"We all are," said Charlie. "Now, you've met Spider. This is Daisy. She's in the police."

"I'm not sure that I am anymore," said Daisy. "I'm probably in all kinds of hot water."

"You're the one who was there last night? The one who got the island police to come up to the house?" Rosie stopped. She said, "Any word on Grahame Coats?"

"He's in intensive care, just like your mum."

"Well, if she comes to before he does," said Rosie, "I expect she'll kill him." Then she said, "They won't talk to me about my mum's condition. They just say that it's very serious, and they'll tell me as soon as there's anything to tell." She looked at Charlie with clear eyes. "She's not as bad as you think she is, really. Not when you get time to know her. We had a lot of time to talk, locked up in the dark. She's all right."

She blew her nose. Then she said, "They don't think she's going to make it. They haven't directly said that to me, but they sort of said it in a not-saying-it sort of way. It's funny. I thought she'd live through anything."

Charlie said, "Me too. I figured even if there was a nuclear war, it would still leave radioactive cockroaches and your mum."

Daisy stepped on his foot. She said, "Do they know anything more about what hurt her?"

"I told them," said Rosie. "There was some kind of animal in the house. Maybe it was just Grahame Coats. I mean it sort of was him, but it was sort of someone else. She distracted it from me, and it went for her...." She had explained it all as best shecould to the island police that morning. She had decided not to talk about the blonde ghost-woman. Sometimes minds snap under pressure, and she thought it best if people did not know that hers had.

Rosie broke off. She was staring at Spider as if she had only just remembered who he was. She said, "I still hate you, you know." Spider said nothing, but a miserable expression crept across his face, and he no longer looked like a doctor: now he looked like a man who had borrowed a white coat from behind a door and was worried that someone would notice. A dreamlike tone came into her voice. "Only," she said, "only when I was in the dark, I thought that you were helping me. That you were keeping the animal away. What happened to your face? It's all scratched."

"It was an animal," said Spider.

"You know," she said, "Now I see you both at once, you don't look anything alike at all."

"I'm the good-looking one," said Charlie, and Daisy's foot pressed down on his toes for the second time.

"Bless," said Daisy, quietly. And then, slightly louder, "Charlie? There's something we need to talk about outside. Now."

They went out into the hospital corridor, leaving Spider inside.

"What?" said Charlie.

"What what?" said Daisy.

"What have we got to talk about?"

"Nothing."

"Then why are we out here? You heard her. She hates him. We shouldn't have left them alone together. She's probably killed him by now."

Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad: there was pity in that expression, along with almost infinite compassion.

She touched a finger to her lips and pulled him back toward the door. He looked back into the hospital room: Rosie did not appear to be killing Spider. Quite the opposite, if anything. "Oh," said Charlie.

They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You'd miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along.

Charlie turned his attention back to the corridor to find Daisy in conversation with several doctors and the police officer they had encountered the previous evening.

"Well, we always had him figured as a bad man," the police officer was saying to Daisy. "I mean, frankly, you only get this kind of behavior from foreigners. The local people, they simply wouldn't do that kind of thing."

"Obviously not," said Daisy.

"Very. Very grateful," said the police chief, patting her shoulder in a way that set Daisy's teeth on edge. "This little lady saved that woman's life," he told Charlie, giving his shoulder a patronizing pat for good measure, before setting off with the doctors down the corridor.

"So what's happening?" asked Charlie.

"Well, Grahame Coats is dead," she said. "More or less. And they don't hold out any hope for Rosie's mum, either."

"I see," said Charlie. He thought about this. Then he finished thinking and came to a decision. Said, "Would you mind if I just chatted to my brother for a bit? I think he and I need to talk."

"I'm going back to the hotel anyway. I'm going to check my e-mail. Probably going to have to say sorry on the phone a lot. Find out if I still have a career."

"But you're a hero, aren't you?"

"I don't think that's what anyone was paying me for," she said, a little wanly. "Come and find me at the hotel when you're done."

Spider and Charlie walked down the Williamstown high street in the morning sun.

"You know, that really is a good hat," said Spider.

"You really think so?"

"Yeah. Can I try it on?"

Charlie gave Spider the green fedora. Spider put it on, looked at his reflection in a shop window. He made a face and gave Charlie the hat back. "Well," he said, disappointed, "it looks good on you, anyway."

Charlie pushed his fedora back onto his head. Some hats can only be worn if you're willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you're only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you. This hat was one of those, and Charlie was up to it. He said, "Rosie's mum is dying."

"Yeah."

"I really,really never liked her."

"I didn't know her as well as you did. But given time, I'm sure I would have really, really disliked her too."

Charlie said, "We have to try and save her life, don't we?" He said it without enthusiasm, like someone pointing out it was time to visit the dentist.

"I don't think we can do things like that."

"Dad did something like it for mum. He got her better, for a while."

"But that was him. I don't know how we'd do that."

Charlie said, "The place at the end of the world. With the caves."

"Beginning of the world, not the end. What about it?"

"Can we just get there? Without all that candles-and-herbs malarkey?"

Spider was quiet. Then he nodded, "I think so."

They turned together, turned in a direction that wasn't usually there, and they walked away from the Williamstown high street.

Now the sun was rising, and Charlie and Spider walked across a beach littered with skulls. They were not proper human skulls, and they covered the beach like yellow pebbles. Charlie avoided them where he could, while Spider crunched his way through them. At the end of the beach they took a left turn that was left to absolutely everything, and the mountains at the beginning of the world towered above them and the cliffs fell away below.

Charlie remembered the last time he was here, and it seemed like a thousand years ago. "Where is everyone?" he said aloud, and his voice echoed against the rocks and came back to him. He said, loudly, "Hello?"

And then they were there, watching him. All of them. They seemed grander, now, less human, more animal,wilder . He realized that he had seen them as people last time because he had expected to meet people. But they were not people. Arrayed on the rocks above them were Lion and Elephant, Crocodile and Python, Rabbit and Scorpion, and the rest of them, hundreds of them, and they stared at him with eyes unsmiling: animals he recognized; animals that no one living would be able to identify. All the animals that have ever been in stories. All the animals that people have dreamed of, worshipped, or placated.

Charlie saw all of them.

It's one thing,he thought,singing for your life, in a room filled with diners, on the spur of the moment, with a gun barrel in the ribs of the girl you ...

That you...

Oh.

Well,thought Charlie,I can worry about that later.

Right now he badly wanted either to breathe into a brown paper bag or to vanish.

"There must be hundreds of them," said Spider, and there was awe in his voice.

There was a flurry in the air, on a nearby rock, which resolved itself into the Bird Woman. She folded her arms and stared at them.

"Whatever it is you're going to do," Spider said, "you better do it soon. They aren't going to wait around forever."

Charlie's mouth was dry. "Right."

Spider said, "So. Um. What exactly do we do now?"

"We sing to them," said Charlie, simply.

"What?"

"It's how we fix things. I figured it out. We just sing it all, you and I."

"I don't understand. Singwhat? "

Charlie said, "Thesong . You sing the song, you fix things." Now he sounded desperate. "Thesong ."

Spider's eyes were like puddles after the rain, and Charlie saw things in them he had not seen before: affection, perhaps, and confusion and, mostly, apology. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Lion watched them from the side of a boulder. Monkey looked at them from the top of a tree. And Tiger....

Charlie saw Tiger. It was walking gingerly on four feet. Its face was swollen and bruised, but there was a glint in its eyes, and it looked as if it would be more than happy to even the score.

Charlie opened his mouth. A small croaking noise came out, as if Charlie had recently swallowed a particularly nervous frog. "It's no use," he whispered to Spider. "This was a stupid idea, wasn't it?"

"Yup."

"Do you think we can just go away again?" Charlie's nervous glance swept the mountainside and the caves, took in each of the hundreds of totem creatures from before the dawn of time. There was one he had not seen the last time he had looked: a small man, with lemon yellow gloves and a pencil-thin moustache and no fedora hat to cover his thinning hair.

The old man winked when he caught Charlie's gaze.

It wasn't much, but it was enough.

Charlie filled his lungs, and he began to sing. "I am Charlie," he sang. "I am Anansi's son. Listen as I sing my song. Listen to my life."

He sang them the song of a boy who was half a god, and who was broken into two by an old woman with a grudge. He sang of his father, and he sang of his mother.

He sang of names and words, of the building blocks beneath the real, the worlds that make worlds, the truths beneath the way things are; he sang of appropriate ends and just conclusions for those who would have hurt him and his.

He sang the world.

It was a good song, and it was his song. Sometimes it had words, and sometimes it didn't have any words at all.

As he sang, all the creatures listening began to clap and to stamp and to hum along; Charlie felt like he was the conduit for a great song that took in all of them. He sang of birds, of the magic of looking up and seeing them in flight, of the sheen of the sun on a wing feather in the morning.

The totem creatures were dancing now, the dances of their kind. The Bird Woman danced the wheeling dance of birds, fanning her tail feathers, tossing back her beak.

There was only one creature on the mountainside who did not dance.

Tiger lashed his tail. He was not clapping or singing or dancing. His face was bruised purple, and his body was covered in welts and in bite marks. He had padded down the rocks, a step at a time, until he was close to Charlie. "The songs aren't yours," he growled.

Charlie looked at him, and sang about Tiger, and about Grahame Coats, and those who would prey upon the innocent. He turned: Spider was looking up at him with admiration. Tiger roared in anger, and Charlie took the roar and wound his song around it. Then he did the roar himself, just like Tiger had done it. Well, the roar began just as Tiger's roar had, but then Charlie changed it, so it became a really goofy sort of roar, and all the creatures watching from the rocks started to laugh. They couldn't help it. Charlie did the goofy roar again. Like any impersonation, like any perfect caricature, it had the effect of making what it made fun of intrinsically ridiculous. No one would ever hear Tiger roar again without hearing Charlie's roar underneath it. "Goofy sort of a roar," they'd say.

Tiger turned his back on Charlie. He loped through the crowd, roaring as he ran, which only made the crowd laugh the harder. Tiger angrily retreated back into his cave.

Spider gestured with his hands, a curt movement.

There was a rumble, and the mouth of Tiger's cave collapsed in a small rock slide. Spider looked satisfied. Charlie kept singing.

He sang the song of Rosie Noah and the song of Rosie's mother: he sang a long life for Mrs Noah and all the happiness that she deserved.

He sang of his life, all of their lives, and in his song he saw the pattern of their lives as a web that a fly had blundered into, and with his song he wrapped the fly, made certain it would not escape, and he repaired the web with new strands.

And now the song was coming to its natural end.

Charlie realized, with no little surprise, that he enjoyed singing to other people, and he knew, at that moment, that this was what he would spend the rest of his life doing. He would sing: not big, magical songs that made worlds or recreated existence. Just small songs that would make people happy for a breath, make them move, make them for a little while, forget their problems. And he knew that there would always be the fear before performing, the stage fright, that would never go away, but he also understood that it would be like jumping into a swimming pool-only uncomfortably chill for a few seconds-and then the discomfort would pass and it would be good....

Neverthis good. Never this good again. But good enough.

And then he was done. Charlie hung his head. The creatures on the cliff top let the last notes die away, stopped stamping, stopped clapping, stopped dancing. Charlie took off his father's green fedora and fanned his face with it.

Under his breath, Spider said, "That was amazing."

"You could have done it too," said Charlie.

"I don't think so. What was happening at the end? I felt you doingsomething, but I couldn't really tell what it was."