“I’LL JUST SAY goodnight to Lola.” Kath stood in the doorway to my new bedroom, as if this game of fucked-up families was natural.
“Don’t be long.”
I sat on the bed. The new quilt cover and pillow case smelt funny. Kenny had put them on straight out of the packaging without washing them first. They still bore the sharp creases of their confinement.
“Lola,” Kathy pulled me up and whispered to me. “He said to me, when we were kids, ‘I’m going to put a baby in you and it’s going to be special, like me and Dad,’ as if I had nothing to do with it. I can’t stand him touching me. When I felt you moving inside me, I was terrified you’d be a squirming snake, but you were mine. I’d do anything to get him away from us and Ami. I was the one who told the police.”
Uncle. Father. Any wonder that I’m monstrous?
“Kenny’s always been wrong. He thought it was from Dad, although he never saw him do it. It’s from Mum. It drove her mad, holding it in. She nearly turned when she had her stroke. I have to know, can you do it too?”
“What?”
“We can’t waste time. Can you turn into,” she hesitated, “a snake?”
“Yes.” I couldn’t meet her gaze.
“Good. Do it as soon as I leave.” She opened the window. “Go out through the bars. Will you fit?”
“I don’t know if I can. I’m not sure that I can do it at will.”
“Try. Get out of here.”
Panic rose in my chest. “What about you?”
“I’m going to do what I should’ve done a long time ago.” She showed me the paring knife in her back pocket and then pulled her baggy sweater back over it. It must’ve been all she had time to grab. “I won’t be far behind you.”
“What if you’re not?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions,” she paused, “I’m sorry for not being stronger. I’m sorry for not getting you away from here.”
“Kathy,” Kenny’s voice boomed from the corridor, “time for bed.”
After she left I heard the key turn in the lock.
I WENT THROUGH the drawers and wardrobe. Kenny had filled them with clothes. I didn’t want to touch anything that had come from him. There was nothing that I could use as a weapon or to help me escape.
I’d not changed since the time I’d bitten Jade. I lay down, trying to slow my breathing and concentrate. Nothing happened. The silence filled my mind along with all the things he would be doing to Kathy.
I dozed, somewhere towards early morning, wakening frequently in the unfamiliar room. I missed Tallulah beside me in the bed we’d shared since childhood. I missed her warmth and tangle of hair.
When Kenny let me out it was late afternoon.
“Where’s my mum?”
“Down here.”
There was a chest freezer in the basement. Kenny lifted the lid. Kathy was inside, frozen in a slumped position, arms crossed over her middle. Frozen blood glittered on the gash in her head and frosted one side of her face.
Kenny put his hand on my shoulder like we were mourners at a wake. I should’ve been kicking and screaming, but I was as frozen as she was.
One of Kathy’s wrists was contorted at an unnatural angle.
“She betrayed me. I always knew it, in my heart.” He shut the lid. “Now it’s just you and me, kid.”
He took me up through the house, to the room at the back with the double doors. There were dozens of tanks that cast a glow. Some contained a single serpent, others several that were coiled together like heaps of intestines.
“My beauties. I’ll start breeding them.”
There were corn snakes, ball pythons, ribbon snakes, though I had no names for them back then, all of which make good pets. I stopped at one tank. He had a broad head with a blunted snout
“Ah, meet Shankly.” Kenny put his hand against the glass. “He was hard to come by. They’re called cottonmouths because they open their mouths so wide to show their fangs that you see all the white lining inside.”
The cottonmouth must have been young. I remember his olive green colour and the clear banded pattern on his back, which he would lose as he got older.
“Are you special, Kathy?”
“I’m Lola.”
“Yes, of course you are. Are you like me?”
“I’m nothing like you. Leave me alone.”
“I’ll look after you. Like you’re a princess. You’ll want for nothing. And you’ll look after me because that’s how it works.”
“Don’t fucking touch me.”
Kenny pressed my face against the tank. Shankly showed me his pale underbelly as he slid towards me.
“Be afraid of him,” Kenny nodded at the snake, “he still has his fangs. I’ll make a mint from his venom.”
Shankly climbed up a branch in his tank and settled there.
Kenny pushed me down with one hand and undid his belt buckle with the other.
“I’m your daughter.”It was my last defence.
“I know.”
Then he put his forked tongue in my mouth.
I COULDN’T MOVE. The place between my legs was numb. I’d already tried sex with a boy from college. I knew what it was about. We’d fumbled and fallen in a heap in the bushes by the old boating lake one afternoon. It wasn’t an experience to set the world alight but it was satisfactory enough.
This wasn’t just a sex crime, it was a power crime. Kenny wanted my fear. I shrunk into the distant corners of myself trying to retreat where he couldn’t follow. His orgasm was grudging, delivered with a short, gratified moan.
Afterwards he sat with his trousers open, watching me like he was waiting for me to do something. I was frozen. I’m not sure I even blinked. That was how Kathy must have felt, forever stuck in that single moment of inertia and shock that kept her in the same spot for a lifetime. She was right. She should have run while she had the chance. Fuck her mother. And Ami, for all the good she’d done her.
Kenny stood up. I thought, It’s going to happen again and then he’s going to dump me in the freezer. Instead, he went upstairs, his tread heavy with disappointment.
“Don’t stay up too late, pet.”
I think I was waiting for something too, when I should’ve been searching for something sharp to stick between his ribs. I couldn’t summon anything; I was still too deep inside myself.
I was colder than I’d ever been before, even though the summer night was stifling. The room felt airless despite the window being wide open and butting up against the grille. Sometimes, when Georgia’s away, I feel that cold.
Get up, get up before he remembers you and comes back down for more.
“Lola.” A voice carried through the window.
It was Tallulah, a pale ghost beyond the glass. Her mouth was moving as she clutched at the bars.
I turned my face away, in the childish way of if I can’t see her, then she can’t see me. I didn’t want her to see me like this. It occurred to me that she might have been a witness to the whole thing. I turned back but she’d gone, so I closed my eyes.
I should’ve known that Tallulah would never leave me. The snakes swayed in their tanks, enraptured. Tallulah was long and white, with pale yellow markings. Slender and magnificent. She glided over me and lay on my chest, rearing up. I couldn’t breathe because she took my breath away. I could feel her muscles contracting and her smooth belly scales against my bare chest.
Get up, get up, or he’ll come down and find her like this.
Are you special?
Her tongue flicked out and touched my lips. I had no choice. I had to do it, for her. There was the rush of lubricant that loosened the top layer of my skin. The change was fast, my boyish body, with its flat chest and narrow hips perfectly suited to the transformation.
I crawled out of my human mantle. Moulting was good. I shed every cell of myself that Kenny had touched.
BOTH TALLULAH AND I are unidentifiable among my extensive research of snakes, bearing properties of several species at
once. We made a perfect pair for hunting. The pits on my face were heat sensitive, able to detect a variation of a thousandth of a degree, feeding information into my optic nerves. I saw the world in thermal. Kenny’s heart was luminous in the dark. I slid up the side of his bed and hovered over his pillow. Tallulah lay beside him on the mattress, waiting.
Look at your princesses, Kenny. See how special we are.
Kenny snored, a gentle, almost purring noise.
It’s a myth that snakes dislocate their jaws.
I opened my mouth as wide as I could, stretching the flexible ligament that joined my lower jaw to my skull. I covered his crown in slow increments. He snorted and twitched. I slipped down over his eyes, his lashes tickling the inside of my throat. He reached up to touch his head.
Tallulah struck him, sinking her fangs into his neck. He started and tried to sit up, limbs flailing, which was a mistake as his accelerating heartbeat sent the venom further around his circulation.
Trying to cover his nose was the hardest part, despite my reconfigured mouth. I thought my head would split open. I wasn’t sure how much more I could stomach. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t trying to swallow him whole. A fraction more and I was over his nostrils completely.
There was only one way to save himself. I recognised the undulations he was making. I could feel the change on my tongue, his skin becoming fibrous. I had to stop him. I couldn’t imagine what he’d become.
He was weakening with Tallulah’s neurotoxins, slumping back on the bed, shaking in an exquisite fit. He’d wet himself. I stretched my flesh further and covered his mouth and waited until long after he was still.
I WOKE UP on the floor beside Tallulah. We were naked. My throat and neck were sore. The corners of my mouth were crusted with dried blood. We lay on our sides, looking at one another without speaking. We were the same, after all.
“How did you find me?” I was hoarse.
“I had to wait until Ami went out. I found the house details in her bedroom drawer. I didn’t have any money so I had to get a bus and walk the rest of the way. I’m sorry that I didn’t get here sooner.”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
Tallulah picked up our clothes and then our skins which lay like shrouds. It was disconcerting to see how they were moulds of us, even down to the contours of our faces.
“I’ll take these with us. We can burn them later.”
I went upstairs. I edged into the darkened room as if Kenny might sit up at any moment. He was a purple, bloated corpse with fang marks in his neck. I fumbled with the chain around his neck, not wanting to touch him.
“Where’s Kathy?” Tallulah asked.
I told her.
“Show me.”
“No, I don’t want you to remember her like that.” I seized Tallulah’s face in my hands. “You do know that she didn’t mean what she said, about you not belonging with us? She was trying to protect you.”
Tallulah nodded, her mouth a line. She didn’t cry.
“We have to bury her.”
“We can’t. Tallulah, we have to get out of here. Do you understand? Ami will come for you when she realises you’ve gone. There’s something else.”
I put my hand in the cottonmouth’s tank. It curled up my arm and I lifted it out, holding it up to my cheek. He nudged my face.
“Lift out the bottom.”
Tallulah pulled out bits of twisted branch and foliage, then pulled up the false base. She gasped. Out came bundles of notes and cloth bags. She tipped the contents out on her palm. More diamonds than I could hold in my cupped hands.
We loaded the money into Kenny’s rucksack and tucked the diamonds in our pockets.
“What about the snakes?”
We opened the tanks and carried them outside. I watched them disappear into the undergrowth. Except for Shankly. I put him in a carrier bag and took him with us.
THERE ARE DAYS when I wake and I can’t remember who I am, like a disorientated traveller who can’t recall which hotel room of which country they’re in.
I’m hurt that Georgia didn’t want me to collect her from the airport.
There’s been a delay. I won’t get in until late. Go to bed, I’ll get a cab.
I wished now that I’d ignored her and gone anyway instead of lying here in the dark. The harsh fluorescent lights and the near empty corridors of the airport are preferable to the vast darkness of our empty bed.
Not going is a stupid test with which I’ve only hurt myself. I’ve resolutely taken her consideration for indifference. I want her to be upset that I wasn’t there, as if she secretly wanted me there all along.
See, I confuse even myself.
The front door opens and closes. I should get up and go to her. She comes in, marked by the unzipping of her boots and the soft sound of her shedding clothes.
Love isn’t just what you feel for someone when you look at them. It’s how they make you feel about yourself when they look back at you.
Georgia is the coolest, most poised woman that I know. We’re older now and our hearts and flesh aren’t so easily moved but I still wonder what she sees when she looks at me.
“Do you love me?” It’s easier to ask it with the lights off and my head turned away from her.
Everything about us is wrong. We’re lovers, sisters, freaks.
She answers in a way that I have to respond to. I glide across the floor towards her and we become a writhing knot. We hunt mice in our grandiose pile and in the morning we are back here in our bed, entwined together in our nest.
When we wake again as human beings she says, “Of course I love you, monster.”
When we shed the disguises that are Georgia and Eliza, and then the skins that are Lola and Tallulah, we are monsters. Fabulous beasts.
THE RAIN HAD stopped at last, but the streets were still slick, the lights from the docks reflecting like flares in the puddles. The stevedores were still working, of course, and I could hear their shouts over the steady thump of the donkey engines that powered the cranes, and then the clatter of chain as someone on the liner took up the slack and the emptied cargo net floated into the air to be hauled aboard and filled again. This was the transatlantic cargo, goods loaded in Le Havre and Plymouth for consignees in New York, and when it was off, the cargo for New Orleans was piled ready for loading. After that would come the passengers’ luggage, tomorrow morning when the sun was up and Naiade was gleaming, ready to sail. I had spent all my life around the Wollart Lines; their schedules were as instinctive as breathing. I clutched my drab black coat tighter at the neck, hunching my shoulders against the spreading chill. Black coat, black cloche to shadow my face, black shoes and stockings and gloves: I’d done just as Peter told me, and so far I’d been invisible in the shadows.
It had seemed like a good idea sitting in the automat with a stack of nickel between us and a good cup of coffee and Peter to fetch us each a slice of pie. Here at the head of Pier 54, the late night traffic on Eleventh Avenue at my back, rats busy among the piles of anonymous crates that lay between me and the ship—I wished Peter would hurry. He had promised to bring me to meet someone else who was interested in the fate of the Wollart Nymphs, the three fast liners my father had designed for Wollart, lean and elegant and unlucky. Dryade had been captured during the War and converted to a commerce raider, only to be sunk on her first cruise. Nereiade had survived the War, but in 1922 she’d passed the Hatteras lightship and disappeared into a fog bank, never to be seen again. Only her ghost remained, a wavering shape seen perhaps a dozen times, and always presaging disaster. Only Naiade remained, the last of the Nymphs, just marginally too profitable to abandon, and yet a source of rumor. The line was careless, people whispered, and crews were let go; there was something wrong with the design, they said, and my father lost work, sickened, and died.
I had come to New York to settle the last of his estate, but also to talk to Peter Gagne, who was also from Bath and had grown up in the Wollart Lines. His uncle had disappeared o
n Neriade, and he’d written to me when Father died, to say that he’d finally found someone who might be interested in helping clear the Nymphs. He’d been close-mouthed about it, not wanting to say more until he was sure, but he’d promised that tonight he would introduce me. I edged a little closer, peering out into the loading lights from the shadows of the terminal wall. Surely he would be here soon.
A steam whistle blew on Naiade, and I flattened my back against the damp boards as a gang of stevedores moved toward the next pile of cargo. It was getting busier at this end of the dock, and the last that would happen was an unpleasant set of explanations. I couldn’t really wait any longer. I took three careful steps backward, my eyes still on the anonymous crates and the men hauling them toward the waiting nets.
Something turned under my foot, and I barely caught myself on the rough wall. I froze in the shadows as one of the stevedores glanced my way. I hadn’t made any more noise than a rat, and after a moment he looked away again. I sagged in relief, still holding onto the wall, and looked down.
I had stepped on someone’s leg. A man’s let, in dark pants and scuffed shoes, the cuff pulled up to show a sagging sock and a flash of skin. I tasted bile, but I followed the leg into the darker shadows, already sure of what I would find. The body lay on its back, one arm twisted unnaturally under it; his face was turned away, but I recognized Peter’s ear, the line of his jaw. He’d shaved before he’d come to meet me, the skin barber-smooth, a fleck of blood on the edge of his chin.
I went to my knees beside him, heedless of the wet ground, felt along the cord of his neck for some hint of a pulse. His skin was cold and slack under my fingers, and tears stung my eyes as I tried to turn him so that his face wasn’t ground against the muddy platform. The bones of his skull gave under my fingers, and it was all I could do not to cry out.
I sat back on my heels, my breath short, wondering what to do. Peter was dead, murdered, almost certainly: I should fetch the police, but then I’d have to explain what I was doing here, and that would be complicated. I touched his cheek again, hoping somehow to feel some fugitive warmth, but there was nothing. I spread my fingers, a last apologetic farewell to a friend and neighbor, and pushed myself to my feet. There would be a phone booth somewhere, in an all-night diner or a hotel lobby; I could call the police format here and not have to give my name.
Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction Page 20