by Neil Gaiman
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.”