Snake Eyes

by Hillary Monahan

  “Do my best. If she goes into labor—”

  “I’ll get her to a hospital.”

  “Good.” Tanis paused. “She has insurance. Make sure she brings her card.”

  Bernie flicked her on the ear. “Stop fretting.”

  Easier said than done.

  Naree was all Tanis thought about as she shouldered her way through a gaggle of yapping college kids to get to the back room. Past the beaded drape, into the storage room. She eyeballed the stairs leading to the bedroom, but then noticed that the back door of the building was propped open with a concrete block. She could hear voices outside. There was the smell of wax and herbs and things Tanis couldn’t immediately identify, and she followed her nose out to a modest courtyard. There was Maman, seated on a plastic chaise longe with rusty hinges, people surrounding her and hanging on her every word. Maman looked totally at ease holding court. She sipped her drink and smiled, intently listening to her flock, a pepper adorning the edge of her drink glass like a lime would on anyone else’s. She’d wrapped her hair in a bright red scarf and wore a royal blue sundress with white flowers all over it, the skirt flirting around her knees, her feet bare.

  Spotting Tanis, she sat up.

  “Koulèv! So glad you could join us. I ache from your fuck. You are surely blessed.”

  There were easily a dozen people in the courtyard and every single one of them turned to ogle Tanis. She wanted to melt away right then and there. Her hand went to her mouth, her face radiating. She expected censure or mocking from her gawkers, but there was none. An unspoken current passed through the crowd and they parted to reveal an altar against the back wall, draped with black, purple and white cloths, complete with candles, funereal crosses and skulls. There were offerings, too, of rum and peppers and cigars and pieces of silver. On the right side was a vase full of black feathers, perhaps for Maman; on the left, beautifully decorated bottles. There were flags tacked to the brick exterior of the building next door, showing skulls and crosses and what looked like saints, picked out in sequins and bright threads. It was beautiful, even if Tanis knew nothing about what any of it meant.

  Maman glanced at her wrist, at a fine gold watch, and offered her hand to one of the people standing nearest her, a darkly tanned, heavyset woman with a port wine birthmark on her neck. She pulled Maman to her feet with minimal struggle.

  “You want the most of your six hours, I’m sure.” Maman winked and drained her rum glass, giving it to the closest worshipper and sauntering Tanis’s way with an exaggerated sway of her hips. She placed her warm hand against Tanis’s cheek, pursing her ruby lips together in obvious appreciation.

  “You are most fine, Tanis. Most fine indeed.”

  That’s the first time she’s used my name.

  “Manbo, what do you need?” a male voice called.

  “A cloth for the koulèv’s eyes. What is ours is not hers. To the floor, koulèv. We will get underway.” She grabbed Tanis’ hand and led her to the center of the courtyard, everyone stepping back to give Maman room to work. The bricks below Tanis formed a circle, and Maman positioned her in the middle of it, on her back, looking up at a star-riddled sky and a moon closer to full than not. The heavyset woman who’d pulled Maman up from the chair offered Maman a pillow, and Maman knelt by Tanis’s head, the pillow tucked beneath her body to keep her comfortable.

  An older man with glasses produced a strip of purple fabric for the Manbo. She leaned down to fasten it over Tanis’ eyes, whispering into her ear.

  “Heed me, little koulèv. Be ready. Be wary. I have fondness for you, yes, but I cannot protect you beyond the gate. Track your path, don’t get lost. Your eyes will deceive you. Remember, the deadlands are full. You are never alone, no matter how it appears.” Maman pressed a soft kiss to Tanis’s forehead. “Keep the blindfold on until the water comes and no sooner, yes? And when you are done, find your way back to your starting point. That is where I will wait.”

  “What do you mean by ‘until the water comes’?” Tanis asked, smelling tobacco on the air; it was similar to what Papa smoked earlier.

  Maman chuckled. “You will know. Do not worry. Do you have your pipe?”

  “In my pocket. The gun’s in my waistband.”

  “The gun is worthless. The pipe, not so much. At ease, koulèv. At ease.”

  There was shuffling all around, bodies moving in close. Tanis could smell the strangers’ skin, their sweat, the last meals they’d had for dinner or their minty gum. A drum sounded, then quieted, as Maman’s voice rose in a beautiful prayer that Tanis had never heard before and couldn’t understand; it wasn’t English or Greek. It was sing-song and lovely, and every few lines, the people gathered would answer Maman with similarly musical lilts. Sometimes there was more drum, but then it would go quiet again, letting Maman continue her veneration. This went on for a while, Maman guiding the ceremony as their Manbo. Tanis listened, and as she listened, her body rhythm dropped to the tune of the ritual. Her breathing slowed, her heart rate slowed. She was caught in a current of prayer and song, her nose full of candle wax and incense. She felt swimmy, not quite right, like she was drunk but, at the same time, totally aware of every part of her body in relation to everyone and everything around her.

  How is this possible?

  It wasn’t comfortable, she didn’t like it, and she almost asked Maman to stop; but then the water came. It struck her face, her shoulders, her upper body. It was freezing, a complete body shock, and Tanis darted up, cold needling her skin and making her teeth chatter. She slapped at her chest, realizing that she wasn’t actually wet. The sensation abated as the seconds ticked by.

  The voices are gone.

  She rolled the blindfold up and off of her face. Darkness everywhere, as far as she could see—or, more appropriately, not see. Her eyes adjusted, and she was able to make out the black tones on blacker tones. It was a field of tall grass, similar to what she’d trekked through in the Glades, except touching the blades proved it was all dry and dead. Spartan, mangled trees dotted the flat landscape. A crow cawed and cut across the starless, moonless sky. Charcoal clouds scrambled in the distance, a flash of lightning zapping the ground every few seconds, but there was no thunder behind it.

  Silence.

  Tanis stood, whirling to see if it was all endless dead fields forever, but no, behind her were mountains. They were enormous, touching the sky, their peaks angry, jagged teeth jutting up from the earth. She tilted her head back and inhaled. It wasn’t hard to catch the scent of the river—water, but soiled. It was shit and death and blood and putridness. She gagged, covering her mouth, and stepped forward only to remember at the last second what Maman said about tracking her path back to the starting point. With few landmarks nearby, with nothing on her to act as breadcrumbs, she did the only thing she could think to do given the circumstances.

  She bit into her own finger and bled on the ground, squeezing the tip. Every few feet, as she walked in the river’s direction, she made sure she splashed a few more drops. She wouldn’t be able to see them, but she’d be able to smell them, even with other blood stench nearby. It wasn’t as good a marker as piss, but she wasn’t about to whip out her dicks in the deadlands of all places.

  Something could bite them off.

  Through the grass and toward the mountains. More crows screeched, some settling on the emaciated carcasses of the here-and-there trees to witness her passing. Tanis had to keep gnawing on her finger to coax more blood out, but the temporary pain was worth the knowledge that, when she was finished with her grim business, she could find her way back.

  Six hours, Papa had said, and she pulled out her cell phone to check the time. It should have occurred to her to bring a manual watch; there was no signal in the deadlands, and for the first time ever, her clock showed straight hash marks for time. Annoyed and unnerved, she shoved it back into her pocket, the one on the left, because the one on the right had Papa’s pipe. Her hand brushed the gun at her hip. Useless, Maman said.

>   But I like it there anyway. It’s like a Tanis-sized pacifier.

  There was no path forward, no clear way to go, and so Tanis trod toward the mountains, grass as high as her hips and breaking beneath her shoes but never making a sound. Walls of black flies greeted her a short while later, but she pressed on through them, their feathery wings striking her face, their spindly, silken legs tickling her neck. She batted them away, keeping her mouth closed so they couldn’t sail in and choke her. One flew into her eye and she cursed, her voice the only thing to break the stillness surrounding her as she plucked it out and flung it.

  The river felt like it was forever away, but she knew she made progress by the size of the encroaching mountains and the rising stink. Still she bled, ever wary of the deadlands with its grass, its dead trees, its crows. “You’re never alone,” Maman had said, and she knew that was true despite the quiet. It seemed like a forgotten place, a void of nothing, but there was a heaviness on the air, a thickness and energy that spoke to things bigger than what she could perceive with the naked eye. She felt it on her skin. She breathed it into her lungs and knew the Other was nearby.

  The first finger stopped donating blood so she bit a second, and it drizzled true all the way to the mountain. It was hard to say how long had passed: two minutes, two hours. The timelessness was not her friend, and so she started to trot, the grass giving way to a rough black gravel and a thick soot that sank beneath her feet. The water was close, that she could tell, the smell so overwhelming she took to breathing through her mouth so she didn’t gag. The incline got steep and hard to navigate, and she had to stop to assess her approach. It took her a bit to spot the pass; it was narrow and tucked behind a line of dead shrubbery, a spindly fence cutting out the right side from the rest of the mountain. She jogged for it, dismayed to discover that the fence was not made of wood, but bones tethered together with spindly red twine.

  That’s pleasant.

  She followed it up, following the slope to the left and down, until she crested a rise in the path and finally laid eyes upon the river. It was black and raging, the current far faster than any river she’d ever seen before. Clots of gray foam formed along the banks, snagging on jutting rocks and fallen tree limbs covered with unpleasant green slime. Bones littered the shores, some skeletons scattered like an animal had been at them, some in repose and unmolested, and by the lack of clothing or artifacts, they’d been there a very long time.

  Tanis didn’t have to stretch her imagination too much to see herself among the debris, lost and forgotten, arms forever reaching for something just beyond her grasp.

  She worked her way down the mountainside, her feet sliding through soft, eroding silt. Her hand gripped the bone fence beside her for purchase, finding it surprisingly sturdy. It was perhaps strange, but the logistics of her trip didn’t occur to her until her descent. A lwa had granted her passage to the River Styx. Did Papa have access to Tartarus because he was a lord of the dead? Did he sneak her in under Hades’ nose? Or were all deadlands one land, only the names and gods ushering you across changing? She had questions she probably should have asked back in that parking lot on Canal, but there’d been so much whirling around in her skull, so many possible ways their bargain could have gone wrong, it hadn’t occurred to her. And frankly, it wasn’t important.

  She was where she needed to be to get what she needed to get. That was all that mattered.

  She hit the flat ground below, almost stepping on a skull. She picked her way around the bones best she could, but there were so many in every direction, sometimes she had no choice but to crunch over them. When she picked her way to the riverside, it occurred to her that the Styx made no sound at all, despite the churning violence of the current. No hissing or spitting or whooshing. It was stone silent, and remained that way as Tanis crouched down in more soft, black silt. It wasn’t wet at all, feeling more like sand beneath her, which was probably good because wet meant dead and she liked being not-dead.

  She wanted to get home to Naree.

  She reached into her jeans pocket for the pipe and drew it forth. She watched the flow of water, how it broke upon the juts along the edges of the banks and splashed up in places. It’d do no one any good if she was stupid and got her hand splashed while she collected her sample, and so she waited for the right time, for a stretch of calmer water. It wasn’t exactly predictable, but there were some spots that lulled more than others, and she crouched in wait, pipe lid up, her arm poised and ready for the dash.

  “Here goes,” she muttered to herself. She counted down from three. On “two,” she lashed her arm out, dunking the pipe into the black water, and for a terrible moment, when she broke the surface, she saw the souls trapped below. Twisted faces, mouths agape, eyes white and forever staring, cheeks hollow. They were there, hundreds of them. Thousands, millions. Toiling and trapped in the savage pull of the water. Tanis only spied them for a heartbeat, but even that was too much, and she scampered back from the shore, her pipe full, a splash of water arcing up and damned near sprinkling her foot.

  “Shit, shit!” She looked inside the bowl of the pipe. It wasn’t full anymore, but it was close enough she didn’t have to dip back into the Hell waters. She held the pipe away from her body as she regained her feet, abandoning the shore, content to never look back at the Styx. Back to the mountain, holding onto the bone fence and pulling herself up the side, exerting herself on the steep slope and soft ground.

  It was only when she reached the peak where she’d seen the river that she heard the squealing. It was a shrill, high-pitched shriek, echoing from the hills and carrying across the deadlands, diminishing to a terrible hiss. Tanis’ eyes jerked to the mountainside, at the black monolith shape before her, searching the landscape for its feral secret.

  “You are never alone, no matter how it appears,” Maman had said.

  Tanis pulled the gun from her waistband seconds before the mongoose lunged.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  MONGOOSES WEREN’T SUPPOSED to be six feet long and hundreds of pounds. They weren’t supposed to have glowing golden eyes and inch-long fangs. They certainly weren’t supposed to bleed into the shadows so it was impossible to anticipate where they’d strike from next.

  There was an exception to every rule.

  It isn’t a mongoose at all. It’s shaped like one, but it’s something else. Something worse. Something that took the form of a snake killer to hunt me.

  Tanis’s first gunshot blasted through its head, and in any normal creature, that would have been the end of it. It barely slowed the damned thing. The bullet parted the dense blackness, creating a ravine through its big, weaselly skull, but it reformed seconds later, the mongoose bellowing with rage as it lunged for Tanis’s legs. She sidestepped, but one of the front paws had enough reach to rake her across the back of the calf. The claws shredded her jeans, the thick fabric protecting her skin, but another strike like that and she’d be shredded to the bone.

  The pipe slipped in her grasp and she adjusted her grip, taking off running for the path ahead. The mongoose was quick and it was agile, keeping pace with her despite the steep incline of the mountain. It screamed again, its deafening cry echoing in the stillness. It had no scent, because it wasn’t real. It wasn’t an actual creature, but the shadow of the deadlands itself coming for her, and shadows had no smell.

  Shadows shouldn’t have claws either.

  Tanis’s feet pounded the soft dirt of the mountain pass. She skimmed her hand over the top of the bone fence as she ran to the bottom, using it as a guide as she worked her way down. As she hit flat land, the mongoose leaped from the stony crags to cut her off. It blocked her way, hunching its back, hackles up, eyes huge and rimmed red, jaws slathering. The claws slashed out, smacking at the air and promising menace, and she had to duck and roll to avoid them, her grip on the pipe wavering.

  If one drop escapes, I’m done. It’s all over.

  Fuck.

  The mongoose circled her, lunging and
biting and gnashing its teeth. Instead of running at the grass where her blood trail was, she took off alongside the mountain to try to zag her way around the shadow creature. It was fast, not as fast as she was, but it was a good jumper; any distance she made, it recovered with a few lunges. It shrieked at her back as she sprinted, her breath coming fast. The thick deadlands air filled her lungs, her nostrils flaring as she tried to pick up her own scent markers. Nothing yet, she wasn’t close enough, and she veered back toward where she thought she’d come earlier. The landscape wasn’t kind to her; the grass extended for miles, the trees few and far between. One of them, some yards up, looked vaguely familiar-ish, and she headed for it, the crows standing sentry on the branches squawking irritably that she’d led the mongoose their way.

  Another wheezing snarl behind her. Tanis pointed the gun back and fired off three shots. They obliterated the shadowy beast, but it coalesced against in moments, picking up its pursuit like nothing had happened.

  Maman said the gun was useless. She didn’t say tits-on-a-bull useless.

  The mongoose lunged at her left side and so she veered right, the grass pushing against her, a tide that had been ignorable before but not so with a nightmare on her heels. She was slowed by the tiniest of fractions, but enough to count. The mongoose lashed out, snarling, caught the back of her T-shirt in its grasp and jerked back. The pipe flew from her hand, but she didn’t dare try to catch it in case the cap unlatched and water drizzled over her hand. She fell forward and the thing was on her, claws digging into her back, pain tearing through her body. She grunted, pushing herself up onto her forearms as the jaws clenched on her shoulder, teeth sinking into the meat. It shook its head back and forth like a dog worrying a bone, trying to tear pieces of her away. A hot wash of blood poured down her neck, her arms. She nearly buckled from the pain, but she couldn’t. She had to stay up.