Anansi Boys

Chapter Seven

The immigration officer squinted at Fat Charlie’s American passport as if she were disappointed he was not a foreign national of the kind she could simply stop coming into the country then, with a sigh, she waved him through.

He wondered what he was going to do once he got through customs. Rent a car, he supposed. And eat.

He got off the tram and walked through the security barrier, out into the wide shopping concourse of Orlando Airport, and was nowhere nearly as surprised as he should have been to see Mrs. Higgler standing there, scanning the faces of the arrivals, her enormous mug of coffee clutched in her hand. They saw each other at more or less the same moment, and she headed toward him.

“You hungry?” she asked him.

He nodded.

“Well,” she said, “I hope you like turkey.”

Fat Charlie wondered if Mrs. Higgler’s maroon station wagon was the same car he remembered her driving when he was a boy. He suspected that it was. It must have been new once, that stood to reason. Everything was new once, after all. The seats were cracked and flaking leather; the dashboard was a dusty wooden veneer.

A brown paper shopping bag sat between them, on the seat.

There was no cup holder in Mrs. Higgler’s ancient car, and she clamped the jumbo mug of coffee between her thighs as she drove. The car appeared to predate air-conditioning, and she drove with the windows down. Fat Charlie did not mind. After the damp chill of England, the Florida heat was welcome. Mrs. Higgler headed south toward the toll road. She talked as she drove. She talked about the last hurricane, and about how she took her nephew Benjamin to SeaWorld and to Walt Disney World and how none of the tourist resorts were what they once were, about building codes, the price of gas, exactly what she had said to the doctor who had suggested a hip replacement, why tourists kept feeding ‘gators, and why newcomers built houses on the beaches and were always surprised when the beach or the house went away or the ‘gators ate their dogs. Fat Charlie let it all wash over him. It was just talk.

Mrs. Higgler slowed down and took the ticket that would take her down the toll road. She stopped talking. She seemed to be thinking.

“So,” she said. “You met your brother.”

“You know,” said Fat Charlie, “you could have warned me.”

“I did warn you that he is a god.”

“You didn’t mention that he was a complete and utter pain in the arse, though.”

Mrs. Higgler sniffed. She took a swig of coffee from her mug.

“Is there anywhere we can stop and get a bite to eat?” asked Fat Charlie. “They only had cereal and bananas on the plane. No spoons. And they ran out of milk before they got to my row. They said they were sorry and gave us all food vouchers to make up for it.”

Mrs. Higgler shook her head.

“I could have used my voucher to get a hamburger in the airport.”

“I tell you already,” said Mrs. Higgler. “Louella Dunwiddy been cooking you a turkey. How do you think she feels if we get there and you fill up already at McDonald’s and you ain’t got no appetite. Eh?”

“But I’m starving. And it’s over two hours away.”

“Not,” she said firmly, “the way I drive.”

And with that she put her foot down. Every now and then, as the maroon station wagon shuddered down the freeway, Fat Charlie would close his eyes tightly while at the same time pushing his own left foot down on an imaginary brake pedal. It was exhausting work.

In significantly less than two hours they reached the tollway exit and got onto a local highway. They drove toward the city. They drove past the Barnes and Noble and the Office Depot. They went past the seven-figure houses with security gates. They went down the older residential streets, which Fat Charlie remembered as being much better cared-for when he was a boy. They went past the West Indian takeaway and the restaurant with the Jamaican flag in the windows, with handwritten signs pushing the oxtail and rice specials and the homemade ginger beer and the curry chicken.

Fat Charlie’s mouth watered; his stomach made a noise.

A lurch and a bounce. Now the houses were older, and this time everything was familiar.

The pink plastic flamingos were still striking attitudes in Mrs. Dunwiddy’s front yard, although the sun had faded them almost white over the years. There was a mirrored gazing ball as well, and when Fat Charlie spotted it he was, only for a moment, as scared as he had ever been of anything.

“How bad is it, with Spider?” asked Mrs. Higgler, as they walked up to Mrs. Dunwiddy’s front door.

“Put it this way,” said Fat Charlie. “I think he’s sleeping with my fiancée. Which is rather more than I ever did.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Higgler. “Tch.” And she rang the doorbell.

It was sort of like Macbeth, thought Fat Charlie, an hour later; in fact, if the witches in Macbeth had been four little old ladies and if, instead of stirring cauldrons and intoning dread incantations, they had just welcomed Macbeth in and fed him turkey and rice and peas spread out on white china plates on a red-and-white patterned plastic tablecloth—not to mention sweet potato pudding and spicy cabbage—and encouraged him to take second helpings, and thirds, and then, when Macbeth had declaimed that nay, he was stuffed nigh unto bursting and on his oath could truly eat no more, the witches had pressed upon him their own special island rice pudding and a large slice of Mrs. Bustamonte’s famous pineapple upside-down cake, it would have been exactly like Macbeth.

“So,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy, scratching a crumb of pineapple upside-down cake from the corner of her mouth, “I understand your brother come to see you.”

“Yes. I talked to a spider. I suppose it was my own fault. I never expected anything to happen.”

A chorus of tuts and tsks and tchs ran around the table as Mrs. Higgler and Mrs. Dunwiddy and Mrs. Bustamonte and Miss Noles clicked their tongues and shook their heads. “He always used to say you were the stupid one,” said Miss Noles. “Your father, that is. I never believed him.”

“Well, how was I to know?” Fat Charlie protested. “It’s not as if my parents ever said to me, ‘By the way, Son, you have a brother you don’t know about. Invite him into your life and he’ll have you investigated by the police, he’ll sleep with your fiancée, he’ll not just move into your home but bring an entire extra house into your spare room. And he’ll brainwash you and make you go to films and spend all night trying to get home and—’ ” He stopped. It was the way they were looking at him.

A sigh went around the table. It went from Mrs. Higgler to Miss Noles to Mrs. Bustamonte to Mrs. Dunwiddy. It was extremely unsettling and quite spooky, but Mrs. Bustamonte belched and ruined the effect.

“So what do you want?” asked Mrs. Dunwiddy. “Say what you want.”

Fat Charlie thought about what he wanted, in Mrs. Dunwiddy’s little dining room. Outside, the daylight was fading into a gentle twilight.

“He’s made my life a misery,” said Fat Charlie. “I want you to make him go away. Just go away. Can you do that?”

The three younger women said nothing. They simply looked at Mrs. Dunwiddy.

“We can’t actually make him go away,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. “We already—” and she stopped herself, and said, “Well, we done all we can about that, you see.”

It is to Fat Charlie’s credit that he did not, as deep down he might have wished to, burst into tears or wail or collapse in on himself like a problematic soufflé. He simply nodded. “Well, then,” he said. “Sorry to have bothered you all. Thank you for the dinner.”

“We can’t make him go away,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy, her old brown eyes almost black behind her pebble-thick spectacles. “But we can send you to somebody who can.”

It was early evening in Florida, which meant that in London it was the dead of night. In Rosie’s big bed, where Fat Charlie had never been, Spider shivered.

Rosie pressed close to him, skin to skin. “Charles,” she said. “Are you all right?” She could feel the goose pimples bumping the skin of his arms.

“I’m fine,” said Spider. “Sudden creepy feeling.”

“Somebody walking over your grave,” said Rosie.

He pulled her close then, and he kissed her.

And Daisy was sitting in the small common room of the house in Hendon, wearing a bright green nightdress and fluffy, vivid pink carpet slippers. She was sitting in front of a computer screen, shaking her head and clicking the mouse.

“You going to be much longer?” asked Carol. “You know, there’s a whole computer unit that’s meant to be doing that. Not you.”

Daisy made a noise. It was not a yes-noise and it was not a no-noise. It was an I-know-somebody-just-said-something-to-me-and-if-I-make-a-noise-maybe-they’ll-go-away sort of noise.

Carol had heard that noise before.

“Oy,” she said. “Big bum. Are you going to be much longer? I want to do my blog.”

Daisy processed the words. Two of them sank in. “Are you saying I’ve got a big bum?”

“No,” said Carol. “I’m saying that it’s getting late, and I want to do me blog. I’m going to have him shagging a supermodel in the loo of an unidentified London nightspot.”

Daisy sighed. “All right,” she said. “It’s just fishy, that’s all.”

“What’s fishy?”

“Embezzlement. I think. Right, I’ve logged out. It’s all yours. You know you can get into trouble for impersonating a member of the royal family.”

“Bog off.”

Carol blogged as a member of the British Royal Family, young, male, and out-of-control. There had been arguments in the press about whether or not she was the real thing, many of them pointing to things she wrote that could only have been known to an actual member of the British Royal Family, or to someone who read the glossy gossip magazines.

Daisy got up from the computer, still pondering the financial affairs of the Grahame Coats Agency.

While fast asleep in his bedroom, in a large but certainly not ostentatious house in Purley, Grahame Coats slept. If there was any justice in the world, he would have moaned and sweated in his sleep, tortured by nightmares, the furies of his conscience lashing him with scorpions. Thus it pains me to admit that Grahame Coats slept like a well-fed milk-scented baby, and he dreamed of nothing at all.

Somewhere in Grahame Coats’s house, a grandfather clock chimed politely, twelve times. In London, it was midnight. In Florida it was seven in the evening.

Either way, it was the witching hour.

Mrs. Dunwiddy removed the plasticated red-and-white check tablecloth and put it away.

She said, “Who’s got the black candles?”

Miss Noles said, “I got the candles.” She had a shopping bag at her feet, and she rummaged about in it, producing four candles. They were mostly black. One of them was tall and undecorated. The other three were in the shape of a cartoon black-and-yellow penguin, with the wick coming out of his head. “It was all they got,” she said apologetically. “And I had to go to three stores until I found anything.”

Mrs. Dunwiddy said nothing, but she shook her head. She arranged the four candles at the four ends of the table, taking the single nonpenguin at the head of the table, where she sat. Each of the candles sat on a plastic picnic plate. Mrs. Dunwiddy took a large box of kosher salt, and she opened the spout and poured salt crystals on the table in a pile. Then she glared at the salt and pushed at it with a withered forefinger, prodding it into heaps and whorls.

Miss Noles came back from the kitchen with a large glass bowl, which she placed at the center of the table. She unscrewed the top from a bottle of sherry and poured a generous helping of sherry into the bowl.

“Now,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy, “the devil grass, the St. John the Conqueror root, and the love-lies-bleeding.”

Mrs. Bustamonte rummaged in her shopping bag and took out a small glass jar. “It’s mixed herbs,” she explained. “I thought it would be all right.”

“Mixed herbs!” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. “Mixed herbs!”

“Will that be a problem?” said Mrs. Bustamonte. “It’s what I always use when the recipe says basil this or oregano that. I can’t be doin’ with it. You ask me, it’s all mixed herbs.”

Mrs. Dunwiddy sighed. “Pour it in,” she said.

Half a bottle of mixed herbs was poured into the sherry. The dried leaves floated on the top of the liquid.

“Now,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy, “The four earths. I hope,” she said, choosing her words with care, “that no one here going to tell me that they could not get the four earths, and now we have to make do with a pebble, a dead jellyfish, a refrigerator magnet, and a bar of soap.”

“I got the earths,” said Mrs. Higgler. She produced her brown paper bag, and pulled from it four Ziploc bags each containing what looked like sand or dried clay, each of a different color. She emptied each bag at one of the four corners of the table.

“Glad somebody is payin’ attention,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy.

Miss Noles lit the candles, pointing out as she did so how easily the penguins lit, and how cute and funny they were.

Mrs. Bustamonte poured out a glass of leftover sherry for each of the four women.

“Don’t I get a glass?” asked Fat Charlie, but he didn’t really want one. He didn’t like sherry.

“No,” said Mrs Dunwiddy, firmly, “you don’t. You’ll need your wits about you.” She reached into her purse and took out a small, gold-colored pill case.

Mrs. Higgler turned off the lights.

They five of them sat around the table in the candlelight.

“Now what?” asked Fat Charlie. “Shall we all join hands and contact the living?”

“We do not,” whispered Mrs. Dunwiddy. “And I do not want to hear another word out of you.”

“Sorry,” said Fat Charlie, then wished he hadn’t said it.

“Listen,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. “You will go where they may help you. Even so, give away nothing you own, and make no promises. You understand? If you have to give somebody something, then make sure you get something of equal value in return. Yes?”

Fat Charlie nearly said “yes,” but he caught himself in time and simply nodded.

“It is good.” And with that, Mrs. Dunwiddy began to hum tunelessly, in her old old voice which quavered and faltered.

Miss Noles also began to hum, rather more melodically. Her voice was higher and stronger.

Mrs. Bustamonte did not hum. She hissed instead, an intermittent, snakelike hissing, which seemed to find the rhythm of the humming and weave through it and beneath it.

Mrs. Higgler started up, and she did not hum, and she did not hiss. She buzzed, like a fly against a window, making a vibrating noise with her tongue and her teeth as odd and as unlikely as if she had a handful of angry bees in her mouth, buzzing against her teeth, trying to get out.

Fat Charlie wondered if he should join in, but he had no idea what sort of thing he ought to do if he did, so he concentrated on sitting there and trying not to be weirded-out by all the noises.

Mrs. Higgler threw a pinch of red earth into the bowl of sherry and mixed herbs. Mrs. Bustamonte threw in a pinch of the yellow earth. Miss Noles threw in the brown earth, while Mrs. Dunwiddy leaned over, painstakingly slowly, and dropped in a lump of black mud.

Mrs. Dunwiddy took a sip of her sherry. Then, with arthritic fingers fumbling and pushing, she took something from the pill case and dropped it into the candle flame. For a moment the room smelled of lemons, and then it simply smelled as if something was burning.

Miss Noles began to drum on the tabletop. She did not stop humming. The candle flames flickered, dancing huge shadows across the walls. Mrs. Higgler began to tap on the tabletop as well, her fingers knocking out a different beat to Miss Noles’s, faster, more percussive, the two drumbeats twining to form a new rhythm.

In Fat Charlie’s mind all the sounds began to blend into one strange sound: the humming and the hissing and the buzzing and the drums. He was starting to feel light-headed. Everything was funny. Everything was unlikely. In the noises of the women he could hear the sound of wildlife in the forest, hear the crackling of enormous fires. His fingers felt stretched and rubbery, his feet were an immensely long way away.

It seemed then that he was somewhere above them, somewhere above everything, and that beneath him there were five people around a table. Then one of the women at the table gestured and dropped something into the bowl in the middle of the table, and it flared up so brightly that Fat Charlie was momentarily blinded. He shut his eyes, which, he found, did no good at all. Even with his eyes closed, everything was much too bright for comfort.

He rubbed his eyes against the daylight. He looked around.

A sheer rock face skyscrapered up behind him: the side of a mountain. Ahead of him was a sheer drop: cliffs, going down. He walked to the cliff edge and, warily, looked over. He saw some white things, and he thought they were sheep until he realized that they were clouds; large, white, fluffy clouds, a very long way below him. And then, beneath the clouds, there was nothing: he could see the blue sky, and it seemed if he kept looking he could see the blackness of space, and beyond that nothing but the chill twinkling of stars.

He took a step back from the cliff edge.

Then he turned and walked back toward the mountains, which rose up and up, so high that he could not see the tops of them, so high that he found himself convinced that they were falling on him, that they would tumble down and bury him forever. He forced himself to look down again, to keep his eyes on the ground, and in so doing, he noticed holes in the rock face near ground level which looked like entrances to natural caves.

The place between the mountainside and the cliffs, on which he was standing, was, he guessed, less than quarter of a mile wide: a boulder-strewn sandy path dotted with patches of greenery and, here and there, a dusty brown tree. The path seemed to follow the mountainside until it faded into a distant haze.

Someone is watching me, thought Fat Charlie. “Hello?” he called, lifting his head back. “Hello, is anybody there?”

The man who stepped out of the nearest cave mouth was much darker of skin than Fat Charlie, darker even than Spider, but his long hair was a tawny yellow and it framed his face like a mane. He wore a ragged yellow lion-skin around his waist, with a lion’s tail hanging down from it behind, and the tail swished a fly from his shoulders.

The man blinked his golden eyes.

“Who are you?” he rumbled. “And on whose authority do you walk in this place?”

“I’m Fat Charlie Nancy,” said Fat Charlie. “Anansi the Spider was my father.”

The massive head nodded. “And why do you come here, Compé Anansi’s child?”

They were alone on the rocks, as far as Fat Charlie knew, yet it felt as if there were many people listening, many voices saying nothing, many ears twitching. Fat Charlie spoke loudly, so that anyone listening could hear. “My brother. He is ruining my life. I don’t have the power to make him leave.”

“So you seek our help?” asked the lion.

“Yes.”

“And this brother. He is, like you, of Anansi’s blood?”

“He’s not like me at all,” said Fat Charlie. “He’s one of you people.”

A fluid, golden movement; the man-lion bounded down lightly, lazily, from the cave mouth, over the gray rocks, covering fifty yards in moments. Now he stood beside Fat Charlie. His tail swished impatiently.

His arms folded, he looked down at Fat Charlie and said, “Why do you not deal with this matter yourself?”

Fat Charlie’s mouth had dried. His throat felt extremely dusty. The creature facing him, taller than any man, did not smell like a man. The tips of his canine teeth rested on his lower lips.

“Can’t,” squeaked Fat Charlie.

From the mouth of the next cave along, an immense man leaned out. His skin was a brownish gray, and he had rumpled, wrinkled skin and round, round legs. “If you and your brother quarrel,” he said, “then you must ask your father to judge between you. Submit to the will of the head of the family. That is the law.” He threw his head back and made a noise then, in the back of his nose and in his throat, a powerful trumpeting noise, and Fat Charlie knew he was looking at Elephant.

Fat Charlie swallowed. “My father is dead,” he said, and now his voice was clear again, cleaner and louder than he expected. It echoed from the cliff wall, bounced back at him from a hundred cave mouths, a hundred jutting outcrops of rock. Dead dead dead dead dead, said the echo. “That’s why I came here.”

Lion said, “I have no love for Anansi the Spider. Once, long ago, he tied me to a log, and had a donkey drag me through the dust, to the seat of Mawu who made all things.” He growled at the memory, and Fat Charlie wanted to be somewhere else.

“Walk on,” said Lion. “There may be someone here who will help you, but it is not I.”

Elephant said, “Nor I. Your father tricked me and ate my belly fat. He told me he was making me some shoes to wear, and he cooked me, and he laughed as he filled his stomach. I do not forget.”

Fat Charlie walked on.

In the next cave mouth along stood a man wearing a natty green suit and a sharp hat with a snakeskin band around it. He wore snakeskin boots and a snakeskin belt. He hissed as Fat Charlie came past. “Walk on, Anansi’s boy,” Snake said, his voice a dry rattle. “Your whole damn family nothin’ but trouble. I ain’t gettin’ mixed up in your messes.”

The woman in the next cave mouth was very beautiful, and her eyes were black oil drops, and her whiskers were snowy white against her skin. She had two rows of breasts down her chest.

“I knew your father,” she said. “Long time back. Hoo-ee.” She shook her head in memory, and Fat Charlie felt like he had just read a private letter. She blew Fat Charlie a kiss but shook her head when he made to approach closer.

He walked on. A dead tree stuck up from the ground before him like an assemblage of old gray bones. The shadows were getting longer now, as the sun was slowly descending in the endless sky, past where the cliffs cragged down into the end of the world; the eye of the sun was a monstrous gold-orange ball, and all the little white clouds beneath it were burnished with gold and with purple.

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, thought Fat Charlie, the line of the poem surfacing from some long-forgotten English lesson. And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold. He tried to remember what a cohort was, and failed. Probably, he decided, it was some kind of chariot.

Something moved, close to his elbow, and he realized that what he had thought was a brown rock, beneath the dead tree, was a man, sandy-colored, his back spotted like a leopard’s. His hair was very long and very black, and when he smiled his teeth were a big cat’s teeth. He only smiled briefly, and it was a smile without warmth or humor or friendship in it. He said, “I am Tiger. Your father, he injured me in a hundred ways and he insulted me in a thousand ways. Tiger does not forget.”

“I’m sorry,” said Fat Charlie.

“I’ll walk along with you,” said Tiger. “For a short while. You say that Anansi is dead?”

“Yes.”

“Well. Well, well. He played me for a fool so many times. Once, everything was mine—the stories, the stars, everything. He stole it all away from me. Maybe now he is dead people will stop telling those damn stories of his. Laughing at me.”

“I’m sure they will,” said Fat Charlie. “I’ve never laughed at you.”

Eyes the color of polished emeralds flashed in the man’s face. “Blood is blood,” was all he said. “Anansi’s bloodline is Anansi.”

“I am not my father,” said Fat Charlie.

Tiger bared his teeth. They were very sharp. “You don’t go around making people laugh at things,” explained Tiger. “It’s a big, serious world out there; nothing to laugh about. Not ever. You must teach the children to fear, teach them to tremble. Teach them to be cruel. Teach them to be the danger in the dark. Hide in the shadows, then pounce or spring or leap or drop, and always kill. You know what the true meaning of life is?”

“Um,” said Fat Charlie. “Is it love one another?”

“The meaning of life is the hot blood of your prey on your tongue, the meat that rends beneath your teeth, the corpse of your enemy left in the sun for the carrion eaters to finish. That is what life is. I am Tiger, and I am stronger than Anansi ever was, bigger, more dangerous, more powerful, crueler, wiser—”

Fat Charlie did not want to be in that place, talking to Tiger. It was not that Tiger was mad; it was that he was so earnest in his convictions, and all his convictions were uniformly unpleasant. Also, he reminded Fat Charlie of someone, and while he could not have told you who, he knew it was someone he disliked. “Will you help me get rid of my brother?”

Tiger coughed, as if he had a feather, or perhaps a whole blackbird, stuck in his throat.

“Would you like me to get you some water?” asked Fat Charlie.

Tiger eyed Fat Charlie with suspicion. “Last time Anansi offered me water, I wound up trying to eat the moon out of a pond, and I drowned.”

“I was just trying to help.”

“That was what he said.” Tiger leaned in to Fat Charlie, stared him in the eye. Close-up, he did not look even faintly human—his nose was too flat, his eyes were positioned differently, and he smelled like a cage at the zoo. His voice was a rumbling growl. “This is how you help me, Anansi’s child. You and all your blood. You keep well away from me. Understand? If you want to keep the meat on those bones.” He licked his lips then, with a tongue the red of fresh-killed flesh and longer than any human tongue had ever been.

Fat Charlie backed away, certain that if he turned, if he ran, he would feel Tiger’s teeth in his neck. There was nothing remotely human about the creature now: it was the size of a real tiger. It was every big cat that had turned man-eater, every tiger that had broken a human’s neck like a house cat dispatching a mouse. So he stared at Tiger as he edged backward, and soon enough the creature padded back to its dead tree and stretched out on the rocks and vanished into the patchy shadows, only the impatient swish of its tail betraying its position.

“Don’t you worry yourself about him,” said a woman, from a cave mouth. “Come here.”

Fat Charlie could not decide if she was attractive or monstrously ugly. He walked toward her.

“He come on all high-and-so-mighty, but he’s a-scairt of his own shadow. And he’s scairter of your daddy’s shadow. He got no strength in his jaws.”

There was something doglike about her face. No, not doglike—.

“Now, me,” she continued, as he reached her, “me, I crush the bone. That’s where the good stuff is hid. That’s where the sweetest meats are hid, and nobody knows it but me.”

“I’m looking for someone to help me get rid of my brother.”

The woman threw back her head and laughed, a wild bray of a laugh, loud, long and insane, and Fat Charlie knew her then.

“You won’t find anyone here to help you,” she said. “They all suffered, when they went up against your father. Tiger hates you and your kind more than anyone has ever hated anything, but even he won’t do anything while your father’s out there in the world. Listen: Walk this path. You ask me, and I got a stone of prophecy behind my eye, you won’t find nobody to help you till you find an empty cave. Go in. Talk to whoever you find there. Understand me?”

“I think I do.”

She laughed. It was not a good laugh. “You want to stop with me for a while first? I’m an education. You know what they say—nothing leaner, meaner, or obscener than Hyena.”

Fat Charlie shook his head and kept walking, past the caves that line the rocky walls at the end of the world. As he passed the darkness of each cave, he would glance inside. There were people of all shapes and all sizes, tiny people and tall people, men and women. And as he passed, and as they moved in and out of the shadows, he would see flanks or scales, horns or claws.

Sometimes he scared them as he passed, and they would retreat into the back of the cave. Others would come forward, staring aggressively or curiously.

Something tumbled through the air from the rocks above a cave mouth and landed beside Fat Charlie. “Hello,” it said breathlessly.

“Hello,” said Fat Charlie.

The new one was excitable and hairy. Its arms and legs seemed all wrong. Fat Charlie tried to place it. The other animal-people were animals, yes, and people, too, and there was nothing strange or contradictory about this—the animalness and the humanness combined like the stripes on a zebra to make something other. This one, however, seemed both human and almost human, and the oddness of it made Fat Charlie’s teeth hurt. Then he got it.

“Monkey,” he said. “You’re Monkey.”

“Got a peach?” said Monkey. “Got a mango? Got a fig?”

“ ‘Fraid not,” said Fat Charlie.

“Give me something to eat,” said Monkey. “I’ll be your friend.”

Mrs. Dunwiddy had warned him about this. Give nothing away, he thought. Make no promises.

“I’m not giving you anything, I’m afraid.”

“Who are you?” asked Monkey. “What are you? You seem like half a thing. Are you from here or from there?”

“Anansi was my father,” said Fat Charlie. “I’m looking for someone to help me deal with my brother, to make him go away.”

“Might get Anansi mad,” said Monkey. “Very bad idea that. Get Anansi mad, you never in any more stories.”

“Anansi’s dead,” said Fat Charlie.

“Dead there,” said Monkey. “Maybe. But dead here? That’s another stump of grubs entirely.”

“You mean, he could be here?” Fat Charlie looked up at the mountainside more warily: the idea that he might, in one of the cave mouths, find his father creaking back and forward in a rocking chair, green fedora hat pushed back on his head, sipping from a can of brown ale and stifling a yawn with his lemon yellow gloves, was troubling indeed.

“Who? What?”

“Do you think he’s here?”

“Who?”

“My father.”

“Your father?”

“Anansi.”

Monkey leapt to the top of a rock in terror, then he pressed himself against the rock, his gaze flicking from side to side as if keeping an eye out for sudden tornadoes. “Anansi? He’s here?”

“I was asking you that,” said Fat Charlie.

Monkey swung suddenly, so he was hanging upside down from its feet, his upside-down face staring straight into Fat Charlie’s. “I go back to the world sometimes,” he said. “They say, Monkey, wise Monkey, come, come. Come eat the peaches we have for you. And the nuts. And the grubs. And the figs.”

“Is my father here?” asked Fat Charlie, patiently.

“He doesn’t have a cave,” said Monkey. “I would know if he had a cave. I think. Maybe he had a cave and I forgot. If you gave me a peach, I would remember better.”

“I don’t have anything on me,” said Fat Charlie.

“No peaches?”

“Nothing, I’m afraid.”

Monkey swung himself up to the top of his rock, and he was gone.

Fat Charlie continued along the rocky path. The sun had sunk until it was level with the path, and it burned a deep orange. It shone its old light straight into the caves, and showed each cave to be inhabited. That must be Rhinoceros, gray of skin, staring out shortsightedly; there, the color of a rotten log in shallow water, was Crocodile, his eyes as black as glass.

There was a rattle behind him of stone scuttering against stone, and Fat Charlie turned with a jerk. Monkey stared up at him, his knuckles brushing the path.

“I really haven’t got any fruit,” said Fat Charlie. “Or I’d give you some.”

Monkey said, “Felt sorry for you. Maybe you should go home. This is a bad bad bad bad bad idea. Yes?”

“No,” said Fat Charlie.

“Ah,” said Monkey. “Right. Right right right right right.” He stopped moving, then a sudden burst of loping speed, and he bounded past Fat Charlie and stopped in front of a cave some little distance away.

“Not to go in there,” he called. “Bad place.” He pointed to the cave opening.

“Why not?” asked Fat Charlie. “Who’s in there?”

“Nobody’s in there,” said Monkey, triumphantly. “So it’s not the one you want, is it?”

“Yes,” said Fat Charlie. “It is.”

Monkey chittered and bounced, but Fat Charlie walked past him and clambered up the rocks until he reached the mouth of the empty cave, as the crimson sun fell below the cliffs at the end of the world.

Walking the path along the edge of the mountains at the beginning of the world (it’s only the mountains at the end of the world if you’re coming from the other direction), reality seemed strange and strained. These mountains and their caves are made from the stuff of the oldest stories (this was long before human-people, of course; whatever made you imagine that people were the first things to tell stories?), and stepping off the path into the cave, Fat Charlie felt as if he were walking into someone else’s reality entirely. The cave was deep; its floor was splashed white with bird droppings. There were feathers on the cave floor too, and here and there, like a desiccated and abandoned feather duster, was the corpse of a bird, flattened and dried.

At the back of the cave, nothing but darkness.

Fat Charlie called “Hello?” and the echo of his voice came back to him from the interior of the cave. Hello hello hello hello. He kept walking. Now the darkness in the cave seemed almost palpable, as if something thin and dark had been laid over his eyes. He walked slowly, a step at a time, his arms outstretched.

Something moved.

“Hello?”

His eyes were learning to use what little light there was, and he could make something out. It’s nothing. Rags and feathers, that’s all. Another step, and the wind stirred the feathers and flapped the rags on the floor of the cave.

Something fluttered about him, fluttered through him, beating the air with the clatter of a pigeon’s wings.

Swirling. Dust stung his eyes and his face, and he blinked in the cold wind and took a step back as it rose up before him, a storm of dust and rags and feathers. Then the wind was gone, and where the feathers had been blowing was a human figure, which reached out a hand and beckoned to Fat Charlie.

He would have stepped back, but it reached out and took him by the sleeve. Its touch was light and dry, and it pulled him toward it—

He took one step forward into the cave—

—and was standing in the open air, on a treeless, copper-colored plain, beneath a sky the color of sour milk.

Different creatures have different eyes. Human eyes (unlike, say, a cat’s eyes, or an octopus’s) are only made to see one version of reality at a time. Fat Charlie saw one thing with his eyes, and he saw something else with his mind, and in the gulf between the two things, madness waited. He could feel a wild panic welling up inside him, and he took a deep breath and held it in while his heart thudded against his rib cage. He forced himself to believe his eyes, not his mind.

So while he knew that he was seeing a bird, mad-eyed, ragged-feathered, bigger than any eagle, taller than an ostrich, its beak the cruel tearing weapon of a raptor, its feathers the color of slate overlaid with an oilslick sheen, making a dark rainbow of purples and greens, he really only knew that for an instant, somewhere in the very back of his mind. What he saw with his eyes was a woman with raven-black hair, standing where the idea of a bird had been. She was neither young nor old, and she stared at him with a face that might have been carved from obsidian in ancient times, when the world was young.

She watched him, and she did not move. Clouds roiled across the sour milk sky.

“I’m Charlie,” said Fat Charlie. “Charlie Nancy. Some people, well, most people, call me Fat Charlie. You can, too. If you like.”

No response.

“Anansi was my father.”

Still nothing. Not a quiver; not a breath.

“I want you to help me make my brother go away.”

She tilted her head at this. Enough to show that she was listening, enough to show that she was alive.

“I can’t do it on my own. He’s got magic powers and stuff. I spoke to a spider, and the next thing you know, my brother turns up. Now I can’t make him go away.”

Her voice, when she spoke, was as rough and as deep as a crow’s. “What do you wish me to do about it?”

“Help me?” he suggested.

She appeared to be thinking.

Later, Fat Charlie tried and failed to remember what she had been wearing. Sometimes he thought it must have been a cloak of feathers; at other times he believed it must have been rags of some kind, or perhaps a tattered raincoat, of the kind she wore when he saw her in Piccadilly, later, when it had all started to go bad. She was not naked, though: of that he was nearly certain. He would have remembered if she had been naked, wouldn’t he?

“Help you,” she echoed.

“Help me get rid of him.”

She nodded. “You wish me to help you get rid of Anansi’s bloodline.”

“I just want him to go away and leave me alone. I don’t want you to hurt him or anything.”

“Then promise me Anansi’s bloodline for my own.”

Fat Charlie stood on the vast coppery plain, which was somehow, he knew, inside the cave in the mountains at the end of the world and was, in its turn, in some sense, inside Mrs. Dunwiddy’s violet-scented front room, and he tried to make sense of what she was asking for.

“I can’t give things away. And I can’t make promises.”

“You want him to go,” she said. “Say it. My time is precious.” She folded her arms and stared at him with mad eyes. “I am not scared of Anansi.”

He remembered Mrs. Dunwiddy’s voice. “Um,” said Fat Charlie. “I mustn’t make promises. And I have to ask for something of equal value. I mean, it has to be a trade.”

The Bird Woman looked displeased, but she nodded. “Then I shall give you something of equal value in trade. I give my word.” She put her hand over his hand, as if she was giving him something, then squeezed his hand closed. “Now say it.”

“I give you Anansi’s bloodline,” Fat Charlie said.

“It is good,” said a voice, and at that she went, quite literally, to pieces.

Where a woman had been standing, there was now a flock of birds, which were flying, as if startled by a gunshot, all in different directions. Now the sky filled with birds, more birds than Fat Charlie had ever imagined, brown birds and black, wheeling and crossing and flowing like a cloud of black smoke vaster than the mind could hold, like a cloud of midges as big as the world.

“You’ll make him go away, now?” called Fat Charlie, shouting the words into the darkening milky sky. The birds slipped and slid in the sky. Each moved only a fraction, and they kept flying, but suddenly Fat Charlie was staring up at a face in the sky, a face made of swirling birds. It was very big.

It said his name in the screams and caws and calls of a thousand, thousand, thousand birds, and lips the size of tower blocks formed the words in the sky.

Then the face dissolved into madness and chaos as the birds that made it flew down from that pale sky, flew straight toward him. He covered his face with his hands, trying to protect himself.

The pain in his cheek was harsh and sudden. For an instant he believed that one of the birds must have gashed him, torn at his cheek with its beak or talons. Then he saw where he was.

“Don’t hit me again!” he said. “It’s all right. You don’t have to hit me!”

On the table, the penguins were guttering low; their heads and shoulders were gone, and now the flames were burning in the shapeless black-and-white blobs that had once been their bellies, their feet in frozen pools of blackish candle wax. There were three old women staring at him.

Miss Noles threw the contents of a glass of water into his face.

“You didn’t have to do that either,” he said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

Mrs. Dunwiddy came into the room. She was holding a small brown glass bottle triumphantly. “Smelling salts,” she announced. “I know I got some somewhere. I buy these in, oh, sixty-seven, sixty-eight. I don’t know if they still any good.” She peered at Fat Charlie, then scowled. “He wake up. Who did wake him up?”

“He wasn’t breathing,” said Mrs. Bustamonte. “So I give him a slap.”

“And I pour water on him,” said Miss Noles, “which help bring him around the rest of the way.”

“I don’t need smelling salts,” said Fat Charlie. “I’m already wet and in pain.” But, with elderly hands, Mrs. Dunwiddy had removed the cap from the bottle, and she was pushing it under his nose. He breathed in as he moved back, and inhaled a wave of ammonia. His eyes watered, and he felt as if he had been punched in the nose. Water dripped down his face.

“There,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. “Feeling better now?”

“What time is it?” asked Fat Charlie.

“It’s almost five in the morning,” said Mrs. Higgler. She took a swig of coffee from her gigantic mug. “We all worried about you. You better tell us what happened.”

Fat Charlie tried to remember. It was not that it had evaporated, as dreams do, more as if the experience of the last few hours had happened to somebody else, someone who was not him, and he had to contact that person by some hitherto unpracticed form of telepathy. It was all a jumble in his mind, the technicolor Ozness of the other place dissolving back into the sepia tones of reality. “There were caves. I asked for help. There were lots of animals there. Animals who were people. None of them wanted to help. They were all scared of my daddy. Then one of them said she would help me.”

“She?” said Mrs. Bustamonte.

“Some of them were men, and some of them were women,” said Fat Charlie. “This one was a woman.”

“Do you know what she was? Crocodile? Hyena? Mouse?”

He shrugged. “I might have remembered before people started hitting me and pouring water on me. And putting things in my nose. It drives stuff out of your head.”

Mrs. Dunwiddy said, “Do you remember what I tell you? Not giving anything away? Only trade?”

“Yes,” he said, vaguely proud of himself. “Yes. There was a monkey who wanted me to give him things, and I said no. Look, I think I need a drink.”

Mrs. Bustamonte took a glass of something from the table. “We thought maybe you need a drink. So we put the sherry through the strainer. There may be a few mixed herbs in there, but nothin’ big.”

His hands were fists in his lap. He opened his right hand to take the glass from the old woman. Then he stopped, and he stared.

“What?” asked Mrs. Dunwiddy. “What is it?”

In the palm of his hand, black and crushed out of shape, and wet with sweat, Fat Charlie was holding a feather. He remembered, then. He remembered all of it.

“It was the Bird Woman,” he said.

Gray dawn was breaking as Fat Charlie climbed into the passenger seat of Mrs. Higgler’s station wagon.

“You sleepy?” she asked him.

“Not really. I just feel weird.”

“Where do you want me to take you? My place? Your dad’s house? A motel?”

“I don’t know.”

She put the car into gear and lurched out into the road.

“Where are we going?”

She did not answer. She slurped some coffee from her megamug. Then she said, “Maybe what we do tonight is for the best and maybe it ain’t. Sometimes family things, they best left for families to fix. You and your brother. You’re too similar. I guess that is why you fight.”

“I take it this is some obscure West Indian usage of the word ‘similar’ which means ‘nothing at all alike’?”

“Don’t you start going all British on me. I know what I’m sayin’. You and him, you both cut from the same cloth. I remember your father sayin’ to me, Callyanne, my boys, they stupider than—you know, it don’t matter what he actually said, but the point is, he said it about both of you.” A thought struck her. “Hey. When you go to the place where the old gods are, you see your father in that place?”

“I don’t think so. I’d remember.”

She nodded, and said nothing as she drove.

She parked the car, and they got out.

It was chilly in the Florida dawn. The Garden of Rest looked like something from a movie: there was a low ground mist which threw everything into soft focus. Mrs. Higgler opened the small gate, and they walked through the cemetery.

Where there had been only fresh earth filling his father’s grave, now there was turf, and at the head of the grave was a metal plaque with a metal vase built into it, and in the vase a single yellow silk rose.

“Lord have mercy on the sinner in this grave,” said Mrs Higgler, with feeling. “Amen, amen, amen.”

They had an audience: the two red-headed cranes which Fat Charlie had observed on his previous visit strutted toward them, heads bobbing, like two aristocratic prison visitors.

“Shoo!” said Mrs. Higgler. The birds started at her, incuriously, and did not leave.

One of them ducked its head down into the grass, came up again with a lizard struggling in its beak. A gulp and a shake, and the lizard was a bulge in the bird’s neck.

The dawn chorus was beginning: grackles and orioles and mockingbirds were singing in the day in the wilderness beyond the Garden of Rest. “It’ll be good to be home again,” said Fat Charlie. “With any luck she’ll have made him leave by the time I get there. Then everything will be all right. I can sort everything out with Rosie.” A mood of gentle optimism welled up within him. It was going to be a good day.

In the old stories, Anansi lives just like you do or I do, in his house. He is greedy, of course, and lustful, and tricky, and full of lies. And he is good-hearted, and lucky, and sometimes even honest. Sometimes he is good, sometimes he is bad. He is never evil. Mostly, you are on Anansi’s side. This is because Anansi owns all the stories. Mawu gave him the stories, back in the dawn days, took them from Tiger and gave them to Anansi, and he spins the web of them so beautifully.

In the stories, Anansi is a spider, but he is also a man. It is not hard to keep two things in your head at the same time. Even a child could do it.

Anansi’s stories are told by grandmothers and by aunts in the West Coast of Africa and across the Caribbean, and all over the world. The stories have made it into books for children: big old smiling Anansi playing his merry tricks upon the world. Trouble is, grandmothers and aunts and writers of books for children tend to leave things out. There are stories that aren’t appropriate for little children anymore.

This is a story you won’t find in the nursery tales. I call it,

Anansi did not like Bird, because when Bird was hungry she ate many things, and one of the things that Bird ate was spiders, and Bird, she was always hungry.

They used to be friends, but they were friends no longer.

One day Anansi was walking, and he saw a hole in the ground, and that gave him an idea. He puts wood in the bottom of the hole, and he makes a fire, and he puts a cookpot in the hole and drops in roots and herbs. Then he starts running around the pot, running and dancing and calling and shouting, going, I feel good. I feel soooo good. Oh boy, all my aches and pains be gone and I never felt so good in my whole damn life!

Bird hears the commotion. Bird flies down from the skies to see what all the fuss is about. She goes, What you singing about? Why you carrying on like a madman, Anansi?

Anansi sings, I had a pain in my neck, but now it’s gone. I had a pain in my belly, but not any longer. I had creaks in my joints, but now I’m supple as a young palm tree, I’m smooth as Snake the morning after he sheds his skin. I’m powerful happy, and now I shall be perfect, for I know the secret, and nobody else does.

What secret? asks Bird.

My secret, says Anansi. Everyone going to give me their favorite things, their most precious things, just to learn my secret. Whoo! Whee! I do feel good!

Bird hops a little closer, and she puts her head on one side. Then she asks, Can I learn your secret?

Anansi looks at Bird with suspicion on his face, and he moves to stand in front of the pot in the hole, bubbling away.

I don’t think so, Anansi says. May not be enough to go around. Don’t bother yourself about it.

Bird says, Now Anansi, I know we haven’t always been friends. But I’ll tell you what. You share your secret with me, and I promise you no bird will never eat no spider ever again. We’ll be friends until the end of time.

Anansi scratches his chin, and he shakes his head. It’s a mighty big secret, he says, making people young and spry and lusty and free from all pain.

Bird, she preens. Bird she says, Oh, Anansi, I’m sure you know that I have always found you a particularly handsome figure of a man. Why don’t we lie by the side of the road for a little while, and I’m sure I can make you forget all your reservations about telling me your secret.

So they lie by the side of the road, and they get to canoodling and laughing and getting all silly, and once Anansi has had what he wants Bird says, Now Anansi, what about your secret?

Anansi says, Well, I wasn’t going to tell anyone. But I’ll tell you. It’s an herbal bath, in this hole in the ground. Watch, I’ll drop in these leaves and these roots. Now, anyone who goes into the bath they going to live forever, feeling no pain. I had the bath, and now I’m frisky as a young goat. But I don’t think I should let anyone else use the bath.

Bird, she looks down at the bubbling water, and quick as anything she slips down into the pot.

It’s awful hot, Anansi, she says.

It’s got to be hot for the herbs to do their good things, says Anansi. Then he takes the lid of the pot and he covers the pot with it. It’s a heavy lid, and Anansi, he puts a rock on top of it, to weigh it down more.

Bam! Bem! Bom! comes the knocking from inside the cookpot.

If I let you out now, calls Anansi, all the good work of the bubbling bath will be undone. You just relax in there and feel yourself getting healthier.

But maybe Bird did not hear him or believe him, because the knocking and the pushing kept on coming from inside the pot for a while longer. And then it stopped.

That evening Anansi and his family had the most delicious Bird soup, with boiled Bird. They did not go hungry again for many days.

Since that time, birds eat spiders every chance they get, and spiders and birds aren’t never going to be friends.

There’s another version of the story where they talk Anansi into the cookpot, too. The stories are all Anansi’s, but he doesn’t always come out ahead.