The night was slowly filled with a gentle rustling.
Spider thought his gratitude and pride at the little seven legged spider he had made from his blood and spittle and from the earth. The spider scuttled from the back of his hand up to his shoulder.
Spider could not see them, but he knew they were all there: the great spiders and the small spiders, venomous spiders and biting spiders: huge hairy spiders and elegant chitinous spiders. Their eyes took whatever light they could find, but they saw through their legs and their feet, constructing vibrations into a virtual image of the world about them.
They were an army.
Tiger spoke again from the darkness. “When you are dead, Anansi’s child—when all of your bloodline is dead—then the stories will be mine. Once again, people will tell Tiger stories. They will gather together and praise my cunning and my strength, my cruelty and my joy. Every story will be mine. Every song will be mine. The world will be as it once was again: a hard place. A dark place.”
Spider listened to the rustle of his army.
He was sitting at the cliff edge for a reason. While it gave him nowhere to retreat to, it meant that Tiger could not charge, he could only creep.
Spider started to laugh.
“What are you laughing at, Anansi’s child? Have you lost your reason?”
At that, Spider laughed longer and louder.
There was a yowl from the darkness. Tiger had met Spider’s army.
Spider venom comes in many forms. It can often take a long while to discover the full effects of the bite. Naturalists have pondered this for years: there are spiders whose bite can cause the place bitten to rot and to die, sometimes more than a year after it was bitten. As to why spiders do this, the answer is simple. It’s because spiders think this is funny, and they don’t want you ever to forget them.
Black widow bites on Tiger’s bruised nose, tarantula bites on his ears: in moments his sensitive places burned and throbbed, swelled and itched. Tiger did not know what was happening: all he knew was the burning and the pain and the sudden fear.
Spider laughed, longer and louder, and listened to the sound of a huge animal bolting into the undergrowth, roaring in agony and in fright.
Then he sat and he waited. Tiger would be back, he had no doubt. It was not over yet.
Spider took the seven-legged spider from his shoulder and stroked it, running his fingers back and forth across its broad back.
A little way down the hill something glowed with a cold green luminescence, and it flickered, like the lights of a tiny city, flashing on and off into the night. It was coming toward him.
The flickering resolved itself into a hundred thousand fire-flies. Silhouetted and illuminated in the center of the firefly-light was a dark figure, man-shaped. It was walking steadily up the hill.
Spider raised a rock and mentally readied his spider troops for one more attack. And then he stopped. There was something familiar about the figure in the firefly-light; it wore a green fedora.
GRAHAME COATS WAS MOST OF THE WAY THROUGH A HALF BOTTLE of rum he had found in the kitchen. He had opened the rum because he had no desire to go down into the wine cellar, and because he imagined it would get him drunk faster than wine would. Unfortunately, it didn’t. It did not seem to be doing much of anything, let alone providing the emotional off-switch he felt he needed. He walked around the house with a bottle in one hand and a half-full glass in the other, and sometimes he took a swig from one, and sometimes from the other. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror, hangdog and sweaty. “Cheer up,” he said aloud. “Might never happen. Cloud silver lining. Life rain mus’ fall. Too many cooks. ‘S an ill wind.” The rum was pretty much gone.
He went back into the kitchen. He opened several cupboards before he noticed a bottle of sherry toward the back. Grahame picked it up and cradled it gratefully, as if it were a very small old friend who had just returned after years at sea.
He unscrewed the top of the bottle. It was a sweet cooking sherry, but he drank it down like lemonade.
There were other things Grahame Coats had noticed while looking for alcohol in the kitchen. There were, for example, knives. Some of them were very sharp. In a drawer, there was even a small stainless steel hacksaw. Grahame Coats approved. It would be the very simple solution to the problem in the basement.
“Habeas corpus,” he said. “Or habeas delicti. One of those. If there is no body, then there was no crime. Ergo. Quod erat demonstrandum.”
He took his gun out of his jacket pocket, put it on the kitchen table. He arranged the knives around it in a pattern, like the spokes of a wheel. “Well,” he said, in the same tones he had once used to persuade innocent boy bands that it was time to sign their contract with him and to say hello to fame if not actually fortune, “no time like the present.”
He pushed three kitchen knives blade-down through his belt, placed the hacksaw in his jacket pocket, and then, gun in hand, he went down the cellar stairs. He turned on the lights, blinked at the wine bottles on their side, each in their rack, each covered with a thin layer of dust, and then he was standing beside the iron meat locker door.
“Right,” he shouted. “You’ll be pleased to hear that I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll be letting you both go now. All a bit of a mistake. Still, no hard feelings. No use crying over spilt. Stand by the far wall. Assume the position. No funny stuff.”
It was, he reflected, as he pulled back the bolts, almost comforting how many clichés already exist for people holding guns. It made Grahame Coats feel like one of a brotherhood: Bogart stood beside him, and Cagney, and all the people who shout at each other on COPS.
He turned the light on and pulled open the door. Rosie’s mother stood against the far wall, with her back to him. As he came in, she flipped up her skirt and
waggled an astonishingly bony brown bottom.