by Neil Gaiman
“Good reason for getting out.”
“But if I leave then I will have done something. I’ll be an escaped prisoner.”
“You’re not a prisoner,” said Spider, cheerfully. “You’ve not been charged with anything yet. You’re just helping them with their inquiries. Look, are you hungry?”
“A bit.”
“What do you want? Tea? Coffee? Hot chocolate?”
Hot chocolate sounded extremely good to Fat Charlie. “I’d love a hot chocolate,” he said.
“Right,” said Spider. He grabbed Fat Charlie’s hand and said, “Close your eyes.”
“Why?”
“It makes it easier.”
Fat Charlie closed his eyes, although he was not certain what it would make easier. The world stretched and squeezed and Fat Charlie was certain that he was going to be sick. Then the inside of his mind settled down, and he felt a warm breeze touch his face.
He opened his eyes.
They were in the open air, in a large market square, somewhere that looked extremely un-English.
“Where is this?”
“I think it’s called Skopsie. Town in Italy or somewhere. I started coming here years ago. They do amazing hot chocolate here. Best I’ve ever had.”
They sat down at a small wooden table. It was painted fire-engine red. A waiter approached and said something to them in a language that didn’t sound like Italian to Fat Charlie. Spider said “Dos Chocolatos, dude,” and the man nodded and went away.
“Right,” said Fat Charlie. “Now you’ve got me into even deeper trouble. Now they’ll just do a manhunt or something. It’ll be in the papers.”
“What are they going to do?” asked Spider with a smile. “Send you to jail?”
“Oh please.”
The hot chocolate arrived, and the waiter poured it into small cups. It was roughly the same temperature as molten lava, was halfway between a chocolate soup and a chocolate custard, and it smelled astonishingly good.
Spider said, “Look, we’ve made rather a mess of this whole family reunion business, haven’t we?”
“We’ve made rather a mess of it?” Fat Charlie managed outrage extremely well. “I wasn’t the one who stole my fiancée. I wasn’t the one who got me sacked from work. I wasn’t the one who got me arrested—”
“No,” said Spider. “But you were the one who brought the birds into it, weren’t you?”
Fat Charlie took a very small initial sip of his hot chocolate. “Ow. I think I’ve just burned my mouth.” He looked at his brother and saw his own expression staring back at him: worried, tired, frightened. “Yes, I was the one who brought the birds into it. So what do we do now?”
Spider said, “They do a really nice sort of noodly-stew thing here, by the way.”
“Are you sure we’re in Italy?”
“Not really.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
Spider nodded.
Fat Charlie tried to think of the best way to put it. “The bird thing. Where they all turn up and pretend they’ve escaped from an Alfred Hitchcock film. Do you think it’s something that only happens in England?”
“Why?”
“Because I think those pigeons have noticed us.” He pointed to the far end of the square.
The pigeons were not doing the things that pigeons usually do. They were not pecking at sandwich crusts or bobbing along with their heads down hunting for tourist-dropped food. They were standing quite still, and they were staring. A clatter of wings, and they were joined by another hundred birds, most of them landing on the statue of a fat man wearing an enormous hat that dominated the center of the square. Fat Charlie looked at the pigeons, and the pigeons looked back at him. “So what’s the worst that could happen?” he asked Spider, in an undertone. “They crap all over us?”
“I don’t know. But I expect they can do worse than that. Finish your hot chocolate.”
“But it’s hot.”
“And we’ll need a couple of bottles of water, won’t we? Garçon?”
A low susurrus of wings; the clack of more arriving birds; and beneath it all, low, burbling secretive coos.
The waiter brought them bottles of water. Spider, who was, Fat Charlie observed, now wearing his black-and-red leather jacket once more, put them into his pockets.
“They’re only pigeons,” said Fat Charlie, but even as he said it, he knew the words were inadequate. They were not just pigeons. They were an army. The statue of the fat man had almost vanished from view beneath the gray and purple feathers.
“I think I preferred birds before they thought about ganging up on us.”
Spider said, “And they’re everywhere.” Then he grabbed Fat Charlie’s hand. “Close your eyes.”
The birds rose as one bird then. Fat Charlie closed his eyes.
The pigeons came down like the wolf on the fold…
There was silence, and distance, and Fat Charlie thought, I’m in an oven. He opened his eyes and realized that it was true: an oven with red dunes that receded into the distance until they faded into a sky the color of mother-of-pearl.
“Desert,” said Spider. “Seemed like a good idea. Bird-free zone. Somewhere to finish a conversation. Here.” He handed Fat Charlie a bottle of water.
“Thanks.”
“So. Would you like to tell me where the birds come from?”
Fat Charlie said, “There’s this place. I went there. There were lots of animal-people there. They um. They all knew Dad. One of them was a woman, a sort of bird woman.”
Spider looked at him. “There’s this place? That’s not exactly very helpful.”
“There’s a mountainside with caves in it. And then there are these cliffs, and they go down into nothing. It’s like the end of the world.”
“It’s the beginning of the world,” corrected Spider. “I’ve heard of the caves. A girl I knew once told me all about them. Never been there, though. So you met the Bird Woman, and…?”
“She offered to make you go away. And, um. Well, I took her up on it.”
“That,” said Spider, with a movie-star smile, “was really stupid.”
“I didn’t tell her to hurt you.”
“What did you think she was going to do to get rid of me? Write me a stiff letter?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think. I was upset.”
“Great. Well, if she has her way, you’ll be upset, and I’ll be dead. You could have simply asked me to leave, you know.”
“I did!”
“Er. What did I say?”
“That you liked it in my house and you weren’t going anywhere.”
Spider drank some of the water. “So what exactly did you say to her?”
Fat Charlie tried to remember. Now he thought about it, it seemed an odd sort of thing to say. “Just that I was going to give her Anansi’s bloodline,” he said, reluctantly.
“You what?”
“It was what she asked me to say.”
Spider looked incredulous. “But that’s not just me. That’s both of us.”
Fat Charlie’s mouth was suddenly very dry. He hoped it was the desert air, and sipped his bottled water.
“Hang on. Why the desert?” asked Fat Charlie.
“No birds. Remember?”
“So what are those?” He pointed. At first they looked tiny, and then you realized that they were simply very high: they were circling, and wobbling on the wing.
“Vultures,” said Spider. “They don’t attack living things.”
“Right. And pigeons are scared of people,” said Fat Charlie. The dots in the sky circled lower, and the birds appeared to grow as they descended.
Spider said, “Point taken.” Then, “Shit.”
They weren’t alone. Someone was watching them on a distant dune. A casual observer might have mistaken the figure for a scarecrow.
Fat Charlie shouted, “Go away!” His voice was swallowed by the sand. “I take it all back. We don’t have a deal! Leave us alone!”
A flutter of overcoat on the hot wind, and the dune was now deserted.
Fat Charlie said, “She went away. Who would have thought it was going to be that simple?”
Spider touched his shoulder, and pointed. Now the woman in the brown overcoat was standing on the nearest ridge of sand, so close that Fat Charlie could see the glassy blacks of her eyes.
The vultures were raggedy black shadows, and then they landed: their naked mauve necks and scalps—featherless because that’s so much easier when you’re putting your head into rotting carcases—extended as they stared shortsightedly at the brothers, as if wondering whether to wait until the two men died or if they should do something to hurry the process along.
Spider said, “What else was there in the deal?”
“Um?”
“Was there anything else? Did she give you something to seal the bargain? Sometimes things like this involve a trade.”
The vultures were edging forward, a step at a time, closing their ranks, tightening the circle. There were more black slashes in the sky, growing and wobbling toward them. Spider’s hand closed around Fat Charlie’s hand.
“Close your eyes.”
The cold hit Fat Charlie like a punch to the gut. He took a deep breath and felt like someone had iced his lungs. He coughed and coughed while the wind howled like a great beast.
He opened his eyes. “Can I ask where we are this time?”
“Antarctica,” said Spider. He zipped up the front of his leather jacket, and did not seem to mind the cold. “It’s a bit chilly, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t you have any middle gears? Straight from desert to ice field.”
“No birds here,” said Spider.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just to go and sit inside a building that’s nice and bird-free? We could have lunch.”
Spider said, “Right. Now you’re complaining, just because it’s a little bit nippy.”
“It’s not a little bit nippy. It’s fifty below. And anyway, look.”
Fat Charlie pointed at the sky. A pale squiggle, like a miniature letter m chalked onto the sky, hung unmoving in the cold air. “Albatross,” he said.
“Frigate,” said Spider.
“Pardon?”
“It’s not an albatross. It’s a frigate. He probably hasn’t even noticed us.”
“Possibly not,” admitted Fat Charlie. “But they have.”
Spider turned, and said something else that sounded a lot like “frigate.” There may not have been a million penguins waddling and slipping and belly-sliding toward the brothers, but it certainly looked that way. As a general rule, the only things properly terrified by the approach of penguins tend to be small fish, but when the numbers get large enough…
Fat Charlie reached out without being told, and he held Spider’s hand. He closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he was somewhere warmer, although opening his eyes made no difference to what he saw. Everything was the color of night. “Have I gone blind?”
“We’re in a disused coal mine,” said Spider. “I saw a photo of this place in a magazine a few years back. Unless there are flocks of sightless finches who have evolved to take advantage of the darkness and eat coal chips, we’re probably fine.”
“That’s a joke, isn’t it? About the sightless finches?”
“More or less.”
Fat Charlie sighed, and the sigh echoed through the underground cavern. “You know,” he said, “If you’d just gone away, if you’d left my house when I asked you to, we’d not be in this mess.”
“That isn’t very helpful.”
“It wasn’t meant to be. God knows how I’m going to explain all this to Rosie.”
Spider cleared his throat. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that.”
“Because…?”
“She’s broken up with us.”
There was a long silence. Then Fat Charlie said, “Of course she has.”
“I made a kind of a sort of a mess of that part of things.” Spider sounded uncomfortable.
“But what if I explain it to her? I mean, if I tell her that I wasn’t you, that you were pretending to be me—”
“I already did. That was when she decided she didn’t want to see either of us ever again.”
“Me as well?”
“‘Fraid so.”
“Look,” said Spider’s voice in the darkness. “I really never meant to make… Well, when I came to see you, all I wanted to do was say hello. Not to. Um. I’ve pretty much completely cocked this all up, haven’t I?”
“Are you trying to say sorry?”
Silence. Then, “I guess. Maybe.”
More silence. Fat Charles said, “Well, then I’m really sorry I called the Bird Woman to get rid of you.” Not seeing Spider while they were talking made it easier, somehow.
“Yeah. Thanks. I just wish I knew how to get rid of her.”
“A feather!” said Fat Charlie.
“No, you’ve lost me.”
“You asked if she gave me anything to seal the deal. She did. She gave me a feather.”
“Where is it?”
Fat Charlie tried to remember. “I’m not sure. I had it when I woke up in Mrs. Dunwiddy’s front room. I didn’t have it when I got on the plane. I suppose that Mrs. Dunwiddy must still have it.”
The silence that met this was long and dark and unbroken. Fat Charlie began to worry that Spider had gone away, that he had been left abandoned in the darkness under the world. Eventually he said, “Are you still there?”
“Still here.”
“That’s a relief. If you abandoned me down here I don’t know how I’d get out.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
More silence.
Fat Charlie said, “What country are we in?”
“Poland, I think. Like I said, I saw a picture of it. Only they had the lights on in the photo.”
“You need to see photos of places to go to them?”
“I need to know where they are.”
It was astounding, thought Fat Charlie, how truly quiet it was in the mine. The place had its own special silence. He started to wonder about silences. Was the silence of the grave different in kind to the silence of, say, outer space?
Spider said, “I remember Mrs. Dunwiddy. She smells of violets.” People have said, “All hope has fled. We’re going to die,” with more enthusiasm.
“That’s her,” said Fat Charlie. “Small, old as the hills. Thick glasses. I suppose we’ll just have to go and get the feather from her. Then we’ll give it back to the Bird Woman. She’ll call off this nightmare.” Fat Charlie finished the last of the bottled water, carried here from the little square somewhere that wasn’t Italy. He screwed the top back onto the bottle and put the empty bottle down into the darkness, wondering if it was littering if no one was ever going to see it. “So let’s hold hands and go and see Mrs. Dunwiddy.”
Spider made a noise. The noise was not cocky. It was unsettled and unsure. In the darkness Fat Charlie imagined Spider deflating, like a bullfrog or a week-old balloon. Fat Charlie had wanted to see Spider taken down a peg; he had not wanted to hear him make a noise like a terrified six-year-old. “Hang on. You’re scared of Mrs. Dunwiddy?”
“I…I can’t go near her.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, I was scared of her, too, when I was a kid, and then I met her again at the funeral and she wasn’t that bad. Not really. She’s just an old lady.” In his mind she lit the black candles once more and sprinkled the herbs into the bowl. “Maybe a bit spooky. But you’ll be okay when you see her.”
“She made me go away,” said Spider. “I didn’t want to go. But I broke this ball in her garden. Big glass thing, like a giant Christmas tree ornament.”
“I did that, too. She was pissed.”
“I know.” The voice from the dark was small and worried and confused. “It was the same time. That was when it all started.”
“Well. Look. It’s not the end
of the world. You take me to Florida, I can go and get the feather back from Mrs. Dunwiddy. I’m not scared. You can stay away.”
“I can’t do that. I can’t go to where she is.”
“So, what are you trying to say? She’s taken out some kind of magical restraining order?”
“More or less. Yes.” Then Spider said, “I miss Rosie. I’m sorry about. You know.”
Fat Charlie thought about Rosie. He found it peculiarly hard to remember her face. He thought about not having Rosie’s mother as his mother-in-law; about the two silhouettes on the curtains in his bedroom window. He said, “Don’t feel bad about it. Well, you can feel bad about it if you want, because you behaved like a complete bastard. But maybe it was all for the best.” There was a twinge in the general region of Fat Charlie’s heart, but he knew that he was speaking the truth. It’s easier to say true things in the dark.
Spider said, “You know what doesn’t make sense here?”
“Everything?”
“No. Only one thing. I don’t understand why the Bird Woman got involved. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Dad pissed her off—”
“Dad pissed everybody off. She’s wrong, though. And if she wanted to kill us, why doesn’t she just try to do it?”
“I gave her our bloodline.”
“So you said. No, something else is going on, and I don’t get it.” Silence. Then Spider said, “Hold my hand.”
“Do I need to close my eyes?”
“May as well.”
“Where are we going? The moon?”
“I’m going to take you somewhere safe,” said Spider.
“Oh good,” said Fat Charlie. “I like safe. Where?”
But then, without even opening his eyes, Fat Charlie knew. The smell was a dead giveaway: unwashed bodies and unflushed toilets, disinfectant, old blankets and apathy.
“I bet I would have been just as safe in a luxury hotel room,” he said aloud, but there was nobody there to hear him. He sat down on the shelflike bed of cell six and wrapped the thin blanket around his shoulders. He might have been there forever.
Half an hour later, someone came and led him to the interrogation room.
“HULLO,” SAID DAISY, WITH A SMILE. “WOULD YOU LIKE A cup of tea?”
“You might as well not bother,” said Fat Charlie. “I’ve seen the telly. I know how it goes. This is that whole good-cop bad-cop thing, isn’t it? You’ll give me a cup of tea and some Jaffa cakes, then some big hard-bitten bastard with a hair-trigger temper comes in and shouts at me and pours the tea away and starts eating my Jaffa cakes and then you stop him from physically attacking me, and make him give me my tea and Jaffa cakes back, and in my gratitude I tell you everything you want to know.”