“Yes,” said Shadow. “I guess I do. Do you think he’ll be back?”
“I think,” said Mr. Nancy, “that wherever two men are gathered together to sell a third man a twenty-dollar violin for ten thousand dollars, he will be there in spirit.”
“Yes, but—”
“We should get back into the kitchen,” said Mr. Nancy, his expression becoming stony. “Those pans won’t wash themselves.”
Mr. Nancy washed the pans and the dishes. Shadow dried them and put them away. Somewhere in there the headache began to ease. They went back into the sitting room.
Shadow stared at the old trunk some more, willing himself to remember. “If I don’t go to see Czernobog,” he said, “what will happen?”
“You’ll see him,” said Mr. Nancy flatly. “Maybe he’ll find you. Or maybe he’ll bring you to him. But one way or another, you’ll see him!”
Shadow nodded. Something started to fall into place. A dream, on the tree. “Hey,” he said. “Is there a god with an elephant’s head?”
“Ganesh? He’s a Hindu god. He removes obstacles, and makes journeys easier. Good cook, too.”
Shadow looked up. “ ‘It’s in the trunk,’” he said. “I knew it was important, but I didn’t know why.’I thought maybe it meant the trunk of the tree. But he wasn’t talking about that at all, was he?”
Mr. Nancy frowned. “You lost me.”
“It’s in the trunk,” said Shadow. He knew it was true. He did not know why it should be true, not quite. But of that he was completely certain.
He got to his feet. “I got to go,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Mr. Nancy raised an eyebrow. “Why the hurry?”
“Because,” said Shadow, simply, “the ice is melting.”
Chapter Twenty
Shadow drove the rental out of the forest at about 8:30 in the morning, came down the hill doing under forty-five miles per hour, and entered the town of Lakeside three weeks after he was certain he had left it for good.
He drove through the city, surprised at how little it had changed in the last few weeks, which were a lifetime, and he parked halfway down the driveway that led to the lake. Then he got out of the car.
There were no more ice-fishing huts on the frozen lake any longer, no SUVs, no men sitting at a fishing hole with a line and a twelve-pack. The lake was dark: no longer covered with a blind white layer of snow, now there were reflective patches of water on the surface of the ice, and the water under the ice was black, and the ice itself was clear enough that the darkness beneath showed through. The sky was gray, but the icy lake was bleak and empty.
Almost empty.
There was one car remaining on the ice, parked out on the frozen lake almost beneath the bridge, so that anyone driving through the town, anyone crossing the town, could not help but see it. It was a dirty green in color; the sort of car that people abandon in parking lots. It had no engine. It was a symbol of a wager, waiting for the ice to become rotten enough and soft enough and dangerous enough to allow the lake to take it forever.
There was a chain across the short driveway that led down to the lake, and a warning sign forbidding entrance to people or to vehicles. THIN ICE, it read. Beneath it was a hand-painted sequence of pictograms with lines through them: NO CARS, NO PEDESTRIANS, NO SNOWMOBILES.
DANGER.
Shadow ignored the warnings and scrambled down the bank. It was slippery—the snow had already melted, turning the earth to mud under his feet, and the brown grass barely offered traction. He skidded and slid, down to the lake and walked, carefully, out onto a short wooden jetty, and from there he stepped down onto the ice.
The layer of water on the ice, made up of melted ice and melted snow, was deeper than it had looked from above, and the ice beneath the water was slicker and more slippery than any skating rink, so that Shadow was forced to fight to keep his footing. He splashed though the water as it covered his boots to the laces and seeped inside. Ice water. It numbed where it touched. He felt strangely distant as he trudged across the frozen lake, as if he were watching himself on a movie screen—a movie in which he was the hero: a detective, perhaps.
He walked toward the klunker, painfully aware that the ice was too rotten for this, and that the water beneath the ice was as cold as water could be without freezing. He kept walking, and he slipped and slid. Several times he fell.
He passed empty beer bottles and cans left to litter the ice, and he passed round holes cut into the ice, for fishing, holes that had not frozen again, each hole filled with black water.
The klunker seemed farther away than it had looked from the road. He heard a loud crack from the south of the lake, like a stick breaking, followed by the sound of something huge thrumming, as if a bass string the size of a lake were vibrating. Massively, the ice creaked and groaned, like an old door protesting being opened. Shadow kept walking, as steadily as he could.