Anansi Boys

The chef’s assistant was a police officer. She was holding a pair of handcuffs. The chef wheeled the cake up onto the dais.

Now, said Rosie to Fat Charlie, in his dream. Cut the cake.

The people at Table B—who were not people but cartoon mice and rats and barnyard animals, human-sized, and celebrating—began to sing songs from Disney cartoons. Fat Charlie knew that they wanted him to join in with them. Even asleep he could feel himself panicking at the simple idea of having to sing in public, his limbs becoming numb, his lips prickling.

I can’t sing with you, he told them, desperate for an excuse. I have to cut this cake.

At this, the hall fell into silence. And in the silence, a chef entered, wheeling a little trolley with something on it. The chef wore Grahame Coats’s face, and on the trolley was an extravagant white wedding cake, an ornate, many-tiered confection. A tiny bride and tiny groom perched precariously on the topmost tier of the cake, like two people trying to keep their balance on top of a sugar-frosted ChryslerBuilding.

Rosie’s mother reached under the table and produced a long, wooden-handled knife—almost a machete—with a rusty blade. She passed it to Rosie, who reached for Fat Charlie’s right hand and placed it over her own, and together they pressed the rusty knife into the thick white icing on the topmost tier of the cake, pushed it in between the groom and the bride. The cake resisted the blade at first, and Fat Charlie pressed harder, putting all his weight on the knife. He felt the cake beginning to give. He pushed harder.

The blade sliced through the topmost tier of the wedding cake. It slipped and sliced down the cake, through every layer and tier, and as it did so, the cake opened—

In his dream, Fat Charlie supposed that the cake was filled with black beads, with beads of black glass or of polished jet, and then, as they tumbled out of the cake, he realized that the beads had legs, each bead had eight clever legs, and they came out the inside of the cake like a black wave. The spiders surged forward and covered the white tablecloth; they covered Rosie’s mother and Rosie herself, turning their white dresses black as ebony; then, as if controlled by some vast and malignant intelligence, they flowed, in their hundreds, toward Fat Charlie. He turned to run, but his legs were trapped in some kind of rubbery tanglefoot, and he tumbled to the floor.

Now they were upon him, their tiny legs crawling over his bare skin; he tried to get up, but he was drowning in spiders.