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  Dream of the Serpent © 2014 by Alan Ryker

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Always to Christina

  Thank you to everyone at DarkFuse who helped in the creation of this book, especially Greg F. Gifune and Shane Staley.

  PROLOGUE

  Burning Burning Burning Burning

  O Lord Thou pluckest me out

  O Lord Thou pluckest

  Burning

  — “The Waste Land,” TS Eliot

  I dreamed of an enormous serpent trying to ensnare me in its coils. It wasn’t trying to wrap me up like a constrictor, but to cage me within the huge pebbly walls of its own bulk, to circumscribe my existence. I wouldn’t let it. I kept searching its scaly limits, looking for a way through. And eventually I found one.

  Or I thought I did.

  But imagine a piece on a Snakes and Ladders board. It would have no idea of the danger until it stepped on the snake, and by then it would be too late. Up until that moment, it would think the world was an ordered, forward progression. But after its trip, through some kind of amnesia or belief that the serpentine backslide was an anomaly, it would get up and march forward again. I’m getting the strange feeling that if I were able to pull back, to gain perspective, I’d understand that, despite the enormity of those coils, I’d only known a small portion of the serpent. I’d see that the serpent, with its tail in its mouth, encircles everything, the entire board from first square to last. It’s a rigged game. We can’t escape the serpent. The concept is totally meaningless, because there is nothing outside of its coils.

  We’re all pieces on this board, but I seem to be the only one who notices that we’re going in circles, that the world is not the logical place we think it is.

  Because the bed I’m lying in isn’t the bed I was lying in when I went to sleep. And the woman I’m lying beside wasn’t here at all.

  It’s watching. Here in the darkness, without the distraction of my senses, I can feel it watching me with cold, reptilian patience. I can feel its pulse. The entire universe thrums with it.

  I can’t let it know that I know, that I’ve figured out the game. I don’t know what it would do, but I know it would be bad. Maybe worse than what’s already happened, which is hard to imagine.

  And so here I lay, searching for the limits of the limitless serpent with its tail in its mouth, losing my mind with a tale in my mouth. Choking on it. Consuming it and consuming it and finding that I’m consuming myself and creating myself endlessly.

  If there’s a way to end this cycle, it’s to be found in taking the tale from my mouth and telling it the only way I know how…the only way it can be told.

  BOOK I

  1

  The last couple sat engrossed in conversation across the small table, his left hand and her right touching in the center. They were middle-aged and dressed nicely, too nicely for the restaurant. It was probably their anniversary. You had to find it a bit sweet, people that age still in love.

  I hovered just out of sight. I could have found something small to do, but I’m the sort of person that can’t start on one task until the one at hand is complete. Then Janet waved me over.

  Janet was a tall, waifish blonde, the sort you’d expect to see as a hostess until she dropped the facade and revealed herself to be a foulmouthed townie, which was probably why she was the hostess of Pajino’s—the Italian equivalent of Applebee’s—instead of a fancier establishment.

  “Cody, why are they just sitting there? Hustle them out of here.”

  “What do you expect me to do? Tell them to leave? That wouldn’t go over well.”

  “Just loom over them. Look black. Blacker. That type, they’re terrified of ethnics.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “It’s unbelievable the things that come out of your mouth.”

  “No, what you wouldn’t believe is what I’ll put in my mouth.”

  I groaned, then stopped suddenly and waggled my eyebrows provocatively at her. She waggled hers back. I estimate we carried on like that for nearly a full minute before I said, “Besides, I’m only half black.”

  “I know that, my incognegro. That’s why I said, ‘Look blacker.’ But really, your indeterminate swarthiness could be even more frightening. What are you? An America-hating Arab? A really tall, disgruntled illegal Mexican? The point is, you should intimidate them the fuck out of here.”

  The point became moot as the man finally put cash in the black vinyl bill presenter.

  “Like the wind,” Janet hissed.

  He’d barely closed the cover when I took it and said, “I’ll be right back with your change.”

  The couple’s eyes cleared, gained focus on the rest of the world. I’d burst the little bubble that had surrounded their table, and they noticed that for the first time the other tables were unoccupied.

  “Not necessary. That’s for you.”

  “Thank you very much, sir. You two have a great night.”

  Within a minute they were out the door, which Janet locked behind them.

  “Jesus Christ. Assholes think I don’t have anywhere to be on a fucking Friday night?”

  “I thought you were being ruder than usual. What have you got going on?”

  “Party over on 18th. Already getting crazy. I’ve been getting texts for the past hour about it. You wanna go?”

  “Townie party? No thanks. I’ve gotta get to the country club. My future father-in-law is throwing a bash.”

  “Oh yeah, ‘a bash.’ People getting wild on crab puffs and Chardonnay.” She rolled her eyes. “We townies be getting nasty, college boy.” Her hands came together and she gyrated her hips a bit.

  “Hey, my phone’s been buzzing like crazy, too. This party must be nuts, because somebody wants me there, like an hour ago.”

  Janet rolled her eyes. “Oh God, she does know that some of us have to work, right?”

  “For some reason she thinks I’m one of them.”

  “Getting that fancy MBA from that fancy college has her confused. I bet none of your classmates have to work.”

  “Not many. Half of them are already at this shindig.”

  “All that thin, blue blood.” She let her eyelids droop, brought her lips together in a slack pucker and held one hand limply up. With her lanky blond hair and fine features, she looked exactly like one of the women who would be drifting around the ballroom. Then she sneered. “Don’t you ever want to cut loose? Get freaky?”

  “That an invitation?” I gave her a wink.

  She opened her eyes wide and put a hand to her mouth, but when she took the hand away she was ramming her tongue lasciviously into her cheek.

  We both busted up until she said, “Go close your shit out. And check on the kitchen.”

  I turned and saw all the front house staff vacuuming and wiping down. Vultures swooped in as soon as I turned my back, taking the easy closing duties.

  I closed out at the register, then stepped into the kitchen. Steam heat had me sweating immediately in my itchy, polyester Pajino’s polo shirt.

  “What do you need?” I asked loudly to be heard over the running water and clattering pots and pans. I swore that dishwasher must have moonlighted as a drummer i
n a death metal band.

  “Dump and scrape the pressure fryer?” George said. He always talked to us front house people in questions. He wasn’t used to this mingling of duties. But the manager of Pajino’s started his restaurant career as a dishwasher, and until everyone was ready to leave, no one got to leave.

  I rolled the grease pump into place beneath the pressure fryer when my phone buzzed again.

  “Jesus Christ, Madison,” I said, drawing my phone from my pocket with one hand and checking my texts while I twisted the valve to release the hot oil. A few drops splattered on my hand and got me cursing, sending my frustration up a couple more notches.

  I licked at the back of my hand, which now tasted like fried chicken, and glanced at the text. It was indeed Madison. Of course it was Madison. Who else had so little experience with employment that she didn’t understand a party wasn’t a good enough excuse to step out early? As if my coworkers would pat me on the back and wish me a good time while I left them to do the disgusting closing duties.

  Aren’t you done yet?

  The grease continued to drain and I tapped out, Closing now. Leaving soon.

  I had to take a deep breath and remind myself to keep things in perspective. These were rich man problems. Madison’s dad was CFO of one of the largest engineering firms in the world, and as long as I didn’t fuck things up, he’d be bringing his brilliant son-in-law on board in a few months and fast-tracking his career into the six figures and beyond.

  I liked thinking of my future in the third person, because then I got to remind myself afterward that I was talking about myself. I was the guy who came from a lower-middle slash upper-lower class background and got a full academic scholarship to study business at a state school, graduated Magna Cum Laude and rocked my GMATs so hard that a prestigious university offered a scholarship equal to its enormous tuition so that I only had to cover living expenses (Madison: “With your school covered, why can’t you take out a small loan to pay your rent?” Me: “You should work in finance. You’ve got the right mentality.”). I was that guy who landed the smart, cool, beautiful girl whose father turned out to be the fucking man, which I swear I didn’t know beforehand. I was the guy who, because of his grades and his performance in the classroom had enough buzz about him to not horrify Little Miss Blue Blood’s parents when she brought him home, or later when he proposed marriage, despite the fact that he’s from a blue collar family and a halfrican. I was the guy with the charm and wit to be able to step into the restroom, clean off work sweat and kitchen grease, then show up at the country club and outshine all my silver-spoon classmates and get all the joking job offers (You sure I can’t steal you away? I’ve even got a worthless son-in-law you can replace).

  I kept all this in mind as I texted an argument back and forth with Madison, trying to keep my cool. Glancing over at the fryer, I saw that the oil had all drained, and sent a final text (I prayed it was the final text): Gotta go. See you soon.

  The pressure fryer accumulated a thick crust of concrete-hard fried flour in a ring that marked the top of the oil. It could only be removed with the vigorous application of a paint scraper, which I grabbed just as my phone rang again. I screamed, which drew looks from the kitchen staff, answered the phone with my left hand and leaned into the fryer to scrape with my right.

  “Madison, for the love of God above, I’m almost done.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Right this second? Trying to scrape a fryer with the use of only one hand.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Probably ten minutes, but it’d go faster if I weren’t on the phone.”

  “People keep asking me where you are. They don’t mean anything by it, but I don’t know what to say.”

  “Work.”

  “And then they ask where you work and…”

  I sighed. I understood her position. I really did. She and somehow her parents saw the real me, but that whole country club crew…They were stuck-up assholes. I don’t know how else to put it.

  “After that you can leave?” she asked.

  “I just need to clean myself up, change and—”

  Then came my first lesson in the malleability of time. Suffering is the path to immortality. Hell can be contained entirely in one moment. They say, later, that I couldn’t have seen this. That I imagined it, dreamed it in my coma. That it would have happened too fast.

  But I saw the spark spit into life on the heating element. And I don’t know if it’s quantum theory or relativity, but I had time to think, “I forgot to turn off the fryer.”

  The brain doesn’t follow the same laws of time that the body does. As I watched that spark turn into a tiny flame, then travel around the coils, then leap to the walls, I took in every detail, but I could not move. From the outside, I was in the middle of a sentence, and then in a split second I was bent waist-deep into a jet engine blasting flames to the ceiling.

  But from the inside of that moment, I watched the cauldron fill with unfurling petals of red, orange and yellow. I watched it swirl and dance as it rose, new gases igniting, buffeting the pool of liquid flame back and forth. I wanted to pull back. As the pillar approached my face I tried to hurl myself back. It was like being pinned against a wall as the tooth-filled maw of some giant predator pressed forward inch by slavering inch. Pressing back. Pressing back. Going nowhere. Looking fate in its golden visage, the future blossoming up around my hand, my arm, my face.

  When I told this to my parents, my dad asked me why I watched it. Why didn’t I close my eyes? Imagine trying to raise the drawbridge of a castle as an invading horde of savage barbarians charge, knowing that it’s too late, knowing that these men will take everything from you, laughing as they do it. Could you look away?

  And it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

  What finally moved my inert mass wasn’t my conscious mind. My reflexive nervous system finally hurled me back out of the pyre, though one dishwasher would say that he saw the whole thing, that my argument on the phone had caught his attention, drawn his eyes, and as he scrubbed one of his last pans he watched me, not with much interest, but because his eyes had to point in some direction. He saw me leaned in to the fryer, and then he saw me disappear in a column of flame that roared up and spilled across the ceiling. He said that he thought that I wasn’t going to move, that I was going to stand there, one elbow cocked out of the fryer to hold the phone to my ear, but everything else above my chest down in that metal cauldron, staring into the flames forever. Time had gone soft for him, too. When I finally fell back, a man on fire, he expected that I’d be nothing more than a bundle of burnt matchsticks. Blackened bones. Because I’d been cooking for hours before I finally tumbled back, phone still clamped to my ear.

  I slipped as I pressed myself back, and I fell. Not into the rolling tub of drained oil, thank God. Yes, thank that most loving and merciful God above for holding me in his loving grace and only roasting me, not deep-frying me. Bastard.

  I hit the ground on my ass and tried to scoot out of the flames, thinking I could escape them, not realizing that I was no longer leaning into fire; I was on fire.

  I tried to escape my pain but I couldn’t figure out how. I couldn’t see. My vision had gone cloudy on one side and wavered with flame on the other. I couldn’t hear. A sound filled my ears, a roaring. It was so loud my head shook with it. At the time I thought it was the roar of the inferno, but looking back I think it was the sound of my eardrums trying to burst into the airless vacuum the firestorm left behind.

  I couldn’t scream. When I breathed in I choked on poisonous fumes, but no air. The fire consumed it all. My vocal cords shook. Nothing came out.

  Pressing back, I slid along the floor, leaving my right palm behind to sizzle on the tile, but I couldn’t escape the flame. I thought that the whole kitchen was on fire. The whole world. I burned and burned and burned.

  Of course the kitchen wasn’t on fire. My polyester shirt was. My hai
r was curly, and required some serious product to tame, product that turned my hair into a wick, my head into a melting candle.

  It’s difficult to explain burning. Almost no one experiences it. Everyone gets burned, but almost no one burns. You escape the source of heat with reflex faster than thought and only experience the aftereffects. Burning is the sort of thing that changes you forever. It makes you realize that you’re an animal, that all the rest is pretense. I would have done anything to make the burning stop. Anything.

  The flames wrapped around me tighter and tighter, clawing into my clothing, melting my clothing to me, which continued to burn like napalm. The flames held me in an inescapable grasp, digging claws into me, thousands of them, deeper and deeper, prying at skin, then fat, then muscle, flaying away my layers.

  And then the fire was out. I tried to breathe, and a fine powder filled my mouth, turned to glue in my throat and deeper down so that I wheezed around it. When I could see out of my left eye, I saw this big lug named Brandon holding the dredging tub, emptied of its flour. I looked down and I was covered in white powder. He’d pulled the tub out of the metal counter top and dumped it over me. George was still trying to get the fire extinguisher off the wall. It had somehow gotten stuck.

  Everything was quiet. The roar of the inferno had died when the oil burnt off the fryer. Flour choked out my screaming. No one moved. They stood around me, some reaching out to me, but no one daring to touch me.

  In that silence, I heard myself cooking. Inside the flour, the fat beneath my skin crackled. My only hopeful thought was that I couldn’t possibly live much longer.

  But the moments dragged out. These people loomed over me, staring down at me. If everything hadn’t been so strangely clear, they would have seemed like nothing so much as demons witnessing my torments.