the time was 1:03 A.M. The light of the Motel America sign outside shone through his bedroom window. Disoriented, Shadow got up and walked into the tiny motel bathroom. He pissed without turning on the lights, and returned to the bedroom. The dream was still fresh and vivid in his mind’s eye, but he could not explain to himself why it had scared him so.
The light that came into the room from outside was not bright, but Shadow’s eyes had become used to the dark. There was a woman sitting on the side of his bed.
He knew her. He would have known her in a crowd of a thousand, or of a hundred thousand. She was still wearing the navy blue suit they had buried her in.
Her voice was a whisper, but a familiar line. “I guess,” said Laura, “you’re going to ask what I’m doing here.”
Shadow said nothing.
He sat down on the room’s only chair and, finally, asked, “Is that you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m cold, puppy.”
“You’re dead, babe.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I am.” She patted the bed next to her. “Come and sit by me,” she said.
“No,” said Shadow. “I think I’ll stay right here for now. We have some unresolved issues to address.”
“Like me being dead?”
“Possibly, but I was thinking more of how you died. You and Robbie.”
“Oh,” she said. “That.”
Shadow could smell—or perhaps, he thought, he simply imagined that he smelled—an odor of rot, of flowers and preservatives. His wife—his ex-wife ... no, he aor-rected himself, his late wife—sat on the bed and stared at him, unblinking.
“Puppy,” she said. “Could you—do you think you could possibly get me—a cigarette?”
“I thought you gave them up.”
“I did,” she said. “But I’m no longer concerned about the health risks. And I think it would calm my nerves. There’s a machine in the lobby.”
Shadow pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt and went, barefoot, into the lobby. The night clerk was a middle-aged man, reading a book by John Grisham. Shadow bought a pack of Virginia Slims from the machine. He asked the night clerk for a book of matches.
“You’re in a nonsmoking room,” said the clerk. “You make sure you open the window, now.” He passed Shadow a book of matches and a plastic ashtray with the Motel America logo on it.
“Got it,” said Shadow.
He went back into his bedroom. She had stretched out now, on top of his rumpled covers. Shadow opened the window and then passed her the cigarettes and the matches. Her fingers were cold. She lit a match and he saw that her nails, usually pristine, were battered and chewed, and there was mud under them.
Laura lit the cigarette, inhaled, blew out the match. She took another puff. “I can’t taste it,” she said. “I don’t think this is doing anything.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Me too,” said Laura. When she inhaled the cigarette tip glowed, and he was able to see her face.
“So,” she said. “They let you out.”
“Yes.”
The tip of the cigarette glowed orange. “I’m still grateful. I should never have got you mixed up in it.”
“Well,” he said, “I agreed to do it. I could have said no.” He wondered why he wasn’t scared of her: why a dream of a museum could leave him terrified, while he seemed to be coping with a walking corpse without fear.
“Yes,” she said. “You could have. You big galoot.” Smoke wreathed her face. She was very beautiful in the dim light. “You want to know about me and Robbie?”
“I guess.”
She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “You were in prison,” she said. “And I needed someone to talk to. I needed a shoulder to cry on. You weren’t there. I was upset.”
“I’m sorry.” Shadow realized something was different about her voice, and he tried to figure out what it was.