Anansi Boys

He was in a cave. The edges of things were crisp—crisper and sharper than anywhere that Spider had ever been before. This was a different kind of place.

She was standing in the mouth of the cave, between him and the open air. He knew her. She had stared into his face in a Greek restaurant in South London, and birds had come from her mouth.

“You know,” said Spider, “I have to say, you’ve got the strangest ideas about hospitality. You come to my world, I’d make you dinner, open a bottle of wine, put on some soft music, give you an evening you would never forget.”

Her face was impassive; carved from black rock it was. The wind tugged at the edges of her old brown coat. She spoke then, her voice high and lonely as the call of a distant gull.

“I took you,” she said. “Now, you will call him.”

“Call him? Call who?”

“You will bleat,” she said. “You will whimper. Your fear will excite him.”

“Spider does not bleat,” he said. He was not certain this was true.

Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.

“If you kill me,” said Spider, “my curse will be upon you.” He wondered if he actually had a curse. He probably did; and if he didn’t, he was sure that he could fake it.

“It will not be I that kills you,” she said. She raised her hand, and it was not a hand but a raptor’s talon. She raked her talon down his face, down his chest, her cruel claws sinking into his flesh, tearing his skin.

It did not hurt, although Spider knew that it would hurt soon enough.

Beads of blood crimsoned his chest and dripped down his face. His eyes stung. His blood touched his lips. He could taste it and smell the iron scent of it.

“Now,” she said in the cries of distant birds. “Now your death begins.”

Spider said, “We’re both reasonable entities. Let me present you with a perhaps rather more feasible alternative scenario that might conceivably have benefits for both of us.” He said it with an easy smile. He said it convincingly.

“You talk too much,” she said, and shook her head. “No more talking.”

She reached into his mouth with her sharp talons, and with one wrenching movement she tore out his tongue.

“There,” she said. And then she seemed to take pity on him, for she touched Spider’s face in a way that was almost kindly, and she said, “Sleep.”

He slept.

Rosie’s mother, now bathed, reappeared refreshed, invigorated and positively glowing.

“Before I give you both a ride into Williamstown, can I give you a hasty guided tour of the house?” asked Grahame Coats.

“We do have to get back to the ship, thanks all the same,” said Rosie, who had not been able to convince herself that she wanted a bath in Grahame Coats’s house.

Her mother checked her watch. “We have ninety minutes,” she said. “It won’t take more than fifteen minutes to get back to the harbor. Don’t be ungracious, Rosie. We would love to see your house.”

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 carcasses 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 of1995 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.