Serpent's Kiss (14 page)

    Chris had never been sure exactly why people wanted the autograph of a local TV reporter, but she was modest enough to be flattered and so she was always most agreeable about putting pen to paper.

    "What's her name?"

    "Eve."

    "Pretty name."

    So she wrote a nice little inscription to Eve, signed it, and handed the pad back. "Here you go."

    "Thanks. And I wasn't kidding about the drinks being on the house. They are."

    When they were alone once again, Chris said to the Lindstrom woman, "I'm really sorry."

    "Actually, it's sort of fascinating. Do you go through all this very often?"

    Chris smiled. "Just enough to keep me off balance."

    "I'd be off balance, too."

    Chris said, "But we're here to talk about you, not me."

    The Lindstrom woman leaned forward. "There's a man I want you to meet."

    "Oh!"

    "Yes. He's waiting for us at an apartment house."

    "Will we leave right away?"

    "No," Emily Lindstrom said. "He's going to be there for a while."

    "Oh?"

    "Yes. He's handcuffed to the bedpost."

    And right then, Chris Holland thought:
Maybe she isn't a garden variety lunatic.

    But she sure is a lunatic of some kind.

    So Chris sat there and sipped her drink and learned all about the man handcuffed to the bedpost with the giant serpent iri his belly.

    

    

    He wasn't sure when it happened. It just happened, too subtie to quantify in any way, some process utterly mysterious.

    Handcuffed to the bed, head dangling in an almost sleepy way, an image of his daughter filling his mind (a rowboat on a scummy but not unpretty pond; lily pads the colour of frog bellies parting as the stem of the rowboat gently parted them; and Cindy's laugh; God, Cindy's laugh).

    And then his head came up abruptly and he thought no more of his daughter.

    He started yanking on the handcuffs.

    He thought of freedom and of what he would do with that freedom.

    The girl: Marie Fane.

    The snake shifted in his innards now, and he felt that crazy upside down nausea again.

    Marie Fane.

    He was so singular of purpose now.

    He had an erection but he scarcely noticed.

    He thought only of working himself free.

    He searched frantically for any tool or implement that would help him escape.

    The only thing that looked marginally useful was a pink plastic hairbrush on the edge of the bureau.

    But what was he going to do with the hairbrush? Pry the cuffs free with it?

    He was being silly.

    And then he began to growl, no melodramatic transformation to hairy wolf or silken vampire, just a low vibration in his chest and larynx, like a dog at the exact moment it senses danger.

    And then he began to tear more ferociously at his metal bonds, up on his feet now, and jerking at them with single-minded viciousness.

    In no time at all, he was lifting the bed from the floor. It made a clattering sound as it rose, then fell; rose, then fell.

    He tore himself so savagely from the bedpost that the cuff ripped deep into his wrist, hot metallic smelling blood spreading through the matted black hair on his arm.

    But he hadn't snapped the cuff. That would take even more strength and he wondered if he'd ever have it.

    He bit his lip so he wouldn't cry out.

    The bed was already making too much noise. He couldn't afford to attract any attention. Not if he wanted to get out of here.

    He knew that he had, at most, one or two chances left. Somebody was bound to call the police if he kept banging away at the bed.

    He crouched down, trying to get better leverage on the bedpost.

    He closed his eyes, trying to focus all his energy on the handcuffs.

    Just the right amount of pressure and-

    And then he felt the snake inside him shift again.

    Oddly, this time there was no sense of nausea.

    Indeed, if anything, he felt stronger, tougher than ever.

    He bent forward a few inches, prepared himself mentally for the struggle with the bed, and then started counting backward from ten.

    Ten… Nine… Eight… Seven… Six… Five…

    (
I've got to fucking do it this time
.)

    Four… Three… Two… One…

    He jerked the handcuffs so hard that he not only lifted the entire bed off the floor but smashed it directly into the wall as well.

    From upstairs, the floor erupted with pounding and a Mexican voice shouted something about
fuckin' stop it man or I'm callin' the police.

    He fell to the floor in terrible pain.

    He had put so much pressure on the wrist that it now felt broken.

    He got up on his haunches, holding his wrist tenderly, tears rolling down his cheeks, just rocking back and forth.

    Twenty minutes went by.

    He stopped crying, but his wrist didn't feel any better.

    And then he was ready again.

    He had to get out of here before Emily Lindstrom got back.

    So he prepared himself once more.

    This time, almost as if for luck, he lay the palm of his free hand flat against his belly and felt the snake coil and uncoil inside.

    Once again, he felt younger, stronger, tougher.

    He stood up.

    This time, he put his foot against the brace that ran across the bottom of the front post.

    His weight would hold the bed down while he pulled. He should have thought of this before.

    And then he heard her voice: Emily.

    In the hallway.

    
Goddamn.
He hadn't expected her so soon.

    He turned his attention fully to the bed now. Concentrated. Foot against the brace. Painful wrist ready to be tugged on again.

    Five… Four… Three…

    (Emily closer now. "It's right down here.")

    Two… One…

    The pain was blinding.

    He could scarcely stop himself from screaming.

    He heard and felt rather than saw-the pain kept him blind- the cuff snap away from the bedpost.

    And then he was free.

    
If you could call it that.

    
Marie Fane.

    She was all he could think of.

    He ran to the window.

    (Emily with her key in the door now, saying to somebody: "Something's wrong in there.")

    And then opening the window and diving through it to the chill but grassy ground below.
Free, goddammit, free.

    He took off running.

    

    

    He put his face down near the sink and spent the next two minutes splashing himself with cold water.

    He needed to be revived, brought out of his stupor. He was having the thoughts he hated to have and he needed to do something about them.

    Then somebody was there: "Walter?"

    "Yeah."

    "Phone. It's Holland."

    "Okay. Thanks."

    Before going out, O'Sullivan picked up the can of Lysol air freshener (pine scent this time around) and sprayed the one-stall john that was just off the news studio. He'd got very uptight about the aroma of his stools since management (ever the trendy ones) had turned the news studio johns unisex. He didn't mind if men knew he'd had Mexican food for lunch, but women were a different matter entirely.

    The newsroom had virtually shut down. The early evening news over with, most reporters had scurried away to meet spouses and lovers. Ordinarily, unless there was a critical breaking news story, everybody took an hour and a half for dinner and then came back to grind out the ten o'clock edition.

    A lone light flickered on the phone buttons. O'Sullivan picked up.

    And spent the next fifteen minutes listening.

    He knew that the Lindstrom woman who Holland described was sitting right next to her so he didn't say anything sarcastic. He just said, "I'd be real leery of this story, Holland."

    "We don't know where Dobyns went."

    "Why don't you call the police?"

    "We have."

    "Have you looked for a Marie Fane in the phone book?"

    "Of course."

    "And nothing?"

    "Nothing. There are seven Fanes. None of the six who answered were or knew of a Marie Fane."

    "I wish I could help you." O'Sullivan had visions of the small Italian joint around the corner. A little table in the rear with the cliche red-and-white-checkered tablecloth in the back and a green wine bottle with candle drippings running down the neck and a small steady candle glow lighting the really sweet face of Chris Holland across from him. That's how he wanted to spend his break. Not chasing down some stupid story that more properly belonged to the
National Enquirer
.

    "You can help me, Walter."

    "Oh, shit. Here we go."

    "There's a janitor."

    "A janitor." He couldn't help being sarcastic. At least this one time.

    "Yes, Walter. A janitor."

    "What about him?"

    "Emily talked to him on several occasions. He worked at Hastings House for forty years before he retired. He knows what's going on there. Dobyns may have contacted him. He may know something about this Marie Fane. Could you go talk to him?"

    "I thought we were going to have dinner."

    ''We'll have dinner afterward."

    "Afterward. Right."

    "You want his address?"

    "Whose address?"

    "The janitor's address. God, Walter, you're supposed to be a news director."

    "Yeah. A hungry one."

    "Here's his name and address." So she gave it to him.

    Reluctantly, he wrote it down.

    "We're going to keep trying to find Marie Fane," Chris said.

    "I can't believe you're buying all this."

    "I'm not. Not entirely, anyway. But it's a lot more interesting than
On the Town
."

    He sighed. "Yeah, I suppose that's true." He paused. "Holland, I was going to put the moves on you again tonight."

    "Really?"

    "Really."

    "I thought we'd kind of given up on that."

    "Well, no harm in trying again."

    "I'd like that, Walter."

    "I thought I'd buy you some pasta and a nice salad-"

    "Come on, Walter. We've got work to do."

    "Thanks for reminding me."

    "Please go see the janitor. All right?"

    "All right."

    He hung up.

    When he turned around and faced the deserted newsroom, he realised how lonely he felt most of the time. Cynical as he was about human nature, he needed other people around him.

    Especially one person in particular named Chris Holland.

    He hadn't been kidding about putting the moves on her. Who said a romance couldn't grow out of a friendship? He was already reading about just such relationships in all the magazines (
Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping
) that the women were leaving in the unisex john.

    He was still hoping that someday somebody would leave new copies of
Baseball Digest
and
Sports Illustrated
in there as well.

    Resigning himself to the fact that dinner tonight was going to be at the McDonald's drive-up window, he tugged on his unlined London Fog and went out the back door to the parking lot.

    

    

    She had long been a believer in premonitions, Kathleen Fane had.

    One day in second grade she'd stared over at the boy across the aisle from her-Bobby Bannock by name-and saw a strange light encircling his head. Years later, she would come to know this curious configuration of sculptured neon as an 'aura' but on that long-ago day all she knew was that the light-even though she had nothing to compare it to-bespoke something terrible that was soon to happen to Bobby Bannock.

    Sister Mary Carmelita had caught her staring at Bobby and had harshly chastised Kathleen for doing so. Sister Mary Carmelita did not much approve of girls and boys interacting, even on so harmless a level as staring.

    Blushing, Kathleen had sat up straight in her desk and looked at the blackboard where the nun had just finished writing the words 'Christopher Columbus.'

    She did not look at Bobby the rest of the day, not even at recess when she usually sat beneath a shade tree daintily eating the crisp red autumn apple her mother always poked into the pocket of her blue buttoned sweater.

    Three days later, just after school, just at the corner that so many parents complained about, Bobby was struck by a black Ford and killed. One little girl actually saw Bobby's head strike the pavement and heard his skull crack. A little boy insisted that he'd actually seen Bobby's brains ooze out through that crack.

    Ever since, Kathleen had felt in some way responsible for Bobby's death. Even if he'd laughed at her-he had usually laughed at most things she'd said-she should have warned him, told him about the strange light around his head and what it portended.

    She stood now at the dusk window watching the walk below. In three and a half hours, her daughter Marie would be walking up those stairs, on her way back from the bookstore and what amounted to her first date. The autumn sky-salmon pink and grey streaked with yellow now at evening-struggled to give birth to night.