The old man said nothing. He stared into the distance. Then he shrugged. “Be a bad thing if he did.”
“What about Anansi?”
“Anansi’s dead,” said the old man. “And there ain’t a lot a duppy can do.”
“As a duppy myself,” she said, “I resent that.”
“Well,” said the old man, “Duppies can’t touch the living. Remember?”
She pondered this a moment. “So what can I touch?” she asked.
The look that flickered across his elderly face was both wily and wicked. “Well,” he said. “You could touch me.”
“I’ll have you know,” she told him, pointedly, “that I’m a married woman.”
His smile only grew wider. It was a sweet smile and a gentle one, as heartwarming as it was dangerous. “Generally speaking, that kind of contract terminates in a till death us do part.”
Maeve was unimpressed.
“Thing is,” he told her, “you’re an immaterial girl. You can touch immaterial things. Like me. I mean, if you want, we could go dancing. There’s a place just down the street here. Won’t nobody notice a couple of duppies on their dance floor.”
Maeve thought about it. It had been a long time since she had gone dancing. “Are you a good dancer?” she asked.
“I’ve never had any complaints,” said the old man.
“I want to find a man—a living man—called Grahame Coats,” she said. “Can you help me find him?”
“I can certainly steer you in the right direction,” he said. “So, are you dancing?”
A smile crept about the edges of her lips. “You asking?” she said.
THE CHAINS THAT HAD KEPT SPIDER CAPTIVE FELL AWAY. THE pain, which had been searing and continuous like a bad toothache that occupied his entire body, began to pass.
Spider took a step forward.
In front of him was what appeared to be a rip in the sky, and he moved toward it.
Ahead of him he could see an island. He could see a small mountain in the center 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 were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. It shrank and slipped from him, and the more he ran toward 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.
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.