Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk Read online

  It was like some sort of practical joke. As though a prankster had broken in and gone mad with those spray cans they use to make cobwebs on movie sets. I couldn’t move without sticky silk wrapping itself round my hands, my legs, my head. I scarcely dared breathe for fear of getting some of the stuff in my mouth or up my nose.

  This is insane, I thought. This can’t be happening.

  I took myself in hand, told myself to get a grip. It was just spider webs. Just dirt that shouldn’t be there.

  I fought my way through the webs to the cleaning cupboard and fetched out dustcloths, broom, brush, dustpan, Dyson upright and Mr Sheen, then tied a bandanna over the lower half of my face and set to work. It took the best part of two hours, but by midnight I’d got the job done. Not a scrap of web remained. It was all inside a pair of large black bin bags, which were stuffed full but weighed next to nothing and which I dumped in the wheelie bin outside with equal parts satisfaction and irritation. Bug Blasterz would be getting a very stern phone call in the morning. You do not bill Dion Yeboah £175 plus VAT for “services rendered” if said services have patently not been rendered.

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night I woke to find a huge spider squatting on my chest.

  It was black against the pale bedcovers, lit by the streetlight glow coming through the curtains. Its carapace glinted dully. Eight long legs straddled my torso, their outermost tips reaching from my collarbone to my navel and from one side of my ribcage to the other.

  I lay there in a paroxysm of horror. It was the biggest, blackest, ugliest spider I’d ever laid eyes on. I didn’t dare move. I had an urge to hurl the thing off me, but at the same time I didn’t want to alarm it, provoke it. What if it was venomous? A spider that size – if it bit me it would surely kill me.

  A dozen shiny eyes regarded me carefully. The mandibles beneath them rustled and clicked, mouth parts folding in and out of one another with machinelike precision.

  Dion.

  A voice. A whisper inside my mind.

  Dion Yeboah. I am here for you. I have come for you.

  I WOKE AGAIN. I was still in bed, still on my back, bathed in fear sweat. But there was no spider. No giant black arachnid perched on top of me, gazing at me with myriad jet-coloured eyes.

  I’d dreamed it, of course. Spiders had overrun my flat with their webs earlier in the evening, so naturally I’d had a spider-themed nightmare.

  Made perfect sense.

  I didn’t sleep again that night, however. Not a wink.

  MR BUG BLASTERZ came back and did the same as before, namely doubt the veracity of my claims and souse the flat with poison. At least he had the good grace not to invoice me for the cost of the repeat visit.

  THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, the spider returned.

  Dion, it said.

  I had no doubt that the whisper I was hearing inside my head – a mental tickling that was as much sensation as sound – was the spider’s voice.

  Dion, I have come far. I have travelled thousands of miles to find you. I have chosen you, you out of the many I could have chosen, to be mine.

  “Who are you?” I challenged that black monstrosity. Its face, if you could call it a face, was just inches from mine.

  Who am I? Its mandibles flared. I heard a raspy chuckle. Oh, you know who I am, Dion. You know full well. I am he whom your grandmother told you about all those years ago. I am Kwaku Ananse. I am Ananse-Tori. I am Nansi. I am Kuent’i Nanzi. I am Ayiyi. I am the god of countless names and countless stories. Everything your Nanabaa Oboshie told you, that is who I am.

  “What do you want?” I demanded. “Why are you here? Why me?”

  I want to be with you, said Anansi. I want your story to become mine and mine yours. I want our tales to intertwine. I want us to be together. We have work to do.

  “Work? What work?”

  Let me in, Dion. Let me inside you. See what we can do together, the two of us. See what we can achieve.

  “No!” I cried. “No! Leave me alone! I don’t believe in you. You’re just a myth. An African old wives’ tale. A story for children. I have nothing to do with you. You don’t belong in my world.”

  Let’s see about that, said Anansi. Let’s just see.

  THINGS STARTED TO go wrong.

  Nothing major, on the face of it. I missed the bus to work a couple of mornings in a row, or rather, the bus failed to turn up as scheduled. The second time, I walked to Edgware Road and took the Tube instead, only for the train to get held up in the tunnel for an hour – a suicide further down the line, apparently. So I was late into chambers both those mornings, and late to court. Everything was a rush, but I compensated. None of my clients was short-changed and the verdicts went the right way.

  Then a case I’d been nurturing for weeks and feeling confident about suddenly veered off-course and seemed headed for disaster. We were ready to go to trial, but a key witness changed his testimony, deciding almost on a whim that he had seen the accused commit violence at the pub that night after all, removing a vital plank in our defence. I scrambled to find someone who could shore things up for us again. Eventually I convinced a lesser witness to be, shall we say, more certain about her facts than she had been previously. I managed to gloss over the discrepancies between her statement to the police on the night itself and her statement in court in such a way that the jurors hardly seemed to notice any difference. Busy, crowded pub. Alcohol imbibed. Under those circumstances, recollections are often clearer some weeks later than they are in the immediate aftermath of the event. Skin of my teeth, but I pulled it off, and our man walked free.

  Then I got word from various mutual acquaintances that the girl I’d gone on that blind date with had begun making disparaging remarks about me. She was saying I’d behaved badly, been rude, snobby, insulting, even racist. It was absurd, of course. I might have been somewhat distracted that evening, maybe not paying her as much attention as she thought she merited, and possibly I’d alluded to the West Indies once or twice in less than complimentary terms, but snobby? Racist? Preposterous. I phoned her to straighten the matter out. She maintained that she’d been misquoted. I suggested that if she was unhappy with the way the evening had panned out, there were better ways of dealing with her disappointment than bandying slanderous accusations about. The conversation didn’t end on a positive note, but I felt that I got my point across.

  Little things. Minor annoyances. In and of themselves, nothing much.

  But this sort of stuff simply did not happen to Dion Yeboah. I organised my life precisely so that there would be a minimum of grief and disruption. I worked hard to maintain my routine and keep everything on an even keel.

  I did not like my shipshape little boat being rocked.

  “ANANSI,” I SAID to my empty flat. “I know you don’t exist. I know you’re not listening. But – if you are there...”

  Silence. Only the murmur of traffic outside and the purr of the refrigerator.

  “If you are there, please go away. Please stop interfering. I’ve done nothing to deserve this. All I wish is to be allowed to carry on as before. I’ve done nothing wrong, nothing to offend you. Find somebody else to bother. Leave me be.”

  I felt foolish, talking to thin air, addressing a spider deity who had appeared to me in dreams alone. I wished Nanabaa Oboshie was with me, so that she could confirm that I had only imagined Anansi. “A story, a story.” That was all he was. Nanabaa Oboshie knew that. Much though my grandmother had loved to tell me of Anansi’s escapades – his silly stunts that almost always backfired, the tricks he played and the trouble they got him into with his fellow gods and the other animals – she was perfectly well aware that he was a fiction. She herself had learned the tales from her own grandmother back in Ghana, sitting in the wattle-walled hut, by the fire. Anansi existed solely as oral tradition handed down from generation to generation, a way to entertain the tribe on a dark hot night while the lions roared in the hills.

  Anansi certainly did not have a place in twenty-first-centu
ry London, in the flat of a sophisticated and highly intelligent lawyer.

  I kept insisting on this to myself even after the improbably large black spider descended in front of me from the ceiling, suspended from a delicate thread of silk.

  SO YOU BELIEVE now, do you? Anansi said.

  “I don’t know what to believe,” I said, hesitantly. The truth.

  Good. An open mind. That’s progress. But you mustn’t be afraid, Dion. Above all else, not that. I shouldn’t frighten you. I’m here to help.

  “Help? How?”

  If you’ll just accept me – fully, wholeheartedly – then you’ll see.

  “Accept?”

  Am I real?

  “You – you look real.”

  Think how you could know for sure.

  I thought. I studied the spider’s fat round abdomen, the wormy spinnerets that extruded the thread, the tiny hairs fringing the legs.

  “I could touch you,” I said.

  Touch me, then, said Anansi. Feel my solidity. There will be your proof.

  I was repulsed by the idea. Who would want to touch a spider that size? Who in their right mind would want to go anywhere near it? Even Sir David Attenborough would think twice.

  My hand went out, shrank back, several times. Anansi hung there, patient, waiting.

  Finally, in a mad dash of bravado, I brushed my fingers against the creature’s back.

  For the briefest of moments, barely a millisecond, I felt something. The coolness of chitin. The hardness of a living shell.

  That was all it took.

  The spider vanished.

  But it wasn’t gone.

  Anansi was within me. I felt him there as surely as I could feel my heartbeat, the air passing in and out of my nostrils, the gurgling of my digestive system. I had allowed Anansi in, and now he was a part of me.

  Yes, Anansi said. Yes, that’s better. That’s so much better, isn’t it, Dion?

  I nodded. I could hardly speak.

  So let’s go and have some fun, said Anansi. You and me. I’m looking forward to this.

  FUN? I HAD no idea what he meant.

  Then, the very next day, I was summoned to HMP Wandsworth. There I met a man who was up on a charge of possession of a class-A controlled substance with intent to distribute and sell. One look at him – gold teeth, a ring on every finger, razored haircut, a plethora of tattoos – told me “drug lord.” No doubt this wasn’t his first time on remand. Nor would it be his last.

  “I’ve just ditched my brief,” the fellow said to me. “Useless cunt was wanting me to plead guilty. I’ve heard you’re the dog’s pods when it comes to getting a bloke off the hook. I’m hiring you.”

  “I’m very expensive.”

  “Money’s no object. Fix this shit for me, and I’ll pay whatever you ask. I ain’t doing another stretch. Too much business going on. Too many irons in the fire.”

  The case against this charming specimen of humanity hinged on a single, crucial piece of evidence – an exchange of text messages between him and an accomplice.

  Reading the transcript, it looked pretty watertight to me. The conversation was clearly a deal, some sort of transaction, and the weakly-coded references to the drug, cocaine, were unmistakable.

  There is a way, though, Anansi whispered in my mind.

  Was there? Well, maybe. But it would take an audacious person to pull it off.

  And aren’t you that person, Dion?

  IN COURT, I tore into the case the police had built up.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you will note the recurrence of the word ‘Colombian’ in these texts, used in connection with weight – pounds and ounces – and monetary value. From that, the prosecution wishes you to infer that the accused and his associate, a trading partner, were negotiating the sale of a quantity of cocaine. This is perfectly possible. But is it not equally possible, if not more so, that the goods in question were of an entirely innocent nature? I put it to you that ‘Colombian’ could easily be taken to mean ‘coffee.’”

  There was an audible gasp from the viewing gallery. My learned friend, the counsel for the prosecution, could barely stifle an incredulous groan. The judge remained impassive, as he should, but I detected a glint of wry amusement in His Honour’s wrinkled old eyes.

  I soldiered on. Nobody was going to buy this line of argument.

  But what if they do? said Anansi.

  “My client is no fool. As we all know, no text-message conversation these days can ever truly be considered private. Who in their right mind would openly, overtly conduct a drugs deal via this medium? I put it to you, members of the jury, that the transcript before you centres on nothing more illegal or sinister than a purchase of ground coffee in bulk, coffee being of course one of the exports for which the country of Colombia is famous. Indeed, I myself drink a cup of Colombian blend every morning.”

  One or two of the jurors began nodding. By God, it seemed to be working. I was winning them over.

  “If there is any doubt in your minds that this principal piece of evidence is in any way suspect,” I went on, “if it is at all conceivable to you that the prosecution’s case rests almost wholly on the misinterpretation of a string of innocuous text messages between two law-abiding individuals going about their legitimate business, then you have no alternative but to acquit the man in the dock and let him walk free from this courtroom without a stain on his reputation.”

  And what do you know, they did.

  The champagne corks popped in chambers that afternoon, I can tell you. One of the senior barristers, who was also my former pupil master, professed himself amazed that I’d bamboozled the jury with such an obvious ruse.

  “It wasn’t what I did,” I told him. “It was how I did it. It’s all in the delivery.”

  “Still and all, dear boy,” he said, “a fine example of legal sleight of hand. I’m proud of you.”

  “I had a good teacher,” I said.

  Yes, said Anansi. Yes, you did.

  FLUSH FROM THAT success, I decided to exact revenge on my one-time blind date, who was still spouting uncomplimentary things about me behind my back. I phoned the Law Society and gave them an anonymous tipoff that the young lady was conducting an improper relationship with a senior partner in her firm of solicitors. I’d done my homework. I named the man, who was married, a father of two, a churchgoer, a charity fundraiser, a pillar of his local community. Whiter than white, in so many ways. Never in a million years would he be likely to dally at the office with an employee, especially one of colour – which somehow made it all the more plausible that he might, not to mention all the more outrageous.

  The bigger the lie, said Anansi, the more credence people will give it.

  And he should know. Had he not wooed and won his wife Aso by convincing her he was greatly in demand among the female animals and hence a worthy “catch”? He did this by tying a rope to each of his eight legs and having hidden animal friends tug on the different ropes. He told Aso the ropes were attached to other prospective wives, who were tugging to get his attention. If Aso wished to marry him, she should agree to it quickly, before one of her rivals hauled the oh-so-eligible bachelor off and claimed him for herself.

  Unfortunately – and there’s almost always an ‘unfortunately,’ in any Anansi story – Anansi’s eight animal friends happened to pull on the ropes at the same time, and with all their might. The result was that Anansi was suddenly and violently yanked in eight directions at once, and his legs, which had been short and stubby, were stretched out like toffee. And that is why all spiders have thin, spindly legs.

  But the good news as far as Anansi was concerned was that Aso laughed at the sight of him being hauled in different directions and stretched like a piece of chewing gum. She laughed so hard that she found herself falling in love with him, and next thing she knew, she was consenting to be his bride.

  It was a decision she would come to regret, for Anansi was famously unfaithful, and all his cunning schemes
seemed to come to nothing, and he often made himself and his family a laughing-stock. In legend, Aso has become synonymous with the exasperated, long-suffering wife.

  My lie, at any rate, gained traction and ran. The Law Society made discreet enquiries, as it was duty-bound to do. It found no evidence of impropriety, but the very fact that it was investigating the firm at all caused ructions and sparked rumours. Word got around that the affair I’d conjured up out of thin air might actually have happened. Gossip spreads fast in legal circles, as it does in any close-knit vocational community. The dash of miscegenation added extra flavour to the already spicy broth of workplace adultery. The world of lawyering in Britain is not as progressive and race-blind as it would like to think it is. Nor is it in any sense liberal.

  In no time the girl was seeking employment elsewhere. Her departure was heralded as a spontaneous act, one born of the desire to seek new pastures and fresh challenges, and was given the blessing of her superiors. She received a severance package she wasn’t, strictly speaking, entitled to, and she didn’t have to serve out her notice.

  But a sacking is still a sacking, however gilded the circumstances, however gently it’s handled.

  Bravo, said Anansi. Well played. Couldn’t have done better myself.

  Was I ashamed? Not for a moment. You do not fuck with Dion Yeboah. The girl had learned that to her cost. Others would too.

  FOR THREE, FOUR months, I was golden. Nothing could touch me. Nothing could stop me. More and more cases came my way that, on face value, looked like lost causes. Few other barristers would touch them with a bargepole. I, and Anansi, tackled them with relish.

  You may have read in the newspapers about the BBC higher-up accused of taking bribes in return for insisting that a certain mobile phone company’s latest product feature prominently in several drama serials he commissioned, in direct contravention of the terms of the Corporation’s charter. I was able to get the charges dismissed on the grounds that the items in question were so desirable, so up-to-the-minute, so lusted after by those who love technology and progress, that the BBC would have been remiss in its duties as the Voice of the Nation if it hadn’t shown them regularly on our TV screens.