COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2011 by Michael R. Collings
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Judi,
with gratitude for her initial request
so many years ago
that I write a mystery,
and
For Robert Reginald,
with thanks for words of advice
whispered into my artificial ears.
OPENING QUOTATION
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
to have a thankless child!”
—William Shakespeare,
King Lear, Act I, Scene IV
PROLOGUE
The late afternoon sun blazed down on the narrow rutted road that ran behind the field, baking the already red-tinted earth to the consistency of brick.
For many smaller creatures, the direct sun was the mortal enemy. It was too hot. It was too sharp. It was too bright. It robbed them of the comforting brindled patterns of light and shadow that so often offered them protection. For some, it marked the time when predators might lurk in damp grasses, on warm rocks, in the cloudless skies, circling and watching and waiting for a single, fatal momentary lapse...for the chance to kill.
For the serpent, however, the warmth felt...well, it felt right. Life-giving. Bracing. It lay stretched across the two-lane track, completely motionless. It looked more like a thick, gnarled stick—perhaps three feet long—tossed negligently to one side by an unwary passerby than like the venom-filled stalker that it was.
It had not moved for long minutes now.
It might almost have been dead, except for the occasional flicker of a black, forked tongue as it tasted the still, pungent air.
At this time of the year, with the first harvest just underway, no one used the back road very much. Oh, one of the local farmers might trundle along in a tractor now and again, preferring to take the shorter but rougher route rather than the smoothly surfaced county highway on the far side of the field.
Or a couple of boys on furlough from the tedium of daily chores might tramp that way on their trek to the not-too-distant river and a favorite swimming hole, where they could enjoy some innocent horseplay far from parents’ prying eyes.
But on the whole, like today, the road belonged to the snake. The only other signs of life were situated clear across the field, where a small crew was combining thigh-high wheat in long, straight rows. Another group would follow with the baler, scooping up the discarded straw and binding it in smallish rectangular bales. A third group would finish the job, hoisting the bales manually onto a noisome flat-bed truck, where the last two or three hands would stack them for transport back to the farm.
There were more modern machines that could do all of these disparate tasks without relying on human muscle-power, of course, but this was a small field, one of only four belonging to an independent farmer, and money was tight. It was cheaper to hire the local boys to manhandle the bales.
All of that made little difference to the serpent.
It lay unmoving, except for that tiny, almost unnoticeable flick-flick-flick of its tongue, tasting, smelling, tasting....
The dry cloud of pulverized straw that billowed behind the combine as its blades thrust clack-clack-clack through the field.
The hot oil spilling in greasy black droplets from the ancient baler’s nearly worn-out engine.
The thick, black exhaust that stuttered from the flatbed’s tailpipe whenever the driver hit the gas pedal.
The sweat of the men as they boosted bales on their knees high enough for the others in the flatbed to grab them and swing them onto the stacks.
The sweetish aroma of the wheat itself, bleeding from severed stalks, spilling its life-fluid onto the hot, thirsty ground.
The faint hint of moisture from the distant river.
The....
The black tongue flickered, paused, flickered again.
Ahhh. There it was....
The scent-taste-sound of something small scurrying this way, threading its way through the jungle of stalks and stems in a blind panic, racing through the stand of as-yet uncut grain, terrified beyond terror by the sounds and smells of the monster behind it that sliced and tore and shredded, that ruptured burrows with its massive tires and sent tiny communities of nervous rodents scampering for the safety of the untouched portions of the field.
A field mouse.
And it was close. Deliciously close.
The snake moved.
When it left the heat of the roadway, slid easily beneath the ramshackle barbed-wire fence that marked the boundary of the farmer’s acreage, and entered the field, not a single stalk quivered to mark the hunter’s passage from the bright sunlight into the shadows.
It made no noise as it insinuated its way toward the terrified mouse still running heedlessly away from the noise and confusion of the machines. Nothing would have noted its passing, brown on brown maneuvering through clots and small stones and broken, desiccated stalks.
The mouse careened forward. The machines’ stench overcame its normally keen sense of smell; their noise drowned out any hint of warning from its almost preternaturally sharp hearing.
It jumped onto a small stone, paused for a fraction of a moment vainly sniffing the air, sniffing the air, then leaped....
Directly in front of the snake.
Suddenly only inches apart, both hunter and hunted froze.
Time seemed to have stopped.
Then, at the same instant, two things happened.
The tiny brown mouse leaped, straight upward at first, and then making as if to twist its body backward in a frantic attempt to escape, its long tail whipping sideways....
Just as the snake lunged, its blunt triangular head almost parallel to the ground, thrusting out from its coiled body almost too fast to follow with the naked eye. Jaws open and fangs extended, it struck the mouse just behind the neck, engulfing the mouse’s entire head. The momentum carried the mouse onto its back, where it gave a single spasmodic shiver, went rigid with shock, and—almost miraculously, it seemed—flipped upward feet-first from the snake’s abruptly open mouth. It contorted itself once in the air before landing on all four paws...again, directly in front of the snake, facing it.
In the instant it took for the mouse to orient itself, the snake’s head withdrew, as fluidly as quicksilver, into striking position.
But it did not strike.
Not immediately.
It could hear-taste-smell the mouse’s terror, the frenzied, flurried beating of its tiny heart, the sound of its blood thrum-ing though its body, the scent of utter fear rising unbidden from its flesh.
It caught the mouse’s wide-eyed gaze, caught it and held it, hypnotically.
It swayed its triangular head slightly to one side.
The mouse twitched just enough to follow the movement.
The snake swayed back.
The mouse’s small, bead-like eyes followed.
The snake swayed sideways again.
Again the mouse’s eyes followed.
The snake began to sway back to its original position—the mouse