He tried doing it the other way, thinking of a person, and trying to make himself be with them. This tended to be a fairly unreliable method of travel for Spider at the best of times: Spider had trouble with other people. He had trouble remembering their faces or their names, or sometimes even that they really existed at all.
He thought about Fat Charlie; he thought of old girlfriends, but they seemed peculiarly unconvincing, reconfiguring in his head into an assembly of breasts and lips and skin and smiles, and they evaporated in his mind; last of all, he thought of Rosie. He thought of her eyes, her warmth, the curve of her nostrils, the smell of her hair.
(And on a cruise ship, dozing by the pool, Rosie shifted uncomfortably.)
Well, thought Spider, if he could not get out one way, he would get out another. There was more than one way to skin a cat, after all!
He tried changing shape, with no result. He tried shouting. He tried shouting some more.
There was a flapping noise. Two sandhill cranes stood in front of him. They looked at him curiously.
It’s not impossible to be Spider, or something like him. All you need is a complete and utter certainty that everything will work out; a cocky assurance that’s just a hair’s breadth away from psychosis; the conviction that you’re a monstrously clever fellow, and that the universe always looks after its own.
“You know,” said Spider to the birds, “I don’t want to cause a problem but these chains are a bit loose. One solid tug and I could fall down.”
The birds might have looked concerned. Spider couldn’t be sure. It’s hard to tell with birds.
“It’s a shocking job,” said Spider. “Whoever made these chains should be properly ashamed of themselves. Frankly, I could get out of them in a couple of minutes, and think of the trouble you’d all be with herself if I simply fell out of them and wandered off. Quite appalling workmanship.”
The cranes looked at each other. One of them strutted back towards the wall. Spider watched it—a jog to the left, then it reached out its beak to the wall, and it touched a feather there, a feather paler than the others. And then it was gone.
“You know,” said Spider to the remaining crane. “Let’s just pretend I didn’t say anything. I’d hate to put you all to any bother.”
A fluttering, and now the space was filled with huge crows who landed on the bone chains, then strutted about like builders examining the work of quite a different firm of builders, one that had left town with the work left incomplete. They cawed and tokked in what Spider was certain was the corvine equivalent of “So what sort of cowboy put this together than?”
A word from their foreman and the chains were covered in crows, pecking and clawing at the bones, tapping and prodding with black beaks against the bones. A loud caw and the chains fell apart—the bones tumbled to the floor, and Spider tumbled with them. The floor was littered with twigs and tiny feathers, splashed and speckled with birdshit.
Spider got to his feet, and noticed, for the first time, the geese. There were five of them, and they surrounded him, pecking at him, honking and hissing, to ensure that he stayed in the centre of them. A goose with its dander up and its neck down can cow a Doberman with a hiss, and these were the geese of nightmares.
Spider smiled at them.
Beneath the clever beaks of the crows the bone chains were expertly reassembled. The geese began to lower their necks once more, honking and hissing, pushing Spider back to where the chains were waiting.
“Hey,” he said to the geese. “Just give me room to breathe. I’m going back. Yeah?”
He turned where the chains hung, waiting for him, he counted to three, and then he turned and swung himself back toward the wall, where the sandhill crane had vanished. In the dim light he lunged for one feather paler than the others, and he hoped.
The wall became thin, almost translucent, and he pushed through it triumphantly, with angry geese pecking at his heels, and realised, as he did so, that he might have made a slight mistake.
Somehow, he had assumed that the cell was deep in the earth—that’s where people build cells, after all. But on the whole, birds don’t burrow. The tree was enormous, higher than a giant redwood, and it was filled with a rookery of nests, including, just above him, the nest from which he had escaped. Below him approaching with the speed of an out-of-control sports car, was the ground.
“Not a problem,” Spider told himself.
Again he tried to shift his location, with no more luck or success than before. Again he tried to change his shape—a little brown spider would simply have flown away on the air currents. Nothing happened, only the ground was rather closer.
Still, he thought, if he couldn’t move and he couldn’t change, the odds were that whatever kind of a place he was in, it wasn’t a real place. It was made of mind, not world. As long as he was able to bear in mind that this was Maya, was illusion, he thought, he would be fine. The cold air rushed past him. He spread his arms and his legs. The cold air rushed past him.
And then he hit the ground. “It’s not real,” he thought, as the air was knocked out of him, and, for a moment, everything went dark.