Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

The strangeness of the cobra—regal, upright, solitary, swaying irritably with the jolting of his crate—did not occur to Hely; he was aware of nothing except the odd unpleasant slide of its weight from side to side, and of the need to keep his hand well back from the screen. Grimly, they pushed it up to the back door, which Harriet unlocked and opened wide. Then, together, they picked up the box and carried it lengthwise between them down the outside staircase (the cobra knocked off balance, thrashing and lashing with a dry, enraged violence) and set it on the ground.

It was dark now. The streetlamps were on and porch lights shone from across the street. Light-headed, too afraid even to look at the box, such was the hateful delirium of thumps from within, they kicked it up beneath the house.

The night breeze was chilly. Harriet’s arms prickled with sharp little goose bumps. Upstairs—around the corner, out of sight—the screen door blew open against the railing and then banged shut. “Hang on,” Hely said. He rose from his half-squatting posture and darted up the stairs again. With trembling, slack-fingered hands, he fumbled with the knob, groping for the lock. His hands were sticky with perspiration; a strange, dreamlike lightness had overtaken him and the dark, shoreless world billowed all around him, as if he were perched high in the rigging of some nightmare pirate ship, tossing and swaying, the night wind sweeping across the high seas….

Hurry , he said to himself, hurry up and let’s get out of here but his hands weren’t working right, they slipped and slid uselessly on the doorknob like they weren’t even his….

From below, a strangled cry from Harriet, so astonished with fright and despair that it choked off partway through.

“Harriet?” he called, into the uncertain silence that followed. His voice sounded flat and oddly casual. Then, the next instant, he heard car tires on gravel. Headlights swept grandly into the back yard. Whenever Hely thought about this night in the years to come, the picture that came to him most vividly was for some reason always this: the stiff, yellowed grass flooded in the sudden glare of car lights; scattered weed-spires—Johnson grass, beggar’s-lice—trembling and illumined harshly….

Before he had time to think, or even breathe, high beams cut to low: pop. Pop again: and the grass went dark. Then a car door opened and what sounded like half a dozen heavy pairs of boots were tramping up the staircase.

Hely panicked. Later, he would wonder that he hadn’t thrown himself off the landing in his fright, and broken a leg or possibly his neck, but in the terror of those heavy footfalls he could think of nothing except the preacher, that scarred face coming toward him in the dark, and the only place to run was back into the apartment.

He darted inside; and in the dim, his heart sank. Card table, folding chairs, ice chest: where to hide? He ran into the back room, stubbing his toe against a dynamite crate (which responded with an angry whack and a tch tch tch of rattles), and instantly realized his terrible mistake but it was too late. The front door creaked. Did I even shut it ? he thought, with a sickening crawl of fear.

Silence, the longest of Hely’s life. After what seemed like forever there was the slight click of a key turning in a lock, then twice again, rapidly.

“What’s the matter,” said a cracked male voice, “didn’t it catch?”

The light snapped on in the next room. In the flag of light from the doorway, Hely saw that he was trapped: no cover, no escape. Apart from the snakes, the room was virtually empty: newspapers, tool chest, a hand-painted signboard propped against one wall ( With the Good Lord’s Help: Upholding the Protestant Religion and all Civil Laws …) and, in the far corner, a vinyl beanbag chair. In an agony of haste (they could see him just by glancing through the open door) he slipped through the dynamite crates towards the beanbag.

Another click: “Yep, there it goes,” said the cracked voice, indistinctly, as Hely dropped to his knees and squirmed under the bean-bag, as best as he could, pulling the bulk of it on top of him.

More talking, which he could not now hear. The bean-bag was heavy; he was facing away from the door, his legs curled tight beneath him. The carpet smashed against his right cheek smelled like sweaty socks. Then—to his horror—the overhead light came on.

What were they saying? He tried to make himself as small as he could. As he couldn’t move, he had no choice—unless he closed his eyes—except to stare at five or six snakes moving inside a gaudy, side-screened box two feet from his nose. As Hely stared at them, half-hypnotized, his muscles locked with terror, one little snake trickled away from the others and crawled halfway up the screen. The hollow of his throat was white, and his belly-scales ran in long, horizontal plates, the chalky tan of calamine lotion.

Too late—as sometimes happened when he caught himself gawking at the spaghetti-sauce guts of some animal squashed on the highway—Hely shut his eyes. Black circles on orange—the light’s afterburn, thrown into negative—drifted up from the bottom of his vision, one after another, like bubbles in a fish tank, growing fainter and fainter as they rose and vanished….

Vibrations in the floor: footsteps. The steps paused; and then another set, heavier, and quicker, tramped in and stopped abruptly.

What if my shoe is poking out ? thought Hely, with a near uncontrollable sizzle of horror.

Everything stopped. The steps reversed themselves a pace or two. More muffled talking. It seemed to him as if one set of feet went to the window, paced fitfully, then retreated. How many different voices there were, he could not tell, but one voice rose distinct from the rest: garbled, singsong, like the game that he and Harriet sometimes played at the swimming pool where they took turns saying sentences underwater and tried to figure out what the other person was saying. At the same time he was aware of a quiet scritch scritch scritch coming from the snake box, a noise so faint that he thought he must be imagining it. He opened his eyes. In the narrow strip between beanbag and smelly carpet, he found himself staring sideways at eight pale inches of snake-belly, resting weirdly against the screen of the box opposite. Like the livery tip of some sea-creature’s tentacle, blindly it oscillated back and forth, like a windshield wiper … scratching itself, Hely realized, with horrified fascination, scritch … scritch … scritch ….

Off snapped the overhead lights, unexpectedly. The footsteps and the voices retreated.

Scritch … scritch … scritch … scritch … scritch …

Hely—rigid, his palms pressed between his knees—stared out hopelessly into the dim. The snake’s belly was still visible, just barely, through the screen. What if he had to spend the night here? Helplessly, his thoughts skittered and bumped around in such a wild confusion that he felt sick. Remember your exits , he told himself; that was what his Health workbook said to do in case of fire or emergency, but he had not been paying very good attention and the exits he did remember were of absolutely no use: back door, inaccessible … inside staircase, padlocked by the Mormons … bathroom window—yes, that was possible—though coming in had been hard enough, never mind trying to squeeze out again unheard, and in the dark….

For the first time, he remembered Harriet. Where was she? He tried to think what he would do if their positions were reversed. Would she have the sense to run get someone? In any other circumstances Hely would sooner have her pour hot coals down his back than call his dad, but now—short of death—he saw no alternative. Balding, soft around the middle, Hely’s father was neither large nor imposing; if anything, he was slightly below the average height but his years as a high-school administrator had given him a gaze which was Authority itself, and a stony manner of stretching out his silences at which even grown men faltered.