"More or less," he said. "I'm dead, anyway."

"Oh. Would you mind if I asked where I was?"

"We're in Florida." he told her. "In the buryin' ground. It's good you caught me," he added. "I was going for a walk. You want to come along?"

"Shouldn't you be in a grave?" she asked, hesitantly.

"I was bored," he told her. "I thought I could do with a walk. And maybe a spot of fishin'."

She hesitated, then nodded. It was nice to have someone to talk to.

"You want to hear a story?" asked the old man.

"Not really," she admitted.

He helped her to her feet, and they walked out of the Garden of Rest.

"Fair enough. Then I'll keep it short. Not go too long. You know, I can tell one of these stories so it lasts for weeks. It's all in the details-what you put in, what you don't. I mean, you leave out the weather and what people are wearing, you can skip half the story. I once told a story-"

"Look," she said, "if you're going to tell a story, then just tell it to me, all right?" It was bad enough walking along the side of the road in the gathering dusk. She reminded herself that she wasn't going to be hit by a passing car, but it did nothing to make her feel more at ease.

The old man started to talk in a gentle sing-song. "When I say 'Tiger,' " he said, "You got to understand it's not just the stripy cat, the India one. It's just what people call big cats-the pumas and the bobcats and the jaguars and all of them. You got that?"

"Certainly."

"Good. So...a long time ago," he began, "Tiger had the stories. All the stories there ever were was Tiger stories, all the songs were Tiger songs, and I'd say that all the jokes were Tiger jokes, but there weren't no jokes told back in the Tiger days. In Tiger stories all that matters is how strong your teeth are, how you hunt and how you kill. Ain't no gentleness in Tiger stories, no tricksiness, and no peace."

Maeve tried to imagine what kind of stories a big cat might tell. "So they were violent?"

"Sometimes. But mostly what they was, was bad. When all the stories and the songs were Tiger's, that was a bad time for everyone. People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song. And in Tiger times all the songs were dark. They began in tears, and they'd end in blood, and they were the only stories that the people of this world knew.

"Then Anansi comes along. Now, I guess you know all about Anansi-"

"I don't think so," said Maeve.

"Well, if I started to tell you how clever and how handsome and how charming and how cunning Anansi was, I could start today and not finish until next Thursday," began the old man.

"Then don't," said Maeve. "We'll take it as said. And what did this Anansi do?"

"Well, Anansi won the stories-won them? No. Heearned them. He took them from Tiger, and made it so Tiger couldn't enter the real world no more. Not in the flesh. The stories people told became Anansi stories. This was, what, ten, fifteen thousand years back.

"Now, Anansi stories, they have wit and trickery and wisdom. Now, all over the world, all of the people they aren't just thinking of hunting and being hunted anymore. Now they're starting tothink their way out of problems-sometimes thinking their way into worse problems. They still need to keep their bellies full, but now they're trying to figure out how to do it without working-andthat's the point where people start using their heads. Some people think the first tools were weapons, but that's all upside down. First of all, people figure out the tools. It's the crutch before the club, every time. Because now people are telling Anansi stories, and they're starting to think about how to get kissed, how to get something for nothing by being smarter or funnier. That's when they start to make the world."

"It's just a folk story," she said. "People made up the stories in the first place."

"Does that change things?" asked the old man. "Maybe Anansi's just some guy from a story, made up back in Africa in the dawn days of the world by some boy with blackfly on his leg, pushing his crutch in the dirt, making up some goofy story about a man made of tar. Does that change anything? People respond to the stories. They tell them themselves. The stories spread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers. Because now the folk who never had any thought in their head but how to run from lions and keep far enough away from rivers that the crocodiles don't get an easy meal, now they're starting to dream about a whole new place to live. The world may be the same, but the wallpaper's changed. Yes? People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before."

"You're telling me that before the Anansi stories the world was savage and bad?"

"Yeah. Pretty much."

She digested this. "Well," she said cheerily, "it's certainly a good thing that the stories are now Anansi's."

The old man nodded.

And then she said, "Doesn't Tiger want them back?"

He nodded. "He's wanted them back for ten thousand years."

"But he won't get them, will he?"

The old man said nothing. He stared into the distance. Then he shrugged. "Be a bad thing if he did."

"What about Anansi?"

"Anansi's dead," said the old man. "And there ain't a lot a duppy can do."

"As a duppy myself," she said, "I resent that."

"Well," said the old man, "Duppies can't touch the living. Remember?"

She pondered this a moment. "So whatcan I touch?" she asked.

The look that flickered across his elderly face was both wily and wicked. "Well," he said. "You could touch me."

"I'll have you know," she told him, pointedly, "that I'm a married woman."

His smile only grew wider. It was a sweet smile and a gentle one, as heartwarming as it was dangerous. "Generally speaking, that kind of contract terminates in atill death us do part ."

Maeve was unimpressed.

"Thing is," he told her, "you're an immaterial girl. You can touch immaterial things. Like me. I mean, if you want, we could go dancing. There's a place just down the street here. Won't nobody notice a couple of duppies on their dance floor."

Maeve thought about it. It had been a long time since she had gone dancing. "Are you a good dancer?" she asked.

"I've never had any complaints," said the old man.

"I want to find a man-a living man-called Grahame Coats," she said. "Can you help me find him?"

"I can certainly steer you in the right direction," he said. "So, are you dancing?"

A smile crept about the edges of her lips. "You asking?" she said.

THE CHAINS THATHAD KEPT SPIDER CAPTIVE FELL AWAY. THEpain, which had been searing and continuous like a bad toothache that occupied his entire body, began to pass.

Spider took a step forward.

In front of him was what appeared to be a rip in the sky, and he moved toward it.

Ahead of him he could see an island. He could see a small mountain in the center of the island. He could see a pure blue sky, and swaying palm trees, a white gull high in the sky. But even as he saw it the world seemed to be receding. It was as if he were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. It shrank and slipped from him, and the more he ran toward it the further away it seemed to get.

The island was a reflection in a puddle of water, and then it was nothing at all.

He was in a cave. The edges of things were crisp-crisper and sharper than anywhere that Spider had ever been before. This was a different kind of place.

She was standing in the mouth of the cave, between him and the open air. He knew her. She had stared into his face in a Greek restaurant in South London, and birds had come from her mouth.

"You know," said Spider, "I have to say, you've got the strangest ideas about hospitality. You come to my world, I'd make you dinner, open a bottle of wine, put on some soft music, give you an evening you would never forget."

Her face was impassive; carved from black rock it was. The wind tugged at the edges of her old brown coat. She spoke then, her voice high and lonely as the call of a distant gull.

"I took you," she said. "Now, you will call him."

"Call him? Call who?"

"You will bleat," she said. "You will whimper. Your fear will excite him."

"Spider does not bleat," he said. He was not certain this was true.

Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.

"If you kill me," said Spider, "my curse will be upon you." He wondered if he actually had a curse. He probably did; and if he didn't, he was sure that he could fake it.

"It will not be I that kills you," she said. She raised her hand, and it was not a hand but a raptor's talon. She raked her talon down his face, down his chest, her cruel claws sinking into his flesh, tearing his skin.

It did not hurt, although Spider knew that it would hurt soon enough.

Beads of blood crimsoned his chest and dripped down his face. His eyes stung. His blood touched his lips. He could taste it and smell the iron scent of it.

"Now," she said in the cries of distant birds. "Now your death begins."

Spider said, "We're both reasonable entities. Let me present you with a perhaps rather more feasible alternative scenario that might conceivably have benefits for both of us." He said it with an easy smile. He said it convincingly.

"You talk too much," she said, and shook her head. "No more talking."

She reached into his mouth with her sharp talons, and with one wrenching movement she tore out his tongue.

"There," she said. And then she seemed to take pity on him, for she touched Spider's face in a way that was almost kindly, and she said, "Sleep."

He slept.

ROSIE'S MOTHER,NOW BATHED, REAPPEARED REFRESHED, INVIGORATEDand positively glowing.

"Before I give you both a ride into Williamstown, can I give you a hasty guided tour of the house?" asked Grahame Coats.

"We do have to get back to the ship, thanks all the same," said Rosie, who had not been able to convince herself that she wanted a bath in Grahame Coats's house.

Her mother checked her watch. "We have ninety minutes," she said. "It won't take more than fifteen minutes to get back to the harbor. Don't be ungracious, Rosie. We would love to see your house."

So Grahame Coats showed them the sitting room, the study, the library, the television room, the dining room, the kitchen and the swimming pool. He opened a door beneath the kitchen stairs that looked as if it would lead to a broom cupboard, and walked his guests down the wooden steps into the rock-walled wine cellar. He showed them the wine, most of which had come with the house when he had bought it. He walked them to the far end of the wine cellar to the bare room that had, back in the days before refrigeration, been a meat storage locker. It was always chilly in the meat locker, where heavy chains came down from the ceiling, the empty hooks on the ends showing where once whole carcases had hung long before. Grahame Coats held the heavy iron door open politely while both the women walked inside.

"You know," he said, helpfully, "I've just realized. The light switch is back where we came in. Hold on." And then he slammed the door behind the women, and he rammed closed the bolts.

He picked out a dusty-looking bottle of1995 Chablis Premier Cru from a wine rack.

He went upstairs with a swing in his step and let his three employees know that he would be giving them the week off.

It seemed to him, as he walked up the stairs to his study, as if something were padding soundlessly behind him, but when he turned there was nothing there. Oddly, he found this comforting. He found a corkscrew, opened the bottle and poured himself a pale glass of wine. He drank it and, although he had never previously had much time for red wines, he found himself wishing that what he was drinking was richer and darker.It should be, he thought,the color of blood.

As he finished his second glass of Chablis, he realized that he had been blaming the wrong person for his plight. Maeve Livingstone was, he saw it now, merely a dupe. No, the person to blame, obviously and undeniably, was Fat Charlie. Without his meddling, without his criminal trespass into Grahame Coats's office computer systems, Grahame Coats wouldn't be here, an exile, like a blond Napoleon on a perfect, sunny Elba. He wouldn't be in the unfortunate predicament of having two women imprisoned in his meat locker.If Fat Charlie was here, he thought,I would tear out his throat with my teeth, and the thought shocked him even as it excited him. You didn't want to screw with Grahame Coats.

Evening came, and Grahame Coats watched theSqueak Attack from his window as it drifted past his house on the cliff and off into the sunset. He wondered how long it would take them to notice that two passengers were missing. He even waved.

CHAPTER TWELVE

IN WHICH FAT CHARLIE DOES SEVERAL THINGS FOR THE FIRST TIME

THE DOLPHIN HOTEL HAD A CONCIERGE. HE WAS YOUNG AND bespectacled, and he was reading a paperback novel with a rose and a gun on the cover.

"I'm trying to find someone," said Fat Charlie. "On the island."

"Who?"

"A lady named Callyanne Higgler. She's here from Florida. She's an old friend of my family."

The young man closed his book thoughtfully, then he looked at Fat Charlie through narrowed eyes. When people do this in paperback books it gives an immediate impression of dangerous alertness, but in reality it just made the young man look like he was trying not to fall asleep. He said, "Are you the man with the lime?"

"What?"

"The man with the lime?"