Mrs. Dunwiddy sighed. "Pour it in," she said.
Half a bottle of mixed herbs was poured into the sherry. The dried leaves floated on the top of the liquid.
"Now," said Mrs. Dunwiddy, "The four earths. I hope," she said, choosing her words with care, "that no one here going to tell me that they could not get the four earths, and now we have to make do with a pebble, a dead jellyfish, a refrigerator magnet, and a bar of soap."
"I got the earths," said Mrs. Higgler. She produced her brown paper bag, and pulled from it four Ziploc bags each containing what looked like sand or dried clay, each of a different color. She emptied each bag at one of the four corners of the table.
"Glad somebody is payin' attention," said Mrs. Dunwiddy.
Miss Noles lit the candles, pointing out as she did so how easily the penguins lit, and how cute and funny they were.
Mrs. Bustamonte poured out a glass of leftover sherry for each of the four women.
"Don't I get a glass?" asked Fat Charlie, but he didn't really want one. He didn't like sherry.
"No," said Mrs Dunwiddy, firmly, "you don't. You'll need your wits about you." She reached into her purse and took out a small, gold-colored pill case.
Mrs. Higgler turned off the lights.
They five of them sat around the table in the candlelight.
"Now what?" asked Fat Charlie. "Shall we all join hands and contact the living?"
"We do not," whispered Mrs. Dunwiddy. "And I do not want to hear another word out of you."
"Sorry," said Fat Charlie, then wished he hadn't said it.
"Listen," said Mrs. Dunwiddy. "You will go where they may help you. Even so, give away nothing you own, and make no promises. You understand? If you have to give somebody something, then make sure you get something of equal value in return. Yes?"
Fat Charlie nearly said "yes," but he caught himself in time and simply nodded.
"It is good." And with that, Mrs. Dunwiddy began to hum tunelessly, in her old old voice which quavered and faltered.
Miss Noles also began to hum, rather more melodically. Her voice was higher and stronger.
Mrs. Bustamonte did not hum. She hissed instead, an intermittent, snakelike hissing, which seemed to find the rhythm of the humming and weave through it and beneath it.
Mrs. Higgler started up, and she did not hum, and she did not hiss. She buzzed, like a fly against a window, making a vibrating noise with her tongue and her teeth as odd and as unlikely as if she had a handful of angry bees in her mouth, buzzing against her teeth, trying to get out.
Fat Charlie wondered if he should join in, but he had no idea what sort of thing he ought to do if he did, so he concentrated on sitting there and trying not to be weirded-out by all the noises.
Mrs. Higgler threw a pinch of red earth into the bowl of sherry and mixed herbs. Mrs. Bustamonte threw in a pinch of the yellow earth. Miss Noles threw in the brown earth, while Mrs. Dunwiddy leaned over, painstakingly slowly, and dropped in a lump of black mud.
Mrs. Dunwiddy took a sip of her sherry. Then, with arthritic fingers fumbling and pushing, she took something from the pill case and dropped it into the candle flame. For a moment the room smelled of lemons, and then it simply smelled as if something was burning.
Miss Noles began to drum on the tabletop. She did not stop humming. The candle flames flickered, dancing huge shadows across the walls. Mrs. Higgler began to tap on the tabletop as well, her fingers knocking out a different beat to Miss Noles's, faster, more percussive, the two drumbeats twining to form a new rhythm.
In Fat Charlie's mind all the sounds began to blend into one strange sound: the humming and the hissing and the buzzing and the drums. He was starting to feel light-headed. Everything was funny. Everything was unlikely. In the noises of the women he could hear the sound of wildlife in the forest, hear the crackling of enormous fires. His fingers felt stretched and rubbery, his feet were an immensely long way away.
It seemed then that he was somewhere above them, somewhere above everything, and that beneath him there were five people around a table. Then one of the women at the table gestured and dropped something into the bowl in the middle of the table, and it flared up so brightly that Fat Charlie was momentarily blinded. He shut his eyes, which, he found, did no good at all. Even with his eyes closed, everything was much too bright for comfort.
He rubbed his eyes against the daylight. He looked around.
A sheer rock face skyscrapered up behind him: the side of a mountain. Ahead of him was a sheer drop: cliffs, going down. He walked to the cliff edge and, warily, looked over. He saw some white things, and he thought they were sheep until he realized that they were clouds; large, white, fluffy clouds, a very long way below him. And then, beneath the clouds, there was nothing: he could see the blue sky, and it seemed if he kept looking he could see the blackness of space, and beyond that nothing but the chill twinkling of stars.
He took a step back from the cliff edge.
Then he turned and walked back toward the mountains, which rose up and up, so high that he could not see the tops of them, so high that he found himself convinced that they were falling on him, that they would tumble down and bury him forever. He forced himself to look down again, to keep his eyes on the ground, and in so doing, he noticed holes in the rock face near ground level which looked like entrances to natural caves.
The place between the mountainside and the cliffs, on which he was standing, was, he guessed, less than quarter of a mile wide: a boulder-strewn sandy path dotted with patches of greenery and, here and there, a dusty brown tree. The path seemed to follow the mountainside until it faded into a distant haze.
Someone is watching me, thought Fat Charlie. "Hello?" he called, lifting his head back. "Hello, is anybody there?"
The man who stepped out of the nearest cave mouth was much darker of skin than Fat Charlie, darker even than Spider, but his long hair was a tawny yellow and it framed his face like a mane. He wore a ragged yellow lion-skin around his waist, with a lion's tail hanging down from it behind, and the tail swished a fly from his shoulders.
The man blinked his golden eyes.
"Who are you?" he rumbled. "And on whose authority do you walk in this place?"
"I'm Fat Charlie Nancy," said Fat Charlie. "Anansi the Spider was my father."
The massive head nodded. "And why do you come here, Compé Anansi's child?"
They were alone on the rocks, as far as Fat Charlie knew, yet it felt as if there were many people listening, many voices saying nothing, many ears twitching. Fat Charlie spoke loudly, so that anyone listening could hear. "My brother. He is ruining my life. I don't have the power to make him leave."