Ed Gorman - Serpent's kiss

His destination was always the same. Gus liked to crawl until he'd reached a grille identical to the one he'd just taken out. This second grille opened on to the first floor of the tower.

Now, reaching the grille, he started hearing the noises he usually did coming from somewhere high up in the shadowy top of the tower-dragging noises, as if something very heavy were being hauled with great difficulty across the floor. And the whimpering sounds. All Gus could liken them to were the sounds his puppy with cancer had made that long ago sunny afternoon. The puppy had died in Gus's lap and as it expired it made these tiny, mewling pleas. All Gus could do was hold the puppy tight and rock him back and forth the way Gus's mother did with Gus's little sister-but it had done no good. The puppy had started sweating and silver spittle spewed from its mouth and then its eyes had rolled all white with just a tiny red tracery of veins showing… and then the little dog had gone rigid in Gus's lap. Gus had cried for days after, inconsolable. He'd been convinced that the same Martians who were after him had also been after his little puppy.

He jumped down and stood in the small lobby area. The tower had only a few windows, and they were more like slats than anything. Moonlight lay silver against the slats now. Gus shone his beam around. This was like being on the ground floor of a lighthouse. All you could see in the cramped, damp darkness was a huge set of metal steps spiralling up into the blackness above.

A chittering sound made him swing his head around. In the gloom behind him, a pair of tiny red eyes watched him. A rat. One time Gus had seen a rat in here that had been as big as a cat he had once had. Gus's mind was filled with stories his mother had told him about rats-how they often snuck into houses and ate tiny babies as the infants slept in their cribs; how their fangs ran red with blood and green with poison; how they sank their fangs into your hair and started ripping your scalp apart. Or was that last one bats? Sometimes Gus got rats and bats confused.

The rat hunkered, started inexorably toward Gus.

While he wasn't as big as a cat, the grey creature with the swollen belly and the swishing spiky tail was formidable nonetheless.

The rat sprang, then. Came off the floor like an animal grotesquely capable of flight. Flew directly at Gus.

But Gus was ready. He'd been through this many times here before in the mildewy darkness of the tower.

Gus expertly brought the flashlight down on the rat's head. The chittering turned into a kind of keening.

The rat slammed to the floor.

Gus brought the heel of his K-Mart slipper down on the animal's skull. He felt a pleasing pop as the rat's brains escaped the confines of its skull, spilling out through its nostrils' and mouth. The animal started jerking wildly, puking and continuing to keen, and then it lay still. Dead.

"You little sonofabitch," Gus said. And smiled to himself.

He never felt more purposeful than when he'd inflicted pain on something or somebody. He couldn't tell you why he felt this way and he didn't give a damn why he felt this way. He just did.

So even squashing a rat gave Gus considerable pleasure.

He wiped the blood, hair, and flecks of bone off the head of the flashlight-he'd knocked the light out for good this time- and then looked once more at the steps.

Up at the top of them, the dragging sound was still going on.

And so was the occasional flash of amber light.

Gus had no idea what this was. During his first trips to the tower, he'd even wondered if he might not be imagining the amber light, if it might not be some kind of illusion.

But no; now almost every time he came through the vent shaft, he saw the intermittent glow coming down the stairs like a ghost just starting to take shape.

Then, as now, it would be gone.

He went over to the stairs and set one foot on the first step. He could feel his heart begin to race, his body grow sleek and pasty with sweat.

In the now claustrophobic darkness (he often told Dr. Milner that he feared they would someday bury him alive), he raised his eyes to the gloom.

What made the dragging sound?

What caused the amber glow? And then he heard a new noise-a kind of snapping sound, the crack a whip makes when it meets flesh.

And he got scared.

This happened to him every time he came here. He'd just get curious about the tower-and what was up at the top-and then he'd get scared.

Because the one time he'd gone all the way to the top of the tower, Gus had seen what actually happened in the room up there.

It was just a small stone room, with a hole in the wall near the lone, mullioned window. That's where the snake came from. Or maybe it wasn't a snake exactly.

But anyway, it came coiling out of the hole, seeming to go on forever, and it angled across the floor to where the naked woman stood.

Gus couldn't keep his eyes off her.

The only woman he'd ever seen naked was his mother and he'd always felt terrible about that.

This woman was named Sally. She was from the third floor, too. She was the one with the slash marks on her wrists. Sometimes at the table she'd start sobbing and saying, I almost did it; I almost did it, but then the muscle boys in the white uniforms would come and take her back to her room and give her the same sharp quick silver needle they always gave Gus.

But tonight she was up here.

And in the soft moonlight through the window he could see her breasts with the big brown nipples and her tidy little thatch of pubic hair (and Gus wondered what it would be like to touch and lick her down there; exciting, he somehow knew, exciting).

And the snake, its slanted eyes throwing off an almost blinding amber light, was coiling, coiling around her leg and coiling, coiling up her body.

And she threw her head back and began touching herself between the legs and laughing and crying at the same time.

And the snake continued to coil around her body, up around her belly and then around her breasts and then angling up over her chest to where it began to feed into-

Her mouth.

She was swallowing the snake.

And as the serpent worked its way down inside her, Gus could see the amber glow begin to shine through the flesh of her belly.

The stench almost made him throw up.

The stench was horrible. All he could think of was the way dead animals left a long time in the basement always smelled.

And somehow every foot of that snake fitted into her belly, she writhed to the enormous size of it slithering down inside her. All he could think of was a scene he'd seen on TV once when a python had swallowed a small pig, the way the jaws came unhinged so the snake could swallow the animal whole.

And for a brief moment, the radiant glow came not from her belly, but her eyes-her eyes looked just the way the snake's had.

And then even that was gone.

There was just the darkness.

And then she sensed him.

She didn't even look in his direction.

But he knew she'd become aware of him.

Gus went back down the stairs through the gloom to the duct opening. He crawled inside so quickly and carelessly that he cut his hands on the edges of the sheet metal. But he kept moving, moving.

She was somewhere behind him.

He didn't want her to swallow him.

He was horrified of her swallowing him.

Two days later they found Mr. Conrad in the shower. Something had dug both his eyes out and ripped off his penis so that there was just a bloody hole there.

That night they found Sally sitting up in her bed.

She was playing with Mr. Conrad's limp, ragged penis.

There wasn't a trial, just a hearing, after which Sally was put on the third floor where rooms were more like cages and where you were fed through slots in the door and where no matter how hard you screamed or cried they never let you out.