Snake Handlin' Man

by D. J. Butler

  Only one way to find out.

  Eddie hurled the jacks down the passageway in a single handful, and the little red rubber ball with them. Some kind of incantation seemed appropriate, too, since that’s what Adrian always did, only Eddie didn’t know any magic words.

  “Piss off, Apep!” he shouted. “Go back to where you came from! You ain’t welcome anymore!”

  It wasn’t poetry, but it would have to do.

  Apep stumbled. The giant stepped on the first of the spiky little metal jacks and winced in pain, tripping and crashing against the wall. He landed on his knee, one shoulder against a column, and stared up the hall at Eddie.

  Who are you, mortal? he bellowed.

  Oops.

  The enormous, echoing voice sounded oddly familiar, and Eddie pegged the familiarity immediately—Apep sounded just a little bit like Jim. The thought of what that might mean made Eddie’s skin crawl.

  Eddie carefully put the cup and its lid back into his pocket. He planned to get out again, which meant he planned to need the cup. He didn’t dare look behind him to see whether the hallway had an exit, and what it might look like.

  Apep rose slowly to his feet again. I will eat you first! he roared, and started moving forward again, taking careful steps and watching the floor for more jack-caltrops. I will eat you all!

  Eddie needed something else. Flashlight, pocketknife, compass, cigarette lighter, he couldn’t imagine how any of it would help him. Then he grabbed the duct tape.

  “Oh yeah,” he said to himself.

  Like produced like. Eddie fastened the end of the duct tape to the column to his left and quickly ran it across the passageway to the opposite column, where he tore off the strip and anchored it.

  “I bar the way to thee, Apep,” he intoned, doing his best dramatic spellcaster voice. The thee was a nice touch, he thought. Sharon would have been impressed, or at least she would have pretended to be impressed. Adrian would have mocked him.

  No! Apep lurched forward, raising a scimitar in objection, but his feet came down on more jacks, and the giant fell to his knees, roaring.

  That seemed like a good sign. Eddie ran across a second strip, cross the first at an angle. “I forbid thee passage!” he added.

  Apep scrambled forward on gigantic hands and knees. Eddie could see the giant’s blood smeared on the sandy stone floor of the tunnel. The swords flashed in the lantern light like a terrible two-tusked death machine, getting closer.

  He ran a third strip across. Third time’s the charm, he thought, and he ran it at a contrary angle to the second, so that the three strips of duct tape met in the center of the passageway like a big asterisk. A lucky star, Eddie said to himself, feeling a little panicky as the giant crashed towards him. Star light, star bright.

  He wedged the stone knife into the tape for good measure, right into the center, turned so that its sharp edge faced down the passage towards the onrushing demon.

  “I place this blade against thy heart, O Apep,” he chanted, feeling himself getting a little carried away in the theater of the moment. “Thou shalt not pass.”

  Then he turned to look for a way out. Behind him rose a solid stone wall with a painting of an open doorway on it. To one side of the painted door image, to his shock, was a painting of Aaron Irving, the snake-armed man, and on the other was a picture of the lamia, Miriam. All the images were painted in what Eddie would have called, without any expertise whatsoever, ancient Egyptian style—they looked flat, with their shoulders both pointed to Eddie and their feet (Miriam’s tail) all pointing inward at the door. They were dressed in what he thought of as Pharaoh-garb, too: cobra-crowns on their foreheads, kilt and sandals for Aaron, lots of eye make-up for them both.

  It was troubling to Eddie to see his foes represented in tomb art. What did that mean? Was he in some real Egyptian tomb, where paintings of Aaron and Miriam showed Apep the way to escape? Was he in some magic dream-space, created only by the ritual?

  But what troubled Eddie even more was the fact that the doorway was only a painting.

  Wait! Apep thundered. We can make a bargain!

  Eddie looked back and saw the snake-headed giant crouching in the hall above him. He was in easy reach of Eddie with his enormous swords now, but he stayed back, squatted in the hall with blood on his knuckles and running down his knees. In snake form he swayed from side to side, his hood flared wide and his fangs bared.

  “Oh, hell no,” Eddie shot back. “You got nothing I want.”

  He hoped.

  Like produces like. Eddie turned and fell against the painted doorway, his strength gone—

  No! Apep bellowed, shaking the tunnel so hard that sand fell from the ceiling onto Eddie’s head and neck—

  and then Eddie was through the doorway, collapsing to the ground in the basement of the Sears. Light shone on him and past him from behind, but even as he fell through, he could feel that he was being pushed, that the gate was closing shut behind him.

  BOOM!

  And then the light was gone, and he smelled snake and incense and saw by the blue-gray light of fluorescent tubes. At first, he just saw smears of blood on the concrete floor against which his face was pressed.

  “Eddie!”

  He lifted his head enough to see boots and shoes splattering through the gore in his direction. Sand fell off him as he moved, dusting the blood with an improbable yellow. His body trembled and he tried to point at the lamia, where she lay on her side next to the table, on a pile of the bodies of her worshippers and minions. “You might need to hold her down,” he mumbled, and started crawling.

  Jim picked him up and carried him, and Eddie saw that Jim’s sword was belted around his waist again, and Mike bristled with guns.

  Eddie half-expected the lamia to break him in two, but she didn’t resist at all. She raised her head to meet Eddie’s gaze as Jim set him carefully on his feet, nodded once and relaxed her neck again.

  “Mierda,” Mike muttered.

  Eddie crawled into the embrace of the lamia. Her flesh was warm and she smelled as much of woman as she did of snake. Her torso, certainly, was all woman, dusky and voluptuous. If he hadn’t felt on death’s door, Eddie might have been excited to be this close to a beautiful woman. The danger, the fear that any moment she might rise up and smash him flat, only added to the thrill of the moment. Shaking like a bad drunk with the DTs, he curled into her arms, attached himself like an infant, and drank.

  The blood that poured from her many wounds and trickled onto Eddie was as hot as his own. The snake heads of Miriam’s hair hissed at him gently. It sounded like voices shushing a baby. Eddie listened to their voices and almost slipped into oblivion.

  But then he felt the burning and the weariness and the trembling of his limbs fall away. He didn’t feel refreshed or rejuvenated—he felt exhausted and beat up, but the effects of the venom were gone. He didn’t feel like he was on the brink of dying anymore.

  He dug into his pocket for the cup. It felt strangely intimate and invasive to lie beside the lamia and milk her, but it would have felt even more wrong to kneel and treat her like an animal. She had made terrible decisions, but she had paid for them, and in the end, she was as much a person as Eddie was. Eddie’s heart roiled with all sorts of feelings, and he found to his surprise that one of the strongest was gratitude. As respectfully as he could, he filled the bottom of the jacks cup with the warm bluish milk of the lamia Miriam. When he had what he thought was probably enough, he put the cap back on the cup and stood.

  He met her gaze one last time through lidded eyes.

  “I forgot,” she hissed simply.

  Eddie nodded solemnly. “I know,” he said. “I won’t forget.”

  Then her last breath rattled in her throat and the lamia was gone. Eddie didn’t feel bad for her—she’d killed way too many people, and done worse, to arouse his compassion. But he didn’t hate her. In the end, he didn’t even really find her monstrous.

  He took a deep breath and stepped
back. When he was sure he could face the others without tears in his eyes, he surveyed the damage.

  It was total. There were bodies all over the room, snake, lizard, and human, and mutant combinations of all stripes. Eddie saw mongoose corpses, too—none of the preacher’s furry allies had survived. The dog was smashed to pieces, the headless priest bled out, the preacher smashed into sanctified marmalade, the totem poles knocked over. The Nehushtan was either pulverized or hidden in the wreckage. Still, there was something about the room that nagged at his perception, something positive, something that made him feel almost happy.

  Mike handed him his guns. Eddie checked to see that both weapons were loaded, snapped the Glock into its holster and reattached the Remington 870 to its shoulder strap while he thought about what it could be. It felt good to be armed again.

  On the other hand, the junk in his pockets had been surprisingly useful.

  “You okay?” Mike asked.

  Eddie snorted and cut away the tourniquet with his pocketknife. “All things considered,” he said, “not too bad.”

  Then it hit him.

  The legs were gone.

  He looked up and saw an ordinary concrete ceiling, undergirded with pipes and fluorescent lights, spattered with blood, but with no sign of the field of ice and the dangling legs of the damned that had previously haunted his vision.

  Eddie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “I feel good.”

  Twitch looked around at the mess. “No amount of bleach is going to clean this up,” the fairy chuckled.

  Jim shook his head and bent to pick up the charcoal grill of smoldering incense coals by its struts. Eddie watched as the singer walked slowly around the carnage, shaking coals out onto fallen totem poles and into puddles of cleaning fluids, throwing the last of them indiscriminately into the janitorial closet. By the time he was done, the basement was on fire.

  Eddie started towards the stairs. In front of him a rusty iron chain ground slowly from right to left at his chest level. Severed human arms, legs and heads hung pinned to the chain like so much laundry on a clothesline. The mouths of the severed heads opened and closed and their eyes bulged in Eddie’s direction like they were calling to him.

  Eddie shook his head and walked right through the chain. He ached and he was exhausted, but he was alive and free.

  Did that mean, he wondered, that his vision of death in a burning palace was a true one?

  Or had he been inspired to fight on by a false vision, thereby making the vision true? Or at least, preserving the possibility of its truth?

  He shook the thoughts out of his head as he crossed the ground floor towards the glass doors. Really, he knew, he wouldn’t know the answer to anything until it was all over.

  “I hope Adrian made it,” Mike muttered.

  Eddie checked his watch. “We still got fifteen minutes,” he said. “We’ll get there in time. How are your fingers?”

  “Fingers?” Mike opened and closed his hands experimentally. “Fine. Why?”

  “We got a gig,” Eddie reminded him. “Unless you got cash you ain’t told me about, we gotta play or we don’t have enough money to get out of Oklahoma.”

  “Cagado.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Eddie agreed. He pushed open the doors and he and Mike walked out into the cooling air of the early evening.

  ***

  About the Author

  D.J. Butler (Dave) is a novelist living in the Rocky Mountain northwest. His training is in law, and he worked as a securities lawyer at a major international firm and inhouse at two multinational semiconductor manufacturers before taking up writing fiction. He is a lover of language and languages, a guitarist and self-recorder, and a serious reader. He is married to a powerful and clever woman and together they have three devious children.

  Dave writes fantasy, science fiction, space opera, steampunk, cyberpunk, superhero, alternate history, dystopian fiction, horror and related genres for all audiences. His novels Crecheling and City of the Saints are available from WordFire Press, and his middle reader steampunk adventure series, The Extraordinary Journeys of Clockwork Charlie, launches soon with the novel The Kidnap Plot (Knopf, 2016).

  Read about all of Dave’s fiction projects at http://davidjohnbutler.com.

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