Movement. Rhythm. Touch. Loretta asleep at his feet. Back to Missouri and the warm humid nights, back to the smells of his sisters around him, the room that somehow retained the smell of bacon and gardenias, back to the knowledge that his body was growing into feelings he already possessed, that he was soon going to experience them as he was born to. So close so many times, almost there, almost to the brink, almost to... what was it... release? An explosion of some kind? Undulate. Then back to the farmhouse in Arkansas and the terrible days of Ernie Mears and his mother locking him in the storm cellar for “things” undone with Valeen and Collette, for the neighbors’ rabbits he stole from the hutch and strangled, for just about anything at all that would keep him locked away while they drank and yelled and mounted each other all over the house like animals, actually found them once on the kitchen floor with the soup boiling over and Ernie’s overalls down around his boots and Wanda on all fours with her face glazed toward the window, reaching for her beer on the floor beside her. Then, onto better days for sure, those back in Hopkin when he began to truly know himself and what could happen if he could only arrange things correctly, and he discovered with Item #1 just how to direct the scene to excite and satisfy himself, how the pageant needed to be acted, how the final tableaux he had photographed with the cheapie Kodak burned in his mind like an eternal coal until he could muster his wit and stamina enough to begin the whole production again. Puxico. Fordyce. Hopkin. Tustin. Point to point, memory to memory, past to present and back again, all tied up into one. He clicked the digital camera again, capturing the present for the future.
Undulate. Closer.
Girl smell. Girl warmth. Girl touch. Contact.
“Nmm-nmm-NMM!
“No? Are you sure? Collette’s getting a what from the bathroom?”
Then the sudden flash of light outside the windows and the sudden realization of what he had heard but not heard in his excitement — the faint overhead drone of an airborne machine coming closer, going past... coming back again?
Loretta stood on the edge of the bed and whined.
Then the light was gone and Hypok lay frozen.
Listen. Undulate. Listen.
But even with the windows closed against the cooling spring night he heard that machine coming closer again, sneaking through the night as if he were too stupid to notice something that rucking obvious; he was sure of it now, the faint, fast botta-botta-botta of blades in air and he rose from the bed and parted the blinds enough to see the lighted craft settling to earth somewhere on the street behind his.
Up with the zipper.
Although Crotalus horridus can be a ferocious foe, he will gladly flee if given an opportunity.
He let go of the blind, went to the bed, lifted Item #4 and took it around to the side of Moloch’s world. Moloch watched him. He stripped the hood off it, men opened the door, unslung the struggling thing from his shoulder and dumped it in. He fetched Loretta from the bed and threw her in, too. Then he slammed the cage door shut and locked it with the key he kept hanging on a nail by the cage and dropped the key down the toilet and flushed it
Finally, he got his .44 magnum from under the bed, opened the front door, locked it behind him before slamming it, then he slipped around to the side of the guest unit, up the fire ladder he’d installed there for just such an occasion, onto the roof and into the dark sturdy branches of the sycamore tree through which he climbed onto the rose fancier’s roof, then down to the lowest part of it before he dropped to the ground and began weaving through the backyards of the houses over fences and hedges with the dogs barking but it didn’t matter, he was light afoot and armored in his fresh skin, in possession of a lethal fang, not so much immune to the night as a part of it.
Let them try to find me.
We jumped the wall at 8:02 P.M. There was a light on in the guest house. One of the deputies shone his flashlight beam against the door as I ran up the stairs onto the porch, took three short steps and lowered my shoulder. It took one more charge to break the thing open and I flew through its unresisting swing, rolling to the floor and up with my .45 out front and my finger finding the trigger, Johnny and Frances beside me in a heartbeat, all three of us screaming and my nerves fried.
When I burst into the back room I could hardly believe what I saw. A glass cage took up the whole wall. There was a snake in it almost as big around as a man, too long to even guess at. Part of it was looped around and over a dollhouse. The other part was spilled out to the cage bottom and coiled around a little girl. Her head and neck and shoulders stuck out from the rolls of muscle at a strange angle, like she was rigid. A hand protruded from between two massive coils. Her mouth was taped shut but she looked through the glass at me with huge dark eyes. Her face was pale purple. I couldn’t tell if she was alive. The snake had its mouth over her shoes and ankles, about halfway to her knees.
“God in heaven,” said Frances.
“Mother of Jesus,” said Johnny.
The girl blinked.
“You bastard!” screamed Frances. She knelt and emptied her 9 mm into the glass. All the bullets did was punch little holes through it and knock puffs of dust off the drywall behind it.
“Door’s fucking locked.!” yelled Johnny.
I zipped up my jacket halfway, held the left side over my head and jumped through the glass. I think I bounced off the tree inside. I landed in gravel, on my back, my legs up. I righted myself and stripped the jacket back. The snake had already disgorged the girl’s feet and his head was about two feet off the ground, his tongue loping out ahead of him as he moved toward me. I shot him between the eyes. His head dipped like someone had slapped it. Then he rose up palebellied above me and I could see the jagged exit hole in his jaw. I shot him twice more, up through the bottom of his head. He writhed higher, coils loosening on the girl and his green body twisting to expose the plated yellow stomach. His mouth gaped. I stepped under the head and tugged on the girl, with the pistol still ready in my right hand. The huge reptile body rolled away from her — green revolving into yellow, then into green again — and I lifted the girl up and out and hugged her against me. Something small and brown fell to the ground but I couldn’t see what. I looked to Frances, waiting just outside the shard-toothed hole I’d made, her arms reaching through.
“Give her to me, Terry. Here!”
I’m not sure why I didn’t. Why I couldn’t. It was like I wasn’t supposed to, like she was mine and there wasn’t anywhere in the world she could be safer than in my arms. And though I’d had that thought before in my life and been wrong, some things are born into a man and you can overrule them but you can never make them go away.
“Terry! Give her over!”
I stood there for just a moment in the ocean of twisting scales, with the girl held tight to my chest, then I passed her into Frances’s waiting arms. She was light, and loose as a beach towel.
Johnny helped me through to the other side. I looked back and saw a small dog scratching up against the glass, trying to reach the hole I’d made. Johnny reached in and scooped it out.
Two paramedics rushed through the doorway, then ran to Frances. One of the deputies charged in right behind them with his shotgun lowered and I thought for a second he was going to blow everyone there to smithereens. “House is empty, sir. Grounds, too. There’s nobody here but us.”
“He’s in the neighborhood,” I said. “Everybody door to door.”
“You’re bleeding,” said Johnny, and when I looked down at myself I could see the slick red soaking my shirt and pants. I felt like I’d been punched in the ribs. In fact, I felt great because I knew I’d just done a good thing, whether the girl made it through or not. I felt lucky.