Different creatures have different eyes. Human eyes (unlike, say, a cat’s eyes, or an octopus’s) are only made to see one version of reality at a time. Fat Charlie saw one thing with his eyes, and he saw something else with his mind, and in the gulf between the two things, madness waited. He could feel a wild panic welling up inside him, and he took a deep breath and held it in while his heart thudded against his rib cage. He forced himself to believe his eyes, not his mind.
So while he knew that he was seeing a bird, mad-eyed, ragged-feathered, bigger than any eagle, taller than an ostrich, its beak the cruel tearing weapon of a raptor, its feathers the color of slate overlaid with an oil slick sheen, making a dark rainbow of purples and greens, he really only knew that for an instant, somewhere in the very back of his mind. What he saw with his eyes was a woman with raven-black hair, standing where the idea of a bird had been. She was neither young nor old, and she stared at him with a face that might have been carved from obsidian in ancient times, when the world was young.
She watched him, and she did not move. Clouds roiled across the sour milk sky.
“I’m Charlie,” said Fat Charlie. “Charlie Nancy. Some people, well, most people, call me Fat Charlie. You can, too. If you like.”
No response.
“Anansi was my father.”
Still nothing. Not a quiver; not a breath.
“I want you to help me make my brother go away.”
She tilted her head at this. Enough to show that she was listening, enough to show that she was alive.
“I can’t do it on my own. He’s got magic powers and stuff. I spoke to a spider, and the next thing you know, my brother turns up. Now I can’t make him go away.”
Her voice, when she spoke, was as rough and as deep as a crow’s. “What do you wish me to do about it?”
“Help me?” he suggested.
She appeared to be thinking.
Later, Fat Charlie tried and failed to remember what she had been wearing. Sometimes he thought it must have been a cloak of feathers; at other times he believed it must have been rags of some kind, or perhaps a tattered raincoat, of the kind she wore when he saw her in Piccadilly, later, when it had all started to go bad. She was not naked, though: of that he was nearly certain. He would have remembered if she had been naked, wouldn’t he?
“Help you,” she echoed.
“Help me get rid of him.”
She nodded. “You wish me to help you get rid of Anansi’s bloodline.”
“I just want him to go away and leave me alone. I don’t want you to hurt him or anything.”
“Then promise me Anansi’s bloodline for my own.”
Fat Charlie stood on the vast coppery plain, which was somehow, he knew, inside the cave in the mountains at the end of the world and was, in its turn, in some sense, inside Mrs. Dunwiddy’s violet-scented front room, and he tried to make sense of what she was asking for.
“I can’t give things away. And I can’t make promises.”
“You want him to go,” she said. “Say it. My time is precious.” She folded her arms and stared at him with mad eyes. “I am not scared of Anansi.”
He remembered Mrs. Dunwiddy’s voice. “Um,” said Fat Charlie. “I mustn’t make promises. And I have to ask for something of equal value. I mean, it has to be a trade.”
The Bird Woman looked displeased, but she nodded. “Then I shall give you something of equal value in trade. I give my word.” She put her hand over his hand, as if she was giving him something, then squeezed his hand closed. “Now say it.”
“I give you Anansi’s bloodline,” Fat Charlie said.
“It is good,” said a voice, and at that she went, quite literally, to pieces.
Where a woman had been standing, there was now a flock of birds, which were flying, as if startled by a gunshot, all in different directions. Now the sky filled with birds, more birds than Fat Charlie had ever imagined, brown birds and black, wheeling and crossing and flowing like a cloud of black smoke vaster than the mind could hold, like a cloud of midges as big as the world.
“You’ll make him go away, now?” called Fat Charlie, shouting the words into the darkening milky sky. The birds slipped and slid in the sky. Each moved only a fraction, and they kept flying, but suddenly Fat Charlie was staring up at a face in the sky, a face made of swirling birds. It was very big.
It said his name in the screams and caws and calls of a thousand, thousand, thousand birds, and lips the size of tower blocks formed the words in the sky.
Then the face dissolved into madness and chaos as the birds that made it flew down from that pale sky, flew straight toward him. He covered his face with his hands, trying to protect himself.
The pain in his cheek was harsh and sudden. For an instant he believed that one of the birds must have gashed him, torn at his cheek with its beak or talons. Then he saw where he was.
“Don’t hit me again!” he said. “It’s all right. You don’t have to hit me!”
On the table, the penguins were guttering low; their heads and shoulders were gone, and now the flames were burning in the shapeless black-and-white blobs that had once been their bellies, their feet in frozen pools of blackish candle wax. There were three old women staring at him.
Miss Noles threw the contents of a glass of water into his face.