Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

As the snake slithered along the wall and under the tall chest of drawers, Sinsemilla bounced on the bed: "Oh, trouble now, trouble with a capital S-n-a-k-e. Thingy's pissed, hidin' under the highboy, him bruised and bitter, him havin' a hissy fit, him broodin' up bad snaky revenge."

Leilani hoped to see bloodstains on the baseboard — or if a snake didn't have exactly blood in it, then a smear of something else that said mortal wounds as clearly as a lot of good red gore would have said it. But she saw no blood, no ichor, no snake syrup of any kind.

The sawn-off circular end of the hollow tubular pole wouldn't be as effective as a sharp knife, but it would cut even tough scales and muscled coils if driven hard enough, if a lot of insistent pressure was put behind it. Her sweaty hands had slipped on the polished steel, but surely some damage had been done to the snake.

The chest of drawers stood against the wall, on four stubby legs. More than live feet high. Four feet wide. Maybe twenty inches deep. The bottom rail cleared the floor by three inches.

Snake; under there somewhere. When Leilani held her breath, she could hear the angry hissing. The reverberant bottom of the lowest drawer amplified the sound in that confined space.

She'd better get a fix on the creature while it was stunned. She backed away, dropped awkwardly to her knees. Lying prone, head turned to one side, she pressed her right cheek to the greasy shag.

If Death had pockets in his robe, they smelled like this filthy carpet. Nauseating waves of righteous anger still churned Leilani, and the rotten-sour sludge of scent that pooled on the wall-to-wall gave her another reason to worry about losing her apple pie.

"Oh, listen to that snaky brain a-hummin', listen to old thingy schemin' up a scheme, like when he wants to kill him a tasty mouse."

The silk-textured light, as red as Sinsemilla's favorite party blouse, barely brightened the nest of shadows under the chest of drawers.

Leilani was gasping, not from exhaustion — she hadn't exerted herself that much — but because she was worried, scared, in a state. As she lay squinting for a glimpse of the beast, her face only six or seven feet from the reptile's crawlspace, she breathed rapidly, noisily, through her mouth, and her tongue translated the stink of the carpet into a taste that made her gag.

Under the chest of drawers, shadows appeared to throb and turn as shadows always do when you stare hard enough at them, but the lipstick light kissed only one form among all the shifting phantom shapes. Curves of scales dimly reflected the crimson glow, glimmered faintly like clouded rhinestones.

"Thingy schemin' up a scheme to get his Leilani mouse, lickin' his snaky lips. Thingy, him be dreamin' what Lani girl gonna taste like."

The serpent huddled all the way back against the wall, and about as far from one side of the chest of drawers as from the other.

Leilani rose to her knees again. She seized the pole with both hands and rammed it hard under the furniture, dead-on for the snake. She struck again, again, again, furiously, burning her knuckles from friction with the shag, and she could hear the critter thrashing, its body slapping loudly against the bottom of the lowest drawer.

On the bed, Sinsemilla romped, cheering one of the combatants, cursing the other, and though Leilani wasn't any longer able to make sense of her mother's words, she figured the woman's sympathies were with the thingy.

She couldn't clearly hear Sinsemilla's ranting because of the snake lashing a crazy drumbeat on the underside of the chest, because of the pole punching into the snarled coils and knocking on the baseboard and rattling against the legs of the furniture — but also because she herself was grunting like a wild beast. Her throat felt scorched. Her raw voice didn't sound like her own: wordless, thick, hideous with a primitive need that she didn't dare contemplate.

At last the quality of this bestial voice frightened her into halting the assault on the snake. It was dead, anyway. She had killed it some time ago. Under the tall chest of drawers, nothing flopped, nothing hissed.

Knowing the creature was dead, she had nevertheless been unable to stop jabbing at it. Out of control. And who did those three words bring to mind? Out of control. Like mother, like daughter. Leilani's accelerator had been pressed to the floorboard by fear, rather than by drugs, also by anger, but this distinction didn't matter as much to her as did the discovery that she, like Sinsemilla, could lose control of herself under the right circumstances.

Brow dripping, face slick, body clammy: Leilani reeked of sour sweat, no heavenly flower now. On her knees, shoulders hunched, head cocked, wild damp hair hanging in tangles over her face, hands still clenched with such rage that she couldn't release the pole, she made her bid for being Quasimodo reborn, only nine and a return to Notre Dame still years away.

She felt diminished, humiliated, shaken — no less afraid than she'd been a moment ago, but now for different reasons. Some serpents were more frightening than others: the specimens that didn't come in ventilated pet-shop boxes, that never slithered through any field or forest, serpents invisible that inhabited the deeper regions of your mind. Until now, she hadn't been aware that she herself provided a nest for such potent snakes of fear and anger, or that her heart could be inflamed and set racing by their sudden bite, so quickly reducing her to these spasms, these half-mad headlong frenzies, out of control.

Like a gargoyle above, Sinsemilla leaned over the footboard of the bed, her face shadowed but her head haloed by red lamplight, glittery-eyed with excitement. "Thingy, him a hard-ass stubborn little crawly boy."

Leilani didn't actually make sense of those words, and she was saved only because she met her mother's eyes and saw where they were focused. Not on her daughter. On the nearest end of the makeshift cudgel, just behind Leilani's two-hand grip.

The tubular-steel rod was hollow, two inches in diameter. The snake, not dead after all, seeking refuge when the battering stopped, had squirmed inside the pole. By this pipeline, it traveled unseen from beneath the chest of drawers to Leilani's exposed back, where now it slowly extruded on the floor behind her like the finished product of a snake-making machine.

Whether the serpent moved slowly because it was hurt or because it was being cautious to deceive, Leilani didn't know, didn't care. Just as the full length of it oozed from the hollow cudgel, she seized it by the tail. She knew that snakehandlers always gripped immediately under the head to immobilize the jaws, but fear for her one good hand caused her to choose the nether end.

Slick it was, wet-slick and therefore injured, but still lively enough to wriggle fiercely in a quest for freedom.

Before the snake could wind back on itself and bite her hand, Leilani shot to her feet faster than her braced leg had ever before allowed, playing cowgirl-with-lariat as she rose from the floor. Swung like a rope, stretched long by centrifugal force that thwarted its inward-coiling efforts, the reptile parted the air with a swoosh louder than its hiss. She swung it twice as she stumbled two steps toward the chest of drawers, the bared fangs missing her mother's face by inches on the first revolution, and then during the third swing, the serpent met the furniture with a crack of skull that took all the wriggle out of it forever.

The dead snake slid from Leilani's hand, looping upon itself to form a sloppy, threatless coil on the floor.

Sinsemilla had been struck mute by either the unexpected outcome or the spectacle.

Although she could let go of the broken serpent and use the pivoting trick with her braced leg to turn her back on the scaly mess, Leilani couldn't turn away as easily from the mental image of herself in a fit of grunting, gasping, snake-killing rage and terror. Like a foxtail bramble, this hateful picture would work its way deep into the flesh of her memory, beyond the hope of excision, and prickle as long as she lived.