Damned Lies!

by Dennis Liggio

  The snake stared at me as it slithered around the rock. It seemed to be moving closer.

  “Nice snake- … -ie,” I ventured and immediately discovered there’s no snake equivalent of “Good doggie”.

  The snake must have agreed with me, as it opened its mouth wide with a very large hiss. With its mouth open, I could clearly see two very large fangs. I did remember from grade school science class that fangs = bad. Poisonous. Why couldn't I have encountered the snake in serious need of dental work?

  I flew into a panicked rush where I pushed myself off the ground, trying to move my numb ass somewhere away from the snake while keeping it in view. I had managed to climb to my feet and was about to push off the rock when disaster struck. In my panic, I had kept my eyes on the snake. It turns out snakes are much more clever than I had ever thought. The snake I was keeping track of was just a diversion.

  For the other snake.

  With a violent hiss, there was a flash of movement and a sharp, hot pain in my left thigh. It was another snake, twin to the one I had been keeping my distance from. Rather than biting and letting go, the snake had latched onto my thigh. A new panic took me and I thrashed, the snake holding on for dear life. I grabbed the first thing I could find, unsurprisingly a rock, and began beating the snake with it.

  Of course, bashing the snake with a rock also meant bludgeoning my own thigh and the newly opened snake bite wound. Imagine a man jumping around crazily in the hot desert, bashing his own thigh with a rock to try to detach the most persistent snake in the world whose body flailed like a hose through the air. I screamed in pain each time I hit myself, while the snake hissed muffled whimpers.

  Eventually the snake let go and fell to the ground, dazed. "Yeah, that's right! Lay there!" I said to the dazed snake. "You know who's bad!"

  The other snake wriggled across the ground at me, but I threatened it with my rock. "Back off! Don't fuck with me!"

  The snake continued moving. I threw the rock at it, which made it retreat. I knew it would come back, so I made my own escape, limping away from the rocks, resuming my walk across the desert.

  After a minute or two, I looked back. I couldn't tell if the snakes were following me, but I was pretty sure they were. Snakes are persistent little buggers and I couldn't trust them. If I collapsed on the ground they'd catch up to me, and make me into their evening feast. Animals are good at sensing weakness, I've seen it on TV. Even if those TV shows were wrong and shoveling shit for the syndicated shill, I'd rather hedge my bets and be careful rather than fall prey to deviously sinister snakes. I had to keep walking.

  My heart rate eventually slowed. This was good. But after a while it increased again. This was not good. This wasn't the increase of adrenaline from either a good pace or a useful fight-or-flight instinct. No, this was the I’ve-had-too-much-Dayquil-and-something-is-definitely-wrong heart rate. I could feel the abnormal thump in my chest. I knew without proof that this was the effect of the snake venom. I didn’t know what type of snake it was, what type of venom it carried, nor how long ago I had been bitten. But in those circumstances, I figured anything would be deadly within twenty-four hours. If I didn’t die outright from the poison, it would debilitate me enough that the desert itself would do me in. I kept walking.

  The sun had gone down, but I kept walking despite being light-headed and dizzy. During the day I had felt somewhat light-headed due to dehydration, but this was different. It felt like there was fluid sloshing around in my head. Even the slightest tilt of my head from a perfectly vertical angle would give me a raging case of vertigo, as if my brain had slipped into that corner of my skull and bunched up. I began to wonder if there was any way I could seatbelt my brain into its proper spot in my head.

  As night continued, my symptoms got worse. When it first got dark, I was thankful for my blanket and the warmth it provided. But then I began to feel a coldness that was inside the blanket. Ice ran through my veins. I could feel it even in my numb left arm. My legs felt the coldest, and I was amazed that I was coordinated enough to keep moving.

  Eventually the ice disappeared and my blood felt lukewarm. This ended up to be more disconcerting. I began to feel as if I were melting. Not a quick melting that would leave me a steaming ooze wondering what a world, but something much slower. As my arms dangled at my sides, I felt as if my skin could no longer contain me. Imagine that your skin suddenly became more porous, so that you felt that your substance was going to leak out your fingertips and fall to the ground. I kept raising my fingers to my eyes expecting to see rivulets of myself flowing down, but I only saw my regular skin, strangely pale.

  The moon was full and provided a strange radiance. When I looked up at the sky, I noticed the clouds were moving across it far too fast. Instead of the lazy movement of clouds, unhurried and unstressed by the day, these moved furtively across the sky as if they were hiding something. Their speed reminded me of time-lapse video. The moon was never fully covered by the clouds, so there was always enough light to keep walking. Which I did.

  At some point, I realized I was being followed. As I scaled a ridge, I looked back on the broken earth behind me and saw a dark form. I focused my eyes, but it had hidden itself in the shadow of rocks. A few minutes later, I looked back again and saw its dark form. No matter how far I walked, it was always behind me. In my weakened state, I found I could not lose my pursuer. I could not judge if they were gaining on me, but how could they not in the state I was in?

  I walked faster, knowing that the dark presence was gaining on me. I began to feel goose bumps on the back of my neck from its malevolent stare. I knew that I had to somehow outpace it, to somehow find someplace safe before it overtook me. If it caught up with me, I knew that everything was lost. I found myself involuntarily touching the hand-shaped bruise on my arm.

  I was sweating profusely. I didn’t realize I even had enough fluids to sweat. My arms shook and my whole body was ice again. My head throbbed, but I knew that evil was still following me. Every time I looked back, I could see the darkness shaped like a man. Over time it had gotten bigger. It must have been seven feet tall now, but I couldn’t be sure. The rocks and desert gave me no sense of scale. All I knew was that it kept following me. No good could come of it.

  My breathing was heavy and I could barely take another step. It was still behind me, but I wasn’t sure how long I could keep moving. I climbed another ridge, using my hands as much as my legs to move forward. My hands were bruised and scraped. I hoped safety was just past this. I hoped there was some sort of a finish line. I pulled myself to the top of the ridge and looked out.

  Disappointment struck as I saw nothing for miles around. Desert, rocks. Not a road, rails, or the faint reflected lights of a rest stop gas station. After all my walking I had gotten no farther to anywhere. I was still lost. I looked behind me. There was the dark shape. It had stopped moving, watching me as I stood and stared at it. I could only feel fear as my eyes tried to discern its dark form.

  I turned my head back and looked out at the nothing, taking a shaking breath and wondering if I had the strength to keep going. I could give up. I could sit and wait for darkness to catch up with me. Or I could go on. Futile as it seemed, I could go on walking and let my end come from exhaustion, rather than a willful surrender.

  I decided to go on. I took a step forward but my shaking leg did not support me. I tumbled down the ridge, bruising myself on rocks and cracked earth. My head came to rest on a few blades of dead grass. I stared off into the distance in front of me.

  It was at this moment that strangeness overtook me. Like the flickering of an old television being turned on, something appeared in front of me. Where once there was nothing but an endless expanse, now there was suddenly a house. A mirage, I guessed. Some snake bite hallucination. Something false. I was sure of it. Just seconds ago there had been nothing.

  I stared at the house, trying to discern anything about it, but my vision had grown dim. I remember just the pale, sad face of a young
woman staring at me from the house’s window before I lost consciousness, not knowing if I’d ever awake again.

  The House in the Wasteland

  "You've kind of written yourself into a corner," said Nurse Angela.

  She had become a regular reader, and of course, a regular criticizer.

  "It's not a corner. Clearly I escaped. I am here now, aren't I?" I said.

  "True," she said, and looked up at my leg in traction. "But still not taking care of yourself."

  "The doctor said I should at least get the leg out of traction next week," I said.

  "He says a lot of things," she said.

  "Don't you have work to do?" I asked. "Sponge baths and the like? Your presence is tiring. Go. Scoot!"

  She stuck out her tongue at me and left.

  But she was right, I do get pretty banged up, and the hospital was not the first time I had woken up in a stranger's care.

  July, 1994 - ??????

  I did not meet my death out in the desert that night, despite popular belief or the desires of the peanut gallery. I do know that I had a few days I barely remember as I shifted in and out of consciousness. I remember being dunked into icy cold water. I remember my skin burning and something rubbed on my wounds. I remember a sound like pots and pans being banged together, the tinkle of wind chimes, and the howl of the wind.

  I remember a man sitting over me, singing something like a Native American song as the acrid scent of incense filled the room. I remember the beat of drums and the somber sound of breath passing through a flute. I remember snakes hissing and crawling up my legs. I remember a pale, blonde woman looking down at me. She reached to touch my face, and I remember the touch was so light that I didn’t even feel it. I remember a laughing, howling man in a mask and a many colored jacket who held the world high up in one hand as he danced under a blanket of stars.

  My first solid memory was of waking up in bed. I heard the sound of his mortar and pestle before I opened my eyes. He was grinding something as he sat in a chair next to my bed. I had not moved an inch to give any sign of consciousness when he spoke.

  “So you’re awake,” he said as a simple statement. Flat, no enthusiasm. He did not look up from what he was doing.

  He was old, but I realized I had no idea how old he was. He could have been as young as his forties or as old as his seventies. His skin was brown, turned to human leather by the sun. His arms were sinewy and lean, his fingers threaded with hard, twisting veins like the roots of a tree. His hair was dark but faded and streaked with grey, pulled back in a ponytail. He wore no shirt, so I could see that he had no fat on him, yet neither did he have more muscle than he needed. Crow’s feet ringed dark eyes, his nose sharp and his mouth strict.

  “Where am I?” I asked sleepily.

  “You are in my home,” he said in a voice devoid of mirth.

  “How…?” I started to ask.

  “You walked out of the wastes to conveniently fall half dead in front of my house. Minutes earlier or minutes later and you would not have been my problem. The wastes would have swallowed you up.”

  “I’m sorry…?” I ventured. The way he said it, he almost seemed unhappy I hadn’t died.

  “There’ll be time enough to pay debts later,” he said.

  I nervously looked around the room. The walls were wooden planks, like a cabin. From the ceiling hung a variety of metal objects. Not quite wind chimes, but things like cowbells, old pots, discarded pieces of machines. When they did strike together, their sound was not a chime, but instead it was a hollow clanking.

  “What’s your name?” I asked to break the silence.

  “You may call me Mestigus,” he said.

  “Huh. Sounds Greek.”

  Silence.

  “What is that you’re doing?” I said, watching his mortar and pestle.

  “This is a medicinal paste,” he said. “For your snake bite. Most of the venom has left your system. But the snake-spirit still lingers within you.”

  “Spirit?” I asked. “I thought I was just bitten by a snake.”

  “Out here, nothing is just anything. The rules you are used to do not apply out here."

  "The rules I am used to?" I asked. "Like science? I'm pretty sure that applies everywhere."

  “Science is just another set of rituals dictated by different set of shamans. Within the criss-cross of power lines and electric totems, their rules do apply. But out here, they do not.”

  “But clearly they do,” I countered. “There’s still gravity. I don’t go floating out into space.” I paused. “Well, I haven’t yet.”

  He chuckled, which should have been the first warm act I had seen him do, but it was cold, very cold. “Just because their rule describes it doesn’t make it theirs.”

  I shifted uneasily in the bed. He seemed at best eccentric, at worst mentally unbalanced. However, his demeanor was cold, self-contained. He might be crazy, but he was not the I-suck-at-life variety.

  While I thought about my discomfort amongst the crazy, I came to another realization. Under the sheets I was naked.

  “What the hell? Where are my clothes?”

  “Burned,” he said. “They were tainted and I would not bear their stench within my home.”

  “Great, now I’m naked in the middle of the desert with a crazy guy.”

  “I could send you back outside,” he said, staring at me with dark, flat eyes.

  “What’s your deal?” I asked. “I’m sorry I bled on your house and you had to save my life. Clearly I should have collapsed on your neighbor’s front yard. I’ll try not to do it again.”

  “I will work with what is brought to me,” he said, “But that does not mean I have to like what is given.”

  “Well, goddamn it,” I said, “are you going to be passive aggressive the whole time? I wonder why you didn’t just let me die.”

  “If a dying dog collapses on your doorstep, you do not leave it there. The carcass is inauspicious and the dog will stink. You nurse it back to barely alive and send it on its way.”

  “So I’m just a dog to you?”

  “No,” he said, looking at me with dark eyes. “I like dogs better.”

  His stare made me uncomfortable, so I looked around the room again. I rubbed my arms and felt a cold pain on my left arm. I still had the dark bruise of a handprint. Now it had a pale white border around it, as if someone had outlined it with chalk. I try to rub the white away, but it was under the skin.

  “You’ve been marked,” he said, nodding his head towards my arm but not looking up. He had pulled out a thick bristle brush, not unlike a shaving brush, and was dipping it in the paste. He pulled the blanket that covered me, which made me flinch and cover myself. He grabbed the blanket again, more firmly as he stared me down. He moved the blanket so just my snake bite was exposed. I watched as he used the brush to apply the paste on the wound. The pungent odor burned through my nostrils.

  “Marked by what?” I asked.

  “A powerful spirit.”

  “A spirit? The snake spirit?” I asked.

  “No, not the snake. You are marked by one who has stayed in this world far longer than intended.”

  “You mean a ghost,” I said.

  “If you like, yes. But such a name underestimates him. You are marked by one who collects souls.”

  “But he is dead, right?”

  “Out here, life and death are not as separate as you are used to,” he said grimly. “There are many ways to keep living after you have died.” He paused before adding, “And to become filled with death while you still live.”

  A chill washed over me then. I chose to fight it off and instead of accepting it; I questioned it. “How is that even possible? Those are two mutually exclusive states.”

  Again, the mirthless laugh. “We shall see, we shall see.” He put the brush back into the mortar bowl and stood up. “We are done talking for now. Rest, we have work to do.”

  He began to leave, but stopped at the door.

&
nbsp; “I did save one of your belongings,” he said, nodding to the table next to the bed.

  I looked over to the night table, winced and then looked back to the door. He had already left, closing the door behind him. I heard the click of a lock. I looked back at the table and sighed.

  Upon it sat that damn bowler hat.

  I wasn't alone.

  I’m not sure how I knew. The room was silent except for my breathing. I woke up from sleep into near darkness, but somehow I still knew that someone was in the room with me.

  I searched the room, my eyes finally resting on a shape I could make out by the light spilling under the door. It wasn’t the old man; the silhouette was wrong. The faint light gave the suggestion of blonde hair and a smaller build.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  The figure immediately tensed. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be here.” A nervous female voice.

  “Who are you?” I asked again, a little more frantically, fumbling near the bed. I couldn’t remember if there had been a lamp on the nightstand or not.

  I heard footsteps creaking along the wood floor, then a match was lit next to the bed. A pale face in flickering light. She touched her fingers in front of her mouth to signal quiet, then lit a small candle.

  She sat down in the chair next to the bed. I had only the inconsistent light from the candle she held in her lap, but I could see she was pretty. She was around my age. The light coming from below gave weird shadows to her face, making it look more hollow than it should have been. I couldn’t tell what color her eyes were; her eyes were lost in shadow.

  “Who are you?” I whispered.

  “Emily,” she whispered back. “I’m sorry, I can’t stay long. He can’t know I was here…”

  “Are you his daughter?” I asked.

  “No,” was all she said, but the frown on her face revealed much more.