The Serpent Papers Read Online Free PDF Page B

low humming rattle like a mouse drilling. By the corner of the window. A hissing, sliding sound, scurrying. Barely present . . . and yet . . . unarguably there . Francesc , I try to whisper. My blood tingles, the animal in me straining. Beyond our window it is dark. I cannot see the garden, or the field or the forest . . . but I can hear the hissing. It is a rustling. The burrowing of a mouse – an intruder? I imagine the chink of dirt moving. The sound of air exiting a fissure. Francesc! Get up! He stirs and turns over. Francesc – I try to call, but his name catches on my teeth – there are two lights shining through the window. Beams of light floating beyond the glass, and I am afraid. They are rising out of the earth. Two orbs like lanterns streak the window. They shrink and condense into a ripple suspended on the night. Blur and snap. I squint through the wakening haze. Two great flames, floating on air? The beacon of a stranger? No – they are eyes. Golden luminous eyes. Looking at me. The sound coils again, breath hissing. In and out. In and out . My mind sharpens. A dark thrust of shadow moves against the pane of glass. A serpentine body unravels itself, birthed from the corner of the window, almost invisible but for the dull ambient sheen of moonlight on scales. A beast watching me as I watch her . . .  A snake , I realize. A garden snake. It was her entrance to the room I had heard, as she burrowed through the earthen wall, the growing crack near the corner of our window. I had said to Francesc that creatures would come. It would be a rat or a gecko or a scorpion, but no – it was the snake who entered first – and I had heard her hissing. Francesc , I whisper. Curious now. Intrigued. There is a snake in our bedroom. She is probably the olive snake I have seen in the hedgerows, with the flat snout and the flecks of black that travel up from her nostrils through her eyes – I have told you to kill her, the one who sleeps by day at the foot of the yucca and eats the sand lizards at night. But I say nothing as the snake stirs. I watch the shadow move, descending the wall, flat on her belly, winding across the dark tiles to the foot of the bed and for a moment she disappears. Francesc! I shake him. Francesc! I try to move, to jump to my feet, to leap out of bed and grab the shovel from the garden. I aim to smash her skull with the sharp end of the blade, to sever her throat, to crush her bones on the tiled floor – but too late: the arrival of a foreign body on the sheets terrifies me. Here comes the mounting weight of the snake slithering across the blanket, between our legs. A river of toiling muscle, moving faster and faster, her head swaying. She watches me . Gaze steady. I am hypnotized by her undulating wave as she slithers towards my outstretched fingers, her scales greet me cold and she begins to climb up me, sliding her bulk round and over my arm, she rises towards my shoulder and I am still as she coils round my throat. I feel the heavy noose of her form as two cold, golden eyes rise before me. Up, up, she rears, dog-snout level with my own. Looks into me . We are frozen in mutual observation. Her tongue flickers. In and out. In and out. Tasting the air. She arches back, as if to strike – but I am quicker, grabbing her throat as she held mine, placing my hand around her. Be calm and still. I am not frightened any more. The snake winds through my fingers, I hold her head below her cheeks, careful to not constrict her windpipe, and pull her tail with my hand, remembering that snakes are weaker in their lower half, unwrapping her from my throat, keeping her far-distanced from my face, and decide in that moment that we will let each other live. We’re going out , I tell her. Out where you belong. I take her to the garden, unlocking the back door by the kitchen before laying her flat on the cold hard dirt. It is winter, snake, you should be sleeping, not burrowing through walls.