“So what really happens tonight?” asked Shadow, on their third trip, or perhaps their fourth.
“Well,” said Smith. “Most of it, as I understand, you’re best off figuring out on your own. As it happens.”
“And you and Mr. Alice. What part do you play in this?”
Smith gave him a sharp look. They put the drums down at the foot of the stairs, in the great hall. There were several men there, talking in front of the fire.
When they were back up the stairs again, and out of earshot of the guests, Smith said, “Mr. Alice will be leaving us late this afternoon. I’ll stick around.”
“He’s leaving? Isn’t he part of this?”
Smith looked offended. “He’s the host,” he said. “But.” He stopped. Shadow understood. Smith didn’t talk about his employer. They carried more drums down the stairs. When they had brought down all the drums, they carried down heavy leather bags.
“What’s in these?” asked Shadow.
“Drumsticks,” said Smith.
Smith continued, “They’re old families. That lot downstairs. Very old money. They know who’s boss, but that doesn’t make him one of them. See? They’re the only ones who’ll be at tonight’s party. They’d not want Mr. Alice. See?”
And Shadow did see. He wished that Smith hadn’t spoken to him about Mr. Alice. He didn’t think Smith would have said anything to anyone he thought would live to talk about it.
But all he said was, “Heavy drumsticks.”
VIII
A small helicopter took Mr. Alice away late that afternoon. Land Rovers took away the staff. Smith drove the last one. Only Shadow was left behind, and the guests, with their smart clothes and their smiles.
They stared at Shadow as if he were a captive lion who had been brought for their amusement, but they did not talk to him.
The dark-haired woman, the one who had smiled at Shadow as she had arrived, brought him food to eat: a steak, almost rare. She brought it to him on a plate, without cutlery, as if she expected him to eat it with his fingers and his teeth, and he was hungry, and he did.
“I am not your hero,” he told them, but they would not meet his gaze. Nobody spoke to him, not directly. He felt like an animal.
And then it was dusk. They led Shadow to the inner courtyard, by the rusty fountain, and they stripped him naked, at gunpoint, and the women smeared his body with some kind of thick yellow grease, rubbing it in.
They put a knife on the grass in front of him. A gesture with a gun, and Shadow picked the knife up. The hilt was black metal, rough and easy to hold. The blade looked sharp.
Then they threw open the great door, from the inner courtyard to the world outside, and two of the men lit the two high bonfires: they crackled and blazed.
They opened the leather bags, and each of the guests took out a single carved black stick, like a cudgel, knobbly and heavy. Shadow found himself thinking of Sawney Beane’s children, swarming up from the darkness holding clubs made of human thigh-bones….
Then the guests arranged themselves around the edge of the courtyard, and they began to beat the drums with the sticks.
They started slow, and they started quietly, a deep, throbbing pounding, like a heartbeat. Then they began to crash and slam into strange rhythms, staccato beats that wove and wound, louder and louder, until they filled Shadow’s mind and his world. It seemed to him that the firelight flickered to the rhythms of the drums.
And then, from outside the house, the howling began.
There was pain in the howling, and anguish, and it echoed across the hills above the drumbeats, a wail of pain and loss and hate.
The figure that stumbled through the doorway to the courtyard was clutching its head, covering its ears, as if to stop the pounding of the drumbeats.
The firelight caught it.
It was huge, now: bigger than Shadow, and naked. It was perfectly hairless, and dripping wet.
It lowered its hands from its ears, and it stared around, its face twisted into a mad grimace. “Stop it!” it screamed. “Stop making all that noise!”
And the people in their pretty clothes beat their drums harder, and faster, and the noise filled Shadow’s head and chest.
The monster stepped into the center of the courtyard. It looked at Shadow. “You,” it said. “I told you. I told you about the noise,” and it howled, a deep throaty howl of hatred and challenge.
The creature edged closer to Shadow. It saw the knife, and stopped. “Fight me!” it shouted. “Fight me fair! Not with cold iron! Fight me!”
“I don’t want to fight you,” said Shadow. He dropped the knife on the grass, raised his hands to show them empty.
“Too late,” said the bald thing that was not a man. “Too late for that.”
And it launched itself at Shadow.
Later, when Shadow thought of that fight, he remembered only fragments: he remembered being slammed to the ground, and throwing himself out of the way. He remembered the pounding of the drums, and the expressions on the faces of the drummers as they stared, hungrily, between the bonfires, at the two men in the firelight.
They fought, wrestling and pounding each other.
Salt tears ran down the monster’s face as it wrestled with Shadow. They were equally matched, it seemed to Shadow.
The monster slammed its arm into Shadow’s face, and Shadow could taste his own blood. He could feel his own anger beginning to rise, like a red wall of hate.
He swung a leg out, hooking the monster behind the knee, and as it stumbled back Shadow’s fist crashed into its gut, making it cry out and roar with anger and pain.
A glance at the guests: Shadow saw the bloodlust on the faces of the drummers.
There was a cold wind, a sea wind, and it seemed to Shadow that there were huge shadows in the sky, vast figures that he had seen on a ship made of the fingernails of dead men, and that they were staring down at him, that this fight was what was keeping them frozen on their ship, unable to land, unable to leave.
This fight was old, Shadow thought, older than even Mr. Alice knew, and he was thinking that even as the creature’s talons raked his chest. It was the fight of man against monster, and it was old as time: it was Theseus battling the Minotaur, it was Beowulf and Grendel, it was the fight of every hero who had ever stood between the firelight and the darkness and wiped the blood of something inhuman from his sword.
The bonfires burned, and the drums pounded and throbbed and pulsed like the beating of a thousand hearts.
Shadow slipped on the damp grass, as the monster came at him, and he was down. The creature’s fingers were around Shadow’s neck, and it was squeezing; Shadow could feel everything starting to thin, to become distant.
He closed his hand around a patch of grass, and pulled at it, dug his fingers deep, grabbing a handful of grass and clammy earth, and he smashed the clod of dirt into the monster’s face, momentarily blinding it.
He pushed up, and was on top of the creature, now. He rammed his knee hard into its groin, and it doubled into a fetal position, and howled, and sobbed.
Shadow realized that the drumming had stopped, and he looked up.
The guests had put down their drums.
They were all approaching him, in a circle, men and women, still holding their drumsticks, but holding them like cudgels. They were not looking at Shadow, though: they were staring at the monster on the ground, and they raised their black sticks and moved toward it in the light of the twin fires.
Shadow said, “Stop!”
The first club blow came down on the creature’s head. It wailed and twisted, raising an arm to ward off the next blow.
Shadow threw himself in front of it, shielding it with his body. The dark-haired woman who had smiled at him before now brought down her club on his shoulder, dispassionately, and another club, from a man this time, hit him a numbing blow in the leg, and a third struck him on his side.