It's dead, it can't hurt you. He steeled himself, called on every bit of logic he could muster in a mind filled with the human revulsion for reptiles, bent forward and stretched out a hand; make sure you don't touch the head.
It wasn't slimy, sort of dry and rough to the touch, a limp thing that might have been a perished length of garden hose. Coils of it, he could not even hazard a guess at its length as he dragged it out of the barley, wondered how long it would take him to reach the village. As soon as he came to the road he would drop his burden, leave it there for some other bugger to fetch.
Gun in one hand, a loop of snake in the other, he set off. His progress was not easy, the corn seeming deliberately to obstruct his passage; once he tripped on a stone and almost fell, cursed profusely.
And then, without warning, the pain hit him, blinding agony that began in the calf of his right leg and travelled up his body, had him arching his back, staggering. Screaming. It was as though every vein were filled with burning acid, his limbs stretched to breaking point, a fiery haze shimmering before his eyes like an electric storm lighting up the night. He dropped the dead snake. It fucking well wasn't dead after all! Oh, Jesus God, it's bitten me!
His brain could not grasp the situation. A lifeless half-coiled reptile thudded to the ground and in its place was a live vicious serpent, a multi-coloured assailant that thrashed and struck, a berserk attacker in the falling darkness, striking, falling back, striking again; pursuing his shambling movements, hissing its fury.
Peter Eversham still had the gun, an unfired cartridge in the left barrel. He tried to bring it round to bear on the snaking shadow but it was too close. Between his flailing feet, wicked fangs darting upwards. His abdomen seemed to contract then expand, airborne with the force of the pain, pulling that trigger in a last gesture of defiance.
He heard the report somewhere beyond the roaring in his agonised brain, the noise receding, rolling away into the distance. Falling.
He braced himself as the ground came up to meet him, frothing through clenched teeth, wide-eyed and sightless. Rolling. Now prone, aware of a constant movement, a sharp needle that injected him repeatedly until his nerves were numbed and he felt no more. Trying to piece everything together but the fragmented logic eluded him. A dead snake, so how could it have bitten him? It was dead all right, he'd seen it, felt it. It didn't make sense. Cynthia ... she wasn't around anywhere, was she? Or Doyle, the gardener? If Doyle was around then why was the garden in such a fucking mess, all overgrown like this?
Then not thinking, lying there stupefied, oblivious to his pain and his injuries, sprawled across the shot-blasted corpse of a coral snake whilst its mate was trying to reach it.
The live snake's anger had subsided, its killing fury gone as quickly as it had come. Now its agitation was caused by grief, a disbelief that its mate was dead, unable to understand. Rubbing itself on the mutilated body, desperately trying to revive it. Failing.
Peter Eversham's head fell back and the cigarette which had adhered to his lower lip was dislodged, rolling and bouncing away in a shower of sparks, coming to rest against a barley stalk; fizzing, the green growth smouldering, giving off a pungent wisp of smoke that had the bereaved coral snake backing off in alarm.
The sparks were fanned by the faint night breeze, burst into a little yellow flame that almost failed, grew again and licked out at the next piece of undergrowth. Catching again. Spreading; the dead man's clothes singed, ignited, gave off a stench of roasting human flesh. Death and instant cremation.
The surviving snake fled terror-stricken before the advancing flames, its mate forgotten, the strongest instinct of the wild taking over, one that had been passed on to it by its mother in a far-off land across the Atlantic. Survival.
Only after that would its thoughts return to revenge.
Chapter 9
JOHN PRICE had remained in the bungalow after they had taken Aunt Elsie's body away simply because he had nowhere else to go. A little voice inside his head whispered, 'It's your bungalow now, John. You know very well she's left it to you in her will. Quite a nice little nest-egg for you.' Shut up, I'm not interested.
Oh God, what a damnable thing to happen. And he couldn't even hate the escaped snakes for it because it was nothing to do with them, would have happened anyway. Elsie Harrison had left the back door ajar, an inquisitive grass snake had found its way in, and as a result she had suffered a heart attack. What bloody rotten luck!
He knew he would stay on in Stainforth, maybe for quite some time because now he had a home here even if he did not have work. For the moment he had a job; oh yes, help us find these snakes before anybody else gets killed. Now a western diamondback rattler had been shot in the village and that was going to scare an awful lot of people. Up on the moors, even on the grassy slopes, was another world, near enough to be interesting but when a rattler turned up in the village itself then folks really began to mess their pants.
John made himself a cup of coffee, knew he had a lot of thinking to do. Somehow he and the rest of the police and army searchers had got it all wrong. They had settled for the obvious, the most wild and desolate place. OK, the rattler could just be one that had stayed behindor two, because there was a pair of them according to the inventory. So there was certainly another one not too far away. He found himself glancing around the kitchen; you're getting jumpy, John Price.
He had just sipped his coffee when he heard the first fire engine go by; a few seconds later another followed in its wake. More traffic, a police car.
John Price opened the door and that was when he smelled the smoke, life-stifling fumes, choking, burning vegetation. The sky was aglow, a deep smoky red, activity everywhere. His eyes smarted; it was surely a heath or woodland fire and this was the last thing they needed in Stainforth with killer snakes on the loose. So much for tomorrow's carefully laid plans; anything could happen now.
He closed the door, went outside. Wherever the fire was the smoke could well drive the reptiles out from their hiding places, disperse them in all directions.
And infuriate them.
Being a single parent in a village like Stainforth was both a source of embarrassment and bitterness as Barbara Brown knew only too well. Tall and lanky, she was 'not bad-looking' as most of the youths in Stainforth agreed, but she wasn't the sort of girl you could get worked up over. Some boasted of having 'had her' after youth club, others kept quiet about it. 'Respectable' parents worried about their sons associating with her, to some she was just a joke, 'the village boot' as they referred to her.
But in reality Barbara was no local whore, merely an unfortunate and misunderstood girl who craved affection and could not find it. She had been desperate for a steady boyfriend from the time she reached fifteen and she had grossly misunderstood the attentions of the teenage boys at youth club; she genuinely thought that when one of them slipped his arm through hers and led her up behind the ramshackle Nissen hut that had served as a youth club since the war ended, it was because he felt for her, loved her. It took her a long time to cotton on to the fact that all the rough element of the local male population were interested in was their own pleasure. And that was how it was for three years, hopes built and dashed, and no chance of a permanent relationship.
Barbara's father had walked out on her mother when Barbara was eleven; he had an affair with a woman in the next town, and he left home to go and five with her. Betty Brown did not seem to care as long as she had enough money to buy forty fags a day; every evening she went down to the pub and usually got-air the free booze she wanted there. Barbara remembered the time her mother brought a boyfriend home. Bill was several years older than her and unemployed, and he used to stop overnight on occasions, sharing Betty's bed. Eventually he moved in permanently.