CHARLIE'S A SINGERTHESE DAYS. HE'S LOST A LOT OF THEsoftness. He's a lean man now, with a trademark fedora hat. He has lots of different fedoras, in different colors; his favorite one is green.

Charlie has a son. His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.

Nobody ever calls Charlie "Fat Charlie" anymore, and honestly, sometimes he misses it.

It was early in the morning in the summer, and it was already light. There was already noise coming from the room next door. Charlie let Daisy sleep. He climbed out of bed quietly, grabbed a T-shirt and shorts, and went through the door to see his son naked on the floor playing with a small wooden train set. Together they pulled on their T-shirts and shorts and flip-flops, and Charlie put on a hat, and they walked down to the beach.

"Daddy?" said the boy. His jaw was set, and he seemed to be pondering something.

"Yes, Marcus?"

"Who was the shortest president?"

"You mean in height?"

"No. In, in days. Who was the shortest."

"Harrison. He caught pneumonia during his inauguration and died. He was president for forty-something days, and he spent most of his time in office dying."

"Oh. Well, who was the longest then?"

"Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He served three full terms. Died in office during his fourth. We'll take off our shoes here."

They placed their shoes on a rock and carried on walking down toward the waves, their toes digging into the damp sand.

"How do you know so much about presidents?"

"Because my father thought it would do me good to find out about them, when I was a kid."

"Oh."

They waded out into the water, making for a boulder, one that could only be seen at low tide. After a while, Charlie picked the boy up and let him ride on his shoulders.

"Daddy?"

"Yes, Marcus."

"P'choona says you're famous."

"And who's Petunia?"

"At playgroup. She says her mom has all your CDs. She says she loves your singing."

"Ah."

"Areyou famous?"

"Not really. A little bit." He put Marcus down on the top of the boulder, then he clambered up it himself. "Okay. Ready to sing?"

"Yes."

"What do you want to sing?"

"My favorite song."

"I don't know if she'll like that one."

"She will." Marcus had the certainty of walls, of mountains.

"Okay. One, two, three...."

They sang "Yellow Bird" together, which was Marcus's favorite song that week, and then they sang "Zombie Jamboree," which was his second favorite, and "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain," which was his third favorite. Marcus, whose eyes were better than Charlie's, spotted her as they were finishing "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain" and he began to wave.

"There she is, Daddy."

"Are you sure?"

The morning haze blurred the sea and sky together into a pale whiteness, and Charlie squinted at the horizon. "I don't see anything."

"She's gone under the water. She'll be here soon."

There was a splash, and she surfaced immediately below them; with a reach and a flip and a wiggle she was sitting on the rock beside them, her silvery tail dangling down into the Atlantic, flicking beads of water up onto her scales. She had long, orange-red hair.

They all sang together now, the man and the boy and the mermaid. They sang "The Lady Is a Tramp" and "Yellow Submarine" and then Marcus taught the mermaid the words to the Flintstones theme song.

"He reminds me of you," she said to Charlie, "when you were a little boy."

"You knew me then?"

She smiled. "You and your father used to walk down the beach, back then. Your father," she said. "He was quite some gentleman." She sighed. Mermaids sigh better than anyone. Then she said, "You should go back now. The tide's coming in." She pushed her long hair back and jackknifed into the ocean. She raised her head above the waves, touched her fingertips to her lips, and blew Marcus a kiss before vanishing under the water.

Charlie put his son onto his shoulders, and he waded through the sea, back to the beach, where his son slipped down from his shoulders onto the sand. He took off his old fedora hat and placed it on his son's head. It was much too big for the boy, but it still made him smile.

"Hey," said Charlie, "You want to see something?"

"Okay. But I want breakfast. I want pancakes. No, I want oatmeal. No, I want pancakes."

"Watch this." Charlie began to do a sand-dance in his bare feet, soft-shoe shuffling through the sand.

"I can do that," said Marcus.

"Really?"

"Watch me, Daddy."

He could, too.

Together the man and the boy danced their way back up the sand to the house, singing a wordless song that they made up as they went along, which lingered in the air even after they had gone in for breakfast.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To begin with, an enormous bunch of flowers to Nalo Hopkinson, who kept a helpful eye on the Caribbean dialogue and not only told me what I needed to fix but suggested ways to fix it; and also to Lenworth Henry, who was there on the day I made it all up, and whose voice I heard in the back of my head when I was writing it (which is why I was delighted to hear that he would be narrating the audio book).

As with my last adult novel,American Gods , I was given two bolt-holes while I was writing this novel. I started writing it in Tori's spare house in Ireland, and I finished it there as well. She is a most gracious hostess. At one point in the middle, hurricanes permitting, I worked in Jonathan and Jane's spare house in Florida. It's a good thing to have friends with more houses than they have bodies, especially if they're happy to share. Most of the rest of the time I wrote in the local coffee house, and drank cup after cup of terrible tea in a rather pathetic demonstration of hope over experience.

Roger Forsdick and Graeme Baker gave up their time to answer my questions about the police, and fraud, and extradition treaties, while Roger also showed me around the cells, fed me dinner, and looked over the finished manuscript. I'm very grateful.

Sharon Stiteler kept an eye on the book to make sure the birds passed muster and she answered my birding questions. Pam Noles was the first person to read any of the book, and her responses kept me going. There was a small host of other people who lent me their eyes and minds and opinions, including Olga Nunes, Colin Greenland, Giorgia Grilli, Anne Bobby, Peter Straub, John M. Ford, Anne Murphy and Paul Kinkaid, Bill Stiteler, and Dan and Michael Johnson. Errors of fact or of opinion are mine, not theirs.

Thanks also go to Ellie Wylie; Thea Gilmore; The Ladies of Lakeside; to Miss Holly Gaiman, who turned up to help whenever she decided I needed a sensible daughter around; to the Petes of Hill House, Publishers; to Michael Morrison, Lisa Gallagher, Jack Womack, and Julia Bannon; and to Dave McKean.

Jennifer Brehl, my editor at Morrow, was the person who persuaded me that the story I told her over lunch that day really would make a good novel, at a time when I really wasn't sure what the next novel was going to be, and she sat patiently when I phoned her up one night and read her the first third of the book. For these things alone she should be sainted. Jane Morpeth at Headline is the kind of editor writers hope to get if they're very good and eat all their vegetables. Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House, with the assistance of Ginger Clark, and, in the U.K., Dorie Simmonds, are my literary agents. I'm lucky to have them all on my side, and I know just how lucky I am.

Jon Levin keeps the world of movies running for me. My assistant, Lorraine, helped keep me writing and made really good cups of tea.

I don't think I could have written Fat Charlie without having had both an excellent but embarrassing father and wonderful but embarrassed children. Hurrah for families.

And a final thank you to something that didn't exist when I wroteAmerican Gods : to the readers of the journal at www.neilgaiman.com, who were always there whenever I needed to know anything, and who, between them all, as far as I can tell, know everything there is to be known.

-Neil Gaiman, June 2005

E-BOOK EXTRA ONE THE ADVENTURES OF SPIDER (A DELETED SCENE) By Neil Gaiman Think of this as being one of those odd scenes that normally turn up as extras on DVDs-the scenes that everyone liked, but that made the film work better without them. It's one of them.

I really enjoyed writing it, and my editor atHeadline, the redoubtable Jane Morpeth, was sad when I told her it was going, because she liked it. And for that matter, I liked it too, only it messed up the pacing of the chapter it was in, and once I was prepared to grit my teeth and cut it, everything worked rather better.

I firmly believe that cut scenes are best left cut.

Even so, it had Spider in it, doing what Spider does best. And it had birds in. And in my head, it was the bit of the novel that was almost a Warner Brothers' cartoon.

So when Jane asked if I would be willing to let it appear-just this once-in the back of the UK edition ofAnansi Boys, I found myself, slightly to my surprise, saying yes, and now here it is inthe electronic version.

I've let it run into an earlier version of the scene that's still in the novel, at the end of Chapter Eleven. (This scene would have been in Chapter Eleven, split into two or three segments, and occurred between Fat Charlie arriving at the hotel, and the end of the chapter.) Neil THE ADVENTURES OF SPIDER (A DELETED SCENE) SPIDER WAS IMAGINING HIMSELF ELSEWHERE.He was flicking, in his mind, through places he knew, or remembered, or imagined, willing himself there. Nothing happened. He remained precisely where he was, held by the chain of bones in his feathered cell.

He tried doing it the other way, thinking of a person, and trying to make himself be with them. This tended to be a fairly unreliable method of travel for Spider at the best of times: Spider had trouble with other people. He had trouble remembering their faces or their names, or sometimes even that they really existed at all.

He thought about Fat Charlie; he thought of old girlfriends, but they seemed peculiarly unconvincing, reconfiguring in his head into an assembly of breasts and lips and skin and smiles, and they evaporated in his mind; last of all, he thought of Rosie. He thought of her eyes, her warmth, the curve of her nostrils, the smell of her hair.

(And on a cruise ship, dozing by the pool, Rosie shifted uncomfortably.) Well, thought Spider, if he could not get out one way, he would get out another. There was more than one way to skin a cat, after all1.

He tried changing shape, with no result. He tried shouting. He tried shouting some more.

There was a flapping noise.Two sandhill cranes stood in front of him.They looked at him curiously.

It's not impossible to be Spider, or something like him. All you need is a complete and utter certainty that everything will work out; a cocky assurance that's just a hair's breadth away from psychosis; the conviction that you're a monstrously clever fellow, and that the universe always looks after its own.

"You know," said Spider to the birds, "I don't want to cause a problem but these chains are a bit loose. One solid tug and I could fall down."

The birds might have looked concerned. Spider couldn't be sure. It's hard to tell with birds.

"It's a shocking job," said Spider. "Whoever made these chains should be properly ashamed of themselves. Frankly, I could get out of them in a couple of minutes, and think of the trouble you'd all be with herself if I simply fell out of them and wandered off. Quite appalling workmanship."

The cranes looked at each other. One of them strutted back towards the wall. Spider watched it-a jog to the left, then it reached out its beak to the wall, and it touched a feather there, a feather paler than the others. And then it was gone.

"You know," said Spider to the remaining crane. "Let's just pretend I didn't say anything. I'd hate to put you all to any bother."

A fluttering, and now the space was filled with huge crows who landed on the bone chains, then strutted about like builders examining the work of quite a different firm of builders, one that had left town with the work left incomplete. They cawed and tokked in what Spider was certain was the corvine equivalent of "So what sort of cowboy put this together than?"

A word from their foreman and the chains were covered in crows, pecking and clawing at the bones, tapping and prodding with black beaks against the bones. A loud caw and the chains fell apart- the bones tumbled to the floor, and Spider tumbled with them. The floor was littered with twigs and tiny feathers, splashed and speckled with birdshit.

Spider got to his feet, and noticed, for the first time, the geese. There were five of them, and they surrounded him, pecking at him, honking and hissing, to ensure that he stayed in the centre of them. A goose with its dander up and its neck down can cow a Doberman with a hiss, and these were the geese of nightmares.

Spider smiled at them.

Beneath the clever beaks of the crows the bone chains were expertly reassembled. The geese began to lower their necks once more, honking and hissing, pushing Spider back to where the chains were waiting.

"Hey," he said to the geese."Just give me room to breathe. I'm going back.Yeah?"

He turned where the chains hung, waiting for him, he counted to three, and then he turned and swung himself back toward the wall, where the sandhill crane had vanished. In the dim light he lunged for one feather paler than the others, and he hoped.

The wall became thin, almost translucent, and he pushed through it triumphantly, with angry geese pecking at his heels, and realised, as he did so, that he might have made a slight mistake.

Somehow, he had assumed that the cell was deep in the earth-that's where people build cells, after all. But on the whole, birds don't burrow. The tree was enormous, higher than a giant redwood, and it was filled with a rookery of nests, including, just above him, the nest from which he had escaped. Below him approaching with the speed of an out-of-control sports car, was the ground.

"Not a problem," Spider told himself.

Again he tried to shift his location, with no more luck or success than before. Again he tried to change his shape-a little brown spider would simply have flown away on the air currents. Nothing happened, only the ground was rather closer.

Still, he thought, if he couldn't move and he couldn't change, the odds were that whatever kind of a place he was in, it wasn't a real place. It was made of mind, not world. As long as he was able to bear in mind that this was Maya, was illusion, he thought, he would be fine. The cold air rushed past him. He spread his arms and his legs.The cold air rushed past him.

And then he hit the ground. "It's not real," he thought, as the air was knocked out of him, and, for a moment, everything went dark.

Spider picked himself up. He hurt, all over, but nothing seemed to be broken.