Anansi Boys

Chapter Thirteen

The birds were excited, now. They were cawing and crying and chattering in the treetops. It’s coming, thought Spider, and he cursed. He was spent and done. There was nothing left in him. Nothing but fatigue, nothing but exhaustion.

He thought about lying on the ground and being devoured. Overall, he decided, it was a lousy way to go. He wasn’t even certain that he’d be able to regrow a liver, while he was pretty sure that whatever was stalking him had no plans to stop at just the liver anyway.

He began to wrench at the stake. He counted to three, and then, as best as he could and as much as he could, jerked both of his arms toward him so they’d tense the rope and pull the stake, then he counted to three and did it again.

It had about as much effect as if he was to try to pull a mountain across a road. One two three—tug. And again. And again.

He wondered if the beast would come soon.

One two three—tug. One two three—tug.

Somewhere, someone was singing, he could hear it. And the song made Spider smile. He found himself wishing that he still had a tongue: he’d stick it out at the tiger when it finally made its appearance. The thought gave him strength.

On two three—tug.

And the stake gave and shifted in his hands.

One more pull and the stake came out of the ground, slick as a sword sliding out of a stone.

He pulled the ropes toward him, and held the stake in his hands. It was about three feet long. One end had been sharpened to go into the ground. He pushed it out of the loops of rope with numb hands. Ropes dangled uselessly from his wrists. He hefted the stake in his right hand. It would do. And he knew then that he was being watched: that it had been watching him for some time now, like a cat watching a mousehole.

It came to him in silence, or nearly, insinuating its way toward him like a shadow moving across the day. The only movement that caught the eye was its tail, which swished impatiently. Otherwise, it might have been a statue, or a mound of sand that looked, due to a trick of the light, like a monstrous beast, for its coat was a sandy color, its unblinking eyes the green of the midwinter sea. Its face was the wide, cruel face of a panther. In the islands they called any big cat Tiger, and this was every big cat there had ever been—bigger, meaner, more dangerous.

Spider’s ankles were still hobbled, and he could barely walk. Pins and needles pricked his hands and his feet. He hopped from one foot to another and tried to look as if he was doing it on purpose, some kind of dance of intimidation, and not because standing hurt him.

He wanted to crouch and untie his ankles, but he did not dare take his eyes off the beast.

The stake was heavy and thick but was too short to be a spear, too clumsy and large to be anything else. Spider held it by the narrower end, where it had been sharpened, and he looked away, out to sea, intentionally not looking at the place the animal was, relying on his peripheral vision for information.

What had she said? You will bleat. You will whimper. Your fear will excite him.

Spider began to whimper. Then he bleated, like an injured goat, lost and plump and alone.

A flash of sandy-colored motion, barely enough time to register teeth and claws as they blurred toward him. Spider swung the stake like a baseball bat as hard as he could, feeling it connect with a satisfying thunk across the beast’s nose.

Tiger stopped, stared at him as if unable to believe its eyes, then made a noise in the back of its throat, a querulous growl, and it walked, stiff-legged, back in the direction it had come, toward the scrub, as if it had a prior appointment that it wished it could get out of. It glared back at Spider resentfully over its shoulder, a beast in pain, and gave him the look of an animal who would be returning.

Spider watched it go.

Then he sat down, and untangled and untied his ankles.

He walked, a little unsteadily, along the cliff edge, following it gently downhill. Soon a stream crossed his path, running off the cliff edge in a sparkling waterfall. Spider went down on his knees, cupped his hands together, and began to drink the cool water.

Then he began to collect rocks. Good, fist-sized rocks. He stacked them together, like snowballs.

“You’ve hardly eaten anything,” said Rosie.

“You eat. Keep your strength up,” said her mother. “I had a little of that cheese. It was enough.”

It was cold in the meat cellar, and it was dark. Not the kind of dark your eyes get used to, either. There was no light. Rosie had walked the perimeter of the cellar, her fingers trailing against the whitewash and rock and crumbling brick, looking for something that would help, finding nothing.

“You used to eat,” said Rosie. “Back when Dad was alive.”

“Your father,” said her mother, “used to eat, too. And see where it got him? A heart attack, aged forty-one. What kind of world is that?”

“But he loved his food.”

“He loved everything,” said her mother bitterly. “He loved food, he loved people, he loved his daughter. He loved cooking. He loved me. What did it get him? Just an early grave. You mustn’t go loving things like that. I’ve told you.”

“Yes,” said Rosie. “I suppose you have.”

She walked toward the sound of her mother’s voice, hand in front of her face to stop it banging into one of the metal chains that hung in the middle of the room. She found her mother’s bony shoulder, put an arm around her.

“I’m not scared,” said Rosie, in the darkness.

“You’re crazy, then,” said her mother.

Rosie let go of her mother, moved back into the middle of the room. There was a sudden creaking noise. Dust and powdered plaster fell from the ceiling.

“Rosie? What are you doing?” asked Rosie’s mother.

“Swinging on the chain.”

“You be careful. If that chain gives way, you’ll be on the floor with a broken head before you can say Jack Robinson.” There was no answer from her daughter. Mrs. Noah said, “I told you. You’re crazy.”

“No,” said Rosie. “I’m not. I’m just not scared anymore.”

Above them, in the house, the front door slammed.

“Bluebeard’s home,” said Rosie’s mother.

“I know. I heard,” said Rosie. “I’m still not scared.”

People kept clapping Fat Charlie on the back, and buying him drinks with umbrellas in them; in addition to which, he had now collected five business cards from people in the music world on the island for the festival.

All around the room, people were smiling at him. He had an arm around Daisy: he could feel her trembling. She put her lips to his ear. “You’re a complete loony, you know that?”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

She looked at him. “You’re full of surprises.”

“Come on,” he said. “We’re not done yet.”

He made for the maitre d’. “Excuse me—There was a lady. While I was singing. She came in, refilled her coffee mug from the pot back there, by the bar. Where did she go?”

The maitre d’ blinked and shrugged. She said, “I don’t know—”

“Yes, you do,” said Fat Charlie. He felt certain, and smart. Soon enough, he knew, he would feel like himself again, but he had sung a song to an audience, and he had enjoyed it. He had done it to save Daisy’s life, and his own, and he had done both these things. “Let’s talk out there.” It was the song. While he had been singing, everything had become perfectly clear. It was still clear. He headed for the hallway, and Daisy and the maitre d’ followed.

“What’s your name?” he asked the maitre d’.

“I’m Clarissa.”

“Hello, Clarissa. What’s your last name?”

Daisy said, “Charlie, shouldn’t we call the police?”

“In a minute. Clarissa what?”

“Higgler.”

“And what’s your relationship to Benjamin? The concierge?”

“He’s my brother.”

“And how exactly are you two related to Mrs. Higgler. To Callyanne Higgler?”

“They’re my niece and nephew, Fat Charlie,” said Mrs. Higgler, from the doorway. “Now, I think you better listen to your fiancée, and talk to the police. Don’t you?”

Spider was sitting by the stream on the cliff top, with his back to the cliff and a heap of throwing stones in front of him, when a man came loping out of the long grass. The man was naked, save for a pelt of sandy fur around his waist, behind which a tail hung down; he wore a necklace of teeth, sharp and white and pointed. His hair was long and black. He walked casually toward Spider as if he were merely out for an early-morning constitutional, and Spider’s appearance there was a pleasant surprise.

Spider picked up a rock the size of a grapefruit, hefted it in his hand.

“Heya, Anansi’s child,” said the stranger. “I was just passing, and I noticed you, and wondered if there was anything I could do to help.” His nose looked crooked and bruised.

Spider shook his head. He missed his tongue.

“Seeing you there, I find myself thinking, poor Anansi’s child, he must be so hungry.” The stranger smiled too widely. “Here. I’ve got food enough to share with you.” He had a sack over his shoulder, and now he opened the sack and reached his right hand into it, producing a freshly killed black-tailed lamb. He held it by the neck. Its head lolled. “Your father and I ate together on many an occasion. Is there any reason that you and I cannot do likewise? You can make the fire and I will clean the lamb and make a spit to turn it. Can you not taste it already?”

Spider was so hungry he was light-headed. Had he still been in possession of his tongue, perhaps he would have said yes, confident of his ability to talk himself out of trouble; but he had no tongue. He picked up a second rock in his left hand.

“So let us feast and be friends; and let there be no more misunderstandings,” said the stranger.

And the vulture and the raven will clean my bones, thought Spider.

The stranger took another step toward Spider, who decided that this was his cue to throw the first rock. He had a good eye and an excellent arm, and the rock struck where he had intended it to strike, on the stranger’s right arm; he dropped the lamb. The next rock hit the stranger on the side of the head—Spider had been aiming for a spot just between the too-widely-set eyes, but the man had moved.

The stranger ran then, a bounding run, with his tail straight out behind him. Sometimes he looked like a man when he ran, and sometimes he looked like a beast.

When he was gone, Spider walked to the place he had been, to retrieve the black-tailed lamb. It was moving, when he reached it, and for a heartbeat he imagined that it was still alive, but then he saw that the flesh was creeping with maggots. It stank, and the stench of the corpse helped Spider forget how hungry he was, for a little while.

He carried it at arm’s length to the cliff edge and threw it down into the sea. Then he washed his hands in the stream.

He did not know how long he had been in this place. Time was stretched and squashed here. The sun was lowering on the horizon.

After the sun has set, and before the moon has risen, thought Spider. That is when the beast will be back.

The implacably cheerful representative of the Saint Andrews Police force sat in the hotel front office with Daisy and Fat Charlie, and listened to everything each of them had to say with a placid but unimpressed smile on his wide face. Sometimes he would reach up a finger and scratch his moustache.

They told the police officer that a fugitive from justice called Grahame Coats had come in to them while they were eating dinner, and threatened Daisy with a gun. Which, they were also forced to admit, nobody but Daisy had actually seen. Then Fat Charlie told him about the incident with the black Mercedes and the bicycle, earlier that afternoon, and no, he hadn’t actually seen who was driving the car. But he knew where it came from. He told the officer about the house on the cliff top.

The man touched his pepper-and-salt moustache, thoughtfully. “Indeed, there is a house where you describe. However, it does not belong to your man Coats. Far from it. You are describing the house of Basil Finnegan, an extremely respectable man. For many years, Mr. Finnegan has had a healthy interest in law and order. He has given money to schools, but more important, he contributed a healthy sum toward the construction of the new police station.”

“He put a gun to my stomach,” said Daisy. “He told me that unless we came with him, he’d shoot.”

“If this was Mr. Finnegan, little lady,” said the police officer, “I’m sure that there is a perfectly simple explanation.” He opened his briefcase, produced a thick sheaf of papers. “I’ll tell you what. You think about the matter. Sleep on it. If, in the morning, you are convinced that it was more than high spirits, you simply have to fill in this form, and drop off all three copies at the police station. Ask for the new police station, at the back of the city square. Everyone knows where it is.”

He shook both of their hands and went on his way.

“You should have told him you were a cop too,” said Fat Charlie. “He might have taken you more seriously.”

“I don’t think it would have done any good,” she said. “Anyone who calls you ‘little lady’ has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.”

They walked out into the hotel reception.

“Where did she go?” asked Fat Charlie.

Benjamin Higgler said, “Aunt Callyanne? She’s waiting for you in the conference room.”

“There,” said Rosie.” I knew I could do it, if I just kept swinging.”

“He’ll kill you.”

“He’s going to kill us anyway.”

“It won’t work.”

“Mum. Have you got a better idea?”

“He’ll see you.”

“Mum. Will you please stop being so negative? If you’ve got any suggestions that would help, please say them. Otherwise just don’t bother. Okay?”

Silence.

Then, “I could show him my bum.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Er. Instead of?”

“In addition to.”

Silence. Then Rosie said, “Well, it couldn’t hurt.”

“Hullo, Mrs. Higgler,”said Fat Charlie. “I want the feather back.”

“What make you think I got your feather?” she asked, arms folded across her vast bosom.

“Mrs. Dunwiddy told me.”

Mrs. Higgler seemed surprised by this, for the first time. “Louella did tell you I got the feather?”

“She said you had the feather.”

“I keeping it safe.” Mrs. Higgler gestured toward Daisy with her mug of coffee. “You can’t expect me to start talkin’ in front of her. I don’t know her.”

“This is Daisy. You can say anything to her you’d say to me.”

“She’s your fiancée,” said Mrs. Higgler. “I heard.”

Fat Charlie could feel his cheeks starting to burn. “She’s not my—we aren’t, actually. I had to say something to get her away from the man with the gun. It seemed the simplest thing.”

Mrs. Higgler looked at him. Behind her thick spectacles, her eyes began to twinkle. “I know that,” she said. “It was during your song. In front of an audience.” She shook her head, in the way that old people like to do when pondering the foolishness of the young. She opened her black purse, took out an envelope, passed it to Fat Charlie. “I promised Louella I keep it safe.”

Fat Charlie took out the feather from the envelope, half-crushed, from where he had been holding it tightly the night of the séance. “Okay,” he said. “Feather. Excellent. Now,” he said to Mrs. Higgler, “What exactly do I do with it?”

“You don’t know?”

Fat Charlie’s mother had told him, when he was young, to count to ten before he lost his temper. He counted, silently and unhurriedly, to ten, whereupon he lost his temper. “Of course I don’t know what to do with it, you stupid old woman! In the last two weeks I’ve been arrested, I’ve lost my fiancée and my job, I’ve watched my semi-imaginary brother get eaten by a wall of birds in Piccadilly Circus, I’ve flown back and forth across the Atlantic like some kind of lunatic transatlantic ping-pong ball, and today I got up in front of an audience and I, and I sang because my psycho ex-boss had a gun barrel against the stomach of the girl I’m having dinner with. All I’m trying to do is sort out the mess my life has turned into since you suggested I might want to talk to my brother. So, no. No, I don’t know what to do with this bloody feather. Burn it? Chop it up and eat it? Build a nest with it? Hold it out in front of me and jump out of the window?”

Mrs. Higgins looked sullen. “You have to ask Louella Dunwiddy.”

“I’m not sure that I can. She wasn’t looking very well the last time I saw her. And we don’t have much time.”

Daisy said, “Great. You got your feather back. Now, can we please talk about Grahame Coats?”

“It’s not only a feather. It’s the feather I swapped for my brother.”

“So swap it back, and let’s get on with things. We’ve got to do something.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” said Fat Charlie. Then he stopped, and thought about what he had said and what she had said. He looked at Daisy admiringly. “God, you’re smart,” he said.

“I try,” she said. “What did I say?”

They didn’t have four old ladies, but they had Mrs. Higgler, Benjamin, and Daisy. Dinner was almost finished, so Clarissa, the maitre d’, seemed perfectly happy to come and join them. They didn’t have earths of four different colors, but there was white sand from the beach behind the hotel and black dirt from the flower bed in front of it, red mud at the side of the hotel, multicolored sand in test tubes in the gift shop. The candles they borrowed from the poolside bar were small and white, not tall and black. Mrs. Higgler assured them that she could find all the herbs they actually needed on the island, but Fat Charlie had Clarissa borrow a pouch of bouquet garni from the kitchen.

“I think it’s all a matter of confidence,” Fat Charlie explained. “The most important thing isn’t the details. It’s the magical atmosphere.”

The magical atmosphere in this case was not enhanced by Benjamin Higgler’s tendency to look around the table and burst into explosive giggles nor by Daisy’s continually pointing out that the whole procedure was extremely silly.

Mrs. Higgler sprinkled the bouquet garni into a bowl of leftover white wine.

Mrs. Higgler began to hum. She raised her hands in encouragement, and the others began to hum along with her, like drunken bees. Fat Charlie waited for something to happen.

Nothing did.

“Fat Charlie,” said Mrs. Higgler. “You hum too.”

Fat Charlie swallowed. There’s nothing to be scared of, he told himself: he had sung in front of a roomful of people; he had proposed marriage in front of an audience to a woman he barely knew. Humming would be a doddle.

He found the note that Mrs. Higgler was humming, and he let it vibrate in his throat—.

He held his feather. He concentrated and he hummed.

Benjamin stopped giggling. His eyes widened. There was an expression of alarm on his face, and Fat Charlie was going to stop humming to find out what was troubling him, but the hum was inside him now, and the candles were flickering—

“Look at him!” said Benjamin. “He’s—”

And Fat Charlie would have wondered what exactly he was, but it was too late to wonder.

Mists parted.

Fat Charlie was walking along a bridge, a long white footbridge across an expanse of gray water. A little way ahead of him, in the middle of the bridge, a man sat on a small wooden chair. The man was fishing. A green fedora hat covered his eyes. He appeared to be dozing, and he did not stir as Fat Charlie approached.

Fat Charlie recognized the man. He rested his hand on the man’s shoulder.

“You know,” he said, “I knew you were faking it. I didn’t think you were really dead.”

The man in the chair did not move, but he smiled. “Shows how much you know,” said Anansi. “I’m dead as they come.” He stretched luxuriantly, pulled a little black cheroot from behind his ear, and lit it with a match. “Yup. I’m dead. Figure I’ll stay dead for a lickle while. If you don’t die now and again, people start takin’ you for granted.”

Fat Charlie said “But.”

Anansi touched his finger to his lips for silence. He picked up his fishing rod and began to wind the reel. He pointed to a small net. Fat Charlie picked it up, and held it out as his father lowered a silver fish, long and wriggling, into it. Anansi took the hook from the fish’s mouth then dropped the fish into a white pail. “There,” he said. “That’s tonight’s dinner taken care of.”

For the first time it registered with Fat Charlie that it had been dark night when he had sat down at the table with Daisy and the Higglers, but that while the sun was low wherever he was now, it had not set.

His father folded up the chair, and gave Fat Charlie the chair and the bucket to carry. They began to walk along the bridge. “You know,” said Mr. Nancy, “I always thought that if you ever came to talk to me, I’d tell you all manner of things. But you seem to be doing pretty good on your own. So what brings you here?”

“I’m not sure. I was trying to find the Bird Woman. I want to give her back her feather.”

“You shouldn’t have been messin’ about with people like that,” said his father, blithely. “No good ever comes from it. She’s a mess of resentments, that one. But she’s a coward.”

“It was Spider—” said Fat Charlie.

“Your own fault. Letting that old busybody send half of you away.”

“I was only a kid. Why didn’t you do anything?”

Anansi pushed the hat back on his head. “Ol’ Dunwiddy couldn’t do anything to you you didn’t let her do,” he said. “You’re my son, after all.”

Fat Charlie thought about this. Then he said, “But why didn’t you tell me?”

“You’re doing okay. You’re figurin’ it all out by yourself. You figured out the songs, didn’t you?”

Fat Charlie felt clumsier and fatter and even more of a disappointment to his father, but he didn’t simply say “No.” Instead he said, “What do you think?”

“I think you’re gettin’ there. The important thing about songs is that they’re just like stories. They don’t mean a damn unless there’s people listenin’ to them.”

They were approaching the end of the bridge. Fat Charlie knew, without being told, that this was the last chance they’d ever have to talk. There were so many things he needed to find out, so many things he wanted to know. He said, “Dad. When I was a kid. Why did you humiliate me?”

The old man’s brow creased. “Humiliate you? I loved you.”

“You got me to go to school dressed as President Taft. You call that love?”

There was a high-pitched yelp of something that might have been laughter from the old man, then he sucked on his cheroot. The smoke drifted from his lips like a ghostly speech balloon. “Your mother had something to say about that,” he said. Then he said, “We don’t have long, Charlie. You want to spend the time we got left fighting?”

Fat Charlie shook his head. “Guess not.”

They had reached the end of the bridge. “Now,” said his father. “When you see your brother. I want you to give him something from me.”

“What?”

His father reached up a hand, pulled Fat Charlie’s head down. Then he kissed him, gently, on the forehead. “That,” he said.

Fat Charlie straightened up. His father was looking up at him with an expression that, if he had seen it in anyone else’s face, he would have thought of as pride. “Let me see the feather,” said his father.

Fat Charlie reached into his pocket. The feather was there, looking even more crumpled and dilapidated than it looked before.

His father made a “tch” noise and held the feather up to the light. “This is a beautiful feather,” said his father. “You don’t want it to get all manky. She won’t take it back if it’s messed up.” Mr. Nancy ran his hand over the feather, and it was perfect. He frowned at it. “Now, you’ll just get it messed up again.” He breathed on his fingernails, polished them against his jacket. Then he seemed to have arrived at a decision. He removed his fedora and slipped the feather into the hatband. “Here. You could do with a natty hat anyway.” He put the hat onto Fat Charlie’s head. “It suits you,” he said.

Fat Charlie sighed. “Dad. I don’t wear hats. It’ll look stupid. I’ll look a complete tit. Why do you always try to embarrass me?”

In the fading light, the old man looked at his son. “You think I’d lie to you? Son, all you need to wear a hat is attitude. And you got that. You think I’d tell you you looked good if you didn’t? You look real sharp. You don’t believe me?”

Fat Charlie said, “Not really.”

“Look,” said his father. He pointed over the side of the bridge. The water beneath them was still and smooth as a mirror, and the man looking up at him from the water looked real sharp in his new green hat.

Fat Charlie looked up to tell his father that maybe he had been wrong, but the old man was gone.

He stepped off the bridge into the dusk.

“Right. I want to know exactly where he is. Where did he go? What have you done to him?”

“I didn’t do anything. Lord, child,” said Mrs. Higgler. “This never happened the last time.”

“It looked like he was beamed up to the mothership,” said Benjamin. “Cool. Real-life special effects.”

“I want you to bring him back,” said Daisy, fiercely. “I want him back now .”

“I don’t even know where he is,” said Mrs. Higgler. “And I didn’t send him there. He do that himself.”

“Anyway,” said Clarissa. “What if he’s off doing what he’s doing and we make him come back? We could ruin it all.”

“Exactly,” said Benjamin. “Like beaming the landing party back, halfway through their mission.”

Daisy thought about this and was irritated to realize that it made sense—as much as anything made sense these days, anyway.

“If nothing else is happening,” said Clarissa, “I ought to go back to the restaurant. Make sure everything’s all right.”

Mrs. Higgler sipped her coffee. “Nothin’ happenin’ here,” she agreed.

Daisy slammed her hand down on the table. “Excuse me. We’ve got a killer out there. And now Fat Charlie’s beamed up to the mastership.”

“Mothership,” said Benjamin.

Mrs. Higgler blinked. “Okay,” she said. “We should do something. What do you suggest?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Daisy and she hated herself for saying it. “Kill time, I suppose.” She picked up the copy of the Williamstown Courier that Mrs. Higgler had been reading and began to flip through it.

The story about the missing tourists, the women who hadn’t gone back to their cruise ship was a column on page three. The two at the house, said Grahame Coats in her head. Did you think I’d believe they were from the ship?

At the end of the day, Daisy was a cop.

“Get me the phone,” she said.

“Who are you calling?”

“I think we’ll start with the minister of tourism and the chief of police, and we’ll go on from there.”

The crimson sun was shrinking on the horizon. Spider, had he not been Spider, would have despaired. On the island, in that place, there was a clean line between day and night, and Spider watched the last red crumb of sun being swallowed by the sea. He had his stones and the two stakes.

He wished he had fire.

He wondered when the moon would be up. When the moon rose, he might have a chance.

The sun set—the final smudge of red sank into the dark sea, and it was night.

“Anansi’s child,” said a voice from out of the darkness. “Soon enough, I shall feed. You will not know I am there until you feel my breath on the back of your head. I stood above you, while you were staked out for me, and I could have crunched through your neck then and there, but I thought better of it. Killing you in your sleep would have brought me no pleasure. I want to feel you die. I want you to know why I have taken your life.”

Spider threw a rock toward where he thought the voice was coming from, and heard it crash harmlessly into the undergrowth.

“You have fingers,” said the voice, “but I have claws sharper than knives. You have your two legs, but I have four legs that will never tire, that can run ten times as fast as you ever will and keep on running. Your teeth can eat meat, if it has been made soft and tasteless by the fire, for you have little monkey teeth, good for chewing soft fruit and crawling bugs; but I have teeth that rend and tear the living flesh from the bones, and I can swallow it while the lifeblood still fountains into the sky.”

And then Spider made a noise. It was a noise that could be made without a tongue, without even opening his lips. It was a “meh” noise of amused disdain. You may be all these things, Tiger, it seemed to say, but so what? All the stories there ever were are Anansi’s. Nobody tells Tiger stories.

There was a roar from the darkness, a roar of fury and frustration.

Spider began to hum the tune of the “Tiger Rag.” It’s an old song, good for teasing tigers with: “Hold that tiger,” it goes. “Where’s that tiger?”

When the voice came next from the darkness, it was nearer.

“I have your woman, Anansi’s child. When I am done with you, I shall tear her flesh. Her meat will taste sweeter than yours.”

Spider made the “hmph!” sound people make when they know they’re being lied to.

“Her name is Rosie.”

Spider made an involuntary noise then.

In the darkness, someone laughed. “And as for eyes,” it said, “You have eyes that see the obvious, in broad daylight, if you are lucky, whereas my people have eyes that can see the hairs prickle on your arms as I talk to you, see the terror on your face, and see that in the nighttime. Fear me, Anansi’s child, and if you have any final prayers to say, say them now.”

Spider had no prayers, but he had rocks, and he could throw them. Perhaps he might get lucky, and a rock might do some damage in the darkness. Spider knew that it would be a miracle if it did, but he had spent his entire life relying on miracles.

He reached for another rock.

Something brushed the back of his hand.

Hello, said the little clay spider, in his mind.

Hi, thought Spider. Look, I’m a bit busy here, trying not to be eaten, so if you don’t mind keeping out of the way for a while—

But I brought them, thought the spider. Like you asked.

Like I asked?

You told me to go for help. I brought them back with me. They followed my web strand. There are no spiders in this creation, so I slipped back and webbed from there to here and from here to there again. I brought the warriors. I brought the brave.

“A penny for your thoughts,” said the big cat voice in the darkness. And then it said, with a certain refined amusement, “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?”

A single spider is silent. They cultivate silence. Even the ones that do make noises will normally remain as still as they can, waiting. So much of what spiders do is waiting.

The night was slowly filled with a gentle rustling.

Spider thought his gratitude and pride at the little seven legged spider he had made from his blood and spittle and from the earth. The spider scuttled from the back of his hand up to his shoulder.

Spider could not see them, but he knew they were all there: the great spiders and the small spiders, venomous spiders and biting spiders: huge hairy spiders and elegant chitinous spiders. Their eyes took whatever light they could find, but they saw through their legs and their feet, constructing vibrations into a virtual image of the world about them.

They were an army.

Tiger spoke again from the darkness. “When you are dead, Anansi’s child—when all of your bloodline is dead—then the stories will be mine. Once again, people will tell Tiger stories. They will gather together and praise my cunning and my strength, my cruelty and my joy. Every story will be mine. Every song will be mine. The world will be as it once was again: a hard place. A dark place.”

Spider listened to the rustle of his army.

He was sitting at the cliff edge for a reason. While it gave him nowhere to retreat to, it meant that Tiger could not charge, he could only creep.

Spider started to laugh.

“What are you laughing at, Anansi’s child? Have you lost your reason?”

At that, Spider laughed longer and louder.

There was a yowl from the darkness. Tiger had met Spider’s army.

Spider venom comes in many forms. It can often take a long while to discover the full effects of the bite. Naturalists have pondered this for years: there are spiders whose bite can cause the place bitten to rot and to die, sometimes more than a year after it was bitten. As to why spiders do this, the answer is simple. It’s because spiders think this is funny, and they don’t want you ever to forget them.

Black widow bites on Tiger’s bruised nose, tarantula bites on his ears: in moments his sensitive places burned and throbbed, swelled and itched. Tiger did not know what was happening: all he knew was the burning and the pain and the sudden fear.

Spider laughed, longer and louder, and listened to the sound of a huge animal bolting into the undergrowth, roaring in agony and in fright.

Then he sat and he waited. Tiger would be back, he had no doubt. It was not over yet.

Spider took the seven-legged spider from his shoulder and stroked it, running his fingers back and forth across its broad back.

A little way down the hill something glowed with a cold green luminescence, and it flickered, like the lights of a tiny city, flashing on and off into the night. It was coming toward him.

The flickering resolved itself into a hundred thousand fire-flies. Silhouetted and illuminated in the center of the firefly-light was a dark figure, man-shaped. It was walking steadily up the hill.

Spider raised a rock and mentally readied his spider troops for one more attack. And then he stopped. There was something familiar about the figure in the firefly-light; it wore a green fedora.

Grahame Coats was most of the way through a half bottle of rum he had found in the kitchen. He had opened the rum because he had no desire to go down into the wine cellar, and because he imagined it would get him drunk faster than wine would. Unfortunately, it didn’t. It did not seem to be doing much of anything, let alone providing the emotional off-switch he felt he needed. He walked around the house with a bottle in one hand and a half-full glass in the other, and sometimes he took a swig from one, and sometimes from the other. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror, hangdog and sweaty. “Cheer up,” he said aloud. “Might never happen. Cloud silver lining. Life rain mus’ fall. Too many cooks. ‘S an ill wind.” The rum was pretty much gone.

He went back into the kitchen. He opened several cupboards before he noticed a bottle of sherry toward the back. Grahame picked it up and cradled it gratefully, as if it were a very small old friend who had just returned after years at sea.

He unscrewed the top of the bottle. It was a sweet cooking sherry, but he drank it down like lemonade.

There were other things Grahame Coats had noticed while looking for alcohol in the kitchen. There were, for example, knives. Some of them were very sharp. In a drawer, there was even a small stainless steel hacksaw. Grahame Coats approved. It would be the very simple solution to the problem in the basement.

“Habeas corpus,” he said. “Or habeas delicti. One of those. If there is no body, then there was no crime. Ergo. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

He took his gun out of his jacket pocket, put it on the kitchen table. He arranged the knives around it in a pattern, like the spokes of a wheel. “Well,” he said, in the same tones he had once used to persuade innocent boy bands that it was time to sign their contract with him and to say hello to fame if not actually fortune, “no time like the present.”

He pushed three kitchen knives blade-down through his belt, placed the hacksaw in his jacket pocket, and then, gun in hand, he went down the cellar stairs. He turned on the lights, blinked at the wine bottles on their side, each in their rack, each covered with a thin layer of dust, and then he was standing beside the iron meat locker door.

“Right,” he shouted. “You’ll be pleased to hear that I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll be letting you both go now. All a bit of a mistake. Still, no hard feelings. No use crying over spilt. Stand by the far wall. Assume the position. No funny stuff.”

It was, he reflected, as he pulled back the bolts, almost comforting how many clichés already exist for people holding guns. It made Grahame Coats feel like one of a brotherhood: Bogart stood beside him, and Cagney, and all the people who shout at each other on COPS.

He turned the light on and pulled open the door. Rosie’s mother stood against the far wall, with her back to him. As he came in, she flipped up her skirt and waggled an astonishingly bony brown bottom.

His jaw dropped open. That was when Rosie slammed down a length of rusty chain onto Grahame Coats’s wrist, sending the gun flying across the room.

With the enthusiasm and accuracy of a much younger woman, Rosie’s mother kicked Grahame Coats in the groin, and as he clutched his crotch and doubled up, making noises pitched at a level that only dogs and bats could hear, Rosie and her mother stumbled out of the meat locker.

They pushed the door closed and Rosie pushed shut one of the bolts. They hugged.

They were still in the wine cellar when all the lights went off.

“It’s just the fuses,” said Rosie, to reassure her mother. She was not certain that she believed it, but she had no other explanation.

“You should have locked both bolts,” said her mother. And then, “Ow,” as she stubbed her toe on something, and cursed.

“On the bright side,” said Rosie, “He can’t see in the dark either. Just hold my hand. I think the stairs are up this way.”

Grahame Coats was down on all fours on the concrete floor of the meat cellar, in the darkness, when the lights went out. There was something hot dripping down his leg. He thought for one uncomfortable moment that he had wet himself, before he understood that the blade of one of the knives he had pushed into his belt had cut deeply into the top of his leg.

He stopped moving and lay on the floor. He decided that he had been very sensible to have drunk so much: it was practically an anaesthetic. He decided to go to sleep.

He was not alone in the meat locker. There was someone in there with him. Something that moved on four legs.

Somebody growled, “Get up.”

“Can’t get up. I’m hurt. Want to go to bed.”

“You’re a pitiful little creature and you destroy everything you touch. Now get up.”

“Would love to,” said Grahame Coats in the reasonable tones of a drunk. “Can’t. Just going to lie on the floor for a bit. Anyway. She bolted the door. I heard her.”

He heard a scraping from the other side of the door, as if a bolt was slowly being released.

“The door is open. Now: if you stay here, you’ll die.” An impatient rustling; the swish of a tail; a roar, half-muffled in the back of a throat. “Give me your hand and your allegiance. Invite me inside you.”

“I don’t underst—”

“Give me your hand, or bleed to death.”

In the black of the meat cellar, Grahame Coats put out his hand. Someone—something—took it and held it, reassuringly. “Now, are you willing to invite me in?”

A moment of cold sobriety touched Grahame Coats then. He had already gone too far. Nothing he did would make matters worse, after all.

“Absatively,” whispered Grahame Coats, and as he said it he began to change. He could see through the darkness easy as daylight. He thought, but only for a moment, that he saw something beside him, bigger than a man, with sharp, sharp teeth. And then it was gone, and Grahame Coats felt wonderful. The blood no longer spurted from his leg.

He could see clearly in the darkness. He pulled the knives from his belt, dropped them onto the floor. He pulled off his shoes, too. There was a gun on the ground, but he left it there. Tools were for apes and crows and weaklings. He was no ape.

He was a hunter.

He pulled himself up onto his hands and his knees, and then he padded, four-footed, out into the wine cellar.

He could see the women. They had found the steps up to the house, and they were edging up them blindly, hand-in-hand in the darkness.

One of them was old and stringy. The other was young and tender. The mouth salivated in something that was only partly Grahame Coats.

Fat Charlie left the bridge, with his father’s green fedora pushed back on his head, and he walked into the dusk. He walked up the rocky beach, slipping on the rocks, splashing into pools. Then he trod on something that moved. A stumble, and he stepped off it.

It rose into the air, and it kept rising. Whatever it was, it was enormous: he thought at first that it was the size of an elephant, but it grew bigger still.

Light, thought Fat Charlie. He sang aloud, and all the lightning bugs, the fireflies of that place, clustered around him, flickering off and on with their cold green luminescence, and in their light he could make out two eyes, bigger than dinner plates, staring down at him from a supercilious reptilian face.

He stared back. “Evening,” he said, cheerfully.

A voice from the creature, smooth as buttered oil. “He-llo,” it said. “Ding-dong. You look remarkably like dinner.”

“I’m Charlie Nancy,” said Charlie Nancy. “Who are you?”

“I am Dragon,” said the dragon. “And I shall devour you in one slow mouthful, little man in a hat.”

Charlie blinked. What would my father do? he wondered. What would Spider have done? He had absolutely no idea. Come on. After all, Spider’s sort of a part of me. I can do whatever he can do.

“Er. You’re bored with talking to me now, and you’re going to let me pass unhindered,” he told the dragon, with as much conviction as he was able to muster.

“Gosh. Good try. But I’m afraid I’m not,” said the dragon, enthusiastically. “Actually, I’m going to eat you.”

“You aren’t scared of limes, are you?” asked Charlie, before remembering that he’d given the lime to Daisy.

The creature laughed, scornfully. “I,” it said, “am frightened of nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing,” it said.

Charlie said, “Are you extremely frightened of nothing?”

“Absolutely terrified of it,” admitted the Dragon.

“You know,” said Charlie, “I have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?”

“No,” said the Dragon, uncomfortably, “I most definitely would not.”

There was a flapping of wings like sails, and Charlie was alone on the beach. “That,” he said, “was much too easy.”

He kept on walking. He made up a song for his walk. Charlie had always wanted to make up songs, but he never did, mostly because of the conviction that if he ever had written a song, someone would have asked him to sing it, and that would not have been a good thing, much as death by hanging would not be a good thing. Now, he cared less and less, and he sang his song to the fireflies, who followed him up the hillside. It was a song about meeting the Bird Woman and finding his brother. He hoped the fireflies were enjoying it: their light seemed to be pulsing and flickering in time with the tune.

The Bird Woman was waiting for him at the top of the hill.

Charlie took off his hat. He pulled the feather from the hatband.

“Here. This is yours, I believe.”

She made no move to take it.

“Our deal’s over,” said Charlie. “I brought your feather. I want my brother. You took him. I want him back. Anansi’s bloodline was not mine to give.”

“And if I no longer have your brother?”

It was hard to tell, in the firefly light, but Charlie did not believe that her lips had moved. Her words surrounded him, however, in the cries of nightjars, and in the owls’ shrieks and hoots.

“I want my brother back,” he told her. “I want him whole and in one piece and uninjured. And I want him now. Or whatever went on between you and my father over the years was just the prelude. You know. The overture.”

Charlie had never threatened anyone before. He had no idea how he would carry out his threats—but he had no doubt that he would indeed carry them out.

“I had him,” she said, in the bittern’s distant boom “But I left him, tongueless, in Tiger’s world. I could not hurt your father’s line. Tiger could, once he found his courage.”

A hush. The night frogs and the night birds were perfectly silent. She stared at him impassively, her face almost part of the shadows. Her hand went into the pocket of her coat. “Give me the feather,” she said.

Charlie put it into her hand.

He felt lighter, then, as if she had taken more from him than just an old feather—

Then she placed something into his hand: something cold and damp. It felt like a lump of meat, and Charlie had to quell the urge to fling it away.

“Return it to him,” she said, in the voice of the night. “He has no quarrel with me now.”

“How do I get to Tiger’s world?”

“How did you get here?” she asked, sounding almost amused, and the night was complete, and Charlie was alone on the hill.

He opened his hand and looked at the lump of meat that sat there, floppy and ridged. It looked like a tongue, and he knew whose tongue it had to be.

He put the fedora back on his head, and he thought, Put my thinking cap on, and as he thought it, it didn’t seem so funny. The green fedora was not a thinking cap: but it was the kind of hat that would be worn by someone who not only thought but also came to conclusions of an important and vital kind.

He imagined the worlds as a web: it blazed in his mind, connecting him to everyone he knew. The strand that connected him to Spider was strong and bright, and it burned with a cold light, like a lightning bug or a star.

Spider had been a part of him once. He held onto this knowledge and let the web fill his mind. And in his hand was his brother’s tongue: that had been part of Spider until very recently, and it wished devoutly to be part of him again. Living things remember.

The wild light of the web burned about him. All Charlie needed to do was follow it—

He followed it, and the fireflies clustered around and traveled with him.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s me.”

Spider made a small, terrible noise.

In the glimmer of firefly light, Spider looked awful: he looked hunted and he looked hurt. There were scabs on his face and chest.

“I think this is probably yours,” said Charlie.

Spider took the tongue from his brother, with an exaggerated thank you gesture, placed it into his mouth, pushed it in, and held it down. Charlie watched and waited. Soon Spider seemed satisfied—he moved his mouth experimentally, pushing the tongue to one side and then to the other, as if he were preparing to shave off a moustache, opening his mouth widely and waggling his tongue about. He closed his mouth and stood up. Finally, in a voice that was still a little wobbly around the edges, he said, “Nice hat.”

Rosie made it to the top of the steps first, and she pushed open the wine cellar door. She stumbled into the house. She waited for her mother, then she slammed and bolted the cellar door. The power was out here, but the moon was high and nearly full, and, after the darkness, the pallid moonlight coming through the kitchen windows might as well have been floodlighting.

Boys and girls come out to play, thought Rosie. The moon does shine as bright as day—

“Phone the police,” said her mother.

“Where’s the phone?”

“How the hell should I know where the phone is? He’s still down there.”

“Right,” said Rosie, wondering whether she should find a phone to call the police or just get out of the house, but before she had reached a decision, it was too late.

There was a bang so loud it hurt her ears, and the door to the cellar crashed open.

The shadow came out of the cellar.

It was real. She knew it was real. She was looking at it. But it was impossible: it was the shadow of a great cat, shaggy and huge. Strangely, though, when the moonlight touched it, the shadow seemed darker. Rosie could not see its eyes, but she knew it was looking at her, and that it was hungry.

It was going to kill her. This was where it would end.

Her mother said, “It wants you, Rosie.”

“I know.”

Rosie picked up the nearest large object, a wooden block that had once held knives, and she threw it at the shadow as hard as she could, and then, without waiting to see if it made contact, she moved as fast as she could out of the kitchen, into the hallway. She knew where the front door was—

Something dark, something four-footed, moved faster: it bounded over her head, landing almost silently in front of her.

Rosie backed up against the wall. Her mouth was dry.

The beast was between them and the front door, and it was padding slowly toward Rosie, as if it had all the time in the world.

Her mother ran out of the kitchen then, then, ran past Rosie—tottered down the moonlit corridor toward the great shadow, her arms flailing. With her thin fists she punched the thing in the ribs. There was a pause, as if the world was holding its breath, and then it turned on her. A blur of motion and Rosie’s mother was down on the ground, while the shadow shook her like a dog with a rag doll between its teeth.

The doorbell rang.

Rosie wanted to call for help but instead she found she was screaming, loudly and insistently. Rosie, when confronted with an unexpected spider in a bathtub, was capable of screaming like a B-movie actress on her first encounter with a man in a rubber suit. Now she was in a dark house containing a shadowy tiger and a potential serial killer, and one, perhaps both, of those entities, had just attacked her mother. Her head thought of a couple of courses of action (the gun: the gun was down in the cellar. She ought to go down and get the gun. Or the door—she could try to get past her mother and the shadow and unlock the front door) but her lungs and her mouth would only scream.

Something banged at the front door. They’re trying to break in, she thought. They won’t get through that door. It’s solid.

Her mother lay on the floor in a patch of moonlight, and the shadow crouched above her, and it threw back its head and it roared, a deep rattling roar of fear and challenge and possession.

I’m hallucinating, thought Rosie with a wild certainty. I’ve been locked up in a cellar for two days and now I’m hallucinating. There is no tiger.

By the same token, she was certain that there was no pale woman in the moonlight, even though she could see her walking down the corridor, a woman with blonde hair and the long, long legs and narrow hips of a dancer. The woman stopped when she reached the shadow of the tiger. She said, “Hello, Grahame.”

The shadow-beast lifted its massive head and growled.

“Don’t think you can hide from me in that silly animal costume,” said the woman. She did not look pleased.

Rosie realized that she could see the window through the woman’s upper body, and she backed up until she was pressing hard against the wall.

The beast growled again, this time a little more uncertainly.

The woman said, “I don’t believe in ghosts, Grahame. I spent my life, my whole life, not believing in ghosts. And then I met you. You let Morris’s career run aground. You steal from us. You murder me. And finally, to add insult to injury, you force me to believe in ghosts.”

The shadowy big-cat-shape was whimpering now, and backing down the hall.

“Don’t think you can avoid me like that, you useless little man. You can pretend to be a tiger all you like. You aren’t a tiger. You’re a rat. No, that’s an insult to a noble and numerous species of rodent. You’re less than a rat. You’re a gerbil. You’re a stoat.”

Rosie ran down the hall. She ran past the shadow-beast, past her fallen mother. She ran through the pale woman, and it felt like she was passing through fog. She reached the front door, and began feeling for the bolts.

In her head or in the world Rosie could hear an argument. Someone was saying,

Pay no attention to her, idiot. She can’t touch you. It’s just a duppy. She’s barely real. Get the girl! Stop the girl!

And someone else was replying,

You certainly do have a valid point here. But I’m not convinced that you’ve taken all the circumstances into account, vis-à-vis, well, discretion, um, better part of valor, if you follow me—

I lead. You follow.

But—

“What I want to know,” said the pale woman, “is just how ghostly you currently are. I mean, I can’t touch people. I can’t really even touch things. I can touch ghosts.”

The pale woman aimed a serious kick at the beast’s face. The shadow-cat hissed and took a step back, and the foot missed it by less than an inch.

The next kick connected, and the beast yowled. Another kick, hard against the place the cat’s shadowy nose would be, and the beast made the noise of a cat being shampooed, a lonely wail of horror and outrage, of shame and defeat.

The corridor was filled with the sound of a dead woman laughing, a laugh of exultation and delight. “Stoat,” said the pale woman’s voice again. “Grahame Stoat.”

A cold wind blew through the house.

Rosie pulled the last of the bolts, and she turned the lock. The front door fell open. There were the beams of flashlights, blinding-bright. People. Cars. A woman’s voice said, “It’s one of the missing tourists.” And then she said, “My God.”

Rosie turned.

In the flashlight’s beam Rosie could see her mother, crumpled on the tiled floor and, beside her, shoeless and unconscious and unmistakably human, Grahame Coats. There was a red liquid splashed all around them, like crimson paint, and Rosie found herself, for a breath, unable to work out what it was.

A woman was talking to her. She was saying, “You’re Rosie Noah. My name’s Daisy. Let’s find somewhere for you to sit down. Would you like to sit down?”

Someone must have found the fuse box, for at that moment the lights went on all over the house.

A large man in a police uniform was bent over the bodies. He looked up and said, “It is definitely Mr. Finnegan. He is not breathing.”

Rosie said, “Yes, please. I would like to sit down very much.”

Charlie sat beside Spider on the edge of the cliff, in the moonlight, his legs dangling over the side.

“You know,” he said, “you used to be a part of me. When we were kids.”

Spider put his head on one side. “Really?”

“I think so.”

“Well, that would explain a few things.” He held out his hand: a seven-legged clay spider sat on the back of his fingers, tasting the air. “So what now? Are you going to take me back or something?”

Charlie’s brow crinkled. “I think you’ve turned out better than you would have done if you were part of me. And you’ve had a lot more fun.”

Spider said, “Rosie. Tiger knows about Rosie. We have to do something.”

“Of course we do,” said Charlie. It was like bookkeeping, he thought: you put entries in one column, deduct them from another, and if you’ve done it correctly, everything should come out right at the bottom of the page. He took his brother’s hand.

They stood up and took a step forward, off the cliff—

—and everything was bright—

A cold wind blew between the worlds.

Charlie said, “You’re not the magical bit of me, you know.”

“I’m not?” Spider took another step. Stars were falling now by the dozen, streaking their way across the dark sky. Someone, somewhere, was playing high sweet music on a flute.

Another step, and now distant sirens were blaring. “No,” said Charlie. “You’re not. Mrs. Dunwiddy thought you were, I think. She split us apart, but she never really understood what she was doing. We’re more like two halves of a starfish. You grew up into a whole person. And so,” he said, realizing it was true as he said it, “did I.”

They stood on the cliff edge in the dawn. An ambulance was on its way up the hill, lights flashing, and another behind that. They parked by the side of the road, beside a cluster of police cars.

Daisy seemed to be telling everyone what to do.

“Not much that we can do here. Not now,” said Charlie. “Come on.” The last of the fireflies left him, and blinked its way to sleep.

They rode the first minibus of the morning back to Williamstown.

Maeve Livingstone sat upstairs in the library of Grahame Coats’s house, surrounded by Grahame Coats’s art and books and DVDs, and she stared out of the window. Down below the island’s emergency services were putting Rosie and her mother into one ambulance, Grahame Coats into another.

She had, she reflected, really enjoyed kicking the beast-thing that Grahame Coats had become. It was the most profoundly satisfying thing she had done since she had been killed—although if she were to be honest with herself, she would have to admit that dancing with Mr. Nancy came in an extremely close second. He had been remarkably spry, and nimble on his feet.

She was tired.

“Maeve?”

“Morris?” She looked around her, but the room was empty.

“I wouldn’t want to disturb you, if you were still busy, pet.”

“That’s very sweet of you,” she said. “But I think I’m done now.”

The walls of the library were beginning to fade. They were losing color and form. The world behind the walls was starting to show, and in its light she saw a small figure in a smart suit waiting for her.

Her hand crept into his. She said, “Where are we going now, Morris?”

He told her.

“Oh. Well, that will be a pleasant change,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

And, hand in hand, they went.