Anansi Boys

Charlie gave Spider the green fedora. Spider put it on, looked at his reflection in a shop window. He made a face and gave Charlie the hat back. “Well,” he said, disappointed, “it looks good on you, anyway.”

Charlie pushed his fedora back onto his head. Some hats can only be worn if you’re willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you’re only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you. This hat was one of those, and Charlie was up to it. He said, “Rosie’s mum is dying.”

“Yeah.”

“I really, really never liked her.”

“I didn’t know her as well as you did. But given time, I’m sure I would have really, really disliked her too.”

Charlie said, “We have to try and save her life, don’t we?” He said it without enthusiasm, like someone pointing out it was time to visit the dentist.

“I don’t think we can do things like that.”

“Dad did something like it for mum. He got her better, for a while.”

“But that was him. I don’t know how we’d do that.”

Charlie said, “The place at the end of the world. With the caves.”

“Beginning of the world, not the end. What about it?”

“Can we just get there? Without all that candles-and-herbs malarkey?”

Spider was quiet. Then he nodded, “I think so.”

They turned together, turned in a direction that wasn’t usually there, and they walked away from the Williamstown high street.

Now the sun was rising, and Charlie and Spider walked across a beach littered with skulls. They were not proper human skulls, and they covered the beach like yellow pebbles. Charlie avoided them where he could, while Spider crunched his way through them. At the end of the beach they took a left turn that was left to absolutely everything, and the mountains at the beginning of the world towered above them and the cliffs fell away below.

Charlie remembered the last time he was here, and it seemed like a thousand years ago. “Where is everyone?” he said aloud, and his voice echoed against the rocks and came back to him. He said, loudly, “Hello?”

And then they were there, watching him. All of them. They seemed grander, now, less human, more animal, wilder. He realized that he had seen them as people last time because he had expected to meet people. But they were not people. Arrayed on the rocks above them were Lion and Elephant, Crocodile and Python, Rabbit and Scorpion, and the rest of them, hundreds of them, and they stared at him with eyes unsmiling: animals he recognized; animals that no one living would be able to identify. All the animals that have ever been in stories. All the animals that people have dreamed of, worshipped, or placated.

Charlie saw all of them.

It’s one thing, he thought, singing for your life, in a room filled with diners, on the spur of the moment, with a gun barrel in the ribs of the girl you—

That you—

Oh.

Well, thought Charlie, I can worry about that later.

Right now he badly wanted either to breathe into a brown paper bag or to vanish.

“There must be hundreds of them,” said Spider, and there was awe in his voice.

There was a flurry in the air, on a nearby rock, which resolved itself into the Bird Woman. She folded her arms and stared at them.

“Whatever it is you’re going to do,” Spider said, “you better do it soon. They aren’t going to wait around forever.”

Charlie’s mouth was dry. “Right.”

Spider said, “So. Um. What exactly do we do now?”

“We sing to them,” said Charlie, simply.

“What?”

“It’s how we fix things. I figured it out. We just sing it all, you and I.”

“I don’t understand. Sing what?”

Charlie said, “The song. You sing the song, you fix things.” Now he sounded desperate. “The song.”

Spider’s eyes were like puddles after the rain, and Charlie saw things in them he had not seen before: affection, perhaps, and confusion and, mostly, apology. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lion watched them from the side of a boulder. Monkey looked at them from the top of a tree. And Tiger—

Charlie saw Tiger. It was walking gingerly on four feet. Its face was swollen and bruised, but there was a glint in its eyes, and it looked as if it would be more than happy to even the score.

Charlie opened his mouth. A small croaking noise came out, as if Charlie had recently swallowed a particularly nervous frog. “It’s no use,” he whispered to Spider. “This was a stupid idea, wasn’t it?”

“Yup.”

“Do you think we can just go away again?” Charlie’s nervous glance swept the mountainside and the caves, took in each of the hundreds of totem creatures from before the dawn of time. There was one he had not seen the last time he had looked: a small man, with lemon yellow gloves and a pencil-thin moustache and no fedora hat to cover his thinning hair.

The old man winked when he caught Charlie’s gaze.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough.