Anansi Boys

The walls of the library were beginning to fade. They were losing color and form. The world behind the walls was starting to show, and in its light she saw a small figure in a smart suit waiting for her.

Her hand crept into his. She said, “Where are we going now, Morris?”

He told her.

“Oh. Well, that will be a pleasant change,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

And, hand in hand, they went.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

WHICH COMES TO SEVERAL CONCLUSIONS

CHARLIE WOKE TO A BANGING ON A DOOR. DISORIENTED, HE looked around: he was in a hotel room; various unlikely events clustered inside his head like moths around a naked bulb, and while he tried to make sense of them he let his feet get up and walk him to the hotel room door. He blinked at the diagram on the back of the door which told him where to go in case of fire, trying to remember the events of the previous night. Then he unlocked the door and pulled it open.

Daisy looked up at him. She said, “Were you asleep in that hat?”

Charlie put his hand up and felt his head. There was definitely a hat on it. “Yes,” he said. “I think I must have been.”

“Bless,” she said. “Well, at least you took your shoes off. You know you missed all the excitement, last night?”

“I did?”

“Brush your teeth,” she said helpfully. “And change your shirt. Yes, you did. While you were…” and then she hesitated. It seemed quite improbable, on reflection, that he really had vanished in the middle of a séance. These things did not happen. Not in the real world. “While you weren’t there. I got the police chief to go up to Grahame Coats’s house. He had those tourists.”

“Tourists…?”

“It was what he said at dinner, something about us sending the two people in, the two at the house. It was your fiancée and her mother. He’d locked them up in his basement.”

“Are they okay?”

“They’re both in the hospital.”

“Oh.”

“Her mum’s in rough shape. I think your fiancée will be okay.”

“Will you stop calling her that? She’s not my fiancée. She ended the engagement.”

“Yes. But you didn’t, did you?”

“She’s not in love with me,” said Charlie. “Now, I’m going to brush my teeth and change my shirt, and I need a certain amount of privacy.”

“You should shower too,” she said. “And that hat smells like a cigar.”

“It’s a family heirloom,” he told her, and he went into the bathroom and locked the door behind him.

THE HOSPITAL WAS A TEN-MINUTE-WALK FROM THE HOTEL, and Spider was sitting in the waiting room, holding a dog-eared copy of Entertainment Weekly magazine as if he were actually reading it.

Charlie tapped him on the shoulder, and Spider jumped. He looked up warily and then, seeing his brother, he relaxed, but not much. “They said I had to wait out here,” Spider said. “Because I’m not a relation or anything.”

Charlie boggled. “Well, why didn’t you just tell them you were a relative? Or a doctor?”

Spider looked uncomfortable. “Well, it’s easy to do that stuff if you don’t care. If it doesn’t matter if I go in or I don’t, it’s easy to go in. But now it matters, and I’d hate to get in the way or do something wrong, and I mean, what if I tried and they said no, and then…what are you grinning about?”

“Nothing really,” said Charlie. “It just all sounds a bit familiar. Come on. Let’s go and find Rosie. You know,” he said to Daisy, as they set off down a random corridor, “there are two ways to walk through a hospital. Either you look like you belong there—here you go Spider. White coat on back of door, just your size. Put it on—or you should look so out of place that no one will complain that you’re there. They’ll just leave it for someone else to sort out.” He began to hum.

“What’s that song?” asked Daisy.