Serpent's Kiss

by Ed Gorman

  "You fucking cunt," he kept saying. "You fucking cunt."

  ***

  In the moonlight, the rock quarry was silver.

  And dusty.

  She started coughing immediately.

  She knew, of course, why they were here. "You could just let me go."

  "Right."

  "I won't tell anybody anything. I promise."

  He hadn't realised, until he saw her out in the streetlight, that she was at least partly black "Get out of the car."

  "No, listen, mister-"

  "Out."

  She wouldn't go, so he pushed her.

  The rock quarry was deserted, pocked with huge shadowed holes. It was like walking on the moon. The sky was black, low; the stars were innumerable and gorgeous.

  He felt exhilarated in a way that he knew was madness.

  He wanted to scream and come and shit and cry and laugh and murder her and heal her all at the same time.

  She walked two steps ahead of him.

  He kept pushing her toward the largest cavern.

  When they reached the edge of it, he stabbed her in the back of the neck and then he ripped the knife out and started stabbing her along the spine.

  Finally, he threw her on the ground and started stabbing her face. Once he noticed how one of her brown eyes had been caught on the point of his knife.

  When he was done with her, he raised her brown bloody body as if in sacrifice and hurled her down into the utter blackness of the pit.

  And then he fell to the ground, feeling the thing in him twist tight, tighter, and then begin slowly working up his oesophagus and then into his mouth and then...

  He lay there, helpless, as the dark snakelike being left him, twisting, twisting, like something newly born leaving the womb.

  He was cold then, colder than he'd ever been and he knew he was crying there in the silent silver dust of the quarry, and he became aware of how filthy his hands were with blood and entrails and...

  ***

  Around dawn he woke up.

  A tabby cat walked over to him and stood there staring and the sweet green eyes of the tabby were the first thing he saw this day.

  And then he looked at his blood soaked clothes and he remembered everything. The black girl and the thing leaving him and...

  He was empty; empty.

  Twenty minutes later he went over to the edge of the gravel pit and looked at the broken body below. Sunlight was just starting to move across the corpse. He had ripped her clothes from her and dug out whole parts of her torso. Her arms, at such odd angles, looked as if they'd been broken in the fall.

  He went to the Mustang.

  ***

  Somehow he got out of there.

  Twenty minutes later he found a phone booth and called his sister.

  5

  MARIE ALWAYS CALLED it the Agony Hour, that time of the afternoon-actually it was more like three hours -when her mother sat in front of the TV set in the living room listening to her talk shows, programs that always featured people who had been beaten by their husbands, abducted by UFOs, pursued by radiation-swollen alligators through the local sewer system, seduced by their choirmaster, unwittingly dated a transsexual for seventeen years, or traumatically lost first prize in a national nude bake-off. By turns the audience was moved to tears, laughter, the modern equivalent of hissing, and great swooping bouts of self-pity-for who in the audience hadn't (it seemed) had a husband who wore ladies' undergarments while being a practising attorney?

  Marie didn't feel contempt for all the guests, of course-not the ones who'd been molested by fathers or made the quite serious decision to have his/her sex changed or found their child suddenly seized from them in a custody suit. No, these griefs were real-because she could see in the tired, swollen eyes of the people genuine sorrow. What she couldn't understand was why they went on TV. Talking about your griefs publicly cheapened and lessened them to Marie, they became spectator sport for women who feasted on sorrow the way others feasted on chocolate.

  Marie and her mother had had this discussion many times over the past year. Marie would come home to their roomy and nicely decorated apartment, find her mother in tears before the TV set, and ask her mother why she liked to sit around and be sad all afternoon. All her mother would say, her voice quavering, was "Those poor people." She said this with equal compassion for babies dying of AIDS and women who had been the mistresses of politicians.

  Marie's father had died when she was eleven years old. A professor, he'd left his wife and daughter comfortable on the proceeds from a large life insurance policy, which he'd dutifully kept up even in the worst of financial times. He seemed to sense that he would die young-a week before his forty-third birthday-of cancer.

  After his death, Marie's mother gave up the two-storey house on the outskirts of town, and moved them into an apartment complex close to the city's largest mall and its two best schools. While Marie missed the house, she was soon enjoying herself in the vast busy city. Here, she could be anonymous, crippled to be sure, but lost in the pace and push of it all. People noticed you but they didn't notice you for long. And anyway, a mere cripple wasn't quite so freaky in a city where people wore green spiky hair and earrings in their noses and paid people to beat them.

  Unfortunately, her mother didn't seem to make the transition very well. While she talked constantly of making new friends and taking advantage of all the activities swirling around her, she mostly holed up in her apartment, and went out only for mass and a few other church oriented events. Most of the time she stayed home and cleaned. In all the city there couldn't be a more spotless apartment. Furniture gleamed with wax, appliances beamed with buffing, even toilet bowls shone whitely. And somehow, in the day to day doing of these things, her mother had lost herself and her purpose in some terrible way. While she was certainly an attractive widow-a very pretty face, dark lovely hair spoiled only somewhat by the out of date pageboy style, and a trim body whose nice round breasts Marie envied from time to time-she never dated. Oh, there were men from the church, sweaty nervous widowers or lifelong bachelors, who paid furtive night calls for tea, cookies, and coffee in the front room before the great yawping electronic mouth of the TV set, but not serious men, not serious dates. So far as Marie knew, there had never been a serious man for Kathleen Marie Fane, not since the death of her husband. And so Kathleen Marie-beginning to grey now, two chins appearing where before there had been only one and the first faint brown spots of age showing on the slender hands-Kathleen Marie had her daughter and her apartment and was seemingly content with her comfortable isolation.

  "Hi, Mom."

  Her mother did not raise her eyes from the TV screen. "Hi." Then, "Those poor people."

  "What is it today, Mom?"

  "Lesbian incest victims."

  "Oh."

  "I didn't know there was so much of that going on."

  "Neither did I."

  The living room was done in Victorian furnishings, her mother having gone through an antique period not long after the death of her husband. There were some very nice pieces here, including a mahogany display cabinet with glazed doors and pagoda top and an oak framed tambour topped pedestal writing desk. Soft, pearl grey walls and beige carpeting set off the rest of the furnishings, which were an amalgam of modem set off with small, complementary period accoutrements. Whenever anybody visited Marie, the guest spent a mandatory amount of time oohing and aahing over the apartment. This wasn't the sort of place you expected to find in a modest middle class neighbourhood.

  "I'm making pork chops for dinner, honey," her mother said, as Marie went to her room.

  "Remember, Mom, it's a work night."

  "Oh, dam." For the first time, her mother's attention left the TV set. "I'd forgotten. Honey, can't you call in sick or something?"

  "Mom, they depend on me. You know that."

  Marie's bookstore job had long been a point of contention at home. Hardly rich but not in dire need of money, Marie's mother saw no
reason for Marie to work, especially in a used bookstore in a part of the city that was crumbling and was by most accounts dangerous.

  "I thought you were going to quit," her mother said. In a lacy blouse and jeans, her dark hair pulled back with a festive pink barrette, her mother looked almost as young as she used to. Young, and quite pretty. Only the dark solemn gaze and the tight worry lines around her mouth revealed her age and her predilection to fret and stew.

  Marie paused on her way back to her room. "I said I'd think about it, Mom. That's all I said. That I'd think about it."

  "There was another killing near there last night. I don't know if you saw that on the news or not."

  Marie smiled, hoping to lighten the mood. "Yes, but was anybody abducted by Venusians?"

  "Very funny, young lady."

  Marie paused in the centre of the hallway and stretched her arms out toward her mother.

  Her mother took Marie's hands. "Honey, I wouldn't worry about you if I didn't love you."

  "I know that, Mom."

  "It's just that neighbourhood-"

  "I know. But the people are so interesting, Mom. I just like it."

  And that was true. The bookstore attracted all sorts of interesting people-not just the usual paperback browsers, either, but holdovers from the days of beatniks who looked through all the Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg books; smart and somewhat sarcastic science professors who bought science fiction novels and made tart comments on the authors they were purchasing; and intense, lonely men and women-women she liked to think would fit into her group at school-who talked of all kinds of books (everything from mysteries to eighteenth-century romances) with great smoking passion. Despite the shabbiness of the store itself, and the somewhat frightening neighbourhood surrounding it, Marie loved her hours in the store, feeling as if she belonged there. The people who came in there took note of her foot, of course, but somehow it didn't seem to matter much to them. She strongly suspected that each of them-in his or her own way-was a geek, too.

  "Anyway," Marie said. She'd been going to tell her mother later, savouring the moment when she could actually say that she had something like a date. Not exactly a date, true; but something at least not unlike a date.

  "Anyway, what?" her mother said.

  "Anyway, I've got a ride to and from the store tonight."

  "You do?"

  "I do."

  "With whom?"

  Marie couldn't help herself then. She grinned like a little girl opening a birthday present. "Remember I told you about Richie Beck?"

  "The cute one who sits at your table every day but doesn't say much?"

  "Right."

  "He's going to give you a ride to and from the bookstore?"

  Marie nodded. "Isn't that great?"

  But instead of answering directly, her mother did something wholly unexpected, reached out and brought her daughter to her, and held her tighter than she had in years.

  "I'm really happy for you," her mother said.

  And Marie knew her mother was crying. That was the oddest thing of all. Her mother crying.

  Marie felt her mother's warm tears on the shoulder of her cotton blouse. "Mom, are you all right?"

  "I'm just happy for you."

  Marie grinned again as they separated. "Mom, I'm not getting married. He's just giving me a ride."

  Her mother, still crying softly, said, "But don't you see what this means?"

  "What what means?"

  "Richie. You."

  "I'm afraid I don't understand."

  "A boy in your life, honey. It means you won't turn out like me. Some crazed old widow lady who keeps all the toilet bowls sparkling."

  In the phrase about toilet bowls, Marie heard with real sorrow that her mother did indeed know the kind of woman she'd turned into. And didn't want her daughter to turn into. Marie had never liked and loved her mother more than she did right now.

  "I was just afraid that with your foot, you'd become like me," her mother said.

  Then she leaned forward and gave her daughter a tearstained kiss on the cheek.

  Then her mother turned and started back for the living room. "I'd better get back there, hon. Who knows? Maybe Oprah herself will get abducted this afternoon."

  Now it was Marie's turn to stand there and cry softly. Crazed as her mother sometimes was, she was still the sweetest person Marie had ever known.

  ***

  "What the hell're you looking so smug about?"

  "Wouldn't you like to know?"

  "C'mon, Holland, for Christ's sake tell me. Three hours ago you were sitting in my office crying."

  "Maybe I got a phone call."

  "Oh, yeah? What kind of phone call? A job offer?"

  They were in the second-floor coffee room. She liked it up here because now, around five, there was never anybody up here and she could take her heels off and rub her feet and stare out the window at the silver river winding north three blocks away.

  "Don't I wish," she said.

  "Then if it wasn't a job offer, what kind of phone call could of made you so happy."

  "Story."

  "News story?"

  She enjoyed keeping him in the dark. She liked seeing him sort of beg, like this big shaggy (and, all right, loveable) dog.

  "Well if it's a news story phone call, don't you think you should be telling me about it?"

  "Not necessarily."

  "I just came up here to see how you were doing-being a pretty nice goddamned guy when you come right down to it-and now look."

  "If it's anything, I'll tell you all about it."

  He took his paper cup of coffee and went to the door. "Won't you even give me a hint?"

  She decided to really get his motor running. "Let's just say it involves murder."

  "Murder?" He sounded practically exultant. News directors always sounded practically exultant when you dropped the word 'murder.' Murders made great visuals. Great visuals.

  "Several of them."

  "Several of them?"

  He looked as if he were going to jump on her and start strangling her until she gave him the whole story but just then a TV sales rep came in.

  "Hey," the sleek rep said. "News guys up here on the second floor." He seemed stunned that such a thing could happen.

  "Yeah," Chris Holland said to O'Sullivan. "Better call CBS and tell them all about it. How there are 'news guys' on the second floor."

  Despite himself, O'Sullivan smiled.

  And then had the good sense to leave.

  Because she sure wasn't going to tell him any more. Not right now anyway.

  At the door, O'Sullivan said, "Oh, yeah, I'm making some dinner tonight. Stop by."

  Then, without waiting for her answer, he left.

  ***

  She hadn't been in the apartment in eight years, not since the night with her brother.

  She stood in the hallway now, the key she'd stolen all those years ago damp and metallic in the soft flesh of her palm.

  What if Dobyns was to walk in right now?

  What could she do?

  How could she escape?

  She eased the key into the Yale lock. Turned it gently. Looked again-for the ninth time? tenth?-for a sign of anybody coming or peeking out of a door.

  And then she pushed at the door and went inside.

  The odour was the first thing that struck her. Of dampness, of something hidden in darkness too long, unclean.

  She remembered the odour vividly from the night with her brother.

  She pushed the door shut behind her.

  Even in the afternoon, sunlight still golden and gorgeous outside, the apartment was a place of deep shadows.

  She looked around the small rooms, knowing she was afraid to move.

  She forced herself to take a single step.

  This is for him not for me. I've got to be brave. Anyway, I've spent all these years for this moment.

  Now-

  Down the hall, a door slammed shut and she jumped. />
  She felt terrified and ridiculous at the same time.

  Her heart was loud in her ears.

  Sweat like glue covered her flesh.

  And then she smiled at herself, just as Rob had always smiled at her for being such a chicken. Remembering Rob's smile, the almost beatific boyishness of it, calmed her.

  She took a second step. And then a third.

  And then she began, traffic sounds in the background, a baby crying somewhere on the second floor, her search of the apartment.

  She spent the next thirty-six minutes going through every closet and every drawer in the place, pausing only once when she had to pee.

  She felt stupid, huddled just above the toilet seat (her parents had taught her too well about strange toilet seats) in an apartment she'd just broken into.

  And then she was back at work

  In one drawer she found a yellowed, brittle newspaper used as lining. She lifted it out and took it over by one of the windows. She held the curtain back with one hand and studied the paper with another. May 23, 1958 was the date. She hadn't even been born then.

  But she knew she didn't have time to waste looking at old newspapers and so she put it back in the drawer.

  There were rings of dirt in the bathtub and in the kitchen a half eaten sandwich that two cockroaches, antennae flicking, were busy with. And in the hall closet she found an ancient, threadbare London Fog with flecks of what was probably dried blood on the sleeve.

  Five minutes later she found the manila envelope.

  Memories of the manila envelope Rob had showed her that night came back in jarring, upsetting images.

  The girls someone had killed several decades ago... and photographed afterward...

  Fingers trembling, stomach tightening, she started to slip the glossy photos from the manila envelope.

  And then she heard the key in the lock. She froze, glancing around the room for someplace to hide. But the apartment was so small-