Dhampire Page 2

  The rattlesnakes were happy enough to be out of their bags and into their cages but the bushmaster coiled and struck at the glass whenever I came near. I finally covered its cage with a tarp to keep it from hurting its nose.

  John went back up to the truck for another crate while I checked the snakes he'd been taking care of.

  "They all look healthy," I told him when he returned with the sea snakes. "You didn't have any problems?"

  "Not really. The green mamba refused to eat the first two months and I was afraid I'd have to try to force-feed it but I finally got it to take a mouse."

  "Excellent. And thanks. I can give you half an ounce of coke now but we'll have to wait until the anaconda finishes digesting the goat to get the rest. You should have seen us trying to shove the goat down the snake's throat. And for that matter it was pretty grim getting the five kilos of coke into the dead goat."

  "No problems getting through customs?"

  "Nothing overt, but Alexandra thinks they're still suspicious. I'm getting everything off the property as soon as I've got the sea snakes in their tank. Do you have anything with you here they could bust us for?"

  "Nothing I don't have a script for."

  The sea snakes were as graceful underwater as they were clumsy on land. John watched them swimming back and forth investigating their tank for a while, then went back up for more snakes while I hid the drugs. When I got back Alexandra was standing at the milking table holding a squirming five-foot western diamondback and massaging its poison glands to get more venom into the beaker on the table.

  "Are you sure you chilled that snake long enough?" I asked, making sure I didn't startle her. "It looks pretty active."

  "Probably not," she admitted, making a face, "but it's too late to do anything about it now. I'll keep the others chilled a bit longer. But I think we're going to run short. Is it all right if I milk some of the South American rattlers?"

  "No, the venom's not quite the same. If you want I can go try to catch some new snakes as soon as I'm done unloading. With any luck we'll have a half dozen or so in the woodpile."

  "No, wait till tomorrow morning. I might be able to get just barely enough."

  John and I saved the crate with the anaconda in it for last. Alexandra took a break between snakes to help us get it onto the dolly and down to the herpetarium. It glided listlessly around its new cage for a while, then coiled up in a corner.

  "Ugly," John said.

  "Mean too. You still want to go swimming? I rolled a joint with some freeze-dried spores in it while I was hiding the rest of our stuff."

  "Sure. Nothing would please me more, as a matter of fact. What with the painting and cleaning up my mess and getting your truck to the airport for you and all I haven't had any sun for at least a week."

  * * *

  Chapter Three

  « ^ »

  For a while after we smoked the psilocybin everything was gentle luminosity, an inexhaustible succession of drifting silences. Neither John nor I spoke. When the rocks got too hot for me I'd dive in, angling deep, and chase the small trout in the pool through a few zigs and zags before they darted away from me, then come up under the waterfall until my head was just beneath the surface and I was lost in the icy-white dazzle that was the waterfall exploding into foam where it hit the surface of the pool.

  It was perfect: peace at last after the months of cocaine and tension. When I felt myself starting to come down I wandered out into the woods to look at the mushrooms and wildflowers and wash the scent of pine sap through my lungs.

  John joined me after a while. With his beard and hair he looked like some small woodland animal—a chipmunk or woodchuck, maybe, or perhaps some sort of small bear that ate nothing but pinecones and berries.

  "David, why do you like snakes so much?" he asked me after a while, and because he was a friend and he trusted me I tried to tell him.

  "It's because—it's complicated. Look, one of my ancestors was a man named Vlad Dracul. His son was the historical Dracula. 'Dracula' means 'Son of Dracul.' OK? Anyway at home they always told me that 'Dracul' meant 'Devil' in Romanian but when I went away to school I learned that it really meant 'Dragon.' Because King Sigismund made Vlad Dracul a member of the Order of the Dragon. And where my family came from people thought of dragons as winged snakes and thought that even normal snakes could protect you against evil and"—I don't know. I can't explain it any better than that."

  Talking about my past had given it the reality I always tried to deny it. I'd grown up in Illinois, in a dark silent house more like a medieval castle than a conventional rich man's home. I was told my mother had died when I was two; I'd never known her and my father never mentioned her. He was a cold, closed man, immensely rich, with no time for my brother Michael or myself; as soon as we were old enough we were sent away to St. George's Romanian Academy (named after the Russian, and not the English, St. George, for reasons that were never really clear to me).

  From the academy Michael had gone first to Yale and then on to Harvard Business School; I, two years later, to Stanford for a year, then to Berkeley for a semester, after which I dropped out and drifted around for a number of years—San Francisco, Boston, Florida, and Mexico, where I'd met Alexandra—before my Aunt Judith, the only member of my family I'd ever loved, committed suicide and left me her property in Big Sur.

  "Was Dracula really a vampire?" John asked, which was so stupid that it ruined what little chance I might have had of getting my head back where I wanted it.

  "No. He got a reputation as a bloodthirsty monster because he killed something between fifty and a hundred thousand people, mainly by impaling them. That's all." I was tired, too tired; there was a dry scraping behind my eyes and my jaw muscles ached. I needed Alexandra.

  I remembered our first day together here in the woods, remembered grabbing a projecting rock and pulling myself up out of the water, my whole body tingling, feeling newly awak-ened, newly alive, as the warm dry breeze and late-spring sun began to steal the water from my back and shoulders.

  Alexandra was lying on her back, her legs slightly spread, her tanned body glistening with sweat and cocoanut oil. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling, totally relaxed for the first time since we'd met. She looked very young and innocent, almost gentle, and that was the first time I'd ever seen her look that way.

  I stood over her and let the cold water drip from my outstretched hands onto her body. She started and opened her eyes, staring wildly up at me an instant before she recognized me, her eyes wide and deep and intensely black. Then some of the tension went out of her and she smiled at me, a relieved, inviting smile.

  She spread her legs and I knelt between them on the smooth white stone. I ran my hands up the insides of her oil-covered thighs and over her slippery stomach to her breasts, then down again between her legs. She took my still-cold, still-soft cock in her hands and held it between them, rubbing gently until her warmth passed into it and it grew hard. I rested my elbows on the rocks and she guided me into her.

  Later we'd swum for a while, holding each other beneath the waterfall until our lungs were bursting, then returned to the rocks and the sun to make love again.

  "John? I think I need to be alone with Alexandra for a while. We haven't slept for a couple of days and it's getting to me. Do you mind just heading back to your car without stopping by to say good-bye to her? You can come by again tomorrow afternoon, maybe about five."

  "Sure. No problem. You look like you could use some sleep."

  We walked back to the cabin together without saying anything. I shook his hand, thanked him again for what he'd done for us, then made my way back to the herpetarium.

  I bent low to enter the cave, straightened:.

  Saw Alexandra lying dead or unconscious on the floor, her right arm swollen huge and purple. And on her chest, coiled, its head raised and swaying like a cobra's as it tasted the air with its tongue and vibrated its rough scaled tail in warning against the bright fabric of her t
op, the bushmaster.

  I grabbed a long snake stick and tried to get the snake to move away from her but it avoided my clumsy attempts with a contemptuous intelligence I had never before seen in a snake, struck at me whenever I got too close. It was guarding Alexandra's body like a jackal with its prey and that was impossible, something no snake would ever do.

  And I couldn't get to her, couldn't even get close enough to her to find out if she was still alive. If she was still alive there was a chance I could save her by cutting open the wound and draining the poison from it while giving her a shot of the right antivenin but with every instant the chances of saving her grew slimmer.

  If she was still alive, if there was any chance at all. And I couldn't get past the bushmaster.

  At last I gave up, retreated, hoping somehow that now it would begin to act like a normal snake and attempt to escape. It stayed where it was, head raised, watching me, its tongue flickering in and out of its mouth. Guarding her body.

  I couldn't tell if she was still breathing. Her arm had swollen to almost twice its normal size; she hadn't moved since I'd first seen her. I hung back, watching her for any sign of life, trying to think of a way to get the snake away from her.

  The fluorescent lights flickered. Alexandra's skin was steaming, misting: she was evaporating, dissolving into a blue-gray fog that thickened and spread, hid her from me. I could see shapes forming in the fog, things moving with a horrible liquidity that made me think of rotting flesh melting from disintegrating bone, of maggots swarming in the empty eye sockets of not-yet-dead birds…

  The cloud was a door opening into red-lit shadow where obscenely mutilated figures danced and capered and coupled around a gigantic man-goat who stood fondling an erect cock like a great legless centipede. I could smell the faraway sweetness of rotting flesh. The chill shadows reached for me, wrapped themselves around me as the black flames in the man-goat's eyes drew me to him through the thickening dark—

  The bushmaster: I could hear its rough scales, impossibly loud, rasping the limestone floor as it glided towards me through the shadow. I wrenched myself free of the goat-man's eyes, turned and stumbled out of the cave.

  Just outside two men in gray suits grabbed me.

  "Federal narcotics agents," the one holding my right arm told me. "You're under arrest. We have a warrant to search your house and grounds and it's our duty to tell you that you have a right to remain silent and that anything you say may be held against you."

  I began to laugh, couldn't make myself stop.

  "What's in the cave?" the other agent asked.

  "A snake. It just bit my wife and she's dead and it's coiled on top of her guarding her and I can't get her away from it because—"

  "Because what?"

  I started to cough, choked. "She's in there."

  The agent holding my right arm nodded and the other one stooped down, started into the cave.

  "Watch it, Mark," the one still holding me yelled after him. "There might really be a poisonous snake in there."

  Mark came out a few minutes later. "He was telling the truth," he said. "There's a dead woman on the floor in the back."

  "Any sign of the snake?"

  "Yeah. It got away through a crack in the wall. It was a fucking monster, sort of pink and black."

  "Alexandra's dead?" I asked him. The agent holding me. let go of my arm.

  "Yes. I'm sorry. Do you want to take a look at her? The snake's gone."

  I nodded and they escorted me back into the cave. But when I looked down at her body, at her frozen contorted face and dry staring eyes I felt nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  * * *

  Chapter Four

  « ^ »

  The agent who'd found Alexandras body phoned Salinas to report her death, then sat across the kitchen table with me while his partner and the six other agents who'd accompanied them searched the cabin and herpetarium.

  There was a leather-bound manuscript, one of the grimoires from my aunt's collection, lying open on the table: Alexandra must have been glancing at it while she waited for John and me to get out of her way so she could start work with the snakes. She'd been after me to sell the collection for a long time.

  The agent picked it up, started to leaf through it. I recognized it as The Grimoire of Honorius the Great, considered for centuries as the most diabolical of all sorcerer's manuals because it contained a forged papal bull demanding that all Catholic priests add the summoning and control of demons to their sacerdotal functions. Not being a Catholic priest myself, I hadn't found the book very diabolical, or even very interesting.

  "Is this in Latin?" the agent asked.

  "Yes."

  "What is it?"

  "A grimoire. Means grammar. Supposedly written by Pope Honorius III."

  "Oh. I see." He looked at the other books and manuscripts in the glass-fronted case against the far wall. "You collect books?'

  "My aunt did. I inherited them from her when she died."

  "I see." He carefully closed the book, put it back on the table. "I'm sorry about your wife."

  "It's not your fault." Around us the other agents on his team were sifting through bags of flour and cutting open pieces of soap, checking for things taped to the backs of drawers and making sure nothing was hidden in the float tank of the toilet. All they found were our bottles of prescription drugs, in plain sight on the kitchen counter, and those they left where they found them—proof, I suppose, that they were going out of their way to be no harder on me than the minimal performance of their duties required, since the more normal procedure would have been to confiscate everything for laboratory analysis.

  I watched them without interest, and if through some fluke they'd chanced across the drugs in the hollow log I don't think I'd have been greatly disturbed. I felt nothing, no grief for Alexandra, no curiosity about the blue-gray cloud and the things I'd seen in it, only a thirst that glass after glass of water did nothing to satisfy, that scraped the backs of my eyeballs raw and made my skin itch intolerably.

  The agent in charge saw me scratching myself and came to the conclusion that I was going through withdrawal. He checked my arms for tracks, then made me strip naked so he could check the insides of my legs. Finding nothing—I'd never been into shooting things, or using heavy opiates in any way whatsoever, for that matter—he let me put my clothes back on.

  When the coroner's deputy arrived with the men from the mortuary the agent sitting with me was glad to surrender me to him.

  The deputy was delighted with Alexandra. I watched him prodding and pinching her swollen and discolored arm, probing the two large puncture wounds with his fingers.

  "You said she was milking your rattlesnakes for their poison when you left her to go swimming with your friend?" He couldn't keep his eyes off her.

  "Yes."

  "And you don't think that was a strange thing to do?"

  "No. We always worked like that."

  "Ah. But she was killed by that South American snake, that bushmaster. The one that got away. Was she trying to milk it too?"

  "No. The venom's too different."

  "But the snake couldn't have escaped from its cage and attacked her on its own?"

  "No."

  "Then either she took it from its cage herself despite the fact that there was no reason for her to do so, or somebody else let it out and then closed its cage afterwards. Is that right?"

  "I guess."

  "And you can't think of anything she might have wanted to do with the snake, or anyone else who might have opened its cage, or any way in which the snake might have escaped on its own?"

  "No. I'm sorry."

  He questioned me for perhaps another hour, then surrendered me back into the custody of the narcotics agents, who in turn booked me into the Salinas jail on suspicion of possession of narcotics with intent to sell while they waited for morning to search the field and woods.

  I filled out the forms I was given (David Pharoh Bathory, twe
nty-nine years old, five foot eleven, hair and beard brown, eyes green, no distinguishing marks or scars, no previous record) and let them fingerprint and photograph me, then fell asleep in the booking cell.

  When they awakened me the next morning they told me I was free to go. It didn't seem very important. I hitched a ride to a friend's house in Monterey and he drove me the rest of the way back to my cabin.

  There was a note on the door from John, telling me to call him as soon as I got back. I called him.

  "How are you doing, David?"

  "OK, I guess."

  "You don't need any help?"

  "I don't think so, but thanks."

  "You don't even care, do you? She's dead and you don't even care."

  I was suddenly angry. "What are you trying to tell me, John? That she'd still be alive if I'd cared for her just a bit more? That it's my fault she's dead?"

  He hung up on me. Over the last few years I'd watched him falling more and more hopelessly in love with Alexandra. But we'd both been his friends and he had a strong sense of honor where his friends were concerned: he'd said nothing to either of us, done his best to keep his feelings concealed. I owed it to him to call back and apologize.

  "Just promise me you'll tell me when her funeral is, David? Just promise."

  I promised, and three days later stood next to him holding him by the arm as they lowered the coffin into the ground and began shoveling dirt in on top of it. He was smiling to himself, so loaded on some combination of psychedelics and animal tranquilizers he could barely stand.

  "That's not really her," he whispered. "She's not really dead. She'll come back and when she comes back she'll be in love with me. I know she will, David. I know she will."