Gillian Anderson - The Sound of Seas

Perhaps they were rooted in Galderkhaan.

Ben pushed aside the woman’s obduracy, watched her with fresh eyes. Madame Langlois’s shaking subsided; she was slipping into some kind of relaxed trance yet the hand itself seemed to be floating, like a cork in water, the fingers moving in unison as if guided by an outside source. He saw the shadow they cast on the area rug but suddenly noticed the angle of the shadow relative to the fingers was increasing, somehow. It was as if the shadow were hooked like one of the curves on Madame Langlois’s skirt, the base of the finger pointing straight ahead, the tip crooked toward one of the rooms.

Toward Jacob’s room.

Anita noticed it too. “Ben!” she said in a loud, insistent whisper. “I don’t care about the academic value of this. You’ve got to stop it.” The shadow grew longer and Anita’s breathing came faster.

“Enok, tell me what’s happening or we must intervene,” Ben said.

“Stop her and the snake will move freely among us,” the man warned stoically.

“What?”

“We do not want that, I think,” Enok said quietly.

“How do you know that will happen?” Ben demanded.

“I have seen it,” he replied. There was respect for the process in his voice, if not in his expression.

Either Enok was correct or Anita and Ben were sharing a delusion. The shadow began to wriggle though Madame Langlois’s fingers remained steady. It was not Ben’s imagination, it was not a hallucination, and from Anita’s frightened expression, she was realizing that as well. The darkness of the serpentine shadow seemed to deepen, obscuring what was beneath it, as they watched it crawl along the rug. And there was something else within it: what looked to Ben like glitter, only it was something transitory. There were tiny facets that appeared and reappeared in roughly the same places, the same relationship one to the other as the shadow moved.

With a back-and-forth motion, the head of the serpent pulled the rest of the body toward the hallway, to where Anita had solidly placed herself.

“Get it away,” she warned, choking on the sentence as she spread her arms and legs.

“It will not hurt you,” Enok said.

“It’s not me I’m worried about,” Anita said, her eyes fastened on the shape.

“It will hurt no one,” he insisted.

“How do you know?” Ben asked.

“That is not its way,” Enok replied.

“More double-talk,” Anita said. “If you don’t make her stop, I will!”

“Let it play out a little longer,” Ben said. “We can always take Jacob and go.”

“Can we?” she asked.

“It’s not solid, Anita,” Ben pointed out. “It doesn’t appear to be noxious.”

“It looks radioactive!” she said.

“That’s not likely,” Ben said. “Anita, please… this is happening for a reason.”

The serpent expanded, thickened, seemed to take on size but not substance; it was like thick smoke with curling eddies of darkness becoming visible within. The tiny fireflies sparked and faded within as the inner clouds moved. Otherwise without features, the snake moved from the rug to the hardwood floor, writhed just feet from Anita where it suddenly stopped. It was almost as if the outer shape had suddenly frozen, while the turmoil and lights continued within. Ben began to walk toward Anita, slowly, around the shape, not sure what he was going to do. He stopped as the black snake rose like a cobra, turning toward him. Its head floated higher, bobbing from side to side until it reached the level of his eyes. A few moments after Ben stopped, the shape turned back toward Anita and moved forward, trailing neither glitter nor making a ripple on the floor. There was terror in the wide set of the woman’s mouth but she did not scream. She placed her hands hard against the frame of the hallway entrance, set her legs, and had no intention of moving.

The shadow came right up to her, face-to-face, but it did not advance. It puffed even wider, as though pressed from within, its circumference increasing.

As the dead, flat head of the thing continued to hover before Anita, Ben heard Jacob moaning in his room. Anita heard him too.

“Goddamnit, get him now !” she said.

“You go,” Ben said, edging around the serpent and taking her place. If it moved, he intended to walk through it, waving his arms in an attempt to disperse it. But the shape just remained there.

Anita turned and moved quickly down the hall, her footsteps on the hardwood floor the only sound in the apartment. Even the cat, Arfa, was missing, cowed by the serpent.

Staring at the thing just inches away, Ben could swear he saw coil-like shapes moving within it, but they were indistinct, like images only visible from the corner of the eye, vanishing when looked at directly. They were hypnotic, wormlike and writhing. But they were not like maggots feeding on a carcass; they were a dark, tightly coiled network from which the serpent seemed to be made. That must be what the madame had meant by “they.” He saw now that where the coils touched, the sparks appeared.

Ben looked at the featureless head, studied the tiny whorls nearest to him. Each one seemed to grow as the snake inflated and then there were smaller snakes inside those other snakes, on and on, deeper into the black pall—

He heard a thumping sound from behind.

“Anita?”

“Shhh!” she said. “Come.”

Ben backed slowly from the serpent. Jacob’s door was the first on his right, Caitlin’s room beyond it. The bathroom was across the hall. He edged backward but the serpent didn’t advance. He didn’t think it was because his eyes were locked on the thing; it had to be something else.

When he reached the bedroom door, Ben saw Jacob standing on the bed, amid the strewn pages of his Captain Nemo comic book. He was facing the wall between his room and Caitlin’s. The boy was sobbing and drumming on the wall with the heel of his palm.

“Mom…” he wept softly. “Mom…”

Anita shook her head hard, as if to say don’t wake him . She hovered nearby, her arms open to catch him in case he fell backward. Whether it was a nightmare or night terrors, Ben left that up to the therapist. He turned from Anita back to the serpent.

It filled the entrance to the hallway but did not approach. It undulated slightly, diffusing the sun but not dimming it: the serpent seemed to have a nimbus, an amber glow as ephemeral as the snaking shape itself. It reminded him then of Wadjet, the Egyptian snake goddess whose images he had come across while researching the Galderkhaani language in ancient hieroglyphics.

Ben stole a quick look back into the bedroom, saw Jacob standing very still now. Then he turned back to the hallway—

The snake was gone. Clean, healthy morning light once more filled the room, illuminating the familiar, creating normal, comforting shadows behind the sofa and under the table. It was as though the apparition had never been.

With a small exhalation, Jacob collapsed to the bed. Anita caught him, lowered him to the mattress, and knelt quickly at his side. She took his pulse, listened to his breathing.

“Call for an ambulance,” she said as she felt his forehead.

“Does he have a high fever?”

“No, but you just saw what he did—”

“His mother said he does this, knocks on the wall in his sleep,” Ben said.

“His mother’s not here and I didn’t bring my medical bag,” Anita said. “Call or get my damn phone and I—”

“No!” a voice burst from the hallway.

Madame Langlois was standing at the entrance where the serpent had been. Enok was beside her, holding her elbow. They were silhouetted by the light, but it struck her necklace in a way that made the beads seem uncommonly bright.