Spider thought about it. He didn’t think he was a duppy. He shook his head.
“If you are, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Apparently, I’m a duppy myself. I hadn’t heard the term before, but I met a delightful old gentleman on the way here who told me all about it. Let me see if I can be of any assistance.”
She crouched down next to him and reached out to help loosen his bonds.
Her hand slipped through him. He could feel her fingers, like strands of fog, brushing his skin.
“I’m afraid I don’t seem able actually to touch you,” she said. “Still, that means that you’re not dead yet. So cheer up.”
Spider hoped this odd ghost-woman would go away soon. He couldn’t think straight.
“Anyway, once I had everything sorted out, I resolved to remain walking the Earth until I take vengeance on my killer. I explained it to Morris—he was on a television screen in Selfridges—and he said he rather thought I was missing the entire point of having moved beyond the flesh, but I ask you, if they expect me to turn the other cheek they have several other thinks coming. There are a number of precedents. And I’m sure I can do a Banquo-at-the-Feast thing, given the opportunity. Do you talk?”
Spider shook his head, and blood dripped from his forehead into his eyes. It stung. Spider wondered how long it would take him to grow a new tongue. Prometheus had managed to grow a new liver on a daily basis, and Spider was pretty sure that a liver had to be a lot more work than a tongue. Livers did chemical reactions—bilirubin, urea, enzymes, all that. They broke down alcohol, and that had to be a lot of work on its own. All tongues did was talk. Well, that and lick, of course…
“I can’t keep yattering on,” said the yellow-haired ghost-lady. “I’ve got a long way to go, I think.” She began to walk away, and she faded as she walked. Spider raised his head and watched her slip from one reality to another, like a photograph fading in the sunlight. He tried to call her back, but all the noises he could make were muffled, incoherent. Tongueless.
Somewhere in the distance, he heard the cry of a bird.
Spider tested his bonds. They held.
He found himself thinking, once again, of Rosie’s story of the raven who saved the man from the mountain lion. It itched in his head, worse than the claw tracks on his face and chest. Concentrate. The man lay on the ground, reading or sunbathing. The raven cawed in the tree. There was a big cat in the undergrowth…
And then the story reshaped itself, and he had it. Nothing had changed. It was all a matter of how you looked at the ingredients.
What if, he thought, the bird wasn’t calling to warn the man that there was a big cat stalking him? What if it was calling to tell the mountain lion that there was a man on the ground—dead or asleep or dying. That all the big cat had to do was finish the man off. And then the raven would feast on what it left…
Spider opened his mouth to moan, and blood ran from his mouth and puddled on the powdery clay.
Reality thinned. Time passed, in that place.
Spider, tongueless and furious, raised his head and twisted it to look at the ghost birds that flew around him, screaming.
He wondered where he was. This was not the Bird Woman’s copper-colored universe, nor her cave, but neither was it the place he had previously tended to think of as the real world. It was closer to the real world, though, close enough that he could almost taste it, or would have tasted it if he could taste anything in his mouth but the iron tang of the blood; close enough that, if he were not staked out on the ground, he could have touched it.
If he had not been perfectly certain of his own sanity, certain to a degree that normally is only found in people who have concluded that they’re definitely Julius Caesar and have been sent to save the world, he might have thought that he was going mad. First he saw a blonde woman who claimed to be a duppy, and now he heard voices. Well, he heard one voice anyway. Rosie’s.