“You should have left me back there on the ice,” said Shadow. “You should have left me in the lake. I opened the trunk of the klunker. Right now Alison is still iced into the trunk. But the ice will melt, and her body’ll float out and up to the surface. And then they’ll go down and look and see what else they can find down there. Find your whole stash of kids. I guess some of those bodies are pretty well preserved.”
Hinzelmann reached down and picked up the poker. He made no pretense of stirring the fire with it any longer; he held it like a sword, or a baton, the glowing orange-white tip of it waving in the air. It smoked. Shadow was very aware that he was next-to-naked, and he was still tired, and clumsy, and far from able to defend himself.
“You want to kill me?” said Shadow. “Go ahead. Do it. I’m a dead man anyway. I know you own this town—it’s your little world. But if you think no one’s going to come looking for me, you’re living in a dream-world. It’s over, Hinzelmann. One way or another, it’s done.”
Hinzelmann pushed himself to his feet, using the poker as a walking stick. The carpet charred and smoked where he rested the red-hot tip, as he got up. He looked at Shadow and there were tears in his pale blue eyes. “I love this town,” he said. “I really like being a cranky old man, and telling my stories and driving Tessie and ice-fishing. Remember what I told you? It’s not the fish you bring home from a day’s fishing. It’s the peace of mind.”
He extended the tip of the poker in Shadow’s direction: Shadow could feel the heat of it from a foot away.
“I could kill you,” said Hinzelmann, “I could fix it. I’ve done it before. You’re not the first to figure it out. Chad Mulligan’s father, he figured it out. I fixed him, and I can fix you.”
“Maybe,” said Shadow. “But for how long, Hinzelmann? Another year? Another decade? They have computers now, Hinzelmann. They aren’t stupid. They pick up on patterns. Every year a kid’s going to vanish. Sooner or later they’ll come sniffing about here. Just like they’ll come looking for me. Tell me—how old are you?” He curled his fingers around a sofa cushion, and prepared to pull it over his head: it would deflect a first blow.
Hinzelmann’s face was expressionless. “They were giving their children to me before the Romans came to the Black Forest,” he said. “I was a god before ever I was a kobold.”
“Maybe it’s time to move on,” said Shadow. He wondered what a kobold was.
Hinzelmann stared at him. Then he took the poker, and pushed the tip of it back into the burning embers. “It’s not that simple. What makes you think I can leave this town, even if I want to, Shadow? I’m part of this town. You going to make me go, Shadow? You ready to kill me? So I can leave?”
Shadow looked down at the floor. There were still glimmers and sparks in the carpet, where the poker tip had rested. Hinzelmann followed the look with his own, and crushed the embers out with his foot, twisting. In Shadow’s mind came, unbidden, children, more than a hundred of them, staring at him with bone-blind eyes, the hair twisting slowly around their faces like fronds of seaweed. They were looking at him reproachfully.
He knew that he was letting them down. He just didn’t know what else to do.
Shadow said, “I can’t kill you. You saved my life.”
He shook his head. He felt like crap, in every way he could feel like crap. He didn’t feel like a hero or a detective anymore—just another fucking sell-out, waving a stern finger at the darkness before turning his back on it.
“You want to know a secret?” asked Hinzelmann.
“Sure,” said Shadow, with a heavy heart. He was ready to be done with secrets.
“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.”