Serpent's Kiss

by Ed Gorman

  The key turning in the lock now-

  The doorknob being turned-

  The door being pushed inward-

  The smell of the day's heat and a man's sweat-

  And there, framed perfectly in the doorway, sunlight blasting behind him and turning him into little more than a silhouette, stood Richard Dobyns.

  He barely hesitated.

  He started to turn.

  It was obvious he was going to run.

  "No!" she shouted, her voice almost hysterical in the ancient shadowy room.

  She had waited all these years for proof. And now her proof was running away from her.

  She lunged for Dobyns, grabbing him by the sleeve.

  "I want to help you. You've got to believe me," she said.

  He was in the doorway, out of breath now, fear lurid in his eyes.

  "Close the door, Richard, and I'll help you." She took the tone of a person trying to reassure a child or a skittish animal.

  "You're not the police?"

  "No."

  He stared out the doorway with a real longing. Freedom lay that way. In this room was only a mysterious woman who claimed to want to help him but whom he deeply distrusted. She could see all this in his gaze.

  "I know what happened at Hastings House," she said.

  He put a shaky hand to his mouth. He licked dry lips.

  "And I know about the thing in your stomach, too," she said.

  "My God," he said. "Who are you?"

  And then he quietly closed the door behind him and came back into the apartment.

  ***

  The old black manual Royal was O'Sullivan's pride. It made him feel like a real journalist.

  Would Edward R. Murrow have used a wimpy word processor?

  Hell no.

  O'Sullivan saw the word processor as just one more symbol of journalism's decline.

  In journalism school now (or TV school as the kids these days called it) the professors spent as much time on 'presentation', (i.e., how to put on makeup and hair spray) as they did on writing news stories.

  And it showed in the kind of writing you saw on local TV. Badly structured pieces that didn't answer half the questions they raised, sometimes including-incredibly enough-the basics of the story itself.

  But the makeup looked good.

  And the King Kong hair spray was working hard.

  So to hell with journalism.

  O'Sullivan was thinking all these uncharitable thoughts because Dashing David Starrett had just handed in another totally incomprehensible tale about alleged corruption in city hall.

  Not until halfway into the story did Starrett's copy tell you which city council members were allegedly involved. Not until three fourths of the way in did the copy tell you what the specific charges were. And three times in a page and a half of copy Starrett seriously violated not only the letter but the spirit of the English language.

  Unfortunately for O'Sullivan, who usually ended up rewriting Dashing David's stuff, the kid was the darling of the news consultants. He booked well in focus groups because-as one grandmotherly woman supposedly told the consultant-he 'has dreamy eyes.'

  Though he was not yet quite twenty-five, Dashing David would most likely get a network job within the next few years.

  He had the 'presentation' part down and there was always an O'Sullivan type somewhere to do the rewriting for him.

  O'Sullivan wondered if Edward R. Murrow had had dreamy eyes.

  Somehow O'Sullivan couldn't imagine that.

  He took a break at a quarter to five.

  The news would be on the air in another hour and fifteen minutes so he stood in his doorway watching the craziness.

  Reporters literally tripped over each other as they stumbled toward deadlines rewriting, reediting, repolishing. There was, predictably, a flare up of egos and tempers in front of one of the small editing rooms. With nine reporters and only three rooms, the video machines needed to complete a story were at a premium. A few times punches had even been exchanged.

  As he stood there, feeling properly paternal about this whole resplendent process of TV journalism, O'Sullivan started wondering about Chris again.

  Had she been joking about a 'murder' tip?

  Where the hell was she now?

  He went back to his desk and dialled her home number.

  Eight rings and no answer.

  He started wondering again about the tip she claimed to have got.

  If the story was true, it might just save her job as a reporter. How could even the craven consultants deny her usefulness to the staff when she unearthed the exclusive tales of butchery and slaughter so desired by the public?

  He went back to his doorway and looked at his staff of kamikaze reporters.

  He had to admit that even though they all used word processors, a few of them actually had the makings of good journalists. A few of them had got into the job not because of the glamour, but because they understood-corny as it sounded-the vital role journalism played in a democracy.

  Holland was like that. A serious reporter.

  Maybe that was why he liked her so much (and a hell of a lot more than he'd ever let on to her, being of the generation of men who believed that women could guess your true feelings through intuition or some goddamned thing like that).

  So where the hell was Holland anyway?

  For the first time he had the thought that maybe if the murder call was the real thing, Holland might be in a little trouble.

  And that didn't make O'Sullivan feel good at all.

  Even if he didn't tell her how much he cared about her (after a few brewskis, he sometimes even admitted to himself that he might even l-o-v-e her), he worried about her sometimes.

  Sometimes he worried about her a lot.

  6

  EVERY MENTAL HOSPITAL had somebody like Gus living within its walls. He'd been at Hastings House so long-some said ever since Dwight Eisenhower had been elected president-that he didn't even have a last name anymore. He was just Gus.

  At this point in his life, he was round, fish belly white, balding, and just as strange as he'd been the day his mother had first brought him here after Gus had complained too many times about the small green Martian man who kept trying to poison him. Every time the staff recommended that Gus be granted a few days at home, he would invariably do something that would make them rescind the order. One time it was sneaking into old Mrs. Grummond's room and taking a dump under her pillow because she hadn't wanted to watch Superman in the TV room. Another time it was dressing up in Katie Dowd's slinkiest nightgown and strolling into the games room, lipstick like a rash on his mouth, and a red paper rose stuck behind his ear. Perhaps his most memorable moment at Hastings came one September day when the state inspectors arrived to check out rumours of abuse they'd heard about Hastings. Just as they reached the third floor, they heard horrifying screams coming from the opposite end of the hall. Along with Dr. Bellamy himself, the inspectors ran to the source of the screams, out of breath and frightened that something terrible was going on. What they found was that Gus had commandeered the nurse's station loudspeaker microphone and was filling all the speakers with his great imitation of a guy being strangled to death, a trick he'd picked up from an episode on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. By this time, Hastings was a literal zoo-a human zoo-patients so horrified by the screams that they were crying and screaming themselves, and huddling in corners, and running up and down the hall, and fighting with staff nearly everywhere.

  Gus later explained that he was just trying to have a little fun and was sorry that some of the patients had got so scared and that some of the staff had suffered injuries trying to calm down some of the more violent patients. But, hey, if you couldn't have a little fun in a mental hospital, where the hell could you have fun?

  Following this last incident, Gus was made PRN, short for the Latin phrase pro re nata, which means 'as needed'-Gus's personal doctor had given the nurses at Hastings permission to shoot Gus up with 100
mg of Thorazine anytime they felt he needed it. As when Gus went fruitcakes on them three or four times a week, peeing in glasses of orange juice and then drinking them down, finding rats in the closets and killing them and then putting them in other patients' drawers so the vermin would turn green and fester with maggots-which meant that the nurses were damn tootin' going to keep Gus shot up every chance they got. He was just too much hassle to deal with otherwise.

  While Gus sometimes suffered tardive dyskinesia, an involuntary movement disorder suffered by many patients who had been overtreated with drugs, the nurses nonetheless kept him zoned out most of the time. He wasn't violent enough to tie down to a bed in one of the isolation rooms, but he was sure as hell violent enough to keep pacified with a needle.

  When Gus was all medicated up, he walked around a lot. He didn't harm anybody, he just walked. You'd see him in the TV room and in the game room and in the visitors' room and in the hallways. Just shuffling along in his shabby pyjamas and his even shabbier robe and his flapping K-Mart house slippers. Gone was the Gus of shitting-under-people's-pillows and getting-all-dressed-up-in-drag and peeing-in-orange-juice-glasses. All that remained was this shambling, dead-eyed, slack-jawed zombie. He got so bad at these times that he had to be showered with the most helpless patients-gang showered, as they called it, hosed off like a circus animal or a car, just a row of cowering naked people like concentration camp prisoners about to be shot and thrown into a mass grave.

  Yet curiously enough, it was when he was all shot up with drugs that Gus heard the voices. They came, according to Gus, from people in the tower that soared from the north-east corner of this part of the building into the black and starry sky above.

  "They's not normal," Gus would tell people over and over again. "They's not normal."

  And even some of the more disturbed patients-patients who heard voices of their own-would look at poor Gus and take him gently by the elbow and say, You wanna Baby Ruth, Gus (or) You want some strawberry Kool-Aid, Gus? (or) You want me to get a nurse and have her take you back to your room, Gus?

  But he never wanted anything. He'd just go on, shuffle down the hall or out of the room or into the next room, and keep muttering "They's not normal" and looking up with childlike awe out a window where he could get a glimpse of the turreted tower.

  This had been Gus's life for nearly four decades. He became an old man, one who'd seemed to give up on everything. He was not even the mad masturbator that he used to be. He now found no solace in his groin area. The drugs had made him sexless. Nor did he care about visitors. The only ones he'd ever wanted to see were his own people-mother, father, aunts, uncles-and they'd passed on long ago.

  He just walked around on the third floor and muttered to himself about the tower and how the people in it weren't normal. And when he'd show any signs of lucidity-any signs, in other words, that the drugs were wearing off-they'd slap him down on his bed and put the quick sharp silver needle into the right cheek of his fleshy white buttock.

  This was Gus.

  Other patients knew that Gus sometimes took the grille from the air conditioning duct and crawled up the dark, dusty passageway until he was on the first floor of the tower. He never had any trouble with the duct-work passage because it was pretty wide and because it was made from sheet metal that was twenty-four-gauge steel that was S-cleated for extra support and that was crimped for even more support beyond that. Gus always went after dusk because during the day, with the full staff out in force, it would be too easy to get caught entering or leaving the duct.

  The grille was located at about eye level to the right of the freight elevator in a seldom-used section of the third floor.

  Tonight, Gus went through his usual procedures. Once he knew nobody was around, he took a small milking stool, set it on the floor directly beneath the grille, set his clawed fingers into the grid itself, and extracted the grille from its square.

  After checking one more time for sight of anybody, Gus boosted himself up and crawled into the opening. He banged his knee as he did so. A shock wave of pain moved through his entire leg and he said severed curse words that he knew were wrong. He even took the Lord's name in vain and that was especially wrong.

  In the pocket of his robe, he kept a flashlight. In need of fresh batteries, the beam was a dim, almost watery yellow but at least it offered a comforting glow in the gloom.

  His destination was always the same. Gus liked to crawl until he'd reached a grille identical to the one he'd just taken out. This second grille opened on to the first floor of the tower.

  Now, reaching the grille, he started hearing the noises he usually did coming from somewhere high up in the shadowy top of the tower-dragging noises, as if something very heavy were being hauled with great difficulty across the floor. And the whimpering sounds. All Gus could liken them to were the sounds his puppy with cancer had made that long ago sunny afternoon. The puppy had died in Gus's lap and as it expired it made these tiny, mewling pleas. All Gus could do was hold the puppy tight and rock him back and forth the way Gus's mother did with Gus's little sister-but it had done no good. The puppy had started sweating and silver spittle spewed from its mouth and then its eyes had rolled all white with just a tiny red tracery of veins showing… and then the little dog had gone rigid in Gus's lap. Gus had cried for days after, inconsolable. He'd been convinced that the same Martians who were after him had also been after his little puppy.

  He jumped down and stood in the small lobby area. The tower had only a few windows, and they were more like slats than anything. Moonlight lay silver against the slats now. Gus shone his beam around. This was like being on the ground floor of a lighthouse. All you could see in the cramped, damp darkness was a huge set of metal steps spiralling up into the blackness above.

  A chittering sound made him swing his head around. In the gloom behind him, a pair of tiny red eyes watched him. A rat. One time Gus had seen a rat in here that had been as big as a cat he had once had. Gus's mind was filled with stories his mother had told him about rats-how they often snuck into houses and ate tiny babies as the infants slept in their cribs; how their fangs ran red with blood and green with poison; how they sank their fangs into your hair and started ripping your scalp apart. Or was that last one bats? Sometimes Gus got rats and bats confused.

  The rat hunkered, started inexorably toward Gus.

  While he wasn't as big as a cat, the grey creature with the swollen belly and the swishing spiky tail was formidable nonetheless.

  The rat sprang, then. Came off the floor like an animal grotesquely capable of flight. Flew directly at Gus.

  But Gus was ready. He'd been through this many times here before in the mildewy darkness of the tower.

  Gus expertly brought the flashlight down on the rat's head. The chittering turned into a kind of keening.

  The rat slammed to the floor.

  Gus brought the heel of his K-Mart slipper down on the animal's skull. He felt a pleasing pop as the rat's brains escaped the confines of its skull, spilling out through its nostrils' and mouth. The animal started jerking wildly, puking and continuing to keen, and then it lay still. Dead.

  "You little sonofabitch," Gus said. And smiled to himself.

  He never felt more purposeful than when he'd inflicted pain on something or somebody. He couldn't tell you why he felt this way and he didn't give a damn why he felt this way. He just did.

  So even squashing a rat gave Gus considerable pleasure.

  He wiped the blood, hair, and flecks of bone off the head of the flashlight-he'd knocked the light out for good this time- and then looked once more at the steps.

  Up at the top of them, the dragging sound was still going on.

  And so was the occasional flash of amber light.

  Gus had no idea what this was. During his first trips to the tower, he'd even wondered if he might not be imagining the amber light, if it might not be some kind of illusion.

  But no; now almost every time he came through the vent shaf
t, he saw the intermittent glow coming down the stairs like a ghost just starting to take shape.

  Then, as now, it would be gone.

  He went over to the stairs and set one foot on the first step. He could feel his heart begin to race, his body grow sleek and pasty with sweat.

  In the now claustrophobic darkness (he often told Dr. Milner that he feared they would someday bury him alive), he raised his eyes to the gloom.

  What made the dragging sound?

  What caused the amber glow? And then he heard a new noise-a kind of snapping sound, the crack a whip makes when it meets flesh.

  And he got scared.

  This happened to him every time he came here. He'd just get curious about the tower-and what was up at the top-and then he'd get scared.

  Because the one time he'd gone all the way to the top of the tower, Gus had seen what actually happened in the room up there.

  It was just a small stone room, with a hole in the wall near the lone, mullioned window. That's where the snake came from. Or maybe it wasn't a snake exactly.

  But anyway, it came coiling out of the hole, seeming to go on forever, and it angled across the floor to where the naked woman stood.

  Gus couldn't keep his eyes off her.

  The only woman he'd ever seen naked was his mother and he'd always felt terrible about that.

  This woman was named Sally. She was from the third floor, too. She was the one with the slash marks on her wrists. Sometimes at the table she'd start sobbing and saying, I almost did it; I almost did it, but then the muscle boys in the white uniforms would come and take her back to her room and give her the same sharp quick silver needle they always gave Gus.

  But tonight she was up here.

  And in the soft moonlight through the window he could see her breasts with the big brown nipples and her tidy little thatch of pubic hair (and Gus wondered what it would be like to touch and lick her down there; exciting, he somehow knew, exciting).

  And the snake, its slanted eyes throwing off an almost blinding amber light, was coiling, coiling around her leg and coiling, coiling up her body.