Chapter 5 (p.5)
Wednesday put his finger to his lips, and they walked forward. Farther in, a player piano was playing something that was intended to have been Ravel's “Bolero.” The place seemed to be a geometrically reconfigured 1960s bachelor pad, with open stonework, pile carpeting, and magnificently ugly mushroom-shaped stained glass lampshades. Up a winding staircase was another room, filled with knickknacks.
“They say this was built by Frank Lloyd Wright's evil twin,” said Wednesday. “Frank Lloyd Wrong.” He chuckled at his joke.
“I saw that on a T-shirt,” said Shadow.
Up and down more stairs, and now they were in a long, long room, made of glass, that protruded, needlelike, out over the leafless black-and-white countryside hundreds of feet below them. Shadow stood and watched the snow tumble and spin.
“This is the House on the Rock?” he asked, puzzled.
“More or less. This is the Infinity Room, part of the actual house, although a late addition. But no, my young friend, we have not scratched the tiniest surface of what the house has to offer.”
“So according to your theory,” said Shadow, “Walt Disney World would be the holiest place in America.”
Wednesday frowned, and stroked his beard. “Walt Disney bought some orange groves in the middle of Florida and built a tourist town on them. No magic there of any kind, although I think there might be something real in the original Disneyland. There may be some power there, although twisted, and hard to access. There's definitely nothing out of the ordinary about Disney World. But some parts of Florida are filled with real magic. You just have to keep your eyes open. Ah, for the mermaids of Weeki Wachee…Follow me, this way.”
Everywhere was the sound of music: jangling, awkward music, ever-so-slightly off the beat and out of time. Wednesday took a five-dollar bill and put it into a change machine, receiving a handful of brass-colored metal coins in return. He tossed one to Shadow, who caught it, and, realizing that a small boy was watching him, held it up between forefinger and thumb and vanished it. The small boy ran over to his mother, who was inspecting one of the ubiquitous Santa Clauses—OVER 6000 ON DISPLAY! the signs said—and he tugged urgently at the hem of her coat.
Shadow followed Wednesday outside briefly, and then followed the signs to the Streets of Yesterday.
“Forty years ago Alex Jordan—his face is on the token you have palmed in your right hand, Shadow—began to build a house on a high jut of rock in a field he did not own, and even he could not have told you why. And people came to see him build it—the curious, and the puzzled, and those who were neither and who could not honestly have told you why they came. So he did what any sensible American male of his generation would do: he began to charge them money—nothing much. A nickel each, perhaps. Or a quarter. And he continued building, and the people kept coming.
“So he took those quarters and nickels and made something even bigger and stranger. He built these warehouses on the land beneath the house, and filled them with things for people to see, and then the people came to see them. Millions of people come here every year.”
“Why?”
But Wednesday simply smiled, and they walked into the dimly lit, tree-lined Streets of Yesterday. Prim-lipped Victorian china dolls stared in profusion through dusty store windows, like so many props from respectable horror films. Cobblestones under their feet, the darkness of a roof above their heads, jangling mechanical music in the background. They passed a glass box of broken puppets, and an overgrown golden music box in a glass case. They passed the dentist's and the drugstore (RESTORE POTENCY! USE O'LEARY'S MAGNETICAL BELT! ).
At the end of the street was a large glass box with a female mannequin inside it, dressed as a gypsy fortune-teller.
“Now,” boomed Wednesday, over the mechanical music, “at the start of any quest or enterprise it behooves us to consult the Norns. So let us designate this Sybil our Urd, eh?” He dropped a brass-colored House on the Rock coin into the slot. With jagged, mechanical motions, the gypsy lifted her arm and lowered it once more. A slip of paper chunked out of the slot.
Wednesday took it, read it, grunted, folded it up, and put it in his pocket.
“Aren't you going to show it to me? I'll show you mine,” said Shadow. “A man's fortune is his own affair,” said Wednesday, stiffly. “I would not ask to see yours.”
Shadow put his own coin in the slot. He took his slip of paper. He read it.
EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING.
YOUR LUCKY NUMBER IS NONE.
YOUR LUCKY COLOR IS DEAD.
Motto: LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON.
Shadow made a face. He folded the fortune up and put it in his inside pocket.
They went further in, down a red corridor, past rooms filled with empty chairs upon which rested violins and violas and cellos which played themselves, or seemed to, when fed a coin. Keys depressed, cymbals crashed, pipes blew compressed air into clarinets and oboes. Shadow observed, with a wry amusement, that the bows of the stringed instruments, played by mechanical arms, never actually touched the strings, which were often loose or missing. He wondered whether all the sounds he heard were made by wind and percussion, or whether there were tapes as well.
They had walked for what felt like several miles when they came to a room called the Mikado, one wall of which was a nineteenth-century pseudo-Oriental nightmare, in which beetle-browed mechanical drummers banged cymbals and drums while staring out from their dragon-encrusted lair. Currently, they were majestically torturing Saint-Saëns's “Danse Macabre.” Czernobog sat on a bench in the wall facing the Mikado machine, tapping out the time with his fingers. Pipes fluted, bells jangled.
Wednesday sat next to him. Shadow decided to remain standing. Czernobog extended his left hand, shook Wednesday's, shook Shadow's. “Well met,” he said. Then he sat back, apparently enjoying the music.
The “Danse Macabre” came to a tempestuous and discordant end. That all the artificial instruments were ever-so-slightly out of tune added to the otherworldliness of the place. A new piece began.
“How was your bank robbery?” asked Czernobog. “It went well?” He stood, reluctant to leave the Mikado and its thundering, jangling music.
“Slick as a snake in a barrel of butter,” said Wednesday.
“I get a pension from the slaughterhouse,” said Czernobog. “I do not ask for more.”
“It won't last forever,” said Wednesday. “Nothing does.”
More corridors, more musical machines. Shadow became aware that they were not following the path through the rooms intended for tourists, but seemed to be following a different route of Wednesday's own devising. They were going down a slope, and Shadow, confused, wondered if they had already been that way.
