“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.