come up here to get away from the noise. And the people. Too many damned people up here anyway. Why don’t you just go back to where you came from and stop making all that bluidy noise?”
The man’s mother appeared in the doorway. She smiled nervously at Shadow, then walked hurriedly over to her son. She pulled at his sleeve. “Now then,” she said. “Don’t you get yourself all worked up over nothing. Everything’s all right.” She looked up at Shadow, birdlike, placatory. “I’m sorry. I’m sure he didn’t mean it.” She had a length of toilet paper sticking to the bottom of her shoe, and she hadn’t noticed yet.
“Everything’s all right,” said Shadow. “It’s good to meet people.”
She nodded. “That’s all right then,” she said. Her son looked relieved. He’s scared of her, thought Shadow.
“Come on pet,” said the woman to her son. She pulled at his sleeve, and he followed her to the door.
Then he stopped, obstinately, and turned. “You tell them,” said the bald young man, “not to make so much noise.”
“I’ll tell them,” said Shadow.
“It’s just that I can hear everything.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Shadow.
“He really is a good boy,” said the bald young man’s mother, and she led her son by the sleeve, into the corridor and away, trailing a tag of toilet paper.
Shadow walked out into the hall. “Excuse me,” he said.
They turned, the man and his mother.
“You’ve got something on your shoe,” said Shadow.
She looked down. Then she stepped on the strip of paper with her other shoe, and lifted her foot, freeing it. She nodded at Shadow, approvingly, and walked away.
Shadow went to the reception desk. “Gordon, have you got a good local map?”
“Like an Ordnance Survey? Absolutely. I’ll bring it into the lounge for you.”
Shadow went back into the bar and finished his coffee. Gordon brought in a map. Shadow was impressed by the detail: it seemed to show every goat-track. He inspected it closely, tracing his walk. He found the hill where he had stopped and eaten his lunch. He ran his finger southwest.
“There aren’t any castles around here, are there?”
“I’m afraid not. There are some to the east. I’ve got a guide to the castles of Scotland I could let you look at-”
“No, no. That’s fine. Are there any big houses in this area? The kind people would call castles? Or big estates?”
“Well, there’s the Cape Wrath Hotel, just over here,” and he pointed to it on the map. “But it’s a fairly empty area. Technically, for human occupation, what do they call it, for population density, it’s a desert up here. Not even any interesting ruins, I’m afraid. Not that you could walk to.”
Shadow thanked him, then asked him for an early-morning alarm call. He wished he had been able to find the house he had seen from the hill on the map, but perhaps he had been looking in the wrong place. It wouldn’t be the first time.
The couple in the room next door were fighting, or making love. Shadow could not tell, but each time he began to drift off to sleep raised voices or cries would jerk him awake.
Later, he was never certain if it had really happened, if she had really come to him, or if it had been the first of that night’s dreams: but in truth or in dreams, shortly before midnight by the bedside clock radio, there was a knock on his bedroom door. He got up. Called, “Who is it?”
“Jennie.”
He opened the door, winced at the light in the hall.
She was wrapped in her brown coat, and she looked up at him hesitantly.
“Yes?” said Shadow.
“You’ll be going to the house tomorrow,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I thought I should say good-bye,” she said. “In case I don’t get a chance to see you again. And if you don’t come back to the hotel. And you just go on somewhere. And I never see you.”
“Well, good-bye, then,” said Shadow.
She looked him up and down, examining the T-shirt and the boxers he slept in, at his bare feet, then up at his face. She seemed worried. “You know where I live,” she said, at last. “Call me if you need me.”
She reached her index finger out and touched it gently to his lips. Her finger was very cold. Then she took a step back into the corridor and just stood there, facing him, making no move to go.
Shadow closed the hotel room door, and he heard her footsteps walking away down the corridor. He climbed back into bed.
He was sure that the next dream was a dream, though. It was his life, jumbled and twisted: one moment he was in prison, teaching himself coin tricks and telling himself that his love for his wife would get him through this. Then Laura was dead, and he was out of prison; he was working as a bodyguard to an old grifter who had told Shadow to call him Wednesday. And then his dream was filled with gods: old, forgotten gods, unloved and abandoned, and new gods, transient scared things, duped and confused. It was a tangle of improbabilities, a cat’s cradle which became a web which became a net which became a skein as big as a world…
In his dream he died on the tree.
In his dream he came back from the dead.
And after that there was darkness.
IV
The telephone beside the bed shrilled at seven. He showered, shaved, dressed, packed his world into his backpack. Then he went down to the restaurant for breakfast: salty porridge, limp bacon, and oily fried eggs. The coffee, though, was surprisingly good.
At ten past eight he was in the lobby, waiting.
At fourteen minutes past eight, a man came in, wearing a sheepskin coat. He was sucking on a hand-rolled cigarette. The man stuck out his hand, cheerfully. “You’ll be Mister Moon,” he said. “My name’s Smith. I’m your lift out to the big house.” The man’s grip was firm. “You are a big feller, aren’t you?”
Unspoken was, “But I could take you,” although Shadow knew that it was there.
Shadow said, “So they tell me. You aren’t Scottish.”
“Not me, matey. Just up for the week to make sure that everything runs like it’s s’posed to. I’m a London boy.” A flash of teeth in a hatchet-blade face. Shadow guessed that the man was in his mid-forties. “Come on out to the car. I can bring you up to speed on the way. Is that your bag?”
Shadow carried his backpack out to the car, a muddy Land Rover, its engine still running. He dropped it in the back, climbed into the passenger seat. Smith pulled one final drag on his cigarette, now little more than a rolled stub of white paper, and threw it out of the open driver’s-side window into the road.
They drove out of the village.
“So how do I pronounce your name?” asked Smith. “Bal-der or Borl-der, or something else? Like Cholmondely is actually pronounced Chumley.”
“Shadow,” said Shadow. “People call me Shadow.”
“Right.”
Silence.
“So,” said Smith. “Shadow. I don’t know how much old Gaskell told you about the party this weekend.”
“A little.”
“Right, well, the most important thing to know is this. Anything that happens, you keep shtum about. Right? Whatever you see, people having a little bit of fun, you don’t say nothing to anybody, even if you recognize them, if you take my meaning.”
“I don’t recognize people,” said Shadow.
