The Gargoyle Read Online Free PDF Page A

double or triple your income by acting in videos. Besides, who doesn’t want to be a movie star? Each shoot took, at most, a couple of days; more often, simply a few hours. That’s good money for an eighteen-year-old with no skills and, as simple as that, my career in pornography had started.
     
II.
     
    L ight spread across the insides of my eyelids and I awoke to the snake slowly swimming up my spinal cord, swallowing it with her disjointed jaw. There was the flick flick flick of her tongue as she hissed, I AM COMING AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT . The voice was feminine—this is how I knew it was a she—and her tongue tickled each vertebra as she searched her way towards the top of my spine. When she reached it, she licked at the undersocket of my skull, and then twisted a few times to let me know that she’d nestled in. Her scales chafed my internal organs and my liver was bruised by her casually wandering tail.
    I was lying upon an air flotation bed that reduced friction and facilitated healing; my bandages lightly fluttered in the upward draft. On each side of the bed was a railing, painted white like bleached bones, so that I could not fall, or force myself, out. I soon named this bed the skeleton’s belly and I lay in the wind that rushed through its rib cage, while its very bones prevented me from wandering off to find a new graveyard.
    I was off the ventilator but there were still enough tubes sticking out of me that I looked like a pincushion doll. The tubes twisted in circles around, around, around, and I thought of Minos presiding at the entrance to Hell, directing sinners to their final destinations by curling his tail around their bodies. For every coil of the tail, that’s one ring deeper into Hell. So I counted my lovely tubes, in simple curiosity: how deep was the grim sorter of the dark and the foul going to send me?
     

     
    The nurse seemed happy to find me awake. “Dr. Edwards modified your drugs to bring you out of your coma. I’ll get her now.”
    I tried to speak, but it felt as though someone had inserted a Coke bottle in my throat and stomped; I had crushed glass where my vocal cords had been. The nurse shushed me and answered the questions that she knew I’d be asking if I were able. I was in a hospital, a burn unit, she said. There had been an accident. I was very lucky. The doctors had worked hard. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I was finally able to rasp, “How—long?”
    “Almost two months.” She granted me a pity smile and turned on her heel to get the doctor.
    I examined the skeleton’s ribs. There were a few places where the shiny white paint had been peeled back by restless fingers. These patches had been painted over, of course, but the minor excavations were still visible. Down through the layers of paint, my thoughts wandered.
How often do they paint these beds? For every patient? For every six, every dozen? How many before me have lain here?
    I wanted to cry but my tear ducts had been burned shut.
     

     
    There was not much to do but drift in and out of consciousness. The morphine dripped and the snake inhabited each inch of my spine, continuing to flick at the base of my skull with her wicked tongue. Lick and kiss, drip drip drip dropped the drugs, hiss hiss hiss spoke the snake. The sibilant sermons of the snake as she discoursed upon the disposition of my sinner’s soul seemed ceaseless. There was clack and clatter of footfalls in the hall, a thousand people coming to pay their respects to the dying. Rooms reverberated with the drone of soap operas. Anxious families whispered about worst-case scenarios.
    I couldn’t quite grasp the enormity of my situation and wondered about things like when I might be able to get back to my film work, or how much this little trip to the hospital would cost me. I hadn’t yet grasped that I might never return to work, and that this trip would cost me everything. It was only over the following weeks, as the doctors