Spider looked at him. “There’s this place? That’s not exactly very helpful.”
“There’s a mountainside with caves in it. And then there are these cliffs, and they go down into nothing. It’s like the end of the world.”
“It’s the beginning of the world,” corrected Spider. “I’ve heard of the caves. A girl I knew once told me all about them. Never been there, though. So you met the Bird Woman, and…?”
“She offered to make you go away. And, um. Well, I took her up on it.”
“That,” said Spider, with a movie-star smile, “was really stupid.”
“I didn’t tell her to hurt you.”
“What did you think she was going to do to get rid of me? Write me a stiff letter?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think. I was upset.”
“Great. Well, if she has her way, you’ll be upset, and I’ll be dead. You could have simply asked me to leave, you know.”
“I did!”
“Er. What did I say?”
“That you liked it in my house and you weren’t going anywhere.”
Spider drank some of the water. “So what exactly did you say to her?”
Fat Charlie tried to remember. Now he thought about it, it seemed an odd sort of thing to say. “Just that I was going to give her Anansi’s bloodline,” he said, reluctantly.
“You what?”
“It was what she asked me to say.”
Spider looked incredulous. “But that’s not just me. That’s both of us.”
Fat Charlie’s mouth was suddenly very dry. He hoped it was the desert air, and sipped his bottled water.
“Hang on. Why the desert?” asked Fat Charlie.
“No birds. Remember?”
“So what are those?” He pointed. At first they looked tiny, and then you realized that they were simply very high: they were circling, and wobbling on the wing.
“Vultures,” said Spider. “They don’t attack living things.”
“Right. And pigeons are scared of people,” said Fat Charlie. The dots in the sky circled lower, and the birds appeared to grow as they descended.
Spider said, “Point taken.” Then, “Shit.”
They weren’t alone. Someone was watching them on a distant dune. A casual observer might have mistaken the figure for a scarecrow.
Fat Charlie shouted, “Go away!” His voice was swallowed by the sand. “I take it all back. We don’t have a deal! Leave us alone!”
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A flutter of overcoat on the hot wind, and the dune was now deserted.
Fat Charlie said, “She went away. Who would have thought it was going to be that simple?”
Spider touched his shoulder, and pointed. Now the woman in the brown overcoat was standing on the nearest ridge of sand, so close that Fat Charlie could see the glassy blacks of her eyes.