The November Editor's Pick Story is by
Gary L. Robbe
Please feel free to email Gary at:
grobbe53@gmail.com
TWO THOUSAND SNAKES
by Gary L. Robbe
He started counting snakes the minute he heard the scratch at the kitchen window downstairs. His bedroom door was closed; the room dark and mysterious, with just enough light seeping beneath the door for him to watch for ceiling snakes.
They came. Coiled, entwined, ready to move...thousands of them. In daylight hours they were water stains. At night, when it mattered, they were snakes.
Tony started looking in the corner by the dresser. Indistinct things—socks, pants, books, a baseball, a squeeze ball, even papers that were piled where his eyes first rested, all rose to the ceiling.
A triangular head was fitting itself nicely in the corner. A viper of some kind. The snakes touched out from there and he had to concentrate too carefully not to skip any or count one twice by mistake. Eleven. Twelve. Some snakes had two heads, depending how you looked at them. He counted those twice. Fourteen.
The sheets and sour blanket were pulled to his chin, left arm to his side, the other on his belly. He must have slept some, before the sound. Twenty-two. A snake with wings, or shedding. Twenty-six. He imagined intersecting lines. Twelve north-south. Twelve east-west. Quadrants. Twenty-nine snakes in quadrant one. Four tails, one partial head slipping into the next. He counted. He listened.
It was too warm to have the covers up but it was pressure. The weight felt good. The window was closed. When the wind kicked up, as it did tonight, it whistled faintly through the cracks. The window shade was a crumbly paper-thing; yellow in daylight, white against the moon when there was one. There was no moon tonight. Thirty-seven. Thirty- eight.
The scratch again. Same window downstairs.
It could be something outside, trying to get in.To Feed. Again.
Forty-seven. Stripes.
Another two head. Venomous. Forty-nine.
No, the scratching was coming from inside. It had been inside all along...downstairs, where mom and dad and older brother Tom used to be.
But what was there now wasn’t his family anymore.
The thing that scratched the window certainly could smell him in his room alone, so it scratched the window to let him know it was still there. Picked his smell over the raw wet stench that bubbled from spaces that should not exist, should be covered in earth and fallen decayed leaves and bottle flies the size of fists, and later the maggots…
Seventy-one. Quadrant two now done. Twenty-nine in one. Forty-two in two.
All the rooms upstairs were empty. When the wind died a little and he could hear better, he could make out the muffled ticks of Tom’s alarm clock through the wall. Pictured his brother’s empty bed. Tom’s covers rolled up like a turtle. Things moving that should not be moving.
Eighty. Eighty-one. There was a fat snake, swollen with its prey, too sluggish to move. Vulnerable. Quadrant three. Ten. Quadrant one, twenty nine. Quadrant two, forty two.
He clenched his fists. Felt the moisture squeezing out between his fingers. His hair against the pillow; wet, stuck in place...the pillow that smelled of sweat and drool and dried pieces that once crawled or flew.
Ninety-four. Ninety- five. Like a stick snapping that time! A sound of brittle bones. Again. Keep the eyes on the ceiling. Was the light brighter beneath the door now?
The ceiling clearer now. The ceiling washed with snakes, dancing snakes, camouflaged snakes, shades of snakes, and, closer to the door itself, just shade with hidden snakes. Too dark there. One hundred. One hundred one. Two. Three.
Voices. Static. Voices. Static.
Tony. Someone, something calling his name. No. Not calling to him. Using his name. Tony. Hush. Tony. Shh. Shhhh.
Shadows dropped down the walls. One of the snakes, a cloud on some nights when brushed by the moon, dropped to the floor.
Tony knew he could not leave his bed now, there was nowhere to go. Low voices carrying and the alarm clock ticks. One hundred twelve. Quadrant four. Thirty-one. The voice in his head that he knew was his still there, still counting.
Streaks of darkness wiping the snakes clean now and spacing them farther apart. One hundred thirteen, one hundred fourteen.
Whose voices did he hear? They were all dead. He knew that. Tom’s eye sockets felt empty and dry...one hundred sixteen, one hundred long, drawn-out seventeen.
He remembered Mom, torn to pieces. Something that could have been dad was stuffed into the fireplace with the ashes of last week’s fire catching what was able to still drip out.
One nineteen. Spiral. Mouth open.
Stay in your room. Stay in your room stay in your room stay in your room. Stay. In. Your. Room. Mom’s voice.
He remembered dad’s breathing, hard and flat against the thin walls. He was awake during all that.
Back to the corner. Where? One thirty-one. One thirty-two. Long, like a wand of spaghetti. Dinner three days ago. Dad busting the plate over mom’s head, not cooked right, sauce dripping from her blonde hair that brushed against her forehead. Shit, he said. One thirty-four. Shit.
Stick to the counting. Stay with the snakes. Fat copperhead, new quadrant, twenty-two for quadrant five.
Voices so far away yet here, in the house. A rustling. Something dragging on the floor in the next room, Tom’s room. But his brother Tom was there and he was dead and the dead don’t move. Snakes on the ceiling move. Shadows move.
The heating vent on the floor hissed. The house was not so quiet anymore. Tony strained to hear anything coming from Tom’s room or from downstairs. One thirty-seven. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine.
Some snakes were half eaten by the others. He still counted them. One snake was swinging loose, buffeted by the warm air from the vent, one-forty. Like it was flying. He hated, absolutely hated flying things, anything alive that flew, and it was a flying thing, he was sure. It got his mom then his dad, and had licked Tom’s eyes out while he was still in his bed dressed like a turtle. Sucked his tongue out and wrapped it around his neck. Tom couldn’t even bubble a sound.
One forty-two. Rocks pushed up from his stomach. There were already rocks in his mouth. Tony could not scream or call out; could only make a bottomless whistle like you get from cracks in window frames.
One forty-three, the headless, harmless snake. Stacked on another like a frenzied noodle. One forty-four. He felt the sour taste rise in his mouth and knew he couldn’t hold back the vomit coming up.
He heard the clock ticking, his mother dripping, hanging in the bathroom, her feet twisted about the shower head. Wetness began spreading between his legs. He crammed as much dusty blanket he could in his mouth to fight the bile taste, lost the ceiling when he closed his eyes the tightest squint ever, one forty-nine wanting out of quadrant five, bad.
The rumbling in his ears and then the dripping went away, and the rustling, the dragging sound, and he saw, clearly through the tear lenses, one fifty. Tumor tail. Coral.
Broken egg shells, some glistened like the moon; cracked as the bare light beneath the door rubbed across the wood floor, lapping up freely against the baseboards.
He watched the lights dance in terror, not daring to look at the door, to turn his head...to see if the door was any more open than it was earlier.
Of course it was coming. One sixty-one, stuck in the corner. Headlights on that one. Mother’s face turned away, bent upside down in the bathroom, drops of water, more eggshell pieces, too many to count and not enough time. Brother Tom was in his bed, only he wasn’t whispering breaths like he was before; now he was counting snakes for his life. One sixty-six. The deep copper stained one, frothy ambiguous mouth—there were subtle fangs in the froth so he always knew it was poisonous and would likely stay that way.
Tony! His mother’s voice, far far below, under the boards...an earth-filled voice.
Tony was wet and cold and the covers were tight but not tight enough. The voice again. Further this time, from some deeper place. Tony, come down here.
He thought he heard a growl. He let go of the blanket to cover his ears. Shut out all the noise.
His eyes stayed on the ceiling. The snakes were moving, colliding. Attract and repel.
Many were changing places. He was losing track. He was losing track…the sentence sped away from him, repeating with such a velocity that he froze his eyes on the copper snake, his landmark. He was losing track. It was coming.
He would never finish counting the snakes. Stay still.
Back to one sixty-six. One sixty-seven. Chunks of snakes. He counted each as a whole. They regenerate, don’t they?
Two-oh-two. Quadrant six. Sixty-eight filed away in quadrant five. Count all the way and count everything: the thing downstairs, the snakes, the remains of his family, hurry. If he counted them all, everything would disappear.
He might disappear as well, and that would be all right. Two-nineteen. Going faster. He could always go faster.
Tom could never keep up even though he was older. Tom stopped trying. Tony heard things just fine but he had been on a different frequency than his brother. He was on a different frequency than all of them. Maybe that protected him from the thing that tore all of them apart.
Maybe not.
Removing his hands from his ears, mom’s voice too deep now to hurt. Two-twenty-nine.
Footsteps. Something like footsteps, creaking up the stairs, heavy, slow. Tony fixed on the last snake in quadrant six, a chopped, striped, flamboyant specimen. If he took his eyes off it the thing, the monster, would be at his door. He closed his burning eyes. Monster. He would call it what it was. Were there more than monster? Did it matter?
The snakes. Trembling. Falling.
They were on the floor. They were on his bed.
He could feel the movement atop the covers. He screamed but there was nothing there, nothing left in him.
The only place to look was the ceiling. Trace back. Big snakes. Little snakes. Brown snakes. Green snakes. Black snakes, and snakes even blacker. Whole snakes. Chopped up snakes. Fat ones. Thin ones.
He jumped quadrants. Four hundred twenty-one. Four hundred thirty-five. His brain working extra fast, like it could.
Nails sliding down the door. The screeching sound cutting through him.
The ceiling shimmering, growing lighter. A thousand snakes, eyes soft-glowing embers. Four thirty-eight, four thirty-nine,four forty-three. All the snakes shaking.
A rap at the door. Don’t say a word. Don’t invite it in.
Four ninety-one, four ninety-two, four ninety three, four, five…how many snakes? One thousand? Two thousand? Say the numbers. Make them more alive.
He was not going to make it.
He could never make it. There were too many. Five twenty-seven, split wide, babies tumbling out, each counted in a blink, twenty-eight, nine, thirty, thirty-one,two, three, four. Tony whispering the numbers, seeing the words like road signs speeding past.
Light fading in. It was in his room. It stood over him and squeezed the bed down gently as it sat beside him. There was the stench of rotting flesh, and upturned earth, unfinished decay. He tried to move but couldn’t. He made his eyes tight and waited for the pain that would surely come, mom and dad and Tom and snakes everywhere but he couldn’t see them, couldn’t feel them anymore.
The monster’s breath was everywhere in the room. Tony opened his eyes. Focused on the ceiling. Had to count the snakes. He had to finish. “Five seventy-five, five seventy-six,” he said aloud.
The shadow-thing next to him traced a snake in blood along the folds of the sheet, its head tilted up, looking at the ceiling. It stayed that way a long time.
And then Tony heard the faint flutter of wings while he counted.
Gary L. Robbe lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he teaches high school students with autism and other related disorders. His favorite activities include writing, reading, running, traveling and hanging out with his beautiful wife.
He worked at a private psychiatric hospital in the 1970s (think a gothic version of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest), taught college on an Indian reservation, once lived in a haunted building (and was probably the only person who didn’t encounter a ghost there), and has taught special education for over thirty years.
He has studied and worked hard at the craft of fiction for quite some time. He has written numerous short stories, co-written several television screenplays, and has worked on a novel (off and on) for eight years. He has always been drawn toward speculative and dark fiction. Now that he is nearing retirement and his kids are grown, he is spending more of his time writing.