Warren Murphy: Prophet Of Doom

It was humid inside the cage, and the thing that had taken possession of Remo smelled the air like an alert hunter.

Behind it and unseen, something large and dark uncoiled from the low-slung branch of an artificial tallow tree.

Remo somehow knew what was happening. The

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mingling of minds had produced a dim form of understanding within him.

It was the snake. The snake held some kind of significance.

He saw visions, more images across the limitless black plain.

The evil combatant returned, but this time he was alone. He appeared almost as an infant in this vision and he wore on his back a quiver full of arrows. In his hand he held a golden bow.

All at once there appeared before the young combatant a great serpent. It moved to attack the boy. Quick as a flash, the youth's hand sought a quivered arrow and launched the deadly missile into the head of the massive creature. The small warrior repeated this motion again and again, spearing the hapless creature with arrow after arrow until at last its great pointed tail flopped lifelessly to the ground.

It was dead.

The image vanished. Remo was again in the reptile cage.

The serpent. Its death was somehow part of a rebirth.

But not of the Pythia. It was the rebirth of something much vaster. Something far more terrifying. Something hunkered down over the far side of the horizon of his mind.

As his thoughts returned in the cage, some lucid part of Remo's brain told him that something was at his ankle.

Like a spectator to his own actions, his head looked down, allowing Remo to see what his body had felt.

A fat, gleaming brown rope was wrapped around

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his right leg. It was banded and spotted in hues of chocolate and mud.

The thing moved and Remo fell.

Palm fronds slapped against his forehead. Remo landed face first in a tuft of tall sawgrass.

A cool pressure surrounded his waist.

The slow, crushing sensation didn't faze the presence of the Pythia in Remo's mind. As the snake's scaly coils slid up around his chest, it remained calm. As if the python sought this cold encounter.

As the unblinking head looped higher, the massive body rippled almost imperceptibly while wrapping its neck around Remo's throat. He felt a growing pressure against his windpipe.

The python, purchased from an East Indian zoological society, was over thirty feet long and had not eaten in days. While it was normal for a python to attack smaller animals, it wasn't unheard of for a snake as large as this one to attack and suffocate something Remo's size. Especially when hungry.

The creature's amber eyes looked directly into Remo's own as it constricted its muscular coils harder.

With every exhalation, the python squeezed Remo's rib cage. Every intake of breath that followed was shallower and less charged with oxygen than the one before. Inexorably the python's shrinking body was starving Remo's lungs of the one element that fueled the sun source that was Sinanju.

Oxygen.

The alien force in Remo's mind seemed almost to mock the efforts of the huge reptile. As the snake strove harder to crush the breath from the warmblooded mammal trapped within its constrictor coils,

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the demon within Remo slowly extracted a hand from the living bonds.

Remo watched as his own hand swatted the creature's flat head, almost as if the Pythia was remonstrating a badly behaved pet.

Immediately the python's coils dropped into loose ropes. It flopped to the cage floor.

Shedding the last clinging coils, the thing that possessed Remo stood.

In the thicket of carefully tended jungle, the reptile stirred. It had only been stunned. The flat, blunt head swayed back and forth, as if adjusting to the vibrations it felt through the bottom of the cage.

Remo felt himself step over the snake. The head lifted slightly and turned toward the new movement. He felt a tingle of evil jubilance in the pit of his own stomach.

Remo sensed what was really happening. The demon within him was only playing with the giant snake. It intended to toy with the creature, and when the entertainment value had at last been exhausted, it would slaughter the python in fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. This was somehow the final step toward the ultimate perversion of Remo's body. An inexplicable rite of passage.

And Remo felt a deep, helpless shame that his perfect body was being corrupted by this ancient demon.

He could not allow it to happen.

The snake slithered about his ankles once again. This time the demon within Remo anticipated the attack. He didn't fall.

While the inner presence was concentrating on the

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external pressure of the predator snake, Remo willed himself loose.

The thick hide wrapped around his chest.

Remo forced himself outward, pushing back to where his mind belonged. As he concentrated all his energy on a single, minuscule effort, he imagined sweat appearing on some internal brow. It was a small thing. But it would be proof that Remo was not totally helpless.

The snake pulled itself up around his neck and bobbed unsteadily in a gawking position a foot before the pale white face of its prey. A long flat tongue darted hungrily from its lipless mouth.

Remo pushed outward. Farther, farther.

The snake brought its alien snout closer. The huge coils below tightened.

With a phenomenal effort of will, Remo forced his index finger to twitch. The movement was quick and sharp. He felt the rough texture of the snake's hide against the pad of his finger.

He felt.

There was a flare of surprise from the presence within him.

Remo pushed again—hard. His hand twitched spas-tically. It rubbed along the interior of the coiled snake.

Something close to panic rose from the spirit of the Pythia within him. It was an inner remonstration. The Pythia had frittered away precious time when it should have first concentrated all of its efforts dispelling the last vestiges of consciousness from its latest vessel.

The rebirth was incomplete. To become the true Pythia, it had to kill the snake. And if the Pythia failed,

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Apollo could not assert his presence in the modern world.

Both hands moved freely now. The shoulders rolled in a shrugging motion, pushing the snake down farther.

The spirit of the Pythia had underestimated Sinanju. Underestimated its power because of the weak-minded Tang so many years before.

The Pythia had assumed that the Remo-vessel was as corruptible as the others. But his training in Sinanju had made Remo stronger.

It could not fail its master, not now. Not when it was so close.

The Pythia forced its will upon its vessel once more.

Remo's hands wrapped around the python's throat. The Pythia squeezed.

The thin, merciless reptilian mouth dropped open as the creature gulped helplessly for air. It thrashed its head, but could not prevail. The giant tail swung around defensively, looping around Remo's ankles.

Remo had had possession of his body only briefly. With a murderous lunge the demon within him had reasserted itself. It felt as if his spirit had been knocked backward into his own mind. Remo concentrated harder, trying to assert mastery over his own body once more.

As the life ebbed from its heavy, limp frame, the tail of the snake began twitching reflexively. It was dying. And Remo was the instrument of its death.

Remo suddenly felt the huge thing he had sensed on the other side of the bleak internal horizon loom into view. The thing was giant. It strode across the barren terrain of his thoughts like a colossus. It was

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nearly larger than his mind could conceive, greater than his consciousness could encompass. It was a vague mountain of pure evil. And it was moving toward him.

At that moment Remo realized that it would not be possible to defeat the thing within him in this place. He could quell it, stall it. But it could not be beaten.