Anansi Boys

by Neil Gaiman

  He pulled out the fortune cookie slip from his pocket and un-crumpled it. “Meet you by Eros,” it said, and next to that was a hasty little drawing of something that looked like large asterisk, and might, conceivably, have been a spider.

  He scanned the skies and the buildings as he walked, but there were no birds, and that was strange because there were always birds in London. There were always birds everywhere.

  Spider was sitting beneath the statue, reading the News of the World. He looked up as Fat Charlie approached.

  “It’s not actually Eros, you know,” said Fat Charlie. “It’s the statue of Christian Charity.”

  “So why is it naked and holding a bow and arrow? That doesn’t seem a particularly charitable or Christian thing to do.”

  “I’m just telling you what I read,” said Fat Charlie. “Where have you been? I was worried about you.”

  “I’m all right. I’ve just been avoiding birds, trying to get my head around all this.”

  “You’ve noticed there aren’t any birds around today?” said Fat Charlie.

  “I’ve noticed. I don’t really know what to make of it. But I’ve been thinking. And you know,” said Spider, “there’s something wrong with this whole thing.”

  “Everything, for a start,” said Fat Charlie.

  “No. I mean there’s something wrong with the Bird Woman trying to hurt us.”

  “Yup. It’s wrong. It’s a very, very bad thing to do. Do you want to tell her, or shall I?”

  “Not wrong like that. Wrong like—well, think about it. I mean, despite the Hitchcock film, birds aren’t the best thing to hurt someone with. They may be death-on-wings for insects but they really aren’t very good at attacking people. Millions of years of learning that, on the whole, people will probably eat you first. Their first instinct is to leave us alone.”

  “Not all of them,” said Fat Charlie. “Not vultures. Or ravens. But they only turn up on the battlefield, when the fighting’s done. Waiting for you to die.”

  “What?”

  “I said, except for vultures and ravens. I didn’t mean anything…”

  “No.” Spider concentrated. “No, it’s gone. You made me think of something, and I almost had it. Look, have you got hold of Mrs. Dunwiddy yet?”

  “I phoned Mrs. Higgler, but there isn’t any answer.”

  “Well go and talk to them.”

  “It’s all very well for you to say that, but I’m skint. Broke. Cleaned out. I can’t keep flying back and forwards across the Atlantic. I don’t even have a job any longer. I’m—”

  Spider reached into his black-and-scarlet jacket and pulled out a wallet. He took out a sheaf of notes in an assortment of currencies, pushed them into Fat Charlie’s hand. “Here. This should be enough to get you there and back. Just get the feather.”

  Fat Charlie said, “Listen. Has it occurred to you that maybe Dad isn’t dead after all?”

  “What?”

  “Well, I was thinking. Maybe all this was one of his jokes. It feels like the kind of thing he’d do, doesn’t it?”

  Spider said, “I don’t know. Could be.”

  Fat Charlie said, “I’m sure it is. That’s the first thing I’m going to do. I’m going to head down to his grave and—”

  But he said nothing else, because that was when the birds came. They were city birds; sparrows and starlings, pigeons and crows, thousands upon thousands of them, and they wove and wound as they flew like a tapestry, forming a wall of birds coming toward Fat Charlie and Spider down Regent Street. A feathered phalanx huge as the side of a skyscraper, perfectly flat, perfectly impossible, all of it in motion, weaving and fluttering and swooping; Fat Charlie saw it, but it would not fit inside his mind, slipping and twisting and thinning the whole time inside his head. He looked up at it and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

  Spider jerked at Fat Charlie’s elbow. He shouted “Run!”

  Fat Charlie turned to run. Spider was methodically folding his newspaper, putting it down on the bin.

  “You run too!”

  “It doesn’t want you. Not yet,” said Spider, and he grinned. It was a grin that had, in its time, persuaded more people than you can imagine to do things they did not want to do; and Fat Charlie really wanted to run. “Get the feather. Get Dad, too, if you think he’s still around. Just go.”

  Fat Charlie went.

  The wall of birds swirled and transformed, became a whirlwind of birds heading for the statue of Eros and the man beneath it. Fat Charlie ran into a doorway and watched as the base of the dark tornado slammed into Spider. Fat Charlie imagined he could hear his brother screaming over the deafening whirr of wings. Maybe he could.

  And then the birds dispersed and the street was empty. The wind teased a handful of feathers along the gray pavement.

  Fat Charlie stood there and felt sick. If any of the passers-by had noticed what had happened, they had not reacted. Somehow, he was certain that no one had seen it but him.

  There was a woman standing beneath the statue, near where his brother had been. Her ragged brown coat flapped in the wind. Fat Charlie walked back to her. “Look,” he said, “When I said to make him go away, I meant just to get him out of my life. Not do whatever it is you’ve done to him.”

  She looked into his face and said nothing. There is a madness in the eyes of some birds of prey, a ferocity that can be perfectly intimidating. Fat Charlie tried not to be intimidated by it. “I made a mistake,” he said. “I’m willing to pay for it. Take me instead. Bring him back.”

  She continued to stare. Then she said, “Do not doubt your turn shall come, Compé Anansi’s child. In time.”

  “Why do you want him?”

  “I don’t want him,” she told him. “Why would I want him? I had an obligation to another. Now I shall deliver him, and then my obligation shall be done.”

  The newspaper fluttered, and Fat Charlie was alone.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  IN WHICH ROSIE LEARNS TO SAY NO TO STRANGERS AND FAT CHARLIE ACQUIRES A LIME

  FAT CHARLIE LOOKED DOWN AT HIS FATHER’S GRAVE. “ARE YOU in there?” he said aloud. “If you are, come out. I need to talk to you.”

  He walked over to the floral grave marker and looked down. He was not certain what he was expecting—a hand to push up through the soil, perhaps, punching up and grabbing his leg—but nothing of the kind seemed to be about to happen.

  He had been so certain.

  Fat Charlie walked back through the Garden of Rest feeling stupid, like a game show contestant who had just made the mistake of betting his million dollars on the Mississippi being a longer river than the Amazon. He should have known. His father was as dead as roadkill, and he had wasted Spider’s money on a wild goose chase. By the windmills of Babyland he sat down and wept, and the moldering toys seemed even sadder and lonelier than he remembered.

  She was waiting for him in the parking lot, leaning against her car, smoking a cigarette. She looked uncomfortable.

  “Hullo, Mrs. Bustamonte,” said Fat Charlie.

  She took one final drag on the cigarette, then dropped it to the asphalt and ground it out beneath the sole of her flat shoe. She was wearing black. She looked tired. “Hello Charles.”

  “I think if I’d expected to see anyone here, it would be Mrs. Higgler. Or Mrs. Dunwiddy.”

  “Callyanne’s gone away. Mrs. Dunwiddy sent me. She wants to see you.”

  It’s like the mafia, thought Fat Charlie. A postmenopausal mafia. “She’s going to make me an offer I can’t refuse?”

  “I doubt it. She is not very well.”

  “Oh.”

  He climbed into his rental, followed Mrs. Bustamonte’s Camry along the Florida streets. He had been so certain about his father. Certain he’d find him alive. Sure that he’d help…

  They parked outside Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house. Fat Charlie looked at the front yard, at the faded plastic flamingos and the gnomes and the red mirrored gazing ball sitting on a small concrete plinth
like an enormous Christmas tree ornament. He walked over to the ball, just like the one he had broken when he was a boy, and saw himself distorted, staring back from it.

  “What’s it for?” he said.

  “It’s not for anything. She liked it.”

  Inside the house the smell of violets hung thick and cloying. Fat Charlie’s Great-Aunt Alanna had kept a tube of parma violet candies in her handbag, but even as a chunky kid with a sweet tooth, Fat Charlie would eat them only if there wasn’t anything else. This house smelled like those sweets had tasted. Fat Charlie hadn’t thought of parma violets in twenty years. He wondered if they still made them. He wondered why anyone had ever made them in the first place…

  “She’s at the end of the hall,” said Mrs. Bustamonte, and she stopped and she pointed. Fat Charlie went into Mrs. Dunwiddy’s bedroom.

  It was not a big bed, but Mrs. Dunwiddy lay in it like an oversized doll. She wore her glasses, and above them something that Fat Charlie realized was the first nightcap he had ever seen, a yellowing tea-cosy-like affair, trimmed in lace. She was propped up on a mountain of pillows, her mouth open, and she was snoring gently as he walked in.

  He coughed.

  Mrs. Dunwiddy jerked her head up, opened her eyes, and stared at him. She pointed her finger to the nightstand beside the bed, and Fat Charlie picked up the glass of water sitting there and passed it to her. She took it with both hands, like a squirrel holding a nut, and she took a long sip before handing it back to him.

  “My mouth get all dry,” she said. “You know how old I am?”

  “Um.” There was, he decided, no right answer. “No.”

  “Hunnert and four.”

  “That’s amazing. You’re in such good shape. I mean, that’s quite marvelous—”

  “Shut up, Fat Charlie.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t say ‘sorry’ like that neither, like a dog that get tell off for messin‘ on the kitchen floor. Hold your head up. Look the world in the eye. You hear me?”

  “Yes. Sorry. I mean, just yes.”

  She sighed. “They want to take me to the hospital. I tell them, when you get to be hunnert and four, you earn the right to die in your own bed. I make babies in this bed long time back, and I birth babies in this bed, and damned if I going to die anywhere else. And another thing…” She stopped talking, closed her eyes, and took a slow, deep breath. Just as Fat Charlie was convinced she had fallen asleep, her eyes opened, and she said, “Fat Charlie, if someone ever ask if you want to live to be hunnert and four, say no. Everything hurt. Everything. I hurt in places nobody ain’t discover yet.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  “None of your back talk.”

  Fat Charlie looked at the little woman in her white wooden bed. “Shall I say sorry?” he asked.

  Mrs. Dunwiddy looked away, guiltily. “I do you wrong,” she said. “Long time ago, I do you wrong.”

  “I know,” said Fat Charlie.

  Mrs. Dunwiddy might have been dying, but she still shot Fat Charlie the kind of look that would have sent children under the age of five screaming for their mothers. “What you mean, you know?”

  Fat Charlie said, “I figured it out. Probably not all of it, but some of it. I’m not stupid.”

  She examined him coldly through the thick glass of her spectacles, then she said, “No. You not. True thing, that.”

  She held out a gnarled hand. “Give me the water back. That’s better.” She sipped her water, dabbing at it with a small, purple tongue. “Is a good thing you’re here today. Tomorrow the whole house be fill with grievin‘ grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of them tryin’ to make me to die in the hospital, makin‘ up to me so I give them things. They don’t know me. I outlive all my own children. Every one of them.”

  Fat Charlie said, “Are you going to talk about the bad turn you did to me?”

  “You should never have break my garden mirror ball.”

  “I’m sure I shouldn’t.”

  He remembered it, in the way you remember things from childhood, part memory, part memory of the memory: following the tennis ball into Mrs. Dunwiddy’s yard, and once he was there, experimentally picking up her mirrored ball to see his face in it, distorted and huge, feeling it tumble to the stone path, watching it smash into a thousand tiny shards of glass. He remembered the strong old fingers that grabbed him by the ear and dragged him out of her yard and into her house…

  “You sent Spider away,” he said. “Didn’t you?”

  Her jaw was set like a mechanical bulldog’s. She nodded. “I did a banishment,” she said. “Didn’t mean for it to go so. Everybody know a little magic back in those days. We didn’t have all them kinda DVDs and cell phones and microwaves, but still, we know a lot regardless. I only wanted to teach you a lesson. You were so full of yourself, all mischief and back talk and vinegar. So I pull Spider out of you, to teach you a lesson.”

  Fat Charlie heard the words, but they made no sense. “You pulled him out?”

  “I break him off from you. All the tricksiness. All the wickedness. All the devilry. All that.” She sighed. “My mistake. Nobody tell me that if you do magic around a, around people like your daddy’s bloodline, it magnify everything. Everything get bigger.” Another sip of the water. “Your mother never believe it. Not really. But that Spider, he worse than you. Your father never say nothing about it until I make Spider go away. Even then, all he tell me is if you can’t fix it you not no son of his.”

  He wanted to argue with her, to tell her how this was nonsense, that Spider was not a part of him, no more than he, Fat Charlie, was part of the sea or of the darkness. Instead he said, “Where’s the feather?”

  “What feather you talking about?”

  “When I came back from that place. The place with the cliffs and the caves. I was holding a feather. What did you do with it?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “I’m an old woman. I’m a hunnert and four.”

  Fat Charlie said, “Where is it?”

  “I forget.”

  “Please tell me.”

  “I ain’t got it.”

  “Who does?”

  “Callyanne.”

  “Mrs. Higgler?”

  She leaned in, confidentially. “The other two, they’re just girls. They’re flighty.”

  “I called Mrs. Higgler before I came out. I stopped at her house before I went to the cemetery. Mrs. Bustamonte says she’s gone away.”

  Mrs. Dunwiddy swayed gently from side to side in the bed, as if she were rocking herself to sleep. She said, “I not going to be here for much longer. I stop eating solid food after you leave the last time. I done. Only water. Some women say they love your father, but I know him long long before them. Back when I had my looks, he would take me dancing. He come pick me up and whirl me around. He was an old man even then, but he always make a girl feel special. You don’t feel…” She stopped, took another sip of water. Her hands were shaking. Fat Charlie took the empty glass from her. “Hunnert and four,” she said. “And never in my bed in the daytime except for confinements. And now I finish.”

  “I’m sure you’ll reach a hundred and five,” said Fat Charlie, uneasily.

  “Don’t you say that!” she said. She looked alarmed. “Don’t! Your family do enough trouble already. Don’t you go making things happen.”

  “I’m not like my dad,” said Fat Charlie. “I’m not magic. Spider got all that side of the family, remember?”

  She did not appear to be listening. She said, “When we would go dancing, way before the Second World War, your daddy would talk to the bandleader, and plenty times they call him up to sing with them. All the people laugh and cheer. Is so he make things happen. Singing.”

  “Where is Mrs. Higgler?”

  “Gone home.”

  “Her house is empty. Her car isn’t there.”

  “Gone home.”

  “Er…you mean she’s dead?”

  The old woman on the whi
te sheets wheezed and gasped for breath. She seemed unable to speak any longer. She motioned to him.

  Fat Charlie said, “Shall I get help?”

  She nodded, and continued to gasp and choke and wheeze as he went out to find Mrs. Bustamonte. She was sitting in the kitchen, watching Oprah on a very small countertop television. “She wants you,” he said.

  Mrs. Bustamonte went out. She came back holding the empty water jug. “What do you say to set her off like that?”

  “Was she having an attack or something?”

  Mrs. Bustamonte gave him a look. “No, Charles. She was laughing at you. She say you make her feel good.”

  “Oh. She said Mrs. Higgler had gone home. I asked if she meant she was dead.”

  Mrs. Bustamonte smiled then. “Saint Andrews,” she said. “Callyanne’s gone to Saint Andrews.” She refilled the jug in the sink.

  Fat Charlie said, “When all this started I thought that it was me against Spider, and you four were on my side. And now Spider’s been taken, and it’s me against the four of you.”

  She turned off the water and gazed at him sullenly.

  “I don’t believe anyone anymore,” said Fat Charlie. “Mrs. Dunwiddy’s probably faking being ill. Probably as soon as I leave here she’ll be out of bed and doing the charleston around her bedroom.”

  “She not eating. She say it makes her feel bad inside. Won’t take a thing to fill her belly. Just water.”

  “Where in Saint Andrews is she?” asked Fat Charlie.

  “Just go,” said Mrs. Bustamonte. “Your family, you done enough harm here.”

  Fat Charlie looked as if he was about to say something, and then he didn’t, and he left without another word.

  Mrs. Bustamonte took the jug of water in to Mrs. Dunwiddy, who lay quiet in the bed.

  “Nancy’s son hates us,” said Mrs. Bustamonte. “What you tell him anyhow?”

  Mrs. Dunwiddy said nothing. Mrs. Bustamonte listened, and when she was sure that the older woman was still breathing, she took off Mrs. Dunwiddy’s thick spectacles and put them down by the bed, then pulled up the sheet to cover Mrs. Dunwiddy’s shoulders.

  After that, she simply waited for the end.