Venom

by Alan Scholefield

  He stood at the bottom of the staircase flicking the gun’s safety catch on and off, listening to the rumble of French from the room where the boy kept his stupid animals.

  In the following weeks they’d done it all over the house; in old Blanchet’s bed and on the couch in the drawing-room and in Louise’s room and in his room and even under the shower and in the huge onyx bath. And then she had started talking about the boy and how much he’d be worth and things like that, just hinting like, at first, but the idea seemed to grow and he began thinking how easy it would be and she said she knew a man who knew about such things, a Frenchman; she said there was no one better because the French were experts at this sort of game and the British weren’t. Before he knew it they were planning, really planning, not just lying on a bed spending money they didn’t have. Then this Frenchman came over for a recce and after that something happened. She wouldn’t do it any more; said she had a bloody cyst in her twat. Like hell. . . no, he didn’t trust her farther than he could kick her. Well, he had a gun too, now.

  He began to pace up and down the hall. They should have gone by now; home and dry. If it hadn’t been for that bloody snake. He shivered. God, he hated creepy crawly things: spiders, snakes, centipedes, didn’t even like earwigs. Real country boy. Even though the snake was harmless he was glad he was getting out. He looked at his watch. Five minutes, the Frog had said. Come on, he thought, come bloody on!

  * * *

  The snake lay in the dark beneath Philip’s bed, tense with aggression and fear, its tongue flicking out into the unfamiliar air, registering the vibrations of voices and footfalls and even the tiny vibrations of cars passing up and down outside. It lay ready, waiting, alert either for attack or flight, or attack in flight. Its venom sacs, depleted only partially by the amount which had entered Louise, were in the process of refilling themselves, but there was enough left for any eventuality.

  The snake’s name was Dendroaspis Polylepis, but to the Zulus from whose far-away country it had come, it was known as iMamba emnyama, the black mamba. It was a female in its fourth year of growth and had reached a length of nearly eight feet, not massive by mamba standards but big enough to be distinguished from the black house snake in whose place it had been mistakenly labelled.

  She was a good example of the species. She had been born three and a half years earlier on a cattle farm near the village of Dannhauser in Natal, South Africa. When she had first broken through the shell of her egg she was not more than an inch or two in length and her colour was greyish olive, which changed as she put on length to a dark olive and olive brown and then to an almost purplish black on top, with a grey- white belly. She had grown very quickly as do all mambas, reaching a length of five feet at the end of eighteen months; but long before that she had been killing her own food, for her venom was highly potent shortly after birth. When she was only a foot long she had possessed enough venom to kill a rat in an hour. At that time she had a fine “bloom” on her skin like that on the skin of ripe black grapes.

  The countryside around Dannhauser is typical savannah; rolling grassland broken up by small hills and kloofs, a sea of grass, acacia and wattle, that rises from east to west until it is checked by the austere spurs of the Drakensberg Mountains; it is good country for black mambas for they are less arboreal than their cousins the green mambas which prefer the bushy coastal plains; black mambas like a mixture of woody country and open spaces where they can bask in the warm upland sun. Man has not spoilt the landscape much. There are collieries at Newcastle and Dundee but their influence on so large an area is relatively small and the wildlife is not in retreat. So the early life of Dendroaspis Polylepis was secure and peaceful and it was not until she was nearly two years old that she felt threatened for the first time and killed her first human being.

  It happened this way. She had mated with an adult male nearly twice her size and had laid her first clutch of eggs in an ant-bear hole. She never travelled far from the hole, but when she did venture out she liked to lie on a small open patch of red earth on the side of a hillock where the early morning sun seemed to strike the warmest. Here she would sleep. She was then at her most vulnerable for like all snakes she was deaf and “heard” vibrations instead of sounds. But she was safe enough for there were no cattle paths nearby nor any used by humans. One morning in early summer, soon after she had laid her eggs, she took up her position on the bare patch of red earth, but instead of sleeping remained alert, so that when an African labourer called George Nuxmalo, on his way to a wedding party at a neighbouring farm, took a short cut past her basking area, her sensitive organs relayed the vibrations of his footfalls to her brain. Unfortunately for the labourer, he had chosen a route that took him between the snake and her hole. He came down the hillside ignorant of the train of events he was already setting in motion. He sang quietly to himself, his mind on the pot of maize beer he would soon be lifting to his lips. He did not see the snake uncoil herself, nor did he see her move swiftly to a near-by tree and rest her head on a low branch while she watched him. He came on steadily until he was in a direct line between the mamba and her hole. She left the tree and came forward, head up, two-thirds of her body off the ground, at a speed faster than the ordinary human being can run. George Nuxmalo was aware of a swishing noise. He turned, saw something that he first thought was the shining black lash of a stockwhip, then he felt a burning sensation on the back of his right thigh. It was all over in a second and the snake had flashed on into the grass and down the ant-bear hole. Nuxmalo was more than three miles from his own group of huts and nearly four from those of the farm to which he was travelling. In his terror he turned and began to run back the way he had come. Half way home he began to feel giddy and numb and he sat down to rest. He knew he should do something about the bite on his thigh but he had neither knife to scarify it nor could he reach it with his mouth to suck at the poison. He tore a piece of cloth from his shirt-tail and tied it above the bite, twisting a stick into the material to make it tighter. He had left it too late. Thirty minutes later, when his pace had slowed to a halting stumble, he found he could no longer breathe and he choked to death on the hillside in the summer sun with no one to witness his convulsions. The snake stayed with her eggs all that day and most of the next.

  George Nuxmalo’s death resulted in a search for the snake but, since he had died nearly two miles away, she felt very few vibrations near her hole and she remained unmolested. Her young were born and disappeared into the bush to live their own lives. She returned to the patch of warm red earth and it was here, while asleep, that she was taken.

  She was caught by a white man called Frans Opperman who spent his annual two-week summer vacation roaming the countryside, catching snakes for profit. To him, it was a purely routine affair. On the day he caught the mamba he had already found and captured two puff-adders, a mole snake and a black house snake. He came upon the mamba where he expected to find one and, approaching silently, had the long catching tongs fastened at the back of her head before she was fully awake. In less than a minute she was in a musty black bag inside a carrying crate; later this was placed in the rear of his station- wagon.

  Opperman did not catch snakes like mambas without help. His assistant on this occasion was an African cook called Humphrey. Humphrey knew little about snakes and cared less. He was frightened of them and what he did he did for the money and so it was with a sense of relief that he climbed into the rear seat of the station-wagon at the end of the day. The boxes containing the snakes were behind him. Before setting off for Durban with his load Opperman wrote out the labels for the last two snakes he had caught, the house snake and the mamba, and gave them to Humphrey to tie on to the travelling crates. The labels were printed in red. CAUTION. DANGEROUS REPTILES. And in the space under the printing on one he had written in heavy black marking ink, “Black House Snake”, and on the other, “Black Mamba”.

  “Tie these on,” he said, passing them back to Humphrey. He started the engine and bega
n the long drive back to Durban. It was then that the mistake occurred: a simple human error. Humphrey had seen two black snakes placed in separate bags; the only difference was size and he thought they were both the same species. Since he could only read and write his own name, the heavy red printing followed by the thick black of the marking pencil meant nothing to him; and so when he tied the labels on the boxes he mistakenly transposed them.

  Opperman reached Durban a little after midnight, went to his home and slept till eight, then took his specimens to the premises of Messrs Mowat Bros near the Indian market. They had been dealing with each other for several years and the transaction was simple and swift. The snakes were unloaded and carried into the darkened rear of the building to take their places with dozens of other travelling crates containing yellow cobras, spitting cobras, Egyptian cobras, night adders, horned vipers, green mambas, African pythons, mole snakes, file snakes, coral snakes, gaboon vipers and boomslangs, all ready to be shipped to different parts of the world, either to zoos, or to medical foundations for research into poisons, or to have their venom milked and made into anti-venom.

  Messrs Mowat Bros had never had a complaint against Opperman, who knew his snakes as well as they did, nor did they ever unpack black mambas once they had been bagged and crated for travelling, for they considered the snakes far too dangerous. On this particular day a consignment of fresh snakes was being sent to Loewenthal’s of London, with whom Messrs Mowat Bros had been dealing for nearly fifteen years. In their last letter Loewenthal had ordered, apart from several other items, one black mamba and one black house snake. The crates were simply attached to the order and taken out to Durban airport just after lunch where they caught the midafternoon 727 to Johannesburg, from which they were transferred that evening to a British Airways London-bound Jumbo. By midmorning the following day the snakes were in the customs building at Heathrow Airport. Again no one opened the bags containing the snakes, for customs officials are no braver than other folk nor do they have facilities for handling angry and venomous reptiles. The following day the black mamba and the black house snake and several other crates were picked up at the cargo terminal by Loewenthal’s van and taken to Camden Town.

  In all that time the snake had not been removed from the bag nor had the bag been removed from the wooden travelling crate; nor indeed had the snake moved much from the coiled position she had taken soon after being captured. In fact, had anyone been able to see, it would have appeared that she was either dead or dying. This had happened because of the changes in air temperature. She had been warm enough in a South African summer but once placed aboard the Jumbo the cold had affected her like a drug and she had remained almost immobile for the entire flight. London Airport in February was no place for a tropical snake and she had remained in a partial coma until she had reached the comparative warmth of Loewenthal’s shop. It was not until she experienced the heat of the taxi that she had begun to revive. Then had come the warmth of the house; the kind of warmth she had been born into. Now, as she lay coiled under Philip’s bed, she began to feel the chill that exists in all houses at floor level in winter, no matter how high the thermostats are set. Cold air entering from outside crept over the rugs and carpets and found its way even under beds. She felt it acutely but her finely-tuned sensors also picked up a flow of warm air near by. She began to move towards it. It grew stronger until it was like a warm river flowing into the room.

  The warm air was being generated by a boiler deep inside the house and carried by fans through a complex system of pipes leading to each room. It was the system which Philip’s mother had argued for and finally won, of ducted warm air containing a controlled percentage of moisture. It had been specifically installed for Philip’s lungs; on a February evening in London it was nirvana to a cold-blooded reptile. The snake moved up the flow of air until she reached the point at which it emerged from the wall. Because the system had only recently been installed and was still being tested, the airduct covers had not been screwed into place and the ducts were open. The one in Philip’s room was hidden by his armchair. The snake paused for a moment, testing the air for danger, but there was no danger, not at least from the duct, while from the other room behind her dangerous vibrations still entered her brain. The duct offered security and warmth and there was a familiar shape and size to it; it was like the ant-bear hole which had been her home near Dannhauser in Natal. She entered the duct, her scales gripping the rough metal, and moved upward and to the right, slowly, testing each foot, until she had left the room behind her and was resting at full length where the warm air flowed over her like balm.

  She lay there for a few moments, then began to move again, and soon she had reached a point where pipes flowed away from her in every direction carrying warmed air to the various rooms; she was in a kind of junction from which she could reach almost any part of the house. She lay quite still enjoying the warm air as she had once enjoyed the sunlight on her patch of red earth; but she did not sleep–her surroundings were too unfamiliar for that–and soon she would begin to move again.

  * * *

  “Where is he, then?” Alec Nash said into the telephone. “No, of course he hasn’t. He’d never ring me, not here. Look, I told him. Six-thirty. Well, I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to tell Mr Arkwright. Have you tried the Bose and Crown? And the . . .” He tried to visualize the pubs in that part of the Fulham Road. There were three within fifty yards of each other and Jim seldom went elsewhere. “. . . The Magpie,” he said at last. “No? Well, I’ll go there first. On the way home. Yes, now. I would have left twenty minutes ago but something’s come up. No, no. Just routine. Five . . . ten minutes at the most. Well, explain. Give him a cup of tea or a gin. Talk to him. He’ll want to hear from you anyway.” He paused as she spoke then he took out his pen and drew his pad towards him and began to write: “Milk, spuds, bread, coffee . . .” He wrote just above another note which read, “412 Eaton Square.” He put a ring around that.

  “All right,” he said. “There’s a supermarket open in South Ken. It’s on my way. Are you sure we’ve got some gin? Tonic? See you in half an hour . . .”

  He put down the telephone and stared unseeing at the list. Jim had sworn blind he’d be at home tonight. Now he’d have to comb the bloody pubs for him. Christ, what a bloody shambles.

  Then he remembered the telephone call he had made to Eaton Square. Someone had answered and had then put the receiver down without hanging up. Nash had waited and waited and finally after much clicking of the bar, had given up. There had been some sort of noise in the background but he had not been able to make it out. He had put down his own receiver to dial again when, in that moment, Mary’s call had come through and he had heard the distress in her voice.

  Nash caught up his dark blue issue topcoat booked out a police Hillman and drove cautiously through the freezing misty night towards Elizabeth Street. First Eaton Square and get that done and then to the supermarket in South Kensington. As he thought of that he remembered the list. It still lay on his desk next to the telephone. He braked, then drove ahead. He could see the paper with the writing on it in his mind’s eye. The address. Then the food. Milk. Spuds. Bread and something else. What the hell was it? Butter? No. Tea? No. Coffee. Yes. Coffee, that was it. Milk. Spuds. Bread and coffee. He turned left into Elizabeth Street and headed for Eaton Square.

  * * *

  “Get up,” Jacmel said.

  “What for?” Howard said.

  “We go now.”

  “Go? Where?”

  “Get up.”

  “Look here,” Howard began. “You’ll never get away with this. If you leave things as they are you’ve got a chance. I promise I’ll–”

  Jacmel moved his right hand and Howard saw he had a gun in it. “Get up.”

  Howard pushed himself off the bed. The pain came again but not as fiercely as it had at first. He stood weakly, letting Phil take his weight. “What do you want us for? We’ll be nothing more than a hindrance.” />
  “Downstairs.” Louise was holding herself up against the door and Jacmel put his left arm around her waist.

  “Don’t you understand? The boy’s sick. What d’you want a sick boy on your hands for? Only slow you down. You’ve got enough trouble with her.”

  “We go now.”

  “Where are we going, Dick?”

  “It’s all right, Phil. They don’t want us. They’ve got what they came for.”

  Jacmel motioned with the gun again and Howard and Philip moved from the room on to the landing. “They only want us for cover,” Howard whispered. “Just to make it look good in the street. They’ll let us go then.”

  “But why, Dick? What’ve they done?”

  “Probably taken the paintings and your mother’s jewels.”

  “Look.” They were passing the drawing-room door and Philip pointed into the room where the paintings still hung under their small showlights.

  Howard stopped. Something began to chip away at his mind. He turned and looked at Jacmel. “Aren’t you taking the paintings?” he said fatuously.

  Jacmel and Louise came on slowly. She looked terrible. “Move,” Jacmel said.

  “They’re worth a few quid,” Howard said, stumbling as he stepped backwards.

  “She took the jewels with her,” Philip said.

  “What?”

  “My mother. The best ones. I saw her pack them.”