Serpent's Kiss (6 page)

    Within twenty-five minutes, he was in the hospital emergency ward.

    And within twenty-four hours after that, he began a three year stay at a mental hospital called Hastings House.

    

    

    He killed his first woman on the night of May 11, 1978. This was the first time he escaped the mental hospital.

    After a few hours' freedom, during which time he ate a good steak dinner and rented a car, he drove up into the hills where he saw a somewhat plump but pretty young woman standing in front of a somewhat battered 1968 Fairlane, the hood up, and steam pouring out of the radiator. She seemed so helpless and disconsolate that she looked positively fetching. The image of a helpless woman appealed to him enormously.

    He pulled in behind where she'd parked just off the road, got out, and went over to her.

    He smiled. "You look like you've got your hands full."

    "I sure do." She touched surprisingly delicate fingers to her face and shook her head. "I'm supposed to be at a wedding shower in twenty minutes."

    "Why don't I take a look?" he said, sounding like a doctor about to peek in at a sore throat.

    He saw the problem immediately. A hole in her radiator. A rock could have put it there or kids sabotaging cars in a parking lot.

    He leaned back from inside the hood. "Tell you what. Why don't I give you a ride? There's a Standard station down the way. They can come back and tow your car in and if it's not too far out of my way, I can give you a ride to your party."

    "Jeez, it's gonna need towing?"

    He smiled again. "Afraid so."

    She didn't say thanks for the offer of a ride; thanks for looking at my car. She was as cheap as her watch.

    "So what's wrong with it?"

    "Hole in your radiator probably."

    Cars went by, most of them filled with teenagers prowling the night. Rock music trailed in their wake like banners fluttering in the wind.

    "Jeez," she said, "why does this crap always happen to me?"

    "My name's O'Rourke," he said. The odd thing was, the false name surprised him. He had no idea why he'd used it. No idea yet what he really had in mind. He put out a slender hand (he'd always hated his hands, tiny as a fourteen year old girl's, the wrists delicate no matter how long he lifted weights) and she took it.

    "Paula. Stufflebeam."

    "Now there's a sturdy name for you."

    "Hah. Sturdy. Shitty is what you mean."

    They got in the car and started driving. The radio played Andy Gibb. The girl started singing along very low and then asked if he could maybe turn up the radio a little. Even in his radio playing he was conservative. Kept it low all the time.

    When the song was over, she looked at him and said, "This is a nice car."

    "Thank you." He wasn't sure why but he didn't want to tell her it was rented.

    "If I woulda got married last fall, I woulda had a car like this. The guy really had bucks."

    "Oh?"

    "But he was all fucked up, pardon my French. Nam. He had these nightmares. He scared me."

    "I'm sorry for both of you."

    "Well, like my mother says, there's always more fish in the sea."

    The night was busy. Mosquitoes slapped against the windshield. Distantly he could smell the river and the hot fishy odours on the darkness. Donna Summer came on. He wondered what Lisa was doing tonight. Probably something fashionable. Her last note indicated that she had become involved in theatre and had met the neatest acting coach. He wondered if she had already betrayed her husband and if she was sleeping with this acting coach.

    He knew he had to hurry. He had to get back to the hospital before he was reported missing.

    Two blocks from the Standard station, he suddenly veered right, still not knowing why. A sign said WARNER PARK, TWO BLOCKS. The Beatles sang
Paperback Writer
.

    "Hey," she said.

    "Pardon me?"

    "This ain't the way to the gas station."

    "No?"

    "No."

    He increased his speed. He was now going forty miles per hour. He had to be careful. He could get stopped by a cop.

    She looked at him. "Don't get any ideas. About me, I mean."

    "Wouldn't you like to look over the city? Just sort of take a break?"

    "I don't even know you."

    He turned toward her. Smiled. "I'm not going to put the make on you, if that's what you're afraid of." He frowned. "I'll be honest with you."

    "Yeah?"

    "Yes. My girlfriend-" He sighed. His words sounded painful beyond belief. "My girlfriend left me for somebody else."

    "That's too bad."

    "So right now I could use some company, you know? Just a friend."

    "But I gotta be at that wedding shower."

    "Just a few minutes is all. Just go up and look out over the city. Just a few minutes."

    "Well-"

    "And I won't try anything. I promise."

    "You're sure?"

    "I'm sure."

    She sighed. "Some guy dumped me once so I know how you're feeling, the pecker." And again she sighed. "I could only spend a few minutes."

    "I've got things to do myself."

    "You mind if I smoke this roach I got in my purse?"

    "Not at all."

    "I'm not a doper or anything. I just like a little grass once in a while. It relaxes me."

    "Fine."

    She took out this tiny roach clip and then inserted this even tinier roach in it. He was amazed that she got it going. She took three heavy tokes on it and then leaned her head back against the seat. The Bee Gees sang
Stayin' Alive
.

    "You want a toke?" she said.

    "No thanks."

    Her voice was kind of raspy now. "It really relaxes me."

    "Yes, that's what you said."

    After he parked the car, they got out and went to the edge of a grassy cliff. The night air was slow and hot, filled with fireflies and bam owls. Below them the city lay like a vast drug dream, unreal in the way it sprawled shimmering over the prairie landscape and then ended abruptly, giving way to the plains and the forest again. Next to him, Paula Stufflebeam smelled of sweat and faded perfume and sexual juices. She had a run in her stockings so bad he could see it even in the moonlit darkness and oddly enough it made him feel sorry for her. She wasn't cheap, she was poor and uneducated and there was a difference. He had to keep this in mind whenever he took to judging people from the eyrie of his privileged life.

    "So who'd she dump you for?" Paula said after they'd been there a few minutes.

    "A lawyer."

    "A lawyer, huh? Bet he pulls down the bucks."

    "No. He's a civil rights lawyer."

    "You mean like black people and people like that?"

    "Right."

    "Oh." She didn't sound impressed. "Well, you know what my mother told me."

    "That there're plenty of other fish in the sea?"

    "Right."

    He slid his arm across her shoulder and brought her closer to him. He'd never been good at making out. He'd always been afraid he was doing all the wrong things. But tonight he felt a curious self-confidence.

    He brought her to him and she surprised him by coming along willingly. He felt her press up against him, the shift of her breasts beneath the polyester of her dress, the faint wisp of hair spray, and the bubblegum taste of her lipstick. Their groins were pressed together, too, and he felt a hard, breathless lust start to increase his heartbeat.

    "I really don't have time to do anything," she said after pulling gently away from him.

    "I know."

    "But you could always call me sometime."

    "I'd like that."

    And he knew, then. Knew why he'd stopped for her, knew why he'd brought her here.

    He leaned close as if to nuzzle her. His hands came up quickly, and found her throat with criminal ease.

    "Oh, God!" she shouted there in the clearing, in the night, in the heat. "Oh, God!"

    And he thought of jism and the pink lips of her pussy and of her dark moist pubic hair.

    And he thought of her blood intermingled with his come.

    And he pressed his hands tighter, tighter about her throat.

    And the birds of this vast night watched, and a distant dog barked as if in protest, and from his pocket he took the knife he'd found in the tower, and he put it deep into her chest, brought it down, down, and as it ripped low he felt himself ejaculate, a blind moment of pleasure he'd never known before, and again he dreamed of his jism flowing with her blood, and he ripped all the more.

    And then, as she fell in what seemed to be slow motion from his grasp, he thought:

    
Oh my God.

    
Oh. My. God.

    
What have I done?

    
And, my God, why?

    
Why have I done this?

    And he thought of the tower and of the coiling snake inside him.

    He stood as if naked on the very curve of the earth, here alone in frail starlight, and for the first time he knew there was some other reality, some more important one, than the homely truth of the every day.

    She was not quite dead, still struggling and vomiting up blood, and he knew now there was time, and he took his sex in his hand and let the jism flow into the blood of her throat and chest, and he cried out to the stars like an animal betrayed.

    And when he was finished, he ran. Through whipsaw undergrowth that ripped up his face and arms, running, running, the very breath of him hot and stale in his lungs, until he fell down next to a small creek where he washed from his hands and face the blood of her.

    And then, helpless and unrelenting, he began to cry and knew then he was changed forever.

    An hour and a half later he stood in the dust and darkness of the tower. He had not set a match to the candle tonight for he did not want to see the snake leave him. He had too many nightmares already of the snake.

    And then, as if choking, he bent over and felt the cold slithering serpent begin to unwind in his belly and slide wriggling up his oesophagus and escape, hissing now, its tongue flicking, from his open mouth.

    

    

    FROM THE CAFETERIA DOOR to the table where Marie Fane usually sat was twenty-eight steps. She knew this because she counted them every once in a while. Between the door and the table was an open space where anybody who was interested could get a clear look at her and her foot. Most of the kids in school always thought of her the same way, as 'the pretty girl who's crippled.'

    They meant nothing malicious by this; it's just the way human beings remember each other, kind of like name tags-big noses or crossed eyes or skin discoloration. Most people didn't know what had caused her foot to be this way, to be angled so that she jerked a little bit every time she stepped down, only that it was a shame that a girl so fetching and quiet and dignified had to be crippled. They didn't know about the car running a kerb and smashing into her when she was five, about the four operations that came after, about the nightmares she had of kids watching her and pointing when she crossed the empty space between the doorway and the cafeteria table where she sat every day. She wasn't poor-she and her mother were reasonably well off actually-but her friends were mostly the poor kids in school. And the oddballs; oh, yes, the oddballs.

    As always, she put her head down when she walked to the table. She hated it when people called her name or drew any attention to her at all. She just wanted to get to her seat and sit down and be forgotten about utterly. This was why she always carried a sack lunch that she packed every night before school. Standing in the cafeteria line just gave more people a chance to see that she was crippled.

    "Hey! Beauty!"

    She didn't have to wonder who it was: Tommy Powell, an obese kid who spent most of his time in comic book stores and who proved that being an outsider didn't necessarily make you sensitive to other people. Marie had asked Tommy many times not to call out to her this way but he did it anyway. Tommy had this terrible crush on her (it was probably just as painful for her as it was for him) and he could only seem to express it in the most obnoxious and childish ways.

    "Hey! Beauty!" he called again.

    Then he started-another typical Tommy move-singing the words to
There She Is, Miss America,
pushing out from the table and standing up in his Batman T-shirt, lime-green pants, and scuffed white Reeboks on which a variety of people had inscribed obscenities.

    Lucy Carnes started tugging on his sleeve and whispering for him to sit down. Lucy knew how self conscious Marie got. Lucy had this big purple birthmark all over her left cheek so she knew all about the eyes of strangers.

    The third person at the table was Richie Beck. He was a nice looking seventeen year old who had transferred this term from somewhere upstate. His appearance, his manners, and his general bearing said that he should have been with the popular kids but for some reason he'd elected to run with Tommy's group. Marie, who was interested in Rich but too shy to tell him so, suspected that he had a secret, something he was ashamed of, which was why he hung out with the group.

    When she reached the table and set down her lunch sack, Tommy said, "You pack any Twinkies today?" He always tried to cadge her dessert.

    She wanted to tell him how much he'd embarrassed her by singing that stupid Miss America song but Tommy was hopeless. Like a surprising number of kids who were socially ostracised, Tommy took his bitterness and loneliness and anger out on others.