Dhampire Read online

  * * *

  DHAMPIRE

  aka

  ANCESTRAL HUNGERS

  By

  Scott Baker

  * * *

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  * * *

  Chapter One

  ^ »

  "We'd been hoping you'd be able to give us a hand with the inspection," the chief customs officer said. He was thicknecked, overmuscular, about thirty-five: he reminded me of a wrestling and tennis coach I'd particularly hated at St. George's Academy. His assistant—taller, older, visibly nervous—was standing a little behind him, as far away from the unopened crates at the other end of the small cold room as possible.

  "Excellent," Alexandra said, giving him her Dragon Lady smile. Her features were beginning to take on that blue-gray blurriness, almost as though I were seeing them through a thin mist, that they sometimes had for me when I'd been too many days without sleep. "If we handle the snakes ourselves there's much less chance of an accident. And many of the snakes are too delicate to survive rough handling."

  "All the better, then. Did you bring all the equipment or whatever you're going to need with you?"

  "In this suitcase," I said.

  "Good. Then let's get it over with as fast as we can." He picked up a list. 'It says here you've got fifteen Columbian rattlesnakes, eleven fer-de-lance, two sea snakes, species unknown—" He glanced up. "Poisonous?"

  "Very," Alexandra said.

  "Ah. Then, an anaconda, seven eyelash vipers, one bush-master, nine emerald tree boas—"

  An unexpected piece of luck. "That should read four emerald tree boas," I said and he made the correction.

  "And three Columbian coral snakes."

  Which meant that the time had come to complicate things. I frowned, said, "There should also be a crate with a half dozen different kinds of small boas and some burrowing snakes in it."

  "It didn't arrive with the rest of your shipment."

  "You're sure?" Alexandra demanded. "You couldn't have misplaced it or something?"

  "I doubt it. You don't lose crates stamped 'DANGER!! POISONOUS SNAKES!!' in bright red letters. It's probably been bumped to the next flight. Are the snakes dangerous?"

  "No, not at all," Alexandra said, "but the burrowing snakes are very delicate. They can't take rough handling or cold and if somebody rerouted them to L.A. or San Jose by mistake—David, can you take care of things here without me while I go check with the airline, put a tracer on it or something?"

  Fuck. Not again. "I guess, if you're not gone too long. Do you have the ticket stubs?"

  "I should. Be back in a few minutes."

  I caught the chief inspector staring at her ass as she walked out the door. Which was only to be expected: Alexandra's idea of what the well-dressed lady snake handler wore consisted of cream-colored boots halfway up her thighs, skintight French jeans, an equally tight red top. Part of her Bread and Circuses theory of getting through customs.

  "Your wife's got lovely hair," the inspector said as soon as she'd closed the door behind her.

  "Very," I agreed. "Where do you want to start?"

  "What's in that crate there?"

  "Two sea snakes."

  "How are they packed?"

  "Separate cloth bags inside a larger insulated bag. If you'll give me a second to get ready I'll open the crate for you."

  "Please."

  I opened my suitcase, took out my folding fence and set it up: a ring a little over three feet in diameter, about two and a half feet high. I screwed the two parts of my snake stick together, took off my suit coat and put on my gray leather vest and long gloves.

  "Will that fence hold them in?"

  "No. At least not for long. But snakes aren't very smart, and if anything goes wrong it should take most of the smaller ones long enough to escape for the two of you to get out of the room. Put the crate in the ring and give me a pry bar and I'll get started."

  I took the boards off one side of the crate, lifted out the insulated bag.

  "They're both there?"

  "I think so. The bag's still sealed—" I ripped it open, carefully lifted out the two cloth bags, taking care to keep them away from my body and arms. "They're both here."

  "Good. Could you hand out the crate and the insulated bag?" He nodded to his assistant, who came up and took them from me, gingerly sorted through the Styrofoam chunks in the crate.

  The chief inspector picked up the insulated bag, examined it.

  "What's this foil lining for?"

  "Insulation, though I had to perforate it to keep the snakes from suffocating. Like those space blankets they use for arctic survival—you know the ones I mean? They sell them for camping now."

  "I've seen them. Can you open the cloth bags and pass them out to Jim? One at a time?"

  "Sure. Could you hand me some of the spare sacks from my suitcase? It's safer if I rebag the snakes as soon as possible."

  He examined the sacks, handed them in to me. I loosed the drawstrings on the first bag with the hook on the other end of my snake stick, waited until the sea snake poked its tiny rounded black and yellow head out, then snared it with the stick. It writhed feebly a bit, hardly protesting as I got it behind the head and dumped it in the other sack. I handed the empty sack to the assistant, who looked in it, shook his head.

  "Can you turn up the temperature in here?" I asked. "It's too cold for the snakes."

  "I'm sorry, but the thermostat's preset. An economy measure, to keep us from wasting energy."

  "Then let's hurry. I don't like the way that sea snake looked."

  "What's in that crate?"

  "Rattlesnakes."

  Only two of the snakes rattled when I lifted their cloth sacks from the insulated envelope and none of them tried to strike at me through the cloth. I had to push the first one with my snake stick to get it to leave the open bag; two of the others were dead, as was one of the coral snakes in the next crate.

  The emerald tree boas were all alive, as were the fer-de-lance, but they were all sluggish. Had any of the snakes been a little more active I might have hesitated to take the bushmaster out without Alexandra around to back me up if something went wrong—it was a magnificent speciman, almost thirteen feet long, with four-and-a-half-inch fangs—but as it was I had no trouble getting it behind the neck and immobilizing it before it could strike at me or damage its delicate neck with its struggles. Bushmasters are slender-bodied snakes, and even my thirteen-foot specimen was no heavier than a six-foot eastern diamondback rattles
nake, but I could feel it slowly coming alert as my body heat revived it and I was almost as relieved as the two inspectors when I had it safely back in its sack.

  Which left only the anaconda. And Alexandra still wasn't back. Which meant either that she'd locked herself in a toilet cubicle in one of the women's bathrooms or that she was gone altogether.

  "I'm going to need a lot of help with the anaconda," I said. "It's not poisonous but all anacondas are pretty evil-tempered and this one's nineteen feet long and close to three hundred pounds. We'll need at least another four men to help hold it while you check out the crate."

  Alexandra made her entrance while the chief inspector was telephoning. Her face was flushed and excited, even through the blurriness. "They claim they don't have any record of the shipment," she said. "So I called Richard and had him tell them that we were going to sue them for some enormous sum if they didn't produce the snakes alive and in good condition very soon. Are the rest of the snakes OK?"

  "We haven't gotten to the anaconda yet," I said. "Two of the rattlesnakes died, and so did one of the coral snakes, but I think the others are going to make it, at least if we can get them somewhere warm pretty soon."

  The anaconda was stout and ugly, a muddy olive green with black splotches. About ten feet behind its relatively small head the goat it had eaten in Bogota had produced a huge bulge, half again as big around as the snake's body. I was holding the head, Alexandra had it by the neck, and the four new customs men were holding its body while the chief inspector and his assistant went through the packing material in the crate.

  "Why's it all swollen like that?" the man holding it just behind the bulge asked.

  "It ate a goat a while before we shipped it," Alexandra said. "Snakes can dislocate their jaws to swallow things much bigger around than they are. They have to, since they mostly eat their prey alive and don't have any way to chew them up into smaller pieces. Their teeth aren't made for it."

  "Thanks." He didn't seem particularly pleased with the information.

  "That's one reason it's so sluggish," I said. "That and the cold. Otherwise it would be giving us a lot more trouble."

  "I'm afraid we're going to have to x-ray that snake," the chief inspector said when he'd finished going through everything else. "I want to examine that bulge."

  "It's a goat," I said. "We've got pictures of the snake eating it, if you want to look at them."

  "No thanks. Just put it back in its sack and we'll take it into the next room—"

  He stared at the x rays for a long time, finally admitted that the pictures showed the goat's skeleton, still partially intact, inside the anaconda.

  "Can you give us some help loading the truck?" I asked. "It's pretty hard to find porters who'll agree to handle crates full of poisonous snakes and a few of these crates are too large for Alexandra and me to handle, even with our dolly."

  "We're not supposed to," he said, "but after the cooperation you've shown us I don't see why not."

  The truck was a lemon-yellow Dodge van with the scarlet head of a cobra flanked by the words "BIG SUR SNAKE FARM" and "Specialists in venomous reptiles" painted on the sides. The little cobra in the glove compartment cage raised its head and spread its hood when I opened the side door.

  "All the other cages are empty," I said. "Just put the anaconda's crate about halfway up front and the rest of the crates behind it."

  Alexandra waited until we were on 101 South, then put on her gloves and took the vial of coke out from under the rock in the baby cobra's cage. She held the spoon to my nostrils four times before snorting any herself. The blue-gray vagueness began to dissipate. Another eight spoonfuls and it was gone altogether.

  She was smiling—white teeth, tanned skin, long soft blond hair—but behind the smile her jaw was knotted and ugly with the tensions that never left her, that ground her teeth together while she slept no matter how many sleeping pills she took, that turned on her and tried to destroy her the instant she stopped moving, stopped pushing, stopped striking out.

  But for the moment she was riding her tension, using it without attacking herself or striking out at me, and I welcomed the respite, the chance to go inside my head with only the coke for company, and play with my thoughts and hopes for a while.

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  « ^ »

  We made it back to the coast about two-thirty. The sky was black and gray and out over the Pacific you could see ball lightning but it hadn't started raining again. Alexandra got a stack of letters out of the mailbox while I unlocked the gate and drove the truck through.

  "There's another letter from your father," she said after I'd locked the gate again. "Marked 'Reply Urgent.' What do you want me to do with it?"

  "Save it till we get back to the cabin, then stick it in the fireplace and forget it. Like all the rest."

  I put the truck in low and started up the road. It was little more than an oversized jeep trail and the spring rains had left it in bad condition: I'd had to have special shocks and springs put in to keep all the bouncing and vibration from panicking the snakes I carried.

  "What about this? Somebody calling themselves CET-VER LABORATORIES in New Mexico wants five hundred dollars' worth of rattlesnake venom as soon as possible."

  "Excellent. I don't think we've got that much venom on hand but—how long's it been since we last milked the pit vipers?"

  "About three and a half months."

  "That should be long enough."

  "If John hasn't killed them all."

  "He said they were all doing OK when we talked to him on the phone last week."

  "When you talked to him. And that was last week. Anyway—David? Why don't I milk the rattlesnakes this time while you and John put away the new snakes? OK?"

  "You sure? It's my turn, remember?" Alexandra was as competent with the snakes as I was but she'd never learned to feel comfortable working with them and we both preferred to have me take care of them whenever possible.

  "Yes, but—a couple of things. The first is that I'd like to get the venom centrifuged tonight so we can send it off UPS tomorrow and you're going to be too busy with the other snakes to have the time to get it done."

  "What's the second?"

  "Something felt really wrong at the airport today. As soon as we get home I want you to get all the drugs and paraphernalia out of the house. Put them in the hollow log just off the property."

  "You think we're going to get raided?"

  "I'm sure of it. That customs man, the one in charge—it was like he was watching us through a one-way mirror. Studying us all the time, even at the end, when he should have been satisfied."

  "If you thought there was something wrong, there was something wrong. You don't make that kind of mistake."

  "No. Look, why don't you and John go swimming after you get the snakes in their cages, maybe smoke some mushroom spores and relax. You look tired. I'll join you when I'm done."

  Which meant that she wanted to make up for having deserted me at the airport without having to admit anything.

  We'd made it up out of the clouds, a gray-black plain stretching away to the western horizon behind us, and onto the ridge: sloping sunlit meadows filled with fuzzy blue lupin and vivid orange California poppies. A few minutes later and we were making our way down through the thick oak and madrone forest on the inland side. The sky overhead was cloudless but the trees blocked out most of the sunlight and little brown mushrooms grew in damp clusters by the sides of the road.

  John's Volkswagen was parked just outside our second gate. There was a painting in the back seat, hundreds of tiny black and white portraits against a violet, yellow and pink background that made the clustered faces look like the dark centers of pastel flowers. It was better than a lot of the stuff John had done—and I'd always liked his work—though it had that same uncomfortable amphetamine precision to it. I recognized some of the portraits, Alexandra's and mine among them. Most of the portraits were quite good—he'd gotten me
down perfectly, as far as I could tell—but he'd put Alexandra in the center of his canvas and then completely missed the tension in her expression, turning her into just another of those unmemorably pretty girls who work in health-food stores or as cocktail waitresses all up and down the coast.

  Or maybe not. I'd just noticed the four other portraits of Alexandra, one in each corner, all of them stark, grim and exquisitely rendered, when I heard John's voice.

  He hugged us both, then unlocked the car and took out the painting. He propped it up against the windshield, steadied it with his right hand.

  "Do you like it? I finished it four days ago."

  "Very much," Alexandra said.

  "You, David?"

  "It's beautiful. Maybe the best thing of yours I've seen so far."

  "Good, because it's for the two of you. A homecoming gift."

  John had brought the dolly up from the cabin. We loaded it with the crate of buzzing rattlesnakes and the bushmaster's crate, then started down the path to the herpetarium.

  I'd set up my herpetarium in a natural limestone cavern I'd discovered in the cliff behind the cabin soon after I inherited the property from my aunt. The entrance was low and you had to stoop to enter but about two feet past the mouth the cave opened up. The ceiling was high and for most of its fifty-foot length the cave was at least thirty feet wide. At the far end it narrowed suddenly, then ended in a wall of purplish red rock. An eight-inch fissure split the red rock from floor to ceiling, but though my flashlight had given me tantalizing glimpses of further caverns the red wall was at least two feet thick and there was no way I could break through it at present, though I'd had vague thoughts of someday renting a jackhammer or miner's drill.

  But for the moment I was well satisfied with what I had. The floor was almost perfectly level and I had as much space as I'd need for a long time to come. I'd installed fluorescent lights and tiers of heated snake cages along the walls, all running off the power generated by our water wheel, windmill, and small solar plant, while in the center of the chamber I'd placed some of the larger cages, the tank in which I'd originally housed my turtles but which I was planning to use for my sea snakes, and all the apparatus I needed for milking the poisonous snakes and preparing their venom for storage and shipment.