American Gods

“Being called dumb as a man who slept late the mornin’ they handed out brains?”

“Being compared to a member of your family.”

Mr. Nancy stubbed out his cigarillo, then he flicked an imaginary speck of ash off his yellow gloves. “You may not be the worst choice old One-Eye could have made, come to that.” He looked up at Wednesday. “You got any idea how many of us there’s goin’ to be here tonight?”

“I sent the message out to everyone I could find,” said Wednesday. “Obviously not everyone is going to be able to come. And some of them,” with a pointed look at Czernobog, “might not want to. But I think we can confidently expect several dozen of us. And the word will travel.”

They made their way past a display of suits of armor (“Victorian fake,” pronounced Wednesday as they passed the glassed-in display, “modern fake, twelfth-century helm on a seventeenth-century reproduction, fifteenth-century left gauntlet . . .”) and then Wednesday pushed through an exit door, circled them around the outside of the building (“I can’t be doin’ with all these ins and outs,” said Nancy, “I’m not as young as I used to be, and I come from warmer climes”) along a covered walkway, in through another exit door, and they were in the carousel room.

Calliope music played: a Strauss waltz, stirring and occasionally discordant. The wall as they entered was hung with antique carousel horses, hundreds of them, some in need of a lick of paint, others in need of a good dusting; above them hung dozens of winged angels constructed rather obviously from female store-window mannequins; some of them bared their sexless breasts; some had lost their wigs and stared baldly and blindly down from the darkness.

And then there was the carousel.

A sign proclaimed it was the largest in the world, said how much it weighed, how many thousand lightbulbs were to be found in the chandeliers that hung from it in Gothic profusion, and forbade anyone from climbing on it or from riding on the animals.

And such animals! Shadow stared, impressed in spite of himself, at the hundreds of full-sized creatures who circled on the platform of the carousel. Real creatures, imaginary creatures, and transformations of the two: each creature was different. He saw mermaid and merman, centaur and unicorn, elephants (one huge, one tiny), bulldog, frog and phoenix, zebra, tiger, manticore and basilisk, swans pulling a carriage, a white ox, a fox, twin walruses, even a sea serpent, all of them brightly colored and more than real: each rode the platform as the waltz came to an end and a new waltz began. The carousel did not even slow down.

“What’s it for?” asked Shadow. “I mean, okay, world’s biggest, hundreds of animals, thousands of lightbulbs, and it goes around all the time, and no one ever rides it.”

“It’s not there to be ridden, not by people,” said Wednesday. “It’s there to be admired. It’s there to be.”

“Like a prayer wheel goin’ around and round,” said Mr. Nancy. “Accumulating power.”

“So where are we meeting everyone?” asked Shadow. “I thought you said that we were meeting them here. But the place is empty.”

Wednesday grinned his scary grin. “Shadow,” he said. “You’re asking too many questions. You are not paid to ask questions.”

“Sorry.”

“Now, stand over here and help us up,” said Wednesday, and he walked over to the platform on one side, with a description of the carousel on it, and a warning that the carousel was not to be ridden.

Shadow thought of saying something, but instead he helped them, one by one, up onto the ledge. Wednesday seemed profoundly heavy, Czernobog climbed up himself, only using Shadow’s shoulder to steady himself, Nancy seemed to weigh nothing at all. Each of the old men climbed out onto the ledge, and then, with a step and a hop, they walked out onto the circling carousel platform.

“Well?” barked Wednesday. “Aren’t you coming?”

Shadow, not without a certain amount of hesitation, and a hasty look around for any House on the Rock personnel who might be watching, swung himself up onto the ledge beside the World’s Largest Carousel. Shadow was amused, and a little puzzled, to realize that he was far more concerned about breaking the rules by climbing onto the carousel than he had been aiding and abetting this afternoon’s bank robbery.

Each of the old men selected a mount. Wednesday climbed onto a golden wolf. Czernobog climbed onto an armored centaur, its face hidden by a metal helmet. Nancy, chuckling, slithered up onto the back of an enormous, leaping lion, captured by the sculptor mid-roar. He patted the side of the lion. The Strauss waltz carried them around, majestically.