The hood he had just put over her was already damp on the side from her tears. She had only gotten that one quick look at him in the sudden light. Sunglasses. Cap. And a scarf around his face. He could be anybody, but she named him Dead Gopher Man because his breath was awful. She’d first noticed it when he carried her from her room to the front door of her house, the way he held her head right under his chin. At first she thought he was Daddy, but she realized quick he wasn’t. Daddy wasn’t that rough, that much in a hurry, and his breath didn’t smell like the dead gopher they’d found in the corner of the playground at school. Daddy wouldn’t wake her from sleep by wrapping a piece of tape around her face. Daddy didn’t have one giant bright eye shining at her from his forehead.
She opened her eyes inside the hood but saw only darkness. She closed them and the darkness got darker. She could hear him across the room, talking quietly to someone.
Like it? I thought you would. See, I can get them to like me any time I want. They see me like Collie and Valee saw me. Like you never did. Oh, fuck you, bitch, and stay where you belong.
Brittany decided again that this was just a bad dream. And, like any other bad dream, she could get out of it by shaking her head real fast, squishing her eyes shut real hard and screaming real loud. And when you screamed you shook your whole body as hard as you could and that’s how you broke out of a bad dream. When you opened your eyes again, you were out of it. It worked. It worked when Finger Man was chasing her and she couldn’t run. It worked when Slow Man came up at her from under the bed. It worked when she was falling. She called it Dream Busting. You just closed your eyes and shook hard, and when you opened your eyes again you had busted out.
She took a deep breath through her nose.
She closed her eyes as hard as she could.
She screamed against the tape, but the scream stayed inside her throat and sounded against the inside of her ears.
She shook her whole body as hard as she could.
She shook it some more.
What are you doing, you little idiot?
She shook it even more than that.
It’s having a fit. What shall we do about that, Mom?
His mom is here?
Brittany gave her body one last supreme shake — head to toe and everything in between. Then she opened her eyes.
She saw only the darkness and felt the stifling closeness of the hood.
Her sobs pulsed down in her neck and she could hear them with the inside of her ears instead of the outside. She could feel the wet part of the hood higher on her cheek now because it had moved when she shook. The open spot that let in the air was still down by her nose, but she could see a little light now. She could feel the new tears running down toward the tape. When she cranked her eyeballs all the way down she could see through a real small slit in the open part: a red bedspread.
Don’t go full convulsive. Everything’s cool. Just lie there and get used to your habitat.
His voice was kind of high, like it was coming through his nose. It was a dull voice. It sounded like he was talking to someone he didn’t believe was there, or maybe talking in a dream.
Better now?
She lay still and listened to the hiss of breath coming in and out of her nose. She strained her eyeballs down and saw the sliver of red bedspread. She smelled the bed she was lying on — someone else’s, an old person’s bed — and she closed her eyes again.
Somehow, Brittany thought, if you saved up and concentrated real hard and did it just right, the Dream Busting might work — even if you weren’t dreaming. You could just burst your way out of one place and into another. I’m going to do that, soon as I stop crying. Soon as I stop crying. Soon as I stop crying.
He opened a can of ravioli, dumped it into a pan and turned the gas up high. He filled a tumbler with ice and poured it three-quarters full of tequila, the rest with water. Predation made him hungry and thirsty. He was in the little guest house kitchen, but he could look through the doorway to the cage room and see the bed and Item #3 upon it and the tripods with his gear attached, aimed down. It was a feisty one. The way it would shake and try to scream, then stop and lie still, as if it were trying to break out of a nightmare. Maybe it was, he thought. He thought about what he might describe to the Midnight Ramblers in the chat room. You had to be careful, but you also wanted to let them know what a good thing you’d had.
When the ravioli was hot he got a spoon and picked up the pan by the handle and went back into the living room with it. He brought the highball, too. He sat in the overstuffed chair — the old floral thing with his mother’s matching arm protectors still on it — and looked at Item #3 on the bed, then past the bed to Mike’s huge glass tank.
He admired the tank and its construction. Twenty-seven feet long, seven high and seven deep. It intruded well into the room. Hypok could walk around in it, no problem, so long as he stayed alert. Full-spectrum light and heat lamps ran behind the bars on top, and underneath the gravel stratum on the cage floor were electric heat elements. The left one-third of it was a deep pool with a running waterfall. In the middle was a pile of big flat rocks overhung by the trunk and branches of a big orange tree he’d trimmed to fit. The right section of the cage was taken up by a child’s playhouse. Hypok sometimes thought of the tank as a separate world, with its own air, light and water, its own shelter — all created by him.
The playhouse looked something like a Victorian dollhouse, with a gabled roof and shingles and even a spire. It was a remarkably sturdy little house, strong enough for kids to climb in and out of the door and windows. It was purchased for Hypok’s sisters when he was five, and they had loved the thing. His mother had forced him to play with them in it — not as “Father,” which he’d wanted to be, or even “Brother,” but “Baby” or “Jeannie” like the girl’s name, or sometimes “Little Sister #3.” It had stayed behind when his sisters outgrew it, and Hypok had brought it here — to stately old-town Tustin — when he moved himself and his mother into more appropriate quarters.
Moloch was piled high inside the playhouse, with his head — about the length and width of a phone book — poking out near the top of the door. Moloch got curious when Hypok was in the room because it usually meant food. You wouldn’t really see him move inside the house, unless you were watching hard. That’s the way it was with big snakes — they didn’t locomote so much as simply adjust One second you’d look through the playhouse door and see two huge inert green coils lying atop each other, still as mossy logs, then the next time you looked his head would be there and he’d be eyeing you. Like now. Hypok could see his big silver eye with the black vertical slash of a pupil through it, and the heavy black tongue going patiently in and out of his closed mouth. Moloch — Eunectes murinus — his beloved anaconda from Paraguay, was close to thirty feet long now, and Hypok guessed his weight at a rather obese five hundred pounds. Realistically, though, how do you weigh such a thing?
Item #3 burst into another fit on the bed but Hypok ignored it. Was it epileptic? Whatever. He drank down the tequila — still warm — then went back to the kitchen for another couple of inches and some fresh ice.
When he came back to his chair he was reflecting upon, for the thousandth time, what a miracle it was that the snake was even alive. Yes, his own mother had tried to kill it when it was just a newborn, hardly twenty-four inches long, by spraying it every morning with bug killer. He was eleven when he bought the reptile, from a friend. He had long been sleeping in the “den” of the house, a miserable, windowless little room that Wanda locked him in during the night. This, due to some curious explorations on the part of Collette and Valeen, starting when he was four. The snake’s cage was in his “room,” and his mother would slide the outside deadbolt early, come in, check to see if Genie — her nickname for Gene — was asleep. And if she was convinced he was — he was great at faking it and lifting one eyelid from the depths of his pillow — she’d produce from the big pocket of her housecoat a red can of roach killer, slide open the cage top and shoot the poor thing right in the face with it. This went on for almost a week, until Hypok had gotten a small padlock and hidden the key. Moloch — he was named Mike, back then — had quit eating, lost his skin in little patches and generally grown depressed. Hypok’s own skin had started turning bad about that time, and he attributed both of their sufferings to the roach spray, but he was more worried about the snake than about himself. He thought the little anaconda would die. But slowly Mike got strong again, then he started growing extra fast. Hypok believed then, and still did now, that the roach killer had actually boosted Mike’s growth rate. A short two years later he was four feet long and taking large rats. Now he was high twenties, at least! The Brooklyn Zoo had just acquired a reticulated python that measured twenty-three, and that had made the news. So much for Mom and her stupid fucking hateful ideas on things. Even twenty-two years ago, as Hypok faked sleep and watched his tiny, wretched, perpetually drunken mother spray his snake, he had imagined how great it would be if Mike could just get big enough to eat her someday. Any woman who tried to turn her boy into a girl, then treated him like a criminal when it didn’t work, deserved what she got, in Hypok’s opinion. And the more he thought about it, the angrier he got.