Snake Eyes

by Joseph D'lacey

  Snake Eyes

  Joseph D'lacey

  TWO novellas by the man who Stephen King says “ROCKS”!

  An isolated, drought-choked village. A starving community. When something big, red and inhuman crash-lands in a cabbage field, the villagers are divided: is this a scrumptious dragon for the barbecue or a toxic demon to be destroyed? And what if it’s something else entirely?

  Robert Johnson dreams of spiders, thousands of them. When he wakes, the true nightmare begins: a tube has been attached to his head — to everyone’s — but he’s the only one aware of it. His cozy suburban life unravels into paranoid hallucination as Johnson fights to free himself from the control of unseen forces.

  “Joseph D’Lacey rocks!”

  Stephen King

  Joseph D’Lacey

  SNAKE EYES

  A Man of Will and Experience

  Chapter 1

  In the hatching chamber of the fourth tier the final spider advanced towards Agent Johnson.

  He had one round left in the shotgun. The shot would scatter a little as it flew towards the creature but he still had to be accurate enough to kill it.

  The eyes…

  That was where its overgrown brain was.

  Behind those ten red eyes.

  His hands were shaking now. There had been so many of them. More than he’d ever anticipated and his backpack of ammunition, which had once seemed plentiful, was now used up. One of the smaller spiders had bitten him and he could feel the toxin slowing him down. He trudged like he was wearing an ancient diver’s suit with weighted boots and a brass helmet. As he backed away, the last spider gained ground.

  This was the female, the guardian of the nest. She was huge, too: a leg span of almost three metres supported her body a metre above the ground. At such a size, she lumbered rather than ran but each ponderous step made huge gains. Johnson knew that if she caught him it didn’t merely mean an agonising end for him. She was pregnant and would lay her eggs at any time. She’d use him to feed her offspring and the whole nightmare would start again. Everything he’d fought for through the corridors and labs of the fourth tier facility would be worth nothing if she survived and he did not.

  The stench of decomposition clotted the hatching chamber. This was where she’d brought the bodies that the male spiders had paralysed. Most of the carcasses had been devoured now and what remained rotted in the choking humidity. He knew that she’d been fertilised—he’d watched as she mated with one of the larger male spiders before sucking every drop of fluid from its body and discarding its monstrous husk.

  Agent Johnson’s stomach knotted and spasmed in response the miasma in the chamber but he fought back his bile. He could afford no lapses in concentration, no mistakes.

  He thought of Angelina and Professor Alpert. He remembered the other members of his team, Shuckman and Fiori, Matthews and Becker. All gone now and him soon to follow if he didn’t keep his nerve. He gripped the shotgun tighter to stop his hands from trembling. It helped but only a little.

  Johnson chambered the last shell.

  She was close enough that he could smell her venom now. It dripped from her fangs in a viscous plasma, steaming slightly where it spattered onto the cadaver-strewn floor. It smelled of sulphur and a sweet spice like cinnamon. He gagged again, knowing that same arachnid bane now flowed within his own blood vessels, slowing his reflexes and dulling his wits. The muzzle of the shotgun drooped downward.

  He lifted it up once more.

  Have to concentrate…

  Wait for the perfect moment.

  She was within fifteen feet now. Another step or two and he would—

  She lunged; he wasn’t expecting it so soon. No time to think—he squeezed the trigger. The shotgun leapt back in his grip as it had so many times that night and her face, if such it could be called, imploded. The spiny palps with which she’d held her prey shattered, her fangs disintegrating in an ochre mist. Every eye disappeared in the blast. She took two more steps and collapsed, spider blood and venom commingling in a sickening stream below her shattered head section.

  Johnson was ready to collapse. Rest a while before he made his way along the dim corridors to the elevator that would take him out; sleep before he headed for the third tier and detonated all the charges.

  He didn’t have the chance.

  From behind her body he heard a pattering sound that reminded him of cows defecating on barn floors. It was the noise made by hundreds of eggs falling from her spinnerets and bursting as they hit the ground. Already he could see the frantic scurrying of hungry infant spiders as they raced towards him. Even these newborns were the size of his hand. He turned and pounded towards the chamber’s exit. There was no door so he couldn’t stop them from following. As he fled he discarded the shotgun and the pack, flinging them into the path of his pursuers.

  All he had left were the detonators. He held one in each fist as he sprinted ahead of the spider brood so close behind him. He could hear their legs scrabbling against the walls and the ceilings of the corridors as he ran. Every door he came to he slammed, buying him a few seconds before the sheer weight of them forced the doors open once more.

  By the time he reached the lift shaft he’d opened a small distance between them but he didn’t believe it was enough. He smashed on the call button. The elevator was right there but the doors opened too slowly. As soon as he could squeeze through the opening, he hit the icon for the third tier, the way out, followed by the ‘close doors’ button. As the steel panels laboured shut, he saw the army of spiders seething along the corridor like a flood. The first ones reached him and leapt through the narrow opening as the doors met and the elevator began its final upward journey.

  Three of them made it through, one already biting his neck. He smashed the one climbing his chest against himself with a fist. He tore at the one needling his neck and flung it against the wall of the elevator, the impact crushing it. The third spider’s fangs probed his ankle. He kicked it against the wall and it slid, wet and broken to the floor.

  Their venom took its toll.

  He couldn’t allow himself to black out; not without first detonating the explosives he’d placed throughout the facility but doing so before he reached the level of the third tier would kill him. He waited as long as he could, the blindness of sleep settling onto him, smothering his consciousness like a blanket. He knew there was a strong chance he’d die from his bites even if he survived the explosions.

  Out of time and out of choices, he depressed the detonators.

  Far below him a deep rumbling began.

  Chapter 2

  The spider dream clung like web to the corners of his mind, running a thread into other less exciting reveries about his day to day life, until at last he was no longer dreaming of spiders but instead of his role as a family man. When these wraithlike visions became fantasies he could control and he felt the pressure in his bladder, he knew he was awake.

  It was the morning after his thirty-fourth birthday, the day Robert Johnson first became aware of his tube. It was such a shock to him that he forgot the spider dream until a long time later.

  The evening before had been a quiet affair; a bottle of Chardonnay shared with Angelina after the kids were asleep. Love, made a little clumsily, on the sofa. Whispered memories of other birthdays—their own and the children’s, hushed talk of birthdays yet to come and all that would arrive with them.

  “Matthew is going to be a great sprinter. None of the other boys his age run anywhere near as fast.”

  “What do you care about sports, Bob? You never played any.”

  “I played Table Tennis. The trophy’s right there in the tall boy.”

  “That doesn’t count and you know it.”

  They had laughed.


  “Truth is, I’d be proud of a sporting son. Being able to do the things I never could.”

  “You should be proud anyway.”

  He knew Angelina was right. His own father had tried to make a sportsman of him. It had caused of a parting of minds that was never resolved—unless Johnson’s sporting failure could be considered an end to the matter.

  He’d stroked her hair as they lay half undressed on the sofa.

  “Rebecca will be an astronaut.” He’d announced.

  “She will not.”

  “A fighter pilot, then.”

  “Baloney.”

  “A mime artist?”

  But Angelina wasn’t laughing.

  “She’ll be a woman before we know what hit us.”

  He’d squeezed her to him.

  “I know it.”

  Johnson had been able to forget for those few hours, not completely but enough, about the grind and increasing pressures of his accountancy job. The sheer anonymity of his contribution to the turning of the world scared him at times, but on that night he was, for a few snatched hours, almost content.

  He was not used to drinking—occasionally, he had a beer or two at the weekend—so the wine gave him a headache. It also caused him to rise earlier than he normally would on a Saturday morning to take a leak.

  In the bathroom he flicked on the dimmer of the two lights. Standing in front of the toilet, he squeezed the head of his penis to unglue the opening of their dried-on sexual fluids. He knew better than to cause Angelina extra work by sending his first squirt all over the bathroom.

  It was at that moment, his eyes becoming accustomed to the dull glare, that he felt a movement from the top of his head. It was as if someone had very softly pulled a few hairs. He turned around expecting to see Angelina but he was still alone. The tug came again, slightly harder. As he pissed, he reached toward the bathroom cabinet and pulled open one of the mirrored doors. That was when he saw the tube for the first time.

  In a moment of frankness, had he been asked off the record, Johnson would have said that until it had started to ‘pull at him’ he’d never really been aware that it was there at all. But, now that he was looking at the thing, a black pipe about half an inch in diameter that protruded from the top of his head and extended upwards beyond his mirrored reflection, he felt as though it had always been there.

  It looked very…familiar.

  It was that single fact that mitigated any initial horror he might otherwise have felt. His head aching slightly, he’d put two Alka-Seltzer’s in a glass, added water, drank the bitter fizzy result and went back to bed where he snuggled up to Angelina and fell immediately back to sleep.

  He awoke alone in their bed to the smell of bacon, eggs and coffee. His head was clear and he felt refreshed. In the bathroom brushing his teeth, he remembered the incident from the small hours.

  Glancing at the mirror, he saw the tube was still there. He must, at that moment, have made some kind of muffled grunt of exclamation.

  “Everything all right in there, Bob? Breakfast is on the table.”

  He spat pink paste froth into the sink.

  “Sure, honey. Just fine. I’ll be there in a second.”

  He heard the swish of her robe as she approached and pushed the door open. He didn’t have a chance to stop her.

  “You find a grey hair, babe?”

  She was looking at him and smiling. He still had the toothbrush in his hand, a foamy mouth. Not sure what to do, he smiled back.

  “No, but I think I may have put on a few pounds. My face looks fatter, don’t you think.”

  She looked at him, at his face. He waited for the shock to register, the disbelief, but it never came. She took his face in her hands and kissed his mouth. When she stood back there was toothpaste on her lips.

  “You look better than ever,” Angelina said.

  It was his own face that registered shock, although he hid it by turning away and rinsing his mouth out with water.

  His wife had a black tube protruding from the crown of her head.

  Chapter 3

  Johnson tried hard to ignore the tube and most of the time he managed to. He chose not to look at the tubes of his family. He chose not to see the tubes of his colleagues. He ignored the thick cables that showed above every cubicle in the office, cables that extended upward.

  The pulling, however, he could not ignore. Every subtle twitch drew his attention back to his discovery. The temptation to touch his tube was strong but the desire was mixed with disturbing feelings of fear and revulsion. What if someone saw him do it? What if he hurt himself?

  Other questions followed like plague rats; did anyone else know? Was it something normal that he just hadn’t noticed until now? Why did the kids never ask about it? Was it something that everyone knew about that remained an impenetrable taboo? If so, why didn’t anyone talk about it? Why were there no books about it, no medical information? What was the public’s opinion of it and where was the legislation that related to it?

  He surfed the net for hours trying every combination of words in every search engine he knew. He found no data at all.

  There was one other question too, of course. The one that scared him most. The one he never asked himself.

  Chapter 4

  Robert Johnson moved rapidly from a condition of enforced avoidance to a tube-obsessive state in a matter of days after the first little tug on the top of his head. He couldn’t help it; tubes were attached to every person he saw. He was prepared to admit to himself that he might have been imagining how the tubes looked—even whether they were there at all—but the tugging, the persistent plucks and twitches were no hallucination. Averting his eyes from the obvious became harder each day and concentrating on anything else was practically impossible. Everyone had a tube but only his was…moving.

  “Aren’t you feeling well, babe?” Angelina asked him one morning at breakfast. She put her hand to his forehead to see if he had a temperature and he flinched, the touch a little too intimate.

  She’d recoiled, hurt by his reaction.

  “What is it, Bob?”

  “It’s nothing. Just a headache is all.” He could tell she didn’t believe him. He sighed as if he was about to betray a secret about himself. “I’m not sleeping.” That much was true. “It’s work, Angie, it just keeps getting worse. I feel like I’m doing three people’s jobs and being thanked for nothing.”

  “You should resign. That bastard Shuckman treats you like dirt.”

  “It’s not him.” Johnson actually liked Shuckman, he was one of the people who understood the inner workings of the company and always cut him slack when things were tough. “I can’t leave. I’m this close to promotion. Then all this bullshit will go away.” It was the first real lie he’d ever told her. It hurt, but there was no way he could bring himself to say the true words to her, the ones that would lay it all on the line. He couldn’t risk the love they’d shared and the family they’d created.

  The next tug had been a little more forceful and had happened in public. His car was being serviced and he’d taken the bus to work. On the way home, exhausted by the demands of the day, he was nodding, half asleep when his head had been whipped into an upright position snapping him back to wakefulness. He’d looked around in furtive shame to have been so obviously caught out but no one had noticed. He tried to tell himself that he’d merely jerked himself awake as he sometimes did when napping.

  Waking so suddenly and seeing all those oily black ducts protruding from every head; that was the moment when he began to look more closely at other people’s tubes. It was risky, of course, because if they looked up and caught him peering, however innocently, at the place above their heads where the tube was attached, it would lead to trouble. He wasn’t certain what sort of trouble but he guessed it would be the worst kind.

  As he appraised those seated with him, he was assailed by many more conundrums relating to the tube and the first thing was this: how did they get in and out
of the train without catching their tubes in the doorway? He almost laughed when the idea struck him but managed to stifle the sound. It might have come out a little cracked, a little high-pitched.

  However, it wasn’t a question he felt he could leave unanswered and so, like a gynaecologist who ought to know better than to relish the view, he glanced up once more at something he was never supposed to have openly noticed. What he saw was dismaying. The tubes extended up through the ceiling of the bus, as if the steel encasing them were no more substantial than mist. He could see the tubes swaying slightly with the rocking of the bus, completely unimpeded by the ceiling. They went through it; up to somewhere else.

  He didn’t have the courage to take any more risks during the rest of the journey but when he arrived home, it took all the willpower he had to hide his agitation.

  That evening he watched television with his family as he always did on weeknights before the kids went to bed. Angelina sat beside him on their sofa and held his hand. She could feel the tension in his body but knew better than to ask him how he was. Many of her friends’ husbands were uptight at home in the evenings; work seemed to be a struggle for everyone and she knew she shouldn’t worry.

  Michael and Rebecca sat cross-legged on the floor in front of them. Their favourite quiz show was on but Johnson couldn’t concentrate. All he could look at were the slightly smaller tubes, ones that were not yet fully grown, snaking upwards from the heads of his children and through the living room ceiling.

  After a few minutes he could stand the temptation no longer.

  “Got to take a leak. Tell me what happens, ’kay?”

  “’Kay, babe.” Angelina said. Her eyes stayed fixed on the screen.

  The children’s bedroom was directly above the living room and as he passed he peered in. It was too gloomy to see anything so he switched the light on. In roughly the centre of the room, two immature tubes stretched up from the floor and through the roof. A slightly wider, ‘adult’ tube, a little farther away did the same. Johnson stared for a moment and then clicked the light off before flushing the toilet and going back downstairs.