Anansi Boys

by Neil Gaiman

  So Grahame Coats showed them the sitting room, the study, the library, the television room, the dining room, the kitchen and the swimming pool. He opened a door beneath the kitchen stairs that looked as if it would lead to a broom cupboard, and walked his guests down the wooden steps into the rock-walled wine cellar. He showed them the wine, most of which had come with the house when he had bought it. He walked them to the far end of the wine cellar to the bare room that had, back in the days before refrigeration, been a meat storage locker. It was always chilly in the meat locker, where heavy chains came down from the ceiling, the empty hooks on the ends showing where once whole carcases had hung long before. Grahame Coats held the heavy iron door open politely while both the women walked inside.

  “You know,” he said, helpfully, “I’ve just realized. The light switch is back where we came in. Hold on.” And then he slammed the door behind the women, and he rammed closed the bolts.

  He picked out a dusty-looking bottle of 1995 Chablis Premier Cru from a wine rack.

  He went upstairs with a swing in his step and let his three employees know that he would be giving them the week off.

  It seemed to him, as he walked up the stairs to his study, as if something were padding soundlessly behind him, but when he turned there was nothing there. Oddly, he found this comforting. He found a corkscrew, opened the bottle and poured himself a pale glass of wine. He drank it and, although he had never previously had much time for red wines, he found himself wishing that what he was drinking was richer and darker. It should be, he thought, the color of blood.

  As he finished his second glass of Chablis, he realized that he had been blaming the wrong person for his plight. Maeve Livingstone was, he saw it now, merely a dupe. No, the person to blame, obviously and undeniably, was Fat Charlie. Without his meddling, without his criminal trespass into Grahame Coats’s office computer systems, Grahame Coats wouldn’t be here, an exile, like a blond Napoleon on a perfect, sunny Elba. He wouldn’t be in the unfortunate predicament of having two women imprisoned in his meat locker. If Fat Charlie was here, he thought, I would tear out his throat with my teeth, and the thought shocked him even as it excited him. You didn’t want to screw with Grahame Coats.

  Evening came, and Grahame Coats watched the Squeak Attack from his window as it drifted past his house on the cliff and off into the sunset. He wondered how long it would take them to notice that two passengers were missing. He even waved.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  IN WHICH FAT CHARLIE DOES SEVERAL THINGS FOR THE FIRST TIME

  THE DOLPHIN HOTEL HAD A CONCIERGE. HE WAS YOUNG AND bespectacled, and he was reading a paperback novel with a rose and a gun on the cover.

  “I’m trying to find someone,” said Fat Charlie. “On the island.”

  “Who?”

  “A lady named Callyanne Higgler. She’s here from Florida. She’s an old friend of my family.”

  The young man closed his book thoughtfully, then he looked at Fat Charlie through narrowed eyes. When people do this in paperback books it gives an immediate impression of dangerous alertness, but in reality it just made the young man look like he was trying not to fall asleep. He said, “Are you the man with the lime?”

  “What?”

  “The man with the lime?”

  “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  “Lemme see it, nuh?”

  “My lime?”

  The young man nodded, gravely.

  “No, you can’t. It’s back in my room.”

  “But you are the man with the lime.”

  “Can you help me find Mrs. Higgler? Are there any Higglers on the island? Do you have a phone book I could look at? I was hoping for a phone book in my bedroom.”

  “It’s a kinda common name, you know?” said the young man. “The phone book not going to help.”

  “How common could it be?”

  “Well,” said the young man, “For example, I’m Benjamin Higgler. She over there, on reception, she name Amerila Higgler.”

  “Oh. Right. Lots of Higglers on the island. I see.”

  “She on the island for the music festival?”

  “What?”

  “It going on all this week.” He handed Fat Charlie a leaflet, informing him that Willie Nelson (canceled) would be headlining the St. Andrews Music Festival.

  “Why’d he cancel?”

  “Same reason Garth Brooks cancel. Nobody tell them it was happening in the first place.”

  “I don’t think she’s going to the music festival. I really need to track her down. She’s got something I’m looking for. Look, if you were me, how would you go about looking for her?”

  Benjamin Higgler reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a map of the island. “We’re here, just south of Williamstown…” he began, making a felt pen mark on the paper. From there, he began marking out a plan of campaign for Fat Charlie: he divided the island into segments that could easily be covered in a day by a man on a bicycle, marked out each rum shop and café with small crosses. He put a circle beside each tourist attraction.

  Then he rented Fat Charlie a bicycle.

  Fat Charlie pedaled off to the south.

  There were information conduits on Saint Andrews that Fat Charlie, who, on some level believed that coconut palms and cellular telephones ought to be mutually exclusive, had not expected. It did not seem to make any difference who he talked to: old men playing draughts in the shade; women with breasts like watermelons and buttocks like armchairs and laughter like mockingbirds; a sensible young lady in the tourist office; a bearded rasta with a green, red, and yellow-colored knit cap and what appeared to be a woollen miniskirt: they all had the same response.

  “You the one with the lime?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Show us your lime.”

  “It’s back at the hotel. Look, I’m trying to find Callyanne Higgler. She’s about sixty. American. Big mug of coffee in her hand.”

  “Never heard of her.”

  Bicycling around the island, Fat Charlie soon discovered, had its dangers. The chief mode of transportation on the island was the minibus: unlicensed, unsafe, always overfilled, the minibuses hurtled around the island, tooting and squealing their brakes, slamming around corners on two wheels whilst relying on the weight of their passengers to ensure they never tipped over. Fat Charlie would have been killed a dozen times on his first morning out were it not for the low thud of drum and bass being played over each bus’s sound system: he could feel them in the pit of his stomach even before he heard their engines, and he had plenty of time to wheel the bicycle over to the side of the road.

  While none of the people he spoke to were exactly what you could call helpful, they were still all extremely friendly. Fat Charlie stopped several times on his day’s expedition to the south and refilled his water bottle: he stopped at cafés and at private houses. Everyone was so pleased to see him, even if they didn’t know anything about Mrs. Higgler. He got back to the Dolphin Hotel in time for dinner.

  On the following day he went north. On his way back to Williamstown, in the late afternoon, he stopped on a cliff top, dismounted, and walked his bike down to the entry gate of a luxurious house that sat on its own, overlooking the bay. He pressed the speakerphone button and said hello, but no one replied. A large black car sat in the driveway. Fat Charlie wondered if perhaps the place was deserted, but a curtain twitched in an upper room.

  He pressed the button again. “Hullo,” he said. “Just wanted to see if I could fill my water bottle here.”

  There was no reply. Perhaps he had only imagined that there was someone at the window. He seemed extremely prone to imagining things here: he started to fancy that he was being watched, not by someone in the house, but by someone or something in the bushes that bordered the road. “Sorry to have bothered you,” he said into the speaker, and clambered back onto his bike. It was downhill from here all the way to Williamstown. He was sure that he’d pass a café or two on the way, or another house, a friend
ly one.

  He was on his way down the road—the cliffs had become a steepish hill down to the sea—when a black car came up behind him and accelerated forward with a roar. Too late, Fat Charlie realized that the driver had not seen him, for there was a long scrape of car against the bike’s handlebars, and Fat Charlie found himself tumbling, with the bike, down the hill. The black car drove on.

  Fat Charlie picked himself up halfway down the hill. “That could have been nasty,” he said aloud. The handlebars were twisted. He hauled his bike back up the hill and onto the road. A low bass rumble alerted him to the approach of a minibus, and he waved it down.

  “Can I put my bike in the back?”

  “No room,” said the driver, but he produced several bungee cords from beneath his seat, and used them to fasten the bike onto the roof of the bus. Then he grinned. “You must be the Englishman with the lime.”

  “I don’t have it on me. It’s back at the hotel.”

  Fat Charlie squeezed onto the bus, where the booming bass resolved itself, extremely improbably, into Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” Fat Charlie squeezed in next to a large woman with a chicken on her lap. Behind them two white girls chattered about the parties they had attended the previous night and the shortcomings of the temporary boyfriends they had accumulated during their holiday.

  Fat Charlie noticed the black car—a Mercedes—as it came back up the road. It had a long scratch along one side. He felt guilty, hoping his bike hadn’t scraped the paintwork too badly. The windows were tinted so dark that the car might have been driving itself…

  Then one of the white girls tapped Fat Charlie on the shoulder and asked him if he knew of any good parties on the island that night, and when he said he didn’t, started telling him about one that she’d been to in a cave two nights before, where there was a swimming pool and a sound system and lights and everything, and so Fat Charlie completely failed to notice that the black Mercedes was now following the minibus into Williamstown, and that it only went on its way once Fat Charlie had retrieved his bike from the roof of the minibus (“next time, you should bring the lime”) and carried the bike into the hotel lobby.

  Only then did the car return to the house on the cliff top.

  Benjamin the concierge examined the bike and told Fat Charlie not to worry, and they’d have it all fixed and good as new by tomorrow.

  Fat Charlie went back to his hotel room, the color of underwater, where his lime sat, like a small green Buddha, on the countertop.

  “You’re no help,” he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.

  STORIES ARE WEBS, INTERCONNECTED STRAND TO STRAND, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of story.

  Daisy, for example.

  Daisy could not have lasted as long as she had in the police force without having a sensible side to her nature, which was mostly all anybody saw. She respected laws, and she respected rules. She understood that many of these rules are perfectly arbitrary—decisions about where one could park, for example, or what hours shops were permitted to open—but that even these rules helped the big picture. They kept society safe. They kept things secure.

  Her flatmate, Carol, thought she’d gone mad.

  “You can’t just leave and say you’re going on holiday. It doesn’t work like that. You’re not on a TV cop show, you know. You can’t just zoom all over the world to follow up a lead.”

  “Well, then, in that case I’m not,” Daisy had retorted untruthfully. “I’m just going on holiday.”

  She said it so convincingly that the sensible cop who lived at the back of her head was shocked into silence and then began to explain to her exactly what she was doing wrong, beginning with pointing out that she was about to go off on an entirely unauthorized leave—tantamount, muttered the sensible cop, to neglect of duty—and moving on from there.

  It explained it on the way to the airport, and all across the Atlantic. It pointed out that even if she managed to avoid a permanent black mark in her Personal File, let alone being thrown out of the police force altogether, even if she did find Grahame Coats, there was nothing she could do once she found him. Her Majesty’s constabulary look unkindly on kidnapping criminals in foreign countries, let alone arresting them, and she rather doubted she would be able to persuade him to return to the UK willingly.

  It was only when Daisy got off the little plane from Jamaica and tasted the air—earthy, spicy, wet, almost sweet—of Saint Andrews that the sensible cop stopped pointing out the sheer ill-considered madness of what she was doing. That was because it was drowned out by another voice. “Evildoers beware!” it sang. “Beware! Take care! Evildoers everywhere!” and Daisy was marching to its beat. Grahame Coats had killed a woman in his office in the Aldwych, and he had walked out of there scot-free. He had done it practically under Daisy’s nose.

  She shook her head, collected her bag, brightly informed the immigration officer that she was here on her holidays, and went out to the taxi rank.

  “I want a hotel that’s not too expensive, but isn’t icky, please,” she said to the driver.

  “I got just the place for you darlin‘,” he said. “Hop in.”

  SPIDER OPENED HIS EYES AND DISCOVERED THAT HE WAS staked-out, face down. His arms were tied to a large stake pounded into the earth in front of him. He could not move his legs or twist his neck enough to see behind him, but he was willing to bet that they were similarly hobbled. The movement, as he tried to lift himself out of the dirt, to look behind him, caused his scratches to burn.

  He opened his mouth, and dark blood drooled onto the dust, wetting it.

  He heard a sound and twisted his head as much as he could. A white woman was looking down at him curiously.

  “Are you all right? Silly question. Just look at the state of you. I suppose you’re another duppy. Do I have that right?”

  Spider thought about it. He didn’t think he was a duppy. He shook his head.

  “If you are, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Apparently, I’m a duppy myself. I hadn’t heard the term before, but I met a delightful old gentleman on the way here who told me all about it. Let me see if I can be of any assistance.”

  She crouched down next to him and reached out to help loosen his bonds.

  Her hand slipped through him. He could feel her fingers, like strands of fog, brushing his skin.

  “I’m afraid I don’t seem able actually to touch you,” she said. “Still, that means that you’re not dead yet. So cheer up.”

  Spider hoped this odd ghost-woman would go away soon. He couldn’t think straight.

  “Anyway, once I had everything sorted out, I resolved to remain walking the Earth until I take vengeance on my killer. I explained it to Morris—he was on a television screen in Selfridges—and he said he rather thought I was missing the entire point of having moved beyond the flesh, but I ask you, if they expect me to turn the other cheek they have several other thinks coming. There are a number of precedents. And I’m sure I can do a Banquo-at-the-Feast thing, given the opportunity. Do you talk?”

  Spider shook his head, and blood dripped from his forehead into his eyes. It stung. Spider wondered how long it would take him to grow a new tongue. Prometheus had managed to grow a new liver on a daily basis, and Spider was pretty sure that a liver had to be a lot more work than a tongue. Livers did chemical reactions—bilirubin, urea, enzymes, all that. They broke down alcohol, and that had to be a lot of work on its own. All tongues did was talk. Well, that and lick, of course…

  “I can’t keep yattering on,” said the yellow-haired ghost-lady. “I’ve got a long way to go, I think.” She began to walk away, and she faded as she walked. Spider raised his head and watched her slip from one reality to another, like a photograph fading in the sunlight. He tried to call her back, but all the noises he could make were muffled, incoherent. Tongueless.

  Somewher
e in the distance, he heard the cry of a bird.

  Spider tested his bonds. They held.

  He found himself thinking, once again, of Rosie’s story of the raven who saved the man from the mountain lion. It itched in his head, worse than the claw tracks on his face and chest. Concentrate. The man lay on the ground, reading or sunbathing. The raven cawed in the tree. There was a big cat in the undergrowth…

  And then the story reshaped itself, and he had it. Nothing had changed. It was all a matter of how you looked at the ingredients.

  What if, he thought, the bird wasn’t calling to warn the man that there was a big cat stalking him? What if it was calling to tell the mountain lion that there was a man on the ground—dead or asleep or dying. That all the big cat had to do was finish the man off. And then the raven would feast on what it left…

  Spider opened his mouth to moan, and blood ran from his mouth and puddled on the powdery clay.

  Reality thinned. Time passed, in that place.

  Spider, tongueless and furious, raised his head and twisted it to look at the ghost birds that flew around him, screaming.

  He wondered where he was. This was not the Bird Woman’s copper-colored universe, nor her cave, but neither was it the place he had previously tended to think of as the real world. It was closer to the real world, though, close enough that he could almost taste it, or would have tasted it if he could taste anything in his mouth but the iron tang of the blood; close enough that, if he were not staked out on the ground, he could have touched it.

  If he had not been perfectly certain of his own sanity, certain to a degree that normally is only found in people who have concluded that they’re definitely Julius Caesar and have been sent to save the world, he might have thought that he was going mad. First he saw a blonde woman who claimed to be a duppy, and now he heard voices. Well, he heard one voice anyway. Rosie’s.