Марни Азарелли - Strange Girls - Women in Horror Anthology

She weaves between the men with sinuous grace, too quick to touch, brushing greedy hands aside and moving on like smoke through trees. The snake lies dormant over her shoulders, soothed, perhaps, by the heat of her skin, the occasional flick of its tongue all that betrays it as a living creature. Once every few steps her dance takes her closer to one of the seated men, and she fixes the lucky one with a calm amber gaze, running a finger down a chest or across a cheek. They laugh and curse and blush, this roomful of grown men, reduced to teenage boys floundering in the wake of her hypnotic progress.

The snake-girl feigns surprise to perfection when she stops in front of Sylvia. Surely she must have noticed her before, but then, perhaps in the dimly lit room the presence of another girl has gone unnoticed by her up until this moment. Sylvia feels the blood rush to her face, unable to tear her gaze from the deep golden eyes that are suddenly inches from her own. The smell of incense is overwhelming, and her head spins so violently that she wonders if she is about to faint. The dancer reaches a hand towards her, brushing the back of her warm, dry fingers down Sylvia’s cheek, lingering on lips, chin, the hollow of her throat, the lapel of Ritchie’s jacket where it sits over the curve of her breast. Sylvia is aware of the noise of her own breath, blood rushing quick in her ears. The dancer is silent, holding her in amber eyes like a butterfly pinned to a board—

And then the snake-girl is laughing, her hands around Richie’s neck, pulling him to his feet, dancing the pair of them up onto the stage. Richie, all red cheeks and grinning white teeth, is looking back over his shoulder, not at Sylvia but at the rest of the noisy, envious crowd. He waves triumphantly to them, and they whoop and curse and cheer and applaud as he is led across the sandy stage – this lucky one, their appointed representative, through the curtain, and away.

The music fades, and the soft lighting of the tent is replaced with a harsh electric glare. The tent’s flap opens, and the boy starts ushering the audience outside, cheerfully wishing them better luck next time. The crowd dissipates into a cloud of lust and frustration, and Sylvia is left standing with her face to the sealed-up canvas door.

Five minutes pass, and then ten. She considers wandering away, but she has nowhere better to be, no one else to be with, and more than that, she wonders what Richie will have to say on his return. The possibility is there that this event might be all that is needed to end things between them, although she is still not entirely sure how exactly she would feign the requisite level of outrage and betrayal. She could tell her parents, but she doubts their reaction would be anything more than an indulgent acceptance of the fact that “boys will be boys”.

The carnival is taking on its nocturnal plumage, and there are no longer children around her; instead, there are clusters of young men and women, courting couples, the occasional older man. Most of the activity seems concentrated around the Ferris wheel, and she watches it lurch into life, music and light streaming down to the ground below. It’s so loud that it takes her a while to notice that the snake-charming music has started again, although the Medusa tent is still pitch black.

She picks her way through the guy ropes round to the back of the tent, noting the skip and scratch of the gramophone needle as she goes. Something is moving in the light behind the tent, shapes dancing on the canvas wall opposite, but the shadow play is formless, without meaning. She can hear quick, grunting breaths, a noise she recognizes as Richie’s. She creeps forward, fascinated, repulsed and suddenly eager to learn what exactly is occurring in the little space behind the tent.

Cast in the light of a single lantern, Richie on the ground. At first it seems he is wrapped in heavy rope and for one wild moment she wonders if she has stumbled upon a kidnapping—and then the rope moves, and she realizes that he is held in the coils of an enormous green-gold serpent, one easily twice the size of the snake the girl had carried in the show. The grunts she had heard are his shallow, desperate attempts to breathe.

The coils shift and tighten, and Richie lets out a breathless, panicky squeal. He jerks his head back, desperately trying to loosen the crushing grip that holds him, and the movement brings her into his line of sight. His face twists with recognition and a surge of obvious relief.

“Sylvia—” he manages. “Help—”

Richie is not the only one to notice her. The huge snake lifts its head and fixes her with two huge amber eyes, deep, wide and lucent. Sylvia realizes, with no real idea of why this understanding is suddenly so firmly in her mind, that they are the eyes of the dancing girl on the stage, the one who had touched her skin with such delicate precision. The eyes, even looking as they are from the face of a monstrous reptile, wear that same inscrutable look of curiosity, mixed with a faint and gentle pity.

He is still trying to scream, she realizes, but the thrashing of his head and neck does nothing to slacken the coils around him. His lips form her name again, but the snake has him so tight that all he manages is a voiceless wheeze.

The snake holds still, despite all Richie’s struggling, the amber eyes calm, serene and questioning, and Sylvia knows, as surely as she knows her own name, that she need only tell the snake—the girl—to stop, to tell her “no,” and she will release Richie and all this will be over. She opens her lips, tongue pressed behind her teeth, ready to articulate the syllable.

Just say no.

But the word doesn’t come.

The snake waits with reptilian patience for a reply, but eventually, when none is forthcoming, the coils tighten again. Richie’s mouth gapes open, his face red, eyes bulging with panic. He tries to scream, but instead, a series of wet snaps like breaking green wood emanate from his mouth as one rib breaks after another. His thrashing intensifies, then subsides, and then ceases. The snake lowers the slack-limbed marionette that he has become to the ground and brings her massive, heart-shaped head into alignment with his. Sylvia watches the snake unhinge her jaw, slide the open edges of her mouth over the crown of Richie’s head, and begin the languorous process of ingesting her meal. Sylvia thinks of Richie’s tongue pushing into her mouth, his weight pressing her to the ground, the insistent and unwelcome push of his flesh into hers. Unsure if the thought makes her want to laugh or scream, she presses her hands across her mouth and in the end does neither.

It takes fully ten minutes before Richie is quite gone, the only sign of his existence the long elephant bulge in the snake’s side as she lies there, tumescent and satisfied. The forked tongue flicks out, tasting the air experimentally. Sylvia smells sandalwood, cinnamon, burned sugar.

Later, she’ll say that Richie left the tent with the dancing girl; that she waited for him, and when he didn’t return she assumed he’d gone on alone. Rehearsing the words inside her head, she navigates through the guy ropes, the benches and the crowds, back to the entrance where her mother is waiting.

“Did you have a good time?” her mother asks.

Sylvia takes a moment to consider.

“No,” she says, and folds the memory of two golden eyes beside her heart like a love letter.

Jude Reidlives in Glasgow and writes in the narrow gaps between her day job, chasing her kids and trying to wear out a border collie. Presently she writes for Tales From The Aletheian Society and Novitero Podcast, studies ITF Tae Kwon Do and drinks a powerful load of coffee. You can find some of her work at www.hunterhoose.co.uk.