Snake Handlin' Man

by D. J. Butler

  The sistra exploded in a burst of noise. It wasn’t chaotic, Eddie realized. There were various sections of sistrum players, and they were playing different rhythms. But all the rhythms hit a crescendo together as Aaron finished his short dedication. The swaying legs of the damned dangling from the ceiling looked perversely like dancers.

  And then, over the heads of her congregants, the lamia saw the band.

  “Infidels!” she shouted, pointing a long-nailed bloody finger. “Enemies of Apep! Unbelievers!”

  “Huevos,” Mike muttered.

  Then Eddie realized that he’d been standing and staring like an idiot while Jim, behind him, kept the mutants at bay. He turned to help and saw Jim slashing at three of them, but Lady Legs and Overalls and Many Arms, hiss though they might, weren’t attacking. They hopped back and forth and raged within a cloud of flying serpents, similarly angry and similarly harmless. Jim and the mongooses picked off many of their number, but the well of enemy serpents seemed bottomless.

  They were all being held back by the power of the Nehushtan, and the faith of Reverend Irving.

  The preacher still mouthed hymns. He was pale and sweaty and he trembled, but he nodded slightly to acknowledge Eddie.

  “Good job,” Eddie patted Irving on the back and raised his shotgun, pointing at the mass of cultists in front of him.

  They were a mix of ordinary human-looking folks in rural Oklahoma outfits and people with minor mutations—gifts of Apep, Irving had called them. A boy with a perfectly ordinary face stared at Eddie out of unblinking snakes’ eyes. A girl near him had human eyes, but a face that was scaly and lacked nostrils around the slits of her nose. Elsewhere forked tongues slithered between human lips, and under a white cotton dress, Eddie heard the sound of a rattle. The worshippers pushed forward, but the Nehushtan held them back, too. The ones in front grimaced in pain. Eddie didn’t know if they were getting pushed too hard by their friends behind them, or if the Nehushtan itself was burning them. Either way was fine with him.

  He pumped the shotgun. “We don’t give a rat’s ass about Apep,” he called over the heads of the crowd.

  Phineas Irving chanted hymns at his side; the other guys in the band stood at bay, weapons out and pointed at the snake-people.

  “This is a free country, and if you want to go to church with snakes, that’s your own business.” He tried not to cringe back from the pallid, frozen feet hanging directly in front of his face.

  “What are you doing here?” Aaron Irving demanded. “You’ve wounded many of my people!” He didn’t move from beside the mewling dog, and the sistrum players stayed in place and kept up their rhythm. What had he called the dog? Opener of the ways? That sounded like the kind of thing Adrian was always working into his incantations. This was no ordinary worship, Eddie realized. This was a magical ritual.

  This was the summoning.

  He felt warmer than he thought he should, and wiped a scalding dew of sweat from his brow before it dripped into his eyes. “All I need,” he said slowly and deliberately, trying to radiate calm strength like he was talking to an unhappy dog, “is a few moments of cooperation from the lady. Nobody else has to get shot or bitten.”

  His arm hurt.

  The lamia straightened until she nearly scraped the ceiling, the snakes of her hair coming to life and hissing at Eddie. “Phineas,” she called in a voice husky with lust and treason, “why do you want to hurt me?”

  Beside him, Eddie felt Phineas Irving collapse to the floor.

  ***

  Chapter Eight

  Pump and squeeze, pump and squeeze, pump and squeeze—

  spent cartridges chunked onto the stairs and Eddie’s shotgun blasted ragged holes in the attacking crowd, but after three quick shots the Remington was ripped from his hands. Knuckles plowed his eyes and his jaw and angry fingers dragged him to the ground so boots could kick him, over and over again.

  “Don’t kill them!” he heard the husky voice of the lamia cry. “Apep likes his meat fresh!”

  Then something stabbed Eddie in his arm, really hard, and he lost consciousness.

  * * *

  Eddie’s hands were empty. He wanted a knife, or a roll of tape, or anything. A gun, especially. Not that it would have done him any good.

  Sharon and the kids were on the ground in front of him. Not the ground, the floor. They lay on a red carpet, tied and helpless. Sharon was dressed in a suit like she’d wear to work, and seeing her made Eddie wonder for the thousandth time what on earth Sharon, a gorgeous girl with a college degree and then an aggressive and successful investment advisor, had ever seen in a guy like him. Marriage was the most important investment of her life, and she’d screwed it up. I screwed it up for her, Eddie thought. The girls were dressed for school, in modest plaid skirts, knee-high socks and maroon sweaters. All three were disheveled and battered, like they’d been run over or mugged. There was fear in their eyes.

  They were afraid of Eddie.

  Fire licked up the heavy curtains all around them; they were in a palace, or something that was furnished to look like one. Above him, a heavy chandelier swung uneasily on its chain, throwing shifting yellow light onto Eddie. Sweat poured down the guitar player’s entire body, but it did nothing to cool him.

  You want out? Rumbled a dark, heavy voice behind Eddie. Terror kept him rooted in his spot, and prevented him from looking around. He felt hot breath on the back of his neck and he smelled goat-stink. Pay the price.

  “No,” Eddie said, like he’d already said a million times. “They’re innocent!”

  The voice laughed. No one is innocent, it laughed. Especially not them. Especially not her. Pay the price, or you’re a dead man, as well as damned.

  “I’m unarmed!” Eddie roared, feeling flames crackling about his ankles.

  You didn’t need a weapon when you decided to kill my child, Eddie Marlowe, the voice boomed. Use your hands. You are your own most dangerous weapon.

  “No, dammit!” Eddie yelled.

  The fire engulfed them all.

  * * *

  Eddie opened his eyes to the sight of dangling feet and a sheet of ice. He felt weak and sluggish. “Where am I?” he muttered.

  “The ass end of the universe,” Mike told him. “In Nowhere, Oklahoma. At Sears. Locked in Customer Service.”

  “Soon to be the belly of Apep the snake-god, though,” Twitch added cheerfully. “They say that a change is as good as a rest.”

  Eddie’s arm ached and he was dripping with sweat. He sat up. His head pounded relentlessly, he was feverish, and his tongue was enormous and dry. He felt like he had a whole potato in his mouth, and the potato was covered in sand.

  “What happened?” He saw that the other sleeve had been ripped off his jacket and the sturdy green cloth had been torn into strips and made into a bandage. No, not a bandage, a tourniquet—in his lean, wiry arm, Eddie saw the X-shaped cut under the tourniquet through which someone had sucked out the poison from his snake bite.

  Some of the poison, anyway. Eddie felt like hell. He wondered if being a thin man was a disadvantage, where the poison was concerned. Maybe a bit of fat in his arm would have slowed the venom.

  “You ain’t been out long,” Mike reassured him. “They locked us up is all you missed, and then we cleaned you up a bit.”

  Eddie realized that part of the pounding in his head came from the noise of the chanting, the drums and the sistra, which he could hear loud and clear. The Customer Service room was split in half by a counter, and Eddie was sitting on top of it. Three walls ran all the way up past a thicket of pipes to the concrete ceiling, and there was a metal grate like a garage door on a prison cell, walling off the fourth direction. The music was really, really loud. He stepped down off the counter gingerly.

  “Thanks for making my sleeves match,” Eddie cracked. “You know how particular I get about fashion.”

  The Nehushtan lay in the corner of the room, but at a quick glance Eddie could see that no one was otherwise arm
ed. Phineas Irving crouched in a black office chair, face on his knees like a whipped dog. He had one mongoose on his lap, and the others tumbled around the wheels of the chair. They were bloodied and maybe injured, but still hyperactive. Maybe the blood all belonged to the snakes they’d killed. Twitch perched on his heels on the edge of the countertop. Mike stood and Jim paced. They all looked worse for wear, but especially Jim, who had bruises on his face and cuts on his arms; the big guy must have gone down swinging.

  “They tried to break that thing,” Mike said, seeing Eddie eyeing the Nehushtan. “They couldn’t do it, so they threw it in with us. I don’t think they liked touching it. It was like it burned them.”

  “So we got one weapon, anyway,” Eddie muttered. “Too bad Moses didn’t heal the Israelites in the wilderness by raising up a decent submachine gun.” He patted his pockets and found they hadn’t stripped them of any of the usual clutter. “Maybe I could duct tape them to death.”

  He stepped over to the chain link wall and looked through. The wall was bolted down by a thick padlock running through its bottom edge and a ring in the floor. Beyond was a short hall with men’s and women’s restrooms and a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Janitor’s closet, maybe. The hall ran right into the main area of the basement.

  Eddie knew they were in the basement, of course. He could still see the legs of the damned dangling above him. He wondered why the vision of the field of ice, the heads sunk into it and the flesh-stripping wind was so persistent. He didn’t remember anything about that in the Bible, but of course the Bible saw Hell mostly as fire. Tares were pulled up and thrown into the fire; trees that didn’t bring forth good fruit went into the fire; death and Hell were cast into a lake of fire, the second death of the Revelation of St. John.

  That wasn’t quite how Eddie saw Hell, though. Fire would have been clean and quick and merciful, compared to what Eddie saw through his Infernal Eye. Of course, he saw more than just visions of Hell through his damned eye. He saw Infernals themselves, when they were present. Maybe that’s what he was seeing here—though the people trapped in the ice field didn’t look like demons.

  Jamming his head into the corner between the wall and the bars, he could make out the backs of worshippers and the corner of the nearest totem pole. None of the cultists paid any attention to the short hallway at the rear, or to the prisoners in Customer Service. And why should they? Eddie’s heart sank as he contemplated the poverty of his chances.

  “That big tube up there runs air,” Twitch said, and pointed at an accordion-like flexible conduit. Eddie saw a rip in the tube’s fabric and guessed that Twitch must have already examined it in bird form, and torn open a hole. “But it would never support the weight of a man, and it’s full of snakes.”

  Jim pointed at the mongooses at the preacher’s feet.

  “Yeah, but then what?” Mike asked. “Unless those mongeese … mongoose … mongooses, whatever … are ninjas, too, getting them out ain’t gonna help us any.” He licked his lips.

  “Nervous, Mike?” Eddie chuckled.

  “I’m not excited about going to Hell,” Mike admitted.

  “You shouldn’t be,” Eddie grunted. “But don’t give up yet.” He considered. The music was thunder in a box, loud enough that he could barely hear the yelps of the vivisected dog as tiny chirps, nearly inaudible accents over the throbbing, droning wall of sound. He almost grabbed the earplugs out of his breast pocket and popped them in, like he’d do onstage, but decided he’d better risk the hearing loss.

  Eddie shook his head, clearing fog out of his vision. He felt like throwing up.

  “We can stop the summoning,” Phineas Irving suggested. “If we can get out, anyway.”

  “How’s that?” Eddie focused on Irving’s words and clutched the bars of his prison, trying to fight through the vertigo and stay conscious. He was poisoned, he knew. He was dying.

  “The columns around the circle,” the preacher said. “They represent the four sons of Horus. They’re present at the ceremony for the purpose of being blinded. Blinding them is a magical ward that prevents the gods from seeing the summoning of Apep, and stepping in to put a stop to it.”

  “Nope,” said Mike, “now you’re talking crazy. You’re saying that the Apep worshippers summon the sons of Horus first, and then they blind them so they can’t see that they’re summoning the big snake second?”

  “Yeah,” Irving agreed, “that does sound crazy. But that’s not what I’m saying.” He thought carefully. “Look, don’t think of it as religion, right? This isn’t church. It’s a magic spell. And the sorcerers don’t want attention, so what they do is include in the spell an element that will hide it.”

  “Okay …” Mike said slowly.

  “This is all just sympathetic magic,” Irving sniffed. “James George Frazer? The Golden Bough?”

  “Nope,” Mike frowned. “You’re talking to the wrong guy. The guy you want got bit by a snake and is lying in a coma in a topless bar.”

  “Look, it’s simple. Like produces like. So if you don’t want the gods to see, you set up their images and you blind the images.”

  “Why the four sons of Horus?” Mike asked. “What about all the other gods, like … uh, Odin and Odysseus?”

  “The four sons of Horus stand for the four cardinal directions,” Irving said thoughtfully, “and the four seasons. They represent the whole universe.”

  “All the gods,” Mike said. “I get it. So we take off their hoods and then what? The gods see and step in?”

  Irving shrugged. “I don’t really know. I think these things are all intricately tied together, so hopefully if we take the hoods off, it crashes the whole summoning. Or maybe, yeah, whoever it is that put Apep in his cage in the first place jumps in to keep him there. Ra the Sun God in some stories, or Bast, who had the head of a cat.”

  “Don’t like her,” Twitch tsked.

  “See?” Eddie snarled. “I knew I should have gone into Egyptology.”

  “Really?” Mike asked. “’Cause what I really wish knew more about is guns and kung fu.”

  “What do the ancient Egyptians say,” Eddie hazarded a question, feeling a little drunk, “about people frozen in a lake or a glacier, with only their heads sticking out?”

  Irving frowned. “The Egyptians?” he considered. “Nothing. Isn’t that Dante?”

  “Dante? You mean, the Inferno?” That sounded a propos to Eddie.

  Irving shrugged. “I’m not a lit guy, but yeah, I’ve read Dante. I think that’s one of the circles of Hell. Uh … traitors, maybe.”

  “And they’re ripped apart by a nasty, nasty wind?” Eddie added.

  “I think that’s Dante, too.” Irving frowned. “Different sin though, I think. Maybe … usury?”

  “Could it be lust?” Eddie suggested.

  “Could be.”

  Eddie looked at Jim, and Jim nodded confidently. Eddie snorted. Jim ought to know; he’d lived all over Europe for a long, long time, and probably knew Dante personally. Lust and treason, though, that made sense, for a description of a bunch of orgy-happy cultists who wanted nothing more than to betray their own kind to snakes. So what was he seeing? The souls of the mutants? Their future punishment in Hell?

  “Kung fu is overrated,” Eddie opined. He felt dizzy. “Stick to the guns.”

  Jim cleared his throat.

  “We ain’t here for the ritual, though,” Eddie reminded the others. “We’re here for the lamia milk.”

  “We could run,” Mike suggested. “Just get out, rip off the blindfolds and run like the devil.”

  “And Adrian dies?” Twitch asked. He looked like a woman now, and Eddie wondered if he was getting ready to Glamour Mike into cooperation.

  “No, I mean … maybe the Nehushtan can cure him. Isn’t that what it did in the Bible?”

  “Good point.” Eddie didn’t think the Nehushtan would heal Adrian, any more than he thought it would heal him—neither of them, he thought, was entitled to any of the gifts Heaven b
estowed on men of faith. He knew the Left Hand was on him, but he was dying now anyway, and anything was worth a try.

  Eddie was woozy, but he started towards the Nehushtan. Halfway across the room, he collapsed.

  “Cojón,” Mike commented.

  Jim picked up the Nehushtan and handed it to the preacher. Gold glinted on Irving’s hand, and Eddie realized that, weird as it was, the preacher must be wearing his wedding ring again.

  “Believe,” Eddie croaked, his face pressed into hard gray industrial carpet squares. Dragging himself up onto his elbows, he repeated himself. “Believe!” He wasn’t entirely sure who he was talking to.

  Irving didn’t look like he believed, but he looked like he wanted to.

  “Come on!” Eddie snapped. “I’m dying!”

  “I believe!” Irving hissed. “I believe in God and the power of the Nehushtan, anyway, I just … I’m not sure I’m the right man.” He wrapped both his bony hands around the Nehushtan’s pole and closed his eyes.

  Jim stood behind the preacher and sang something, but over the ringing in his ears and the drone of the ritual, Eddie couldn’t hear it. He stared into the snake eyes of the Nehushtan, begging it to get off its pole and … something. And heal him. This couldn’t be how he died, Eddie was sure of it. He had been seeing visions of his own death since that fateful night at the crossroads, and this wasn’t it. His death was to come by fire, in a palace, together with his family.

  That was most of the reason he’d stayed away from them—they couldn’t die, none of them could die, until the moment came that Eddie always saw in his dreams, when they were all together. That was the ultimate terrible irony of Eddie’s failed bargain with Hell; he had done it to provide for his family, but the result forced him out of their lives. At least for now, and maybe forever. He just couldn’t risk bringing the events of his terrible repeated dream to pass, even if, stubbornly, they were inevitable.

  Unless his recurring dream was a trick. Staring at the Nehushtan, Eddie started to laugh. His mouth was dry and sweat ran down his face, but the thought that he had pinned so many hopes, and lost so much time he might have spent with his family, on what might be nothing more than a lie punched him right in the cynical part of his sense of humor and once he started laughing, it was hard to stop.