by J L Aarne
So, that answered that question: Silas had known what he was going to do before they got to the beach. A long time before, it seemed now.
Wyatt didn’t feel like doing much anymore. He went to work, not because he had to, but because if he didn’t he would have nothing else to keep him occupied. Being busy helped take his mind off what had happened. It didn’t help a lot, but it helped some and some was better than nothing. Better than lying in his bed staring at the wall trying not to feel the guilt that was eating him, trying to ignore the voices that had filled the hole the serpent had left behind with whispers that he was useless and alone, that he deserved it, that he had let his only friend die for him, that he should have known, that he should have been quicker, that he should have been kinder to him in the end, that he should have forgiven him. The voices were all his own voice, which wasn’t a great comfort for him. It meant that he wasn’t mad, but he sometimes thought he would have preferred madness.
Tallie called him one evening as he was getting ready for work and he told her everything. He didn’t mean to, it happened before he realized what he was saying and by the time he realized, he didn’t care. It felt good to tell someone and he hadn’t dared go back to Dr. Graham yet. He wasn’t sure he would. Dr. Graham wouldn’t understand and nothing he could do would ever make her understand. Tallie understood. She didn’t understand all of it, but she understood enough, and she believed him.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” she said when he stopped talking. “What can I do?”
“I don’t know,” Wyatt said. “I don’t think there’s anything. Just… believe me.”
“I do,” Tallie said.
“I know,” Wyatt said.
“Wyatt?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry about your friend, but I’m glad it wasn’t you.”
He experienced a flash of irrational anger at her words that brought him close to telling her the secret of the thing that was now her brother. The one and only secret he had kept from her. He had promised that creature that he would never tell, promised himself that he could keep his word to protect his family from the horrible truth, and at the time he had meant it, but he wanted to hurt his aunt and crush the sympathy he heard in her voice. He wanted to hear her rage and wail.
“I have to go, Aunt Tallie,” he said. His hand was shaking as he disconnected the call.
Even with Amarok’s frequent visits, Wyatt’s apartment was empty without the cats chasing each other down the hall and getting under foot begging for food. He decided one day that he should get a kitten, so he stopped at a pet store on his way home from work in the morning. He looked at the cats there for adoption from the local animal shelter and held a kitten named Cocoa with one blue and one amber yellow eye. He knew right away that he would have to change its name. He hoped the kitten wasn’t too attached to it.
Hellooooo?
Still cradling the kitten in one arm, Wyatt turned around, expecting to see a creature lurking in the shadows near the fish tanks. There was nothing there. The room was bright enough that there were no shadows wide enough to hide inside.
The kitten dug its claws into his chest and Wyatt carefully pulled its paw away and freed its claws from his shirt.
Hellooooo?
“Who said that?” Wyatt whispered, turning around again to search the room.
Along the wall opposite him were many glass tanks housing lizards and snakes. There was a bright colored corn snake coiled up and basking under a heating light, a chameleon watching him without moving anything except its eyes, a horny toad with a cricket crawling on its face. There were no shadows with fingers and faces moving through the darkness near their tanks because there wasn’t any real darkness in the shop.
“Who said that?” Wyatt repeated.
The clerk who had helped him with the kitten then left him alone for a few minutes to decide looked up from where he was reading something on a computer screen and frowned. “Sir? Is everything all right?”
“Oh, yeah, I’m… fine. Everything’s fine,” Wyatt said.
He petted the kitten and it purred against his chest.
He did not try to talk himself into believing that he was hearing things as he might have done a year earlier. He knew better now.
“I need to think about it,” he told the clerk, handing the kitten over.
The clerk returned it to its cage and the kitten curled up on the bit of carpet inside and went to sleep.
“Can I show you anything else?”
Wyatt moved away from him toward the glass tanks. He looked inside, searching for the thing that had spoken to him, but there were just lizards and snakes in the tanks. He tapped on a glass tank containing a sleeping king snake. The snake didn’t even twitch, but the clerk became agitated.
“Sir, please don’t tap on the glass. It—”
“Sorry.”
He stopped before a tank with a cave-like formation of rocks along one back corner. The tank appeared to be empty at first, then a snake’s head moved into the opening made by the rocks. Its eyes were black, its skin dark grey with ridges of scales down its back, but in the shadows, it glowed softly, and its scales fanned open.
Set me free.
Wyatt leaned down to get a closer look and the snake emerged from its hiding place. When it came into the light, it looked completely different. It was brown and cream colored, marked with spots. Its eyes were bronze like crinkled foil candy wrappers. Its scales were smooth and lay flat to its body.
“This is Henry, he’s a baby cinnamon spider ball python,” the clerk said. “We haven’t had him long. He was bred in captivity, so he’s quite docile. Beautiful markings, aren’t they? We had an albino one for a while, older, more expensive. I think the owner liked him. She named him Atlas. Henry’s only been here about a month.”
Henry. Wyatt smiled. He would ask the snake its true name later, but he was sure it was nothing as common as Henry.
“I see you,” he whispered.
The snake’s tongue flicked, and it lifted its head to look at him through the glass. Get me out of here, asshole.
Wyatt took the python home and spent a couple of hours setting up its tank, which he placed on a table just outside the hallway where it was dark. There was a light for it to bask in if it chose to, but the python was not an ordinary ball python and it seemed to prefer the dark.
When the tank was ready, Wyatt took the snake out of the box the clerk had put it in for transport and held it between his hands. The reptile wound lazily around his wrists and scented him, then allowed itself to be lowered into the tank where it slithered into the hidey-hole Wyatt had placed in the back and disappeared.
He had never had a pet snake or lizard before. He hadn’t even kept tree frogs he caught when he was little for more than a day before his mother made him release them. He couldn’t have said why he had to have the snake, but he did and something about its presence made him happy. The happiness came in brief bursts and he didn’t understand it, but if he didn’t try too hard to understand it, it stayed for a little while.
That day, he woke from a memory dream sweating and clinging to his bed. He lay there with the sunlight coming through the cracks in the blinds and tried to think about anything else, but when he closed his eyes, he saw Silas’s face transforming into a lumpy block of stone.
“Thorn?”
“I’m here,” Thorn said.
“Can a memory be a nightmare?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t even think about it.”
“Because the answer is yes.”
Wyatt rolled onto his side and put his hand down. Thorn’s hand reached up and took his and Wyatt sighed. “I wish I could forget.”
“I think sometimes it’s important to remember the things you would rather forget,” Thorn said.
“I know,” Wyatt said, “but still.”
He didn’t say anything for several minutes and was dozing when he said, “I think I should visit him.”
/>
“Then why don’t you?”
“What’s the point? He’s not even there really, he’s a… big rock. He’s not dead, I don’t think, but I don’t know what he is anymore.”
Thorn was quiet for a long time and once again Wyatt started to fall asleep. He was sure he would wake again from another nightmare where Silas bled out on the beach or was pecked to death by vicious little black birds or torn to pieces by black-eyed children. Every time, Wyatt was there and every time, he tried to stop it from happening and every single time, he failed. That was the worst part of all. He was starting to be afraid of sleep, but he was always so tired.
“I love you, did you know that?” Thorn said in his soft, whispery voice.
Wyatt blinked and came awake. “I think so,” he said hesitantly.
“Good,” Thorn said. “I wanted you to know.”
“And sometimes I’m dumb,” Wyatt said with a laugh.
Amused, Thorn said, “Occasionally you are, yes.”
“Thorn?”
“Yes?”
“I love you, too, you know.”
“I know. Go back to sleep.”
When Wyatt woke again, it was night and he didn’t remember dreaming anything at all, which was a relief. Thorn had let go his hand when he fell asleep and was gone wherever he went, however he traveled there. Wyatt had always been able to tell when he wasn’t there.
He went to the closet and opened it, stood looking up at the top shelf where the pommel of the rapier stuck out of the cloth he had wrapped it in. He thought about taking it down, putting it in the back of his car, and bringing it with him just in case. Then he closed the accordion doors and left it there.
The python was curled up and basking in the warmth in the center of its tank. It followed Wyatt with its golden tinfoil eyes as he moved through the apartment in the dark. Before he left, he paused in front of the tank and looked in at it. The snake watched him back.
“I’ll be back in an hour. There’s something I have to do,” Wyatt told it.
He didn’t know why he was telling the snake, except he had always talked to Benson and Hedges when they were alive. They hadn’t understood him, but it hadn’t mattered. It had made him feel less alone.
“I should have visited him before,” Wyatt said, mostly to himself.
The snake shifted and turned its face away from him. It didn’t look like anything special under the faint light in the tank, but he knew what he had seen, though he had only seen it for an instant.
“You are something special, aren’t you?” Wyatt said. “Do you have a name? Other than Henry, I mean?”
Fuck off.
Wyatt grinned. “Tell me when you’re ready then,” he said. “And don’t get out of the tank while I’m gone.”
Ball pythons were notorious escape artists, the clerk at the pet store had warned him. Whatever else this creature was, that little touch of something more would make it twice as clever as a python.
I make no promises. Now, go away.
Wyatt left and drove out to the rocky beach. He had no idea what had happened to all the dead black-eyed children, but there was never anything about it on the news and no one ever came knocking at his door asking questions. Now, as he got out of his car and walked down to the shore, he half expected to find himself walking over little bones and crushed skulls. However, there were no bodies, except for what remained of the dead birds. The birds had decayed rapidly, leaving behind mostly feathers and little else. The whale was gone, but there were no bones and no signs of decay, so he thought something had probably carried it away or the local American Indians had claimed it and butchered it. He had never tried it, but Wyatt had heard that whale meat was excellent. The sand had turned black all the way to the tideline from the ashes of the sand snakes, and the entire area looked like the pit of an old bonfire.
Not many people would come to this part of the beach to play and swim. Not for a long time.
Wyatt walked down to the water, stepping over rocks he had tripped over that day and sand he remembered going down on his knees in. He went by moonlight with a flashlight to guide him though he didn’t need it. His night vision was extraordinarily sharp. He hadn’t known that when he’d carried flashlights and headlamps in the trunk of his car and went out of his way to never cross a shadow wherever he walked, but he could see in the dark almost as well as a cat. By moonlight, he followed the burnt snake sand to where the first rocks that had once been blood started, and from there it was only a few feet to where the stone pillar rose up out of the shallow water.
He stopped and stared at it. There wasn’t a single thing about it to indicate that it had, not so long ago, been a man.
“Hello,” Wyatt said.
He felt a bit stupid talking to a rock, but there was no one there to hear or see him, so he shrugged it off. He talked to himself all the time, so even if it was only a rock, what did it matter?
“I was going to do it, you know,” Wyatt said. “I wish you’d let me. This is… so awful. Damn you, Silas.”
Nothing answered him except the crash of the waves on the rocks and the whisper of the water on the sand.
“My sister’s getting married. I never met him, but she’s pregnant, so… I hope that’s not why she’s marrying him. I didn’t think she was that stupid. I guess I’ll go to the wedding. She asked me to. Or… well, there’s an invitation.”
Wyatt couldn’t look at the pillar of rock anymore. It kept on being nothing but a big, ugly chunk of rock and he hated it for not being Silas. He looked out at the ocean instead.
The cold, salty wind tossed his hair back. His hair wasn’t usually long enough to flap in the wind, but it had started getting long. He was surprised his mother hadn’t fussed at him about it the last time he saw her.
There was a boat bobbing in the distance. It was just a tiny light, it was so far away.
“If her kid’s like me, I won’t let it grow up thinking it’s crazy like I did,” Wyatt said. “I won’t be like Tallie. Besides, in four hundred years when that thing starts waking up, someone’s going to have to know what to do, right? I’m definitely not going to be around anymore.”
“Wyatt.”
Wyatt jumped and backpedaled, came close to tripping over his own feet and caught himself.
“Wyatt, come here.”
He moved back toward the pillar and peered at it closely. Maybe it was his imagination. Wishful thinking. He saw the stone move, though only slightly. It rearranged itself in the vague, indistinct form of a face.
“Silas?” Wyatt choked. “How the hell?”
“Find him for me.”
It was Silas’s voice in the stone and the more Wyatt stared at it, the more it seemed to look like him. The face was almost recognizable as Silas’s face.
“How are you talking right now?” Wyatt asked.
“With incredible difficulty,” Silas said. “I can… do things, but only at night. Of course, it would be that way.”
“Is it magic?” Wyatt couldn’t see how it could be possible any other way.
“Does it feel like magic?” Silas asked.
Not any kind of magic Wyatt had ever imagined. When he thought of magic, he thought of mermaids and Neverland and wonder, like magic always was in his favorite stories. Whatever this was, it was dark and disturbing and gross. It felt wrong and it made him feel dirty just being near it.
“Who am I supposed to find?” Wyatt asked.
“John,” Silas said. “He’s free now. He’s lost. He has nothing, no one. He’s a fifteenth century Englishman in twenty-first century America and he’s been guarding the door of the universe’s most horrible prison for over four hundred years. He needs your help.”
Wyatt felt his legs give and sat down on the wet rock where he’d been standing. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “He’s alive?”
“Maybe,” Silas said. “If he didn’t walk out on the highway and get hit by a car.”
Wyatt understood that Silas was tr
ying to joke, but he was still trying to wrap his mind around the idea of John Bledsoe being alive and it went over his head completely. “He’s alive,” he said again.
“Find him,” Silas said.
“He needs me, yeah, I got it,” Wyatt said. He stood up, wincing at the wetness that had soaked through the seat of his pants. “Okay.”
“I have to go,” Silas said. “This is… hard. Painful.”
“I don’t really understand how it works, even now,” Wyatt said.
“I’m the lock and he sleeps again. I gave my life. That’s all that matters,” Silas said.
Wyatt turned and started back to his car. “Goodbye, Silas.”
But Silas was gone. The rock was once again faceless and ugly, and he was alone. The cold wind cut through his clothes and Wyatt hurried up the embankment back to his car. He sat behind the wheel for a few minutes, his mind a riot of things he needed to do and the seemingly impossible question of where to begin. Silas had given him a quest, he was well aware, but knowing it didn’t change the feeling of purpose that had overtaken him.
Find John Bledsoe. Save him.
The first thing he needed to do was find a map and figure out where John Bledsoe had been in 1610. That would help him determine where to start looking. Tallie would be able to help him with that. Once he knew where to look, he would have to call the hospitals and police stations. He would need a good story because a man from 1610 wouldn’t have any identification or documentation. It would likely be remarkably easy to convince the authorities that John was a little bonkers. After what he had survived, the truly remarkable thing would be if he wasn’t.
Wyatt started the car and headed back home. He would have to make a deal with Kat. Maybe if he agreed to attend her wedding he could talk her into babysitting his snake while he was out of town.
