Peaceable Kingdom (mobi)

by Jack Ketchum

  There must have been dozens of them. All sizes.

  All lengths.

  The water was thick with them.

  They moved over and through one another in some arcane inborn pattern, formed a mass that was roughly circular in shape and maybe six or seven feet in diameter, thickest at the center, lightest at the edges, but all in constant motion, some of them shooting like sparks off a sparkler or a catherine wheel and then swimming back into the circle again that formed their roiling gleaming nucleus.

  Driving through them was unimaginable. She had to go around them but it was impossible to see where the street ended and lawn began and like every street in the development the curbs were shallow—she would feel very little going over them.

  But she had to try.

  And in fact felt nothing as she passed to the right onto her neighbor’s lawn and into her neighbor’s mud and she tried not to see them out the driver’s side window as the car lurched once and shuddered and stopped while her wheels spun uselessly on.

  Her first response was to gun the thing but that was no good, all it did was dig her deeper into the mud on the passenger side.

  Well. Not exactly all.

  It also stirred them, seemed to annoy them all to hell. She heard them hit the front and back doors on her side. Bump. Bump. Bumpbumpbumpbumpbump. She dared to glance out her window and saw that the circle had become and oblong figure stretching the entire length of the car—as though something protoplasmic were trying to engulf her.

  She put the car in park and let it idle. Fighting a growing panic. Trying to consider her options.

  She could sit there. She could wait for help. She could wait for them to disperse.

  But there wouldn’t be any help. There was practically nobody on the main road let alone this one, no one but her dumb enough to be out on side streets in a storm like this.

  And they wouldn’t be dispersing either.

  That much was obvious. Now that the car was quiet the circle formed again. Almost exactly as before.

  Except for these two. Crawling up over the hood.

  A black snake. And something banded yellow and brown. Crawling toward the windshield. Looking for higher ground.

  And she could feel them with her inside the car. She could hear them on the seat in back. Crawling up to her seat. Crawling up to her neck and over her neck and down across her breasts and thighs.

  She had to get out of there. That or go crazy. There was one option she simply could not tolerate and that was just to sit there listening to them slither across the roof and over the hood. She could imagine them, see them, thick as flies, blocking her view through the windshield, crawling, staring in at her. Wanting in.

  She had to get out.

  She could run. She could run through the water. It wasn’t that deep. Go out the passenger side. Maybe it was free of them.

  She shifted seats.

  It wasn’t. Not completely. But there weren’t many. Just sparks on the catherine wheel. Darting back and forth beneath the car.

  The black snake was at the windshield. Another yellow and brown appeared just over the headlight, moving up across the hood.

  How long before the car was buried in them?

  Her heart was pounding. There was a taste in her mouth like dry old leaves.

  You can do this, she thought. You haven’t any choice. The only other choice is giving up and giving in and that will make you crazy. When you have no choice you do what you’ve got to do.

  Don’t wait. Waiting will make it worse. Go. Go now.

  She took a deep breath and wrenched at the door handle and pushed hard with her shoulder. Warm floodwater poured in over her feet and ankles. The door opened a few inches and jammed into the mud. The spinning tires had angled the passenger side down.

  She pushed again. The door gave another inch. She tried desperately to get through.

  It wasn’t enough.

  She threw herself across the seat onto her back, grabbed the steering wheel above with both hands for leverage and kicked at the door with all her might, kicked it twice and then got up and rammed her body into the gap. Buttons popped on her blouse. She screamed and kicked as a brown snake glided over her leg above the ankle and into the car and she pushed again and then suddenly she was through.

  Mud sucked at her feet. The water was up to mid-thigh. Her skirt was floating. She slogged a few steps and almost fell. A green snake twisted by a few feet to the left—and what may have been a coral snake, small and banded black, yellow and red swam back toward the car beside her: She lurched away. Corals carried poison. She turned to make sure it had gone back to the swirling hell it came from and that was when she saw him.

  Her snake.

  Perched atop the roof of the car. Coiled there.

  Looking at her.

  And now, beginning to move.

  The dream, she thought, it’s the dream all over again as she saw the snake glide off the roof and into the water and she hauled herself through the water, making for what she knew was the concrete drive in front of her house, its firmer footing, but now she was still on the lawn next door, her feet slapping down deep into the soft slimy mud, legs splashing through the water so that she was mud from head to toe in no time and not turning back, not needing to—the snake gaining on her as real in her mind’s eye as it had been in her dream.

  When she fell she fell flat out straight ahead and her left hand came down on concrete, the right sunk deep into mud. She gulped water spit it out. Scrambled up. The torn silk blouse had come open completely and hung off one shoulder like a filthy sodden rag.

  She risked a glance and there it was, taking its time, gliding, sinuous and a graceful and awful with hurt for her just a few feet away.

  A black snake skittered out ahead but she didn’t care, her feet hit the concrete and suddenly she was splashing toward the garage because its door was kept unlocked for Danny after school, there were keys to the house hidden by the washing machine, there were rakes and tools inside.

  She hit the door at a run and turned and saw the snake raise its head out of the water ready to strike and she bent down and reached into the warm deep muddy water, her head going under for a terrible moment blind as she clawed at the center of the door searching for the handle and found it and pulled up as the massive head of the thing struck at her, barely missing her naked breast as she lurched back and fell and it tangled itself, writhing furiously, in her torn nylon blouse.

  Floodwater poured rushing into the garage, the thick muscular body of the snake turning over and across her in its tide, caressing the flesh of her stomach and sliding all along her back as she struggled to free herself of the blouse and twist it around its darting head. She stumbled to her feet and ran for the washing machine, found the keys and gripped them tight and ran for the door.

  The snake was free. The blouse drifted.

  Ann was standing in two feet of water and she couldn’t see the snake.

  She fumbled the key into the lock and twisted it and flung open the door.

  The snake rose up out of the water and hit the lip of the single stair just as she crossed the threshold and then it began to move inside.

  “No.” she was screaming. “I don’t let you in I didn’t invite you in. Goddammit! You bastard!” Screaming in fear but fury too, slamming the wooden door over and over again against the body of the snake while the head of the thing searched her out behind the door and she was aware of Katie barking beside her, the snake aware too, its head turning in that direction now and its black tongue tasting dogscent, womanscent, turning, until she saw the vacuum cleaner standing by the refrigerator still plugged in from this morning and flipped the switch and opened the door wide and hurled it toward the body of the black thing in the water.

  The machine burst into a shower of sparks that raced blue and yellow through the garage like a blast of St. Elmo’s Fire. The snake thrashed and suddenly seemed to swell. Smoke curled puffing off its body. Its mouth snapped open and shut a
nd opened wide again, impossibly wide. She smelled burning flesh and sour electric fire. The cord crackled and burst in its wallsocket. Katie howled, ran ears back and tail low into the living room and cowered by the sofa.

  She grabbed a hot pad off the stove and pulled the plug.

  She looked down at the smoking body.

  “I got you,” she said. “You didn’t get me. You didn’t expect that, did you.”

  When she had hauled the carcass outside and closed the garage door and then fed Katie and finally indulged in a wonderful, long, hot bath, she put on a favorite soft cotton robe and then went to the phone.

  The lawyer was surprised to hear from her again so soon.

  “I’m having a little garage sale,” she said.

  And she almost laughed. Her little garage sale would no doubt relieve her of everything she was looking at, of practically everything she owned. It didn’t matter a damn bit. It was worth it.

  “I want you to go after him,” she said. “You hear me? I want you to get the sonofabitch.”

  And then she did laugh.

  Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, she thought.

  Snakes.

  Firedance

  Frisco Hans shifted the Remington over-and-under to his scarred white-knuckled left hand and nervously adjusted his hat. A night as cold as this, they all wore hats. A night like this you could feel the body-heat rise off your head like steam out of a sewerpipe. For eight and a half years Hans had worked as a merchant seaman. Then one morning he jumped off a lifeboat made fast high over the leeward rail onto the deck of the Curlew, hit the deck too hard and lost his sense of taste. Couldn’t tell salmon from a plate of liver and onions. It never came back. When he realized it was not going to come back he quit the merchant marine before he lost some other of his senses and took a job as a security guard in a frozen-fish factory way up here in Maine. Hans knew about loss. He kept his hat on.

  The little guy beside him, Homer Devins, considered that he knew about it too. But that was because Devins’ wife had run away with the Chinese dry-cleaner last winter while Devins was out hunting rabbits. He bagged one rabbit and Chin Feng Chi made off with his wife of thirty years. Devins was still a little uncomfortable with the deal.

  Hans shook his head. “What I still want to know is, how the hell does this kind of thing just happen? Did I just wake up one morning and all the rules’re changed?”

  Devins pulled hard on his Camel Light, a tiny glow in the dark. “Damned if I know. You come up with the answer to that, you tell me.”

  Devins glanced down the line of bare scrubby trees that encircled the field. Other cigarettes glowed. A kitchen-match flared. Half the town was out, standing around the perimeter, watching. He threw his Camel Light into the snow.

  “Damn! Animals are s’pposed to be afraid of fire.”

  Hans nodded. He’d been hearing the same puzzled wisdom for over two days now, ever since Ray Fogarty and Dot Hardcuff rushed into the Bar None Grill Wednesday night just after one in the morning all red-faced and out of breath and babbling about animals in the clearing up by Zeigler’s Notch. To which he and most of the sixteen or eighteen gathered there responded bullshit. And what the hell were the two of them doing up there in the first place? kidding them, knowing full well what they were doing, but knowing also that Ray’s wife would skin him alive if she knew and so would Dot’s husband.

  Not one of them believed them. Not for a second. But it was Wednesday night and nobody in the joint had much to go home to—damn few even had work to go to in the morning given what was happening with the economy. So they piled into half a dozen trucks and made the run up the mountain to the Notch, their tire chains grinding up the dirt beneath the snow like one long open wound.

  They pulled over where the road stopped dead and even from the base of the trail through the thicket you could see the glow up ahead over the hill so that they knew the part about the fire was true enough. But the rest? Bullshit. Ray and Dot were having a little fun with them was all.

  It was only at the rim of the clearing that the cigarettes started falling out of incredulous wide-open mouths and beer bottles started dropping down into the snow—because what they were looking at wasn’t possible. Wasn’t natural. Wasn’t right. It flew in the face of everything.

  You didn’t have to be a genius—you didn’t even have to have finished high school for godsakes—to know that it was not just brainmatter and the almighty opposable thumb that set people apart from the animals, certainly set them apart from the animals in nature, in the wild, you were not talking about some fat old yellow hound or bone-lazy housecat lying all curled up and comfy on the sofa, you were talking about wild things, and it was not just brain and thumb that made humans different. It was fire.

  An animal saw a fire in the hearth, it stayed the hell outside. Saw fire in a cave, it hung well clear in the dark. Saw fire in the woods, it panicked. It ran like the beejeezuz.

  What kept us warm and comforable was for animals a source of terror yet here they were, seven of them, basking in its warm red glow.

  And not even all the same species.

  Yet another impossibility.

  You had mice, two of them.

  You had snakes, big ones, impossible to tell exactly what kind from this distance but a pair of those too.

  You had a big red cardinal, a goddamn bird no less.

  You had a wolf. You had a lynx. Both of them rare as hens’ teeth around here.

  But basically, you had a bunch of natural enemies. Wolf. Lynx. Bird. Snakes. Mice. Nobody eating nobody. Lying instead by a good hot fire enclosed by a fieldstone circle maybe three and a half feet in diameter. Easy as you please, staring into the fire, listening to its crack and sizzle.

  The first thing Hans realized was that it would not be a good idea to fuck with them. Other than the occasional half-empty beer bottle they were all unarmed out there. A wolf could get nasty. A lynx was practically bound to get nasty.

  So the patrons of the Bar None Grill stood in the cold perimeter and at first it was as though they were standing in the presence of something as miraculous and awe-inspiring as the Second Coming, as Lourdes for chrissake, they could have been watching little green men stepping wide-eyed out of a saucer, they could have been watching Nessie poke her head from beneath the waters of a Scottish lake.

  Then one man stepped back, and then another. In the crackle of the flames and the silence which surrounded them they seemed to have heard something ominous, felt the dark chill of a moonless Maine winter night move from outside to in.

  Later, many would admit to having pretty much the same thought.

  It was as though the natural way of things had reversed itself.

  Humans in the shadows, wild things in the light.

  “Not right,” someone said. “No-fucking-way right!” and suddenly they bolted, pounding down the mountain, running like kids from the bogeyman, half of them ignoring the trail entirely and battling their way through the thicket as though the woods itself had all of a sudden turned on them and was barking, snapping at their heels, racing after them like cobras, diving from the skies like hunting birds.

  The drinking lasted till dawn.

  By noon that day the whole town knew.

  Something was happening with the animals.

  It was Gert McChesney talking. Who, because she was old and lived alone in an ancient ramshackle house on top of Cedar Hill and walked with a rolling limp, refusing the indignity of hospital gown and bedpan the hip replacement would have called for, the local kids dubbed the Witch. But who in reality was Dead River’s one and only Rhodes Scholar—Yale University, Class of ’31—and only marginally a drunk.

  They were sitting at the Bar at the Tip Top Lounge and Gert was on her second Heineken and Musiel and Schilling and Frisco Hans were each on their third. It was only one o’clock—a cold, grim grey day that seeped across the floor of the bar and over their feet even with the door closed tight behind them.

  “You think about what
fire is,” she was saying, “and what do you come up with? Fire’s a breaking down of things. You start with a hardwood log, you end up with a pile of ash. You get the fire hot enough, same goes for flesh and bone. See, the form’s gone. All you’re left with’s minerals and gasses and the temporary release of energy. That’s what scares the animals. The destruction, the breaking down of all those old familiar forms. Trees, grass, nests—and whatever’s unlucky enough to be trapped in ’em. Animals got enough sense to run like hell when things are falling apart around them. Us on the other hand, we love it. We love the smell of a fire, the look and sound of it, the nice warm glow. To us fire’s a comfort. We’re the only animal on earth who takes comfort in the breaking down of things.”

  She sipped from her beerglass, a little foam clinging to the long steel-grey hairs of her upper lip.

  “Maybe that’s changed now.”

  “Now how the hell could that be, Gert? The fire ain’t changed any.” Frisco Hans slapped his bottle down and pointed at it and Teddy Panik swept it away and uncapped him another and set it on the bar. He didn’t ask if anybody else was ready. He never did have much to say.

  She shrugged. “I dunno.”

  Hans looked at her, frowning. He’d been following her pretty well he thought. Now he’d run head-first, tires screeching into a mental brick wall. Maybe that’s changed now? He thought Gert had more sense than the whole town council combined on the very best day of their lives but what the hell did that mean? Musiel and Schilling were looking at her like they were puzzled too.

  Hans was a man of action though. Given the roadblock he’d skirt around it.

  “Okay,” he said. “So what do we do about it?”

  She smiled. More often than not Gert’s teeth had a lipstick stain on the uppers. Today was no exception.