The Serpent and the Light

by Bo Luellen

  She pushed his bowl away, kissed him, and replied, “Yeah, but I still married the college lineman that stole my heart.”

  He tilted his head back a little and asked, “So, what did this symbol look like again?”

  She rested her head on his broad chest and repeated, “An octopus-like monster was carved into a black handle, with a curved blade.”

  Larry flicked the ashes of the joint into a tray, saying, “Sounds like something you would see in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. You’d expect one of those Thuggee cult members to carry one.”

  She sat up a little and remarked, “Yes, just like a cult knife.”

  Steadying herself, she walked over to her home computer, asking, “Hey, do you remember in our Sophomore year, that lecture our archeology professor gave on cults?”

  He let out a puff of smoke and blurted out, “No. I’m high. I barely remember our children’s names… whoever you are.”

  She turned back to the computer and typed into a Google search, “ceremonial dagger witchcraft.” As Larry began a monologue about how their college friend Josh looked suspiciously like Barney from How I Met Your Mother, she panned through pages in search of the symbol. Just as her husband was beginning to mock Dyer in a Steve Erwin voice, she found it.

  She turned to her husband, exclaimed, “Hey, get a look at this!”

  He grunted his way off their bed, onto all fours, and crawled his way over to her chair. Larry grabbed his glasses out from his shirt pocket and looked up at the screen. The picture was a photograph of a black-handled dagger with a silver looking curved blade. In the handle was an octopus-like symbol carved into the nearly black wood.

  She read out loud, “An Athame Dagger discovered in an Egyptian dig site near the Memphis Necropolis in 1953. The blade is thought to be over two-thousand years old and was used by an ancient cult that worshiped the Old Gods. Its flat blade was used to ring bells for spell work, and the handle was inscribed with the symbol of the worshipers of the Great Dreamer.”

  Larry stroked his long dark beard, replying, “Honey, if this is a ceremonial dagger, then it wouldn’t be in the hands of some random homeless person. It would be an important part of the culture of that religion.”

  She pointed at the dagger on the monitor and asked, “Important enough to come back and risk getting caught by the police to retrieve?”

  He forced himself up into the chair next to her and answered, “Very possibly. The question is, what cult are we dealing with?”

  Amanda leaned back and let the high sink in deeper as she mused, “The answer is in the symbol carved into that handle. Right now, all we have is a third-hand description.”

  They both looked at each other a moment before she asked, “What do you think I should do?”

  He leaned on the desk and answered, “Eat some Oreos in milk with me until we burst, or we make a fool of ourselves trying to be junior detectives.”

  She kissed him and conceded, “Oreos are a good idea. So is getting in touch with that detective tomorrow morning.”

  He smiled, “I love it when you compromise.”

  Chapter 5: Henry II

  Tulsa, OK - Tuesday, October 16th, 2018 – 10:48 p.m. CST

  After Dr. Amanda Lanyon had left, a tall police officer walked in and stood at the foot of his bed. The man was massive and made him feel like a gnat compared to his hulking frame. The man peered down at him with a halfhearted smile and had a copy of the Tulsa Tribune under his arm.

  The man stuck out his hand and stated, “I’m Officer Terry Johnston. Detective Utterson was concerned for you after you had your spill. How are you feeling?”

  Henry touched the bulging patch of gauze on the back of his head and replied, “Okay, I guess. The last thing I remember is looking down at Lewis, and then it all went black.”

  Terry nodded and then replied, “John would have been here himself, but he was injured chasing down a suspect he believes was involved in Lewis’s murder.”

  Henry shot a look of focused concern up at the patrolman and asked, “Murdered? Lewis was killed?”

  With a stoic look, Johnston revealed, “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Lewis was stabbed in the back, then either fell or was dumped over the side of the bridge. The M.E. believes he was alive when the train did the rest.”

  He felt a twinge of panic in his chest as Terry continued, “Detective Utterson was able to contact the Uber company that gave you a ride home that night. They verified your story. Although I’m sure the Detective will have more questions for you.”

  He looked suspiciously at the tall black man and asked, “Talk to me? What about?”

  Before he could answer, a short nurse came in the door and announced Henry was free to go. The cop stood and watched as he signed the discharge papers. Putting on his street clothes caused Jekyll’s head to pound again.

  He sighed in resignation as he pulled pants up and told the officer, “I appreciate you staying, but I’ll be okay.”

  Terry pulled his phone out and replied, “My sergeant wants to make sure you are okay, and to give you a ride home.”

  Henry looked at the cop's shiny new shoes and then on his own. His tattered white Wal-Mart specials had seen better days, and the soles were flopping off the toe. Ignoring the strange looks from the cop, he swung on his stained fur-lined jean jacket and breathed in the smell of pot on the coat. He looked out of the corner of his eye at Terry, trying to remember if he had any pot on him.

  His cell phone buzzed, and a text read, “We’re outside.”

  Jekyll turned his phone around to show the officer and stated, “I won’t need a ride. My friends from work are here to pick me up.”

  Terry put on his own coat and replied, “That’s cool. I’ll walk you out.”

  As the two walked together down the hallway, Henry gave a nervous, “I thought hospitals were supposed to wheel you out in a chair.”

  Johnston shook his head, replying, “That is only if you get surgery, and you didn’t fall so hard that your brains rolled out. So, lucky you, huh?”

  As they exited the front entrance to the hospital, Henry pointed at Dallas’s yellow VW Bug, and announced, “There I am right there. Thanks for walking me out.”

  Johnston’s phone rang just as he shook Jekyll’s hand. Henry was relieved that the officer got distracted because if he followed him to Dallas’s car, he knew there would be a cloud of pot fumes rolling out of windows. As he briskly walked towards freedom, he heard Terry say, “John, I thought you’d be in a medicated slut-filled dreamscape. Where are you?”

  The images of the last time he saw Lewis flashed in his mind as he walked into the night air. Memories of Lewis dressed up as a victim of an Alien Face Hugger at the Halloween party floated in his head. Before he knew it, Henry had wandered over to the VW and saw Juste sitting in the passenger seat. They were too busy harmonizing “Losing My Religion” by REM to notice his approach.

  He squeezed into the back seat, as Dallas exclaimed, “Hey, man! You look like hell.”

  She had on a pair of ripped jeans and a worn black shirt that read, “Lewis’s Hoagies” on the front. She had let her dark curly hair fall down on her shoulders and had a beer can between her legs. Henry slammed the door as she flipped off the radio and started the car.

  Juste spun around in his seat and explained, “Lewis’s murder is all over the news. They said they are looking for a bearded homeless guy in a yellow shirt. Did the cops question you?”

  Henry put on his seat belt and replied, “They just said he was stabbed, and that my alibi with Uber checked out.”

  The two in the front seat shared a shocked look as Juste repeated, “Stabbed? We thought he was pushed.”

  Henry itched, under the head bandage, replied, “No. He wasn’t. Guys, I’d like to just go home. My head is pounding.”

  Dallas turned the radio back up and started driving as Juste remarked, “Damn, man. I know you two were close. Closer than the rest of us were to him. He helped
you get off the street into an apartment. The guy was like a father to…”

  Dallas punched Juste in the shoulder hard, as Henry’s head exploded with pain at the fresh tears coming out of his eyes. It dawned on him that he had just lost one of his best friends. The rest of the drive was spent in silence. He hid his sobs in the darkness of the backseat and sounds of traffic.

  Twenty minutes later, Dallas rolled up on Henry’s dilapidated apartment building and maneuvered around the stray homeless that walked the streets. It was just past midnight, and his road was relatively quiet for a Tuesday night. The rumbling German engine, mixed with the hole in Webb’s muffler, made for a feeling of utter relief when it pulled to a stop.

  As Henry jumped out of the car, Juste exclaimed, “Hey man! Are you going to be okay?”

  He replied, “Yeah, I think I’m just going to try and get some sleep.”

  With that, Dallas gave him a wink, and the Bug’s loud engine roared down the street like a motorboat trolling down Grand Lake. He watched them turn the corner and then shambled to his front door. The stairs up to his place seemed a little longer than usual, and Henry had trouble keeping his balance. He paused towards the top of the stairs and felt a cloud coming over his head. It was the same fog that he felt when waking up, but this time it was more intense. He knelt down and crawled the rest of the way up the stairs. As he reached the entranceway to his front room, Henry fell face first onto his stained carpet and scattered a dozen cockroaches. He tried to get back up, but the brain fog was so thick he had trouble maintaining concentration on where he was. He leaned to one side to get up, but his muscles gave out on him. Within moments, Henry slipped into a deep sleep and began surfing through a dreamscape of colors.

  Tulsa, OK - Wednesday, October 17th, 2018 – 7:54 a.m. CST

  The next morning, light shining in from an open window hit Henry’s face and beckoned him to consciousness. Sitting up slowly, he instinctively brought his hand up to his head to find the bandage was gone, and his head felt funny. With his eyes clearing, he noticed he wasn’t in the living room anymore but in the bedroom. The smell of bleach assaulted his nose as he looked down to see the bare twin mattress he had been sleeping on were replaced with a queen-sized bed. He was tucked under the most comfortable bedding he had ever had against his skin.

  He moved his hand over the black sheets and said out loud to himself, “It’s silk.”

  Quickly jumping onto the floor, he looked back at the white Victorian bed frame and the oak dresser that lined the wall. A fright came over him as he wondered if he was in the right house. Looking down, he saw the floor was vacuumed and smelled like lemon.

  He opened the door to the bathroom and was taken aback. The bright whiteness of the once brown toilet and tub caused him to gasp out loud. Henry had never once cleaned, but somehow it was spotless with a new set of brass faucets attacked to the sink. He flung open the medicine cabinet to find his toothbrush was sitting in a clear Ziploc bag, along with a new tube of toothpaste. He slammed the door shut and started hyperventilating at the reflection that looked back at him. Henry’s hair was cut short, and his scruffy beard was trimmed down. He rubbed his fingers through his once greasy mane and found it smelled like mint. Henry carefully checked the raised spot on the back of his head and expected some degree of pain, but, to his surprise, there was no sting in response to his touch. The massive bump was substantially smaller, and the laceration was only a tiny scab a half an inch long.

  He thought to himself, Well, maybe I wasn’t hurt that bad.

  He smelled his pits and found he was fully bathed. His hair was washed, his body was scented with lavender, and he had on deodorant. He looked on the sink and saw a line of products such as shampoo, hair spray, conditioner, and body wash. Every brand was something exotic, with a few labels in a different language.

  He walked into the living room in a zombie-like trance at the shock of all the changes. When he arrived, Henry found it was stripped bare. His awful looking couch was gone, the carpet was missing, and the walls had been painted.

  A fearful notion went through him, What if the landlord that had come in and started gutting the place because of the infestation? Why would my landlord do all of this without evicting me?

  He carefully walked through the living room, careful to avoid the upturned carpet tacks. Henry noticed the rancid smell of the apartment was gone, and on the floor were red and white cans of roach bombs. He looked back into the bedroom and saw a collection of them on the floor in there as well. Henry looked closer at the bare flooring and noticed dozens of dead roaches lying with their legs up. He swallowed hard as a cold pit formed in his stomach.

  He leaned his bare ass against a wall, How is this possible?

  He put a hand on the door leading into the kitchen and was astonished to see his linoleum had been replaced with sheets of fake hardwood flooring. He grabbed a cabinet to steady himself as he swooned over the impossibly spotless kitchen. The sink had been backed up for months, and the refrigerator hadn’t worked since he moved in. He put his hand over his mouth in disbelief as the water flowed smoothly down the drain with no problem. A massive double-door, chrome-looking fridge was tucked into the spot where his broken one had once been. He opened the door and looked inside to find a carton of eggs, bottled water, a gallon of milk, and stacks of steak and vegetables. For the first time, he laughed to himself in nervous anxiety, as he didn’t have a pan to cook it with. He walked over to the shiny new sink and pulled the handle.

  Instantly the thought came to mind, Do I?

  He moved over to one of the cabinets and realized he had never once opened them since he moved in. Slowly, his hand grabbed the knob and, with squinted eyes, pulled back on the door. Inside was an organized stack of new plates, cups, glasses, and cookware sitting on a freshly lined shelf. With a shaky hand, he pulled a large pan out and put it down on the stove.

  Backing away, he whispered, “What the fuck?”

  He jumped at the sound of an alarm buzzer that was coming from his bedroom. He backtracked and saw a light shining up from beneath one of the silk sheets. Pulling the covers back, a new Galaxy Note 8 cell phone flashed, “Time to go to school.” As he shut it off, Jekyll suddenly realized his own phone was nowhere to be seen. Henry searched the bed and looked around the room, tossing covers and pills everywhere.

  After a few minutes, he gave up and looked at the strange phone again. The screensaver was the Eastland College logo of a lion roaring. He swiped the face to reveal its security lock. He closed his eyes for a moment, hoping what was about to happen couldn’t be real. Taking a sharp breath out, he keyed in his old phone code, and to his dismay, it accepted it. Henry found his contacts, social media, and pictures were all loaded on the device.

  The closed his eyes and squeezed the phone in frustration thinking, Okay, Somehow, someone had bought this phone, activated it, and then pushed everything from the cloud from his old phone onto this one. How is that possible?

  The alarm went off again, snapping him out of the wild speculations and into a rush of panic. Quickly he realized he only had a few minutes to get ready before he had to leave for school. He bolted to the closet door, swung it open, and stood stone still at the sight of clothes that didn’t belong to him. Three suits, three pairs of jeans, various shirts, socks of a brand he had never heard of, three pairs of dress shoes, black tennis shoes, and some workout clothes were neatly organized on hangers and shelves. He took a couple of jeans off the rack and looked at the size.

  Henry’s head swam as he read, “36 x 34, my size. What in the hell.”

  Henry mindlessly grabbed some clothes and dressed. He didn’t even bother to check the size of the black button-down shirt’s dimensions and gave a stifled laugh of fear as he slipped on the black dress shoes that were a perfect fit. Looking in the bathroom mirror, he barely recognized the man he had become.

  Looking at his phone, he realized he needed to get going if he was going to make it to class. Locking the door behi
nd him, he moved down the stairway to his front door. At the bottom was a new sleek looking black ten-speed mountain bike sitting where his old red one had once been. Hanging off the handlebars was a leather backpack with a white tag hanging off that read, “Henry Jekyll.” He yanked the bag off the bike and opened the zipper. Looking back at him was a brand new laptop and the school books he had brought home to study. He lowered his arms and stared up at the ceiling in an attempt to reconcile all of this mentally. Maybe this was from the school. Mrs. Lanyon might have put together some kind of a fundraiser. This might be an episode on the school’s Secret Blessing YouTube show. He looked up in the corners of the stairwell for hidden cameras but saw nothing but the dirty walls and occasional cockroach. The staircase only led up to his apartment, and no other tenant’s door connected to it.

  He crept up to the glass door that went outside and peered out. There were dozens of trash bags stacked up on the corner alongside his couch, carpet, and old bedding. Wheeling the bike outside like a staggering zombie, he swung the backpack on. He regarded the pile of his infested belongings with a dumbfounded look. A few seconds later, he mounted the bike and decided to ride away from the crazy morning. Leaving the mountain of trash bags behind, he headed in the direction of Eastland Christian College in hopes of making Professor Lanyon’s Religious Studies class on time.

  Pedaling hard from one street to the next, he felt more alive than he had could remember. It was cold, but for some reason, he didn’t feel the chill. His lungs soaked up the morning air as he flipped the gears to a harder setting and caught up with the car in front of him. He glanced inside the vehicle and looked at the speedometer and saw he was going 30 miles an hour.

  Suddenly, a paranoid idea crept into his brain, What if this is some kind of TV show?

  At the halfway point to the school, he slammed on the brakes and parked next to a bench. He looked around to see if anyone was following him, but he couldn’t see anything large enough to be a camera truck. There were no suspicious-looking pedestrians ready to catch his reaction to the new bike or clothes on their cell phones. He felt his stomach knot up again, as he just wanted to know what was going on or have it all stop. Henry got back on the bike and made his way towards the College.