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Serpent's Daughterby Wayne Summers
The heat was bitingly oppressive. Sleep was a long time coming. Max and Kandra lay staring at the ceiling, their bodies coated in sweat.
“You should’ve got the air conditioning seen to,” Kandra grumbled.
“What was that?” snapped Max. “What, you don’t know how to use a telephone?”
His fists were clenched.
“Well it doesn’t make a hellava lot of difference now!” Kandra bit back as she rolled away from her fiance.
A trickle of sweat ran down her forehead and soaked into the cotton fabric of the pillowcase. A light came on behind her.
“What are you doing now?” she asked through gritted teeth.
“With your permission, dearest, I thought that since neither of us can sleep I might as well use the time to catch up on some reading.”
Kandra snorted her irritation but kept her lips tightly closed. They were both hot and tired, and the situation was in imminent danger of erupting into something that neither of them needed. Her thoughts jumped from Max to pondering why she was so wide awake when her body was craving sleep. Though, had her eyes not been wide open she wouldn’t have noticed it.
“Max,” she said, her tone softer and quieter.
“What is it this time? Am I reading too loudly?”
“Shut up and take a look at this.”
“What am I looking at?” he asked leaning across the mattress.
“Over there. Under the chair.”
Max directed his attention to the faux Louis 16th armchair and the shadows beneath it. At first he couldn’t see anything and then it moved; the light from the bedside lamp glistened momentarily on its scales.
“Shit man! How did that thing get in here?” he gasped.
The tail disappeared around the back leg of the chair as its shiny, black head appeared from under the front of the chair. Its tongue flickered and it paused as a beady eye took them in.
“Oh shit! Did you see that?” asked Max. “It just looked at us!”
“Would you just keep it together?” said Kandra, frowning and turning her head slightly to ensure Max didn’t miss the expression on her face.
He shrugged it off but noticed that she hadn’t returned her attention to the snake slithering across the carpet towards them.
“Don’t move,” she said.
“Why not?” he asked, hardly daring to move his lips. A feeling of dread filled his stomach like cement.
Its scales felt smooth against the skin on the back of his hand, polished and cold. As a second snake moved slowly over his hand, his fingers, his veins, it chilled the blood beneath. He could feel the iciness running up his arm and into his torso, infecting his body. He dare not look down at it, instead he focused on Kandra’s face – her wide brown eyes and full, glistening lips, slightly parted as though on the edge of a scream.
The head of the first snake appeared over Kandra’s shoulder. She could feel the strength of its muscular body pushing itself up the taut flesh of her back and rippling on her shoulder as its head moved closer to her face. Her eyes were full of tears and she was trembling, uncontrollably.
The thin black tongue flickered on the soft skin of her jaw. She could smell the venom already beading on the creature’s fangs. Potent. Repellent.
“Oh God!” she cried through clenched teeth. “Oh God!”
The greyish-brown serpent continued around her neck, using her collar bone for support. When it reached her other shoulder it stopped, draped around her neck like a piece of jewelery. The second snake soon joined it, sliding up over her right breast, weaving itself around the other snake and around the back of her neck until it reached the opposite shoulder.
Kandra felt the warm, wet effects of her bladder releasing and began to sob.
“Help me,” she whimpered. “Help me, Max.”
Free of snakes, Max inched his way back towards his side of the bed. He had no idea what he was going to do since touching them in any way could mean that Kandra got bitten. Perhaps he could lure them away, create a diversion so that they chased him but what could divert a snake?
He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and immediately felt the stabbing pain of a snake bite. He jerked backwards as the snake launched itself at him again, the dripping fangs only just missing his small toe as he lifted his feet onto the mattress. The carpet was alive with more snakes, crawling and twisting over each other as they slithered up the bedposts and onto the mattress.
“I love you, baby,” Max said, his voice breaking as he choked back the tears that were forming. “I really do.”
Kandra was crying uncontrollably. In ones and twos the slender reptiles propelled their way up her body towards her head until soon her head and torso were heavy with the creatures. Suddenly one of the snakes raised a tail up over its head and plunged it into Kandra’s skull. She screamed as the serpent’s tail punctured her cranium and rooted itself to her brain. There was a flash of light behind her eyes and for a moment she was temporarily blinded. A second snake speared its tail through the top of her skull and as its tail burrowed into the tissue of her brain she saw a vision - a temple, Grecian, high on a hill in front of a cave. Far below the temple was a wild sea, crashing onto some rocks at the foot of the sheer cliff.
One after the other the snakes smashed through the bone of her skull to fix themselves securely inside their host. As more snakes became permanently fixed in her skull, the vision became clearer. The dark clouds gathering overhead obliterated all but the faintest traces of sunlight, bringing with them a sense of doom. Lightning cracked and a sharp wind blew in from the ocean. In the small temple there appeared to be an offering of gold and wine, the supplicants bowing a few metres away near the steps of the stone structure; too terrified to look up.
A figure moved in the pitch darkness at the mouth of the cave. Dressed in a tunic of olive green silk and fixed at the shoulder with a solid gold clasp, the female stepped into the light. Her lips were stained red from berry juice and her skin was as pale as the snow that fell on Olympus in the winter. Her eyes were dead, milky white and unseeing; her teeth also perfect white with incisors long and needle-like. The creature smiled with a hiss. Her head was adorned by a nest of serpents that curled and twisted over each other, trapped for eternity within the head of the Medusa.
The three villagers dared not look upon this woman, this creature. Around them were the reminders of others who had, those whose curiosity had got the better of them; those who had needed proof.
As Kandra sat trance-like, staring into space, Max clutched his chest. It felt as though there were a great weight resting upon it and drawing breath was becoming increasingly difficult. Torrents of sweat poured off his body and soon the room began to swim. His muscles were cramping as the venom seeped into their fibres. Panic swamped him and all he could think about was Kandra. Even as she sat up in bed, her head a writhing mass of snakes and her beautiful face streaked with the blood from her wounds, she was beautiful.
But the minute his beloved’s vision stopped she turned to him and everything stopped – his pain, his thoughts, his life. Every cell became silicon, his form preserved for the ages. Kandra looked him over coldly and then got up from the bed. Under cover of darkness she would find her way to the cave of her vision, to the cave of her ancestors. To the cave of the sisterhood.
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© Summers, 2008
Wayne currently has stories in Issue 19 of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction; Volume 1, Number 6 of Art&Prose Magazine, The Willows, Vulgata Magazine and as the cover story in Issue 2, Niteblade Horror and Fantasy Magazine. He has other stories about to be published in Issue 21 of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, Aphelion, Cemetery Moon and Black Petals.