Serpent's Kiss

by Ed Gorman

"Come on, Walter. We've got work to do."

  "Thanks for reminding me."

  "Please go see the janitor. All right?"

  "All right."

  He hung up.

  When he turned around and faced the deserted newsroom, he realised how lonely he felt most of the time. Cynical as he was about human nature, he needed other people around him.

  Especially one person in particular named Chris Holland.

  He hadn't been kidding about putting the moves on her. Who said a romance couldn't grow out of a friendship? He was already reading about just such relationships in all the magazines (Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping) that the women were leaving in the unisex john.

  He was still hoping that someday somebody would leave new copies of Baseball Digest and Sports Illustrated in there as well.

  Resigning himself to the fact that dinner tonight was going to be at the McDonald's drive-up window, he tugged on his unlined London Fog and went out the back door to the parking lot.

  ***

  She had long been a believer in premonitions, Kathleen Fane had.

  One day in second grade she'd stared over at the boy across the aisle from her-Bobby Bannock by name-and saw a strange light encircling his head. Years later, she would come to know this curious configuration of sculptured neon as an 'aura' but on that long-ago day all she knew was that the light-even though she had nothing to compare it to-bespoke something terrible that was soon to happen to Bobby Bannock.

  Sister Mary Carmelita had caught her staring at Bobby and had harshly chastised Kathleen for doing so. Sister Mary Carmelita did not much approve of girls and boys interacting, even on so harmless a level as staring.

  Blushing, Kathleen had sat up straight in her desk and looked at the blackboard where the nun had just finished writing the words 'Christopher Columbus.'

  She did not look at Bobby the rest of the day, not even at recess when she usually sat beneath a shade tree daintily eating the crisp red autumn apple her mother always poked into the pocket of her blue buttoned sweater.

  Three days later, just after school, just at the corner that so many parents complained about, Bobby was struck by a black Ford and killed. One little girl actually saw Bobby's head strike the pavement and heard his skull crack. A little boy insisted that he'd actually seen Bobby's brains ooze out through that crack.

  Ever since, Kathleen had felt in some way responsible for Bobby's death. Even if he'd laughed at her-he had usually laughed at most things she'd said-she should have warned him, told him about the strange light around his head and what it portended.

  She stood now at the dusk window watching the walk below. In three and a half hours, her daughter Marie would be walking up those stairs, on her way back from the bookstore and what amounted to her first date. The autumn sky-salmon pink and grey streaked with yellow now at evening-struggled to give birth to night.

  Kathleen wished now that she'd handled the whole matter better.

  In her defence, she thought that she might have been more receptive to the idea of a date-even admittedly an informal one-if only Marie had given her a little warning.

  Kathleen shook her head.

  Sometimes her life seemed to be little more than a long list of regrets.

  These days she wished, for example, that she'd been more compliant with her husband where sex was concerned. He really hadn't asked for much but Kathleen had always been something of a prude and the notion of actually putting his thing in her mouth- Well, without exactly knowing why, the whole idea had always frightened her. Now she wished she'd done it, at least a few times, and at least with the pretence of enjoyment. She'd certainly enjoyed it when he'd put his mouth on her down there and-

  So many regrets with Marie these days.

  How badly Kathleen wanted to strike the right balance of strict but compassionate. That was the key to raising a teenager well. Strict but compassionate.

  Tonight was a milestone of sorts in Marie's life. That's where the compassion should have come in. Kathleen should have shared Marie's obvious excitement for the evening.

  And now there was the premonition.

  It wasn't a vision. She hadn't seen any curious light around Marie's head this afternoon.

  It was just a feeling.

  A terrible, fluttering feeling in both her chest and her stomach.

  Something awful was going to happen to Marie tonight.

  That's where the strict came in.

  She should have risked disappointing or even angering Marie and just said it-Even though you think I'm being hysterical honey, I've just got this notion about tonight. This feeling, honey. There's no other way to explain it. I know you think your mother's crazy and old-fashioned and just trying to spoil all your fun but, honey- (And then maybe she'd tell Marie, for the first time ever, about little Bobby Bannock in second grade, and about the terrible thing that had happened to him and about the terrible sin Kathleen had committed by not warning him-)

  She continued to stare out the window.

  The downtown buildings were outlined in black against a dark blue sky. Somewhere in this evening radiance was her daughter who thought she was so big and impervious but was still this little girl-

  Then Kathleen smiled.

  She thought of how freaky Marie considered herself. No matter how many times you told her how pretty she was or how bright or how giving or caring-

  No matter what you said, Marie always considered herself a freak.

  Her foot, of course. That was the culprit.

  You couldn't really be pretty or bright and walk with a limp. That was what Marie thought. Believed.

  So tonight would be good for her.

  She hoped the boy somehow convinced Marie that she was a worthy and desirable person.

  Self-esteem, Kathleen thought. Oprah and Phil and Sally Jessy and even Geraldo preached it, and so did most modern psychologists.

  Self-esteem: without it you had nothing.

  For a time she followed the arc of a small private plane across the very top of the sky.

  Flight had always fascinated her, especially at night when the small moving lights on the wings and tail were like stars mysteriously crossing the firmament.

  But then her dread premonition returned, and Kathleen forgot all about aeroplanes and stars, and thought again of Marie. Something was going to happen.

  She was sure of it.

  7

  SEVERAL BLOCKS from the apartment building, Dobyns came running out from an alley. He was panting, staggering. He was not used to running this way.

  He quickly became aware of a young mother pushing a stroller watching him.

  He could imagine how he looked.

  The mother shook her head in great distaste and hurried on by.

  Bitch, Dobyns thought.

  Smug fucking bitch.

  Another block down, he found a taxi.

  Guy was in there behind the wheel reading a paperback in the dim light of the overhead. Wonder the guy wasn't blind by now.

  Dobyns got in the back seat. Slammed the door.

  The guy put the paperback away with great reluctance, as if he were doing Dobyns here quite a favour.

  "Okay," the guy said, addressing his body to the wheel.

  Dobyns gave him the address.

  For the first time, the cabbie took a look at Dobyns. A good one, anyway.

  In the rear-view, the cabbie's eyes narrowed. Lots of cabbies got murdered these days.

  A sweaty, dishevelled, panting man with crazed eyes would seem to fit the profile of Those To Be Avoided.

  "You got money?" the cabbie said.

  "Yeah."

  "Mind if I see it?"

  "Why?"

  The cabbie sighed. Picked up the microphone of his two-way radio. "You want me to call the fuckin' cops, pal?"

  "No," Dobyns said.

  "Then let's see your money."

  Dobyns dug into his pants pocket and came up with a fistful of bills.

  He fo
und a twenty and handed it over to the driver.

  "Sorry," the man said. "But these days you got to cover your ass."

  Dobyns said nothing, sat back "Could you turn off that light?" He wanted to be in darkness.

  "The overhead?"

  "Yeah."

  "Bothers you, huh?"

  "Yeah."

  In the rear-view the cabbie offered Dobyns a small white slice of grin. "What're you, pal, some kind of vampire or something?"

  The cab pulled away with the overhead light off, the cabbie's laughter trailing out the window. He seemed to find his vampire gag a major source of yuks.

  ***

  In memory, the street was a perfect image from a song by Elvis early on, or Chuck Berry or Little Richard-a street where chopped and channelled '51 Mercs and '53 Oldsmobiles ferried dazzling ponytailed girls and carefully duck tailed boys up and down the avenue, where corner boys dangled Lucky Strikes from their lips and kept copies of The Amboy Dukes in back pockets of Levi's jeans from which the belt loops had been cut away with razor blades. The sounds: glas-pak mufflers rumbling; jukeboxes thundering Fats Domino's Ain't That a Shame (forget the white boy bullshit Pat Boone version); police sirens cutting the night and sounding somehow cool and threatening at the same time (like a sound effect from one of the juvenile delinquent movies that always played on the double bill at the State); Italian babies screaming from tiny apartments; Irish babies screaming; black babies screaming; an argument ending with "Fuck you!" "Well fuck you too!" as one corner boy walks away from another, not really wanting to get into it (unlike movie pain, real pain hurts); and talk talk talk, wives and husbands, lovers, little kids having just gluttoned themselves on Captain Video and imitating the Cap'n now, and old lonely ladies saying prayers for somebody in the parish, heart attack or cancer suddenly striking. And the smells. Evening in Paris on the girls and Wildroot on the boys and cigarette smoke and Doublemint gum and smoke autumn chill and cheeseburgers with lots of thick whorls of onion and night itself, the neon of it, and the vast harrowing potential of it, too (a guy could get laid; a guy could get knifed; a guy could find God; it was great giddy fun, the vast potential of this night, and it was scary as hell too).

  What O'Sullivan wanted to know was how did you get from skinny, gangly corner boy looking good in his duck's ass and mandatory black leather jacket to now-to age-forty-three-thirty-pounds-overweight-worrier-TV-news-director?

  How exactly did that happen anyway? Didn't you get to stay eighteen forever?

  He stood now in the street of his youth, wondering about this. Sometimes he had the feeling that his life-the life he'd really been meant to lead-was like a bus that was always pulling away from the corner before he could quite get aboard. So instead of being a spy or assassin or lonely cowpoke he'd ended up a news director with corns on his feet, anxiety pains in his stomach, and this dim animal notion that given the dull life he'd led, his death would be anticlimactic.

  He hadn't been back in this old neighbourhood in years and if Holland hadn't conned him into it, he'd never have come back, either. Too many memories of when he'd been a reasonably cool teenager unwittingly on his way to becoming a decidedly uncool middle-ager.

  O'Sullivan crossed the street toward the address he was looking for.

  It had all changed.

  What had once been bright was now grimy; what had once been sturdy now leaned and sagged.

  Long gone were the teenagers of his time. Now there was a new language, Vietnamese, and it coiled through the dark air like a twisting yellow snake, touching the shuffling frightened old man with his shopping bag as he hurried back to his social security hovel; and the wino on his knees in the alley vomiting; and the fat Irish cop beyond rage, beyond fear any longer, sitting lonely in his squad car eating doughnuts and trying not to think about the fact that he didn't have hard ons anymore, he had soft ons.

  The janitor O'Sullivan was looking for lived at the opposite end of the street above a Laundromat. As he climbed the enclosed stairs on the side of the building, O'Sullivan could hear the thrum of big industrial sized washers threatening to tear from their mountings; and he smelled the high sour stench of dirty water washing even dirtier clothes. Even this late in the evening-suppertime-you could hear the sad wail of poor little two and three-year-olds running around on the filthy linoleum floor of the Laundromat while their ADC mothers smoked endless cigarettes and gossiped about their boyfriends, especially black boyfriends whom their social workers seemed to disapprove of on general principle ("Sharon, you shouldn't ought to let him wump on you like that, you know?").

  The narrow passage upward smelled of fading sunlight and garbage. There was only one door at the top of the stairs and he discovered it was locked. He knocked three times before he heard something tapping on the other side of the door.

  The sound was as regular and odd as a woodpecker's rapping. He wondered what it could be and-

  -and then an image filled his mind.

  Blind man with a cane.

  Moving across a wooden floor.

  Tapping.

  The door opened up and there stood just such a man. Or at least O'Sullivan thought there stood just such a man. In the dusty gloom, he couldn't be sure.

  All he could be sure of was the stench.

  This apartment hadn't been cleaned since 1946 or something like that. It didn't say much for his janitorial skills.

  "Are you Mr. Telfair?"

  "Yes."

  "My name is O'Sullivan. I'm from Channel 3 news."

  "Channel 3 news?"

  "Yes."

  "Is something wrong?"

  "I'd just like to talk to you a few minutes."

  "About what?"

  "Well, when you were employed at Hastings House."

  "Forty years."

  "Forty years?"

  "That's how long I worked there."

  "Oh. I see. That's a long time."

  "A hell of a long time." Then, at least as far as O'Sullivan could tell, Telfair turned back toward the interior of the dusty apartment.

  The tapping started again.

  In the darkness of the apartment, the tip of the cane against the wood tap-tapping had an eerie resonance.

  O'Sullivan followed Telfair around the corner of the hallway and there lay the living room. Light from the street below painted it in various neon colours-blue-red-green; green-red-blue flashing alternately.

  O'Sullivan got his first good look at the old bastard. He was blind all right, with eyes the colour of Milk of Magnesia. His head was impossibly small, like a head cannibals had shrunk, with wild strands of white hair jutting out spikelike. His slack mouth ran with silver spittle. He smelled unclean, like an animal that has been sick for a long time. The ragged white shirt he wore on his bony frame was stained as if from wounds that excreted not only blood but pus, too. He kept his knobbly hands on top of a knobbly black cane. When he turned to invite O'Sullivan to sit down, his breath almost literally knocked O'Sullivan over. The stink was incredible.

  But what was most curious about Telfair was the fat animal crouching on his shoulder. At first, O'Sullivan had mistaken it for an odd-looking cat.

  Now, its red eyes flaring, its teeth dripping hungrily, O'Sullivan saw it for what it was-a rat.

  Telfair sat down in a ragged armchair set in front of the room's two windows. Backlit this way, Telfair was entirely in silhouette. The only detail O'Sullivan could pick out was Telfair's white useless eyes. And it was the same with the rat that sat on Telfair's shoulder watching O'Sullivan. All he could see was the rat's disturbingly red gaze.

  "He bothers you, doesn't he?" Telfair said.

  "I guess I just kind of buy into all the myths about rats. You know, how they carry rabies and drag babies off and stuff like that."

  "You're a very intense man."

  "I suppose I am." O'Sullivan sighed. In the blinking neon, he got his first good look at this room. The furniture all looked as if somebody had worked it over with a club and a knife. It was
like the world's worst garage sale, boxes and sacks of junk packed tight along three of the walls, overflowing with all sorts of worthless crap, lamps that didn't glow, pop-up toasters that didn't pop up, even an old white Kelvinator refrigerator like the one the O'Sullivan family had had at home-only this one luid a most peculiar door, one that hung at a comic angle by a single screw. "I shouldn't have said anything about your pet. I'm sorry."

  "I never have guests. I didn't even think about Charlie being on my shoulder."

  "Charlie, huh?"

  "When he's been bad I call him Charles."

  For some reason that struck O'Sullivan as funny and he laughed out loud. Laughter sounded real weird in this dusty pauper's grave.

  "Well, in seventh grade I had a milk snake named Raymond," O'Sullivan said. "He wasn't real popular around my house, either. So I guess I should understand about Charlie."

  And as if to prove his master's point, red eyed Charlie climbed down from Telfair's shoulder and landed in his lap and then wriggled his head into the Oreo bag.

  There was something obscene about it, the way the rat burrowed his head into the sack.

  O'Sullivan could hear the munching all the way across the room where he had parked his butt on the edge of a lumpy couch with a hideous flowered slipcover over it.

  "Good boy, Charlie," Telfair said, knobbly hand stroking the relentless rat. "Just remember to save a few for me."

  Then, sated apparently, the rat withdrew, shaking its head as if shaking away Oreo crumbs, and then hopped back up on Telfair's shoulder.

  Telfair said, "You've been talking to the Lindstrom woman, haven't you?"

  "One of my reporters has."

  "And she told you about the old tower."

  "Yes. But I have to confess, I don't understand much about it."

  Telfair chuckled with a certain satisfaction. "Nobody but me does, Mr. O'Sullivan. Nobody but me does. And an old, insane patient named Gus."

  Then he reached into the Oreo bag, seized another brown cookie, and popped it into his mouth.

  He also, at the same time, raised his right leg off the seat of the armchair and cut a sharp, quick world record fart. "The Oreos have the darndest effect on me, Mr. O'Sullivan. They make me flatulent."