Serpent's Kiss

by Ed Gorman

  And she threw her head back and began touching herself between the legs and laughing and crying at the same time.

  And the snake continued to coil around her body, up around her belly and then around her breasts and then angling up over her chest to where it began to feed into-

  Her mouth.

  She was swallowing the snake.

  And as the serpent worked its way down inside her, Gus could see the amber glow begin to shine through the flesh of her belly.

  The stench almost made him throw up.

  The stench was horrible. All he could think of was the way dead animals left a long time in the basement always smelled.

  And somehow every foot of that snake fitted into her belly, she writhed to the enormous size of it slithering down inside her. All he could think of was a scene he'd seen on TV once when a python had swallowed a small pig, the way the jaws came unhinged so the snake could swallow the animal whole.

  And for a brief moment, the radiant glow came not from her belly, but her eyes-her eyes looked just the way the snake's had.

  And then even that was gone.

  There was just the darkness.

  And then she sensed him.

  She didn't even look in his direction.

  But he knew she'd become aware of him.

  Gus went back down the stairs through the gloom to the duct opening. He crawled inside so quickly and carelessly that he cut his hands on the edges of the sheet metal. But he kept moving, moving.

  She was somewhere behind him.

  He didn't want her to swallow him.

  He was horrified of her swallowing him.

  Two days later they found Mr. Conrad in the shower. Something had dug both his eyes out and ripped off his penis so that there was just a bloody hole there.

  That night they found Sally sitting up in her bed.

  She was playing with Mr. Conrad's limp, ragged penis.

  There wasn't a trial, just a hearing, after which Sally was put on the third floor where rooms were more like cages and where you were fed through slots in the door and where no matter how hard you screamed or cried they never let you out.

  A new director was appointed. Hastings House spent the next three years staging a variety of public relations events. On Christmas Eve, for instance, they had the most docile patients dress up like elves to serve dinner to two hundred orphans. There was a lot of TV coverage.

  Gus was eager to tell everybody what he'd seen. Especially the part about how her eyes became just like the snake's and how she'd taken the entire snake inside her. But nobody paid much attention to him, of course.

  If he wasn't talking about Sally and the serpent, then he was talking about this nice man he'd once met from Uranus. Somehow, most of Gus's words ran together. About the only other guy who'd believe him was a janitor named Telfair, whom Gus knew had also been to the tower at least a few times.

  ***

  It wasn't really a date, of course, but it was a sort of pretend date…

  From her bedroom window Marie saw Richie's car coming down the driveway and stopping at her apartment complex. Picking up her red jacket, she walked out into the living room where her mother was watching the last of the local news.

  "Night, Mom," Marie said.

  Her mother looked up. "Don't forget this is a school night."

  "I won't."

  "And-" Her mother paused, as if afraid to speak her mind. "And be careful."

  "I know it's not a good neighbourhood, Mom. That's why I'm always careful.'"

  Her mother's gaze did not leave Marie's face. "I don't mean just the neighbourhood. I mean that boy, too." She hesitated again. "I don't want to see you just-disappointed over anything."

  I don't want to see you get your heart broken. That's what her mother was really saying. No doubt about that.

  Marie leaned over and kissed her mother tenderly on the forehead. Her mother meant well. There was no meanness or mendacity in her heart.

  She went to the door, waved goodbye, and went out.

  In the hall she saw Mrs. Rubens. The older lady, who always wore the same sparkly rhinestone eyeglasses and the same shade of dire red lipstick, looked her over and whistled. "You must have a date tonight!"

  And then it happened: a giggle. An honest-to-God giggle issuing from the otherwise mature mouth of Marie Fane. Marie couldn't believe it. She felt her cheeks bum.

  Mrs. Rubens, whom Marie liked very much, winked and said, "So I was right. You do have a date tonight."

  "Well, not really, I guess. Or not exactly, Mrs. Rubens."

  "Not exactly?" Mrs. Rubens smiled. "Now what could that mean?"

  By now they had reached the front door. Mrs. Rubens held it open for her. At such times Marie was always reminded of people's kindness. People always held doors for Marie. Given her crippled walk, they probably always would. On some paranoid occasions, she resented them. There was such a thing as being too kind; kind to the point of being patronising. But then she always realised that she was being unfair-that people only meant to show her that they liked her and were concerned for her.

  The early evening was an explosion of wonderful aroma- everything in urgent bloom-and lovely, vital sounds.

  "You have a good time tonight," Mrs. Rubens said, taking her lone sack of garbage out to the big Dumpster discreetly kept on the other side of the nearest garage.

  Marie walked over to the car, aware that Richie was watching her. He'd changed into a white shirt and a blue jacket. With the collar up and his dark hair piled high, he resembled a teen idol from the fifties. Especially with his slightly petulant mouth and sad dark eyes. She thought again: Richie must have a secret otherwise he wouldn't always look so melancholy.

  The car was five years old, an Oldsmobile, the kind of vehicle that was ideal for families but that teenage boys looked a little awkward driving. It had 'Daddy's Car' stamped all over it. As if to compensate for this, Richie had the radio up loud, playing some very punky dance music.

  He surprised her suddenly by bolting from the car, running around to her door, and opening it for her.

  "Why thanks, Richie."

  He smiled. "My pleasure."

  When he got her safely ensconced, he walked around the rear of the car and got in.

  So here it is, she thought. My first actual date. Or sort-of-date, anyway. She'd been waiting the better part of five years for this, constantly shaping and reshaping this moment to make it into the maximum thrill.

  As she sat there watching him put the car in gear, watching him glance out the back window as he started moving in reverse, she wondered if she weren't at least a tad disappointed. In her fantasies, her first date had always had a gauzy unreality to it. Mere glances carried searing meaning; his few muttered words had inspired rhapsodies in her heart. Whoever it was in her dreams (and the boy changed from time to time, blond now, now dark; short sometimes, tall others) didn't look quite as young as Richie nor did he sink down in the seat quite as much as Richie, nor did he smell of excessive aftershave lotion as did Richie, nor had his voice risen an octave and a half out of sheer plain nervousness.

  She strapped on her seat belt as Richie pulled out into traffic.

  "You get off at nine-thirty, right?"

  "Right," she said, feeling kind of sorry for him that he had to struggle to make conversation. In the cafeteria, he had always seemed so self possessed and self confident. He knew very well that she got off at nine-thirty.

  "Well, maybe around nine or so I'll go get us some Dairy Queens."

  "Dairy Queens? Are they open already?"

  And here he looked younger than ever. Not the dark teen idol despite his calculated appearance, but rather the kid brother got up to look like the teen idol.

  In that moment something came to her-something that was better than all the gauzy unreal fantasy first dates could ever offer-she liked Richie and liked him lots and thought he was really cute and clean and appealing.

  "Boy, that sounds great," she said, wanting
her own enthusiasm to match his.

  "You like Blizzards?"

  "I love Blizzards," she said.

  He glanced over at her and grinned. "Great," he said. "Great."

  ***

  Ten blocks from the bookstore you started seeing winos and homeless people. They clung to the shadows of crumbling buildings and rambled listlessly down the cracked sidewalks amid the garbage and wind-pushed litter. There were homeless dogs and cats, too, and they roamed after their human counterparts. Dirty children belonging to some of the people who lived and worked in the neighbourhood played in the gutters, too far from their parents, too close to traffic. Nobody seemed to notice or care.

  Towering over all this in the near distance were the spires of the university, great Gothic structures built at the turn of the century. While the university itself had not been touched by the poverty and hopelessness and shambling violence of the streets, everything around it had been.

  The Alice B. Toklas Bookshop was situated in an aged two-storey brick building that sat on an alley. Across the alley was a pizza place that seemed to do business twenty-four hours a day.

  Marie showed Richie where they could park in the rear-in a shadowy cove next to a Dumpster that always smelled of rotting meat from the pizza place-and then they went inside.

  They walked in on a familiar scene-a customer at the cash register buying a book and Brewster giving his opinion of the book to the customer. Arnold Brewster looked like Maynard G. Krebs on the old Dobie Gillis show. Except this was Maynard at fifty years of age. Round, bald, stoop-shouldered, he wore a wine-coloured beret, a little tuft of grey goatee on his chin, and a FUGS T-shirt. Marie wasn't even sure who the FUGS were exactly-just some kind of musical group that had prospered briefly during the hippie era.

  The customer-a proper looking man, probably a professor, in a tweedy sports jacket and a white button-down shirt and a narrow dark necktie-looked as if he wanted badly to get out of here. Every time he pulled to go away, Brewster started telling him how bad a writer Sartre (the man had bought a copy of Nausea) really was.

  Actually, Marie had met many bookstore owners who were not unlike Brewster. Maybe they weren't quite as forthcoming but they were certainly as opinionated. They ran their stores like little fiefdoms over which they were absolute masters-dispensing approval or disapproval (this author was good, this author was bad), handing out second-hand gossip (did you know that this writer was getting a divorce, that that writer was an alcoholic?), and pushing their own pets (you could tell the authors they really liked because they referred to them almost as personal friends).

  As Brewster wound up his harangue ("Camus was the artist; Sartre was just a journalist"), Marie glanced over at Richie who looked both fascinated and repelled by Brewster's loud earnest diatribe.

  Marie spent the last few minutes of the verbal barrage looking around the store. One thing you had to say for Brewster, he was a Zen master of organisation. Every book was very strictly categorised and God forbid you-customer or employee-put the book back in the wrong place. If he saw you do this, he'd come screaming down the aisle like a maniac and make you put the book in its proper place.

  The weird thing was, Marie actually liked Brewster. He was crazed, he was obnoxious, but he loved literature and books with a true passion that was moving to see in this age of television and disco. He knew 3,453 things about Shakespeare and at least 2,978 things about Keats and this made him-by Marie's definition anyway-a holy man.

  On the walls above the long aisles of books-he sold everything from the plays of Henrik Ibsen to the sleazy 'adult' westerns of Jake Foster-were drawings and photographs of the men and women he admired most-Shakespeare, of course, but also Shaw and Whitman and Hemingway and Faulkner.

  When the customer left, Brewster picked up his lunch sack from underneath the register and said, "Who's this?"

  "This is Richie." Then she introduced them.

  "You a reader, Richie?" Brewster wanted to know, pushing his black hom-rimmed glasses back up his tiny pug nose.

  "Sometimes," Richie said.

  "Good," Brewster said, quite seriously. "I wouldn't want Marie here to have any friends who weren't." Then he looked back to Marie. "I cleaned it and oiled it today. Okay?"

  Marie felt her cheeks burn again. "Okay."

  "I know hippie-dippies like myself aren't supposed to believe in such things, but I don't want you to take any chances, all right?"

  "All right."

  Brewster cuffed Richie on the shoulder and said, "Nice to meet you, Richie."

  "Nice to meet you."

  "Talk to you tomorrow, Marie."

  Then Brewster went out the back way to his car.

  ***

  "You were put into Hastings House as a patient and one night while you were half asleep you felt this compulsion to go to the tower that was a part of the hospital's first building. You had to go through the air conditioning ductwork but you made it. And then upstairs in the tower-"

  Emily Lindstrom then described to Richard Dobyns how he stood in the centre of the dusty tower room and watched the snake come out of the crack in the wall and how the snake then entered his body.

  She then described the peculiar amber light of the snake's eyes.

  He just sat across from her in the small, shadowy apartment, staring.

  And then she told him about the killings.

  "My brother didn't understand why he killed those women," she said gently. "And it wasn't his fault. But he didn't believe that. He just thought that the snake and the way it controlled him was illusory."

  They sat for a time in silence.

  She said, "Are you thirsty?"

  "No."

  "Hungry?"

  "No."

  "Is there somebody you'd like me to call for you?"

  "How did you know about this apartment?"

  "I've spent every day since my brother's death-as you may remember, he was shot and killed by a policeman-trying to find out what happened. This apartment is part of it."

  He fell into silence once more.

  Traffic noise. Children being called in for dinner. A subtle drop in the temperature; the dusk chill now despite the blooming day.

  She said, "I want to help you."

  "You're going to the police, I suppose."

  "The police won't help us. They won't believe us."

  He shook his head again.

  And now he did start sobbing.

  He put his hand to his stomach. "I want to cut this goddamn thing out of me."

  And then he just cried.

  She lit a cigarette. She was down to six a day now but she couldn't quit completely. Times like these drove her to light up.

  "I'm going to see a TV reporter in a little while," she said.

  Slowly, he quit crying and looked up at her. "A TV reporter?"

  "A woman named Chris Holland."

  "How can she help?"

  "I don't know if she can, but I at least want to try. She's covered a lot of murders in this city, including the ones my brother supposedly committed. She'll at least listen, I think."

  "I'm afraid of tonight."

  "Afraid?"

  "There was a girl's name in the manila envelope."

  "I saw it. Marie Fane."

  He touched his stomach.

  She was slowly becoming aware of the odour; the uncleanness.

  "I want you to help me."

  "How?" she said.

  He reached in the pocket of his sport coat. "I stopped by a hock shop this afternoon. I got these."

  In the shadows, he held up a pair of handcuffs.

  "While you're gone visiting the reporter, I want you to handcuff me to the bedpost. And you take the key." He looked at her through his teary eyes. "I don't want to hurt this Fane girl. I don't want to hurt anybody at all."

  She sighed. She couldn't go to the police but maybe Chris Holland could. She might at least listen to her.

  "I'll be glad to help you," she said. Then, "Do you know
there's some bourbon in the kitchen? Would you like a shot?"

  "Yes. Please."

  "I'll be right back"

  While she was pouring them two drinks, he said, "You know there's an old man at Hastings House who knows all about the tower."

  "There is?"

  "His name's Gus."

  She brought the drinks in. "Really?"

  "Yes, but whenever he tells people about the tower and the snake, people just smile at him. Think he's crazy."

  "I wonder how long he's known."

  "Years probably. He's been there since the fifties."

  "My God."

  Richard Dobyns sipped his whiskey. "That's why I'm afraid to tell anybody about what's happened to me. They'll start looking at me the way they look at Gus."

  "There's also a janitor named Telfair who knows about the tower." She sighed. "My brother tried to get back to Hastings House. After he killed those women, I mean. So did the other men."

  "Other men?"

  She nodded, sipped at her own whiskey. "Since 1891 there've been six escapees who committed murder and were then killed- either by police or by suicide. Every one of them tried to get back to the tower. One of the men committed suicide by climbing up on the turret next to the tower and jumping."

  He stared at her, miserable again. "I know why those men committed suicide, believe me."

  "The thing inside you," she said.

  He smiled bitterly. "The devil made me do it?"

  "Something like that, yes."

  He bowed his head and ran a shaky hand through his hair. He looked up at Emily again. "I called my wife today. I couldn't explain to her, either."

  "I know."

  "I just wanted to see her one more time before-" He paused. "You'll help me with the handcuffs?"

  "Of course." She glanced at her wristwatch. She had to turn it so she could get the light of the dying day through the edges of the curtain. Nearly 5:45. She had to get going if she was going to be on time meeting Chris Holland.

  She stood up and walked over to the chair.

  This close, the odour was stomach turning.