SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Northup holds his arm out over the gunwale like Moses preparing to part the waters.

Don’t let the mouth alarm you, he says. Takes some getting used to, I’ll readily admit.

The wake stops a few yards short of the boat, and the leading ripples plash quietly against the side. Then a gout of water bursts up right next to them and out of it thrusts a fleshy column, water runneling down its sides. Like the tail of an enormous snake. The top of it’s more rounded than a snake’s tail, but it’s scaly all over and glistens.

The thing thrashes up and down, like a horse resisting the bridle. Splashes of water fly all over.

It rears back and bulks tall, and a good two feet of it drop over the side of the boat, where it rests, quivering.

Chambers jumps up. The boat rocks.

It all goes so quickly!

Three slits along its sides flare and lapse, flare and lapse, like the gills of a hooked fish. The three slits widen. They flap open. The inside’s bright green. And lined with teeth, rows of teeth, spiraling rows of teeth. And out of the—. It must be a mouth. Out of the mouth a dozen—tongues?—tentacles?—whips?—a dozen little lashes of flesh in as many colors and—

—quite casually—

—as if he’s done it many times before—

—Northup thrusts his hand into the writhing.

He looks up at Chambers, his hand nearly engulfed in a frenzy of caressing whiplets. And he smiles! He holds up the other hand, as if to say, wait, wait, you’ll see.

Two more tentacles emerge from the rings of teeth. Their tips flicker like snake tongues, forked, but fast, much faster, the motion a blur in the air. Dost…fare…well…friend… sings a piercing little voice like the whine of a mosquito.

Chambers seizes the oar from the bottom of the boat, wrenches it out of its lock, and brings it down with all his strength on the snake looped across the gunwale. The blade skids against solid flesh and he beats it again and again then another oar smacks black against his skull and his eyesight narrows and darkens and he drops the oar. He staggers back. Sky and water swap places and the water blooms green and someone wrenches his arm and tugs him, he’s facedown in the bottom of the boat.

A deep thud from below the boat; the boards (Chambers could swear) strike his jaw like a blow and he sits up like a jack-in-the-box. Water wells up and sinks. Circles of waves with the boat at their center flee outward.

Somewhere deep inside his fury and panic, Chambers hears Northup shouting: Hell’s teeth in a bucket of blood, man! How could you! Why could you! What’s come over you?

Northup grasps Chambers’s lapels and hauls him upright against the bench. He sits down on the other bench and stares at him. Chambers blinks back tears. His belly’s heaving and he swallows hard. He’s panting.

Northup says: For sure your heart is a furtive, terrified, and small one.

And he says: Not to worry, he won’t be returning today.

And he says: I say "he," but probably it’s nonsense to apply that word to him.

And he says: Always seemed impertinent to ask.

Chambers’s hands are nervously rummaging about, as if they’re someone else’s hands, touching rope, wood, wet, a bucket handle, moss, the oar, a nailhead. Moss?

He looks down. Strewn around him: hundreds of wet rounds, like seedpods or ragged coins. He picks one up and immediately flings it down, for it’s warm as flesh and as yielding, its surface plush as velvet.

Ah, Northup says. The eggs, you know.

Chambers levers himself off the bottom and onto the bench.

It’s not done to a purpose, Northup says. He strews his spoor as he goes. Not usually so many, though.

Chambers says: And from these small notions such monsters hatch…

Northup says: Oh, they don’t hatch. Just swell up for a day or two, turn all leathery, crack open, and dry up. Seems this world lacks some vital necessity.

This world? Is there some other?

Northup spreads his open hands, then lets them fall back to his knees.

Chambers’s jaw flaps open: No! You can’t mean—these Hellish creatures—

No just God has any use for a Hell.

He says it with an air of quoting someone irrefutable.

Chambers says: Spare me your heresies. Not Hell, then, but certainly not Heaven. Where then?

Northup waves one hand skywards.

He says, Elsewhere, elsewise. I don’t pretend to understand. I like to think—

He smiles as if at a private joke.

Venus, he says.

Chambers scoffs: Venus! You might as well say Mars. Or Jupiter.

Yes! Northup says with a peculiar enthusiasm. Or the Pole Star!

Northup often spent time on the lake shore, because sometimes he needed to be there, and because he wished to establish that his presence was not unusual. Probably most folks assumed he was smuggling whiskey, and laughed at his pose as an abstemious hemi-demi-semi-quasi-Quaker. He often said: I am myself a burnt-over district.

He picked up a flattish stone and flung it spinning at the water. It smacked the surface and leapt up one two three four times and vanished, plunk , at five. Not bad. He looked around for another suitable rock.

At first he thought it was a log washed ashore—blackened, slick with wet and rot, a clutter of stones and sticks tangled around it. The water surged and retreated in the onshore wind. His boot heels crunched dimples into the shoal of pebbles. Those angles of rocks, that arrangement, the broken driftwood—it almost resembled, it seemed to be—oh it must be: it was a word. L O V E.

And then the log opened its eyes.

All six of them.

Not a log but a serpent, an enormous—

( Everything that is in Nature , the Universall Friend once told the two boys, Stutley and Samuel (the only other boy even close to Stutley’s age) she’d caught beating a little black grass snake with sticks, is of Nature and thus partakes of some measure of God’s benevolence . She fixed her eyes on each boy in turn and continued: In some cases, to be sure, alas, it is a distressingly small measure. But this creature —she looked into its eyes dangling before her own and with a flick of her arm tossed it into the tall grass— is not venomous and serves God’s will by eating the vermin that would otherwise eat the maize belonging to God’s servants. She turned. And now, my small gentlemen, with that lesson well learned we shall proceed with our schoolwork. And with the two of them in tow she strode across the field, long black clergy-cloak flapping behind her and the two boys making faces at each other.)

He stood frozen to the spot.

The serpent bucked back and shook itself, flung out multiple whipping arms, and flapped and flipped up and down in a frenzy of motion. Like an epileptic fit. Was it ill? It fell down and lay still.

Now the stones and driftwood read H O M E.

Northup’s knees just gave out on him, his legs went limp and he sat down right there on the rocks. Terror dwindled quickly, though, swamped with astonishment and, as that too ebbed, with, what else, it must be curiosity —

He found a stick and scratched into the mud ∃ ∧ O ⅂.

And the serpent whistled. A high keening, like a winter wind through pine trees, and somehow communicating the utmost melancholy. It reared back again and rapidly rearranged its sticks and stones to read F R E E.

A scurf of scales rose and fell on the broken water, blank to the horizon.

Back at the farmhouse, Chambers paces up and down the parlor.

How long? he asks. How long?

How long what? Northup asks.

How long has God’s good earth been infested with these—these—monstrous vermin ?