Dedication
To Katherine, Jake, and Julia
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Back Ads
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
THE FACTS WERE THESE: A TWENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD woman named Lisa Bayless was dead. The cause of her death had been officially listed as “anaphylaxis caused by severe allergic reaction.”
The specific cause was shrimp.
Shrimp.
Lisa Bayless had died of shrimp. Case closed, as far as the coroner, the police, and even Lisa’s family were concerned.
She left behind a grieving husband, a three-year-old son named Abel, and a number of very sad students at Hayfield Secondary School in Alexandria, Virginia. Lisa Bayless was a good history teacher; everyone said so, and they said it even before her tragic death, although they said it more frequently now that she was gone and no longer able to assign homework.
“I don’t understand,” I told Messenger. I was grumpy because he had come to my abode—I can’t call it home, and I can barely refer to it as mine—when I was just falling asleep. My eyes were literally closing, weighed down by a long day of work with Messenger.
He appeared outside my bedroom and knocked softly but insistently on my door. Softly enough that it wouldn’t make me jump, but with sufficient confidence and persistence that I knew I could not ignore him.
Not that I could conceivably ignore Messenger. I don’t think anyone who has met him has ever ignored him.
First, Messenger is idiosyncratically dressed in a long black coat over a steel-gray shirt and black pants, and he wears tall boots. Thus far he might seem merely eccentric, or perhaps stylish. But then you notice that his buttons are small silver skulls. And then, now that you are looking with some focus, you see the rings.
The ring on his right hand is in the shape of a stately female figure who holds a sword. This is Isthil, goddess of justice and wickedness. This detail, along with his odd mode of dress, definitely draws your attention.
But it’s the other ring, the one on his left hand, that causes your attention to go from wary curiosity to real nervousness. For this is the ring of the shrieking face. It renders in silver the face of a young person screaming, face distorted, eyes bulging in abject terror.
And then there is the fact that Messenger is as beautiful as any male person I have ever seen or imagined. His hair is long and black, and his skin—the visible parts—is pale. His eyes are blue and perhaps judgmental—yes, judgmental—but not pitiless, though Messenger’s duties often require him to inflict punishments the likes of which no civilized government would ever allow.
Here is what I know about Messenger: He is, or at least was, human. He has a name, something other than Messenger, but I know not what it is. He is perhaps the least talkative person I have ever met.
His full title is Messenger of Fear. I am Mara, and I am apprentice to this Messenger of Fear.
“Isn’t it late? Or early?” I was confused. There are no timepieces in this abode; even the display on the microwave just blinks an eternal 00:00.
“We are summoned to our duty,” Messenger said.
This is the kind of sharing, giving, easygoing relationship we have. He says words like duty without a hint of ironic distance. And I suppose the truth is that I have come to have a similar attitude. I have certain duties. These are punishment duties, ones I took on voluntarily—a punishment I deserved.
So I wasn’t going to argue. I was, however, going to look grumpy. I reserve the right not to enjoy everything duty requires of me.
Messenger filled me in on the basic facts—the public facts, at least.
“So she had a severe shrimp allergy and she ate a shrimp. That’s a mistake, not a deliberate evil act.”
“Not if someone gave her the shrimp knowing it would make her sick and quite possibly kill her,” Messenger said.
“Ah.” I thought for a moment, but had not yet had my morning (evening? midday?) coffee, so my capacity for reason was not at its peak. I started a pot. “But allergies like that hit fast. So the coroner would know what was in her stomach and thus what had killed her.”
“Indeed. The answer was chocolate.”
“Chocolate shrimp?”
“Shrimp inside a chocolate.”
This unappetizing thought stopped me from insisting on breakfast. I did, however, drink my coffee. I took it black because he did, or maybe just because in this world I now inhabited, cream and sugar seemed trivial. We had very serious business, and somehow I felt that demanded black coffee.
I had managed four blessed sips before Messenger relocated us. Messengers are given certain powers that they are to use only in pursuit of their duty, which is a very good limit to impose, since among those powers is the ability to move effortlessly from place to place, and even from time to time.
Thus did I find myself in a two-story brick Colonial in a pleasant but not wealthy suburban neighborhood in Alexandria, which is just outside Washington, DC.
I saw a woman with straight blond hair parted in the middle—a cadaverously thin woman, but not anorexic, more just like one of those people who are very into exercise. She had a high, intelligent forehead and wore oval glasses.
She was alone, in a tiny home office, hunched over a laptop, in the act of reading what looked like essays. To her right was an open box of See’s Candies. About half the box was gone, and my first thought was to wonder how this woman could manage to be this thin with such an appetite for sweets. I admit the idea made me jealous.
Understand that Messenger and I were not visible or audible to Lisa Bayless. And the office was so cramped that Messenger and I stood with half our bodies literally inside the wall, so that only our faces, chests, and hands were in the room. Understand as well that yes, this was extremely weird for me, but I was slowly adjusting to the oddness of my occupation, and since I had moved through solid objects before, this was merely a new wrinkle on an existing weirdness.
As we watched, Lisa reached without taking her eyes off the screen, fumbled for and then found a roundish dark chocolate, and popped it into her mouth.
She chewed, then made a face, obviously tasting something odd, something unexpected. But then she continued working for another few minutes.
And then, I saw her mouth working as though she was still tasting something unpleasant. She felt her lips with her tongue, and then touched her fingers to her lips, and all at once: panic.
Lisa leaped up from her chair, pushed open the door, and raced through the kitchen. But by the time she reached the stairs she was wheezing, and her face was puffy, as if her skin was a balloon being slowly inflated.
Halfway up the stairs she tripped and gasped, and her face turned pink. She sucked air with all her might but nothing came. Yet she climbed and turned onto the upper landing. But now walking, let alone running, was no longer possible. Still, she crawled, hands and knees along the carpeted hallway, into the master bedroom, and from there across the tile of her bathroom floor.
The medicine cabinet was above her, and she was desperate by this point, desperate and terrified. Her eyes were squeezing shut, and I don’t believe that by the time she managed to drag herself to her feet she could see at all. It was with blind fumbling that she ransacked the medicine cabinet, knocking pill bottles and toothpaste onto the floor.
I saw the moment when she realized that what she was looking for was not there.
“An EpiPen,” I muttered. “She’s looking for an EpiPen, the injectable adrenaline you keep if you’re severely allergic.”
Messenger said nothing. When words are not absolutely necessary, Messenger does not lik
e to spend them.
I have by now seen death, most terribly the suicide of Samantha Early. This death lacked the blood and gore of that earlier one, but no amount of exposure can ever really prepare you for the terrible sight of a human being dying before your eyes.
I looked away. I heard rather than saw her slip to the floor. I heard grunted efforts at breathing. I heard a surrendering moan. And when I looked again, Lisa Bayless, history teacher, was dead.
Perhaps ten minutes had passed.
“Someone put that shrimp in that chocolate,” I said, because unlike Messenger, I will occasionally say the obvious. Perhaps it’s a weakness on my part; I can be verbose, but I find that putting awful events into words makes them more manageable. It gives me a little distance.
I did not know this woman, but she was a human being, a human being with life yet to live. And now her life had been stolen from her.
“Murder,” I said. “But how . . . Her family would have seen the chocolates and . . .” I frowned, trying to work it out. But Messenger has more direct means of explaining events. He walked away and I followed.
We walked back through the bedroom, down the hallway, and down the stairs.
We stood in the empty foyer. I had time enough to look at the usual family pictures hung on the wall. Lisa and her husband. Lisa and her son.
And then, a key turned the front-door lock, and in stepped a boy.
He was perhaps my age, sixteen, or close enough. I think he was good-looking, though constant exposure to Messenger has raised my standards in that regard. But good-looking by normal standards.
He wore a Lorde T-shirt, and I approved since I like her music. He carried a canvas bag slung over one shoulder. He closed the door behind him and stood, listening, wary.
He then went room by room, through the kitchen, the living room, the breakfast nook, and last, the tiny office.
He stared, transfixed, at the box of chocolates.
Then, his face alight with an expression of excitement and fear, he continued searching until he found Lisa’s cooling body. He stared at her for a while, too, but made no move to touch her, no move to help; and he did not call 911.
Instead he pulled latex gloves from his bag and put them on. He ripped a paper towel from a roll on the bathroom counter, knelt down, and clumsily wiped the inside of her mouth with it. The paper towel came out brown with chocolate and wet with saliva. He stuck the towel in a plastic ziplock, which went into his bag.
The boy looked in the bag, found what he was looking for, and pulled out the last thing I would have expected: an egg roll. This he stuck into Lisa’s mouth, and twisted it in half to leave part of it in her mouth. He took her jaw and moved it up and down, back and forth, in a macabre chewing motion.
Now he put the rest of the egg roll in his bag and trotted downstairs to the kitchen. From his bag he pulled out a box of spring rolls no different from those you’d find in any supermarket. The box had been opened. He stuck it in the freezer.
The second half of the egg roll he placed on a small plate, carried it to the office, and set it beside the box of chocolates.
Any person looking at the scene would see clear evidence that Lisa had been eating an egg roll and chocolate.
“Very clever,” I said. “But if she was allergic to shrimp, why would she have bought shrimp egg rolls?”
“She didn’t. The ingredients will show no shrimp listed. But the box does not match the contents. Thus the obvious explanation is that the egg roll company made a mistake, boxing its shrimp rolls in a package meant for a less dangerous product. The producer will be seen as responsible.”
“Very clever,” I said again. “But who is he? And why is he doing this? And how did he get a key to the front door?”
“He does not have a key, but he knows where the spare key is kept. And his name is Barton Jones. As to why . . .”
I should be used to it by now, but it’s still unsettling to find yourself in a completely different place at a completely different time. It had been day. Now it was night. And this was not a home but a hotel room.
I walked over to a window and looked out, but the street scene didn’t tell me very much. The flyer on the desk did: Hilton Hotel, Boston.
Lisa was in the bed watching TV. She had a glass of wine in her hand and a mostly empty bottle on the nightstand. There was a knock at the door, and with a puzzled look she went to answer it. Framed in the doorway was Barton Jones.
“Hey, Mrs. Bayless.”
“What’s up there, Barton?” She slurred her words slightly, and the boy noticed. He also noticed that she was wearing a hotel robe and that the robe was not entirely closed.
“Um, the kids were asking what time we had to be ready in the morning,” he said.
Lisa saw him looking where he should not have looked, and her hand jerked toward the opening of her robe . . . and then dropped back to her side.
“Eight a.m.,” she said.
“Good wine?” he asked, nodding at the glass.
“Good enough. You like wine?”
He shrugged. “I won’t know unless I try some.”
She hesitated, and even glanced down the hotel hallway, which was empty. “Well, you’re old enough to try just a sip,” she said.
She turned away and walked slowly back toward the bed. “Close the door,” she said.
He seemed a little unsure whether she meant he should close it from the outside . . . or from inside. Now he glanced down the hallway, slipped inside, and shut the door behind him.
“I think I see where this is going,” I said, curling my lip in distaste.
“Yes,” Messenger agreed.
We did not stay for what came next. Nor did we pursue a greater understanding of just how this illegal relationship—if you can call the seduction of a child by an adult a relationship—progressed. I was not familiar with the laws of Massachusetts, but in California we called it rape.
Yes, society treats it differently when a woman is the adult, but a crime it is; and though he smirked and went very willingly, this boy was still just a boy, not a man.
Messenger and I discreetly left the room.
“They’re on a class trip,” I said, figuring it out as I spoke. “She’s one of the chaperones. I suppose things became less, um, um . . . cooperative?” That wasn’t quite the right word, but I didn’t know how to describe it.
Without any sense of movement or the passage of time, we were back in Lisa’s bedroom in her home.
A shirtless Barton and a barely covered Lisa were arguing.
“This is bs,” Barton was saying heatedly.
“It is not bs,” she shot back. “Your paper is still due. I may be your lover, but I’m also your teacher. And if you don’t hand in your paper, on time, I have no choice but to flunk you.”
And there it was: motive.
The argument went on for a while, round and round in increasingly acrimonious circles, until at last Lisa said, “My husband will be home soon; you have to get out of here.”
“He murdered her over a history paper?” I asked, incredulous, and since the two of them were still shouting not five feet from where I stood, the urge to demand an explanation of both of them was hard to resist.
But that time was not yet, and in any case, it doesn’t matter much. She had molested a minor. He had committed murder.
It is our duty as Messengers (and apprentices to same) to understand what has happened. And so we spent some time sifting through the details of her life and his. I suppose each had their reasons or excuses, but neither had an excuse that amounted to excusing the rape of a minor or cold-blooded murder.
Lisa had paid for her crime. Barton had not.
2
WE FOUND BARTON AT SCHOOL. HE WAS WORKING his way with swift confidence through a precalc test. It seemed he preferred math to history. At least his math teacher was still alive.
Messenger froze the class. It took Barton a few minutes to realize that no one around him was moving. He gla
nced left, glanced right, frowned at the teacher, who sat frozen, bending down to take something from a low bookshelf. And finally, he turned in his seat and saw us.
I don’t know what he thought at that moment; we were obviously not the police, but a guilty conscience is a powerful thing, so he leaped to his feet, scattering the test paper and pencils, and made a dash toward the door.
The door did not open. He tugged and twisted the knob, kicked at it, and finally, shoulders slumped, turned to face us.
“Who are you?” Barton demanded.
“Barton Jones,” Messenger said, “you have done wrong. You must first acknowledge the wrong, and then you must atone.”
Barton’s brown eyes darted to the left, then the right, and lingered on the windows, as if he might be preparing to jump. Out there the day was gray and overcast but must have looked like a better bet than standing around waiting for Messenger to explain. But in the end he calculated that it was hopeless and went back to asking belligerent questions.
“Who are you? What are you doing? What the hell, man?”
“This wrong you have committed demands punishment. I offer you a game. If you win, you will go free, unbothered by me or my apprentice.”
Barton blinked. “What the hell? This is bull, man. This is not right. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“We’re talking about murder,” I said.
That got his full and undivided attention. “You’re crazy. I didn’t murder anyone! You mean Mrs. Bayless, right? Yeah, well, that wasn’t me, she wasn’t even murdered, she just ate a bad shrimp.”
Messenger waited patiently as Barton denied with increasing vehemence and a lot of repetition, before saying, “I offer you a game. You must accept or reject the offer.”
“I don’t must do a damn thing!”
“If you do not answer, it will be assumed that you have rejected the game and are choosing to go ahead with punishment.” Messenger had, by this point in his life as a Messenger of Fear, encountered every kind of denial. He heard nothing unusual here. Barton started another round of angry denials and then Messenger said, “I give you seven seconds. Seven. Six.”
The Snake Page 1