by Guy N Smith
'I doubt it, sir.' John Price spoke softly, an interruption which had the superintendent pushing his heavy rimmed spectacles up on to his forehead and glowering from beneath bushy eyebrows.
'Why do you doubt it, Mr Price?'
'Because these snakes are a variety of species from all over the world. No way is a mixture like this gregarious. Their hatred for one another is as great as their hatred towards Man. I would think that the chances of finding them all in a small area are very remote. I'd like to think I'm wrong, sir, but I very much doubt it.'
'I see.' Superintendent Burlington passed a hand across his forehead. He had not realised until now that he had a headache, a dull throbbing behind the eyes. 'Thank you, Mr Price, for that information. At least we now have no illusions about the size of the task that faces us. Well, I wish you the best of luck, gentlemen. I take it, Colonel, that you have already discussed with Mr Price your plans for searching the area.'
'We are both agreed that in all probability the snakes will head for high ground. The moors are a wild stretch and that is where we shall begin.' The uniformed colonel consulted his watch. 'Fortunately the days are long, and we have ample men at our disposal. I would hope to finish combing the moorland before dark.'
'Good. And now, unfortunately, I must give a press conference. You can imagine how some of the more sensational dailies will blow the whole thing up. An awful lot of people in Britain are not going to sleep easy in their beds until every one of those snakes is dead.'
John Price followed the others outside, pausing in the doorway to glance back at the senior police officer. Burlington's dislike of the zoologist had not gone unnoticed. Whatever happened John knew he was the odd man out. If they were successful the police and army would take the credit; if they failed they had a scapegoat. He accepted his lot with a shrug.
So much for a week's vacation with Aunt Elsie, his mother's sister, his last surviving relative. One came to the countryside for a few days away from it all and found oneself caught up in something too awful to contemplate. They didn't realise, none of them, and there was no way of making them until they met up with the escaped killers. Each and every one of those snakes was a cunning and deadly killer, a master of camouflage, an expert in ambush. They remembered their long incarceration, in an inexplicable way they were seeking revenge.
To begin with they would run.
Then they would turn and fight.
Chapter 5
ELSIE HARRISON was in the twilight of her life; at seventy-six the only thing to look forward to was the visit of her nephew, John Price, the only person in the world she had. Not that the villagers of Stainforth were unkind to her, but when you were getting on the only people who really cared for you were your own kin. The loneliness of old age had closed in on her this last couple of years or so.
Small and frail, her white hair tied up in a bun on the back of her head, Elsie walked with two sticks. She had built her hopes on a replacement hip early last year, had even gone into hospital for the op. and then they had shattered her by telling her that her heart wasn't strong enough to stand it and had sent her home to be a cripple for the rest of her life. In due course she came to accept the fact that she would not be able to dispense with her sticks, and she endured the worsening pain and decreasing mobility because the next step would be a wheelchair and that meant going into a home. And when that happened she wanted to die.
After Bert had passed away (he had lingered on for a whole year following that terrible afternoon when he had suffered a stroke in the garden), she sold the cottage and bought this small bungalow on the edge of the village. She missed Daffodil Cottage with its quaint tumbledown features and the ivy over the front porch, but there was no way she could have kept it on and the garden would have to have gone untended and Bert wouldn't have liked that. Neither, she winced at the thought, would he have approved of what those people from Manchester who bought it had done to it. They had completely destroyed its character, knocked down walls, built a modern extension, one of those pine structures that might have come all the way from Canada, turned it into something that looked like a log-cabin. And they weren't interested in gardening, either. They had landscaped the whole place, built hideous rockeries and made slab paths; there was not a vegetable in sight, and they had ripped out all the soft fruit bushes too. Vandalism. Perhaps it was as well that her husband was not here to see it. Just thinking of Bert brought tears to her eyes and she hoped her Maker would decide that it was time to send for her, too, before long.
The district nurse had tried to persuade her to have one of those aluminium walking-frames. Certainly not, she had told the rather sharp-tongued woman who always thought she knew best and that you had no right to have an opinion of your own, when she needed that she did not want to be here anymore. Elsie would manage with her sticks, she would defy them all right up to the very end.
But this was no time to indulge in self-pity with John here for a few days. She worried a lot about the boy; all this college education and he finished up no better off than any of the other youths out of work who didn't have a qualification or a skill to their name. Young Doyle out of the village was another example. He'd got five 'A! levels and a lot of good it had done him. Never worked since he left school until in the end he got so fed up with doing nothing that he'd built up a gardening round for himself. All credit to the boy but gardening was a hobby like it had been with Bert, not a way of earning your living. It was just labouring, nothing more.
Elsie hobbled across to the kettle and switched it on. My, how she missed her old Rayburn with the kettle bubbling on top of it all the time, but that was the price you had to pay for growing old.
She wondered how long John was going to be away. He'd said probably most of the day. It wasn't fair, the police dragging him away from her like that to help them look for these escaped snakes. Horrible things snakes, whatever was John thinking about when he elected to study them at university? His mother and father should never have allowed it; they should have taken a firmer line with him. Not enough discipline, but she would probably have been equally soft with him if he had been her son. She missed not having children of her own, that was another cruel twist life had dealt her but she'd make do with her nephew. She wished he would shave that awful beard off, though. And have his hair cut properly. If he didn't like wearing a suit then why on earth couldn't he settle for a nice smart sports jacket and flannels instead of those disreputable jeans? He needed to smarten himself up and then at least he'd stand a chance of getting a job. All the same, she mustn't nag him too much or else he might not come and stay with her again, and that was an unbearable thought.
She poured herself a cup of tea, hobbled back to her chair by the gas-fire with it. At least in this hot weather she didn't need to light the gas and that was a relief. After selling the cottage and buying this bungalow she had to rely solely on her pension.
Her thoughts turned to the snakes again. What a terrible thing to happen. PC Aylott had called round earlier in the day to warn her, warn everybody in Stainforth to stay indoors and keep the doors and windows shut. Well, you couldn't really do that this weather, the heat would suffocate you. Those snakes wouldn't be looking to enter houses, she told herself, they would be heading for the woods and the moors, as far from human habitation as they could get.
She dozed, aware of the flies buzzing on the windows, a kind of soothing summer sound, perhaps the only redeemable feature the filthy little insects had. Later on she would give them a squirt of fly-killer but she couldn't be bothered right now.
Footsteps. She opened her eyes, listened, tried to will them to turn in off the pavement and crunch their way up the short gravel path to the front door. But they carried on, faded away in the direction of the village, sank her hopes.
Goodness, it was almost dusk, she must have fallen asleep. Surely John wouldn't be long now. She began to worry, it was almost half past nine. If he wasn't home by ten then she would go to the fence and shout for the H
owarths, ask them to phone the police station for news of her nephew. The Howarths were always very good about phoning for her; she really ought to get a telephone of her own put in before the winter in case of an emergency. She'd give John until ten o'clock, no longer.
The grandfather clock in the corner ticked loudly. Somehow it was out of place in this modern bungalow but she wouldn't get rid of it. You had to cling on to a few things that reminded you of happier days.
Ten to ten. Elsie Harrison sucked her lips, it really was getting quite dark outside now. She listened hard, but there did not seem to be anybody about outside at all. Probably the villagers had taken the policeman's advice literally and were all remaining indoors. She wondered if the Howarths might have their windows shut and be unable to hear her. She must do her best to rouse them.
She reached for her sticks, had to exert considerable effort to haul herself up out of the easy chair, felt a wave of slight dizziness as she came upright. That was her blood pressure but she wasn't going to tell the nurse about her dizzy turns; she knew too much about her already.
She felt for the light switch, pressed it down. The strip light in the ceiling flickered hesitantly, took a second or two before it gave off that dazzling white light that lit up every corner of the room. Elsie Harrison blinked, had to wait for her eyes to adjust. One unsteady step in the direction of the door and then she stopped, gave a little cry of fear.
The snake was lying on the mat just inside the slightly open back door. Motionless, it might have been dead, or a stuffed woollen draught-stopper like those they sold for 75p down at the church rummage sales; except that its eyes moved, glittered and winked evilly in the fluorescent lighting.
The reptile was three feet, maybe four feet long, olive coloured, tapering from the blunt squat snout down to a fine slender tail. Now it moved, almost a lazy stretching of its entire body. See just how long I am and I'm not dead or stuffed. I'm alive!
Elsie Harrison's dizziness returned causing her to sway unsteadily and then it passed. Her heart began to pound as though it were deliberately racing against the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner, triggering off her fear. She wanted to scream, a piercing cry that would fetch the Howarths round on the run, but her throat had gone dry and a kind of temporary seizure paralysed her vocal cords.
She glanced about her. The snake barred her escape via the door and she could not reach the window without going near the fearsome intruder. Just the corner behind the chair she had vacated, nowhere else. She was trapped.
Keeping her eyes firmly on the reptile she moved awkwardly, unsteadily backwards, until finally she had the chair between herself and her adversary. She was breathing heavily and there was a sharp pain in her chest.
She leaned on the upholstery, clasping a walking stick in either hand, wondering if she had the strength to strike a blow if the thing advanced. She'd darned well have a go if it came any nearer. Oh, please God, send John home soon.
She would have to shout out to warn him when she heard him coming or else he would walk right into it. And all she could manage at the moment was a hoarse whisper.
'Go away, you devil. Go away.'
The snake did not move, just lay there stretched out across the doormat, watching her. Waiting. She wondered what kind it was, some venomous viper from the swamps of somewhere-or-other, no doubt. Her flesh crawled and her heartbeat was speeding up even faster, hurting her with those fast little hammer blows inside her chest that she had felt this past six months but had kept to herself.
The light wasn't as bright as it usually was, quite dim in fact. Perhaps the fitting was going, due for replacement.
Elsie leaned her full weight on the back of the chair. She couldn't stand much longer. The pain in her hip had started up viciously but it wasn't as bad as the one in her chest. Oh Lord, she couldn't stand it much longer. 'Go away, you devil, and let me sit down. D'you hear me, go away?'
And then something inside her seemed to explode, an agonising pain as though she had been delivered a physical blow, throwing her back against the wall behind her. She cried out, a pathetic little shriek of terror and the dimness turned to blackness. She slumped forward and the chair rolled sideways on its flimsy castors, Elsie Harrison pitching headlong, unconscious before she hit the floor.
Even then the snake did not move. Possibly there was a slight change of reptilian expression on its blunt features. One of puzzlement.
It was after nine o'clock before the shotgun-carrying searchers had finished combing the moorland above Stainforth. Hot and weary, their feet painful after the necessity of wearing knee-length protective rubber boots, disillusioned. The dogs lay panting, licking at tufts of grass in the hope of obtaining a droplet of moisture but there was none. A barren wilderness where only the heather and bracken survived, bilberry bushes loaded with red fruit that would ripen in a month or so, the domain of the grouse and the buzzard, even the free-ranging sheep preferring the lower slopes where there were patches of shade to be found.
John Price had had his misgivings from the start, a feeling that one sometimes got that it was all going to be a waste of time. You sensed you were in the wrong place but with no alternative you had to start somewhere.
The snakes were definitely not on the moor unless they had gone to ground somewhere and it was unlikely that every one of the escaped eight reptiles would have done that. Of course, the dogs had no idea what they were hunting, they could not be expected to. They were the sacrificial victims; it was inevitable that should one of them come upon a reptile it would attack in ignorance and get bitten. There was no other way; canine lives were expendable, human lives were not.
They beat out the three-thousand-acre, triangular moorland from its apex, the furthermost point. John had to agree with Colonel Marks that that was the logical thing to do even though the slight breeze was blowing towards the ragged line of police and army. You knew then, when you finally arrived at the rocky outcrop overlooking Stainforth village, that the poisonous reptiles were not on the moor. A process of elimination. Tomorrow it would be the grassy slopes down to the arable land that would be thrashed out. On day three it would be the barley and oilseed rape fields. And after that...
Nightfall was the snakes' greatest ally. They could have been lying low further down by day and with the coming of darkness they might start to move. Upwards. So tomorrow whilst the searchers toiled down below, their prey could be safely ensconced several hundred feet above them up on the moorland.
But not all of them, John Price was adamant about that. They were not hunting a flock of snakes, rather six very different species. The pairs would stay together in all probability. But nobody really knew, they could only guess. The killers were in a strange alien environment and there was no way of knowing how they might react. There was no book of rules to consult.
John heard the whine of the helicopters again. The choppers were flying low, sweeping the grassy slopes, determined not to give up until the light was gone altogether. A long shot, but when lives were at stake you played every card you had.
'We'll have to call it a day,' the sweat-grimed colonel was polishing his spectacles, dejection in his tone, head bowed as though their failure to find the snakes was a personal affront to his own rank and status. 'We'll make an early start in the morning. 7 a.m. Everybody assemble at the police station. It's the hillsides and slopes tomorrow, working back towards the village. The choppers will be out before then, scouring. We can only hope.'
Chief Inspector Watts nodded but declined to comment. Everybody knew the position, the colonel had said everything there was to be said. Surely the reptiles had to show up somewhere; the worrying factor was just where.
It was 10.05 when John Price disembarked from the camouflaged army Land Rover and began to walk the length of the village in the direction of Aunt Elsie's bungalow. His feet dragged but mentally he was still alert. On a balmy summer evening such as this he would have expected to see families enjoying the late evening in deck-chai
rs in their gardens or taking a stroll before going to bed. The main street was deserted, lights showing in some of the houses on either side.
He passed the Rising Sun. The beer-garden at the side was deserted, an air of desolation about the array of white-painted tables and chairs, an empty glass tipped over with insects crawling inside it after the dregs; you had the feeling that it had been like that since yesterday, that nobody had ventured out there. Stay indoors and be safe, never mind the stifling atmosphere, that's a small price to pay for your life.