"I'm not sure. I was trying to find the Bird Woman. I want to give her back her feather."

"You shouldn't have been messin' about with people like that," said his father, blithely. "No good ever comes from it. She's a mess of resentments, that one. But she's a coward."

"It was Spider-" said Fat Charlie.

"Your own fault. Letting that old busybody send half of you away."

"I was only a kid. Why didn't youdo anything?"

Anansi pushed the hat back on his head. "Ol' Dunwiddy couldn't do anything to you you didn't let her do," he said. "You'remy son, after all."

Fat Charlie thought about this. Then he said, "But why didn't youtell me?"

"You're doing okay. You're figurin' it all out by yourself. You figured out the songs, didn't you?"

Fat Charlie felt clumsier and fatter and even more of a disappointment to his father, but he didn't simply say "No." Instead he said, "What do you think?"

"I think you're gettin' there. The important thing about songs is that they're just like stories. They don't mean a damn unless there's people listenin' to them."

They were approaching the end of the bridge. Fat Charlie knew, without being told, that this was the last chance they'd ever have to talk. There were so many things he needed to find out, so many things he wanted to know. He said, "Dad. When I was a kid. Why did you humiliate me?"

The old man's brow creased. "Humiliate you? I loved you."

"You got me to go to school dressed as President Taft. You call that love?"

There was a high-pitched yelp of something that might have been laughter from the old man, then he sucked on his cheroot. The smoke drifted from his lips like a ghostly speech balloon. "Your mother had something to say about that," he said. Then he said, "We don't have long, Charlie. You want to spend the time we got left fighting?"

Fat Charlie shook his head. "Guess not."

They had reached the end of the bridge. "Now," said his father. "When you see your brother. I want you to give him something from me."

"What?"

His father reached up a hand, pulled Fat Charlie's head down. Then he kissed him, gently, on the forehead. "That," he said.

Fat Charlie straightened up. His father was looking up at him with an expression that, if he had seen it in anyone else's face, he would have thought of as pride. "Let me see the feather," said his father.

Fat Charlie reached into his pocket. The feather was there, looking even more crumpled and dilapidated than it looked before.

His father made a "tch" noise and held the feather up to the light. "This is a beautiful feather," said his father. "You don't want it to get all manky. She won't take it back if it's messed up." Mr. Nancy ran his hand over the feather, and it was perfect. He frowned at it. "Now, you'll just get it messed up again." He breathed on his fingernails, polished them against his jacket. Then he seemed to have arrived at a decision. He removed his fedora and slipped the feather into the hatband. "Here. You could do with a natty hat anyway." He put the hat onto Fat Charlie's head. "It suits you," he said.

Fat Charlie sighed. "Dad. I don't wear hats. It'll look stupid. I'll look a complete tit. Why do you always try to embarrass me?"

In the fading light, the old man looked at his son. "You think I'd lie to you? Son, all you need to wear a hat is attitude. And you got that. You think I'd tell you you looked good if you didn't? You look real sharp. You don't believe me?"

Fat Charlie said, "Not really."

"Look," said his father. He pointed over the side of the bridge. The water beneath them was still and smooth as a mirror, and the man looking up at him from the water looked real sharp in his new green hat.

Fat Charlie looked up to tell his father that maybe he had been wrong, but the old man was gone.

He stepped off the bridge into the dusk.

"RIGHT. I WANTTO KNOW EXACTLY WHERE HE IS. WHERE DIDhe go? What have you done to him?"

"I didn't do anything. Lord, child," said Mrs. Higgler. "This never happened the last time."

"It looked like he was beamed up to the mothership," said Benjamin. "Cool. Real-life special effects."

"I want you to bring him back," said Daisy, fiercely. "I want him backnow ."

"I don't even know where he is," said Mrs. Higgler. "And I didn't send him there. He do that himself."

"Anyway," said Clarissa. "What if he's off doing what he's doing and we make him come back? We could ruin it all."

"Exactly," said Benjamin. "Like beaming the landing party back, halfway through their mission."

Daisy thought about this and was irritated to realize that it made sense-as much as anything made sense these days, anyway.

"If nothing else is happening," said Clarissa, "I ought to go back to the restaurant. Make sure everything's all right."

Mrs. Higgler sipped her coffee. "Nothin' happenin' here," she agreed.

Daisy slammed her hand down on the table. "Excuse me. We've got a killer out there. And now Fat Charlie's beamed up to the mastership."

"Mothership," said Benjamin.

Mrs. Higgler blinked. "Okay," she said. "We should do something. What do you suggest?"

"I don't know," admitted Daisy and she hated herself for saying it. "Kill time, I suppose." She picked up the copy of theWilliamstown Courier that Mrs. Higgler had been reading and began to flip through it.

The story about the missing tourists, the women who hadn't gone back to their cruise ship was a column on page three.The two at the house, said Grahame Coats in her head.Did you think I'd believe they were from the ship?

At the end of the day, Daisy was a cop.

"Get me the phone," she said.

"Who are you calling?"

"I think we'll start with the minister of tourism and the chief of police, and we'll go on from there."

THE CRIMSON SUNWAS SHRINKING ON THE HORIZON. SPIDER,had he not been Spider, would have despaired. On the island, in that place, there was a clean line between day and night, and Spider watched the last red crumb of sun being swallowed by the sea. He had his stones and the two stakes.

He wished he had fire.

He wondered when the moon would be up. When the moon rose, he might have a chance.

The sun set-the final smudge of red sank into the dark sea, and it was night.

"Anansi's child," said a voice from out of the darkness. "Soon enough, I shall feed. You will not know I am there until you feel my breath on the back of your head. I stood above you, while you were staked out for me, and I could have crunched through your neck then and there, but I thought better of it. Killing you in your sleep would have brought me no pleasure. I want to feel you die. I want you to know why I have taken your life."

Spider threw a rock toward where he thought the voice was coming from, and heard it crash harmlessly into the undergrowth.

"You have fingers," said the voice, "but I have claws sharper than knives. You have your two legs, but I have four legs that will never tire, that can run ten times as fast as you ever will and keep on running. Your teeth can eat meat, if it has been made soft and tasteless by the fire, for you have little monkey teeth, good for chewing soft fruit and crawling bugs; but I have teeth that rend and tear the living flesh from the bones, and I can swallow it while the lifeblood still fountains into the sky."

And then Spider made a noise. It was a noise that could be made without a tongue, without even opening his lips. It was a "meh" noise of amused disdain.You may be all these things, Tiger, it seemed to say,but so what? All the stories there ever were are Anansi's. Nobody tells Tiger stories .

There was a roar from the darkness, a roar of fury and frustration.

Spider began to hum the tune of the "Tiger Rag." It's an old song, good for teasing tigers with: "Hold that tiger," it goes. "Where's that tiger?"

When the voice came next from the darkness, it was nearer.

"I have your woman, Anansi's child. When I am done with you, I shall tear her flesh. Her meat will taste sweeter than yours."

Spider made the "hmph!" sound people make when they know they're being lied to.

"Her name is Rosie."

Spider made an involuntary noise then.

In the darkness, someone laughed. "And as for eyes," it said, "You have eyes that see the obvious, in broad daylight, if you are lucky, whereas my people have eyes that can see the hairs prickle on your arms as I talk to you, see the terror on your face, and see that in the nighttime. Fear me, Anansi's child, and if you have any final prayers to say, say them now."

Spider had no prayers, but he had rocks, and he could throw them. Perhaps he might get lucky, and a rock might do some damage in the darkness. Spider knew that it would be a miracle if it did, but he had spent his entire life relying on miracles.

He reached for another rock.

Something brushed the back of his hand.

Hello,said the little clay spider, in his mind.

Hi,thought Spider.Look, I'm a bit busy here, trying not to be eaten, so if you don't mind keeping out of the way for a while ....

But I brought them,thought the spider.Like you asked.

Like I asked?

You told me to go for help. I brought them back with me. They followed my web strand. There are no spiders in this creation, so I slipped back and webbed from there to here and from here to there again. I brought the warriors. I brought the brave.

"A penny for your thoughts," said the big cat voice in the darkness. And then it said, with a certain refined amusement, "What's the matter? Cat got your tongue?"

A single spider is silent. They cultivate silence. Even the ones that do make noises will normally remain as still as they can, waiting. So much of what spiders do is waiting.

The night was slowly filled with a gentle rustling.

Spider thought his gratitude and pride at the little sevenlegged spider he had made from his blood and spittle and from the earth. The spider scuttled from the back of his hand up to his shoulder.

Spider could not see them, but he knew they were all there: the great spiders and the small spiders, venomous spiders and biting spiders: huge hairy spiders and elegant chitinous spiders. Their eyes took whatever light they could find, but they saw through their legs and their feet, constructing vibrations into a virtual image of the world about them.

They were an army.

Tiger spoke again from the darkness. "When you are dead, Anansi's child-when all of your bloodline is dead-then the stories will be mine. Once again, people will tell Tiger stories. They will gather together and praise my cunning and my strength, my cruelty and my joy. Every story will be mine. Every song will be mine. The world will be as it once was again: a hard place. A dark place."

Spider listened to the rustle of his army.

He was sitting at the cliff edge for a reason. While it gave him nowhere to retreat to, it meant that Tiger could not charge, he could only creep.

Spider started to laugh.

"What are you laughing at, Anansi's child? Have you lost your reason?"

At that, Spider laughed longer and louder.

There was a yowl from the darkness. Tiger had met Spider's army.

Spider venom comes in many forms. It can often take a long while to discover the full effects of the bite. Naturalists have pondered this for years: there are spiders whose bite can cause the place bitten to rot and to die, sometimes more than a year after it was bitten. As to why spiders do this, the answer is simple. It's because spiders think this is funny, and they don't want you ever to forget them.

Black widow bites on Tiger's bruised nose, tarantula bites on his ears: in moments his sensitive places burned and throbbed, swelled and itched. Tiger did not know what was happening: all he knew was the burning and the pain and the sudden fear.

Spider laughed, longer and louder, and listened to the sound of a huge animal bolting into the undergrowth, roaring in agony and in fright.

Then he sat and he waited. Tiger would be back, he had no doubt. It was not over yet.

Spider took the seven-legged spider from his shoulder and stroked it, running his fingers back and forth across its broad back.

A little way down the hill something glowed with a cold green luminescence, and it flickered, like the lights of a tiny city, flashing on and off into the night. It was coming toward him.

The flickering resolved itself into a hundred thousand fire-flies. Silhouetted and illuminated in the center of the firefly-light was a dark figure, man-shaped. It was walking steadily up the hill.

Spider raised a rock and mentally readied his spider troops for one more attack. And then he stopped. There was something familiar about the figure in the firefly-light; it wore a green fedora.

GRAHAME COATSWAS MOST OF THE WAY THROUGH A HALF BOTTLEof rum he had found in the kitchen. He had opened the rum because he had no desire to go down into the wine cellar, and because he imagined it would get him drunk faster than wine would. Unfortunately, it didn't. It did not seem to be doing much of anything, let alone providing the emotional off-switch he felt he needed. He walked around the house with a bottle in one hand and a half-full glass in the other, and sometimes he took a swig from one, and sometimes from the other. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror, hangdog and sweaty. "Cheer up," he said aloud. "Might never happen. Cloud silver lining. Life rain mus' fall. Too many cooks. 'S an ill wind." The rum was pretty much gone.

He went back into the kitchen. He opened several cupboards before he noticed a bottle of sherry toward the back. Grahame picked it up and cradled it gratefully, as if it were a very small old friend who had just returned after years at sea.

He unscrewed the top of the bottle. It was a sweet cooking sherry, but he drank it down like lemonade.