by Neil Gaiman
THE IMPLACABLY CHEERFUL REPRESENTATIVE OF THE Saint Andrews Police force sat in the hotel front office with Daisy and Fat Charlie, and listened to everything each of them had to say with a placid but unimpressed smile on his wide face. Sometimes he would reach up a finger and scratch his moustache.
They told the police officer that a fugitive from justice called Grahame Coats had come in to them while they were eating dinner, and threatened Daisy with a gun. Which, they were also forced to admit, nobody but Daisy had actually seen. Then Fat Charlie told him about the incident with the black Mercedes and the bicycle, earlier that afternoon, and no, he hadn’t actually seen who was driving the car. But he knew where it came from. He told the officer about the house on the cliff top.
The man touched his pepper-and-salt moustache, thoughtfully. “Indeed, there is a house where you describe. However, it does not belong to your man Coats. Far from it. You are describing the house of Basil Finnegan, an extremely respectable man. For many years, Mr. Finnegan has had a healthy interest in law and order. He has given money to schools, but more important, he contributed a healthy sum toward the construction of the new police station.”
“He put a gun to my stomach,” said Daisy. “He told me that unless we came with him, he’d shoot.”
“If this was Mr. Finnegan, little lady,” said the police officer, “I’m sure that there is a perfectly simple explanation.” He opened his briefcase, produced a thick sheaf of papers. “I’ll tell you what. You think about the matter. Sleep on it. If, in the morning, you are convinced that it was more than high spirits, you simply have to fill in this form, and drop off all three copies at the police station. Ask for the new police station, at the back of the city square. Everyone knows where it is.”
He shook both of their hands and went on his way.
“You should have told him you were a cop too,” said Fat Charlie. “He might have taken you more seriously.”
“I don’t think it would have done any good,” she said. “Anyone who calls you ‘little lady’ has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.”
They walked out into the hotel reception.
“Where did she go?” asked Fat Charlie.
Benjamin Higgler said, “Aunt Callyanne? She’s waiting for you in the conference room.”
“THERE,” SAID ROSIE. “I KNEW I COULD DO IT, IF I JUST KEPT swinging.”
“He’ll kill you.”
“He’s going to kill us anyway.”
“It won’t work.”
“Mum. Have you got a better idea?”
“He’ll see you.”
“Mum. Will you please stop being so negative? If you’ve got any suggestions that would help, please say them. Otherwise just don’t bother. Okay?”
Silence.
Then, “I could show him my bum.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Er. Instead of?”
“In addition to.”
Silence. Then Rosie said, “Well, it couldn’t hurt.”
“HULLO, MRS. HIGGLER,” SAID FAT CHARLIE. “I WANT THE feather back.”
“What make you think I got your feather?” she asked, arms folded across her vast bosom.
“Mrs. Dunwiddy told me.”
Mrs. Higgler seemed surprised by this, for the first time. “Louella did tell you I got the feather?”
“She said you had the feather.”
“I keeping it safe.” Mrs. Higgler gestured toward Daisy with her mug of coffee. “You can’t expect me to start talkin‘ in front of her. I don’t know her.”
“This is Daisy. You can say anything to her you’d say to me.”
“She’s your fiancée,” said Mrs. Higgler. “I heard.”
Fat Charlie could feel his cheeks starting to burn. “She’s not my—we aren’t, actually. I had to say something to get her away from the man with the gun. It seemed the simplest thing.”
Mrs. Higgler looked at him. Behind her thick spectacles, her eyes began to twinkle. “I know that,” she said. “It was during your song. In front of an audience.” She shook her head, in the way that old people like to do when pondering the foolishness of the young. She opened her black purse, took out an envelope, passed it to Fat Charlie. “I promised Louella I keep it safe.”
Fat Charlie took out the feather from the envelope, half-crushed, from where he had been holding it tightly the night of the séance. “Okay,” he said. “Feather. Excellent. Now,” he said to Mrs. Higgler, “What exactly do I do with it?”
“You don’t know?”
Fat Charlie’s mother had told him, when he was young, to count to ten before he lost his temper. He counted, silently and unhurriedly, to ten, whereupon he lost his temper. “Of course I don’t know what to do with it, you stupid old woman! In the last two weeks I’ve been arrested, I’ve lost my fiancée and my job, I’ve watched my semi-imaginary brother get eaten by a wall of birds in Piccadilly Circus, I’ve flown back and forth across the Atlantic like some kind of lunatic transatlantic ping-pong ball, and today I got up in front of an audience and I, and I sang because my psycho ex-boss had a gun barrel against the stomach of the girl I’m having dinner with. All I’m trying to do is sort out the mess my life has turned into since you suggested I might want to talk to my brother. So, no. No, I don’t know what to do with this bloody feather. Burn it? Chop it up and eat it? Build a nest with it? Hold it out in front of me and jump out of the window?”
Mrs. Higgins looked sullen. “You have to ask Louella Dunwiddy.”
“I’m not sure that I can. She wasn’t looking very well the last time I saw her. And we don’t have much time.”
Daisy said, “Great. You got your feather back. Now, can we please talk about Grahame Coats?”
“It’s not only a feather. It’s the feather I swapped for my brother.”
“So swap it back, and let’s get on with things. We’ve got to do something.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” said Fat Charlie. Then he stopped, and thought about what he had said and what she had said. He looked at Daisy admiringly. “God, you’re smart,” he said.
“I try,” she said. “What did I say?”
They didn’t have four old ladies, but they had Mrs. Higgler, Benjamin, and Daisy. Dinner was almost finished, so Clarissa, the maître d‘, seemed perfectly happy to come and join them. They didn’t have earths of four different colors, but there was white sand from the beach behind the hotel and black dirt from the flower bed in front of it, red mud at the side of the hotel, multicolored sand in test tubes in the gift shop. The candles they borrowed from the poolside bar were small and white, not tall and black. Mrs. Higgler assured them that she could find all the herbs they actually needed on the island, but Fat Charlie had Clarissa borrow a pouch of bouquet garni from the kitchen.
“I think it’s all a matter of confidence,” Fat Charlie explained. “The most important thing isn’t the details. It’s the magical atmosphere.”
The magical atmosphere in this case was not enhanced by Benjamin Higgler’s tendency to look around the table and burst into explosive giggles nor by Daisy’s continually pointing out that the whole procedure was extremely silly.
Mrs. Higgler sprinkled the bouquet garni into a bowl of leftover white wine.
Mrs. Higgler began to hum. She raised her hands in encouragement, and the others began to hum along with her, like drunken bees. Fat Charlie waited for something to happen.
Nothing did.
“Fat Charlie,” said Mrs. Higgler. “You hum too.”
Fat Charlie swallowed. There’s nothing to be scared of, he told himself: he had sung in front of a roomful of people; he had proposed marriage in front of an audience to a woman he barely knew. Humming would be a doddle.
He found the note that Mrs. Higgler was humming, and he let it vibrate in his throat…
He held his feather. He concentrated and he hummed.
Benjamin stopped giggling. His eyes widened. There was a
n expression of alarm on his face, and Fat Charlie was going to stop humming to find out what was troubling him, but the hum was inside him now, and the candles were flickering…
“Look at him!” said Benjamin. “He’s—”
And Fat Charlie would have wondered what exactly he was, but it was too late to wonder.
Mists parted.
Fat Charlie was walking along a bridge, a long white footbridge across an expanse of gray water. A little way ahead of him, in the middle of the bridge, a man sat on a small wooden chair. The man was fishing. A green fedora hat covered his eyes. He appeared to be dozing, and he did not stir as Fat Charlie approached.
Fat Charlie recognized the man. He rested his hand on the man’s shoulder.
“You know,” he said, “I knew you were faking it. I didn’t think you were really dead.”
The man in the chair did not move, but he smiled. “Shows how much you know,” said Anansi. “I’m dead as they come.” He stretched luxuriantly, pulled a little black cheroot from behind his ear, and lit it with a match. “Yup. I’m dead. Figure I’ll stay dead for a lickle while. If you don’t die now and again, people start takin‘ you for granted.”
Fat Charlie said “But.”
Anansi touched his finger to his lips for silence. He picked up his fishing rod and began to wind the reel. He pointed to a small net. Fat Charlie picked it up, and held it out as his father lowered a silver fish, long and wriggling, into it. Anansi took the hook from the fish’s mouth then dropped the fish into a white pail. “There,” he said. “That’s tonight’s dinner taken care of.”
For the first time it registered with Fat Charlie that it had been dark night when he had sat down at the table with Daisy and the Higglers, but that while the sun was low wherever he was now, it had not set.
His father folded up the chair, and gave Fat Charlie the chair and the bucket to carry. They began to walk along the bridge. “You know,” said Mr. Nancy, “I always thought that if you ever came to talk to me, I’d tell you all manner of things. But you seem to be doing pretty good on your own. So what brings you here?”
“I’m not sure. I was trying to find the Bird Woman. I want to give her back her feather.”
“You shouldn’t have been messin‘ about with people like that,” said his father, blithely. “No good ever comes from it. She’s a mess of resentments, that one. But she’s a coward.”
“It was Spider—” said Fat Charlie.
“Your own fault. Letting that old busybody send half of you away.”
“I was only a kid. Why didn’t you do anything?”
Anansi pushed the hat back on his head. “Ol‘ Dunwiddy couldn’t do anything to you you didn’t let her do,” he said. “You’re my son, after all.”
Fat Charlie thought about this. Then he said, “But why didn’t you tell me?”
“You’re doing okay. You’re figurin‘ it all out by yourself. You figured out the songs, didn’t you?”
Fat Charlie felt clumsier and fatter and even more of a disappointment to his father, but he didn’t simply say “No.” Instead he said, “What do you think?”
“I think you’re gettin‘ there. The important thing about songs is that they’re just like stories. They don’t mean a damn unless there’s people listenin’ to them.”
They were approaching the end of the bridge. Fat Charlie knew, without being told, that this was the last chance they’d ever have to talk. There were so many things he needed to find out, so many things he wanted to know. He said, “Dad. When I was a kid. Why did you humiliate me?”
The old man’s brow creased. “Humiliate you? I loved you.”
“You got me to go to school dressed as President Taft. You call that love?”
There was a high-pitched yelp of something that might have been laughter from the old man, then he sucked on his cheroot. The smoke drifted from his lips like a ghostly speech balloon. “Your mother had something to say about that,” he said. Then he said, “We don’t have long, Charlie. You want to spend the time we got left fighting?”
Fat Charlie shook his head. “Guess not.”
They had reached the end of the bridge. “Now,” said his father. “When you see your brother. I want you to give him something from me.”
“What?”
His father reached up a hand, pulled Fat Charlie’s head down. Then he kissed him, gently, on the forehead. “That,” he said.
Fat Charlie straightened up. His father was looking up at him with an expression that, if he had seen it in anyone else’s face, he would have thought of as pride. “Let me see the feather,” said his father.
Fat Charlie reached into his pocket. The feather was there, looking even more crumpled and dilapidated than it looked before.
His father made a “tch” noise and held the feather up to the light. “This is a beautiful feather,” said his father. “You don’t want it to get all manky. She won’t take it back if it’s messed up.” Mr. Nancy ran his hand over the feather, and it was perfect. He frowned at it. “Now, you’ll just get it messed up again.” He breathed on his fingernails, polished them against his jacket. Then he seemed to have arrived at a decision. He removed his fedora and slipped the feather into the hatband. “Here. You could do with a natty hat anyway.” He put the hat onto Fat Charlie’s head. “It suits you,” he said.
Fat Charlie sighed. “Dad. I don’t wear hats. It’ll look stupid. I’ll look a complete tit. Why do you always try to embarrass me?”
In the fading light, the old man looked at his son. “You think I’d lie to you? Son, all you need to wear a hat is attitude. And you got that. You think I’d tell you you looked good if you didn’t? You look real sharp. You don’t believe me?”
Fat Charlie said, “Not really.”
“Look,” said his father. He pointed over the side of the bridge. The water beneath them was still and smooth as a mirror, and the man looking up at him from the water looked real sharp in his new green hat.
Fat Charlie looked up to tell his father that maybe he had been wrong, but the old man was gone.
He stepped off the bridge into the dusk.
“RIGHT. I WANT TO KNOW EXACTLY WHERE HE IS. WHERE DID he go? What have you done to him?”
“I didn’t do anything. Lord, child,” said Mrs. Higgler. “This never happened the last time.”
“It looked like he was beamed up to the mothership,” said Benjamin. “Cool. Real-life special effects.”
“I want you to bring him back,” said Daisy, fiercely. “I want him back now.”
“I don’t even know where he is,” said Mrs. Higgler. “And I didn’t send him there. He do that himself.”
“Anyway,” said Clarissa. “What if he’s off doing what he’s doing and we make him come back? We could ruin it all.”
“Exactly,” said Benjamin. “Like beaming the landing party back, halfway through their mission.”
Daisy thought about this and was irritated to realize that it made sense—as much as anything made sense these days, anyway.
“If nothing else is happening,” said Clarissa, “I ought to go back to the restaurant. Make sure everything’s all right.”
Mrs. Higgler sipped her coffee. “Nothin‘ happenin’ here,” she agreed.
Daisy slammed her hand down on the table. “Excuse me. We’ve got a killer out there. And now Fat Charlie’s beamed up to the mastership.”
“Mothership,” said Benjamin.
Mrs. Higgler blinked. “Okay,” she said. “We should do something. What do you suggest?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Daisy and she hated herself for saying it. “Kill time, I suppose.” She picked up the copy of the Williamstown Courier that Mrs. Higgler had been reading and began to flip through it.
The story about the missing tourists, the women who hadn’t gone back to their cruise ship was a column on page three. The two at the house, said Grahame Coats in her head. Did you think I’d believe they were from the ship?
At the end o
f the day, Daisy was a cop.
“Get me the phone,” she said.
“Who are you calling?”
“I think we’ll start with the minister of tourism and the chief of police, and we’ll go on from there.”
THE CRIMSON SUN WAS SHRINKING ON THE HORIZON. SPIDER, had he not been Spider, would have despaired. On the island, in that place, there was a clean line between day and night, and Spider watched the last red crumb of sun being swallowed by the sea. He had his stones and the two stakes.
He wished he had fire.
He wondered when the moon would be up. When the moon rose, he might have a chance.
The sun set—the final smudge of red sank into the dark sea, and it was night.
“Anansi’s child,” said a voice from out of the darkness. “Soon enough, I shall feed. You will not know I am there until you feel my breath on the back of your head. I stood above you, while you were staked out for me, and I could have crunched through your neck then and there, but I thought better of it. Killing you in your sleep would have brought me no pleasure. I want to feel you die. I want you to know why I have taken your life.”
Spider threw a rock toward where he thought the voice was coming from, and heard it crash harmlessly into the undergrowth.
“You have fingers,” said the voice, “but I have claws sharper than knives. You have your two legs, but I have four legs that will never tire, that can run ten times as fast as you ever will and keep on running. Your teeth can eat meat, if it has been made soft and tasteless by the fire, for you have little monkey teeth, good for chewing soft fruit and crawling bugs; but I have teeth that rend and tear the living flesh from the bones, and I can swallow it while the lifeblood still fountains into the sky.”
And then Spider made a noise. It was a noise that could be made without a tongue, without even opening his lips. It was a “meh” noise of amused disdain. You may be all these things, Tiger, it seemed to say, but so what? All the stories there ever were are Anansi’s. Nobody tells Tiger stories.
