Ed Gorman - Serpent's kiss

"Forty years."

"Forty years?"

"That's how long I worked there."

"Oh. I see. That's a long time."

"A hell of a long time." Then, at least as far as O'Sullivan could tell, Telfair turned back toward the interior of the dusty apartment.

The tapping started again.

In the darkness of the apartment, the tip of the cane against the wood tap-tapping had an eerie resonance.

O'Sullivan followed Telfair around the corner of the hallway and there lay the living room. Light from the street below painted it in various neon colours-blue-red-green; green-red-blue flashing alternately.

O'Sullivan got his first good look at the old bastard. He was blind all right, with eyes the colour of Milk of Magnesia. His head was impossibly small, like a head cannibals had shrunk, with wild strands of white hair jutting out spikelike. His slack mouth ran with silver spittle. He smelled unclean, like an animal that has been sick for a long time. The ragged white shirt he wore on his bony frame was stained as if from wounds that excreted not only blood but pus, too. He kept his knobbly hands on top of a knobbly black cane. When he turned to invite O'Sullivan to sit down, his breath almost literally knocked O'Sullivan over. The stink was incredible.

But what was most curious about Telfair was the fat animal crouching on his shoulder. At first, O'Sullivan had mistaken it for an odd-looking cat.

Now, its red eyes flaring, its teeth dripping hungrily, O'Sullivan saw it for what it was-a rat.

Telfair sat down in a ragged armchair set in front of the room's two windows. Backlit this way, Telfair was entirely in silhouette. The only detail O'Sullivan could pick out was Telfair's white useless eyes. And it was the same with the rat that sat on Telfair's shoulder watching O'Sullivan. All he could see was the rat's disturbingly red gaze.

"He bothers you, doesn't he?" Telfair said.

"I guess I just kind of buy into all the myths about rats. You know, how they carry rabies and drag babies off and stuff like that."

"You're a very intense man."

"I suppose I am." O'Sullivan sighed. In the blinking neon, he got his first good look at this room. The furniture all looked as if somebody had worked it over with a club and a knife. It was like the world's worst garage sale, boxes and sacks of junk packed tight along three of the walls, overflowing with all sorts of worthless crap, lamps that didn't glow, pop-up toasters that didn't pop up, even an old white Kelvinator refrigerator like the one the O'Sullivan family had had at home-only this one luid a most peculiar door, one that hung at a comic angle by a single screw. "I shouldn't have said anything about your pet. I'm sorry."

"I never have guests. I didn't even think about Charlie being on my shoulder."

"Charlie, huh?"

"When he's been bad I call him Charles."

For some reason that struck O'Sullivan as funny and he laughed out loud. Laughter sounded real weird in this dusty pauper's grave.

"Well, in seventh grade I had a milk snake named Raymond," O'Sullivan said. "He wasn't real popular around my house, either. So I guess I should understand about Charlie."

And as if to prove his master's point, red eyed Charlie climbed down from Telfair's shoulder and landed in his lap and then wriggled his head into the Oreo bag.

There was something obscene about it, the way the rat burrowed his head into the sack.

O'Sullivan could hear the munching all the way across the room where he had parked his butt on the edge of a lumpy couch with a hideous flowered slipcover over it.

"Good boy, Charlie," Telfair said, knobbly hand stroking the relentless rat. "Just remember to save a few for me."

Then, sated apparently, the rat withdrew, shaking its head as if shaking away Oreo crumbs, and then hopped back up on Telfair's shoulder.

Telfair said, "You've been talking to the Lindstrom woman, haven't you?"

"One of my reporters has."

"And she told you about the old tower."

"Yes. But I have to confess, I don't understand much about it."

Telfair chuckled with a certain satisfaction. "Nobody but me does, Mr. O'Sullivan. Nobody but me does. And an old, insane patient named Gus."

Then he reached into the Oreo bag, seized another brown cookie, and popped it into his mouth.

He also, at the same time, raised his right leg off the seat of the armchair and cut a sharp, quick world record fart. "The Oreos have the darndest effect on me, Mr. O'Sullivan. They make me flatulent."

"Ah," O'Sullivan said. He was definitely planning to kill Holland when he saw her again.

As his teeth ground the Oreos to a fine powdery brown dust, Telfair said, "Have you ever heard of the Cloisters, Mr. O'Sullivan?"

"I guess not."

"They were a splinter religious sect that roamed this state back in the 1800s. They'd been Roman Catholics until the bishop found out that they were practising black magic and then he kicked them out."

"I see." He wondered when Telfair was going to get to the UFO abductions and the out-of-body experiences.

"They also killed children. Usually runaways."

"Runaways?"

"Believe it or not, there was a teenage underground bigger than today's back in the late 1800s. And there weren't nearly as many shelters for them, either."

"Oh."

"Guess where the Cloisters put up for five years?"

"I'm afraid I don't know."

"Right where Hastings House is."

O'Sullivan could see this coming.

"Where the old tower was built was right on the burial ground."

"The authorities know about this?"

Telfair rattled his hand inside the Oreo package and snorted. His rat made a tiny chittering noise. "Authorities? They were suspicious of the Cloisters, of course, the way authorities are suspicious of any strange group, but they never really believed that the Cloisters were killing children in sacrifice."

"They never dug in the earth there?"

"Never."

"How do you know that there was a burial ground there, then?"

"I found the book."

"The book?"

"A sort of diary that one of the cult members kept."

"You found it?"

"Yes. Up in the tower when I was rummaging around up there." He sighed, his windpipe rattling there in the gloom. "You see, they never did use the tower, just the main building and then the other buildings they added on later. The tower was always structurally unsound. It swayed whenever there was a wind and even the smallest rain flooded the place."

"Why didn't they just tear it down?"

Telfair shrugged. "It's a nice piece of architecture. I suppose they felt that as long as nobody was in there, it wasn't hurting anything."

"So what did the diary say?"

"It told about the serpent."

"The serpent."

"Uh-huh. The huge snake that came up out of the ground one night after a certain incantation."

Now it was O'Sullivan's turn to sigh.

"You're starting to squirm, Mr. O'Sullivan."

"I guess I am."

"The Cloisters sacrificed the children. That's why the serpent came. It had waited centuries for a host."

"A host?"

"Yes. The snake works its way into a human body-it shrinks down, of course-and then it takes over the intelligence and the will of that person. It makes the person go out and seek other sacrifices-children or adults, it doesn't really matter."

"I see."

Telfair laughed. "I wish you could hear yourself, Mr. O'Sullivan."

"Oh?"

"You sound as if you'd like to dive out that window."

"You have to admit this is a pretty unlikely story."

" 'Unlikely' is a very polite word, Mr. O'Sullivan. I appreciate it."

And with that O'Sullivan got up.

He walked carefully to the window-carefully because the dusty floor was a mine trap of debris-and then he looked down to the street.

He was still wondering where that teenager had gone to, the one who used to masquerade as himself. He could see the street rods again with the flames painted on the sides and the bikers all doing their self conscious Brando impressions as they wheeled their Harleys and big mother Indians to the kerb. A great sorrow overcame him then as he mourned the loss of the boy he'd been. He wanted it all to be ahead of him and it was all largely behind him and he wore neckties and had to worry about annual health check-ups and loneliness.