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.
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.
She was saying, “I dunno. I thought it would be a holiday, but seeing those kids, without anything, it breaks your heart. There’s so much they need.” And then, while Spider was trying to assess the significance of this, she said, “I wonder how much longer she’s going to be in the bath. Good thing you’ve got plenty of hot water here.”
Spider wondered if Rosie’s words were meant to be important, whether they held the key to escaping from his predicament. He doubted it. Still, he listened harder, wondering whether the wind would carry any more words between the worlds. Apart from the crash of the waves on breakers behind and far below him, he heard nothing, only silence. But a specific kind of silence. There are, as Fat Charlie once imagined, many kinds of silences. Graves have their own silence, space has its silence, mountaintops have theirs. This was a hunting silence. It was a stalking silence. In this silence something moved on velvet-soft pads, with muscles like steel springs coiled beneath soft fur; something the color of shadows in the long grass; something that would ensure that you heard nothing it did not wish you to hear. It was a silence that was moving from side to side in front of him, slowly and relentlessly, and with every arc it was getting closer.
Spider heard that in the silence, and the hairs on the back of his neck stiffened. He spat blood onto the dust by his face, and he waited.
In his house on the cliff top, Grahame Coats paced back and forth. He walked from his bedroom to the study, then down the stairs to the kitchen and back up to the library and from there back to his bedroom again. He was angry with himself: how could he have been so stupid as to assume that Rosie’s visit was a coincidence?
He had realized it when the buzzer had sounded and he had looked into the closed-circuit TV screen at Fat Charlie’s inane face. There was no mistaking it.
He had imitated the action of a tiger, and climbed into the car, certain of an easy hit-and-run: if they found a mangled bicycle rider, people would blame it on a minibus. Unfortunately, he had not counted on Fat Charlie’s cycling so close to the road’s drop-off: Grahame Coats had been unwilling to push his car any closer to the edge of the road, and now he was regretting it. No, Fat Charlie had sent in the women in the meat locker; they were his spies. They had infiltrated Grahame Coats’s house. He was lucky that he had tumbled their scheme. He had known there was something
As he thought of the women, he realized that he had not fed them yet. He ought to give them something to eat. And a bucket. They would probably need a bucket after twenty-four hours. Nobody could say that he was an animal.
He had bought a handgun in Williamstown, the previous week. You could buy guns pretty easily on Saint Andrews, it was that sort of island. Most people didn’t bother with buying guns though, it was that sort of island too. He took the gun from his bedside drawer and went down to the kitchen. He took a plastic bucket from under the sink, tossed several tomatoes, a raw yam, a half-eaten lump of cheddar cheese, and a carton of orange juice into it. Then, pleased with himself for thinking of it, he fetched a toilet roll.
He went down to the wine cellar. There was no noise from inside the meat locker.
“I’ve got a gun,” he said. “And I’m not afraid to use it. I’m going to open the door now. Please go over to the far wall, turn around, and put your hands against it. I’ve brought food. Cooperate and you will both be released unharmed. Cooperate and nobody gets hurt. That means,” he said, delighted to find himself able to deploy an entire battalion of cliches hitherto off-limits, “no funny business.”
He turned on the lights inside the room, then pulled the bolts. The walls of the room were rock and brick. Rusting chains hung from hooks in the ceiling.
They were against the far wall. Rosie looked at the rock. Her mother stared over her shoulder at him like a trapped rat, furious and filled with hate.
Grahame Coats put down the bucket; he did not put down the gun. “Lovely grub,” he said. “And, better late than never, a bucket. I see you’ve been using the corner. There’s toilet paper, too. Don’t ever say I didn’t do anything for you.”
“You’re going to kill us,” said Rosie. “Aren’t you?”
“Don’t antagonize him, you stupid girl,” spat her mother. Then, assuming a smile of sorts, she said, “We’re grateful for the food.”
“Of course I’m not going to kill you,” said Grahame Coats. It was only as he heard the words coming out of his mouth that he admitted to himself that, yes, of course he was going to have to kill them. What other option did he have? “You didn’t tell me that Fat Charlie sent you here.”
Rosie said, “We came on a cruise ship. This evening we’re meant to be in Barbados for the fish fry. Fat Charlie’s in England. I don’t even think he knows where we’ve gone. I didn’t tell him.”
“It doesn’t matter what you say,” said Grahame Coats. “I’ve got the gun.”
He pushed the door closed and bolted it. Through the door he could hear Rosie’s mother saying, “The
