Shadow’s Story

On Shadow’s first day hanging in the tree, he feels very uncomfortable. After that, he feels worse. His whole body hurts. He hallucinates flashes of color, and he dreams about a man with an elephant head who hides a mouse in his trunk. “In the trunk,” the elephant man says. He urges Shadow to remember this detail.

After a while, a thunderstorm comes, and rain falls hard on Shadow’s naked body. He is terribly thirsty, so he opens his mouth and lets the storm wet his lips and tongue. He catches some water in the cup of his collarbone and slurps as much as he can. As lightning crashes overhead, he feels giddy with life—more alive than he has ever felt before.

But as the hours pass, Shadow’s joy fades. He struggles against his ropes, but they do not give. He exhausts himself trying to get free. The pain in his whole body grows worse, and he feels alternately far too hot and far too cold. He hallucinates that Laura is comforting him, but he knows she is not really there because she looks alive and whole. At one point, he receives a strange gift—water, brought to him in a walnut shell by a squirrel.

Every now and then, Shadow’s mind grows lucid. Once, he looks up in the tree and sees a man sitting there, naked, like a hawk. Once, long ago, he heard Mr. Ibis and Jacquel mention a god named Horus who spends almost all his time in hawk form. He guesses, correctly, that he is seeing Horus now. He tries to talk a little, but the god seems insane. Horus catches a squirrel and eats it raw. Then he transforms himself back into a hawk and flies away. Just before he goes, he comments that Shadow is dying.

Shadow’s next visitor is Laura. This time, she is not a hallucination but the reanimated dead body of his actual wife. She has decayed quite a bit since he last saw her, and as they talk, she coughs up squirming things from her lungs. She keeps saying she is thirsty, so he tells her to ask for water from the strange women who hung him in the tree.

Soon Shadow falls asleep, and when he wakes up, Laura is gone. He has the worst headache he has ever had. It pounds inside his brain, and he cannot stand the feeling. Eventually he loses consciousness again, and this time he does not wake up.