He was under the lake, down in the darkness and the cold, weighed down by his clothes and his gloves and his boots, trapped and swathed in his coat, which seemed to have become heavier and bulkier than he could have imagined.
He was falling, still. He tried to push away from the car, but it was pulling him with it, and then there was a bang that he could hear with his whole body, not his ears, and his left foot was wrenched at the ankle, the foot twisted and trapped beneath the car as it settled on the lake bottom, and panic took him.
He opened his eyes.
He knew it was dark down there: rationally, he knew it was too dark to see anything, but still, he could see; he could see everything. He could see Alison McGovern’s white face staring at him from the open trunk. He could see other cars as well—the klunkers of bygone years, rotten hulk shapes in the darkness, half buried in the lake mud. And what else would they have dragged out on to the lake, Shadow wondered, before there were cars?
Each one, he knew, without any question, had a dead child in the trunk. There were scores of them . . . each had sat out on the ice, in front of the eyes of the world, all through the cold winter. Each had tumbled into the cold waters of the lake, when the winter was done.
This was where they rested: Lemmi Hautala and Jessie Lovat and Sandy Olsen and Jo Ming and Sarah Lindquist and all the rest of them. Down where it was silent and cold . . .
He pulled at his foot. It was stuck fast, and the pressure in his lungs was becoming unbearable. There was a sharp, terrible hurt in his ears. He exhaled slowly, and the air bubbled around his face.
Soon, he thought, soon I’ll have to breathe. Or I’ll choke.
He reached down, put both hands around the bumper of the klunker, and pushed, with everything he had, leaning into it. Nothing happened.
It’s only the shell of a car, he told himself. They took out the engine. That’s the heaviest part of the car. You can do it. Just keep pushing.
He pushed.
Agonizingly slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, the car slipped forward in the mud, and Shadow pulled his foot from the mud beneath the car, and kicked, and tried to push himself out into the cold lake water. He didn’t move. The coat, he told himself. It’s the coat. It’s stuck, or caught on something. He pulled his arms from his coat, fumbled with numb fingers at the frozen zipper. Then he pulled both hands on each side of the zipper, felt the coat give and rend. Hastily, he freed himself from its embrace, and pushed upward, away from the car.
There was a rushing sensation but no sense of up, no sense of down, and he was choking and the pain in his chest and in his head was too much to bear, so that he was certain that he was going to have to inhale, to breathe in the cold water, to die. And then his head hit something solid.
Ice. He was pushing against the ice on the top of the lake. He hammered at it with his fists, but there was no strength left in his arms, nothing to hold on to, nothing to push against. The world had dissolved into the chill blackness beneath the lake. There was nothing left but cold.
This is ridiculous, he thought. And he thought, remembering some old Tony Curtis film he’d seen as a kid, I should roll onto my back and push the ice upward and press my face to it, and find some air, I could breathe again, there’s air there somewhere, but he was just floating and freezing and he could no longer move a muscle, not if his life depended on it, which it did.
The cold became bearable. Became warm. And he thought, I’m dying. There was anger there this time, a deep fury, and he took the pain and the anger and reached with it, flailed, forced muscles to move that were ready never to move again.
He pushed up with his hand, and felt it scrape the edge of the ice and move up into the air. He flailed for a grip, and felt another hand take his own, and pull.
His head banged against the ice, his face scraped the underneath of the ice, and then his head was up in the air, and he could see that he was coming up through a hole in the ice, and for a moment all he could do was breathe, and let the black lake water run from his nose and his mouth, and blink his eyes, which could see nothing more than a blinding
daylight, and shapes, and someone was pulling him, now, forcing him out of the water, saying something about how he’d freeze to death, so come on, man, pull, and Shadow wriggled and shook like a bull seal coming ashore, shaking and coughing and shuddering.
He breathed deep gasps of air, stretched flat out on the creaking ice, and even that would not hold for long, he knew, but it was no good. His thoughts were coming with difficulty, syrupy-slow.
“Just leave me,” he tried to say. “I’ll be fine.” His words were a slur, and everything was drawing to a halt.
He just needed to rest for a moment, that was all, just rest, and then he would get up and move on. Obviously he could not just lie there forever.
There was a jerk; water splashed his face. His head was lifted up. Shadow felt himself being hauled across the ice, sliding on his back across the slick surface, and he wanted to protest, to explain that he just needed a little rest—maybe a little sleep, was that asking for so much?—and he would be just fine. If they just left him alone.
He did not believe that he had fallen asleep, but he was standing on a vast plain, and there was a man there with the head and shoulders of a buffalo, and a woman with the head of an enormous condor, and there was Whiskey Jack standing between them, looking at him sadly, shaking his head.
Whiskey Jack turned and walked slowly away from Shadow. The buffalo man walked away beside him. The thunderbird woman also walked, and then she ducked and kicked and she was gliding out into the skies.
Shadow felt a sense of loss. He wanted to call to them, to plead with them to come back, not to give up on him, but everything was becoming formless and without shape: they were gone, and the plains were fading, and everything became void.
The pain was intense: it was as if every cell in his body, every nerve, was melting and waking and advertising its presence by burning him and hurting him.
There was a hand at the back of his head, gripping it by the hair, and another hand beneath his chin. He opened his eyes, expecting to find himself in some kind of hospital.
His feet were bare. He was wearing jeans. He was naked from the waist up. There was steam in the air. He could see a shaving mirror on the wall facing him, and a small basin, and a blue toothbrush in a toothpaste-stained glass.
Information was processed slowly, one datum at a time.