Venom

by Alan Scholefield

  He came to the dark square that was the open door to Philip’s room and switched on the light. Dave was some way behind him and quite useless if the snake were to attack. It was the sitting-room all over again, beyond the doorframe lay a nightmare land of shadows.

  “Get in,” Dave said. It was no more than a whisper, as though the snake would hear.

  Howard moved forward and the door clicked closed behind him. If anything he felt slightly safer. He had no trust in Dave’s ability to overcome his own terror in an emergency. He was alone. He had the poker. He could smash the windows and jump for it. The thought died, still-born. What about Philip? What about Marion?

  Again he unconsciously formed his territory, this time within a few feet of the door, the only patch of known safety; again he forced his feet forward and fought to control the shaking of his legs. And then in the half darkness of the Great Ngorongoro Crater Menagerie his bush-trained eyes saw something which gave him hope. From the door of Philip’s bedroom he could see the guinea-pig and the rabbit and the golden hamster feeding unconcernedly in the front of their cages. The presence of the snake in either the Menagerie or in Philip’s bedroom would have caused the terrified animals to huddle deep in their sleeping quarters. He moved forward, strengthened somewhat by his knowledge. He searched and found nothing.

  * * *

  Howard carried the boy into the room and placed him on his bed. As he was tucking the blankets over him Philip came drowsily awake.

  “It’s all right, old chap,” Howard said soothingly.

  Thickly, Philip mumbled. “The name . . . haven’t got a name . . .”

  For a moment Howard was confused, then he realized that Philip had been dreaming and had gone back in time to refer to an earlier conversation about naming the snake. “Don’t worry,” he said softly, not wishing to wake Philip further. “We’ll think of one. A really good one.”

  “You weren’t here,” Philip said drowsily. “Can’t open the box.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow. We’ll open the box tomorrow.”

  “You must . . . must wake me early.”

  “Yes.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise. Early.”

  Jacmel was testing the double-glazing.

  “The clock,” Philip said, sliding away. “I didn’t. . . I didn’t set the clock.”

  Howard picked it up and wound it. “All done,” he said. “No need to worry now. Just get some sleep.”

  Philip’s eyes flickered then closed.

  “Come,” Jacmel said.

  “Why don’t you leave the light on?” Howard said. “Then he won’t be so frightened if he wakes.” Jacmel nodded. “That’s the heater,” Howard said, pointing to a two-kilowatt fan heater. “Shall I switch it on?”

  “Yes.”

  He canted it at an angle so the warm air blew upwards across Philip’s bed. The vibration of the fan made a slight humming noise.

  “All right,” Jacmel said. He motioned Howard to go back to the landing, then he locked Philip’s bedroom door and placed the key on the telephone table. They went back to the sitting-room. Marion was huddled on the sofa with her feet tucked up underneath her. The temperature in the room had dropped into the low forties and the whole house, with the exception of Philip’s room, was very cold. As she saw Howard, however, she smiled and shifted her feet, making room.

  “Don’t move,” he said and began to veer away from the sofa towards an armchair.

  “I’d feel better if you sat here,” she said.

  He tried to answer with a smile but it was tight on his face. He sat down in the place he had occupied before. “Is he all right?” she said.

  “For a while. He’s warm enough, anyway.”

  * * *

  The snake was not warm enough. For some time her body temperature had been dropping, with a consequent drop in heartbeat and breathing. She lay where she had lain for the past few hours, at the junction of the hot air ducts. Every now and then, as a Circle line train rumbled along the underground track on its way from Victoria Station to Sloane Square, she would lift her head. Some minutes after the vibrations ended, the head would gradually drop down to a resting position. But the vibrations had now almost ceased, and instead of being alert, a torpor was gradually enveloping her body as cold air moved along the ducts. Dendroaspis Polylepis was, like all snakes, highly susceptible to minute changes in temperature. She had been born into a world where summer temperatures varied between seventy and eighty degrees Farenheit and she was able to keep her own body temperature within two degrees of any point within-that range. Once, in high summer, she had been caught by a blistering sun at noon on part of a plain on which there were no trees and no ant-hills to give her shade. She had no sweat glands and her body temperature began to climb into the nineties and then over a hundred degrees. She was on the point of death by heatstroke when she had come across the rusted remains of an Anson bomber which had been used as a trainer by the Royal Air Force during the Second World War and which had crashed there in 1943 killing the pilot and navigator. She had slithered up into a patch of shade in what had once been the cockpit and had lain there, barely alive, until nightfall brought coolness.

  The reverse had also happened to her. She had been out hunting one warm evening in early autumn when the weather had suddenly changed, and freezing winds had come racing down on to her range from the Drakensberg Mountains, giving the first brutal taste of the upland winter. The temperature had dropped so quickly she had been unable to find shelter and she had simply come to a halt out in the middle of the veld, her body as rigid as an iron bar. During that time any small rodent could have eaten her living flesh, for she had been unable to move. The following day the sun came out and warmed the earth and warmed her, too, and gave new life to her body. Now the temperature in her maze of air ducts was dropping quickly as was the temperature of her body, which she was unable to control or adjust.

  But fortunately she was well equipped for survival. She had sophisticated systems at her control even though the functions of each seemed paradoxical. In the air-duct, where no light penetrated and the darkness was as thick as black velvet, she could “see” with her tongue. Her normal vision, even in conditions of adequate light, was poor and monochromatic. But the perceptions gathered by her tongue were multi-dimensional. It was linked with a mechanism in the roof of her mouth called the Organ of Jacobson which processed the information and passed it on to her brain. Not only did her tongue “see” it also “smelt” for her. And while she did not have any external ears the bones of her jaw were able to absorb vibrations and pass these on to her inner ear which in turn routed them to her brain.

  So now, in the dark of the middle of the house, her information-gathering sensors were filtering data to her brain which was forming a pattern. Firstly her tongue was getting a strong “smell” of vegetation, a smell with which she was familiar. Secondly, the nerve endings near the front of her nose were picking up, from the same area, faint traces of heat. Thirdly the Circle line had closed down for the night so there were no longer any vibrations to make her afraid. She began to move in the direction which her sense organs dictated.

  The smell of vegetation came from a garbage can filled with, among other things, several discarded lettuce leaves, the green tops of carrots and half a stale cabbage. The garbage can stood in the dumb waiter in the basement. It had been sent down earlier in the day from the kitchen two floors above. The warmth came from the boiler. The cooling metal had stopped ticking, but there was a vestigial heat remaining in the walls and also in the flue pipe that rose from the top of the boiler and entered one of the old chimney breasts. Dendroaspis pulled her already stiffening body in the direction of the warmth.

  * * *

  “You’re cold,” Marion said, touching Howard’s hand, her voice over-full of solicitude.

  “I don’t feel it,” he said. He was lying back on the sofa, his face ashen.

&
nbsp; “Freezing.” She kept her fingers on his hand a moment longer. Again she took comfort from the touch of another human but this time the language of the contact was different, unconsciously she was conveying gratitude for what he had done and apology for her own guilt in being unable to help.

  “I’m all right.” He felt her hand hesitate then move away and again the sadness flashed over him. He liked her touching him, and in a way was grateful for it. She must know what it had been like, she dealt with snakes all the time. Well, perhaps she didn’t know. No one who had not searched a house as he had searched this one for a deadly snake could possibly know what it was like to pull back a hanging curtain, to move a chair, look under a table–never certain from where it might strike. It was like playing Russian roulette except that a bullet was quicker and cleaner. He closed his eyes and again the huge slab-sided building that was called Shakespeare Close flashed across his inner vision. But now he saw it with the rain beating slantwise against the red-brick walls. He had stayed there once, years ago on long leave from the Colonial Service. When had that been? Early fifties? Must have been. That was when he’d met Jane.

  He’d had a service flat in Wordsworth. She had been in Shelley. They’d met in unromantic circumstances. He had been buying a newspaper in the arcade of shops on the ground floor of the administrative block and she had been standing next to him. She’d had a fat dachshund on a lead. He had just bought his paper and was pocketing the change when he saw that the dachshund had defecated on the floor next to the shop counter. As he looked up his eyes met those of the girl holding the lead. They were filled with frightened embarrassment. The shopkeeper had not seen what had occurred, nor had the only other customer who was looking at a rack of paper-backs. In a second Howard had dropped his Times on the pile of stiffish dung, bent, scooped it up and marched swiftly from the shop to the nearest litter basket. The girl hurried after him pulling the dachshund after her like a miniature hippo.

  “God, I’m sorry,” she said.

  He smiled. Part of an old joke flitted through his head. He began to say, “It’s all right, I thought it was the dog.” But he shut his mouth with a snap. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I had a terrier once that brought lions home. Nothing more embarrassing than an unwanted lion.”

  She had stared at him as though he was raving, then slowly a smile of relief had spread over her face.

  That had been the beginning. Her name was Jane Lasser, Mrs Jane Lasser, and she was twenty-three. Blonde. Good figure. Heavy bust. And the most beautiful grey eyes he had ever seen. She had been married for eight months to a man nearly twenty years older than herself who ran an international exhibition business and spent most of his time in Europe organizing trade fairs, boat shows, book fairs, wine shows, anything that people wished to exhibit. It meant almost constant travelling and she had not seen him for nearly five months.

  She lived with her dachshund in a flat in Shakespeare Close. She had been ready for a liaison and, he supposed, he had been ready for the great love affair of his life. He had spent the past years in various isolated posts in Central Africa, deprived of any female companionship other than African women whom he had left untouched for fear of undermining his position of authority, and the District Commissioner’s wife whom he had left untouched for fear of the DC.

  He and Jane had fallen on each other like cannibals, devouring flesh and emotions as though they had been on the brink of starvation–which, he supposed, they had. Time had no meaning. They lived in her great double bed in a room with a view of the Thames and only emerged to eat or go to a show in the evenings. She used to get letters from her husband. She never opened them and after a few weeks there was a small pile on the table in the hall.

  They lived like that for six weeks, almost inside each other’s skins. Until then he had been a virgin, and in those six weeks his body exploded with the pent-up lust of enforced celibacy, and his senses demanded and received all the softness and tenderness of which the years in the bush had deprived him. They were in love as no two people had ever been in love, or so he thought. They talked. They planned for the future. They spoke of marriage. They could not do without one another. She would divorce her husband. Howard would leave the service and get a job in London. They would never be parted.

  And then had come the terrible telegram from the family solicitor in Nairobi telling him that both his parents had been killed by Mau Mau terrorists.

  He had flown back immediately and the only plane he could get was an elderly Dakota which had taken him down Africa with the leisureliness of a flying-boat, coming down for coffee, lunch, and tea and landing every evening so that the passengers could sleep in hotels. The first night he’d spent at Malta, the second at Wadi Haifa in the Sudan, the third at Entebbe in Uganda. He had finally reached Nairobi on the fourth day and his parents were already buried. It was only then he had realized with shame that during most of the flight he had thought very little about anything but the pain of his parting with Jane.

  The first few evenings alone in the big stone-built farmhouse were among the worst of his life. His parents had been cut down while at the evening meal by one of the young gardeners who had burst into the room with a panga, and Howard could still see the blood stains on the rug around the table legs. The gardener had had to get past old Luke the cook, and had killed him too. Howard knew none of the servants, and each one looked a potential enemy. At six o’clock every evening he had closed the heavy shutters on the windows and barred the front and back doors and the servants had gone to their dwelling-huts half a mile away and he had been left alone with his thoughts and the crackling static of his radio.

  The arrangement had been that Jane would follow in a few weeks. First she had to tell her husband and then she had to make arrangements for a divorce; it did not matter either to Howard or to her who divorced whom just so long as it was done. She would come out to Kenya and they would live together as man and wife until such time as they could marry. That was the arrangement. But as he sat in the farmhouse night after night writing to her, he was torn by need for her and by the thought of bringing her out into an area of danger. He had finally compromised by taking a flat in Nairobi where she could stay and where he could join her for weekends or for longer periods depending on work at the farm.

  All this he put into his letters, together with suggestions for what clothing to bring–she had assumed Kenya to be overgrown with steamy jungle and he had had to convince her that at six thousand feet their farm was cool enough even on a summer evening to wear a jersey. They were letters full of longing, full of allusions to what they had enjoyed during those six weeks. He found himself also alluding openly to their sexual life, something he would normally have been inhibited from doing. As he recalled the days and nights in which they were drunk with each other’s sexuality he would be overcome with desire for her and the empty farmhouse would become a prison.

  He wrote every day, she wrote once a fortnight. He told himself that his own letters were as much to pass the long evening hours as anything else, and that the brief rather hastily-written letters he received from London were fruits of a normal correspondence. But then weeks began to pass without a letter from her. The ones that did arrive were even briefer than before. He became anxious. He wrote asking if anything was wrong. She did not reply. He sent a telegram. She did not reply to that either. He telephoned. It took him six hours to get through to Shakespeare Close and when he did so the line was bad.

  But not so bad that he couldn’t hear the man’s voice who had answered the phone and who had told him Jane had just gone down to the shops for a few minutes. Howard steeled himself, then plunged.

  “Is that Mr Lasser?” he had asked.

  The man had laughed. No, he said, it wasn’t Mr Lasser. Howard could suddenly visualize the scene: the big double bed; the telephone on the table next to it; the man lying naked staring out at the rain dimpling the Thames; and Jane shopping downstairs. What for? A couple of steaks so she could make steak
and chips as she had so often done for them? “To keep your strength up,” she had said. And he had seen in that instant another picture. The hall table. A pile of unopened air-letters; this time they were from him. He had put down the phone and tried to put Jane out of his mind. It had taken more than a year before the pain began to diminish.

  “Here,” Marion Stowe said, “let me put some of this round you.” She had taken off her coat and was trying to tuck it round his body.

  “No. No,” he said, sitting upright. “I’m not cold. Really.”

  “Of course you are. Frozen. And it’s big enough for two.” For the past few minutes she had been watching him. His face, already grey, had become thinner, the cheeks more hollow, the flesh more tautly stretched. He’s sick, she thought. Either sick or physically drained from fear. Don’t drift away, she thought, don’t leave me here alone. She had begun to fuss with her coat and when that did not seem to wake him, had taken it off and begun to wrap it round both of them. To do this she had to move much closer, until their bodies were touching. Her soft and rounded limbs met sharp angles and bony protuberances and she realized that under his clothing he must be very thin. Her heart went out to him again. They used him, these people, like some sort of . . . her mind tried to search for the exact word and a picture arose of a man holding a mine detector. That’s how they used him. A piece of machinery, with no feelings. But he did have feelings. He was terrified and yet he had been kind to her, gallant almost in an old-fashioned way. She found herself immeasurably touched but at the same time frightened lest he slide away into some capsule of his own for his own self-protection. She wanted him in her dimension. She needed him.

  “Which part of Africa are you from?” she said brightly.

  “Kenya.”

  “Oh, I’ve never been there. Except just to land at Nairobi.” He did not reply. “You can’t see much from airports. I mean you can’t really get a taste of the country, can you?”