“Might get Anansi mad,” said Monkey. “Very bad idea that. Get Anansi mad, you never in any more stories.”
“Anansi’s dead,” said Fat Charlie.
“Dead there,” said Monkey. “Maybe. But dead here? That’s another stump of grubs entirely.”
“You mean, he could be here?” Fat Charlie looked up at the mountainside more warily: the idea that he might, in one of the cave mouths, find his father creaking back and forward in a rocking chair, green fedora hat pushed back on his head, sipping from a can of brown ale and stifling a yawn with his lemon yellow gloves, was troubling indeed.
“Who? What?”
“Do you think he’s here?”
“Who?”
“My father.”
“Your father?”
“Anansi.”
Monkey leapt to the top of a rock in terror, then he pressed himself against the rock, his gaze flicking from side to side as if keeping an eye out for sudden tornadoes. “Anansi? He’s here?”
“I was asking you that,” said Fat Charlie.
Monkey swung suddenly, so he was hanging upside down from its feet, his upside-down face staring straight into Fat Charlie’s. “I go back to the world sometimes,” he said. “They say, Monkey, wise Monkey, come, come. Come eat the peaches we have for you. And the nuts. And the grubs. And the figs.”
“Is my father here?” asked Fat Charlie, patiently.
“He doesn’t have a cave,” said Monkey. “I would know if he had a cave. I think. Maybe he had a cave and I forgot. If you gave me a peach, I would remember better.”
“I don’t have anything on me,” said Fat Charlie.
“No peaches?”
“Nothing, I’m afraid.”
Monkey swung himself up to the top of his rock, and he was gone.
Fat Charlie continued along the rocky path. The sun had sunk until it was level with the path, and it burned a deep orange. It shone its old light straight into the caves, and showed each cave to be inhabited. That must be Rhinoceros, gray of skin, staring out shortsightedly; there, the color of a rotten log in shallow water, was Crocodile, his eyes as black as glass.
There was a rattle behind him of stone scuttering against stone, and Fat Charlie turned with a jerk. Monkey stared up at him, his knuckles brushing the path.
“I really haven’t got any fruit,” said Fat Charlie. “Or I’d give you some.”
Monkey said, “Felt sorry for you. Maybe you should go home. This is a bad bad bad bad bad idea. Yes?”
“No,” said Fat Charlie.
“Ah,” said Monkey. “Right. Right right right right right.” He stopped moving, then a sudden burst of loping speed, and he bounded past Fat Charlie and stopped in front of a cave some little distance away.
“Not to go in there,” he called. “Bad place.” He pointed to the cave opening.
“Why not?” asked Fat Charlie. “Who’s in there?”
“Nobody’s in there,” said Monkey, triumphantly. “So it’s not the one you want, is it?”
“Yes,” said Fat Charlie. “It is.”
Monkey chittered and bounced, but Fat Charlie walked past him and clambered up the rocks until he reached the mouth of the empty cave, as the crimson sun fell below the cliffs at the end of the world.
Walking the path along the edge of the mountains at the beginning of the world (it’s only the mountains at the end of the world if you’re coming from the other direction), reality seemed strange and strained. These mountains and their caves are made from the stuff of the oldest stories (this was long before human-people, of course; whatever made you imagine that people were the first things to tell stories?), and stepping off the path into the cave, Fat Charlie felt as if he were walking into someone else’s reality entirely. The cave was deep; its floor was splashed white with bird droppings. There were feathers on the cave floor too, and here and there, like a desiccated and abandoned feather duster, was the corpse of a bird, flattened and dried.
At the back of the cave, nothing but darkness.
Fat Charlie called “Hello?” and the echo of his voice came back to him from the interior of the cave. Hello hello hello hello. He kept walking. Now the darkness in the cave seemed almost palpable, as if something thin and dark had been laid over his eyes. He walked slowly, a step at a time, his arms outstretched.
Something moved.
“Hello?”
His eyes were learning to use what little light there was, and he could make something out. It’s nothing. Rags and feathers, that’s all. Another step, and the wind stirred the feathers and flapped the rags on the floor of the cave.
Something fluttered about him, fluttered through him, beating the air with the clatter of a pigeon’s wings.
Swirling. Dust stung his eyes and his face, and he blinked in the cold wind and took a step back as it rose up before him, a storm of dust and rags and feathers. Then the wind was gone, and where the feathers had been blowing was a human figure, which reached out a hand and beckoned to Fat Charlie.
He would have stepped back, but it reached out and took him by the sleeve. Its touch was light and dry, and it pulled him toward it….
He took one step forward into the cave—
—and was standing in the open air, on a treeless, copper-colored plain, beneath a sky the color of sour milk.
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 oilslick 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?