by Neil Gaiman
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-meand-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 mu
st 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.