Free American Gods by Neil Gaiman

it.
    He began to walk through the hall. The carved eyes of those statues that had eyes seemed to follow his every step.
    In his dream, he realized that each statue had a name burning on the floor in front of it. The man with the white hair, with a necklace of teeth about his neck, holding a drum, was Leucotios ; the broad-hipped woman with monsters dropping from the vast gash between her legs was Hubur ; the ram-headed man holding the golden ball was Hershef .
    A precise voice, fussy and exact, was speaking to him, in his dream, but he could see no one.
    â€œThese are gods who have been forgotten, and now might as well be dead. They can be found only in dry histories. They are gone, all gone, but their names and their images remain with us.”
    Shadow turned a corner, and knew himself to be in another room, even vaster than the first. It went on farther than the eye could see. Close to him was the skull of a mammoth, polished and brown, and a hairy ocher cloak, being worn by a small woman with a deformed left hand. Next to that were three women, each carved from the same granite boulder, joined at the waist: their faces had an unfinished, hasty look to them, although their breasts and genitalia had been carved with elaborate care; and there was a flightless bird which Shadow did not recognize, twice his height, with a beak like a vulture’s, but with human arms: and on, and on.
    The voice spoke once more, as if it were addressing a class, saying, “These are the gods who have passed out of memory. Even their names are lost. The people who worshiped them are as forgotten as their gods. Their totems are long since broken and cast down. Their last priests died without passing on their secrets.
    â€œGods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”
    There was a whispering noise that began then to run through the hall, a low susurrus that caused Shadow, in his dream, to experience a chilling and inexplicable fear. An all-engulfing panic took him, there in the halls of the gods whose very existence had been forgotten— octopus-faced gods and gods who were only mummified hands or falling rocks or forest fires . . .
    Shadow woke with his heart jackhammering in his chest, his forehead clammy, entirely awake. The red numerals on the bedside clock told him the time was 1:03 A.M . The light of the Motel America sign outside shone through his bedroom window. Disoriented, Shadow got up and walked into the tiny motel bathroom. He pissed without turning on the lights, and returned to the bedroom. The dream was still fresh and vivid in his mind’s eye, but he could not explain to himself why it had scared him so.
    The light that came into the room from outside was not bright, but Shadow’s eyes had become used to the dark. There was a woman sitting on the side of his bed.
    He knew her. He would have known her in a crowd of a thousand, or of a hundred thousand. She was still wearing the navy blue suit they had buried her in.
    Her voice was a whisper, but a familiar one. “I guess,” said Laura, “you’re going to ask what I’m doing here.”
    Shadow said nothing.
    He sat down on the room’s only chair and, finally, asked, “Is that you?”
    â€œYes,” she said. “I’m cold, puppy.”
    â€œYou’re dead, babe.”
    â€œYes,” she said. “Yes. I am.” She patted the bed next to her. “Come and sit by me,” she said.
    â€œNo,” said Shadow. “I think I’ll stay right here for now. We have some unresolved issues to address.”
    â€œLike me being dead?”
    â€œPossibly, but I was thinking more of how you died. You and Robbie.”
    â€œOh,” she said. “That.”
    Shadow could smell—or perhaps, he thought, he simply imagined that he smelled—an odor of rot, of flowers and preservatives.