by John Shirley
“No Spaniards, at least,” DeVore said too loudly.
As Roosevelt held forth, a hunchback wearing a fez and caftan shuffled past and bumped into him, making a most exotic variation of the Evil Eye at him before he scooted away. An older man in a stained white suit and string tie rose to interrupt Roosevelt, bearing a cage of wire mesh and shaking it to agitate something sleeping within. “The hour is upon us!” he shouted. His accent was of the Alabama piney woods, his booming tone that of an apostate tent preacher. “Unbelievers are welcome among us, for they will be crushed in the coils of the Eternal Serpent!”
“Then I suppose we’re entitled to an apéritif,” DeVore said, which set the officers to laughing.
Roosevelt, polishing his spectacles, drew us into a circle. “No drinking. We must tread lightly here, until we know what manner of conspiracy we’ve blundered into.”
Looking about the room, Lieutenant Van Patten said, “This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s another World’s Fair.”
“Look around you, gentlemen,” Roosevelt said. “The flotsam of every decadent, bygone empire haunts this place, but for what fell purpose.…?”
The troopers encamped at a table nearest the door. DeVore ambled over to the American lady’s table.
Once she’d complimented his uniform and his bravery, she covered her mouth with a fan as she hissed, “You men must leave while you can! They’re choosing the last of their inner circle tonight! After that, I fear the rest of us will be … Oh, it’s too horrible!”
DeVore smiled. “Rest easy, Miss, the cavalry is here. Meet Sgt. Cameron. He has to do whatever I tell him.…”
“Privilege of rank,” I hastily added, using DeVore’s pause to recharge his flask to question the lady. “You’re here to cover the war…?”
She offered her ungloved hand, pickled in sweet ladysweat. “Elizabeth Arnesen, Sergeant, of the New Orleans Picayune. I did come here on my own initiative to cover the war, but that … man …” She pointed at the gentleman in the white suit, who sat with one hand in his cage and an eerily vacant expression. “He’s a fugitive wanted in Louisiana for burning down his church with the congregation locked up inside.…”
“How awful!” DeVore said.
“Indeed! And what’s worse, he’s come here with these others of the same notorious cloth to be chosen to receive some prize or to share some secret … None of them will say what it is. But they’ll kill to get it. And none of those who have received this all-important blessing have deigned to shed any light upon the mystery.” She waved a hand at the Chinese scholars and the Hindoo, who regarded the rest of the gathering with an unsettling arrogance.
“Oh, come now,” DeVore said, sliding a cup of fortified coffee across the small table, “we’re the only story, my dear. They’re eating dogs in Santiago. The war’s all but in the bag. Surely you’ve heard of Teddy’s Texas Tarantulas…?” He pointed to Roosevelt, who was orating dramatically with his billfold out at a sleepwalking servant, attempting to buy supplies.
“These men all appear to be of a metaphysical bent,” I said. “And you say they’re all after some secret. Is the prize whatever came in that derelict ship in the lagoon?”
Her eyes widened. “They were beside themselves when it appeared! They despise each other, yet they all carry snakes, or trinkets or idols or fetishes, and whatever it is they found down there, they’ve been quite keen to get their hands on it.” Looking about defiantly as if at war with herself, Arnesen sipped DeVore’s coffee. “There was another man the first day; he died right here in the lobby. They say the Kiss of Wisdom rejected him.…”
“What the devil is this Kiss of Wisdom?” DeVore asked. “Are you perchance qualified to administer it?”
Silence fell over the room like a wet shroud. Some stood and sat down again or wrung their hands. All eyes fixed on the front doors, standing open to let the smoke from cigars and the stifling humidity waft out into the night. From somewhere outside came the ominous sound of drums.
Roosevelt clapped his dusty gloved hands. “Gentlemen! Rally and retreat!” We all of us picked up, swiftly stubbing out cigars and downing rum drinks before donning our campaign hats and mustering near the door.…
Then she walked in.
At the first glimpse of her, the room collectively sucked in its breath and held it.
She wore layers of crepe and lace that obscured all but the vaguest outline of her form. She glided like a jellyfish into the center of the room, then twisted round and ripped away a veil. Underneath, glossy black hair, dusky brown skin and the sheen of scales …
We drew together with our backs to the door, but not one of us, not even our stalwart and famously married commander could take a step closer to it.
The drums seemed to draw nearer and to throb faster.
Another veil was torn away and lofted over the transfixed mob.
Lieutenant DeVore was lost to us. Her arm clutching at mine, Miss Arnesen stared into my eyes with a searching, probing intensity. “Are you familiar with Haitian vodun, Sgt. Cameron?”
To such an odd question, at such a strange time, I could only give a discreet nod. I’d had occasion to observe such rituals. “This woman is being ridden by a loa?”
“Exactly so! But she is only a messenger. These people have come seeking congress with the gods! And yet …” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I must speak to Mr. Roosevelt.…”
“That’ll be a tough one,” DeVore said, chuckling. “If there’s one thing he likes more than talking to reporters …”
Lt. Col. Roosevelt stood with arms akimbo and head straight forward as if held in place by an old-time photographer’s brace. The veiled dancer now wore only one diaphanous lace veil and the long coil of an enormous snake that clung to her modesty in a way far more lewd than mere nudity. She circled him and doubled back, her intent unmistakable. An angry murmur flowed through the assembled occultists. The Egyptian drew a short, cruelly curved blade and stabbed the darkly gleaming mahogany table.
Miss Arnesen let go my arm and reached out to Lieutenant DeVore, who stood much like Roosevelt, utterly absent. Much as every man in the place save myself, for whom such charms have little appeal, and several of the guests.
So we all stood by when the dancer threw out an arm to rip away the last veil, and dispelled the illusion that we had been watching a human woman at all. A column of serpents entwined in the crude likeness of a human body, they sprang and spilled out at the still-hypnotized soldiers. Rearing up almost as tall as a man, an enormous viper with fangs longer than fingers slithered up close enough to Roosevelt’s naked face that a mist of aerosolized venom condensed upon and dripped from his spectacles.
In spite of my relative alertness, it was almost like moving underwater, shoving others aside to throw out an arm and knock Roosevelt down and at the same time duck under the striking head of the gigantic snake.
Before either of them had fallen, the spell broke. Our party circled the lieutenant colonel and drew revolvers. The guests erupted from their seats. The snake lashed out at the fugitive preacher, fastening upon his neck. The others seemed to freeze, abruptly robbed of their urgency, indeed of all hope.
A torrent of bodies poured in the doors and windows, dropped from the ceiling and sprouted from the floor. Some among the guests resisted as strenuously as I, but even when my revolver was empty and most of the bodies crushed against me were growing cold, the mob carried us inexorably out of the hotel and into the night toward the swampy lagoon, where the drums gradually grew ever louder.…
***
A compound of mud and reeds in the feverish swamp, where a massive pit had been dug in the sand. The flooded bottom of the pit writhed with an assortment of imported vipers. High on a rampart of sand overlooking the pit stood a rude stone altar, and upon it a globe of black glass the diameter of a wagon wheel, which emitted a sinister, syrupy green vapor. The noxious steam from the globe seemed to vent synchronously with the wild rhythm of the primal ceremony and to deep
en the acrid, reptilian stench. A ragged crowd of glassy-eyed Cuban blacks pounded drums and chanted and danced wildly about the pit. Beside the rampart, a close knot of people stood silent and still beside the altar––the Oriental delegation, the monk and the bearded Hindoo all appeared to have passed.
I have seen such things and come away unmoved. But my fellow troopers remained quite oblivious of our imminent peril. One of the hotel’s staff broke free of the mob and tried to flee but went down in a hurricane of machetes.
I abruptly found Miss Arnesen beside me. Her eyes gleamed with lascivious zeal as she pressed the tip of a most ladylike stiletto to my back.
Presuming she was magnanimous enough not to kill me outright, I asked her if she might not elaborate upon her earlier warning.
“The true masters of this world have returned to claim it, little half-man. They lay at the bottom of the ocean for only ten years, but were imprisoned by human treachery in the summer of lost Mhu Thulan, three million years ago … and yet within, scarcely a score of seasons have turned.…”
The nature of the globe was suddenly quite transparent to me. Seeing the weird disconnect between her seeming and her sense, I observed that her demons might have come from the distant past, but they caught on fast, now able to pass among us.
Far from showing dismay at being discovered, she positively beamed with supercilious glee. Compliments must be scarce, among her kind. “Oh, my unworthy self is as unlike them, as you are unlike the great apes. Our kind has been devolved and debased, our blood polluted by hiding among you scavenging brutes that stole from our ancestors all the knowledge that raised you up from the slime. Stole our birthright! Hating in silence, striking out in secrecy to bring you ever closer to chaos and ruin. But no longer! Your pretty, petty wars, your parades of filth and empty noise, your defilement and misrule of this perfect world … it begins to end tonight!”
I wiped her venomous spittle from my cheek, but offered no reply.
As the ritual escalated, many of the hotel’s sinister guests were manhandled to the edge of the pit, struck with clubs or machetes and dropped, wailing and grievously wounded, into the snake-choked pit. The circle of favored guests began to chant in low, hissing tones that became a slurred, savage roar as the careening peasants took it up. It was no sound for human ears, any more than it was for human tongues to say, yet it was unmistakably a name. Green clouds whistled out of the black orb like steam from a teapot.
The snake-bitten preacher was escorted up the slope to kneel before the sphere. He seemed to vanish within a cloud of green steam that rolled out to envelop us all.
I know that what happened next was not a product of my sleeping imagination, for I do not dream.
The sky, a soup of seething green clouds––pyramidal towers of mossy black basalt––a triangle of iridescent orichalcum etched around a circle that glowed and crackled with the strain of containing the black lightning sweating off a red metallic orb that snorted and exhaled fumes as our reflections twisted …
I raised my age-knurled forelimbs high as my brother acolytes intoned the song of the Eternal Serpent in time with the throbbing rhythm that shivered the earth beneath our coiled tails.… We raised our voices higher and basked in the cascade of little lives pouring into the confines of our prison. Drawing power from our own captive daemon to force wider the door, to speed the stuck calendar wheel and reverse the singular pull of the gravity that kept us from escaping …
At a gesture from the Eldest among us, I stepped over the orichalcum border of the outer threshold.
And suddenly, the red orb became a mirror showing us a world choked with fire and smoke and overrun with grunting, vulgar hominids.
We raised our voices higher and fed our daemon handfuls of souls.
The mirror became a door.
The door yawned wide and a host of pale, soft bodies lay prone and open for me to choose.…
Fading as abruptly as it came, the vision left me confused, but seemed to leave my fellow troopers unfazed and oblivious to their peril.
When the noxious green mist dissipated, the preacher stood on his own, shaky but somehow imbued with a strange new vitality, though he walked down from the altar as if unfamiliar with the workings of a human body.
“Now, the most fit among you must be selected,” Arnesen raved, “to bear the Eldest. The offerings will fight to the death for the privilege of receiving the kiss of his wisdom.”
I told her we would do no such thing, albeit without much faith behind it. No doubt we could be induced to fight, but I could see little point in it. If the invaders desired a superior body to host their supreme eminence, then none on offer could compare with the pedigree and natural assets of our commander.
Almost before I thought it, Miss Arnesen reached the same conclusion. “That one!” she shrieked in Spanish and then in that hissing, gargling language that seemed to call for two tongues. She pointed at Lt. Col. Roosevelt. “Our master will have their master’s form! Kill the others.…”
I saw little point in letting her continue. Her knife was easier to reach than my own, so I took it from her and tried to secure her silence.
Even under such straits, I could not bring myself to stab a woman unless so ordered, but as I took her in my hands, the body in my grip twisted and squirmed out of my hands as no human form possibly could. Instead of throwing up her arms to protect herself as any man or woman would do under such an assault, she lurched at my face with her mouth wide and a venomous mist fizzing out over bared fangs.
The moment the blade penetrated her heart, the glamour was broken, though none seemed to notice except myself. The creature had brown scales like brittle autumn leaves wherever its stunted, gnarled limbs protruded from its Gibson Girl disguise. Its head was almost more crocodilian than serpentine, the tapered, underslung jaw with its outgrown and recursive fangs a sad travesty of a once-mighty species whose empire on earth had seen the rise and fall of the dinosaurs. She had walked among humans for a lifetime, despising us and dreaming of our extinction. She almost lived to see the return of her ancestors from out of the mists of pre-history. She almost insured that one of them would inhabit the body of the most famous man in America.
Before I could let her fall, Lt. Col. Roosevelt stepped forward and drew his cavalry saber. We rallied round him and drew our own weapons, awaiting his order. But Roosevelt said nothing as he chopped Captain Helps’ hand cleanly off just above the wrist.
None of the others seemed to take notice as he pivoted and chopped at Helps’ neck. The wild blow had every ounce of the bull-necked officer’s weight behind it, yet the blade still lodged in the captain’s vertebrae. Roosevelt staggered over the falling body as he wrenched his blade free. The rest of us spread out into a circle with our knives or machetes given to us by the hissing, growling crowd.
One of the dubious gifts of my condition is that I am immune to hypnosis. But I was alone in a circle of sleepwalkers.
What went through each man’s mind as he turned on his comrades was impossible to guess, yet each used his natural skills to defend himself or eliminate the competition as if in a dream of battle. Scovill lunged into Kiesling and Van Patten with a knife in each fist. Van Patten fell with a blade lodged in his cheek, machete waving. Kiesling fumbled at his empty holster, but his other hand windmilled crazily with a bowie knife, keeping Scovill, the champion boxer, at bay until Van Patten waded into it, taking the knife to the chest and burying his machete in Kiesling’s forehead.
Scovill turned to seek another enemy and walked into Heslop’s knife, which sheathed up to its hilt just below his navel. Scovill struggled and came unzipped, stumbling on the seemingly endless stream of his own viscera as he strangled Heslop to death.
Roosevelt slewed across the improvised arena with his saber up, clearly crossing the floor to me. I was looking at him and sizing him up when DeVore showed more initiative than I gave him credit for and stabbed me in the back.
The knife skated across my right shoul
der blade and snagged in my woolen outer blouse. Taking as much care as I could, I struck him in the belly to break his resolve, then buffeted him about the head until he went down.
In the meantime, Roosevelt had executed Scovill, running him through just below the sternum. Incredibly, he had discovered a natural aptitude with the cumbersome ceremonial sword, a butcher’s easy confidence with meat and steel.
What did he see, as he waded through us with his saber flashing and jets of blood splashing in his face like hot red rain? Did he see his hated, cowardly Spaniards with their green coats and detestable smokeless powder? Did he see monsters, phantoms of the demons who manipulated us, or loathsome apparitions of his sickly childhood? Or did he see us as we were, as men entrusted to his care in the brotherhood of arms, men whom some whispering forked-tongued voice had told him were obstacles in his path to greatness?
No others stood between us, the rest insensate, dead or dying at our feet. The savage mob pressed closer. I took up a machete and weighed the possibilities of stopping this dreadful charade. None of those who had bathed in the vapors from the orb were close enough, and they seemed not to be the prime movers, in any case. It was the unguessably ancient black orb which held sway now, as it had wielded influence to have itself dragged across the ocean floor and delivered to this benighted backwater on the eve of a great upheaval, where their alien nature would attract little attention until they could seize power. And yet they were bottled up within the sphere, just as those I had glimpsed in that fleeting vision kept some presence of enormous power as an engine for their experiments in alchemy and magic. The spherical prison was so charged with energy by the souls of those sacrificed to it that those trapped within were able to escape in immaterial form to somehow take possession of a fit human body.
