by Adam Nevill
“This is the place,” he said, punching the earth with his staff and sweeping his hand over the vast expanse of prismatic sandstone, frozen waves of geologic record lapping at an endless shore. “This is where we made our main camp for the vision quest.” His manner and tone implied fulfillment of the job I’d hired him for. But no, we were far from done here.
“Do you still take kids on quests, with the fasting and staying up all night?”
He didn’t answer. He traced a spiral in the dust with his staff, scrutinized me, and asked, “You think I’m responsible for what happened to your friend?”
“I don’t know.”
“His parents took on the risks. They signed a waiver. Yours did, too. Do you think the desert isn’t dangerous? Do you think confronting it would mean anything if it wasn’t?”
“I don’t know what happened to Adam,” I said. “But you do, I know you do. I didn’t come all the way here to blame you. I just want to know what happened.”
“Then you should have gone to his father.”
“His father ate a gun a long time ago. And I don’t know if his mother ever really knew what happened.”
“You boys shouldn’t have wandered off on your own.”
I scanned the paths that branched off from the ridge. Some wound around sculpted rock formations that resembled faces in profile or the silhouettes of great spiny beasts. Others were lost among the sage and cacti. “This is where you showed us the stars,” I said.
Wormbone nodded.
“All that snake-themed mumbo jumbo. Ironic, don’t you think?”
His eyes narrowed.
“You pointed out Virgo, Hercules, and the Snake Handler near the horizon. You pointed out the bright star you called the Heart of the Serpent—”
“Unukalhai. That’s the Arabic name. The double star in the serpent’s throat.”
“Yeah, you said we were like a double star, Adam and I. Connected by our own invisible gravity, like brothers.”
“You were. Anyone could see that. But he burned brighter.”
“His parents told everyone he died of a snakebite. But I was there when he killed the snake. It never bit him.”
“He should have left it alone.”
“So he deserved what happened to him?”
“You don’t kill your avatar on a vision quest.”
“We were delirious from deprivation and faced with a venomous snake. I think you set us up for that.”
“Why would I do that?”
“The Curse of Yig.”
Wormbone turned, grinding the end of his staff in the ground, and started back down the trail. “I brought you here, like you asked. You can hitch a ride back to the city from the truck stop, chum.”
I drew the gun from under my shirt at the small of my back and cocked the hammer. He spun on me, nostrils flaring.
“I want my money’s worth, medicine man. Take me to the arch where it happened.”
***
Adam was contorted on the ground beside the severed snake when the men found us. Wormbone hung back while Lee and my dad knelt in the dust and tried to keep him from thrashing. When they finally overpowered him, my dad—pale, sweaty and wide-eyed—asked me what had happened, while Lee curled a finger into his son’s mouth to keep him from choking on his own tongue.
Before I could answer, Wormbone asked, “Is he prone to seizures?”
“No,” Lee said, never taking his eyes from Adam’s bluing face.
“Allergic to bee stings?”
“What? No. Look, it was a snake. He was bitten by a snake.”
“Was he?” Wormbone looked at me. He seemed so calm, like we were discussing the weather.
“No,” I said. “It didn’t bite him. It came after us but he killed it with the spade.”
Lee cried out and yanked his finger from Adam’s mouth. A ruby ribbon of blood ran down his hand. He stared at it in awe. “Bit me. Jesus.”
Adam shook his head in his father’s lap, showing his teeth. I could swear they were fangs. We all jumped and shuffled back, all except for Wormbone who held his staff out in front of him, as if it would ward off the threat, and for a second I wondered if he was going to shove the stick in Adam’s jaws to give him something to bite down on, like you might do to a dog.
Lee sucked the blood off his finger and dug through his pack, quickly losing patience and dumping the contents in the dirt. Adam hissed at him, and Lee scampered out of range, dragging his fingers through the scattered camping paraphernalia and seizing on a bright yellow plastic box. He popped the lid. A syringe and a set of suction cups spilled out, along with a few alcohol wipes. “Where did it bite him?” he yelled at me. I’d never seen an adult look so scared in my life.
“It didn’t bite him,” I said again, but Lee seemed unable to process the information and by then even I was wondering if I’d seen it wrong, missed something.
“It had to have,” my father said. “Did it get him on the leg?”
“I don’t know. I… I didn’t see it bite him!”
Lee reached for Adam’s exposed calf below his cargo shorts, but Adam kicked dirt at him and kept kicking until he gained some traction and was up on his feet, sprinting up the rise and through the sandstone arch.
The sun was sinking fast, the shadows of the rock formations stretching toward the horizon. My heart was flopping, a fish in a bucket. My eyes stung with sweat. Lee ran through the arch after Adam, and I went to follow, but my father stopped me with a palm to the hollow of my shoulder. “Wait here, Nathan. Just wait for us.” He shot a glance at Wormbone and I could see all kinds of calculation in it: not trusting the man to help them restrain Adam, not trusting him to stay with me, and a suspicion that he wouldn’t heed instructions anyway. The sound of Lee calling Adam’s name echoed in the valley. My dad jogged through the arch, holding his hand out behind him in my direction, his fingers splayed. “Just… stay back,” he said. “Let me go first.”
But I followed him through the arch, leaving Wormbone staring at the severed body of the rattler in the blood-gummed sand.
Later there were dogs and a helicopter. The men called 911 from the Travel Plaza and the police came searching for Adam, ready to airlift him to Vegas for antivenom. But they never found him. Not all of him, anyway. What the dogs found tangled in the brush and cactus needles two days later was tatters of necrotic tissue, gossamer sheaths in the shapes of a boy’s limbs, sloughed off and left behind.
***
It could have been yesterday when I’d last stood here with my father, Lee and Danny Wormbone, except that the season was different: cooler and with fewer yellow flowers in the creosote bushes. And now it was just the two of us. I followed my shadow through the arch. The sun had sunk below the cloud cover in the west, gilding the formations. I felt as if I were passing into a cathedral. The arch marked the pinnacle of the formation we had been climbing. On the other side it began its eastern descent through a series of interconnected open caves, each spilling into the next through terraced slopes of vermiculated red rock, illuminated at intervals where the dusty sunlight spilled through apertures in the sandstone. There were petroglyphs here as well, but they were different, less pictogram and more akin to cuneiform writing.
I worked my jaw and felt a pressure I hadn’t been aware of open up in my inner ear. A sound like cicadas poured into my consciousness, an unnerving texture that made my stomach roil and churn.
Wormbone turned to me. I pointed the gun at his chest and jutted my chin toward the descending slopes. He shuffled down ahead of me, jabbing at strategic angles in the rock with his staff for balance. I followed in a crouch, using many of the same footholds, and taking it slower so as not to have need of changing the gun to my left hand. I had no doubt the old medicine man could be swift as a viper if I gave him an opportunity.
“What’s that sound,” I asked. “Rattlers?”
He paused in his descent and when he answered, his voice echoed in the stone vaults. “Those rattles are to a r
attlesnake what a street fiddler is to a symphony, son.”
It wasn’t much of an answer, but before I could press him further, a new layer of sound emerged from the drone, weaving and winding through the percussive texture with a breathy, sinuous dissonance. A flute.
“Where is that music coming from?” I hoped my voice didn’t sound panicked.
He was outpacing me now, passing into the lower bowels of the cave system. He didn’t answer.
I asked again. “Who’s making that music? Tell me.”
His head swiveled toward me, his eyes radiating a jaundiced contempt in the fading light. “My tribe,” he said. “Isn’t that why you came? For the initiation you never had?”
I sat on the slope and slid down to him, landing in the dust just out of reach of his staff if he chose to swing it. I kept the gun on him all the while, and standing again, I aimed it at his face.
He took a step away.
“No,” I said. “Wait.” I cupped the heel of my right hand with my left and moved around him in a wide arc, keeping the sight blade aligned to his head, thinking of junkyard rats.
“When Adam got away from his father and passed through here… that wasn’t the last time you saw him, was it?”
“No.”
“Before, you said I should have gone to Adam’s father. When the cops finished questioning us and let you go, that wasn’t the last time you saw Lee, either. Was it?”
“No.”
“I asked my mother about Adam’s parents when I was home from college but she didn’t want to talk about them. She said she and my father had a falling out with them because they’d found religion after losing their son. They’d become fanatical about it, maybe even a little crazy. Was it your religion they found? I always assumed Lee would kill you as soon as look at you again after what happened.”
“He wanted to at first. But grief can take the fight out of a man. And I had a balm for that.”
“A balm? What did you do? Con them into accepting your version of the afterlife? Tell them you could commune with the spirits of the dead? Take advantage of shattered, grieving parents with your mystic bullshit?”
“I didn’t have to convince them I could commune with the dead. Their son wasn’t dead. I helped them to commune with the living.”
“That’s a lie. They would have taken him home if he was alive.”
“The desert was his home by then, the deep places of the earth for his body and the cold fathoms of the sky for his consciousness, a sine wave undulating in the dark reaches of the night.”
“How long did it take you to suck them dry?”
“I asked for nothing. They paid tribute to the Father of Serpents with the carcasses of cats and dogs, which they fed their boy as well. It was a comfort to them… feeding him. They couldn’t talk with him in any human tongue by then, but they knew it was him. They knew him by his eyes.”
Something massive moved through a tunnel behind me, the sand crunching under its weight.
We had arrived at a level where the curved stone walls were honeycombed with openings. I scanned the arches in the murk and caught glimpses of silhouettes gliding past, the sounds of flute and rattles phasing in and out as they passed, sound merging with echo, substance with shadow.
A quick motion from Wormbone drew my attention back to him. He had raised his walking stick like a javelin and now dashed it at the rock at my feet where it clattered and bounced before the shape of the thing wavered in a scribble of gold light, emerging as a black snake. Wormbone’s body dissolved in a twist of oily smoke trailing after it and vanishing up its nostrils.
I sidestepped the snake, slipped on the smooth rock and almost fell. The snake reared up in a coil and hissed. I fired a shot at it, felt the thunder of the gun punch my eardrums, and saw the spray of limestone chips where the bullet drilled into the rock. The snake slithered out of view behind an hourglass pillar as I fired again.
Sweating and trembling with adrenaline, I surveyed the cavernous space around me. Below, the terraced slopes continued their descent through cavities of eroded stone where shadows pulsed like pools of black water lapping against the sand. The chamber around me was relatively wide, with yawning apertures at intervals in the walls. Without pause for deliberation, I lunged through the nearest of these, hoping to find a more direct and open path to the valley floor and the trail back to the Jeep.
The chamber was round and high, the walls crawling with glistening sinuous shadows. Here and there ashen appendages reminiscent of human limbs emerged from the chaos of black motion, lit by the green phosphorescence of the central figure, which I first took to be a towering pillar of slime-covered stone. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the organic aspects of the form took precedence and I beheld the gently undulating form of the Father of Serpents.
A towering column of armored flesh, the pale ventral scales of the exposed underside bordered by a byzantine matrix of small dark scales that made the monster appear gem encrusted in its own light. It radiated billowing veils of energy behind which a pair of sinewy arms rose with the graceful fluidity of a conductor drawing an orchestra into the beat preceding a crash. They lashed forward revealing humanoid hands, beaded fingers splayed and tipped with keratin bulbs that rattled as the hands vibrated in a translucent blur. The sound overwhelmed my body and mind, lacerating my brainwaves with virulent interference, paralyzing me in the blazing topaz gaze of Yig.
The creature lowered its head and I felt the baleful scrutiny of those ancient eyes probing my mind from beneath the scaly spikes of an organic crown studded with dying stars. Its forked tongue flickered, a cloven flame, tasting my aura of fear and pheromone.
And then the scrying of my soul ceased and I was released.
I fell to my knees in the darkness, my fingers finding beads of my own sweat in the dust. I crawled backward to the sounds of grotesque motion from the braided perimeter and nearly wept with relief when my groping hand found bare rock to guide me back to the fissure I had entered through.
The light had leeched from the sky and I felt my way through the honeycombed rock on my belly letting gravity and an updraft of sage-scented air guide me down and down to the valley floor.
A spike of pain flared in the webbing of my left hand and I recoiled with a cry as the black king snake, the alter-shape of Wormbone, wound around my forearm and reared up in my face with a hiss. My reaction was reflexive. I shoved the pistol in its mouth, squeezed the trigger, and pissed myself when the roar of the shot decayed in a rain of bone and blood in the darkness.
Moaning, nearly blind and deaf, I rolled and scampered through the hollows until a chute of polished rock swallowed me down and shat me out under the desert stars.
***
When I was younger I wanted to be a writer someday. I never managed to get it together. Maybe I lacked confidence. Maybe I made excuses. I spent a lot of years drifting, anesthetizing myself, trying to forget what happened that summer. You thought I was trying to find myself, but I was trying to find my tribe.
I may have found them now. And this will be the only story I leave behind.
I’m sorry, Mom and Dad. You should talk to Renée about joining the congregation. It’s the oldest religion on Earth.
I took the medicine man’s Jeep down I-15 like the hordes of hell were on my trail, and I’ve holed up in a seedy motel on the outskirts of Vegas to set this down.
The skein of shed flesh that I’ve been depositing in the bathtub is almost the size of a man. Where the heel of my writing hand—my shooting hand—rubs against the paper, it’s been worn through to black scales for a while already.
I probably shouldn’t have left the valley. I don’t know how I’ll get back. I may have to travel beside the highway by night and hide in culverts when the sun is up.
I wonder if I will know Adam when I see him, smell him, read his heat signature in the dark. And I wonder if he will still burn brighter.
Yig
The serpent has always been regarded as
the wisest of beasts. It is deathless because it renews its life each time it sheds its skin. For this reason the Greeks associated it with their god of healing, Asclepius. He carries the symbol of the serpent twined about his staff. Hermes, the Greek god of wisdom, bears a rod upon which two serpents are entwined.
In the creation myth of the Hebrews, which they adopted from the Babylonians, the knowledge of good and evil was a gift from the god of serpents, who in the Torah remains unnamed. It is associated with evil, but that is a false teaching. For the race of man, the gift of wisdom from the serpent meant liberation from the slavery of ignorance.
Serpents are ancient creatures whose species crawled on the earth long before the first beginning of human beings. They existed in the same forms they have now when the world was infested by monstrous reptilian beings the size of houses, and they continued unchanged when those monsters perished.
The serpents worship a deathless old one as their god. He is a shape-changer who appears sometimes as a large snake, but other times as a manlike figure with the head of a serpent covered in scales. Always he has been feared by men, who have called him such names as the Evil Lizard and the Encircler of the World. Those who worship this god do so to turn away his wrath.
The Egyptians named this god Apophis and feared that he would one day devour the sun the way a snake swallows a hen’s egg. They called him “he who is spat out” and believed he arose from the saliva of the goddess of the night sky. There is wisdom in this, for this god is whispered by deathless things that dwell in deep places to have fallen from the stars.
The black tribes of Africa sometimes call him Dhamballah, and dance the dance of serpents to summon him. It is his pleasure to possess those who dance well, and when they are possessed by his spirit, they lose the ability to speak, but fall on their bellies, hissing like snakes, and crawl upon the ground with a sinuous, twisting motion until he leaves them.
