Fat Charlie said, “Listen. Has it occurred to you that maybe Dad isn’t dead after all?”
“What?”
“Well, I was thinking. Maybe all this was one of his jokes. It feels like the kind of thing he’d do, doesn’t it?”
Spider said, “I don’t know. Could be.”
Fat Charlie said, “I’m sure it is. That’s the first thing I’m going to do. I’m going to head down to his grave and—”
But he said nothing else, because that was when the birds came. They were city birds; sparrows and starlings, pigeons and crows, thousands upon thousands of them, and they wove and wound as they flew like a tapestry, forming a wall of birds coming toward Fat Charlie and Spider down Regent Street. A feathered phalanx huge as the side of a skyscraper, perfectly flat, perfectly impossible, all of it in motion, weaving and fluttering and swooping; Fat Charlie saw it, but it would not fit inside his mind, slipping and twisting and thinning the whole time inside his head. He looked up at it and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
Spider jerked at Fat Charlie’s elbow. He shouted “Run!”
Fat Charlie turned to run. Spider was methodically folding his newspaper, putting it down on the bin.
“You run too!”
“It doesn’t want you. Not yet,” said Spider, and he grinned. It was a grin that had, in its time, persuaded more people than you can imagine to do things they did not want to do; and Fat Charlie really wanted to run. “Get the feather. Get Dad, too, if you think he’s still around. Just go.”
Fat Charlie went.
The wall of birds swirled and transformed, became a whirlwind of birds heading for the statue of Eros and the man beneath it. Fat Charlie ran into a doorway and watched as the base of the dark tornado slammed into Spider. Fat Charlie imagined he could hear his brother screaming over the deafening whirr of wings. Maybe he could.
And then the birds dispersed and the street was empty. The wind teased a handful of feathers along the gray pavement.
Fat Charlie stood there and felt sick. If any of the passers-by had noticed what had happened, they had not reacted. Somehow, he was certain that no one had seen it but him.
There was a woman standing beneath the statue, near where his brother had been. Her ragged brown coat flapped in the wind. Fat Charlie walked back to her. “Look,” he said, “When I said to make him go away, I meant just to get him out of my life. Not do whatever it is you’ve done to him.”
She looked into his face and said nothing. There is a madness in the eyes of some birds of prey, a ferocity that can be perfectly intimidating. Fat Charlie tried not to be intimidated by it. “I made a mistake,” he said. “I’m willing to pay for it. Take me instead. Bring him back.”
She continued to stare. Then she said, “Do not doubt your turn shall come, Compé Anansi’s child. In time.”
“Why do you want him?”
“I don’t want him,” she told him. “Why would I want him? I had an obligation to another. Now I shall deliver him, and then my obligation shall be done.”
The newspaper fluttered, and Fat Charlie was alone.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IN WHICH ROSIE LEARNS TO SAY NO TO STRANGERS AND FAT CHARLIE ACQUIRES A LIME
FAT CHARLIE LOOKED DOWN AT HIS FATHER’S GRAVE. “ARE YOU in there?” he said aloud. “If you are, come out. I need to talk to you.”
He walked over to the floral grave marker and looked down. He was not certain what he was expecting—a hand to push up through the soil, perhaps, punching up and grabbing his leg—but nothing of the kind seemed to be about to happen.
He had been so certain.
Fat Charlie walked back through the Garden of Rest feeling stupid, like a game show contestant who had just made the mistake of betting his million dollars on the Mississippi being a longer river than the Amazon. He should have known. His father was as dead as roadkill, and he had wasted Spider’s money on a wild goose chase. By the windmills of Babyland he sat down and wept, and the moldering toys seemed even sadder and lonelier than he remembered.
She was waiting for him in the parking lot, leaning against her car, smoking a cigarette. She looked uncomfortable.
“Hullo, Mrs. Bustamonte,” said Fat Charlie.
She took one final drag on the cigarette, then dropped it to the asphalt and ground it out beneath the sole of her flat shoe. She was wearing black. She looked tired. “Hello Charles.”
“I think if I’d expected to see anyone here, it would be Mrs. Higgler. Or Mrs. Dunwiddy.”