Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

When Paul had discovered the hole the day before, murder had not been in his thoughts, but once he saw what lay within, the plan had sprung full-blown into his head. Just like that, he had gone from wronged husband and friend to murderer, when a mere twenty-four hours before, it had been he who was the victim.

It had been the pregnancy test that had finally opened his eyes, though why it should have taken that, Paul could not fathom. Surely, everything that he had needed to know had lain before his eyes for some time, yet it had required a small, mass-produced medical device that was sold over the counter in every local pharmacy to provide the spark that burned away his blindness. It was like Vanda to be so careless.

She had blown into their lives like some primal feminine force during the first month of their senior year, as Paul and Josh sat hunched over a map of their next backpacking trip — a whirlwind of long black hair and colorful scarves, dog-eared textbooks and swirling skirts, that suddenly commanded their secluded spot in the student center. With a great sigh, she had sunk onto the sagging sofa next to Paul, allowing her books and papers to cascade onto the coffee table and their terrain map, her great silver earrings tinkling as she threw back her head to stare at the ceiling. After a moment, she had raised herself to regard the two young men she had intruded upon, fixed her grey eyes upon Paul’s, widened them dramatically, and announced, “Professor Rais is going to be a problem.”

Paul had no idea to whom she was referring or what his expression must have been that day, and he had not bothered to look over at Josh for confirmation of this apparition. It had been enough, at that moment, to simply look back into Vanda’s eyes — eyes that had sought his and, remarkably, not Josh’s. “I believe he expects me to study in my senior year,” she added; then, turning to the map, she asked abruptly, “What’s all this?”

“We’re going... planning,” Paul had corrected himself, “a backpacking trip.”

“Really,” she had said. “I’d like to do that sometime.”

For the briefest of moments, Paul had studied her profiled face, strikingly white and smooth as porcelain, her ebony tresses tangled in amongst the dozen necklaces that hung over the tabletop from her slender neck. An image floated unbidden before his mind’s eye of her wildly dancing in a lonely clearing, naked but for her outlandish jewelry and glowing beneath a hunter’s moon. That had been it. “Wanna come?” he had asked.

She had regarded him quizzically for several heartbeats, an animal sensing a trap, and then calmly nodded while reaching over and removing a smudge of chocolate, the remnant of an earlier energy bar, from his chin with her tongue-moistened thumb. Her unexpected touch had paralyzed him, even as she had deigned to finally notice Josh, who had sat slack-jawed throughout this spell-weaving. With a broad smile, she had offered him her hand, which he clumsily grasped.

The three were seldom apart from that day forward, except during the prophesied interference of the demanding Professor Rais, her anthropology teacher and chair of her department, and something of a local celebrity for his travels to distant jungles where he immersed himself in the culture and rites of primitive societies. That year had flown by, filled with countless hikes and climbs, and even a week spent in the wilderness of the Great Smokies during a heartbreakingly beautiful spring.

Vanda was everything Paul had fantasized on that first meeting, unremittingly feminine, yet elemental, in some indecipherable way. She seldom had to be helped along, even on the most arduous journeys, and her joy in nature was unbridled and infectious. It had seemed to Paul that she had subtly influenced his view of the natural world — no longer did he see it as a primeval struggle betwixt man and nature, one in which he and Josh were challenged to master, but slowly and through her eyes, he began to perceive it as some type of cooperative venture, a partnership between the three adventurers and the untrammeled land. She had dashed about from one to the other of them, tirelessly pointing out the salubrious properties of hitherto unnoticed flowers, ferns, and leaves, laughingly providing unlikely foods from mosses and mushrooms for her reluctant followers. That which Paul and Josh had marched forth to conquer with their youthful strength and bravado, they found to have willfully surrendered to their enchantress. Paul would not have been surprised to have seen birds perched on her shoulders or wolves lying at her small, booted feet, as he too had been snared without the least violence.

Like everything else in their relationship, it seemed their marriage had come about as surely and naturally as a new season. It had appeared to simply unfold before Paul’s eyes like the warm sun that rose above the treetops and reflected off the still, blue lake on the shore of which they took their vows. Josh, uncomfortably stuffed into a rented tuxedo, had nervously acted the part of Paul’s best man. The bride had worn green: a diaphanous layering of gossamer materials that accentuated her ample bosom and tiny waist while trailing to the earth about her ankles even as her delicate green shoes peeked out from the foliage. She had worn her dark, luxuriant hair up in a complicated arrangement of braids and ribbons, surmounted by a crown of tiny wildflowers, which only served to somehow accentuate the superabundance of her shining tresses — a raven-haired Tinker Bell arrayed for the Solstice Ball.

The only jarring note that Paul could recall was his mother’s rather shocked comment on first viewing the bride on her wedding day. With a small cry, she had raised a white-gloved hand to her mouth and gasped to his father, “Oh my Lord, Edwin, she looks like a heathen princess,” just loud enough for Paul to have overheard as he awaited Vanda at the makeshift altar.

A second moment had occurred at the giving-away of the bride: The exotic Professor Rais, looking tall and rather elegant in his tailored tux and with swept-back, shoulder-length graying hair, had stumbled slightly on the way to the lake’s edge, betraying his somewhat advanced stage of inebriation, and managed to step on the bride’s hem. The sound of rending material was only just matched by the suppressed groan from the feminine members of the assembled. Yet the bride appeared to take no notice and proceeded with her unsteady stand-in (Vanda’s father had not been heard from for many years) to her waiting groom. Rais, flushing somewhat, manfully squared his narrow shoulders and hastened to keep up.

Once their goal had been reached and the bride safely delivered, if somewhat the worse for wear, he breathed the noxious fumes of his earlier imbibements over the happy couple, then attempted to kiss the bride on the lips through her veil. With a small shove from Vanda’s gloved hand, he had disengaged and stumbled hastily away, suddenly visibly and obviously intoxicated. Her smile for Paul, radiant behind the green veil and like some exotic and beautiful creature glimpsed within its lair, had swept away the awkwardness of the moment, and Paul as well. He had wished to never be free of her from that time forth.

Paul crouched at the edge of the hole and listened, but no sounds came from within. Far below, in the patch of sunlight that reached the cavern floor, he could make out Josh’s backpack, but his friend was not with it. “Josh,” he called down. “Josh!” Silence, laden with reproach, wafted up to him with the cold draft from the cavern. The pack shifted slightly and appeared to tip to one side; something long and sinewy gathered itself atop it to better enjoy the meager shaft of sunlight, and appeared to stare up at him. The cavern floor undulated within the circle of illumination, the snakes so thickly intertwined that only when one’s triangular head or sharp tail separated from the writhing mass could Paul comprehend that it was not one living, multi-tentacled creature in uneasy repose. He drew back from the edge, grateful there was no tension on the rope, then thought of Josh still tethered to the other end down there in the dark, in the midst of serpents. “Josh!” Paul cried out once more as remorse and terror for his friend flooded his heart. “I’m coming down. I’m sorry... so sorry! Do you hear me?”