Anansi Boys

“Well, we always had him figured as a bad man,” the police officer was saying to Daisy. “I mean, frankly, you only get this kind of behavior from foreigners. The local people, they simply wouldn’t do that kind of thing.”

“Obviously not,” said Daisy.

“Very. Very grateful,” said the police chief, patting her shoulder in a way that set Daisy’s teeth on edge. “This little lady saved that woman’s life,” he told Charlie, giving his shoulder a patronizing pat for good measure, before setting off with the doctors down the corridor.

“So what’s happening?” asked Charlie.

“Well, Grahame Coats is dead,” she said. “More or less. And they don’t hold out any hope for Rosie’s mum, either.”

“I see,” said Charlie. He thought about this. Then he finished thinking and came to a decision. Said, “Would you mind if I just chatted to my brother for a bit? I think he and I need to talk.”

“I’m going back to the hotel anyway. I’m going to check my e-mail. Probably going to have to say sorry on the phone a lot. Find out if I still have a career.”

“But you’re a hero, aren’t you?”

“I don’t think that’s what anyone was paying me for,” she said, a little wanly. “Come and find me at the hotel when you’re done.”

Spider and Charlie walked down the Williamstown high street in the morning sun.

“You know, that really is a good hat,” said Spider.

“You really think so?”

“Yeah. Can I try it on?”

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.”

“Begi

“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 begi

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 thi

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

It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

Charlie filled his lungs, and he began to sing. “I am Charlie,” he sang. “I am Anansi’s son. Listen as I sing my song. Listen to my life.”

He sang them the song of a boy who was half a god, and who was broken into two by an old woman with a grudge. He sang of his father, and he sang of his mother.

He sang of names and words, of the building blocks beneath the real, the worlds that make worlds, the truths beneath the way things are; he sang of appropriate ends and just conclusions for those who would have hurt him and his.

He sang the world.

It was a good song, and it was his song. Sometimes it had words, and sometimes it didn’t have any words at all.

As he sang, all the creatures listening began to clap and to stamp and to hum along; Charlie felt like he was the conduit for a great song that took in all of them. He sang of birds, of the magic of looking up and seeing them in flight, of the sheen of the sun on a wing feather in the morning.

The totem creatures were dancing now, the dances of their kind. The Bird Woman danced the wheeling dance of birds, fa

There was only one creature on the mountainside who did not dance.

Tiger lashed his tail. He was not clapping or singing or dancing. His face was bruised purple, and his body was covered in welts and in bite marks. He had padded down the rocks, a step at a time, until he was close to Charlie. “The songs aren’t yours,” he growled.