Anansi Boys

A word from their foreman and the chains were covered in crows, pecking and clawing at the bones, tapping and prodding with black beaks against the bones. A loud caw and the chains fell apart—the bones tumbled to the floor, and Spider tumbled with them. The floor was littered with twigs and tiny feathers, splashed and speckled with birdshit.

Spider got to his feet, and noticed, for the first time, the geese. There were five of them, and they surrounded him, pecking at him, honking and hissing, to ensure that he stayed in the centre of them. A goose with its dander up and its neck down can cow a Doberman with a hiss, and these were the geese of nightmares.

Spider smiled at them.

Beneath the clever beaks of the crows the bone chains were expertly reassembled. The geese began to lower their necks once more, honking and hissing, pushing Spider back to where the chains were waiting.

“Hey,” he said to the geese.”Just give me room to breathe. I’m going back.Yeah?”

He turned where the chains hung, waiting for him, he counted to three, and then he turned and swung himself back toward the wall, where the sandhill crane had vanished. In the dim light he lunged for one feather paler than the others, and he hoped.

The wall became thin, almost translucent, and he pushed through it triumphantly, with angry geese pecking at his heels, and realised, as he did so, that he might have made a slight mistake.

Somehow, he had assumed that the cell was deep in the earth—that’s where people build cells, after all. But on the whole, birds don’t burrow. The tree was enormous, higher than a giant redwood, and it was filled with a rookery of nests, including, just above him, the nest from which he had escaped. Below him approaching with the speed of an out-of-control sports car, was the ground.

“Not a problem,” Spider told himself.

Again he tried to shift his location, with no more luck or success than before. Again he tried to change his shape—a little brown spider would simply have flown away on the air currents. Nothing happened, only the ground was rather closer.

Still, he thought, if he couldn’t move and he couldn’t change, the odds were that whatever kind of a place he was in, it wasn’t a real place. It was made of mind, not world. As long as he was able to bear in mind that this was Maya, was illusion, he thought, he would be fine. The cold air rushed past him. He spread his arms and his legs.The cold air rushed past him.

And then he hit the ground. “It’s not real,” he thought, as the air was knocked out of him, and, for a moment, everything went dark.

Spider picked himself up. He hurt, all over, but nothing seemed to be broken.

He wondered if he had his own pocket universe somewhere, hung with webs and scuttling, industrious, storytelling spiders. He did not know. He was not sure where to look for it, if he did have one. His father would have known, of course—

The sky was the colour of beaten copper, and the earth was sandy and grey, and everything smelled of ci

There was a large bird on a bush looking at him. The bird said, “Spider.You know you’re never going to escape from here.”

Spider said, “I’ll bet you all I own that I shall. And that you’ll show me how to get away.”

Birds can’t smirk, they don’t have the equipment, but this one almost managed it. “All you own?”

“Everything, if you don’t show me the way out. So please, show me the way out of here.”

“Never,” said the bird.

“Close your eyes,” said Spider, “And count to ten. I promise that by the time you’ve finished counting you’ll have pointed me to the way out of here.”

The bird closed its eyes. “One,” it said. “Two. Three. Four.”

With one twist, Spider broke its neck, and it stopped counting. “Still, I wouldn’t want you to think me a liar,” said Spider to the bird. He plucked it, and set the feathers to one side, then he made a small fire in the earth, roasted and ate the meat, cleaned off the bones, and, last of all, he cast the bones onto the sand.

They fell higgledy-piggledy, every which way. Spider scooped them up again. “Remember,” he said, “You can’t lie when you’re dead. “This time when he cast the bones they pointed unequivocally in one direction.

“That’s what I like,” said Spider. “Someone who honours his bets.”

He put the bird’s feathers on, and walked to the top of a hill. Ahead of him was a tear in the sky, a small rip in the coppery fabric of everything, and darkness spilled through it, and behind the darkness stars were twinkling. Spider no longer cared that it was uncool to run. Now he ran.

As he reached the bottom of the hill, birds descended around him.

“Stop!” they called.

He stopped. “I’m a bird,” he told them. “Just like you.” Even in the Bird Woman’s universe, he was certain that he had enough conviction to make the things he said true for those that heard them.

“What ma

“Yeah. Sure. Something like that,” said Spider. “Hey, have any of you seen Spider anywhere? I heard that he had escaped, and I was told to guard the way out of here.”

“We’re looking for him too,” said an eagle. “Haven’t seen him, though. Actually, we thought you might be him, when we saw you coming towards us.”

“No, you didn’t,” said Spider. “You thought I was just another bird.”

“Oh. Right. That was what we thought,” agreed the heron.

“So. You lot all wait here, and guard the way out,” said Spider. “And I’ll just put my head through there and make sure that he hasn’t got here ahead of us.”

Spider walked forward. He walked through the rip in the sky.

Ahead of him he could see an island. He could see a small mountain in the centre of the island. He could see a pure blue sky, and swaying palm trees, a white gull high in the sky. But even as he saw it the world seemed to be receding. It was as if he was looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. It shrank and slipped from him, and the more he ran towards it the further away it seemed to get.

The island was a reflection in a puddle of water, and then it was nothing at all.

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.The feather she had worn fell to the rocky floor. He turned to the daylight.

She was standing in the mouth of the cave, between him and the open air. 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 was just in your world. And I have to say, you’ve got the strangest ideas about hospitality. You come to my world, I’d make you di

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 distant as the wrenching 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 it 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.

“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, ripping his skin.