Anansi Boys

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.

Somewhere 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.

She was saying, “I dunno. I thought it would be a holiday, but seeing those kids, without anything, it breaks your heart. There’s so much they need.” And then, while Spider was trying to assess the significance of this, she said, “I wonder how much longer she’s going to be in the bath. Good thing you’ve got plenty of hot water here.”

Spider wondered if Rosie’s words were meant to be important, whether they held the key to escaping from his predicament. He doubted it. Still, he listened harder, wondering whether the wind would carry any more words between the worlds. Apart from the crash of the waves on breakers behind and far below him, he heard nothing, only silence. But a specific kind of silence. There are, as Fat Charlie once imagined, many kinds of silences. Graves have their own silence, space has its silence, mountaintops have theirs. This was a hunting silence. It was a stalking silence. In this silence something moved on velvet-soft pads, with muscles like steel springs coiled beneath soft fur; something the color of shadows in the long grass; something that would ensure that you heard nothing it did not wish you to hear. It was a silence that was moving from side to side in front of him, slowly and relentlessly, and with every arc it was getting closer.

Spider heard that in the silence, and the hairs on the back of his neck stiffened. He spat blood onto the dust by his face, and he waited.

IN HIS HOUSE ON THE CLIFF TOP, GRAHAME COATS PACED BACK and forth. He walked from his bedroom to the study, then down the stairs to the kitchen and back up to the library and from there back to his bedroom again. He was angry with himself: how could he have been so stupid as to assume that Rosie’s visit was a coincidence?

He had realized it when the buzzer had sounded and he had looked into the closed-circuit TV screen at Fat Charlie’s inane face. There was no mistaking it. It was a conspiracy.