Snake Handlin' Man

by D. J. Butler

  Eddie saw a man and a woman, naked, standing behind the preacher. They were emaciated, their hair falling out. Each held a jagged saw to the other’s abdomen and yanked back and forth on the handle. Blood gushed down, drenching their legs. He resisted the urge to make fun of the man for the romance in his story. “Go on.”

  “My brother Aaron was studying theology,” Irving continued. “He became obsessed with old gnostic documents about apotheosis, the divinization of man. Crazy stuff, all about men becoming like the gods, or becoming angels.”

  “Yeah, crazy,” Mike muttered.

  “And it was all in Coptic, so he and Miriam spent a lot of time together.”

  “But in these gnostic books,” Eddie probed, “in the Coffin Texts or whatever, Miriam learned how to deal with these flying snakes? Where is she? Is she in town here?”

  “She’s close,” Irving said dryly. “While we were engaged, she and Aaron became lovers. When I … found out about it, when she told me about it, you know, she said it had nothing to do with love, and nothing to do with me, it had to do with the ritual.”

  “So you called it off,” Mike concluded. “Sent the skank packing.”

  “What ritual?” Eddie asked.

  “They wanted to summon Apep, but there were steps they had to take before that, to become his true worshippers. To get his gifts. Apep’s a snake god—well, a snake devil, really—and his worship is orgiastic, so they … they became involved.”

  “Isn’t that your family, Jim?” Twitch asked. “I mean, aren’t you all cousins or something, according to Eddie? Family reunions must be so entertaining.”

  Jim glowered at the drummer and drew his sword partly out of the sheath, exposing six inches of sharp blade.

  “But why on earth would they want to summon the big snake?” Twitch asked, ignoring the bared weapon. The fairy looked more curious than shocked. “There are easier ways to commit suicide.”

  “Power, I think,” Irving said wearily. “And immortality.”

  “The snake sheds its skin, born anew each time,” Eddie whispered to himself. “Are they crazy? Can they possibly be right?”

  “I think both,” Phineas Irving said. “I found out on our honeymoon. I woke up in the middle of the night in the hotel and she was gone, so I rang her cell phone. When I heard it in the room next door, I broke in and found them.” He stopped talking and his eyes glazed over. His face was drawn and pale.

  “Orgiastic, you said.” Mike fidgeted. He stared at the mongooses, tussling and tossing each other about on the trailer’s shag carpet. “Does that mean what it sounds like?”

  “What does it sound like?” Twitch winked.

  Mike hesitated. “Like orgy plus fantastic.”

  “You mean like ginormous,” Eddie snorted. “Giant plus enormous.”

  “Yes,” Irving whispered, and looked down at the floor. “That’s about what it means.”

  Eddie respected the other man’s pain and waited.

  “There were snakes everywhere,” the Egyptologist said slowly. “And incense, a cloud of it so thick I couldn’t see or breathe. And then I saw a light … like a gap in the air, and on the other side of it was lightning. And when the hole was gone, there was a crowd of people chanting and shaking rattles. And in the middle, there they were. Only … only …” He couldn’t seem to get it out, whatever it was.

  “Only they were snakes,” Twitch guessed. “Snakes and humans at the same time, all mixed up, like the Egyptians like to do.”

  Eddie felt sick. “Monsters.”

  Irving nodded miserably. “Aaron’s arms were gone, and instead he had snakes growing out of his shoulders. Once the incense cleared and the light was gone, I could see it clearly, because he was naked. And Miriam …”

  “Miriam got what she wanted,” Twitch said. The fairy’s voice was gentle. Eddie thought that was pretty generous of him, since only a few minutes earlier Phineas Irving had threatened to shoot Twitch if he opened his mouth.

  “Miriam is a lamia,” Irving told them. He couldn’t meet their eyes, and just sat staring a hole into the carpet.

  Mike looked baffled.

  “Lower half of a snake,” Eddie said. “Upper half of a woman. Ugh. Sorry, man. I didn’t know you could become one.”

  “Jeez, I really gotta read the Bible one of these days.” Mike shook his head in amazement.

  “Snakes for hair, too,” the preacher said. “Aaron and their … cultists … wanted to kill me, but Miriam stopped them. She told me what she’d been doing, and let me go.”

  “And then you divorced the bitch,” Mike said. “’Cause a snake … Jeez …”

  Phineas Irving shook his head. “She spared me. Besides, I was in love with her. I’m still in love with her now.” He dug into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a creased and folded letter envelope. He shook out its contents, and a single gold ring, heavy and dull, fell into his palm.

  “Did they summon Apep, then?” Twitch asked.

  “They’re still trying,” Irving said. He clenched his fists together in a big ball of knuckles around the wedding ring. “And I followed them here to try to stop them.”

  “That’s why you’re penned in by snakes?” Mike asked. “They know you’re here?”

  “They know I’m here,” Irving agreed. “I keep the snakes at bay with my mongooses and my jerry-rigged charms. I preach against them, but the county thinks I’m crazy, so they send deputies and social workers to harass me. Almost no one listens, anyway. I try to help people I can—people like Sami, who get involved with the cult and then want to leave—and I try to figure out how to stop the summoning. They don’t care. They sit just down the road and laugh at me.”

  “Down the road?” Mike asked.

  Jim sat up, suddenly alert and looking curiously at Eddie. Even the mongooses stopped wrestling, and their stubby round ears perked up.

  The hair on the back of Eddie’s neck prickled. “Sears,” he said. “Tell me they’re not in that old shitbucket Sears we passed.”

  Irving just nodded.

  Eddie felt a thick lump at the back of his throat. “I was hoping you’d say that you can raise up the Nehushtan on a pole and Adrian would look at it and be cured,” he said. “Like in the Bible. Now you’re telling me that your … wife … is a lamia, and she knows the cure.”

  Irving shook his head. “She doesn’t know the cure.”

  Eddie scratched his head. “Then my memory’s shorting out on me, or I just don’t get it. You said it’s the woman.”

  “She doesn’t know the cure. She is the cure.”

  “There’s no Nehushtan?” Eddie pressed. “You just put up a signboard to announce that you’re a snake hater?”

  “There’s a Nehushtan,” Phineas said, and he jerked his head at the back door of the double-wide. “It’s in the tent, and it might even be the Nehushtan. But I’ve never cured anybody with it. I’ve got enough juice to keep snakes out of the tent, and that’s about it.”

  “Juice?” Twitch asked.

  “The Nehushtan is powered by faith,” Irving said. “Faith’s not my strong suit.” He put the ring back into the envelope and jammed it into his pocket again. “Snakes do stay out of the tent when I’m preaching, though, so that’s good.”

  “Huevos.”

  “So what’s the cure?” Eddie asked, slightly puzzled. “Is this some kind of voodoo thing, like the snakes are her offspring and so you can cure the children’s bites with some of the mother’s blood? Hair of the dog?”

  “They’re not her children,” Irving grouched. “They’re Aaron’s.”

  Eddie felt sick. “You mean it’s still an orgiastic cult,” he said. “And girls like Sami …”

  Irving nodded. “Young girls, girls alone who need jobs and help,” he finished. “They get taken in and … they get taken. Boys, too. By Aaron, or by someone else in the cult. They’re all monsters, or they want to become monsters. And some of the kids escape, I try to help if I can. But if they don’t, then
their bodies are consumed by their children. And by the other worshippers of the snake.”

  Mike looked shaken.

  “What do you mean, you try to help?” Eddie demanded. “How did you help that poor girl? She was still stuck in this town, right next to the temple of the snake. Why didn’t you get her out?”

  Irving buried his face in his hands. “She was going to leave tomorrow,” he muttered, and ran his fingers through his bristly hair. “Collect her last paycheck and leave. And I thought I had hexed her womb, killed the snakes inside. I thought she’d get to her aunt’s house in Dallas and be in for a terrible shock when she delivered dead snakes … she’d make the National Enquirer, but she’d be alive.”

  “She didn’t know,” Eddie realized. He remembered how delighted Sami had seemed when she thought her baby was kicking. “She thought her baby was just a normal human kid. She wanted a boy.”

  “Should I have told her?” Irving had despair in his face. “Would you want your daughter to know that she had snakes in her womb? I did what I could, and I thought I had done enough. I thought the danger was controlled.”

  “Your hex failed,” Twitch said sharply. It was an awfully direct statement from the fairy, Eddie thought, and unusually judgmental.

  The mongooses hissed. They chased their own tails and looked skittishly into the corners of the room.

  “Jeez, are there any wizards who actually know what they’re doing?” Mike asked.

  “Not me,” Irving said. “I’m no wizard, I’m just an Egyptologist. Not even that, I’m ABD, never got my degree. Whatever I know, I learned by reading the old monuments, execration texts, second millennium B.C. medical treatises. Or from folklore. Some of it works. I think the hex I put on this house works—anyway, the snakes don’t come in.”

  “Anyway, it ain’t a house,” Mike grumbled. “It’s an advertisement for meth lab tenants.”

  “And the Nehushtan?” Eddie asked. “You get the instructions for that out of a book?”

  “I stole it. The University had it in its museum collection, and I had access because of the work I was doing on the Wadi Hammamat grave finds. I took it with me when I left. I don’t know if it’s authentic or not—neither did they, it was a recent acquisition and they were still examining it. But it works. At least, sort of.”

  “You and Adrian have a lot in common, really,” Mike mused. “You a napper?”

  “What?”

  “What are you doing to stop the summoning?” Eddie asked. He knew this was a distraction, and that he should be focused on his real challenge—Adrian, the ticking clock, and getting the wizard cured—but the thought that some sort of snake-worshipping sex cult was trying to summon its demon-deity caught his attention. “Was that the idea behind stealing the Nehushtan?”

  “Yeah,” Irving looked depressed. “But I can barely get it to flicker. It’s the real deal, all right—but I’m not. Funny thing is, if our positions were switched, Aaron could probably use it like a flamethrower. He was always a believer.”

  “Still is,” Eddie pointed out. “Just in the wrong stuff.”

  Irving nodded. “And the spells. The summoning—I think—is a sort of group performance and incantation. I only saw it the one time, of course … on my honeymoon … but some of the kids I’ve known have told me that the same kind of thing is what they experienced. I think I have some ideas about how to throw a monkey wrench into it, but I’d need to have access to their props and scripts beforehand. Well,” he chuckled uneasily, “or else I’d need to be present at the ritual.”

  “Would that be another orgy?” Mike asked.

  “Boobs,” Twitch said cheerfully. Mike turned his palms up in an innocent shrug and Jim shook his head in mock frustration. “We all know what you like, is all I’m saying,” the drummer added.

  “Yes,” Irving answered. “And at the end of the orgy, Apep is supposed to appear. Surviving worshippers will be touched by him—like Aaron and Miriam were touched.”

  “You mean they’ll turn into freaky snake-mutants,” Mike interpreted. “Dare to dream.”

  “Surviving?” Eddie asked.

  “Most of the worshippers will be eaten.”

  “And what do you get out of all this?” Eddie asked. “Don’t go quoting the Book of Joshua and telling me you’re on the Lord’s side. What is it you want here? You think this gets you to Heaven?”

  Irving shrugged and looked down at his feet. “Maybe,” he admitted. “If there is a Heaven. Or maybe I get my revenge. Or maybe I get my wife back.”

  Mike whistled. “Really? Don’t you just hate her too much now?”

  Eddie shook his head; he understood Phineas Irving all too well. “Says the man who ain’t never been married. Love and hate ain’t opposites,” he told the bass player. “They’re pretty near the same thing. The opposite of both of them is just not giving a crap.”

  “I give a crap,” Irving agreed, but he couldn’t look up.

  The mongooses darted across the room and through a doggie flap in the trailer door. Jim stood and stared at the animals, his hand on his sword, but the preacher waved him down.

  “They’re going after snakes,” Phineas Irving said. “There are always snakes.”

  “I’m glad you care,” Eddie said, and he meant it. He hoped Irving succeeded, but he was concentrating again on his own immediate problem. He wanted to get Adrian back on his feet, play the evening’s gig, and get clean out of Oklahoma. “But I’m on a clock and you still haven’t answered the question I care about. How does the lamia … Mrs. Irving … cure snakebite?”

  “Milk,” Irving said. “Lamia’s milk is a sovereign remedy against the bite of any snake.”

  Twitch laughed. “Boobs,” he said again.

  CRACK!

  The trailer shook.

  ***

  Chapter Five

  Eddie spilled his coffee on his lap.

  “Dammit!” he yelled, and jumped to his feet. Now he was burned front and back.

  Jim was already standing, and the big man whipped out his sword and raced for the door. Twitch would have been on his heels, but the drummer got tangled up in Mike, whose knees knocked the fairy down and slowed them both. The snake preacher fell off his stool with the shuddering of the trailer, and then turned and scrambled for the kitchenette, going for his Enfield rifle.

  Eddie grabbed the Remington and pumped it.

  The trailer shook again.

  Jim opened the door and jumped back—

  a snake head jammed itself at the singer, a snake head the size of a whole ham, with a tongue as long as a human arm.

  Eddie saw his shot and took it. Boom! The Remington’s slug bit into the hinge of the serpent’s jaw with a small splash of blood, and the snake pulled back.

  “Is that Apep?” Mike yelled. The bass player pushed the sofa over onto its back and crouched behind it, drawing his pistol and covering the windows. From the yard, Eddie heard a surprisingly loud hissing sound.

  Twitch flashed into a silver avian blur and swooped out the open door. Jim fended off a second lunge of the enormous snake’s head by sliding his backside up onto the kitchenette counter, kicking with the heels of both boots. Eddie scooted to the front window of the trailer, trying to get a better look outside.

  The preacher came over by the kitchenette sink with the .30-06 and looked through greasy Venetian blinds at the yard. “No,” he said. “Apep should be much, much bigger. Also, I think Apep should be a straightforward serpent.”

  Eddie brushed aside dingy cotton flaps that served as curtains with the nose of his shotgun and threw a glance into the yard. “Hell,” he said.

  A shambling crew of monsters rammed themselves against the porch. The mongooses stood on hind legs and hissed a protest, but the furry little snake-eaters were out of their depth here, because their foes weren’t simple snakes. They were snake-men. The big head that shoved at the trailer door trying to get in sprouted from the shoulders of heavy-bellied human body in denim overalls. A sec
ond monster looked like a mass of snakes, an entire hedge of them, sprouting out of a brown gabardine skirt and a pair of shapely legs. A third beast was a snake the size of a Christmas tree, with three sets of muscular human arms sprouting out of its scaly flanks and a human head. There were more, but Eddie stopped cataloguing and started shooting.

  Boom! Boom!

  He shattered the window and put as many slugs as he could into Overalls the snake-headed man. In the yard, Twitch harassed the other serpent-thugs, but he wasn’t very effective in falcon form against creatures so large. He did manage to pluck several heads off Lady Legs the bush of serpents, but either Lady Legs grew them back immediately, or she had so many to start with that the loss of a few made no difference.

  Mike crawled over to join Eddie, while Phineas Irving smashed out the window over the kitchenette sink and poked the muzzle of the Enfield out through the hole. Jim slashed and stabbed at the creatures, making Overalls bleed from several chest wounds and reducing Many Arms to One Arm Less, but the monsters didn’t seem to care. They grunted and hissed, and snapped at Jim and the mongooses when they had a chance, but their focus was elsewhere.

  They rammed themselves against the porch, and grabbed at it with both hands, lifting.

  “They’re trying to break apart the trailer!” Eddie barked, seeing the danger. “They’re not getting past your hexes, so they’re just going to tip us over or smash us to bits!” He leveled the Remington at a man who looked totally normal, and wore a blue-green-colored jumpsuit like he was a plumber or some sort of appliance repairman. He was squatting to get his hands under the lip of the porch, trying to rip planks out directly. Eddie got a good enough look at the man to see that the name on his chest read Bob and that his belly writhed, and then he squeezed the trigger. Blood spattered the porch, the khaki fabric ripped open and a mass of hissing serpents sprang from Bob’s belly. Bob stumbled back, arms windmilling. Eddie glanced around the yard and guessed there might be fifteen or twenty of the snake-man-monsters besieging them. “We need another way out!”