by Neil Gaiman
It had been a fine game, thought Grahame Coats, and he added two eyes to the apple, and a couple of ears. It now looked, he decided, more or less like a cat. Soon enough it would be time to exchange a life of milking hard-to-please celebrities for a life of sunshine, swimming pools, fine meals, good wines, and, if possible, enormous quantities of oral sex. The best things in life, Grahame Coats was convinced, could all be bought and paid for.
He drew a mouth on the cat and filled it with sharp teeth, so it looked a little like a mountain lion, and as he drew he began to sing, in a reedy tenor voice,
“When I were a young man my father would say
It’s lovely outside, you should go out to play,
But now that I’m older, the ladies all say,
It’s nice out, but put it away…”
Morris Livingstone had bought and paid for Grahame Coats’s penthouse flat on the Copacabana and for the installation of the swimming pool on the island of Saint Andrews, and you must not imagine that Grahame Coats was not grateful.
“It’s nice out, but put it awaaaay.”
SPIDER FELT ODD.
There was something going on: a strange feeling, spreading like a mist through his life, and it was ruining his day. He could not identify it, and he did not like it.
And if there was one thing that he was definitely not feeling, it was guilty. It simply wasn’t the kind of thing he ever felt. He felt excellent. Spider felt cool. He did not feel guilty. He would not have felt guilty if he was caught red-handed holding up a bank.
And yet there was, all about him, a faint miasma of discomfort.
Until now Spider had believed that gods were different: they had no consciences, nor did they need them. A god’s relationship to the world, even a world in which he was walking, was about as emotionally connected as that of a computer gamer playing with knowledge of the overall shape of the game and armed with a complete set of cheat codes.
Spider kept himself amused. That was what he did. That was the important bit. He would not have recognized guilt if he had an illustrated guide to it with all the component parts clearly labeled. It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck. But something had changed—inside him or outside, he was not sure—and it bothered him. He poured himself another drink. He waved a hand and made the music louder. He changed it from Miles Davis to James Brown. It still didn’t help.
He lay on the hammock, in the tropical sunshine, listening to the music, basking in how extremely cool it was to be him…and for the first time even that, somehow, wasn’t enough.
He climbed out of the hammock and wandered over to the door. “Fat Charlie?”
There was no answer. The flat felt empty. Outside the windows of the flat, there was a gray day, and rain. Spider liked the rain. It seemed appropriate.
Shrill and sweet, the telephone rang. Spider picked it up.
Rosie said, “Is that you?”
“Hullo Rosie.”
“Last night,” she said. Then she didn’t say anything. Then she said, “Was it as wonderful for you as it was for me?”
“I don’t know,” said Spider. “It was pretty wonderful for me. So, I mean, that’s probably a yes.”
“Mmm,” she said.
They didn’t say anything.
“Charlie?” said Rosie.
“Uh-huh?”
“I even like not saying anything, just knowing you’re on the other end of the phone.”
“Me too,” said Spider.
They enjoyed the sensation of not saying anything for a while longer, savoring it, making it last.
“Do you want to come over to my place tonight?” asked Rosie. “My flatmates are in the Cairngorms.”
“That,” said Spider, “may be a candidate for the most beautiful phrase in the English language. My flatmates are in the Cairngorms. Perfect poetry.”
She giggled. “Twit. Um. Bring your toothbrush…?”
“Oh. Oh. Okay.”
And after several minutes of “you put down the phone” and “no you put the down the phone” that would have done credit to a pair of hormonally intoxicated fifteen-year-olds, the phone was eventually put down.
Spider smiled like a saint. The world, given that it had Rosie in it, was the best world that any world could possibly be. The fog had lifted, the world had ungloomed.
It did not even occur to Spider to wonder where Fat Charlie had gone. Why should he care about such trivia? Rosie’s flat-mates were in the Cairngorms, and tonight? Why, tonight he would be bringing his toothbrush.
FAT CHARLIE’S BODY WAS ON A PLANE TO FLORIDA; IT WAS crushed in a seat in the middle of a row of five people, and it was fast asleep. This was a good thing: the rear toilets had malfunctioned as soon as the plane was in the air, and although the cabin attendants had hung Out of Order signs on the doors, this did nothing to alleviate the smell, which spread slowly across the back of the plane like a low-level chemical fug. There were babies crying and adults grumbling and children whining. One faction of the passengers, en route to Walt Disney World, who felt that their holidays began the moment they got on the plane, had got settled into their seats then began a sing-song. They sang “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” and “The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers,” and “Under the Sea” and “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, It’s Off To Work We Go,” and even, under the impression that it was a Disney song as well, “We’re Off to See the Wizard.”
Once the plane was in the air it was discovered that, due to a catering confusion, no coach class lunch meals had been put on-board. Instead, only breakfasts had been packed, which meant there would be individual packs of cereal and a banana for all passengers, which they would have to eat with plastic knives and forks, because there were, unfortunately, no spoons, which may have been a good thing, because pretty soon there wasn’t any milk for the cereal, either.
It was a hell flight, and Fat Charlie was sleeping through it.
In Fat Charlie’s dream he was in a huge hall, and he was wearing a morning suit. Next to him was Rosie, wearing a white wedding dress, and on the other side of her on the dais was Rosie’s mother, who was, a little jarringly, also wearing a wedding dress, although this one was covered with dust and with cobwebs. Far away, at the horizon, which was the distant edge of the hall, there were people firing guns and waving white flags.
It’s just the people at Table H, said Rosie’s mother. Don’t pay them no attention.
Fat Charlie turned to Rosie. She smiled at him with her soft, sweet smile, then she licked her lips.
Cake, said Rosie, in his dream.
This was the signal for an orchestra to begin to play. It was a New Orleans jazz band, playing a funeral march.
The chef’s assistant was a police officer. She was holding a pair of handcuffs. The chef wheeled the cake up onto the dais.
Now, said Rosie to Fat Charlie, in his dream. Cut the cake.
The people at Table B—who were not people but cartoon mice and rats and barnyard animals, human-sized, and celebrating—began to sing songs from Disney cartoons. Fat Charlie knew that they wanted him to join in with them. Even asleep he could feel himself panicking at the simple idea of having to sing in public, his limbs becoming numb, his lips prickling.
I can’t sing with you, he told them, desperate for an excuse. I have to cut this cake.
At this, the hall fell into silence. And in the silence, a chef entered, wheeling a little trolley with something on it. The chef wore Grahame Coats’s face, and on the trolley was an extravagant white wedding cake, an ornate, many-tiered confection. A tiny bride and tiny groom perched precariously on the topmost tier of the cake, like two people trying to keep their balance on top of a sugar-frosted Chrysler Building.
Rosie’s mother reached under the table and produced a long, wooden-handled knife—almost a machete—with a rusty blade. She passed it to Rosie, who reached for Fat Charlie’s right hand and placed it over her own, and together they pressed the rusty knife into
the thick white icing on the topmost tier of the cake, pushed it in between the groom and the bride. The cake resisted the blade at first, and Fat Charlie pressed harder, putting all his weight on the knife. He felt the cake beginning to give. He pushed harder.
The blade sliced through the topmost tier of the wedding cake. It slipped and sliced down the cake, through every layer and tier, and as it did so, the cake opened…
In his dream, Fat Charlie supposed that the cake was filled with black beads, with beads of black glass or of polished jet, and then, as they tumbled out of the cake, he realized that the beads had legs, each bead had eight clever legs, and they came out the inside of the cake like a black wave. The spiders surged forward and covered the white tablecloth; they covered Rosie’s mother and Rosie herself, turning their white dresses black as ebony; then, as if controlled by some vast and malignant intelligence, they flowed, in their hundreds, toward Fat Charlie. He turned to run, but his legs were trapped in some kind of rubbery tanglefoot, and he tumbled to the floor.
Now they were upon him, their tiny legs crawling over his bare skin; he tried to get up, but he was drowning in spiders.
Fat Charlie wanted to scream, but his mouth was filled with spiders. They covered his eyes, and his world went dark…
Fat Charlie opened his eyes and saw nothing but blackness, and he screamed and he screamed and he screamed. Then he realized the lights were off and the window shades drawn, because people were watching the film.
It was already a flight from hell. Fat Charlie had just made it a little worse for everyone else.
He stood up and tried to get out to the aisle, tripping over people as he went past, then, when he was almost at the gangway, straightening up and banging the overhead locker with his forehead, which knocked open the locker door and tumbled someone’s hand luggage down onto his head.
People nearby, the ones who were watching, laughed. It was an elegant piece of slapstick, and it cheered them all up no end.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IN WHICH FAT CHARLIE GOES A LONG WAY
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 No
les. “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.
