Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Moloch was piled high inside the playhouse, with his head—about the length and width of a phone book—poking out near the top of the door. Moloch got curious when Hypok was in the room because it usually meant food. You wouldn’t really see him move inside the house, unless you were watching hard. That’s the way it was with big snakes—they didn’t locomote so much as simply adjust One second you’d look through the playhouse door and see two huge inert green coils lying atop each other, still as mossy logs, then the next time you looked his head would be there and he’d be eyeing you. Like now. Hypok could see his big silver eye with the black vertical slash of a pupil through it, and the heavy black tongue going patiently in and out of his closed mouth. Moloch—Eunectes murinus—his beloved anaconda from Paraguay, was close to thirty feet long now, and Hypok guessed his weight at a rather obese five hundred pounds. Realistically, though, how do you weigh such a thing?

  Item #3 burst into another fit on the bed but Hypok ignored it. Was it epileptic? Whatever. He drank down the tequila—still warm—then went back to the kitchen for another couple of inches and some fresh ice.

  When he came back to his chair he was reflecting upon, for the thousandth time, what a miracle it was that the snake was even alive. Yes, his own mother had tried to kill it when it was just a newborn, hardly twenty-four inches long, by spraying it every morning with bug killer. He was eleven when he bought the reptile, from a friend. He had long been sleeping in the “den” of the house, a miserable, windowless little room that Wanda locked him in during the night. This, due to some curious explorations on the part of Collette and Valeen, starting when he was four. The snake’s cage was in his “room,” and his mother would slide the outside deadbolt early, come in, check to see if Genie—her nickname for Gene—was asleep. And if she was convinced he was—he was great at faking it and lifting one eyelid from the depths of his pillow—she’d produce from the big pocket of her housecoat a red can of roach killer, slide open the cage top and shoot the poor thing right in the face with it. This went on for almost a week, until Hypok had gotten a small padlock and hidden the key. Moloch—he was named Mike, back then—had quit eating, lost his skin in little patches and generally grown depressed. Hypok’s own skin had started turning bad about that time, and he attributed both of their sufferings to the roach spray, but he was more worried about the snake than about himself. He thought the little anaconda would die. But slowly Mike got strong again, then he started growing extra fast. Hypok believed then, and still did now, that the roach killer had actually boosted Mike’s growth rate. A short two years later he was four feet long and taking large rats. Now he was high twenties, at least! The Brooklyn Zoo had just acquired a reticulated python that measured twenty-three, and that had made the news. So much for Mom and her stupid fucking hateful ideas on things. Even twenty-two years ago, as Hypok faked sleep and watched his tiny, wretched, perpetually drunken mother spray his snake, he had imagined how great it would be if Mike could just get big enough to eat her someday. Any woman who tried to turn her boy into a girl, then treated him like a criminal when it didn’t work, deserved what she got, in Hypok’s opinion. And the more he thought about it, the angrier he got.

  Three Dream Busts later, Brittany was dispirited and exhausted. She’d almost fallen off the bed during the last one. She was certain that Dead Gopher Man would come over and hit her, or at least drag her back to the middle of the mattress, but he didn’t. She could hear him across the room, eating something right from the pan, muttering to someone she was now convinced was not there. So she scrunched herself back onto the bed using the side of her head and feet as pivots, raising the middle of her body like a big inchworm, wriggling backward, her ankles aching against each other and the black hood riding up so far onto her head that she could now see through the airholes if she moved her eyeballs down a little.

  She lay on her side. Dead Gopher Man was somewhere in the room behind her. When she tilted back her head and looked down through the breathing hole, she saw a big window with a naked tree, a pond and a playhouse behind it. There were walls inside at both ends. It was lit from above and looked clean. Was it a cage? A playroom for a toddler? Where were the toys?

  Soundlessly, Dead Gopher Man came into her view. He had his back to her and he was looking through the glass. He looked neither tall nor short; neither fat nor skinny. He wore a jacket like Daddy did sometimes when he picked her up after his work. With his cap and bandanna gone she could see his short, white, brushed-back hair. It wasn’t a hairstyle you saw a lot. When he turned to the side, his face looked kind of tight and mean. He was holding something in one hand that looked like a little girl’s dress—pink with white trim, like you’d wear to church. In the other hand was some kind of white lacy thing. He was looking at the playhouse behind the glass.

  Then he turned all the way and looked at her. She closed her eyes. But she did see his face first—a regular face, maybe a little thin, with brown eyes. It was a serious face, one that you wouldn’t want to talk to if your mouth was full of food. That was a big thing with her dad. Dead Gopher Man looked like he would spank you for anything. She started sobbing again, thinking of her dad, and the way he was big and strong and would beat the crap out of this guy if he was here. He was never there when you wanted him to be.

  Maybe just one more big giant Dream Bust would work and she’d open her eyes to find all of this gone.

  She opened her eyes again and looked down toward the breathing hole and she didn’t see the glass cage at all, but instead, a face up close and looking in at her. Then she smelled his breath again. She tried to keep her body from shaking as she scrunched her eyes shut hard and sobbed, but it didn’t do any good at all.

  Hypok rearranged the hood over its head, just to make sure it was getting breath and not looking out. Then he took out the big scissors and cut the nightgown from neck to hem, then the sleeves, then he peeled it away like a skin. It shivered and pressed its hooded head into one of the pillows. Its skin was pale and perfect, its panties white. He wanted to see and maybe touch what was under those. Hypok put one of Valeen’s old dresses on Item #3, touching it as little as possible but consuming every inch of it with his eyes. When it was arranged, he stood and looked down at it, pleased.

  He went into the bedroom and got his good skin from a drawer in the old dresser. He took off his clothes and stepped through the leg openings. He didn’t look in the mirror because he’d seen himself enough times in all these years to have the image branded in his memory: the raw pink stretchy patches that invaded all of him except his face and neck and hands, the lesions, the rock-hard scars left by two-plus decades of chronic psoriasis that no amount of Lidex or UVA baths could control let alone cure, the vanishing wilderness of his original skin, his birth skin, his good skin, the way God had intended him to be before his mother got to him with the spray. No, he didn’t even look. One worked with what one had. The cards one is dealt. He slipped his legs into the thin cotton suit, pulled it up snugly to his waist, then over his shoulders, then put his hands through the armholes and stretched them out straight to bring the thing taut against his back. He reached down to his crotch and zipped himself all the way up to his chin and in.

  Now he looked in the mirror. And there he was, newly hatched in a skein of overlapping bright silver blue metallic scales that housed him in a supple, holographic shimmer. He gave a turn. The polyester scales picked up the dim light and gathered it into a rainbow of reflected color. Next, the booties and gloves. And a lingering final assessment in the glass: yes, reptilian and celestial all at once, he thought, essential and ideal, yet tactile and present. The best he could be. Hypok transcendent. Touchable.

  His heart was beating slow and smooth as he went back to the living room. He finished the tequila and poured more. He felt capable with the good skin on him. His shoulders were relaxed, loose and low, and his neck was strong but flexible. He walked, feeling himself. His head was quick on a neck this powerful, and it was pleasurable to feel
it swiveling left, straight ahead, then hard right, as he took the measure of his environment. He felt like he could smoothly glide around any obstacle—rock or brick or branches. He felt as if he could enter a swamp, slowly and noiselessly, and account himself well in the mysteries of dark water. Item #3 was behaving now, curled into itself atop the old red blanket he and his sisters had slept under all those years ago, its hooded face toward the tank. Moloch stared at him from the depth of the pool. Hypok reached up and turned on the video recorder.

  He gulped the tequila, set the glass on the chair arm, then guided himself down beside the Item, lying between it and the glass. His scales slid without resistance against the wool. He basked for a moment. For a while he watched the unmoving head of Moloch and sensed the breathing behind him. To his heightened sense of smell, the old blanket smelled like it did three decades ago—of thickly fatted mammal and juvenile human females. But thirty years ago was right now. And right now was the past, too—all the way back to the black sloughs where life begins—and whatever future he chose to take. He reached down to the floor and got the two remote exposure controls. These he transferred to his left hand. Without looking he reached behind himself with his right arm and set his brightly scaled hand on the small of the Item’s back. It began sobbing.

  Shhhhh.

  Hypok closed his eyes and inhaled the smells—the girl, the blanket, the faint fecal aroma of Moloch. He pressed the cable controls: shoot, shoot, shoot. The Item had a soapier smell than Collette and Valeen, though Valeen’s old clothes undercut that freshness with the dank richness of time. This is close to how it was back then: the scent of the available female, the dark liquid power of his instincts, the punishing reality of the maternal nearby, overhead, perhaps, like a bird of prey:

  Collette: Let’s inspect Genie again.

  Valeen: Genie, are you asleep yet?

  Gene: (groans as if in sleep, turning onto his back)

  Collette: Everybody be real quiet now.

  Oooooooh …

  All the nascent power returns to him in the memory, along with all the power of his subsequent years. The past has crawled forward to swallow the present, and together, this thirty-year span of desire resides in Hypok with all the sharpness and immediacy of a spark. He feels present in the past and present in the moment because it is all just one huge thing, a chain of hours linked to make a life. He begins to undulate in his good skin. He peers out at Moloch and groans as if in sleep: here you are, you hateful bitch if you can see me. Then he closes his eyes again and knows that she’ll never beat him with the belt for what his sisters loved to do, will never lock him away in the small cold room with the loaf of bread and the jug of water, will never humiliate him for his shyness, punish him for his breath, ridicule him for his skin or pound him for his desires again. Moloch has blessed him with that. So he undulates in his beautiful skin, the power of the years gathering. He feels beneath his scaled hand the body he has always needed. He doesn’t even need to see it. There it is: the object of all desire. He will never be that body. It will always be another. To possess it would mean to inject it with his life, and offer it to Moloch. This is the direction of his years, the shape of his destiny. He has been here before and he has lost his courage. He has been here before and not lost it. He wonders if he is truly ready to attain the summit again. He opens his eyes. Moloch stares at him from the tree. Shoot, shoot, shoot.

  Brittany could still see through the airhole she was meant to breathe through. Dead Gopher Man was covered in silver scales like a fish and lying just a few feet away from her. His back was to her and his whole body was moving, slowly and rhythmically, like he was swimming in slow motion. He made noises every few seconds, but nothing she could understand. It was kind of moaning, kind of talking. She heard this funny sound above her every once in a while—kind of a short click with a rattle after it. Two or three times. Then it stopped. His hand was still on her back and she could see his arm extending back toward her, covered in the shimmering scales. She could see just a tiny bit of the dress he had put on her and she knew it wasn’t one of hers. Beyond Dead Gopher Man this slow dark shape moved through a tree. Dead Gopher Man kept moving, faster now but still evenly—what was he doing?

  Brittany closed her eyes as hard as she could and tried to scream and shook herself into a Dream Bust. She shook so hard she thought her bones would come undone. But the scream wouldn’t get out past the tape and she realized why the Dream Bust had failed her today: because the scream was the most important part; it frightened away everything else in the dream, but she couldn’t do it because of the tape.

  Suddenly she was on her back and she felt two strong hands on her arms pinning her down and she couldn’t see past the hood but when he spoke she knew he was just inches from her face. His voice was a quick, foul hiss:

  Stop it! Mother’s watching!

  THIRTEEN

  Marcine Browne ushered me into her office at Bright Tomorrows. It was 9:55 A.M. She was mid-thirties, dressed and made up with pride, red haired and quite attractive. She flicked on the lights and pointed to a chair in front of a desk.

  “Can I get you some coffee?”

  “I’d rather not waste your time,” I said.

  “Can I get me some coffee?”

  She was back in five minutes with two cups. They were white mugs with BRIGHT TOMORROWS emblazoned across them in optimistic red script. She looked at the bandage on my face as she offered me the coffee.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Ms. Browne, I’m the lead investigator for the Sheriff’s Crimes Against Youth unit. We’re small, we work hard and we believe that children in our society need protection.”

  I waited a beat. I like to let the importance of what we do sink in.

  “All right.”

  “Can I speak frankly with you?”

  “Please do.”

  “Have you heard of The Horridus?”

  “Yes.”

  “He took his third girl from a condo in Irvine, about four hours ago. The condo is three miles from here. The girl is missing, her mother is ready to break down and I’ve failed them. She’s five years old, and somewhere out in this county of 2.6 million souls, he’s got her.”

  She said nothing. I liked her face.

  “The Horridus named himself. It’s the Latin root for rough. He’s living through what the FBI calls an escalating fantasy. That means he’s got a vision, a goal in his imagination. It isn’t something he can just go out and start doing. It’s something he has to work up to. That’s what the abductions are—practice runs for the real thing. Who knows, maybe this time, it will be the real thing. Rough.”

  I paused but she said nothing. I was reassured by the intelligence in her face, though I knew my chances of getting what I wanted from Marcine Browne were somewhere between slim and none.

  I was pleased that she was finally unable to resist the bait.

  “I think this is absolutely terrible,” she said. “I feel awful. I’m not a mother myself, but I can imagine how it would feel, to have that happen to your daughter. What would the ‘real thing’ be?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’ll rape and kill them. Probably in that order. It’s a matter of time. Right now, it might be a matter of minutes.”

  I let this sink in. She looked at me with her lovely green eyes. “Investigator Naughton, why are you here?”

  “I need your help.”

  “How?”

  One of Marcine Browne’s co-workers stuck her head in the door and said good morning. She smiled brightly at me, no doubt the lure-the-new-male-membership smile. Marcine asked her to shut the door, please.

  The quiet in the office was just what I wanted. What Marcine did in the next few minutes would be between herself and her soul, and the soul is best heard in silence.

  “We know, very generally, what he looks like. We have some general indications as to his age, what he drives, what kind of a house he lives in and what kind
of a past he has. We have some suspicions—founded on the opinions of people who profile unknown subjects for a living—about what kind of work he does, how he behaves socially, what his interests are.”

  “That sounds like a lot.”

  “Until you realize it isn’t. Until you realize we don’t know his name. And that people can change their appearance pretty easily. That there are five thousand other vehicles like his on the roads out there. And over two and a half million people in this county alone. Plenty more in Los Angeles and down in San Diego. Until you realize he just kidnapped a five-year-old while we were all asleep. While her own mother was asleep fifteen feet away. When you realize all that, you understand how little you’ve really got.”

  She looked at me again. I could see the confusion on her face. She sighed, sat back, then sat forward again. “Mr. Naughton, maybe I watch too much TV, but this isn’t like anything I ever saw a cop do. You’re telling me all this stuff, but you’re not asking me any questions. May I see your ID again?”

  I showed it to her again.

  “I’m sorry. But what is it that you want?”

  “Let me tell you just a little something more. I talked to the mother of the second girl. That’s part of my job. The girl was named Courtney and she was six. I was trying to put things together. I’m glad I did. Her mother was a member of Dawn Christie and Associates.”

  Marcine looked at me with a hard, uncomprehending stare. “Well, they’re another service. They have a different philosophy than we do. Our competitors, but … so what?”

  “The mother of the girl who was taken four hours ago was a member here. A new member, Abby Elder.”

  “Oh, God,” she said quietly. “I was afraid that’s why you were here.”