Dark Serpent

by Kylie Chan

  ‘You have the same sort of heedless courage that Emma does, and that makes you more than human.’

  ‘We don’t want to be.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll call Margaret, you should talk to her. She has access to the DDOMA archives and might have something for you.’

  She went to an old-fashioned dial telephone sitting on the sideboard. ‘Margaret, sorry to wake you, love, but that Chinese god is back and says he can help us find Ruby. Will you talk to him? No, he’s not mad, he just wants to find Ruby. Yes, come on up, we’re in the breakfast room. Okay. Bye.’

  She put the phone down. ‘I am so sorry about all of this, Ross. You were never supposed to be involved in any of our secrets.’

  Ross was staring at John. ‘Chinese god?’

  ‘Where I come from we’re not called gods, we’re called Shen.’

  ‘You both sound like you actually believe this,’ Ross said.

  ‘We’re concerned about Ruby,’ Mabel said to John. ‘We’d appreciate your help. It’s not like her to disappear for a week. She’s normally very careful about keeping her pharmacy open, and she has regular customers who need her.’

  ‘I saw Ruby yesterday,’ John said.

  ‘That’s reassuring,’ Mabel said. ‘We’ve called her several times on her mobile phone and there was no answer. We really were beginning to worry.’

  John felt a shock of concern. ‘Wait a moment — what day is it?’

  Margaret looked up at a calendar on the wall. ‘Friday.’

  ‘But yesterday was Friday.’ John saw the calendar and shot to his feet. ‘I passed out for a week. I need to use your phone. Can I use your phone?’

  ‘You pay for it if you call international,’ Mabel said.

  ‘I don’t even know my daughter’s phone number; it was stored in my phone,’ John said, picking up the receiver. ‘I have to call my house in London.’

  Peta answered. ‘Chen residence.’

  ‘Just tell me yes or no. Is Simone safe?’

  ‘Yes. Where have you been? We’ve all been frantic! There’s a team out looking for you. They went to that castle you visited, and couldn’t find a way in.’

  ‘Have you heard from Emma?’

  ‘No, sir. Gold advised us not to call the police, but we are very worried about her.’

  ‘I passed out from exhaustion and slept for a week,’ John said. ‘I didn’t mean to do it. I’m back in Holyhead, talking to the serpent people. Listen carefully, Peta.’

  ‘Just let me get a pencil,’ Peta said. ‘Go.’

  ‘Call Simone’s mobile, let her know I’m okay and that I’m looking for Emma. Call Gold, tell him the Jade Building Block was last seen in a stone laboratory in Wales. Have him contact the stone network and start looking.’

  ‘Already doing that, sir,’ Peta said. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Has anyone been … Is everybody all right?’

  ‘Everybody’s fine, but we’re missing Emma and the Jade Building Block; and until now we were missing you. Apparently Simone is driving everybody on your Mountain completely nuts. She was convinced you’d rejoined.’

  ‘I’ll buy myself a new phone right away and give you the number so you can contact me.’

  ‘I’ll pass the message on to everyone.’

  ‘Good.’

  Mabel’s doorbell rang.

  ‘I have someone I’m talking to right now,’ John said to Peta. ‘I’ll be in touch as soon as I’ve bought a new phone.’

  ‘If you need anything at all, just contact me,’ Peta said.

  ‘Emma did exactly the right thing hiring you.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Bye, Peta.’

  ‘Bye.’

  John put the phone down and immediately thought of half a dozen things he should have told Peta. Mabel came into the room with Margaret, the middle-aged woman who’d opened the hall and sent him and Emma into the ambush. Margaret stopped in the doorway, her face unreadable.

  ‘I won’t hurt you,’ John said. ‘I just want to talk to you. I need to find Ruby.’

  Margaret visibly relaxed and sat at the table. ‘I hope you understand why they did what they did. It was a town vote.’

  John sat with her and took a sip of the bitter Ceylon tea. ‘Explain.’

  ‘Your friend is dangerous. We’re all dangerous, but she’s more dangerous than any of us. She’s more demon than human, and one day she’ll go berserk and kill everybody around her. It’s happened before.’

  ‘She has control,’ John said. ‘I’ve been teaching her the Way of the East.’

  ‘What happened when she saw the mountain? Holy Mountain?’ Margaret said.

  John didn’t reply.

  ‘They see it, and they remember what happened up there. They want to taste blood again; they go wild.’ She shook her head at her teacup. ‘We’re stronger than ordinary humans, and when one of us turns into a snake and goes stupid, people die.’ She looked up at him, miserable. ‘Many people die. Last time one of us went mad with bloodlust, he killed twenty-six men, women and children.’

  ‘And he went for the children first,’ Mabel said.

  ‘The demons have Emma,’ John said. ‘They’ve been doing genetic experiments. They want to make her stronger and breed from her to make a new race of demons.’

  Margaret was quiet for a while. ‘That’s even worse than us breeding pure snake people. The result will be monsters. We have to get her out of there.’

  ‘I need you to give me a guide to the Celestial Plane. There’s a building somewhere with big windows, either in your Heaven or Hell, where they’re working. I need that information so I can find them.’

  ‘Come with me down to the town hall and we’ll see what we can find for you,’ Margaret said.

  She rose and nodded to Mabel.

  ‘Help him find his girlfriend,’ Mabel said, still sitting. She looked down at her tea and dropped her voice. ‘And when you find her, do it again and this time don’t miss. I can’t bear the thought of all that happening again.’

  ‘Come on,’ Margaret said, gesturing for John to follow her.

  ‘Thank you for your hospitality,’ John said to Mabel.

  ‘Just find your girl,’ Mabel said, ‘and do what’s right.’

  ‘You’ll have to forgive Mabel,’ Margaret said as they walked along the icy street in the grey dawn. ‘Her son was one of the children I was talking about.’

  ‘Killed by the berserk serpent?’

  ‘Yes. The serpent was her other son. Her first husband came from Yorkshire and we didn’t check his bloodlines. Turns out he was DDOMA as well; his mother didn’t follow the Welsh tradition of keeping her family name. Their oldest went mad when he turned fifteen.’

  ‘He was so mad with bloodlust he killed his own brother?’

  ‘He killed his brother and his father, and tried to kill Mabel. Ripped her open. I was only just able to save her. Mabel’s had health problems ever since. After he’d finished with his family, he headed up the hill to the school and killed the children.’

  ‘I’m only just beginning to understand the depth of the blunder I’ve made by bringing Emma here.’

  ‘You sure you’re a god?’

  John smiled slightly. ‘Sometimes it’s debatable.’

  ‘So tell me what happened after you were shot.’

  John brought her up to date as they walked to the hall.

  When they arrived, she unlocked the padlock. ‘Nobody inside with guns, I promise.’

  ‘Even if there are and they kill me, I will be back in twenty-four hours asking the same questions — and extremely annoyed.’

  The interior of the hall didn’t match the run-down exterior at all. The windows along the tops of the side walls let in the early morning light, but it was still gloomy until Margaret turned on some fluorescent strip lights on the ceiling. The walls were faced with polished stone from the quarry, and at the far end of the hall was a large stone frieze showing the serpent people fighting the Romans in both human
and snake form. Cupboards stood along the wall underneath it, and bookshelves lined the other three walls. A rectangular stone slab provided a conference table in the middle of the room, with modern office chairs around it. The slab had words carved into it in a language John didn’t recognise.

  ‘It says “Never kill again”,’ Margaret said, tapping the table top as she passed it. She went to a computer set up underneath the frieze and woke it up, then typed into the search box on the screen. ‘G for gateway. Let’s see what we find.’

  John leaned on the bench next to her and she gave him a sly sideways look. She was slightly younger than his current human form and the attraction was obvious. The thought of being with a human woman again just made him miss Emma more fiercely.

  ‘I thought you didn’t keep written records,’ he said.

  ‘We didn’t. But we were forced to keep records of our bloodlines to stop any more children, and over time notes were added to them, until eventually we had something of a history.’

  ‘How far back does it go?’

  ‘Not far. We only started keeping historical records in about 1500; before that it was just the serpent family birth records. We wanted to disappear completely, but we had to make sure that what we are capable of never happens again. The story must be told.’

  He looked down at the bench, and the row of round stones that sat along its edge. He picked one up and turned it over in his hands. It was the size of an apple with a hole through it. He put it down and checked the others; they all had holes through them.

  ‘Something about these stones stirs a memory and I don’t know what it is,’ he said.

  ‘Those are serpent eggs,’ she said, reading from the screen and taking notes. ‘Our people used to wear them to identify themselves. With the right sort of energy treatment, they’re a potent protective amulet.’

  John opened his senses into the stone he was holding and felt nothing. ‘They’re not sentient stones like Ruby?’

  ‘No, just rocks. We’re deliberately letting them fade. We want nothing to do with that stuff any more.’ She sat straighter and wrote something on her notepad. ‘Aha.’

  ‘Found something?’

  ‘This hasn’t been translated in a while: document 554556. Let me see.’ She rose, went to a shelf and pulled out a large volume bound in green leather. ‘It’s the job of the town headman — or woman — to keep updated versions of every document. As time passes, we pull them out, update the language and put them away again. That way the information is never really lost. This one hasn’t been redone since 1750. It’s on my to-do list.’

  ‘Don’t you lose meaning across the translations?’

  ‘We do our best not to. It’s part of the job to be an expert in old languages, and we keep the originals.’

  ‘You’re an expert in languages as well as a doctor?’

  ‘Most of us are smarter than average.’ She put the book on the table and flipped it open. ‘Gateway, gateway.’ She glanced up at him. ‘How do you do alphabetical order in Chinese? Do you even have an alphabetical order? Isn’t your alphabet enormous?’

  ‘We sort them by the number of character strokes in the basic part of the character, then the number of strokes in the whole character,’ John said, leaning over to see the book. ‘Every character is made up of other characters, and if you know what the base one is and the number of strokes …’ He put his finger on the book. ‘That’s the Penrhos Feilw stones.’

  ‘That’s your gateway,’ Margaret said. She peered at the text. ‘Gateway to Heaven. We cannot use this gateway any more; it required our serpent forms. We would take the form and walk through the stones, which are alive, although slow in thought, and act as a gateway to the gods.’

  ‘The stones are dead,’ John said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I went there a week ago and touched them. They were alive once; now they’re dead. The demons we’re dealing with are experts at manipulating stones. Look at the laboratory under the castle I told you about.’

  Margaret glanced up at him. ‘How do you kill a stone?’

  John shook his head. ‘Theoretically it’s impossible. The stones are terrified.’

  ‘What about poor Ruby?’

  John tapped the book. ‘This is why I’m here. I need to find her. Is there mention of a gateway to Hell?’

  She put her hand on the picture of the Penrhos Feilw stones. ‘You can’t use these?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay.’ She left the book on the table and John flipped through it, fascinated, while she went back to the computer. ‘This is an older one: 29798.’ She rose and went to the shelves again.

  The hall doors opened and a group of men came in carrying guns, although they were pointed upwards rather than at John. Nevertheless, John immediately raised his hands to demonstrate he was harmless.

  ‘You okay here, Doctor Margaret?’ one of the men said.

  ‘No trouble. I’m helping this gentleman here with some research,’ Margaret said.

  ‘Isn’t that the one …?’ one of them said, his voice trailing off.

  John didn’t lower his hands. ‘You killed me when you tried to shoot my girlfriend.’

  ‘You don’t look dead.’

  ‘Right now I feel it,’ John said. He leaned on the desk and wiggled his fingers. ‘May I?’

  ‘He all right, Doctor Margaret?’

  ‘He can help us find Ruby. Put the guns away.’

  The men’s expressions changed from suspicion to relief. They went to the cupboards at the end of the hall, unloaded the ammunition from the rifles and stowed the guns away, locking the cupboard doors.

  ‘Leave us to it,’ Margaret said, studying the volumes on the side wall. ‘I’ll let you know if we find Ruby.’

  One of the men came to John and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Find her for us. We’re lost without her.’

  ‘I will find her,’ John said.

  They appeared satisfied with that and went out.

  ‘Here,’ Margaret said, pulling down another thick volume. ‘I didn’t want them to see this. The information in here can be disturbing and we only share it on a need-to-know basis.’

  She flipped the book open. Unlike the previous one, the lettering was spidery with many vertical strokes. Margaret put on some reading glasses and flipped through the pages, studying the text and occasionally referring to notes she’d written while looking at the computer.

  She stopped, leaned back and stared at the book. ‘Good Lord, I never knew. I used to mess around down there when I was a kid. No wonder we were so strongly warned not to go inside.’ She spun the book around on the table so that John could see the hand-drawn picture of two vertical stones with a third stone horizontally over them. ‘Trefignath burial chamber,’ she said. ‘There are three chambers; the oldest two have fallen down, but the most recent one is still intact.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘As old as Penrhos Feilw, maybe older.’

  ‘And that’s the gateway to Hell?’

  Margaret read the text: ‘Come under these stones at your own peril; place your hand on the end wall, then make it in your mind as the wall unseen …’ She winced. ‘Old terminology, they mean …’ Her expression cleared. ‘Seriously, this is hard to believe and I know it must be true. Make the wall invisible in your mind,’ she read from the book, ‘and you shall be transported to the netherworld. Beware, this is not the world of the fae and our fathers, the Sidhe, but the world of demons and the dead. Go you hence and you will never return; only the dead may enter the domain of the dead, and if one who is alive should enter, they are henceforth dead and will never return.’

  ‘Definitely sounds like Hell,’ John said. ‘Where’s this chamber?’

  ‘Down past the Tesco’s on a bike track. It’s on top of a little hill — you can’t miss it.’ She picked up her car keys. ‘I’ll show you. I want to take another look myself now.’

  ‘It would be quicker to fly,’ John said. ‘I can
carry you and you show me the way.’

  She was silent for a moment, then, ‘Fly?’ she said weakly.

  He saw how terrified she was at the concept. ‘Never mind. You can drive.’

  26

  Margaret parked in a car park at the end of the bike trail and they got out of the car. The land around was low treeless rolling hills with the outskirts of the town behind them. There was a small group of houses nearby, and the occasional passing car was audible from the motorway a hundred metres away. They followed the bike track, which ran parallel to a row of metre-tall standing stones, each spaced ten metres apart over a kilometre. They passed a few people walking dogs or strolling, who looked at them curiously.

  The burial chamber was on top of a low hill. A group of teenage boys and girls were sitting with their backs against the stone, smoking and sharing a six-pack of beer. They scrambled to their feet when they saw John and Margaret approaching.

  ‘Heads up,’ one of them said loudly, then they all dropped their stuff and ran into the trees.

  ‘Oh shit,’ a voice said loudly, and a girl and boy, half-dressed, rushed out of the chamber and into the trees as well.

  ‘I hope you’re using a condom, Tiffany and Stuart!’ Margaret yelled after them. ‘I’m not here to fix your mistakes.’

  She dropped her voice to speak to John. ‘Like I said, we used to come down here and mess around. The archaeologists hated us; we used to move the smaller stones to piss them off.’ She gestured towards the chamber. ‘This is it. I never saw it as anything unusual before, just a pile of rocks.’

  The chamber wasn’t big: only a metre high, the same wide and two metres deep. John had to crouch to go inside.

  ‘Make the back wall invisible, you say?’ he said.

  ‘That’s what it said.’

  He crawled back out of the stone chamber and stood up, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be. Will you do something for me while I’m gone?’

  ‘What?’ she said, eyeing his wallet suspiciously.

  He pulled out a wad of fifty-pound notes. ‘Buy me a phone. I don’t care what it is or what plan it’s on. I’ll only need it as long as I’m in the UK, so put the contract in your name and you can have it when I’m done.’ He handed her the money. ‘Keep the change, just get me a phone.’