A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Kiss of the Cobra

Mary’s old man, after six years of office-managing for a tire company in India, comes heading back with a brand-new wife. He breaks it to us in a telegram first and then makes a bee-line for the place we’ve taken up in the hills beyond San Bernardino. It seems he wants to show her to us.

My boss has been whiter than snow to me. I’m on leave of absence with pay, and that’s how we happen to be there.

When I had dragged myself in, a few weeks before, to report for duty after a tussle with the flu, I was down to 130, stripped, and saw spots in front of my eyes. He took one look at me and started swearing. “Get out of here!” he hollered. “Go ’way back someplace and sit down for six weeks. I’ll see that you get your checks. It gives me the shivers to look at you!” When I tried to thank him he reached for his inkwell, maybe just to sign some report, but I didn’t wait to find out.

So we hauled two centuries out of the bank, took the kid brother with us, and wound up in this dead-end up in the San Benny mountains. It hasn’t even electric lights, but it isn’t so bad at that. You can’t quite hear the caterpillars drop. So there we are now, the three of us, Mary and me and the kid brother, waiting for her old man to show up.

He drives up around eight in the evening, smack off the boat, in a car he’s hired down in L. A. He’s brought her with him. She gets out and comes up to the house on his arm, while the driver starts unloading half of Asia behind them. He comes in grinning all over and shakes hands with the three of us. “This is Veda,” he says.

“Where’d she ever get that name?” I think to myself.

She’s a slinky sort of person, no angles at all; and magnetic — you can’t take your eyes off her. She’s dressed like a Westerner, but her eyes have a slant to them. They are the eyes of an Easterner. She doesn’t walk like our women do, she seems to writhe all in one piece — undulates is the word.

She’s smoking a ten-inch Russian cigarette, and when I touch her hand the sensation I get is of something cold wriggling in my grasp — like an eel. I can’t help it, the skin on the back of my own hand crawls a little. I try to tell myself that anyone’s handshake would feel like that after a drive in the open on a raw, damp night like this. But I can tell Mary doesn’t like her either. She acts a little afraid of her without knowing why, and I have never known Mary to be afraid of anything in her life before. Mary keeps blinking her eyes rapidly, but she welcomes her just the same and takes her upstairs to show her her room. A peculiar odor of musk stays behind in the room after she’s gone.

I go out to the pantry and I find the kid brother helping himself to a stiff nip. “The rain is bringing things up out of the ground,” he mutters.

Kids don’t finish growing until they’re twenty-five, so I kick him in the shins, take it away from him, and kill it myself, so as not to cheat him out of an extra half inch or so. “What’s your trouble?” I snap.

“She’s Eurasian,” he scowls, staring down at the floor. “Something mixed like that.” He’s been to college and I haven’t, so he has me there. “Tough on sis,” he says. “Damn it, I would have preferred some little digger with a pickax and baby-blue eyes. There’s something musty, something creepy about her. Brrh!”

Me too, but I won’t give in to him. “It’s the house, it’s been shut up all summer.” And we look at each other and we know I’m lying.

All kinds of trunks, boxes, crates come in and go up to her room, the driver is paid off and takes the car back to L. A., and the five of us are left alone now in the house.

When she comes down to supper I don’t like her any better; in fact, a hell of a lot less. She’s put on a shiny dress, all fish-scales, like this was still India or the boat. On her head she’s put a sort of beaded cap that fits close — like a hood. A mottled green-and-black thing that gleams dully in the candlelight. Not a hair shows below it, you can’t tell whether she’s a woman or what the devil she is. Right in front, above her forehead, there’s a sort of question-mark worked into it, in darker beads. You can’t be sure what it is, but it’s shaped like a question-mark.

Then, when we all sit down and I happen to notice how she’s sitting, all the short hairs on the back of my neck stand up. She’s sort of coiled around in her chair, like there were yards and yards of her. One arm is looped sinuously around the back of the chair, like she was hanging from it, and when I pretend to drop my napkin and look under the table, I see both her feet twined around a single chair-leg instead of being flat on the floor. But I tell myself, “What the hell, they probably sit different in India than we do,” and let it go at that.

Then, when Mary slaps around the soup-plates I get another jar. We’re none of us very refined and we all bend our heads low over the soup, so as not to miss any of it. But when I happen to look up and take a gander at her, her head is down lower than anyone else’s with that damn flat hood on it, and I get a sudden horrible impression, for a minute, of a long black-and-green snake sipping water down by the edge of a river or pool. I shake my head to clear it and keep from jumping back, and tell myself that that nip I had in the pantry just before dinner was no good. Wait’ll I get hold of that guy in San Benny for selling me stuff like that!

O.K. Supper’s over and Mary tickles the dishes, and then we light a log fire in the fireplace and we sit around. At ten Mary goes up to bed; she can’t stand that damn Indian perfume or whatever it is. Vin, that’s the kid brother, and I stick around a little longer sipping port and listening to the old man jaw about India, and I keep watching Veda.

She’s facing the fire, still in that coiled-up position. She’s sort of torpid, she hasn’t moved for hours, but her eyes glitter like shoe-buttons in the light of the flames. There’s something so reptilian about her that I keep fighting back an impulse to grab up a long stick, a fire-iron, anything at all, and batter and whack at her sitting over there.

It scares me and I sweat down the back— God, I must be going screwy! It’s my father-in-law’s wife, it’s a woman, and me thinking things like that! But you can’t see the lines of her body at all, they’re lost in a thick, double coil, the top one formed by her hip, the lower one by her calf, and then that flat, hooded head of hers rising in the middle of it and brooding into the fire with its basilisk eyes.

After a long time, she moves, but it only adds to the horrid impression that I can’t seem to get rid of. I’m watching her very closely and she evidently doesn’t know it. But what I see is this: she sort of arches her neck, which is long and thin anyway, so that her head comes up a little higher. She holds it for a minute, reared like that, and then she lets it sink back again between her shoulder-blades. So help me God if it isn’t like a snake peering out from some tall grass to see what’s what!

She repeats it again a little while later, and then a third time. Vin and the old man don’t see it at all, and it’s barely noticeable anyway. Just like a person easing a stiff neck by stretching it. Only she does it in a sort of rounded way, almost a spiral way. But maybe it’s just a nervous habit, I try to tell myself, and what’s the matter with me anyway? If this keeps up, I’m a son of a so-and-so if I don’t go in and see a doctor tomorrow.

I look at the wall-clock and it’s five to eleven, late for the mountains, so I give Vin the eye to clear, to give the newlyweds a break alone together by the fire. Meanwhile a big orange moon has come up late and everything is as still as death for miles around, not even a mountain owl’s hoot, as if the whole set-up was just waiting for something to happen.

The kid and I get up and say good-night, and, fire or no fire, her hand isn’t any warmer than before, so I let go of it in a hurry. Vin goes right up but I take a minute off to lock up the windows and the door. Then, as I’m climbing, I glance around at them. They’ve moved closer together and the dying fire throws their shadows on the wall behind them. The old man’s head looks just like what it should, but hers is flat, spade-shaped, you almost expect to see a forked tongue come darting in and out. She’s moving a little and I see what she’s doing, she’s rouging her lips. I give a deep sigh of relief and it takes such a load off my mind to find out she’s just a regular woman after all, that I stop there for a minute and forget to go on.

Then she takes something out of the little bag she has with her and offers it to him. It’s one of those long reefers she seems partial to. She also takes one herself. “Cigarette,” she murmurs silkily, “before we go up?” She says it in such a soft voice it almost sounds like a hiss.

I know I have no business watching, so I soft-shoe it the rest of the way up and go about my business. Only five minutes go by, less than that even, and I hear a rustling and a swishing in the upstairs hall and that’s her going to her room — by herself. You don’t hear any footsteps when she walks, just a soft sound that scaly dress of hers makes when it drags along the floor.

Her door closes and goodnight to her, I say to myself; and I think I wouldn’t want to be in Mary’s father’s shoes for all the rice in China. Then, as I come out of the bathroom with my toothbrush in my hand, I hear the old man’s step starting up the stairs from the floor below and I wait there out in the hall to have a last word with him.

He comes up slow, he’s breathing kind of hard, sounds like sandpaper rubbing on concrete, and then when he gets halfway to where the landing is, he hesitates. Then he comes on a step or two more, stops again, and then there’s a soft plop like something heavy falling. Right after that the woodwork starts to creak and snap a lot, as if somebody was wrestling on it. I don’t wait to listen to any more, I throw my toothbrush away and I chase to the end of the hall. When I look down, I gasp in surprise.

He’s lying flat on his back on the staircase landing between the two floors, and he’s threshing about and squirming horribly, as if he’s in convulsions. The agonized movement of his body is what’s making the woodwork creak like that. Something seems to be jerking him all over, his arms and legs will stiffen to their full length and then contract again like corkscrews. His tongue’s sticking all the way out of his mouth, and saliva or foam or something is bubbling around it. His eyes are glazed over.

One jump brings me down to where he is, and I lift his head and get it off the floor. As I do so, his whole face begins to blacken in my hands. There is one last hideous upheaval, as if I was trying to hold down a wild animal, and then everything stops. There’s not a twitch left in his whole body after that.

Vin’s heard the racket and he comes tearing out of his room.

“Whiskey,” I pant. “Don’t know what it is, gotta bring him to!” But there isn’t any bringing to. Before the kid can sprint down past me and then up again with it, he’s stiff as a board in my arms. I’m holding a lead weight, with a color that matches.

The blackness has spread all over his body like lightning and shows up in the veins in his throat and on his wrists, as if ink had been poured into his arteries. Nothing to be done, he isn’t breathing. We pour the whiskey into his open mouth, but when we tilt his head to make it go down it comes right back again.

I pass him to Vin and get out from under and go down and take a miniature Keeley cure right then and there. It isn’t because he’s Mary’s old man or because it happened right in my arms, it’s those terrific spasms and that blackness that have gotten me. I get over it in a minute and we bring him down off the landing between us and lay him out. Then I let the kid have a double bracer and the hell with his extra growth.

We look at him lying there on the divan, stiff as a ramrod, and I try to flex his arms and legs. A peculiar muscular rigidity has already set in all over, even in those few minutes. I’m no medical student but I know it can’t be rigor mortis that soon. This is the United States, but this was an unrecognizable death, a sudden, thrashing, black, tropical death — here in the States.

“Get your hat,” I say to Vin, “and thumb yourself down into town and bring back the medical expert. Damn this place anyway for not having a telephone!” I push him out the door.

Now there are only four of us left in the house, two of them women and one a dead man, and the moon’s peeping in at all the windows and filling the place with black shadows. From the minute the kid’s dogs have left the wooden porch, you don’t hear another sound outside, not the snapping of a twig, not the rustling of a dry leaf.

I’m not scared of stiffs. That’s because of the unpleasant business I’m in. I cover his face to hide the blackness and then I pull down all the shades to keep the nosey moon out.

Then, as I start up the stairs to break the news to Mary, I see a thread hanging, moving in the air above the landing where he fell. It shows up against the light shining down from the upstairs hall, and that’s how I happen to notice it.

It’s a cigarette burning itself out where he dropped it when he fell. It’s the same one she gave him when I left them before the fire. I said those Russian ones are long, it’s lasted all this while, as long as a cigar would. There’s still an inch or two left of it, there’s still a dab of unburned tobacco in it; and the end, the mouth part, is still intact. That’s all that matters, so I pinch it out and wrap it in my handkerchief.

After I’ve told Mary and persuaded her it’s better if she doesn’t go down and look at him, I knock on the other door across the hall, her door. No answer. So I open it and I go in. Not there. She must have gone downstairs while I was in Mary’s room just now.

The air is loaded with that sticky musk smell that follows her wherever she goes. It’s even worse up here though. Downstairs, it was more like a perfume; up here it’s rank, fetid. It recalls stagnant, green pools and lush, slimy, decaying vegetation.

On the dresser, she had a lot of exotic scents and lotions in bottles, the same as any other woman would, the only difference being that hers hail from India. Sandalwood, attar of roses — but one of them’s just ordinary everyday liquid mucilage mixed in with the others. No label on it, but my nose tells me this — and my fingertips, when I try it. I even take a pretty good-sized chance and test it on the tip of my tongue. Just mucilage. Anyone that’s ever sealed an envelope or licked a stamp knows the taste. I wonder what it’s doing there among those other things, but I put it back.

In the drawer, I come across a box of those extra-long cigarettes of hers, and I help myself to two or three just to see how they’ll stack up against chemical analysis. She has some other peculiar junk hanging around too, that I can’t make head or tail of. I know what it is all right, but I can’t figure what she’s doing with it.

First off, she has a cake of that stuff they call camphor ice — in a tin box. It freezes the skin, closes up the pores, is supposed to be good for chapped hands or something. But since when do they have chapped hands in India? All right, I argue to myself, maybe she brought it with her to guard against the colder climate over here, and I put that back too.

Then there’s a funny little Indian contraption of wood about the size of a cup and saucer, which looks like a baby-sized pestle and mortar. The hollow part of it is all smeared red, like she was in the habit of pounding out and mixing her own rouge instead of buying it ready-made. Well, maybe they do that in India too.

Next I come across a hell of a whole lot of flannel. At first I think it is bandage, but there is too much of it for that. So the best I can figure she makes her undies out of it.

So much for the dresser, and I haven’t gotten anywhere much. She has a lot of trunks, bags, boxes, etc., ranged around the room — all the stuff that I saw the driver unload from the car when she and the old man got here. One of the biggest pieces has a cover draped over it.

When I yank this off, lo and behold, a chicken-coop! Not only that, but the peculiar rank smell I’ve mentioned seems to come stronger from there than anywhere else. It nearly throws me over when I try to go near it. So she keeps pets, does she? I get up close to the thing and try to peer down into it between two of the slats, and I can’t see a thing, there’s a very close wire mesh on the inside. There’s something alive in it though, all right, because while I’m standing there with my face up against it, I hear the wire netting sing out. The wing of a chicken must have brushed against it.

I cluck a little at it. No answering cluck. I shift it around a little and shake it up a little to try to get a peep out of them — it must be more than one chicken, one chicken couldn’t smell that strong — and the wire sings out plenty, zing, zing, zing.

I go around on the other side of it and I spot a saucer of milk standing there on the floor next to it. One of the slats on that side is hinged, so that it can be opened up just about six inches from the floor. I reach down and I put my hand on it and I’m just fixing to lift it, then I think: “The hell with her and her chickens, I’d better go down and find out what she’s up to instead of wasting my time up here.” So I ease out of the room and go downstairs.

She’s down there with the body. I stop and watch her for a minute from the stairs. She’s uncovered his face and she’s groveling upon him — sort of twined about him. Her face is hidden against him as if she was trying to burrow her way into his clothes and she couldn’t have got any closer if she tried. Maybe it’s just the Oriental mode of displaying grief, but I have my doubts. There’s something pathological in this, that creature is less than human — or thinks she is.

Something snaps in me. “Don’t coil up on him like that!” I bark at her. “You’re like a damn snake nesting on something it’s killed!” She untwines slowly and raises her head and turns it my way, and a ghoulish smile flickers on her face. Maybe I just imagine that, for it’s dark in the room.

There’s a pounding outside at the door and Vin has come back with the medical expert and a policeman. There’s a motorcycle throbbing against a tree out there, and it’s the friendliest sound I’ve heard in twenty-eight years. They’ve parked the ambulance as close to the house as they can get it, which is about half a mile down the dirt road which gives up at about that point.

“So what’s the riot?” says the medical guy. “This kid comes tearing in on a Ford without brakes, which he stole from a Jap farmer, and knocks over one of the lamp posts outside headquarters—”

“That was the only way I could stop it,” explains Vin.

“Stole ain’t the word,” I squelch the hick. “I’m Lawton of the L. A. homicide bureau, and since he was deputizing for me, you call that commandeering. I want an autopsy from you.”

“When’d it happen?”

“Five after eleven.”

He goes over and he fumbles around a little, then he straightens up and his mouth is an O. “P.M., huh?”

“Not last year and not last week, eleven tonight!” I snap.

“Never saw anything like it,” he mutters. “Stiff as a board and all black like that! You’re gonna get your autopsy, mister.”

“And make it gilt-edged, too.”

There’s a rustling on the stairs and we all look upward. Veda’s on her way back to her room, with that damn long dress of hers trailing after her up the steps like a wriggling tail.

“Who’s the spook?” asks the examiner.

“We’re coming to her. First, the autopsy,” I tell him. “Don’t put it off, I want it right away — as soon as you get back with him!”

The driver comes in with a rubber sheet and he and the cop carry the old man out between them.

“Turn these over for me too,” I say, “and get me a chemical analysis on them,” and I pass him the butts I swiped in her room and the one the old man was smoking on the stairs when he fell. “And make room for my wife on the front seat. I’m sending her in with you.”

He gives me a surprised look. “You sure you want her to ride with us on a death car like that?”

“One sure thing, she’s not staying another minute in this house, not while I know it. Wait, I’ll bring her right down!”

I go up to get her, and I find her in the hall shivering and pop-eyed. She’s standing outside Veda’s door bent over at the keyhole like she was rooted to the spot. But as soon as she sees me she comes running to me and goes into a clinch and hides her head on my shoulder and starts bawling and shaking all over. “Charlie, I’m afraid to stay here! That awful woman, that awful heathen woman in there, she’s possessed of the devil.”

I lead her downstairs and out, and walk her down the road to where the car is, and on the way she tells me about it. “It’s enough to make your hair stand on end,” she whispers. “Such awful goings-on in there.”

“All right,” I say soothingly, “tell Charlie about it, Charlie’ll know if it’s bad or not.”

“I heard the gentlemen come downstairs,” she says, “so I got up to come down and make them a cup of coffee. As I was going past her door, I heard funny sounds from there. I’m only a woman after all, so I stopped and took a look through the keyhole. And after that I couldn’t move from there. I was held there against my will, until you came along. Charlie, she was dancing — all by herself in such a weird way, and it kept getting worse all the time. She kept getting nearer and nearer the door, until I think she would have caught me there if you hadn’t come. She seemed to know someone was outside her door, and she kept her eyes on it. I couldn’t budge!”

I know she isn’t exaggerating, because I myself noticed a sort of magnetism or mild hypnotism about this Veda from the minute she came in the house. “What kind of a dance was she doing?” I ask her.

“First, she was just standing in one place and just wriggling back and forth and curving in and out like she didn’t have any spine at all. She still had on that horrible, glittery dress clinging to her like a wet glove and that ugly hood on her head and she kept making a hissing noise and sticking her tongue in and out like she was tasting something. But then, afterwards, it got even worse than that. All of a sudden she went down on the floor in a heap and began crawling around on her stomach and switching her legs from side to side, like she was a fish or mermaid got stranded outside of the water—”

“Or a snake?” I put in.

She grabs my arm. “That’s it, that’s it! Now I know what she reminded me of! Every once in awhile she’d lift her head off the floor and raise it up and look around, and then she’d drop it back again. Then, finally, she squirms over to a little saucer of milk standing next to a big packing case and she starts drinking from it, but just with her tongue, without using her hands at all.”

“O.K., Toots, get in, you’re going to town.”

“Charlie, I think you’d better notify the state asylum,” she whispers. “I think his death has made her lose her mind. She must really think she’s a snake.”

This is putting it so mild that I have a hard time not laughing right in her face. That creature lurking back there in the house doesn’t only think she’s a snake; for all practical purposes, she is one. I don’t mean in the slang sense, either. She is sub-human, some sort of monstrosity or freak that India has bred just once in all its thousands of years of history.

Now, there are two possibilities as I see it. She is what she is, either of her own free will — maybe a member of some ghastly snake-worshiping cult — or without being able to control herself. Maybe her mother had some unspeakable experience with a snake before she was born. In either case she’s more than a menace to society, she’s a menace to the race itself.

As for Mary’s tip about the asylum, what’s the sense? She could beat an insanity rap too easily. The strangeness of her ways, the far country she comes from, would be points in her favor. It would be a cinch for her to pass off the exhibition Mary saw through the keyhole as just an Asiatic way of showing grief for the departed. And even if I could get her booked in an institution, look what I’d have on my conscience, unloading her on a bunch of poor harmless nuts clipping paper dolls! She’d depopulate the place in a week. No, I tell myself, if I can only get the goods on her for the old man’s death, she goes up for first-degree murder without any fancy insanity trimmings. The rope’s the only sure cure for what’s the matter with her.

So far I haven’t got a thing, no motive and not even any evidence, and won’t have until that damned medical examiner reports to me. The law being what it is, a person’s innocent until you can prove him guilty. I can’t prove her guilty just because I don’t like how she dresses, how she hisses when she talks, how her room smells, and how she drinks milk off the floor.

I go back to the house alone. The moon’s on the late shift and now there are only three of us there — one of them a kid of twenty who’s just goofy enough to fall for this exotic vamp of death.

My footsteps don’t make any noise on the dirt road, and as I come up on the porch, the living-room windows are orange from the fire going inside. I look in through one of them and I see her and the kid there in the room. He’s standing there motionless, as if fascinated, and she’s coiled up next to him and I see one of her white arms creeping, wavering like a vine up his coat sleeve. I freeze all over with dread. Their heads start coming closer together, slowly, very slowly, and in another minute their lips will meet.

Maybe this first kiss won’t hurt him any, but I’m not in the mood to take a chance; I’d rather see him kissing poison ivy. Her head starts to weave a little and her neck lengthens in that old familiar movement. It’s the almost hypnotic slowness of the thing that gives me a chance to do something about it. I nearly take the front door off its hinges and before they can even turn their heads to look, I’ve split them wide apart with my shoulder for a wedge.

They each react differently. He flops back, and I can tell the buildup she has given him has already taken effect, because he turns sore. Maybe he’s ashamed too. She sinks back into a sort of coiled watchfulness and tries to look very innocent and harmless. She wets her lips a little.

“Watch what you’re doing!” he shouts wrathfully, and before I can get out of the way, wham, right below the ear! I go down holding onto my jaw and I feel rotten, not from the blow either. Something tells me he’s a goner, unless I can reason with him. If he won’t listen to me nothing can save him. “Vin, for Pete’s sake, you don’t know what you’re up against!”

“In the East,” she lisps, “a kiss means only friendship, peace.” But the look she squirts at me would drop an ox.

“Your kind of kiss means death, East or West!” Maybe I shouldn’t show my hand like that, but my busting in has told her enough already. She goes slinking up the stairs like a noisome reptile crawling back into its hole.

“You let up on her!” the kid blusters. “You’re all wrong! Being a detective has gone to your head! She told me herself you suspect her of all kinds of God-awful stuff. She didn’t have anything to gain from the old guy’s cashing in!”

I pick myself up and brush myself off. “No? Not much!”

He points at the fireplace. “Know what she just did before you got here? She brings down a codicil to the old guy’s will, that he signed on the boat coming over, and shows it to me — makes me read it. It cut her in on his estate instead of leaving it to me and your wife, Mary. It was done against her wishes, as a wedding present to her. Then she throws it in the fire. She don’t want his money, especially when there’s suspicion attached to her!”

Damn clever! I swear softly to myself. Not that I believe for a minute that she isn’t interested in the old guy’s money. She isn’t throwing it away that easy. Probably it was only a carbon-copy and the original’s put away in a safe place. But, this way, she’s given herself an out; gypped me out of my motive. If I jump on her now, I can’t produce any — and without one where am I?

A money motive will stack up stronger in a criminal court of justice than any other you can dig up. It’s liable to make an innocent person guilty in the minds of any twelve people in a jury box, I don’t care who they are. If you can’t produce one you may as well turn your defendant loose unless you can show them newsreel films of the crime in the act of being committed!

Veda was a pushover for a deaf, dumb and blind defense attorney now, if I dared haul her up. As a matter of fact, now that the original will was the only one left in circulation, a much stronger motive could be pinned on Mary and the kid than on her, and there was nothing to prevent the defense boomeranging and trying to show that it was to their interest to get the old guy out of the way before he changed his will and dished them out of it in favor of this stranger from the East. There wouldn’t be much danger of its going any further than that, but at least it would free her — and then woe betide California, Oregon, Washington, while she roamed the Pacific Coast jacking up the death rate!

“So now,” the kid says bitterly, “why don’t you get smart to yourself, y’ would-be gumshoer, and lay off her? Strain a muscle and act chivalrous even if it ain’t in you!”

I close my eyes to shut out what I see coming to him. Is he sold on her! Has she got what it takes to catch ’em young and brand ’em! He’s doomed if I don’t break this thing up in a hurry. It may be puppy love to him, but what has he got that she wants? She don’t want anything from him but his life! She would probably have picked on me instead, only she knows I’m on to her, can tell I don’t trust her. The resistance ratio would be too high. Maybe guys in their prime aren’t her meat; she only works on the old and the young.

What the hell can I do? I can’t drive him out of the house at the point of my gun and make him stay away from her. He’d probably throw a rock at me the minute my back was turned and come right in again the back way. “All right, Sir Galahad,” I tell him sadly, “have it your way.”

“Aw, go to hell!” he says, and bangs out of the house to kick around among the trees outside and blow off steam. I do too. I smash last night’s empty whiskey bottle across the room, then I just sit down and wait. The old man never died a natural death, and my hands are tied. It hurts where I ought to have pleasure!

The moon chokes down out of sight, it gets light, and at six there’s a lot of commotion and backfiring outside and the San Benny medical expert is back with his report. No cop with him this time, I notice, which doesn’t look encouraging. I can hardly wait for him to get in the house. I almost haul him in by the collar. The kid looks up scornfully, I notice, then goes ahead scuffling pebbles with the point of his shoe out there.

“All right, what’s the ticket? Hurry up!” I fire at the examiner.

“I been up all night,” he says. “I been working like a machine. I wouldn’t do this for my own mother.” He has a baffled air about him. “I’m out of my depth,” he admits.

“I ain’t interested in your swimming ability, I wanna know about that stiff and those cigarettes. What’d you find?”

“Well, we’ll tackle the butts first. They’re out. I had the tobacco and the paper analyzed, triple-ply. No narcotic, not dipped or impregnated in any poisonous solution — absolutely nothing wrong anywhere.”

“Wa-a-ait a minute, wa-a-ait a minute now!” I haul up short. “I got eyes. What was that brownish stain on the mouthpiece of the one he’d smoked? Don’t try to hand me it was nicotine discoloring the paper, either, because it didn’t run all the way around the tip. It was just in one place and one only!”

“That,” he explains, “was a dot of dried blood. He’d torn his lip there in smoking the cigarette. Too dry. Often happens.”

“O.K.,” I say disappointedly, “let’s get on with it. What are you putting down in your report as the direct cause?”

“Paralysis of the nerve centers.” He takes a turn or two around the room. “But there was no rhyme or reason for it. It wasn’t a stroke, it wasn’t apoplexy, it wasn’t the bubonic plague—”

Through the window just then, I see the kid look up at the upper part of the house, as though a pebble or something fell near him and attracted his attention. But I’m too interested in what we’re talking about to give him much thought right then. He sort of smiles in a goofy way.

I turn back to the examiner. “Then you can’t tell me anything? You’re a big help!”

“I can’t give you any more facts than those. And since it’s my business to give you facts and not theories, I’ll shut up.”

“The pig’s aunt you will!” I blaze. “You’ll give me whatever you’ve got whether you can back it up or not.”

“Well, this is off the record then. I’d be laughed at from here to

Frisco and back. But the only close parallel to the symptoms of that corpse, the only similarity to the condition of the blood stream and to the bodily rigidity and distortion I’ve ever found, was in bodies I used to see every once in awhile along the sides of the roads, years ago, when I was a young medical student out in India, Java, and the Malay States.”

“Write a book about it!” I think impatiently. “And what stopped ’em?” I hurry him up. It’s like pulling teeth to get anything out of this guy.

“The bite of a cobra,” he says in a low voice.

The front door inches open and the kid slides back in the house and tracks up the stairs sort of noiseless and self-effacing like he didn’t want to attract attention. He’s been up all night, and I figure he’s going to bed and don’t even turn my head and look around at him. Besides, I’ve finally got something out of this guy, and it chimes in with what’s been in the back of my mind ever since she first showed up here, and I’m too excited right then to think of anything else.

“Then what’s holding you up?” I holler out excitedly. “Put it down in your report, that’s all I need! If you ain’t sure of the species, just say ‘poisonous snakebite.’ What are you waiting for? You want me to catch the thing and stuff it for you before you’ll go ahead? I’ll produce it for you all right!”

I remember those “chickens” of hers in that crate with the wire netting — upstairs in her room at this very minute. Chickens, me eye! And a couple of hours after I should have thought of it, I realize that chickens don’t drink milk, they peck com.

“And when I do produce it, the findings aren’t going to be ‘accidental death.’ The charge is going to be murder in the first degree — with a cobra for a weapon.”

Whereupon, he goes and throws cold water all over me. “You can produce dozens of ’em,” he tells me, shaking his head. “You can empty the whole zoo into this house, and I still can’t put anything like that into my report.”

I nearly have pups all over the carpet. “Why? For Pete’s sake, why?”

“Because, for anyone to die of snake bite, there has to be a bite — first of all. The fangs of any snake would leave a puncture, a livid mark, a zone of discoloration. What do you suppose my assistant and I were doing all night, sitting playing rummy? I tell you we went over every inch of body surface with the highest-powered microscopes available. There wasn’t a blemish. Absolutely no place anywhere into which the venom could have been injected.”

I throw all the possibilities that occur to me at him one after the other. I’m not a trained doc, remember. Anyway, he squelches them as fast as they come.

“When you examined the blood stream, or what was left of it, weren’t there heavier traces of this stuff in some parts than others? Couldn’t you track it down from there?”

“It’s very volatile. It diffuses itself all over the system, like lightning, once it’s in. Does away with itself as a specific. It’s not a blood poison, it’s a nerve poison. You can tell it’s there by the effects rather than by the cause.”

“How about a hypodermic needle?”

“That would have left a swelling — and a puncture too; even if smaller than the snake’s fangs, even if invisible to the naked eye.”

“How about internally?”

“It doesn’t kill internally. We analyzed the contents of his stomach. Nothing foreign there, nothing harmful.”

I move the position of one of the chairs in the room rather suddenly — with my foot. “What a temper,” he says reproachfully.

“Maybe I’ve stuck too close to the village green,” I let him know. “Maybe I should have had L. A. in on this.”

“Suit yourself. But, if you go over our heads like that, you better have a direct accusation ready — and be able to back it up. I can’t support you if it comes to a showdown. This report’ll have to stay the way it is — ‘paralysis of the nerve centers, of unknown origin’ — take it or leave it.”

“You take it,” I say violently, and I tell him a good place to keep it while I’m at it. “You get L. A. on the wire for me when you go back,” I order him as he prepares to leave in a huff, “and have ’em send a squad up here with butterfly nets and insect guns. We’re gonna play cops and robbers.” And when he takes his departure we don’t say goodbye to each other.

I lock the front door on the inside and ditto the back door and drop both keys into my pocket. Then I latch all the shutters and fasten down all the windows with a hammer and wedges of wood. She isn’t going to get away from here until I’ve cinched this thing one way or the other, and I’ve got to be having some sleep soon. I can’t hold out forever.

I go upstairs, and there’s not a sound around me. It’s been light out for a long time now, but the upstairs hallway is still dim, and at the end of it, where the kid’s room is, lamplight is shining through the crack of his door. I thought he was asleep by now, and I get a little worried for a minute, but when I tap on it and hear him say, “Come in,” I heave a long breath of relief, it’s sweet music to my ears.

He’s in bed, all right, but he’s propped up reading a book, with a cigarette in his mouth. He hasn’t noticed it got light and he’s forgotten to turn out the lamp. That’s all right — I used to do that too, when I was his age. “Didn’t mean to butt in,” I say. I figure it’s a good time to patch up that little set-to we had downstairs before.

He beats me to the rap. “I’m sorry about what happened before.”

“Forget it.” I haul up a chair and sit down alongside the bed, and we’re all set to bury the hatchet and smoke the pipe of peace. “You got me wrong, that was all.” I frisk myself, no results. “Let’s have one of your butts.”

“I’m out of them myself,” he grins.

“Then where’d you get that one?” I get a little uncomfortable for a minute. I give it a quick look. It’s just one of the regular-size ones though.

“One of Veda’s,” he admits. He keeps talking around it without taking it out of his mouth. “I been dragging on it for ages, they last a long time.” So that’s why it’s down to ordinary size! “Now don’t go getting all het up again,” he says as he sees me change color. “I didn’t ask her for it, she offered it to me.”

I try to remind myself those butts got a clean bill of health. I try to tell myself that if nothing’s happened so far, after he’s smoked it all this time—

I can hardly stay still on the chair. I lean forward and watch his face anxiously. He seems perfectly normal. “Feel all right, kid?”

“Never felt better.”

Then I see something that I haven’t noticed until now, and I go pins and needles all over. “Wait a minute, whatcha been doing? Where’d ya get all that red all over your mouth?”

He turns all colors of the rainbow and looks guilty. “Aw, there you go again! All right, she kissed me. So what? I couldn’t push her away, could I?”

My heart’s pounding in my ears and I can hardly talk. It’s too much like the set-up she gave the old man! She was rouging her lips, she was getting set to kiss him when I left them alone, and when I found him he had one of her butts. Still, there’s no use losing my head, nothing’s happened to the kid so far, and if I frighten him—

I haul out my handkerchief and try to talk slow and easy. “Here, get it off with this. Get it off easy, don’t rub.” My wrist is jerking like sixty as I pass it to him, though. “Just sort of smooth it off, keep your tongue away from it.”

That’s where the mistake happens. To do it he has to get the cigarette out of the way. He touches it, he parts his lips. It goes with the upper one! It’s adhered, just like the old man’s!

He flips it out, there isn’t time for me to stop him, he winces and he says “Ow!”

I’m on my feet like a shot. “What’d you do?”

“Caught my lip on it,” he says and tosses it down angrily. He’s out of bed before he knows what’s happened to him and I’ve flung him halfway across the room to the door. “Bathroom, quick!” I pant. “One of my razor blades — cut it wide open, split it to the gums if you have to, bleed like a pig, it’s your only chance!”

He does it, he must read death on my face, for once he doesn’t argue. I don’t go with him, can’t. I’m shaking so, I’d cut his throat. The water gives a roar into the washbasin, he lets out a yell of pain, and he’s done it.

Second mistake. Opening it up like that only gives all the red stuff a chance to get in. He’s young, maybe he could have fought off the smaller amount that would have penetrated through the original slit. Too late, the examiner’s words come back to me: “It isn’t a blood poison, it’s a nerve poison. Letting the blood out won’t help, it isn’t rattlesnake venom.” I’ve finished him!

He’s back in the doorway, white as a sheet. Blood’s pouring down his chin and the front of his pajamas look like he’d had a nosebleed. It isn’t a nosebleed; he’s opened the cleft of his lip to the nostrils. It’s started in already though, the poison; it’s in him already, and he doesn’t know what it is.

“What’d you make me do that for? I feel—” He tries to get to me and totters. Then I guess he knows what it is — for just one minute he knows what it is — that’s all the time he has to know it in.

I get him onto the bed — that’s all I can do for him — and the rest of it happens there. He just says one thing more. “Don’t let me, will you? Charlie, I dowanna die!” in a voice like a worn-out record running down under a scratchy needle. After that, he’s not recognizable as anything human any more.

I can’t do anything for him, so I just turn my face to the wall and shut out the rustling with my hands clapped to my ears. “Charlie, I dowanna die!” He isn’t saying it any more, it’s over already, but it goes on and on. For years I’ll probably hear it.

After awhile I cover him over without looking and I go to my own room. I’ve got a job to do — a job no one but me can do. While I’m in there, there’s a sort of fluttery sound for a minute outside, as though something whisked itself along the hall and down the stairs just then. That’s all right, I took care of the doors and windows before I came up. “Charlie, I dowanna die!” No, no insanity plea. Not this time — that’s too easy. An asylum’s too good.

I get my gun out of the closet where it’s been since we came here, and I break it. Two slugs in it. Two are enough. I crack it shut again and shove it on my hip. Then I take a long pole that’s standing in a comer, the handle of a floor-mop or something, and I go across the hall to her room. She’s pounding on the door downstairs. I can hear her shaking it, clawing at it, trying to get out of the house. She can wait.

I shift the chicken coop around so it faces my way, and zing, zing, zing goes the wire netting. Then I step back and prod the hinged slat open with the end of the long pole. Then I dig the pole into the bedclothes and loosen them up. There’s no wire mesh over the place that the one movable slat covers. There’s sort of a wicket left in it there, and out through that wicket comes the hooded head, the slow, coiling, glistening length of one of the world’s deadly things, the king cobra of India! I see Veda’s twin before my dilating eyes. The same scaly, gleaming covering; even the same marking like a question-mark on its hood! Endless lengths of it come out, like gigantic black-and-green toothpaste out of a squeezed tube, and I want to throw up in revulsion. Twelve feet of it — a monster. The story might have ended then, right in the room there — but the thing is torpid, sluggish from the cold climate and its long confinement.

It sees me, standing back across the room from it. Slowly it rears up, waist high, balancing on tightening coils for the thrust. Quickly the horrid hood swells, fills out with animosity. There’s not a sound in the room. I’m not breathing. The pounding and the lunging at the door downstairs has stopped some time ago. And in the silence I suddenly know that she’s come back into the room with me, that she’s standing somewhere right behind me.

I dare not turn around and look; dare not take my eyes off the swaying, dancing funnel of death before me for an instant. But I feel a weight suddenly gone from my hip. She’s got my gun!

Over my shoulder comes a whisper. “You’ve locked death into the house with you.”

The split second seems to expand itself into an hour. She edges her way along the wall until she comes into my range of vision. But my eyes can’t even flicker toward her. I know my own gun’s on me. But rather that than the other death.

Suddenly, I dip on buckled knees. I heave the long pole out from the bed like a fishing rod. A scarlet blanket and sheet come with it. The sheet drops off on the way, the blanket, heavier, clings to the end. The loathsome, fetid mouth of the thing below it has already gone wide. The blanket falls in swift effacement, covers the monster in stifling folds just as its head has gone back in the last preparatory move.

A fraction of an instant later, there is a lightning lunge against the blanket. A bulge appears there which soon is gone again — where the snake’s head struck after its spring. After that, everything is squirming, thrashing, cataleptic movement under the folds as it tries to free itself.

There’s a flash of fire from the wall and my hand burns — but if I drop that pole I’m gone. I wield the mop-handle in my bleeding, tortured hand, making it hiss through the air, flattening the blanket under it. It breaks in two under the terrific impacts, but I keep on with the short end of it until there’s no life under that blanket any more. Even then I step on the mess and grind and stamp with my steel-rimmed heels until the blanket discolors in places.

Veda stands there against the wall, the smoking gun in her hand, moaning: “You have killed a god!” If she really worshipped that thing, her whole world has come to an end. The gun slips from her hand, clatters to the floor. I swoop for it and get it again. She sinks down to her knees, her back against the wall, very still, looking at me. Her breath is coming very fast, she doesn’t betray her feelings in any other way.

Sometimes under the greatest tension, in moments almost of insanity, you can think the clearest. I am almost insane just then. And, in a flash, the whole set-up comes to me, now that it’s too late, now that the old man and the kid are gone. That lunge at the blanket just now has told me the whole story. The thick flannel I found in her drawer!

She held that before the opening in the crate and extracted the venom that way — when the cobra struck. Then she mixed it with her rouge in the little wooden mortar. Then she waxed her lips with camphor ice, freezing the pores tight shut, forming an impervious base for the red stuff. Then she kissed them, smeared them with it, offered them a cigarette to smoke—

They’re still there on the dresser, her long, thick-tipped cigarettes. I take a couple out of the box. Then I take the little bottle of mucilage, standing with all the perfumes, and I let a drop of it fall on the end of each cigarette. She did that too — I know that, now.

It dries in no time, but the moisture of the human mouth will dampen it again and cause the paper to stick to the lips. She sees me do all this, and yet she doesn’t move, doesn’t try to escape. Her god is dead, the fatalism of the East has her in its grip. Almost, I relent. But — “Charlie, I dowanna die!” rings in my ears.

I turn to her. You’d think nothing had happened, you’d think the kid was only asleep back there in his room, the way I talk to her. “Have a cigarette.”

She shakes her head and backs away along the wall.

“Better have a cigarette,” I say, and I take up the gun and bead it at her forehead. This is no act, and she can tell the difference. I won’t even ask her a second time. She takes a cigarette. “What have I done?” she tries to say.

“Nothing,” I answer, “nothing that I can prove, or even care to prove any more. Doll up. You have it with you.”

She smiles a little, maybe fatalistically, or maybe because she still thinks she can outsmart me. She rouges her lips. She raises the cigarette. But I see the half-curves it makes. “No you don’t, not that end. The way it’s supposed to be smoked.”

She puts the glued end in and I hold the match for her. She can’t tell yet about it but the smile goes and her eyes widen with fear.

I light my own — that’s glued, too. “I’m going to smoke right along with you; one of these is no different from the other. See, I have a clear conscience; have you?” I’m going to match her, step by step — I want to know just when it happens. I didn’t know I could be that cruel, but — “Charlie, I dowanna die!”

She begins by taking quick little puffs, not letting it stay any time in her mouth, and each time she puts it in at a different place. She thinks she’ll get around it that way. That’s easy to stop. “Keep your hands down. Touch it one more time and I’ll shoot.”

“Siva!” she moans. I think it is their goddess of death or something. Then to me: “You are going to kill me?”

“No, you are going to kill yourself. You last through that cigarette and you are welcome to your insanity plea when they get here from L.A.”

We don’t talk any more after that. Slowly the cigarettes burn down. I don’t take mine out, either. A dozen times her hands start upward and each time the gun stops them. Time is on my side. She begins to have trouble breathing, not from fear now, from nicotine and burnt paper. Her eyes fill with moisture. Not even an inveterate smoker can consume a ten-inch fag like that without at least a couple of clear breaths between drags.

I can’t stand it myself any more and out comes my own, and there’s a white-hot sting to my lower lip. She holds on, though, for dear life.

So would I, if death was going to be the penalty. I can see her desperately trying to free hers by working the tip of her tongue around the edges. No good. She begins to strangle deep down in her throat, water’s pouring out of her eyes. She twists and turns and retches and tries to get a free breath. It’s torture, maybe, but so were the thousand red-hot needles piercing that kid’s body upstairs — awhile ago.

All at once, a deep groan seems to come all the way up from her feet. The strangling and the gasping stop and the cigarette is smoldering on the floor. A thread of blood runs down her chin — purer, cleaner than the livid red stuff all around it. I lay the gun down near her and I watch her. Let her make her own choice!

“There’s only one more bullet in it,” I tell her. “If you think you can stand what’s coming, you can pay me back with it.”

She knows too well what it’s going to be like, so she has no time to waste.

She grabs for the gun and her eyes light up. “I am going, but you are coming with me!” she pants.

She levels my rod at me. Four times she pulls the trigger and four times it clicks harmlessly. The first chamber and the last must have been the loaded ones, and the ones in between were empty.

Now, she has no more time to waste on getting even. The twitching has already set in. She turns the gun on herself.

“Once more will get you out of it,” I say, and I turn away.

This time, there’s a shattering explosion behind me and something heavy falls like a log. I don’t bother looking. I wrap my handkerchief around my throbbing hand and go downstairs to the front door to wait for the men from L.A. to show up. I don’t smoke while I’m waiting, either.