Snake Handlin' Man (9 page)

Unless his recurring dream was a trick. Staring at the Nehushtan, Eddie started to laugh. His mouth was dry and sweat ran down his face, but the thought that he had pinned so many hopes, and lost so much time he might have spent with his family, on what might be nothing more than a lie punched him right in the cynical part of his sense of humor and once he started laughing, it was hard to stop.

After all, Old Scratch had tricked him about his gift, giving him amazing tambourine chops when he wanted to play the guitar … why not give him false visions of death, too? Forcing Eddie away from his family for nothing struck him as just the kind of practical joke that would appeal to the head of the Infernal Council. Maybe separating him from his family was Eddie’s real damnation.

“You okay?” Mike asked. “You all right, or did you go crazy?”

Irving’s knuckles were white with effort and Eddie’s eyes hurt from staring, but the snake remained frozen in place. Finally, Eddie collapsed forward onto the floor. His burned buttocks hurt, and his snake-bitten arm and his belly. His muscles all felt like rubber and he had the mother of all fevers. He’d never felt worse in his life.

“Yeah,” he muttered into the carpet. “I ain’t cured, but I’m all right.”

He dragged himself to his feet with the counter, and Twitch jumped down to help.

“Mike,” he said. “Have you looked at the lock?”

Mike nodded. “No big deal, just the same kind of thing you’d put on your storage locker, but I got nothing to pick it with.”

Eddie dug into one of his pockets until he found a hairpin and a paperclip. He untangled the latter from a folded stick of gum. “Either one of these work?”

Mike grinned and took them both.

“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Eddie laid it out. “Mike picks the lock. Irving takes the snake-on-a-stick. We arm ourselves out of the janitorial supplies—hopefully that’s what’s across the hall, since it’s probably too much to hope that the manager has a gun locker. We rush the first totem pole and rip its hood off. Then we do whatever we can to get to the lamia.”

“Ah,” said Twitch, “so it’s a sophisticated plan.”

Eddie shot him the evil eye. “You wanna bolt,” he said, “now’s the time. Fly on outta here and spend the rest of your long, fairy-ass life alone.”

Twitch was quiet.

“Or stick with us,” Eddie continued. “Next stop for this band’s Chicago, where we got a little business to take care of.” He straightened his jacket and cleared his throat. “We just gotta get through a minor obstacle first.”

Twitch was a man again. He smiled, bowed slightly, and plucked his fighting batons from thin air.

“You need the milk, too,” Irving said quietly to Eddie.

“Yeah, I do,” Eddie admitted. “But it ain’t lack of faith on
your
part that makes the Nehushtan not work on me. It’s lack of faith on
mine
. I’m a damned man, I told you, and I can’t have the gift. But
you
,” he clapped the preacher woozily on the shoulder, “you’ve got it up the wazoo. So you’re the key part of the plan, got it? Without you working the mojo of the Moses snake, we ain’t gonna get to the totem pole.”

“I have faith,” the preacher said. He said it so confidently that Eddie almost believed him. “If we die, but we stop Apep, we won’t have died in vain.”

“I ain’t gonna die,” Eddie said, willing it to be true. “Not today. Someone promised me that once, and I’m gonna hold him to his promise, come Hell or high water. Mike?”

“Done.” Mike picked himself up off the floor with the open padlock in his hand.

Eddie grabbed the chain door and hoisted, but his strength was sapped and he couldn’t budge it. Jim, big pale rugby-looking lunk that he was, stuck two fingers into the gate and raised it up over his head in a single gesture.

“Damn showoff,” Eddie grumbled, but he shot Jim a grateful look.

If anything, the noise of the magical ritual throbbed even louder in the hall. It was almost groovy, the complex rhythm that the sistrum players had going, though it was too complex to be easily danceable. That kind of rhythm took practice and real coordination. The
EMPLOYEES ONLY
door was locked, so Eddie stepped aside and stood guard while Mike worked his magic on it.

“We consecrate thee Wepwawet, opener of the ways,” he heard Aaron’s voice over the noise. “Thy brain is purified by the fire of the serpent. Thy vision is free of taint.”

Idiots, Eddie thought. At least the ritual wasn’t over yet. He kept an uncomfortable eye on the backs of the cultists. They danced and pressed forward, humans and mutants and actual snakes all alike, as if they were watching the concert of their lives. Like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were playing on the same tiny stage.

Hadn’t Irving said that Apep was going to eat some of them? What kind of stupid religion was that?

Of course, he and his comrades were supposed to be the appetizers now. Eddie wished he had a gun.

“Open,” Mike said, and stepped aside. Eddie tried to pick up a jug of cleaning fluid and a box of lye flakes, but found he couldn’t heft either. He settled for a straw broom and stood aside, leaning on it, while Mike and Jim loaded up with chemicals and box cutters.

“Here we go,” Eddie said softly. He looked at his watch just in time to see the countdown slip below the one-hour mark. He really hoped Adrian hadn’t been too optimistic in his estimate of the time.

BOOM!

A dazzling light suddenly burst into the dim basement of the Sears, accompanied by the stink of sulfur. Eddie staggered and caught himself with his broom, then looked toward the ritual, shielding his eyes with his hand.

The sistrum players had changed rhythms, but continued, their patterns as complex as before. The worshippers at the back of the circle, nearest the band, still faced into the center, but now they were beginning to step out of their clothes. Fine, Eddie thought. Naked and disarmed was better. The incense cloud was thick in his nostrils.

In the center of the circle, beside the makeshift surgical table, there was a hole in the air. It looked like a streak of starlight had been painted onto nothing at all, or an invisible curtain had parted and directly behind it was a lighthouse, blazing at full power. Eddie blinked against the strength of the light and tried to keep his attention on the figures in the middle.

With a final slash of the stone flake knife, Miriam the lamia freed the dog from the ropes that still tied it to the table. Eddie saw that its chest was stitched shut now, but of course, the dog couldn’t possibly be alive, not after all its organs had been replaced.

But as he watched, the dog—Wepwawet, opener of the ways?—rolled over. It rose quite steadily onto all fours, sniffed at the air and jumped to the ground.

And then padded forward quickly, disappearing into the blazing gap of light.

***

Chapter Nine

“No!” Phineas Irving yelled.

Eddie wanted to punch the preacher in the face. The cultists nearest the band stopped in the last stages of their disrobing and turned to see the source of the noise. A bald man, with sagging flesh, wiry gray curls of hair all over his body and ridges on his skull like a lizard, met Eddie’s gaze and hissed in disapproval, showing a row of needle-like teeth and a preternaturally thin tongue.

“Screw you,” Eddie muttered, and jammed the end of his broom into Ridge Head’s eye. The fat man jerked back from the blow and doubled over in pain.

Something orange flashed past Eddie and spun out over the crowd. It was a box, Eddie saw, like a large box that baking soda might come in, and it shed big white snowflakes as it flew. From the shrieks that erupted from those that were hit, he guessed that the flakes were lye. The worshippers clawed at their faces and cringed and Jim launched into them like a vengeful comet, box-cutter spinning without mercy.

“Sing!” Eddie shouted. “Or pray, or whatever!”

Ridge Head lurched forward, grabbing with both hands for Eddie’s throat. He felt weak, but he managed to stumble under the attack and avoid it, probably because Ridge Head’s face and eyes were already red from the lye and the broom handle, and he was blinking out too many tears to see straight. The lizard-man’s nudity and blindness made his testicles an easy target, and Eddie launched a knife-hand of knuckles into the soft tissue, twisting and tearing and dropping the mutant to the floor in a spray of blood and shrieking.

Twitch whizzed past on Jim’s heels in falcon shape, and then Mike lumbered by. Eddie saw that the singer was already bogged down in fighting the crowd. He pushed off one man’s shoulders to springboard with his boot heels into another’s chest; he grabbed a snake-legged woman by the hair and cracked her forehead-first into the nose of a heavy bearded man with snakes’ heads dangling limply from his clavicle; he sliced with the box cutter, eviscerating in a single blow two men rushing him with knives; he grabbed a snake-headed freak by the ankles and hurled his feet toward the ceiling, dropping the monster onto its face on the floor. But there were just too many of them. They grabbed Jim by the elbows and shoulders and pulled him back, swinging and kicking, to the ground.

Mike threw a gallon jug of something orange on a knot of them and they hollered and hissed in protest. A second gallon, colorless, smashed into their faces as they looked up, and then the big bass player plowed into them, bellowing like a bull and cursing like a Mexican pimp.

They were both still several rows back behind the sistrum players. In the center of the room, worshippers rushed forward into a thickening cloud of incense. Without being able to pay much attention to it—and sure as hell without
wanting
to—Eddie noticed that the surgery table had become an altar-bed. Phineas’s snake-armed brother, naked now, savaged one prone woman with his hips while others rushed to embrace and caress the coiling monstrosities that sprouted from his shoulders. The lamia Miriam rose beside the shimmering gate of light, singing, while men and women alike pressed themselves to her sides, stroking her body with their hands and mouths. Most of the snake-snakes and the winged snakes in the room clustered around the table and the lamia, pressing to get into the action like so many detached, living organs. In their frenzy, they pushed each other against the incense brazier-charcoal grill, and the stink of their scorched flesh added a new note to the reek of the ritual chamber.

Above them all, the legs of the frozen damned twitched and shook in a frenzy of restrained motion.

“This is just wrong,” Eddie grimaced, and limped forward into the fray.

“Onward Christian soldiers,” he heard Phineas Irving trying to sing behind him, but the preacher was timid and quiet, and then he faltered.

“Come on!” Eddie barked. “Louder!” He grabbed Irving by the lapel of his jacket and stumbled forward into the crowd. He looked up at the Nehushtan to see if Irving was having any success.

The snake stayed coiled on its pole. It looked still and dead.

Ahead, Twitch landed on top of the nearest totem pole. The fairy shifted from falcon into human form as he touched down, and squatted on all fours above a big carved monkey’s head. Baboon, maybe. In his leather-and-spikes outfit, Eddie thought, Twitch fit right in with this crowd. He crouched low and reached down with his hands, trying to get at the blindfold over the monkey’s eyes.

Three young women had Mike knocked to the ground and stood over the bass player, scratching at him with their long nails. Mike wore his cracked old brown leather jacket and it protected his arms and chest, but there were bloody furrows on his neck and the backs of his hands. He held his box cutter, but he wasn’t fighting back very effectively, just raising his arms and cringing.

Mike was not the right guy to bring to a fight against naked women. He had plenty of hate and fear in him, but it wasn’t directed at women. For women, what he mostly had was a slack jaw and a dumb grin.

But Eddie had enough bitterness in his heart for both of them. He swung his broom as hard as he could like a bo staff, cracking it against the temple of the nearest girl. She stumbled away, shrieking in outrage and grabbing her head. Eddie continued his charge and rammed with his shoulder into the second young woman’s side. She fell squirming and breathless.

Phineas Irving stabbed the butt end of the Nehushtan’s pole between the shoulder blades of the third.

“Aaaaaararaaaaagh!” she shrieked, a piercing cry that cut through the drums and the chanting. Her skin where the pole touched her charred instantly to black, like a Satanic cattle branding, and the stink of scorching flesh filled Eddie’s nostrils, overpowering even the billowing incense. She crumpled to the ground and Mike staggered to his feet, just in time to meet a slithering charge from the mutant Many Arms.

This guy, Mike had no trouble attacking. Head down, he rammed the fingers of one hand into the mutant’s throat while he slashed with his janitorial knife at the thing’s long, scaly and exposed chest.

“It works!” Irving laughed. “It’s working again!” He raised the pole like a spear and jabbed over Mike’s shoulder, poking Many Arms in his human face with the butt of the pole. The mutant roared with rage and slithered back, bleeding from the cuts Mike inflicted on him and slapping at a charred mark on his face the size of a silver dollar.

Jim was back on his feet too, and crashed through a writhing pile of sex-inflamed worshippers, scattering them right and left and almost forcing open a path to the center of the circle. Eddie looked into the light—no sign of the dog’s return yet, or of any giant snake. Any
more
giant snakes, anyway.

“Twitch!” he yelled.

The fairy lay on the totem pole’s head on his belly, booted feet and tail hanging over one side while his arms dangled over the other. “I’m working on it!” he shouted back.

A small cloud of winged serpents rushed towards Twitch from the focal center of the orgy. “Faster!” Eddie called, and he swung his broom, smacking serpents left and right. He sucked in the sex-reeking, serpent-fouled air, wishing it were colder and cleaner and willing his head to stop spinning.

He heard the hiss of a snake at his ankle level. He spun to face it, fearing he was too late and that he was about to take a second dose of venom, but gray-brown fur flashed between him and the snake and then the snake collapsed, headless.

The mongoose kept moving, bounding off between the wrestling bodies in search of more prey. Its fellows raced around the melee with coordination, striking down serpents by the charcoal grill, around the totem poles, on the stairs, under the altar, and even low in the air.

“Got it!” Twitch yelled triumphantly. He hooked two of his unnaturally long, slender fingers into the rough cloth of the blindfold and ripped it away. Eddie held his breath.

But nothing happened. Underneath the blindfold, Eddie saw that the monkey’s head didn’t have eyes, anyway. It had had them once, big and bulbous, but they’d been hacked into splinters, as if by hatchets, and then burned by fire. The Apep worshippers weren’t going to take any chances.

“Rats.”

Eddie knocked another flying serpent away, staggered and almost fell.

Stay focused, he told himself. Get to the lamia.

He looked into the center of the rite again. Still no dog. Snakes swarmed all over the frenzied multi-participant coupling on the table, and on the swaying mass of the lamia’s body. There were lizards too, he now saw, things the size of iguanas and bigger, nastier monsters, like the thing he’d battled back in the diner kitchen … that seemed a decade ago now. Worshippers of every kind pressed themselves against the lamia like piglets against a sow, writhing and squirming with ripe urgency.

Could he just slip in there with them and … feed?

The thought made him feel sick. Miriam was voluptuous, but there was an unhealthy tinge to her skin, and the snakes in her hair and her lower half made her a monstrous thing. She was blue, dammit, and more than half a snake! Some men would have been aroused—some men clearly
were
aroused—but the naked Eros of the lamia’s body just made Eddie think of Sharon and curse his luck even more.

And he had to get milk for Adrian, he reminded himself. This wasn’t sex, this was grocery shopping.

Besides, he’d never get in there, not with all the worshippers pressing around, not unnoticed. And he wouldn’t be able to collect milk casually in a container without being spotted. He had to stop the ritual, somehow immobilize the lamia.

He just didn’t see how.

“Come on.” He shanghaied Phineas Irving, pulling the preacher away from a four-person pile-up that now stank of burned flesh as well as of lust and viscous body fluids, dragging the rangy man with him towards the center of the room. Where were his guns, anyway? He wondered, his vision slipping like an old filmstrip on a jerky projector. He’d give a lot right now for his pump-action, twelve gauge Remington 870 Express Magnum shotgun, fully loaded with three-inch shells.

He’d give even more for a fifty caliber M2, a pile of sandbags and a high vantage point to shoot from. Clean out this nest of snakes in thirty seconds.

Jim had opened a path through into the center of the room. He held the box cutter in his left hand now and fought with a long hunting knife in his right—he must have taken it from one of the cultists while Eddie wasn’t watching. Overalls lunged at him, snapping and biting, and Lady Legs charged from another direction—

and from a third came John Deere. The man’s head was still gone, a ragged bloody stump of a neck sprouting from his shoulders, but the snakes waggling from his back seemed longer and angrier, and he held a long metal pipe in his hand like a club. At least he didn’t have a TV on his shoulders, Eddie thought, and then he wondered why he thought that would be any worse.

Jim fought like a dancer, weaving in and out, feinting, dodging, stepping under. The mutants tangled with each other, missing, and chased him in circles. But they were getting closer, and Jim had nowhere to go. The smaller serpents, ground-stuck and flying ones as well, began to close in on him too. The mongooses wreaked havoc among serpentkind, but they were slowing down. If they weren’t injured, they had to at least be exhausted.

Eddie dragged the preacher out into the circle. “
Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war.…
”

“
With the cross of Jesus going on before,
” Jim joined in. The guy had serious lungs on him, to be able to sing and fight at the same time.

Eddie spun with his broomstick club, knocking aside serpents, and then Twitch flashed through the central circle in falcon form, snatching two more flying snakes out of the air. Mike backed into the circle, too, his box cutter in his hands slashing half-heartedly to fend off the bare-fisted advances of two women. One had a perfectly formed womanly body but a snake’s scales on her cheeks and forehead, and the other had a fine, clean young woman’s face but snakes erupting from her chest instead of breasts.

Mike circled back to keep out of both their reach, but mostly he stabbed at the latter.

The sistrum players changed rhythm suddenly.

“O Wepwawet!” Aaron Irving’s voice boomed suddenly from beneath a shuddering pile of women and snakes. “Wepwawet returns! The opener of the ways, behold, he comes!”

Eddie really wished he had guns.

Christ the royal master leaders against the foe,

Forward into battle see his banners go.

Overalls and Lady Legs and the others hesitated at the fringe of the Nehushtan’s bubble, but Phineas Irving’s voice sounded like it was losing some of its intensity.

Eddie looked around for anything else at hand that he could use—a gun, a knife, a torch, a charm, anything that might be more effective than a broomstick.

Nothing.

A dim outline began to take shape in the light of the pulsating rift. Eddie saw that the sistrum players nearest to him were just outside the space cleared by the Nehushtan. He staggered towards them, a plan spinning into being in his feverish brain. It was half-baked and half-assed and wholly insane, but what was the point of being the world’s best tambourine player if he never used his chops?

Lady Legs rushed at him hissing—

and the sparkling red Nehushtan sprang from its perch, intercepting the hedge of woman-legged snakes and snapping it into its gullet in a single bite.

“No!” bellowed Aaron Irving. He sat up on his altar-bed, scattering scaly nymphlets and ecstatically hissing serpents with his sudden movement. The Nehushtan struck again, devouring John Deere whole. Freed of some of his assailants, Jim leaped spinning through the air, crashing into one of the totem poles and knocking it flying.

Eddie squinted at the pillar of light, fearing it was about to disgorge Apep himself, but the shadowy shape coalesced into a discrete form and emerged. It was the mummy-dog, Wepwawet, and it padded out calmly, looking totally normal apart from beady black eyes and a long snake-like tongue wagging from between its jaws.