Snake Handlin' Man

by D. J. Butler

  Mike circled back to keep out of both their reach, but mostly he stabbed at the latter.

  The sistrum players changed rhythm suddenly.

  “O Wepwawet!” Aaron Irving’s voice boomed suddenly from beneath a shuddering pile of women and snakes. “Wepwawet returns! The opener of the ways, behold, he comes!”

  Eddie really wished he had guns.

  Christ the royal master leaders against the foe,

  Forward into battle see his banners go.

  Overalls and Lady Legs and the others hesitated at the fringe of the Nehushtan’s bubble, but Phineas Irving’s voice sounded like it was losing some of its intensity.

  Eddie looked around for anything else at hand that he could use—a gun, a knife, a torch, a charm, anything that might be more effective than a broomstick.

  Nothing.

  A dim outline began to take shape in the light of the pulsating rift. Eddie saw that the sistrum players nearest to him were just outside the space cleared by the Nehushtan. He staggered towards them, a plan spinning into being in his feverish brain. It was half-baked and half-assed and wholly insane, but what was the point of being the world’s best tambourine player if he never used his chops?

  Lady Legs rushed at him hissing—

  and the sparkling red Nehushtan sprang from its perch, intercepting the hedge of woman-legged snakes and snapping it into its gullet in a single bite.

  “No!” bellowed Aaron Irving. He sat up on his altar-bed, scattering scaly nymphlets and ecstatically hissing serpents with his sudden movement. The Nehushtan struck again, devouring John Deere whole. Freed of some of his assailants, Jim leaped spinning through the air, crashing into one of the totem poles and knocking it flying.

  Eddie squinted at the pillar of light, fearing it was about to disgorge Apep himself, but the shadowy shape coalesced into a discrete form and emerged. It was the mummy-dog, Wepwawet, and it padded out calmly, looking totally normal apart from beady black eyes and a long snake-like tongue wagging from between its jaws.

  And what would happen if Apep himself came out? Could the Nehushtan swallow the Egyptian god whole like it swallowed his minions? Somehow, Eddie doubted it.

  Eddie shuffled and kicked his way into the row of sistrum players and snatched sistra away from them. As he plucked the instruments from their grip, some of the players kept playing, shaking their empty hands intently as if they were still making sound. Others stared at where the instruments had been in surprise.

  He wondered if they were in trances. Or ensorcelled. Or high, although people who were stoned shouldn’t be able to make such a complicated, coordinated sound together. Or maybe there were just enough of them playing together that they were individually trapped in the collective groove.

  He thought he’d grab all the instruments and silence them, but there were too many of them, and then the rest of the worshippers lunged his way. He looked over his shoulder for help, but the others were distracted with their own problems.

  Aaron Irving was standing, snake arms raised high and chanting as nude women crouched around his feet like feral cats. His brother faced off against him, staggering forward one step at a time like the Nehushtan was a boulder and he had to push it.

  Eddie grabbed a handful of the instruments and retreated. Whatever it was that drove the sistrum players, he hoped they still had free will. He hoped they could see and hear, and be distracted.

  Eddie, who was as good as stoned on snake venom, shouldn’t by rights be able to play anything at all. The crowd loomed huge around him, naked and sweating and full of breasts and totem poles, and the room spun. But he was the world’s best tambourine player, dammit. The world’s best.

  He jammed a sistrum handle into the top of each combat boot. He pinned a handle in the crook of each elbow by bringing his fists up to his shoulders, and he held two more in his two hands.

  And he started to dance.

  Not that he was much of a dancer, not in any formal kind of way. Sharon had paid for lessons once and he’d gone; the Foxtrot he’d been able to handle, and the Waltz, and even the Rumba, which was just the Waltz in four-four with a bit of Latin booty-shaking mixed in, but that was his limit. When he’d tried the Tango, he’d literally fallen down. Eddie didn’t dance, he led the dancing from the stage.

  But this wasn’t a dance, not really. The sistrum was just a funky old tambourine, shaped like a hairbrush. Loaded up with six sistra, Eddie wasn’t dancing—he was putting on the world’s first one-man-six-tambourine performance.

  He skipped in front of the section of sistrum players in front of him, trying to distract them. He needed to be the Pied Piper of Tambourines now, the most fascinating thing a sistrum player could ever see, and accidentally follow. He built up a rhythm in layers, and he built it up fast. He moved on his left foot in a slow hop, with his right shuffling and slamming down in a syncopated, ankle-twisting rattle quickly after every other front beat. He swung his left arm in slow circles, getting a steady chink-chink-chink out of the elbow rattle and shifting, ever-so-slightly-out-of-sync rasp on the back beats with the sistrum in his left hand. It looked sort of like a cross between St. Vitus’ Dance and the Funky Chicken.

  And with his right arm, he really went to town. His right elbow played sixteenth notes in an almost study drumming, deliberately omitting the third, the seventh, the eleventh and the thirteenth in every measure. The right hand played the rhythm of the melody to the song that he could hear Jim and Phineas Irving and even Mike now still singing.

  “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,

  With the cross of Jesus going on before.”

  Eddie didn’t need the sistrum players to follow his lead; he just needed to put on a wild enough show that it would snap them out of their pattern. Hopefully Irving was right, and the whole summoning was bound together in a tight interlocking pattern so that Eddie could put a stop to it by throwing off the rhythm.

  Some of the players faltered, staring curiously at him. Eddie looked around the chamber. His friends sang and fought around the Nehushtan pole in Reverend Irving’s hands in the circle. Snake mutants and flying vipers and ordinary rattlesnakes threw themselves against Eddie’s friends and were thrown back by the ancient Israelite artifact, or chopped down with box cutters and cleaning supplies, or trampled by the hooves of the fairy, who now fought in his silver horse form. The ruby serpent itself was off its pole and inflicting terrible damage on the cultists, snapping up snakes and worshippers and mutant snake-worshippers with equal relish, and looking unstoppable.

  Jim and Twitch and Mike, though, looked tired.

  And Eddie felt exhausted. He was drained and sick, and only the Satanic power of his curse-begotten prowess with the tambourine kept him going. The sistrum players near him faltered and slowed, puzzled. They stared at him and some of them fell silent, but the overwhelming rhythm of drums and sistra and chanting continued, driven by the dozens of worshippers who didn’t join in the combat. The racket was now supplemented by the squelching and grunting sounds of the further dozens who neither made music nor entered the fray, but piled upon each other in frantic animal lust all around the periphery of the room.

  The chasm of light still shone in the middle of the room, and between it and the charcoal grill full of incense Aaron stood and chanted something Eddie didn’t understand.

  The lamia, Miriam, moved forward, shedding her more insensate micro-lovers as she went, sliding across the floor to intercept the Nehushtan.

  “He comes!” Aaron Irving roared. “Behold, Apep comes!”

  The mummy-dog sat obediently by the snake-armed sorcerer’s side. Aaron flung his serpent arms wide like a carnival barker, and Eddie saw that something dark and very, very tall was inside the rent space full of light.

  Eddie worked faster.

  He hopped forward to the next bank of sistrum players. He didn’t know what else to do—he had no gun, no wizard, and almost no hope. He clung to the recurring nightmare of his death, telling himself that
he couldn’t possibly die in the basement of a Sears in Oklahoma today, because his wife and daughters weren’t here, there was no chandelier, no carpet, no curtains, no fire, no palace.

  Unless that was all a lie.

  The Nehushtan moved like a thing with intelligence, like it was reading Eddie’s mind and trying to help him. It cleared his path, swallowing John Deere and a woman swinging a hatchet without slowing down.

  Jim rushed Aaron Irving, with Mike and Twitch behind him, but a wall of snakes forced them back.

  Eddie looked at Phineas Irving and saw that the preacher had dropped the Nehushtan pole. He stared at the column of light and backed away from it and snakes began to swarm in his direction.

  The Nehushtan stopped, turned, and slid back towards its fallen perch.

  “Oh no,” Eddie muttered. He found the bank of sistrum players and shook his booty for them, knowing in his heart it was over. “Run!” he yelled feebly to the others. He was a dead man, and so was Adrian, but the others might still escape. “Run!” He knew they couldn’t hear him.

  “He comes!” Aaron Irving shouted again.

  In his normal sight, Eddie still saw a moving shadow within the light. The shadow was immense. With his Infernal Eye, he saw a towering giant man with the head of a cobra, wearing sandals and a kilt and holding a curved scimitar in each hand.

  Then another shadow rose over him, and he realized it was Miriam, bearing upon him to crush him with the coils of her body. She still held the obsidian knife, raised high overhead like she would follow the crushing body blow with a slashing attack.

  “No!”

  The shout was in the voice of Phineas Irving, and then the preacher slammed into Eddie, knocking him out of the way.

  The lamia came down hard, square on the body of her estranged husband, with a sickening crack.

  Eddie stumbled and fell to his knees, nauseated and burning, directly in front of the gate of light.

  ***

  Chapter Ten

  “Nooooooooo!”

  The lamia pulled back, bucking and rearing and scattering her lustful worshippers like a suddenly-charging rhino might scatter the birds feeding off its back. Lizards and snakes and snake-people staggered away in all directions.

  Eddie shook himself, cracked an eye in the direction of Phineas Irving, and saw that the man was dead. Not just dead, totally squashed into a stain. His legs still existed, and one of his arms, and part of his head; the rest was a puddle of meat-pulp and blood.

  But on the hand of the arm that hadn’t been totally flattened, Eddie saw Irving’s wedding ring.

  Miriam saw it, too. She stopped for several long seconds, staring down at the bloody band of gold.

  “Nooooooo!” she howled again and spun around.

  Her tail was the thickness of a horse’s chest where it joined her woman-shaped hips and tapered out maybe twenty long feet, covered in bluish scales. It was smooth except, Eddie now saw, twisted little fins of flesh near the end. The fins looked like bits that had once been legs and were in the long, slow process of withering away or being absorbed into the snake-flesh.

  As she spun, the lamia thrashed her tail through a bank of sistrum players, killing them, knocking them out, knocking them over, and totally silencing their rhythm. The totem pole with the dog’s head toppled too, falling into a writhing knot of naked worshippers with a wet cracking of bone. There had been mongooses in and around that writhing knot, Eddie thought dimly, and he wondered if the creatures had escaped.

  He turned back to the gate of light, hoping it would now slam shut. It didn’t. Either the ritual was a lot more tamper-resistant than Phineas Irving had imagined, or it had gone beyond the point of no return before Eddie and his friends intervened. The shadow, and the serpent-headed Infernal, loomed large in the brilliance. Lying directly in front of the gate, Eddie smelled sulfur and snake.

  “Stop!” Aaron Irving cried. He stood naked before the charcoal grill, snake arms flailing. Incense billowed around him a cloud like he was being fumigated.

  “We agreed!” the lamia howled. Her tail flicked right past Eddie in a blow that surely would have crushed him into jelly if it had hit him.

  “It was his choice!” Aaron shouted to her. “We spared him once! He should have left us alone!”

  Eddie saw Jim sweeping snakes off Mike’s body with a broom, and dragging the bass player to his feet. Twitch, in his falcon form, snatched serpents from the air around the big singer’s head.

  Miriam darted forward and snatched her priest-lover by the throat. Their torsos were the same size, but her tail made her loom over him, and she evidently had superhuman strength, because she hoisted the man off the floor with one arm.

  “We should have left him alone!” she hissed in a voice of a thousand rattles.

  Eddie staggered to his feet. The worshippers were scattering, so he had a clear run at the lamia, but nothing to do once he got there. He patted his jacket pockets for something to hold lamia milk in and found the plastic cup full of jacks. That at least was something.

  “He’s not the first to die and he won’t be the last!” the sorcerer hissed. “Besides, you killed him, not I!”

  The lamia emitted a long, drawn-out wail, like a police siren. The chanting, the drums and the sistra were falling silent here and there around the room as the players fell victim to the spreading chaos, but Miriam’s howl was louder than the musicians had ever been, and more piercing. And sad.

  The gate of light stayed open.

  “I killed him!” she shrieked, and then Eddie saw the back of the hand in which she held the obsidian knife.

  And saw that she was wearing a wedding ring, too.

  “Eternal life!” Aaron Irving choked out around the long-nailed fingers on his throat. His feet kicked helplessly off the ground and he was starting to change color to a deep purple. “Have you forgotten?”

  The lamia raised him over her head and slammed him down on the table, hard. He groaned.

  The mummy-dog Wepwawet barked at her and snarled. Without so much as a look of disdain, Miriam snapped her tail and threw the creature across the room. It sailed over the heads of scattering, confused orgy-goers and hit the stairs. Its body burst at the stitches on impact, scattering blood and a macabre collection of tiny organs on the concrete.

  “Love!” the lamia shouted back at her consort, all the snakes in her hair mad and dancing with aggression. “Have you forgotten?”

  Aaron Irving attacked her. Lying prone on his back, his snake-mouthed arms bit her flank and her neck, teeth sinking into her flesh. She didn’t flinch, though blood ran down her chest and over her scales onto the floor, and sank the obsidian knife into Aaron’s belly.

  The priest-sorcerer arched his back, spitting blood from his mouth and nostrils. His snake arms bit Miriam again and again, on her arms, on her face, on her belly. His legs thrashed, the frantic activity of his body hurling blood in all directions. “Too late!” he shouted wetly. “He comes!”

  With a last slash of the stone knife, Miriam chopped off the sorcerer’s head. It bounced to the floor with a wet thud—

  she swayed, lurching this way and that—

  and crashed to the floor.

  “Eddie!” Mike yelled, pointing at the gate.

  Eddie looked down at the flattened body of the Reverend Irving. If we die, the preacher had said, but we stop Apep, we won’t have died in vain.

  “Hell.”

  Eddie grabbed the stone knife from the lamia’s relaxing fingers; at least that was some kind of weapon. He blinked sweat from his eyes, stepped over her twitching tail—

  and walked into the gate of light.

  The basement of the Sears and the cleared-out Kitchenwares Department disappeared. The totem poles were gone, the sistrum players, the drums, the serpents, the fallen Nehushtan, the flattened Egyptologist, the altar, the dying lamia, Eddie’s friends, all of it, disappeared in the blink of an eye.

  Eddie still felt like total shit. His body burned and
trembled and he sweated.

  He stood in a long hall. It descended smoothly before him in a ramp, the floor of which felt like stone and was covered with sand. The air was warm and close and stank of snake. The ceiling of the hall disappeared in darkness, and the walls were ribbed with stone columns, with flickering oil lamps set into the stone between each pair. He heard a low humming sound, like a far-away engine idling.

  He couldn’t see the bottom of the passage. Below and ahead of him, he saw Apep. With his Infernal Eye, Eddie again saw the gigantic man with the head of a serpent. Apep wore an Egyptian-style headdress and simple white kilt, he had sandals on his feet, and he held a curved sword in each hand. And he was massive—maybe fifty feet tall, though the darkness and the distance might be deceptive.

  Through his normal human eyes, Eddie saw an enormous cobra, hood flared—

  headed his way.

  The flake of sharpened stone in his hand now seemed totally inadequate. He really wished he had a decent gun. Or hand grenades.

  No, he needed another kind of solution. What had Irving said? Sympathetic magic, like produces like. He was inside the ritual now, inside the summoning spell. He needed to do something to stop it, like producing like.

  He realized that, out of reflex, he was patting his pockets. What did he have? The usual stuff. No hand grenades, sadly. His fingers found the plastic cup with the game of jacks in it. He’d bought the game at a gas station because the girls had liked jacks when they were younger, playing it on the stoop of the apartment building when they were supposed to be doing homework, and it had given him something to stare at and reminisce.

  He pulled out the cup and ripped the top off. Could this possibly work? Or was this more insane than his Funky Chickenesque six-part sistrum performance?