Johnny was two and a half years old the first time his mother lost him in the shopping mall. She had given him a quarter to put in the toy fire truck that jiggled up and down and had a noisy siren and flashing lights and felt like you were a real firefighter on your way to put out a blaze. And when the ride finished and he climbed out, Mom was gone. There were lots of adults walking around, but they were all strangers, and Johnny knew you weren't supposed to talk to strangers.

Fortunately, he'd been eating a candy bar, and tearing off bits of the wrapper and throwing them out of his pushchair. So he followed the bits of wrapper back to the entrance and out to the bus stop where Mom was just getting onto the bus, and he had time to shout, 'Wait for me!' before the bus drove off.

Mom grabbed him and yelled, 'You bad kid! What did you think you were doing, running off like that? I've been worried sick about you!' But Johnny knew she was mad at him for coming back, not for getting lost.

After that, he always held tight to Mom's hand when they went out. He never wanted to play on the toy fire truck, or to run off and play in the park. But then one day, when they were at the mall again, he needed the restroom.

Mom took him into the Ladies', so she could wait outside to help him wash his hands afterwards. Johnny wanted to keep the door open, but Mom said he was a big boy now, nearly four, and anyway there might be strangers who might see him.

Johnny didn't know how to talk about the time when she'd left him to the strangers. After all, it had been a very long time ago now, and he had only been a little boy then, and maybe he had dreamed it, or maybe Mom hadn't meant to lose him. So he closed the door and waited until he was finished, and then he wiped himself and pulled up his underpants and his proper pants, and opened the door – and Mom wasn't there. She had tricked him. Again. And he was a big boy now, and should have known better.

Johnny left the restroom – without washing his hands, because he couldn't reach the washbasin without Mom to hold him up – and started to search the mall. He could find his way to the exit now, even without candy wrappers, but he couldn't see Mom anywhere. He started to cry.

Then someone picked him up, and he found himself looking at an old lady with grey hair. He knew he knew her, but he didn't know where from. And he didn't remember her being old. But she wasn't a stranger, so that was the important thing.

'Hush, cookie,' she said. 'Your Mommy's asked me to take you home today. She's not feeling so good, so you'll be staying with me until she's a bit better. You remember your Granny, don't you, Johann?'

'I'm Johnny,' said Johnny.

'That's what your Mommy calls you. You're Johann when you're with me, aren't you? Or just Jo or Hans, sometimes. Anyway, let's get you home, now. I've been doing some baking. Do you like chocolate brownies?'

'My favourite!' said Johann. He hadn't had any lunch. Mom often didn't make lunch, or breakfast. Sometimes he stole from the kitchen cupboard, and if he was lucky there were potato chips, or pretzels, or candy, but there hadn't been any for a long time.

Granny buckled him into a seat in the back of her car, and drove off to her house. She lived out in the country, and it was dark by the time they got there. Granny showed him down to his room, which was in the basement. It was full of toys, all the ones he'd seen on TV before Mom had to sell the TV, and there was a plate with chocolate brownies and cookies, and a mug of milk.

'That should keep you going while I get dinner ready,' Granny said. 'What would you like for dinner, then?'

'Can I have pizza?' said Johann. 'That's my favourite! Please?'

'Well, you're a well-brought-up young man, aren't you, honey?' said Granny. 'Well, well, pizza it is, then. And you can watch TV or play with these toys while I'm making it.'

She went out, shutting the door behind her, and Johann began to explore. There was a door off to a bathroom on one side, and a bed with a set of warm red pyjamas and a fluffy red dressing-gown. The toys looked good, except the ones that looked boring, like Barbie dolls, or jigsaw puzzles with hundreds of pieces, or books with mostly words and only a few pictures and none of them in colour. Granny couldn't have thought he'd want those, could she? Well, maybe there were other kids who came to visit sometimes. Maybe he could make some friends.

He played with toy trucks until Granny came in with supper, and then she gave him a bath, with actual warm water and bubble-bath. At home, Mom never had money for electricity bills so the bathwater was always cold, and Johnny could remember even colder water, from an icy lake somewhere, but he couldn't remember where.

Granny washed his long hair, which hurt when she had to comb it to get the tangles out. 'Are you going to cut it?' Johnny asked, because that was what Mom did sometimes when it got too long to take care of.

'Hardly!' said Granny. 'You're beautiful, with your long golden curls. Just take a look at yourself, when your hair's had time to dry and I've brushed it again! You look like a little prince!'

after the bath, she read him Jack and the Beanstalk and put him to bed.

The next day he woke up early and tried to get out, but the door was locked, so he played on his own until Granny came in with waffles and syrup and a mug of hot chocolate for his breakfast. They played together for most of the morning, and then Granny went upstairs to fix lunch, and locked the door behind her. After lunch, they played together until evening. And so it went on, day after day.

It wasn't until he'd been there a few days that Johann asked, 'Can I go and play outside?'

'Oh, no!' said Granny, sounding very shocked. 'It's winter, and that's a bad time for children. All sorts of terrible things happen to children, in winter.'

'What sorts of things?' said Johann.

'Well – there are wolves round here, for a start. And grizzlies, and mountain lions. No, you'd better stay in. Why don't you have a think about what you want Santa Claus to bring you for Christmas?'

So Johann stayed in, and tried to think about Christmas presents. But mainly, he thought about winter, and wondered if it was really so dangerous. He was sure kids in other places played outside, even in winter. He remembered a place he'd been to once, with a big lake that froze right across in winter. You could even park a car on it. He didn't remember Mom being there, but he thought Granny had. He remembered her crying. He couldn't remember why.

In the run-up to Christmas, Granny was busier and busier. After she'd helped Johann write his list to Santa Claus, she had to drive into town on her own one day. She locked him into the basement as usual, but Johann found a set of pliers in a tool kit meant for older boys, and spent some time finding out how to open the door from the inside. Then he went upstairs and explored the rest of the house. It wasn't as nice as his room. He found the kitchen, with an oven so big that Johann could have hidden inside it. When he stood on a chair he could find the cupboard where the sharp knives were kept.

Next to the kitchen was a cupboard with brooms and a mop and the washing-machine. It would be another good place to hide, but it wasn't very interesting. The next proper room was Granny's study. There was an old-fashioned landline telephone in there, not a cellphone. There was a writing-desk, with lots of letters from children. Johann couldn't read, but he could see that some of the letters had pictures of Santa Claus and reindeer drawn on them, and pictures of toys. Some of them looked like the toys in Johann's room downstairs.

Out in the garden, he could see a board over a hole. Maybe Granny had been doing some digging before it got cold and the ground froze? He wanted to go outside and explore, but he knew his feet would leave prints, and then Granny would know he had been naughty and might ring Santa Claus to tell him not to come. He thought he could see a barn. He wondered whether Granny was buying a turkey for Christmas dinner, or whether she kept her own animals and killed them herself. He had almost decided to try to see if he could get out, when he heard a car coming, so he hurried back down to the basement, just before Granny came in.

The next day was Christmas Eve. Granny brought a tree down to Johann's room and they decorated it together and spent all day together. They sang Christmas carols. Granny knew lots that Johann had never heard before, especially sad carols like 'Lully Lullay' and 'Poor Little Jesus'. Then they looked at a comic book about a boy and a snowman who had a wonderful time together, but the snowman died in the end. When Johann looked up, he saw that Granny was crying, just the way he remembered her crying in the little town by the lake.

'Don't be sad, Granny,' he said. 'It's nearly Christmas!'

'I know,' said Granny. 'I just feel sad because – you'll have to go home tomorrow. I'm going to miss you. That's all.'

'Do I still get my presents?'

'Oh, yes. Santa Claus will be bringing those tonight. You'd better make sure your room is all tidy – you don't want Santa Claus to trip, do you?'

So Johann tidied up, and changed into his red pyjamas and dressing-gown, and hung up a pillowcase at the end of his bed. Granny read him another story, but he was still too wriggly to settle down and sleep.

'I think you're a bit too excited,' said Granny. 'And maybe you've had a few too many cookies. I think you'd better have a pill to help you sleep, so Santa Claus can get here.'

Johann said, 'All right.' The pill Granny brought looked like the ones Mom sometimes used to give him to make sure he went to sleep when she needed to go out in the evening. He was going to swallow it as usual, when he realised he didn't have to. He could stay awake and get to see the real Santa Claus, not just someone dressed up as Santa in the mall. So he tucked the pill into his cheek, waited until Granny had gone, and then spat it out. It tasted horrible, but he didn't care.

He still wasn't sure whether he actually would stay awake until Santa got there. After all, Santa probably didn't come until so late at night that even adults were asleep. So Johann waited as long as he could, until he was sure Granny was asleep, and then, without turning the light on, he felt his way to the door and unlocked it again. Then he crept up the stairs and left a roller-skate on the second step from the top. That way, if Santa slipped on it, he might fall down and crash into the door, and the noise was sure to wake Johann.

He was just about to creep back to bed when he heard a noise. Maybe Santa was already here! Johann knew he could get caught if he tried to get back to bed in the dark, and then Santa wouldn't think he was a good boy at all. So instead he hid in the broom cupboard, and watched through the slits in the door.

It wasn't Santa who came down the stairs, but Granny. She stepped on the roller-skate and slid down the stairs and crashed into the door. Johann expected her to stand up and be very cross, but instead she just lay there, very still.

Johann went to the study, picked up the phone and dialled 911, like he'd seen people do on TV. When someone picked up the phone, it took him a long time to explain where he was, because he wasn't sure. But when he explained what town he was from, and what mall Granny had picked him up from, they sounded a lot more interested. They told him to stay where he was, in the study, and not to go near Granny.

In the end, it was a police car, not an ambulance, that came to pick him up and take him away. He fell asleep on the journey, and when he woke up, he was in an orphanage. They called him Johnny again here, or John sometimes. He preferred that. Being Johann when he was with Granny hadn't felt right, nor had Hans. Sometimes she called him Hansel, and that had felt – right, but in a different way from Johnny, as if it was a name he had had an even longer time ago.

The carers at the orphanage said that John's Granny was dead, except that she hadn't been his real Granny but just a sad old lady who had kidnapped him because she wished she could have a child of her own. But they said they couldn't find Mom either, so John needed to stay here until they could find him a new family.

He heard more about 'Granny' from the older kids at the orphanage. 'She was a serial killer,' – 'been killing kids at Christmas every year since the 1970s,' – 'used to roast them for Christmas dinner' – 'did not! She buried them in her garden, the police found all the bodies,' 'yeah, right, all of them? Bet the bears got some!' and so on. They said he was a hero for killing her, and nobody believed him when he said it was an accident.

One girl said, 'I feel a bit sorry for her, really. It said in the papers that she went crazy because her daughter got murdered by another serial killer all those years ago…'

And that was when Johnny remembered where he'd seen her before.

She used to run the cake shop. Her daughter Gerda worked Saturdays and holidays as a waitress in Hinzelmann's favourite coffee shop. She was a good kid. That was why he had picked her to go in the klunker. It had been a good year for the klunker raffle, too. They'd raised two thousand dollars for the schools and the children's section of the Lakeside library. Gerda would have approved.

It wasn't that he'd wanted to make Gerda's mother cry. But there was no way he could have explained to her that when you're a god who's been made redundant, you have to organise your own sacrifices. He hadn't wanted to make the friendly baker run away from Lakeside.

He certainly hadn't meant to start her on a child-killing career of her own.

It was a pity the kids he'd picked couldn't all have been – well, unwanted kids, like he was when he was Johnny – kids born to parents who hadn't wanted them and didn't take care of them. But if they weren't well-loved kids, the ones their parents and their friends and the entire town was going to miss, they didn't work as sacrifices. Even back in the 1870s, when not many whites thought the disappearance of a black kid was any great loss, everyone who had known little Jessie Lovat had missed her bright eyes and her cheeky smile.

'Johnny? Johnny, are you with us?' One of the orphanage staff was trying to rouse him to consciousness without actually slapping him.

'Yeah, I'm okay. I was just thinking about – stuff before.'

'Well, we've got some good news for you. You know we said we'd look after you until we could find a new family for you? Well, there's someone here who's interested in fostering a child for a while, and if the two of you get on well, you can think about whether you'd like him to adopt you. Don't worry, it won't be like being with that old woman – you'll be going to school, and your social worker will call in on you every few days to check that everything's okay. But would you like to have a family of your own?'

Johnny nodded. That was all he had wanted, ever since he found out what 'family' was. He hadn't had one in his first childhood, just the people who came into the hut to feed him. And this time round, Mom hadn't really been family, because she hadn't wanted a kid in the first place. And the old lady who called him Johann had wanted one, desperately, but the only problem was that she was insane.

The carer led him into the front lounge. Johnny's social worker was standing by the door, and was a big, strong-looking man sitting in one of the armchairs. He seemed quite young for an adult, though adults just looked like adults to Johnny these days, at least until they had white hair or wrinkles. He had dark skin, but somehow he looked Nordic, as if one parent had been black and the other had been a Norse god. Hinzelmann was aware that Johnny, aged four, probably wouldn't know words like 'Nordic', but he thought it, nevertheless.

'Shadow?' he exclaimed, incredulously.

'My name's Baldur,' said Shadow. 'Or Mr Moon, if you prefer. And I hear yours is John Selmann?'

'Or Johnny, if you prefer,' said Johnny politely.

They looked at each other, wondering how the conversation should go from here. It wasn't as if they could discuss Richie Hinzelmann, the notorious Lakeside Murderer, in front of the social worker and the carer, any more than they could discuss incognito gods and multi-pantheon conspiracies and coming back from the dead. Johnny couldn't very well say, 'How does an ex-convict like you get approved to work with children?' if he didn't want Shadow to say, 'How does a child-killer get to be reincarnated instead of going straight to hell?'

In the end, Shadow said, 'Would you like me to tell you a story?'

'Yes, please!'

So Shadow began:

Long ago, in a land across the ocean, there was a boy who lived in a skin tent. It was in the land where the sun rises, but he never saw the sunrise, only darkness by night and dimness by day. Nobody spoke to him. He could hear people talking outside, but to him their voices were just noises, like the hooting of the owls. People came in to bring him food, and left again immediately, but he never saw their faces. Only once did someone come in and hold him, and she cried, though the boy did not know what tears were. He had not cried since he was a baby, because he had long learned that it was useless, that no-one came to comfort him when he cried.

Then, one day, someone came to lead him out of the hut. There was a big bonfire lit, and all the people were sitting around it, waiting for him. The firelight hurt his eyes, because he was used to light, and he had never seen people's faces before, but he knew that they were glad to see him, and that at last he could become part of the tribe…

Johnny burst in:

Then they stuck a knife through him from the right and another one from the left, and it hurt, and he died.

The social worker looked anxious, and said something about, 'Very traumatised child – we've tried to get him to talk to a counsellor, but he won't open up – we hope he might be more able to talk about his feelings once he's settled with a family…'

Shadow said, 'Well, he's talking about them now, isn't he? Go on, Johnny, what happened after that?'

He got turned into a god, and he lived in a skin box. They carried him around with him, and he watched over the tribe and gave them good luck in their hunting and protected them from the wolves and bears who wanted to hunt them.

Only then people stopped believing in him, so he had to leave the forest, so he went to haunt a castle instead. He wasn't sure if people were going to be nice or if they were going to stick knives in him again, so at first he was invisible and only came out at night. But one of the maids put down a saucer of milk for him one night, so he drank it, and afterwards he swept the kitchen. So next night she put down another saucer of milk, and he did the washing-up.

She wanted to see him, so one night she sat up and watched him drinking the milk, and she said hello, and they talked for a bit. But then she asked if she could see him, so he made himself visible, and she fainted, because of all the blood and the knives sticking in him. So then he knew that people don't like children with knives stuck in them, so next night he was a pretty little boy with a red silk coat on, and long curly blond hair. But mostly he was invisible.

People called him a kobold now, because they didn't believe he was a god because they worshipped a different god now. But he didn't mind. They gave him his own bedroom and let him have straw to weave toys with, and he had two girlfriends called Anne and Catherine. He helped the people he liked, but if people were mean to him, sometimes he made them fall off their horses into deep lakes and drown. He became a Christian for a while, but he found that Christian ministers wouldn't believe he was a proper Christian because they thought he was an evil spirit and tried to exorcise him, so he stopped believing in Jesus after a while.

He lived in the castle for four years, and then he decided to go to the New World instead. For three hundred years he haunted farms and miners' camps and lakes, but he wished he could have a proper home. So he came to a town called Lakeside, even though it didn't really have a proper lake, just a creek that made a bit of a pond, and he got them to make it into a proper lake because kobolds like lakes.

But he found out that now, if you go around looking like a kid, people say, 'Where are your parents?' and 'Why aren't you in school?' and stuff. So instead he decided to be a jolly old man who told funny stories. And everyone liked him – but nobody thought he was a god or even a kobold now, so they didn't believe in him. So he had to sacrifice to himself, so every year he took a child and killed them and hid their bodies in the lake. And their spirits fed him, so he could go on being a god and watching over the town and making sure that nothing really bad ever happened, except to the kids he killed. And then the town cop shot him and he died…

Johnny paused. 'What happened to the cop?' he asked.

'Well, he was real upset, because he didn't want to kill anyone, even a murderer,' said Shadow. 'He – almost didn't survive it. But then a passing god came and took the memory out of his head so that he didn't have to worry about it any more. What happened to Hinz- the boy who became a god who became a kobold, though?'

'The cat god and the dog god and the ibis god weighed his soul to see if it weighed more than a feather,' said Johnny. 'Only – it was only his soul up to when he got killed the first time, because he hadn't had his soul with him after that. So there wasn't much weight on it and – they said he could go free. They asked him what he wanted to do next.'

'What did he want?' asked Shadow.

'He wanted to live. He wanted to take his soul out of the dark hut and live a real life with it. He wanted to have a family. Only – he'd always be weird, and someone who was a normal human and hadn't been dead wouldn't understand him. So when he was born, his Mom didn't want him and she lost him accidentally-on-purpose, and he came here until there was someone who knew what it's like to be weird and not-really-human, and to be alive after they've died.'

'Is that the end?' asked Shadow.

'No,' said Johnny. 'I just don't know what happens after that.'

'Neither do I,' said Shadow. 'But I'm looking forward to finding out.'