Hell Snake

by Bernard Schaffer

  At the girl’s harsh words, Folsom’s eyes widened in surprise. But Istaqa laughed. “I like this one,” he said. “She has spirit.”

  “I just meant that I will go with you,” Folsom said.

  “Fine,” Mirta said. “But do not ride slow or I will leave you behind.”

  Folsom waited for Mirta to go through the door before he looked at Odell and said, “Is she always this way?”

  “Usually she’s meaner,” Odell replied. “Try and stay on her good side or you’ll probably never make it back here.”

  “Very funny,” Folsom said, but Odell didn’t smile.

  Once Folsom left, Odell went to Istaqa’s side and looked down at Connor. The boy’s breathing had calmed and he wasn’t thrashing about any longer. Hopefully that was a good sign. “So what are we waiting for?” Odell asked.

  Istaqa dipped a cloth in cool water from a pitcher on the table near his bed and rubbed it on Connor’s cheeks and chin to wash away the spilled tea. “We wait to see whether he cleanses himself of the evil spirit or he dies.”

  “Dies?” Odell asked in alarm.

  “There is no need to be anxious,” Istaqa said. He dropped the cloth and clapped Odell on the shoulder.

  “Well, that’s good,” said Odell, and smiled with relief.

  “Yes,” Istaqa said. “If he’s going to die, he will do it very soon.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The woods were cold and full of sounds that sent chills up Miss Rena’s spine. Every snap of a twig sent her spinning around, searching for the source. “It’s them, oh, I know it’s them,” she moaned.

  “No, it’s not,” Jesse Sinclair whispered. “They’re all dead.”

  “Yes, the ones in the house,” Rena said. “But what if there are more just like them? What if the woods are full of them things?”

  “Then I expect we’d have been eaten by now,” Jesse said. Rena’s eyes widened and Jesse let out a soft laugh. “Stop it. I’m just playing with you.” She rubbed her arms to get warmer. They’d fled the house in what they were wearing and neither one of them was dressed to be outside for so long. As the sun moved past the trees above them it left the woods in shadow and a chill wind rose. Jesse looked up at the sky and said, “When it gets dark, we’ll light a fire. Don’t want to risk anyone seeing the smoke and knowing where we are.”

  Rena sat down behind Jesse and pressed up against her, back-to-back, to use each other’s body heat for warmth. “You talk like there’s nothing else that wants to eat you in the woods,” Rena said. “Wolves, bears, cougars, alligators—”

  “There’s no alligators around here,” Jesse said. “Now you’re just talking crazy.”

  “There is so,” Rena said.

  “Gators like hot, humid swamps. It ain’t hot, it ain’t humid, and we ain’t in no swamp. Now, maybe we’ll see some wolves or bears or cougars, but we damn sure won’t see no alligators.”

  Rena looked over her shoulder and said, “My uncle Geoffrey lived in Louisiana and he come up here to work in the flour mills. Know what he brought? Two baby alligators. He said he was going to keep them as pets until they got real big, and then, if he ever got lonely for the taste of back home, he was going to eat one. You ever had gator meat?”

  “Can’t say that I have,” Jesse said. “Why would anyone want to eat something with all them fangs and scales?”

  “Some of the best eating you ever had,” Rena said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Honest to God. But you have to get it from someone who knows how to butcher one. Gator fat is rancid. You eat some of that and we’ll be burying you. But the meat? My uncle knew just how to cook him some gator, boy. I wish I had some of that now.”

  “So I guess he ate one of his pets?” Jesse asked.

  “Mm-hmm,” Rena said. “We all did. Neighbors came from all around to try it.”

  “What happened to the other?” Jesse asked.

  “The other neighbors?”

  “No, the other alligator.”

  “Oh,” Rena said. “He escaped.”

  Jesse turned around. “What?”

  “Guess he saw what was in store for him when my uncle killed the first gator. The second one ran off and we never saw him again.”

  “Nobody tried to catch him?” Jesse asked.

  “They tried,” Rena said. “They tracked him and everything. But every time they got close he’d just run off, and gators are fast too, let me tell you. They’ll run fast as a horse.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Somewhere out in the woods,” Rena said.

  Jesse looked around at the darkening trees and drew her knees up closer to her chest. “That had to be a long time ago, right?”

  “Sure was,” Rena said. “About twenty-five years ago. ’Course, gators can live to be fifty years old or more.”

  “Well, maybe we’ll get lucky and them ones with the robes and torches will come looking for us and run into your old friend the gator instead.”

  “I hope not,” Rena said. “I hope they saw what happened to them naked folk who burned up and just run off.”

  “I guess I hope that too,” Jesse said. She leaned her head back and looked up at the sky.

  * * *

  * * *

  Jesse worked a length of thin vine that she’d found wrapped around the trunk of an old oak tree. She smoothed and straightened it out until it was like a piece of rope. “Come over here and stick out your finger,” she told Miss Rena.

  Rena sat in front of Jesse and stuck out her finger like she was told. Jesse wrapped the vine around the tip of Rena’s finger, then around the base to form a small slipknot. “What are you making?” Rena asked.

  “Rope snare,” Jesse said. “A vine snare, I guess, since vine is all we have.”

  When the loop was completed, Jesse grabbed the end of the vine and slid it through the slipknot until she’d formed a decent-sized loop. She pulled the length of vine to make the loop go small, then let it out to make it larger. “This’ll do for now,” Jesse said.

  “What’s it for?”

  “We’ve been out here for hours and I’m starting to get hungry,” Jesse said. “How about you?”

  Rena nodded. “I was too upset about forgetting the shotgun to think about it.”

  “It’s all right,” Jesse said. “If we fired a gun out here, I’m sure we’d have company real fast. This is our best bet. All I have to do is tie this end around a low-hanging branch. First rabbit that comes hopping past is going to get caught and then we are going to build ourselves a fire and have a roasted rabbit dinner.”

  “That sounds good,” Rena said. “I’ll look around for something to season it with.”

  Jesse stood up and looked at the sky past the trees above. The sun was headed toward the western horizon and the autumn leaves glowed crimson. “There’s only about an hour or so before it’s dark,” Jesse said. “That’s good. We’ll need time to figure out how to clean whatever we catch with no knife. Start looking around for something to make a fire with. Just remember to wait until I get back to start it.”

  “Okay,” Rena said. She swung her arms back and forth as Jesse disappeared into the woods. She quietly snapped her fingers and rubbed her hands together to warm them. She turned and looked over her shoulder, convinced she’d heard something, but there was nothing there. She took a deep breath to settle herself, turned and looked again to be sure, then closed her eyes and said a prayer.

  * * *

  * * *

  Jesse found a tree with sturdy branches that were low enough to climb. She pulled herself upward and used her feet to get up onto the branch, then swung her leg over to straddle it and look down. There was a decent clearing just ahead where all sorts of animals might pass through. All sorts of animals, she thought. She turned and looked at the branches sur
rounding her. No bears, cougars, or snakes up here, thank God. All of Rena’s talk about the things in the woods that wanted to eat them made her glad to have both snake guns holstered on her hip.

  She lowered herself onto her stomach and slid out across the branch until she was suspended over the clearing. She wrapped her left arm around the branch for support while she lowered the snare to the ground with her other hand. She couldn’t quite reach far enough for the loop to touch the ground, but she reckoned she didn’t need to. She was trying to snare a varmint by the neck as it loped past, not catch it by the foot.

  This will do just fine, she thought, and laid her head against the branch to wait.

  I hope it’s not one of them big rabbits, she thought. One of them ten-pounders running past would probably rip the snare right out of my hand. Unless it caught me by surprise and knocked me off this branch. Wouldn’t that be something? Falling out of a tree while hiding out from a bunch of maniacs who want to kill us for no reason?

  What if it’s a deer? she thought. Even a small deer is definitely strong enough to pull me off balance.

  The branch swayed in the wind and she heard something rustling in the leaves over her head. She twisted her neck to look up and saw it was nothing but a bird. The bird shivered, then leapt back into the air again. She lowered her head back to the branch and tried to get settled. The branch continued to sway.

  In her mind, she could almost feel the branch bounce under the weight of something leaping onto it with her. Something hungry. If it was a bear, especially a full-sized one, the branch would probably break and send them both crashing to the ground. If it was a cougar, she’d probably only have time to turn around and see its massive feline head, low to the branch, green eyes blazing.

  Cougars could climb trees. Everyone knew that. They were silent and skillful too. One could be climbing up the other side of the tree at that very moment and she would never know it. Not until the dip of the branch under its weight. What did they weigh anyway? Two hundred pounds?

  But what if one wasn’t climbing up the tree, she thought. What if it had seen her dangling from the branch like a worm on a fishing hook and it was sitting below her at that very moment? She’d never seen one do it, but she had no reason to think a cougar couldn’t jump. In fact, they could probably jump far. If a house cat could jump from the floor to the top of a dresser, a mountain lion could jump onto the branch she was lying on. Without question. It would stalk across the woodland floor and wait. Just sit there and wait, silent. Then, whenever it felt the time was right, it would leap into the air and onto the branch.

  She’d fall, she thought. She’d fall and land badly. If she only broke one arm or a leg or a hip, and the cougar stood on the branch looking down at her to assess its new meal, she might have time to yank one of the snake guns free and fire off a shot.

  Worst-case scenario was that she fell and broke her spine or her neck.

  Anything that rendered her immobile. That left her sprawled out on the grass and leaves, staring in mute horror at those muscular jaws and long, curved fangs. The cougar would gracefully step down off the branch and land next to her. It would sniff her and paw at her a few times to make sure she couldn’t move, and then, it would take its first bite.

  What could be worse than lying there, fully awake, unable to move, while something ate you?

  Jesse raised her head and turned to look the other way and see if anything was creeping up on her. Nothing.

  If she’d seen anything coming her way, she was certain she would have shot it. She didn’t care if it was a cougar, a bear, a wolf, or a mean-looking raccoon.

  Of course, the men in the robes were undoubtedly in the woods searching for her and Miss Rena. Soon as they heard a gun go off, they’d be riding in this direction, hard.

  They had to know Jesse and Rena had fled Edna’s Prayer on foot. They’d have searched the road on horseback and seen no tracks for miles in either direction. We obviously went into the woods, Jesse thought. Where else would we have gone?

  Something thrashed against the leaves on the ground and came shooting past the vine snare’s loop. It was just a rat, with black fur and a long, curled tail. It raced beneath the branch and was gone between the trees. Jesse felt her heart beating, hard. There was nothing to be nervous about, she thought. After all, it was only the woods.

  She felt the bark digging into the side of her cheek and whispered, “I hate the woods.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Miss Rena decided to gather all the things she would need for the fire long before she would light it. It was a way to pass the time and keep the blood circulating through her body to warm her instead of sitting on the cold ground and freezing.

  She was careful not to walk too far from their rudimentary camp. She ventured out only far enough to find a few decent-sized logs before she carried them back. When there were enough logs to make a nice pile, she sat and waited. Rena had seen the direction Jesse went, but had lost sight of her in the trees and was unsure how far away they were from each other. “Mrs. Jesse?” she called out quietly.

  When there was no response, Rena got up to gather branches that they could use for kindling. She looked for the ones with the most dried leaves still attached, thinking the leaves would flare up bright and hot and spread flames to keep it all burning evenly.

  When she had a supply of kindling, she searched the ground for several long, sturdy sticks and a sharp rock. They’d need the sticks to tend the fire and to spit roast whatever animal Jesse wound up catching in her vine snare. They’d probably need more of that vine Jesse had found to bind the meat to the spit and keep it from falling off into the fire.

  She dropped several sticks near the pile of logs and wiped her forehead with her arm. It sure was much harder cooking out in the wild than it was back home.

  Just the thought of home and what had been done to it was enough to make her throat cinch up. The house had never belonged to her, but it had sure enough been her home. She took pride in it. She cared for it. It was where she belonged and the people who lived there were the people she belonged with.

  She’d cried hard when the sheriff came to tell them that Mr. William had been found dead. She’d cried as hard as Connor, whose legs had gone out from under him and left him bent over on the ground, sobbing. She loved that boy too. She’d watched him grow up. While his parents had been out working on the ranch and tending the animals and crops and workers, Rena had taught him to read and to write his name and get dressed by himself.

  Now that he was grown, it wasn’t the same between them, but that was to be expected. He was nearly a man now, with hair on his chest and chin and everything, and even though he was still sweet to her and hugged her and told her he loved her sometimes, it wasn’t the same as when he was a little boy and snuggled up alongside her while she read him his favorite books. He always wanted to hear stories about great heroes. Medieval knights who slew dragons in defense of some maiden. Greek heroes who were the half sons of Zeus and would use their powers to overcome terrible beasts. Connor’s most favorite were the stories of the Norse gods. While the lives of the knights had been ones of leisure, with squires and servants to do their work, and the Greek gods lived in idle luxury, the lives of the Norse gods were hard. Full of struggle and betrayal and, if things went wrong, true death.

  Rena had never told him so, but reading him those stories had been some of the finest moments of her life. She missed that little boy and she loved him like he was her own and it just about killed her to think he’d be coming home to find that everything he knew had been burned to the ground.

  She sat down again and folded her legs beneath her. Moving around had warmed her up but the ground was cold and getting colder as the sun sank. She was grateful, more than anything, that she’d put her boots on before they fled.

  She leaned back on her palms and looked up at the trees
and the sky beyond. We’ll rebuild, she thought. Together. All of us. Young Connor and his grandfather will return, and perhaps they’ll have even convinced Miss Mirta to come back with them. She’d seemed content enough among them. Somehow Jesse Sinclair would find a way to a rebuild, and Rena and all the others would be at her side to do it.

  We’ll build a new house and hire new hands and raise new stock. We’ll not be defeated by anyone. We weren’t defeated by that no-good Nelson Granger and we weren’t defeated by those naked creatures who wanted to eat us, and we’ll not be defeated now. Not by any men in robes with torches or masks or none of it. We’re strong. We’re decent. We’re kind. And people like that, well, they always come out all right in the end, even if there’s some struggle in between. That’s the way of the universe. You do right and eventually it all comes back around. Otherwise, what did any of it mean?

  Something crashed through the leaves behind her and Rena clutched her nightdress in fright. She was too terrified to move. It was as if some massive unseen hand had clenched every part of her body in its grip and would not release her. She stayed frozen in place until she saw that what was coming toward her was just a doe.

  It leapt high in the air as it ran, graceful and fast. Rena pressed a hand to her mouth to stifle her laughter at how frightened she’d been. The doe landed on the leaves nearby and skidded as it tried to find its footing, then got back up and took off running once more.

  It wasn’t alone. Another deer was racing behind it, even faster. It was headed directly for her. Rena cried out and dove out of the way as the deer charged past. It would have trampled her with its shining black hooves if she hadn’t moved. She rolled across the ground, then got up and spat out a leaf that was stuck to her mouth. Her nightdress was covered in debris and she scowled as she began swiping it away to clean herself off.

  It was only then that she saw what the deer had been running from.