“Would love to,” said Grahame Coats in the reasonable tones of a drunk. “Can’t. Just going to lie on the floor for a bit. Anyway. She bolted the door. I heard her.”
He heard a scraping from the other side of the door, as if a bolt was slowly being released.
“The door is open. Now: if you stay here, you’ll die.” An impatient rustling; the swish of a tail; a roar, half-muffled in the back of a throat. “Give me your hand and your allegiance. Invite me inside you.”
“I don’t underst—”
“Give me your hand, or bleed to death.”
In the black of the meat cellar, Grahame Coats put out his hand. Someone—something—took it and held it, reassuringly. “Now, are you willing to invite me in?”
A moment of cold sobriety touched Grahame Coats then. He had already gone too far. Nothing he did would make matters worse, after all.
“Absatively,” whispered Grahame Coats, and as he said it he began to change. He could see through the darkness easy as daylight. He thought, but only for a moment, that he saw something beside him, bigger than a man, with sharp, sharp teeth. And then it was gone, and Grahame Coats felt wonderful. The blood no longer spurted from his leg.
He could see clearly in the darkness. He pulled the knives from his belt, dropped them onto the floor. He pulled off his shoes, too. There was a gun on the ground, but he left it there. Tools were for apes and crows and weaklings. He was no ape.
He was a hunter.
He pulled himself up onto his hands and his knees, and then he padded, four-footed, out into the wine cellar.
He could see the women. They had found the steps up to the house, and they were edging up them blindly, hand-in-hand in the darkness.
One of them was old and stringy. The other was young and tender. The mouth salivated in something that was only partly Grahame Coats.
FAT CHARLIE LEFT THE BRIDGE, WITH HIS FATHER’S GREEN FEDORA pushed back on his head, and he walked into the dusk. He walked up the rocky beach, slipping on the rocks, splashing into pools. Then he trod on something that moved. A stumble, and he stepped off it.
It rose into the air, and it kept rising. Whatever it was, it was enormous: he thought at first that it was the size of an elephant, but it grew bigger still.
Light, thought Fat Charlie. He sang aloud, and all the lightning bugs, the fireflies of that place, clustered around him, flickering off and on with their cold green luminescence, and in their light he could make out two eyes, bigger than dinner plates, staring down at him from a supercilious reptilian face.
He stared back. “Evening,” he said, cheerfully.
A voice from the creature, smooth as buttered oil. “He-llo,” it said. “Ding-dong. You look remarkably like dinner.”
“I’m Charlie Nancy,” said Charlie Nancy. “Who are you?”
“I am Dragon,” said the dragon. “And I shall devour you in one slow mouthful, little man in a hat.”
Charlie blinked. What would my father do? he wondered. What would Spider have done? He had absolutely no idea. Come on. After all, Spider’s sort of a part of me. I can do whatever he can do.
“Er. You’re bored with talking to me now, and you’re going to let me pass unhindered,” he told the dragon, with as much conviction as he was able to muster.
“Gosh. Good try. But I’m afraid I’m not,” said the dragon, enthusiastically. “Actually, I’m going to eat you.”
“You aren’t scared of limes, are you?” asked Charlie, before remembering that he’d given the lime to Daisy.
The creature laughed, scornfully. “I,” it said, “am frightened of nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing,” it said.
Charlie said, “Are you extremely frightened of nothing?”
“Absolutely terrified of it,” admitted the Dragon.
“You know,” said Charlie, “I have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?”
“No,” said the Dragon, uncomfortably, “I most definitely would not.”
There was a flapping of wings like sails, and Charlie was alone on the beach. “That,” he said, “was much too easy.”
He kept on walking. He made up a song for his walk. Charlie had always wanted to make up songs, but he never did, mostly because of the conviction that if he ever had written a song, someone would have asked him to sing it, and that would not have been a good thing, much as death by hanging would not be a good thing. Now, he cared less and less, and he sang his song to the fireflies, who followed him up the hillside. It was a song about meeting the Bird Woman and finding his brother. He hoped the fireflies were enjoying it: their light seemed to be pulsing and flickering in time with the tune.
The Bird Woman was waiting for him at the top of the hill.
Charlie took off his hat. He pulled the feather from the hatband.
“Here. This is yours, I believe.”
She made no move to take it.
“Our deal’s over,” said Charlie. “I brought your feather. I want my brother. You took him. I want him back. Anansi’s bloodline was not mine to give.”