“Why are you telling me this stuff?” said Shadow. “I’m not important. I’m not anything. I was an okay physical trainer, a really lousy small-time crook, and maybe not so good a husband as I thought I was . . .” He trailed off.
“How do I help Laura?” Shadow asked the buffalo man. “She wants to be alive again. I said I’d help her. I owe her that.”
The buffalo man said nothing. He pointed up toward the roof of the cave. Shadow’s eyes followed. There was a thin, wintery light coming from a tiny opening far above.
“Up there?” asked Shadow, wishing that one of his questions would be answered. “I’m supposed to go up there?”
The dream took him then, the idea becoming the thing itself, and Shadow was crushed into the rock and earth. He was like a mole, trying to push through the earth, like a badger, climbing through the earth, like a groundhog, pushing the earth out of his way, like a bear, but the earth was too hard, too dense, and his breath was coming in gasps, and soon he could go no farther, dig and climb no more, and he knew then that he would die somewhere in the deep place beneath the world.
His own strength was not enough. His efforts became weaker. He knew that though his body was riding in a hot bus through cold woods if he stopped breathing here, beneath the world, he would stop breathing there as well, that even now his breath was coming in shallow panting gasps.
He struggled and he pushed, ever more weakly, each movement using precious air. He was trapped: could go no farther, and could not return the way that he had come.
“Now bargain,” said a voice in his mind.
“What do I have to bargain with?” Shadow asked. “I have nothing.” He could taste the clay now, thick and mud-gritty in his mouth.
And then Shadow said, “Except myself. I have myself, don’t I?”
It seemed as if everything was holding its breath.
“I offer myself,” he said.
The response was immediate. The rocks and the earth that had surrounded him began to push down on Shadow, squeezed him so hard that the last ounce of air in his lungs was crushed out of him. The pressure became pain, pushing him on every side. He reached the zenith of pain and hung there, cresting, knowing that he could take no more, at that moment the spasm eased and Shadow could breathe again. The light above him had grown larger.
He was being pushed toward the surface.
As the next earth-spasm hit, Shadow tried to ride with it. This time he felt himself being pushed upward.
The pain, on that last awful contraction, was impossible to believe, as he felt himself being squeezed, crushed, and pushed through an unyielding rock gap, his bones shattering, his flesh becoming something shapeless. As his mouth and ruined head cleared the hole he began to scream, in fear and pain.
He wondered, as he screamed, whether, back in the waking world, he was also screaming—if he was screaming in his sleep back on the darkened bus.
And as that final spasm ended Shadow was on the ground, his fingers clutching the red earth.
He pulled himself into a sitting position, wiped the earth from his face with his hand and looked up at the sky. It was twilight, a long, purple twilight, and the stars were coming out, one by one, stars so much brighter and more vivid than any stars he had ever seen or imagined.
“Soon,” said the crackling voice of the flame, coming from behind him, “they will fall. Soon they will fall and the star people will meet the earth people. There will be heroes among them, and men who will slay monsters and bring knowledge, but none of them will be gods. This is a poor place for gods.”
A blast of air, shocking in its coldness, touched his face. It was like being doused in ice water. He could hear the driver’s voice saying that they were in Pinewood, “anyone who needs a cigarette or wants to stretch their legs, we’ll be stopping here for ten minutes, then we’ll be back on the road.”
Shadow stumbled off the bus. They were parked outside another rural gas station, almost identical to the one they had left. The driver was helping a couple of teenage girls onto the bus, putting their suitcases away in the luggage compartment.
“Hey,” the driver said, when she saw Shadow. “You’re getting off at Lakeside, right?”
Shadow agreed, sleepily, that he was.
“Heck, that’s a good town,” said the bus driver. “I think sometimes that if I were just going to pack it all in, I’d move to Lakeside. Prettiest town I’ve ever seen. You’ve lived there long?”
“My first visit.”
“You have a pasty at Mabel’s for me, you hear?”
Shadow decided not to ask for clarification. “Tell me,” said Shadow, “was I talking in my sleep?”
“If you were, I didn’t hear you.” She looked at her watch. “Back on the bus. I’ll call you when we get to Lakeside.”
The two girls—he doubted that either of them was much more than fourteen years old—who had got on in Pinewood were now in the seat in front of him. They were friends, Shadow decided, eavesdropping without meaning to, not sisters. One of them knew almost nothing about sex, but knew a lot about animals, helped out or spent a lot of time at some kind of animal shelter, while the other was not interested in animals, but, armed with a hundred tidbits gleaned from the Internet and from daytime television, thought she knew a great deal about human sexuality. Shadow listened with a horrified and amused fascination to the one who thought she was wise in the ways of the world detail the precise mechanics of using Alka-Seltzer tablets to enhance oral sex.