Dream of the Serpent

by Alan Ryker

  “I just want to know, what would you do if mom were in trouble.”

  “There’s nothing you could have done, Cody.”

  “I know, Dad. I’m asking about you.”

  “Anything. I would do anything.”

  “What if, say, she got in trouble trying to help you?”

  He gives me the look again, the look that says that he knows that I’m up to something, and that he’ll figure it out sooner or later. “What is this about?”

  “I’ve got all these thoughts spinning around in my head and I can’t seem to find stable ground.” I take a long gulp of coffee that burns my tongue, then stand up. “This was a mistake. I’m sorry.”

  “No,” he says. “Sit down. I can only imagine how hard this has all been on you. Okay, if your mom got in trouble trying to keep me out of trouble? I wouldn’t let her.”

  “She already did. Would you undo what she’d done to get her out of trouble?”

  “I’m having a bit of trouble imagining the scenario, but yes. There’s no way I’d let her take a fall for me.”

  “Even if she wanted to? Even if it meant so much to her that she gave everything? Wouldn’t you respect that?”

  His eyes turn inward, and I can see him really thinking about the dilemma. “I see what you’re getting at: am I sacrificing for her if it would make her unhappy? Should I let her sacrifice for me? What happens when a couple who would give everything for each other both try to give everything?” He’s silent for a minute. “There was a story I read when I was in high school that stuck with me, a Christmas story where the husband sold his watch to get his wife a hair trinket, and his wife sells her hair to get him a watch band. It’s like that, but without a happy ending.”

  “Yeah, I remember that story, too.”

  He snorts a short laugh. “So they still have kids read that. To answer your question: I wouldn’t let your mother sacrifice herself for me. From the terms you gave, I have to admit that it would be out of selfishness, that I couldn’t live with myself.” He stops short, looks at me, trying to stare into my brain. “I don’t like giving advice when I don’t know what it’s about. I’m not sure that was the right advice.”

  For some reason, the memory of him giving me the stack of burn victim memoirs hits me like a brick. I remember how angry it made me, and looking into his concerned face, all I can feel is ashamed. I’m not the man he is. The words don’t even matter. Who he is, that’s the advice I need.

  “Don’t worry, Dad. I just needed some of that parental concern.” I finish my coffee, take the cup to the sink. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  He stands, puts an arm around my shoulder and shakes me a bit. “Call us or come around if you need to talk. Your mother misses you.”

  I nod. “I will. Have a good one.”

  “You too,” he says as I walk out the door.

  * * *

  It’s weird driving downtown in rush hour traffic, considering I live downtown. It’s not something I usually get to experience.

  The drive gives me time to think, time to talk myself out of what I’m about to do. It doesn’t work.

  My phone rings. It’s Janet. I let it ring.

  By the time I arrive downtown my bank is open. I go in and withdraw five thousand dollars in twenties and fifties. Then I get on a bus and ride it as close to the Burnout as it will take me.

  10

  Being on the streets of the Burnout during the day is even more surreal than at night. At night, quiet streets are expected. During the day, the lack of people and crumbling buildings give the Burnout the look of a bombed out town that was never reclaimed.

  The weird thing is that I find myself feeling safer here than in the neighborhoods that are bad, but inhabitable. Then I look into the shadows of shattered windows and remember why no one lives here, and I walk quickly. When I feel the malice of the place, déjà vu washes over me, and then I remember wandering these streets in my coma, the one that never happened.

  I know, now, the sign of the Serpent, and I can spot it if I look hard enough.

  The plywood over the windows of an old filling station is marked. The pumps are missing, and as I circle the building looking for an entrance I see that the lids covering the underground gas cistern are also missing.

  I find a back door still intact and pull it open on screeching hinges. The smell of piss punches me in the sinuses, and as I pull my flashlight I try and fail to acclimate to the stench.

  I find an old bag woman, and I keep the light in her face.

  “Are you here for the Serpent?” I ask.

  “Yes. I’m ready to go.”

  “Do you know where the Serpent lives?”

  She doesn’t answer. Her face goes hard. “No.”

  “Do you know another place like this? A place they go?”

  “No!” Her wrinkled face screws itself up. Saliva glistens in her nearly toothless mouth as she tells me to go fuck myself.

  “They won’t want you,” I say. “You’re too old. You have nothing to give them.”

  I feel terrible as her face collapses on itself and tears immediately fill her eyes. But this isn’t the time for compassion.

  “But I can help you,” I say. “Show me to another place like this and I’ll give you twenty bucks.”

  “Fifty,” she says, her eyes glinting even beneath the tears.

  “Fifty.”

  She moves slowly, muttering to herself as she goes. I want to hurry her along, but I feel she could change her shattered mind at any moment. It feels like I’m asking an old land mine not to explode, and I want to do nothing that might set her off.

  Her cart doesn’t help. She gets stuck in areas where the road has crumbled, where pipes have been dug right out of it.

  She stops in the middle of the road, and I think that one of her squeaking wheels must have gotten stuck again, but she points to a house, and on the house, hidden in layers of spray paint is the snake swallowing its own tail.

  I hand her the promised fifty and go in.

  * * *

  This is how it goes, hour after hour, bribing, cajoling, threatening. No one will ever admit to knowing where the Serpent lives, but we can all feel its coils sliding around us, its scales rattling.

  Once, I’m abandoned in the middle of the street when I look away from my guide. Later, I have to duck into a half-collapsed building to avoid a small band of searchers, my treacherous guide at their head wanting more then the promised hundred dollars, wanting everything I’ve got in my pockets and probably more.

  They pass, and I find another sad soul, and I keep going.

  I only have to pull my pistol once, but I keep a hand on it the entire time.

  The hours pass. I’ve walked miles and gotten nowhere. It reminds me of Ouroboros circular path, only able to move forward and back but always eventually returning to the same point. There’s something there, something in that thought, but my shifty guide, some drug-ravaged junkie, stops before an old shop in a strip of shops and holds out a filthy hand. I give him fifty.

  This building is empty. I’ve found them empty many times over the course of the day, but managed to find another Serpent marked building, or a person living like a rodent in a trash heap who knew of another. This time I sit, heaving myself up onto the dusty countertop of what was once a checkout area. As the sun sets, the light is leaving the Burnout to its true self, its dark self. The residents of the shadows will be easier to find as the shadows expand and merge, but I don’t think I’ll want to find them.

  I’m so tired.

  I take out my phone, turn on the GPS and open a map of the area. I start marking the places claimed by the Serpent, leaving a little virtual pin stuck everywhere I’ve visited over the course of that long day. A pattern begins to emerge almost immediately, and I don’t even have to finish to see where this is leading.

  I’ve been going in circles. No wonder it feels like I’ve walked so far. Everyone knows the shortest path is a straight line, and I haven’t ta
ken the straight path from one side to the other once today.

  I’ve been wandering the dead core of the city, but been unknowingly avoiding what I suspect is the rottenest cavity of the dead core.

  Did they know? Some part of them knew. Even if they weren’t consciously aware, they were skirting an area where even the burnouts of the Burnout don’t dare tread.

  I zoom in, and one huge structure dominates the center of my satellite orbiting. It’s the center of many communities.

  Maybe you need to go back to school.

  Ouroboros and his Serpent cult live in Franklin High School.

  11

  My exhaustion is washed away by a tidal wave of adrenaline, and I take off in the direction of the school.

  The clue, the cute little clue…Ouroboros wants me to find him. The pictures…Now I know what those strange, gleaming metal bars are. Not the bars of a cage. Desk legs. The photos are of Madison sitting on the tiled floor of a classroom, surrounded by the old school desks.

  I could have spent weeks wandering within a two block radius of the school the way things were going, but as soon as I see it, I feel its gravity, I know why an orbit around the building is so easy to fall into.

  Franklin High School stands three stories, but seems taller. It’s old, not one of the new, sprawling schools that look more like a shopping mall. Franklin High School is three stories and two wings of dark, looming brick.

  What better place to house a cult? Leaving alone the social commentary of a school already being a place of indoctrination, the building is made to keep students in and intruders out. The first floor windows are all caged. There’s only one apparent entrance from the front. It’s not marked with the seal of the Serpent, but it doesn’t need to be. The Serpents coils guided me here as surely as they’ve kept others out.

  I enter the chain link fence, and the gravity of the building grows as it begins to loom overhead. I have a strong urge to fight its pull, but to where? This is where the answers are. I could turn around and live my made-up existence and try to forget this, but I never could. I could never let it go. I need to know.

  So I go on.

  I wonder how I’m going to get inside the huge, sturdy-looking metal doors if they’re locked, until a man opens one and waits as I approach. I resist the urge to shove a hand down into my jacket pocket there to find small, false comfort from my heavy little pistol.

  The man stands before darkness, and it seems to reach out of the school to envelop him. None of the light of the setting sun reaches him so that I don’t recognize him until I’m twenty yards away. At least I think I recognize the bald man from the night I didn’t get shot by two street punks.

  “Are you—?”

  “Yeah,” he says, stepping aside to let me in. “He’s been waiting for you.”

  “So he did know. How?”

  “Some posh mark wanders around the Burnout flashing a stack of cash, and you think that goes unnoticed? You think you’d still be alive if he didn’t want you to be? Do you know what kind of people live here? They could leave, but they don’t. Ask yourself why.”

  Any feeling of being streetwise leaves me at this. There are no double memories this time, but Ouroboros saved me today nonetheless. I should probably be dead a dozen times over. The urge to grab my gun hits me hard, and then the recognition of the futility of that urge hits me even harder and I bark out one sharp laugh before I catch myself.

  “You think that’s funny?” He turns in disgust and walks away into the darkness, and I only assume I’m supposed to follow.

  To the left and right are huge hallways whose walls are broken by doorways every few dozen feet, continuing until darkness swallows the sight and I have to assume they go on forever. Those are the classrooms. Baldy doesn’t lead me into these wings, but straight down the center of this three-story high atrium that bisects the school. Men sit silently back. They don’t chat. They just watch. Men like baldy. The Serpent. They must keep the junkies and bums elsewhere. I think this dismissive thought, reducing human misery to a snide joke, until I remember that Madison is one of those burnouts that they have stored somewhere in here. I consider myself civilized, and it’s that easy for me to reduce suffering people to less than human. So how easy is it for men like these?

  The walls are lined with wood and glass cases in various states of wreckage. The air is thick with dust and mold, though I can’t see it for the darkness, which our footsteps echo up into.

  Because it’s dark and because of the debris, I watch the floor as we go. A few yards ahead of me, the floor shifts, slides...slithers. For a moment I feel dizzy, as if everything sturdy in the world has gone limp.

  “What the fuck was that?” I ask in a voice I’d prefer not to have let this dangerous man hear.

  “A snake. A big one.”

  I freeze at that. Baldy walks on a few steps without me, then stops and looks back. With a smirk he says, “You come looking for the Serpent when you’re afraid of snakes?”

  “Who isn’t afraid of snakes? Why are they here? Are you keeping up some sort of fucking theme?”

  He laughs at this, looks at me like maybe I’m not quite as dumb as he thought. Nearly, but not quite. “They were here before me, but from what I understand, this building used to have a rat problem.”

  Glancing around the place, it’s not hard to imagine.

  “People showed up. Their trash piled up. The rats poured in from blocks around. Somebody brought in some cats. The rats ate the cats. Someone suggested dogs, like terriers. Ratters. Ouroboros, he doesn’t like dogs. So some freak brought in a few snakes, and they got the rats under control.”

  “Shouldn’t they have moved on afterward?” I ask, as if maybe the snakes will hear me and clear out once they realize how illogical they’re being.

  “Yeah, they should have. But they didn’t. They started pouring in like the rats did before. No one knows why.” His expression hardens again. “Question time over. Let’s go.”

  But we don’t go more than twenty feet before he points up at the wall. There’s little light, but I clearly see the school seal, a big, round placard. I wonder why he’s calling attention to it, until I see what encircles the seal.

  An enormous, serpentine skeleton, its bony tail in its mouth. The thing must be ten feet long.

  “That was Leviathan. He was Ouroboros favorite,” he says with a smile before moving casually on.

  I pray Leviathan was unique in his size, that like the dinosaurs, his progeny have diminished.

  As we pass the men sitting beside battery-powered lanterns, I stop watching the floor for snakes for long enough to finally get a look at the members of this brotherhood of the Serpent. I expected something else of a secret society, something more postured, civilized, impressive. The men are well-fed, but otherwise fit their blasted environment, looking like refugees squatting in wreckage. They’re dirty, so that their eyes stand out large and glistening in the lamplight as they track me. Many have shaved heads, but what I took for some cultish denigration or monk-like casting off of the worldly I suspect may be a way to prevent lice.

  “Why are you here?” I ask.

  Baldy looks at me like I’m the world’s biggest idiot before saying, “This is where he lives.”

  “But you, why are you here?”

  “Some people he helps immediately. The stronger of us, though, he makes wait. We serve him until he agrees to help us.”

  “What help could you need so badly?”

  “None of your fucking business,” he says without even a glance back.

  We approach an end to the atrium, the school office. I follow baldy up to what was once a glass wall. Beyond it stands a long counter where the school secretaries would have helped students and parents.

  Oh God, Ouroboros has settled into the principal’s office? What a joke.

  But we don’t step into the administrative section. Instead we turn and approach a metal door marked MAINTENANCE. Beside it stands a man with a shotgun. He sti
ffens, recognizes Baldy, or maybe both of us, and opens the door. We walk through a room lined with shelves stocked with moldering cleaning supplies. We pass an industrial sink, turn a corner, and another man with a shotgun looks us over before waving us forward.

  I follow baldy, but the guard stops him, gestures to me and says, “Just him.”

  “That’s not safe. He never—”

  “It’s what he wants.”

  Baldy steps aside, shaking his head and giving me a glare as I pass him. When the man with the gun makes way for me, I see that the door he stood before is also marked with a sign.

  BASEMENT.

  As the guard opens the door and cool, musty air rolls out of the door, I’m surprised by how much I want baldy to continue escorting me. I don’t want to go into that darkness alone. In the face of that prospect, this man is suddenly my friend. Maybe that’s all friendship is.

  My musing is cut short as I’m ushered through the door and down onto the first dark step, and every rational thought leaves me as the metal door clangs shut. It bumps me in the back, and I have to grab the metal rail bolted into the concrete wall to keep from falling. I turn and grab the door knob, and despite the fact that I searched this out I think I would go back if a man with a gun weren’t blocking my way.

  My lungs suck in only the shallowest breaths of the sour air. I slow them. Deepen them. Take in my surroundings. My eyes begin to adjust. There’s more light than I first thought, and I begin to descend the stairs. Halfway down, the right wall stops and opens up into the basement. I’m about to peek around the corner when I hear a noise behind me and turn.

  The door is still shut, but I hear a distinct rustling and a very light, dry slapping. Then I notice a semi-circle of light at the bottom of the door, now at eye level, the shape of a mouse hole but dark in the center. As I watch, the darkness in the center diminishes.

  Then I see it. Someone had cut a hole in the door. The light came from the maintenance room beyond. The shrinking darkness was the narrowing body of an enormous snake as it slithered through to join me on the staircase.