Snakes and Ladders

by Seanan McGuire

  “Look!” Mary said, pointing to a speck of color on the ground, wedged between the gray and jagged shapes of the shoreline rocks. Fran knelt, picking it up, feeling it out between her fingers.

  It was a piece of candy corn.

  Hope rose in her chest as she scanned the lake shore. There was another speck of color about five feet further along. She covered the distance in two long strides, bending to pluck that piece of candy corn from the rocks as well, nestling it next to the first in the hollow of her palm. Why would a trick-or-treater have been wandering along the lake, dropping candy corn as they went? They wouldn’t have. No parent in Buckley who wanted to have children that lived would have allowed it.

  “Oh, Ally, you brilliant little thing,” she murmured, almost running to pick up the third piece of candy corn. The fourth and fifth were visible now, bright little specks of brilliant orange, leading her onward. “Didn’t have any breadcrumbs, and so you found another way to tell us where to go. I’m going to kiss you forever, right after I kill you for scaring me.”

  “Is this the right way?” asked Mary, moving up behind her.

  “Ever wanted to see a gingerbread house?” Fran asked in reply, and started down the shore, following the candy corn trail into the dark.

  *

  The wagon carrying Alice ground to a sudden halt, sending her jolting through the straw and slamming her back and shoulders, hard, against the wooden side of the wagon. She cried out involuntarily, and the voice of the man that had grabbed her hissed, “You be quiet, girl, or you won’t enjoy what happens to you!”

  Alice wasn’t enjoying what was already happening to her. She’d been snatched in the middle of trick-or-treating, threatened with losing parts of her body that she didn’t want to lose, tied up, loaded into the back of a hayrick that smelled like mold and nasty wet straw, and—worst indignity of them all—forced to convince the mice to throw her hard-earned candy out the back of the wagon to give her mama a trail to follow. She tried to think of something she’d like less than what was already happening, and she couldn’t. She was pretty sure she didn’t want to.

  Something rustled the straw above her, and she heard the mice scamper deeper into the recesses of her trick-or-treat bag, hiding themselves among the remaining candy. Then hands were grabbing her roughly by the hair and shoulders, and she whimpered, again involuntarily. A fist struck her across the side of the face, even as the voice snapped, “You keep that brat quiet, you hear me? Her folks may be come-latelies, but that won’t stop people taking an interest if they hear a child carrying on out here.”

  Another voice, this one slow and sullen, said, “I don’t see why we can’t just slice her tongue out.” Alice’s eyes widened behind the blindfold, and she clamped her mouth as tightly shut as it would go, clutching for her trick-or-treat bag as the hands lifted her up out of the straw.

  “The ritual says she needs to be as intact as possible,” said the first voice, in the same sort of patient tone that so many adults used when they were talking to children. Alice didn’t like it any better when it was being used on the adults themselves. “The more intact she is, the better our control will be. Don’t you like the sound of that? Control?”

  “Reckon I do.”

  “Good. Now come on.”

  Alice barely managed to keep her grip on her trick-or-treat bag as she was thrown over the second man’s shoulder, and then they were walking away from the wagon, and from the ending of her makeshift trail.

  Hurry, Mama, she thought, too terrified of the “something worse” that had surely taken the place of cutting off her hand to scream. I’m scared.

  The men kept walking.

  *

  The candy corn trail led the length of the lake shore. To Fran’s delight, it turned away from the swamp, heading back toward Old Orchard Road. Maybe Old Orchard represented the worst part of the town, but she’d take it over the swamp any night of the year; sometimes the people who got lost on Old Orchard Road came back alive. And the people who frequented the Red Angel weren’t bad folks, exactly, no matter what the town said about them—they were just poor, unlucky, or unusual enough to be considered “not our kind” by the hide-bound bastards who held the reins of the town. If she asked them for help, they’d likely help her, especially once they heard that a child was missing.

  It always seemed to be the people with the least to lose that held onto their understanding of what it meant to be a decent human being for the longest. If Alice had been taken somewhere on Old Orchard, she might be able to work up a decent lynch mob, should the need arise.

  They were crossing the hard-packed mud between the lake shore and the highway when the trail of candy corn ran out. The kernels had remained evenly spaced all the way around the lake, appearing about every four to six feet; there was no warning or tapering off before the sudden stop. Fran froze as the trail cut off, staring at the unmarked ground.

  “Fran?” said Mary, uncertainly.

  “Yes?”

  “There’s no more candy corn.”

  “Yes, I see that.”

  “Did she run out of candy corn?”

  “Or whatever’s taken her noticed she was dropping it.” She liked the idea of Alice running out more than she liked the notion of some slavering beast suddenly realizing that its snack was leaving a trail behind. At least there was no blood. She could take comfort in that much, even if she couldn’t take comfort in anything else. There was no blood; for the moment, at least, Alice was almost certainly still alive.

  The one thing she couldn’t allow herself to do was think about the “still” in that statement. If she stopped to think about the “still,” she wouldn’t be able to keep going.

  Mary bit her lip. “So what do we do now?”

  Fran turned, scanning the area. No tracks, no further trail to follow…but in the distance, she could see the lights of the Red Angel glimmering electric yellow through the fog that was rising to circle the lake. “Now we go and ask the locals where they think we need to go.”

  Mary looked at her expression and was afraid.

  *

  The man carried Alice across a corn field—she could hear the dry stalks going crunch-crunch-crunch under his feet, and under the feet of at least three more men—and through a door that creaked on its hinges. There was no more crunch-crunching after that, only the dull thud of footsteps on solid floorboards. They paused as one of the men moved to raise a trapdoor, and then they were going down, the man holding onto Alice with one hand as he descended a steep, rickety ladder.

  “Don’t drop her,” cautioned one of the men.

  “I won’t,” said the one that was carrying her. “I smash her skull in, she’s no good to us anymore.”

  Despite herself, Alice whimpered. She hurt all over from the bumpy ride in the hayrick and the places where she’d been hit, the mice had thrown most of her candy away to make a trail she wasn’t even sure would be followed, she couldn’t see, and now bad men—she was sure they were bad men, at the very least, since good men didn’t usually threaten to cut little girls’ hands off if they made noise—were talking about smashing her skull like it was something reasonable.

  Alice liked her skull. More importantly, she liked her skull not smashed. She’d seen things with their skulls smashed, and as a rule, if they did anything other than lie around and get rotten, her parents shot them. She didn’t want her parents to shoot her for having a smashed-up skull and still moving around, and she didn’t want to be a dead thing, either. So she whimpered, even knowing what was likely to happen as a consequence, and steeled herself against the blow she was sure was coming.

  There was a metallic creaking instead, like the trunk of a car being opened, and she was suddenly flying through the air, losing her grip on her pillowcase as she tumbled, end over end, to slam, hard, into what felt like a series of densely rolled rugs. The wind was knocked out of her, and so she simply sagged there, struggling to breathe, as the men laughed, slamming the door shut behind her.


  “Don’t struggle too much,” one of them called. “Might go fast, if you don’t.” And then their footsteps were moving away from the door, moving back up the ladder, leaving her alone in the dark behind her blindfold.

  She forced herself to count slowly to the highest number she knew—fifty-six, which was where she always forgot whether it was fifty-seven or fifty-eight that came next—and then, when she lost her place, started back over again from one. By the time she finished counting all the way back up five times, the footsteps hadn’t returned.

  Lowering her voice so she hopefully wouldn’t be heard, Alice whispered, “Hey! Hey!”

  A moment later, a squeaky voice replied, “We are here, Priestess.”

  “I’m all tied up. You gotta untie me.”

  “How?”

  Alice paused. The mice were good with the paws, which were really more like tiny hands, but they were too small to manage anything the size of the knots she’d been bound with. “Chew through the ropes,” she said, finally.

  “The teachings of Beth, the Kindly Priestess, tell us that Nice People Do Not Chew Through the Support Cables,” said the mouse. A grave murmuring followed its words.

  Alice groaned inwardly. Running up against one of the catechisms was just about the worst thing she could think of right now, which was saying something, seeing as she was tied up and sprawled on top of a bunch of lumpy old rugs that were anything but comfortable. “They aren’t support cables, they’re stupid ropes, and they’re hurting me!”

  “But the Kindly Priestess—”

  “I’m your new Priestess, and I say when somebody’s all tied up an’ they ask you for help an’ they’re not a bad person or a dead thing or…or…” She fumbled for a moment, trying to think of something else terrible, before finishing, “or from the Covenant, you chew through the ropes an’ you let them out!” The last words came out on a high, indignant note, and she bit her lip, waiting for the sound of the door swinging open and the men making their return.

  It didn’t come. Instead, the mouse said, almost meekly, “You are right, Priestess. Truly, we have forgotten that there are teachings yet to be learned. We are shamed before your sight.” The other mice murmured shame behind him, their tiny, squeaky voices downcast.

  Alice bit back hysterical giggles. “You’re not shamed before my sight,” she said, as sensibly as she could. “I’m blindfolded. Now c’mon and chew through these ropes.”

  “At once, Priestess,” said the mouse. Tiny feet scampered toward her, followed by the sound of teeth gnawing through rope. It was a matter of seconds before her feet were free, pins and needles filling them as the blood began to flow normally again, and then her hands were free, and she pushed herself upright, reaching for the blindfold.

  “Priestess—” said one of the mice, anxiously.

  “In a second, I can’t see,” she said, fumbling with the knot at the back of her head.

  “Priestess, we smell snake.”

  “Get back in the bag, then,” Alice said. Then the blindfold fell away, and she was squinting in the light, which was dim and filtered through the ceiling above her, yet still seemed to be impossibly bright after the artificial darkness.

  She was sitting in a root cellar, with a slatted ceiling of pine boards overhead, and a hard-packed earth floor visible beyond the slightly raised mound that she was currently on the top of. Half the room had been portioned off with a steel gate and tall iron bars, turning it into a prison cell, or a cage. Pushing herself further upright, Alice looked down and frowned. The rugs she’d landed on didn’t feel like rugs; they were too solid, with a slick, scaly feel to them, and there really only seemed to be one of them, wound around and around like a giant cinnamon bun.

  A hissing sound was coming from behind her.

  Alice turned slowly, eyes widening in the darkness, and screamed.

  *

  Frances Healy didn’t so much knock on the door leading to the basement of the Red Angel as “blow it off the hinges.” The two women had approached by way of the lake shore, taking the lower route to the part of the bar whose cryptid clientele was an open secret among certain portions of the town’s population. “If you want to find a fellow with horns or purple skin or whatnot when he isn’t all tied up with sucking out the livers of the locals, you go to the basement of the Red Angel,” Alexander Healy had said, more than once, usually while occupied with stripping the skin off something that had, up until recently, been a part of that selfsame clientele. “They’re generally polite enough down there. Not looking for trouble, unless you come in making it.”

  In the years since she’d moved to Buckley, Fran had only found reason to visit the Red Angel three times. There was a sort of uneasy truce between the Healys and the bar; as long as you stay where you belong, it said, I won’t be forced to kill you. Tonight, Fran was starting to feel like killing a few things might be exactly what she needed. That’s why when she found the door into the lower bar locked, and no one willing to open it for her, she didn’t hesitate before pulling a shotgun out of her sack, much to Mary’s wide-eyed dismay, and shooting the goddamn door right off of its hinges.

  The cloud of dust and shattered wood was still settling as Fran stepped through the hole she’d made and into the room filled with frozen, staring cryptids. “Evening, boys,” she said, pushing her hat back on her head. “Don’t suppose you’ve got a moment to help a lady, have you?”

  Something snarled off to her left. Without turning her head or abandoning her otherwise relaxed position, Fran swung the shotgun around, aiming it squarely at the cat-headed barmaid, who froze, whiskers flattening back against her cheeks. In the silence, the sound of Fran pulling the pistol from her belt and clicking off the safety with her free hand was very, very loud.

  “Now, I recognize this isn’t good manners, and I’m sorry for that,” she said genially, “but Mary an’ me—y’all remember Mary Dunlavy, don’t you? Died a few years back, out on Old Logger’s Road? You go ahead and say hello, now, Mary, don’t be shy—we’re in a bit of a hurry, on account of some two-bit son-of-a-bitch went and carted off my Alice. Now, I said to myself, I said, Fran, ain’t no way the good folks of Buckley would’ve have broken the truce just to make off with a little girl who’d be as much trouble as mine is. But then I thought…maybe y’all didn’t do it. But maybe y’all would know who did.”

  The silence in the room was as deep as an ocean. Fran’s eyes narrowed. “Y’all have me outnumbered; I’ll give you that. But I have a lot of bullets, and I’ll bet you wouldn’t enjoy playing the ‘who does the crazy Healy woman shoot first’ game. Now, does one of you want to share with Auntie Fran, or does Auntie Fran start shooting?”

  For a moment, the silence held. Fran shrugged, saying, “Suit yourself,” and was pulling back the hammer on the shotgun when a voice from the back of the room said, “There’s a new snake cult in town.”

  Fran relaxed her finger, turning toward the voice. “Is there, now?”

  “Shut up, Carl!” shouted a voice from somewhere else in the crowd.

  “Don’t reckon I will,” said the first speaker, and stood. He was a towering figure in logger’s flannel and denim, whose height and excessive body hair only betrayed his Sasquatch blood if you knew enough to look for it. Pushing his cap back from his slightly too-pronounced forehead, he said, “Now, look. These folks aren’t my favorites, what with the shooting and all, but it’s not like they come into our places lookin’ for trouble, most the time, and times like this’un, I can’t exactly say as I blame her.”

  “Keep the numbers down!” called someone else. Fran swung the muzzle of her shotgun in the direction of the voice, but couldn’t find a target in the crowd.

  The logger snorted. “That ain’t neighborly. You think a mama bear’s less inclined to bite if you kill her young? You shut up now, let me get these nice folks out of here.” Folding his arms across his barrel of a chest, he turned back to Fran and Mary. “The cult’s brand new. They just summoned
themselves a god not three days ago.”

  “Saints preserve us from idiots and their damn snake cults,” muttered Fran. More loudly, she said, “What makes you reckon this could lead us to my Alice?”

  “Well, seems to me that since it’s all humans, and they just got their god into town, he hasn’t got too much power yet.” The speaker paused to unfold his arms and take a drink from his tankard, which was large enough to hold near-on a gallon of beer at one go. “Seems to me if I were a human looking to fuel up a snake god, get me some proper power, I’d need sacrifices. And I’d want to snatch them on a night when there were lots of options wandering around. Make sure I got something fresh.”

  “Makes sense,” Fran allowed. “I’m going to overlook the part where you equated snatching my daughter to doing the grocery shopping, provided you do me one tiny little favor.”

  Narrowing his eyes, the logger gave her a suspicious look. “And what’s that?” he asked.

  Fran smiled. In that moment, she looked more like a monster than anyone else in that room. “Tell me where.”

  *

  Alice had never seen a snake god before, except in the pictures in Grandpa’s books. She knew enough to know that they came in all different shapes and sizes, from little slithery ones that looked like normal snakes all the way up to ones big enough to swallow whole houses like they were mice, and she knew enough to know that none of them were exactly friendly to people who weren’t worshipping them. She wasn’t clear on what you did to worship a snake god, since every time people talked about snake gods and their followers in her presence, it was in the context of methods of taxidermical preservation, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t anything good, since her mama didn’t normally get all slitty-eyed and angry about good people existing.

  The figure looming in front of her had the torso, head and arms of a naked, hairless man, with skin covered by the same shiny brown and green scales as covered the twenty-foot length of its tail. The thickest part of it—the part Alice had mistaken for rolled-up rugs—was bigger around than the rain barrel by the kitchen steps. It couldn’t swallow a house, but it could swallow a little girl, easy, without stopping to think about it. Alice took short, panting breaths, trying to swallow her panic. “Never let a wild animal know that you’re afraid,” that was what her grandma always said. “They’ll just get aggressive if they realize that you’re scared.”