Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

The Wisdom of Serpents by David Dean

David Dean is Avalon, New Jersey’s new chief of police. EQMM has had stories from cops who also write fiction before, but this may be our first contributing chief. Chief Dean has worked full-time on the force through all of his many years of writing. Yet he rarely writes about cops, and even when he does, his tales are not procedurals.

When Josh spied the writhing ball of serpents that he was being lowered into, he cried out to his best friend belaying him into the cave from above, and his descent was mercifully halted. He dangled some twenty feet above the knot of snakes that glistened in the shaft of sunlight that pierced the aperture through which he had entered, and called out in a shaky voice, “Snakes, Paul! There’s a bunch of snakes in here!”

After a moment’s pause, his descent was resumed.

“Paul! Paul! Did you hear me? Pull me up... there’s snakes down here,” Josh pleaded.

As Paul continued to feed the rope through the pulley on the tripod, he contemplated just letting go and allowing Josh to hurtle the remaining distance to the fate that awaited him in the snake hole; packing up the caving gear and leaving. But his plans had failed to take into account that as it required two hands to lower Josh to his hideous death, his ears remained open to his friend’s piteous cries, and so he faltered and the pulley squeaked to a halt once more. Then he remembered the home pregnancy-test kit so carelessly discarded by Vanda in the bathroom waste basket and thought, All you have to do is open your hands... just release. Within his gloves, water began to seep from his palms.

“Paul, can you hear me? What are you doin’? It’s not funny, dude! Pull me up right now! I mean it, man! I’m gonna kick your ass if you don’t!”

The voice that wafted up through the hole in the earth was fainter now. Paul guessed that Josh now hung a scant twenty feet above the torpid nest of vipers that lay below.

“Pull me up... please! I think they know I’m in here! They’re starting to move around a lot. We’re best of friends, for God’s sake! I don’t know what you’re thinking, Paul, but it’s not true! We’ve been friends all our lives!”

It was true, from boyhood to manhood, twenty-eight years’ worth of friendship lay between them. Compared to their lifetime relationship, Vanda was a recent addition. Paul had met and fallen in love with her his senior year of college, and they had married the following year. Five years of marriage. Seen in a certain light, she was almost an interloper, and considering the recent events that had brought Paul to this lonely place in the mountains, a poisonous one, not unlike the hibernating snakes that lay waiting at Josh’s feet.

In keeping with his nature, Josh had been a most pliant victim; never questioning Paul’s story of prehistoric pictographs inadvertently discovered while on a winter day’s ramble in the mountains. Paul had found it almost distressingly easy to convince the easygoing Josh that today’s trek was simply to be a “sneak preview” in preparation for a detailed exploration of the cavern when the weather warmed, hence, there was no need of rappel racks or ascenders — Josh had only to relax and play tourist as Paul lowered him into the pothole for a quick peek at their discovery.

Of course, there were no cave paintings that Paul knew of, even though the story of his chancing upon the vertical cave was entirely true. He had only just missed falling through the flush opening the day before. No one could have been more surprised, as this was an area of mountains well known to Josh and Paul... Vanda, too. When he had lowered a flashlight down to have a look, he had at first thought he was looking at a floor of boiling mud. Once his eyes had adjusted, however, he had understood what he was seeing and contemplated for several moments flinging himself down amongst them.

The rope began to swing violently from side to side and Paul guessed that Josh was attempting to climb back up under his own steam. Without ascenders, this would be a formidable task, even for someone as strong as Josh. Suddenly, he was aware of the tremendous strain on his own arms, shoulders, and the great muscles between his shoulder blades. His gloves were staining with the moisture squeezed from his palms as he struggled to maintain stasis against Josh’s exertions.

From below came a strangled cry; silence; then the rope snapped taut, nearly snatching Paul off his feet. Josh had lost his grip and fallen back to the end of the rope, gaining nothing for all his effort. From deep within the earth, Paul could hear his friend groan. It was impossible to tell whether it was from pain or despair. The line that suspended Josh swayed gently from side to side, and after a few moments there came the unmistakable sound of weeping.

“You’re a bastard, Paul,” Josh called up. “I don’t know why you’re doing this, but it’s wrong! She’s just messed up your mind... mine too, for that matter.” Paul could hear the tears of self-pity in his friend’s voice. He had always been the weaker of the two, even if he was the larger and stronger. “But it’s not like you think, if that’s what this is all about. Not at all, man. Is that what you think? Paul? I know you can hear me up there. Answer me, damn it... please.” Paul could hear him crying again.

Paul tried to think of the answer he could give that would adequately explain why he was killing his best friend — a succinct indictment of a friend’s betrayal and a wife’s infidelity. But the words remained bound up in a heart seething with hurt and anger, and oddly, with the loss of a companion that was yet to come. A great wave of aloneness washed over him and rendered him mute with future bereavement.

Big, athletic, handsome, not-too-bright Josh. Always the bachelor; the perennial third wheel at Paul and Vanda’s dinner table. Six years after college and he still opened cans for dinner. Hapless, helpless Josh, and the women loved him for it. Ever the affable “catch” to whom married women loved to introduce their single friends, and who remained their friend long after the affair was over and marriage never proffered. The high-school star athlete who simply grew into the game-winning coach. The friend Paul had tutored through every grade, including college, and shared more meals, beer, and adventures with than he could possibly recall; the near constant companion of countless camping trips, hiking excursions, rafting expeditions, mountain-climbing forays, and caving adventures. The steady, strong arm that had shielded Paul from harm on numerous occasions and had probably saved his life more than once. The same friend that gravity and exhaustion would soon snatch from his grasp whether he willed it or no.

The rope began to swing wildly and Paul knew that Josh was attempting to save himself once more. He could discern his steady, exhausted huffs as he pulled himself hand-over-hand up the rope. Paul wondered if Josh had thought to divest himself of the heavy backpack he wore. The pulley swayed from side to side as Josh attacked the rope and, alarmingly, the motion began to be mirrored by the metal tripod that it hung from and that straddled the hole in the earth that he had been lowered into. The stakes that anchored the frame to the stony soil began to work themselves loose and the violent motion transferred itself to Paul as well, causing him to rock from foot to foot. He understood instantly that he would not be able to hold on much longer if this was allowed to continue, and the choice of saving or killing Josh would no longer be his.

“Josh! Stop climbing! You’re going to rock the whole frame over if you keep it up!” The rope continued to switch back and forth like a windshield wiper as Paul struggled for purchase. “Josh, stop it! Do you hear me?”

Slowly, the rope’s movements began to subside and Paul was able to relax somewhat, in spite of the fire that was spreading through his muscles. From below he could hear that Josh had started to cry once more and detected within the sobs that note of despair that denotes extreme exhaustion. The line shuddered once, twice, and then a third time. Josh had dropped back to the end of the rope by degrees.

“Help! Help me, somebody, please!” Josh’s tired voice echoed up from the cavern.

Paul could stand it no longer. “Josh, I’m gonna pull you up! Shed the pack and I’ll pull you back up!”

There was a pause, and then through the blood singing in his ears, Paul heard a distant thump. “The snakes didn’t like that,” Josh called out. “Not even a little bit!” Josh began to laugh as if it was the funniest thing in the world, and Paul pictured the riled serpents striking the rucksack again and again in their impotent fury, and found nothing funny about it.

“Hold on, Josh, here goes!” And with that, Paul began to back away from the hole, digging the heels of his boots into the flinty soil with each wrenching step, red-faced and panting with exertion, and inch by gut-straining inch began to reverse the unequal tug-of-war with Josh’s two hundred pounds and unrelenting gravity.

Then the pulley gave way.

In an instant gravity regained the upper hand and Paul was being pulled rapidly toward the lip of the hole. Even as he registered that the eyebolt that had connected the pulley to the tripod had snapped, sending the heavy pulley sliding down the rope towards the helpless Josh, he also saw the hole yawn wider to receive him as well. Freed from the fulcrum provided by the frame and pulley, the rope snapped against the lip of the aperture and began to hum and smoke against the rough edges, dropping Josh ever closer to the angry, waiting snakes, even as it effortlessly dragged Paul to the same fate. From beneath the earth, Paul heard a sharp cry of pain as the pulley struck Josh’s hands where they clasped the lifeline.

Without conscious thought, Paul sat suddenly and spread his legs, at once lowering his center of gravity and allowing the dirt and stones gathered painfully between them in his headlong rush to further slow him with additional weight and drag. The now useless tripod appeared to rush forward and he lined up the soles of his boots with its legs. With a jolt of agony to his knee joints, he impacted, and held, even as the line went slack and a low wail drifted up from the snake pit, punctuated by almost comical hoots of unrestrained terror. Josh was in amongst the snakes.

When Paul had discovered the hole the day before, murder had not been in his thoughts, but once he saw what lay within, the plan had sprung full-blown into his head. Just like that, he had gone from wronged husband and friend to murderer, when a mere twenty-four hours before, it had been he who was the victim.

It had been the pregnancy test that had finally opened his eyes, though why it should have taken that, Paul could not fathom. Surely, everything that he had needed to know had lain before his eyes for some time, yet it had required a small, mass-produced medical device that was sold over the counter in every local pharmacy to provide the spark that burned away his blindness. It was like Vanda to be so careless.

She had blown into their lives like some primal feminine force during the first month of their senior year, as Paul and Josh sat hunched over a map of their next backpacking trip — a whirlwind of long black hair and colorful scarves, dog-eared textbooks and swirling skirts, that suddenly commanded their secluded spot in the student center. With a great sigh, she had sunk onto the sagging sofa next to Paul, allowing her books and papers to cascade onto the coffee table and their terrain map, her great silver earrings tinkling as she threw back her head to stare at the ceiling. After a moment, she had raised herself to regard the two young men she had intruded upon, fixed her grey eyes upon Paul’s, widened them dramatically, and announced, “Professor Rais is going to be a problem.”

Paul had no idea to whom she was referring or what his expression must have been that day, and he had not bothered to look over at Josh for confirmation of this apparition. It had been enough, at that moment, to simply look back into Vanda’s eyes — eyes that had sought his and, remarkably, not Josh’s. “I believe he expects me to study in my senior year,” she added; then, turning to the map, she asked abruptly, “What’s all this?”

“We’re going... planning,” Paul had corrected himself, “a backpacking trip.”

“Really,” she had said. “I’d like to do that sometime.”

For the briefest of moments, Paul had studied her profiled face, strikingly white and smooth as porcelain, her ebony tresses tangled in amongst the dozen necklaces that hung over the tabletop from her slender neck. An image floated unbidden before his mind’s eye of her wildly dancing in a lonely clearing, naked but for her outlandish jewelry and glowing beneath a hunter’s moon. That had been it. “Wanna come?” he had asked.

She had regarded him quizzically for several heartbeats, an animal sensing a trap, and then calmly nodded while reaching over and removing a smudge of chocolate, the remnant of an earlier energy bar, from his chin with her tongue-moistened thumb. Her unexpected touch had paralyzed him, even as she had deigned to finally notice Josh, who had sat slack-jawed throughout this spell-weaving. With a broad smile, she had offered him her hand, which he clumsily grasped.

The three were seldom apart from that day forward, except during the prophesied interference of the demanding Professor Rais, her anthropology teacher and chair of her department, and something of a local celebrity for his travels to distant jungles where he immersed himself in the culture and rites of primitive societies. That year had flown by, filled with countless hikes and climbs, and even a week spent in the wilderness of the Great Smokies during a heartbreakingly beautiful spring.

Vanda was everything Paul had fantasized on that first meeting, unremittingly feminine, yet elemental, in some indecipherable way. She seldom had to be helped along, even on the most arduous journeys, and her joy in nature was unbridled and infectious. It had seemed to Paul that she had subtly influenced his view of the natural world — no longer did he see it as a primeval struggle betwixt man and nature, one in which he and Josh were challenged to master, but slowly and through her eyes, he began to perceive it as some type of cooperative venture, a partnership between the three adventurers and the untrammeled land. She had dashed about from one to the other of them, tirelessly pointing out the salubrious properties of hitherto unnoticed flowers, ferns, and leaves, laughingly providing unlikely foods from mosses and mushrooms for her reluctant followers. That which Paul and Josh had marched forth to conquer with their youthful strength and bravado, they found to have willfully surrendered to their enchantress. Paul would not have been surprised to have seen birds perched on her shoulders or wolves lying at her small, booted feet, as he too had been snared without the least violence.

Like everything else in their relationship, it seemed their marriage had come about as surely and naturally as a new season. It had appeared to simply unfold before Paul’s eyes like the warm sun that rose above the treetops and reflected off the still, blue lake on the shore of which they took their vows. Josh, uncomfortably stuffed into a rented tuxedo, had nervously acted the part of Paul’s best man. The bride had worn green: a diaphanous layering of gossamer materials that accentuated her ample bosom and tiny waist while trailing to the earth about her ankles even as her delicate green shoes peeked out from the foliage. She had worn her dark, luxuriant hair up in a complicated arrangement of braids and ribbons, surmounted by a crown of tiny wildflowers, which only served to somehow accentuate the superabundance of her shining tresses — a raven-haired Tinker Bell arrayed for the Solstice Ball.

The only jarring note that Paul could recall was his mother’s rather shocked comment on first viewing the bride on her wedding day. With a small cry, she had raised a white-gloved hand to her mouth and gasped to his father, “Oh my Lord, Edwin, she looks like a heathen princess,” just loud enough for Paul to have overheard as he awaited Vanda at the makeshift altar.

A second moment had occurred at the giving-away of the bride: The exotic Professor Rais, looking tall and rather elegant in his tailored tux and with swept-back, shoulder-length graying hair, had stumbled slightly on the way to the lake’s edge, betraying his somewhat advanced stage of inebriation, and managed to step on the bride’s hem. The sound of rending material was only just matched by the suppressed groan from the feminine members of the assembled. Yet the bride appeared to take no notice and proceeded with her unsteady stand-in (Vanda’s father had not been heard from for many years) to her waiting groom. Rais, flushing somewhat, manfully squared his narrow shoulders and hastened to keep up.

Once their goal had been reached and the bride safely delivered, if somewhat the worse for wear, he breathed the noxious fumes of his earlier imbibements over the happy couple, then attempted to kiss the bride on the lips through her veil. With a small shove from Vanda’s gloved hand, he had disengaged and stumbled hastily away, suddenly visibly and obviously intoxicated. Her smile for Paul, radiant behind the green veil and like some exotic and beautiful creature glimpsed within its lair, had swept away the awkwardness of the moment, and Paul as well. He had wished to never be free of her from that time forth.

Paul crouched at the edge of the hole and listened, but no sounds came from within. Far below, in the patch of sunlight that reached the cavern floor, he could make out Josh’s backpack, but his friend was not with it. “Josh,” he called down. “Josh!” Silence, laden with reproach, wafted up to him with the cold draft from the cavern. The pack shifted slightly and appeared to tip to one side; something long and sinewy gathered itself atop it to better enjoy the meager shaft of sunlight, and appeared to stare up at him. The cavern floor undulated within the circle of illumination, the snakes so thickly intertwined that only when one’s triangular head or sharp tail separated from the writhing mass could Paul comprehend that it was not one living, multi-tentacled creature in uneasy repose. He drew back from the edge, grateful there was no tension on the rope, then thought of Josh still tethered to the other end down there in the dark, in the midst of serpents. “Josh!” Paul cried out once more as remorse and terror for his friend flooded his heart. “I’m coming down. I’m sorry... so sorry! Do you hear me?”

“Yeah, I hear you... and you should be.” Josh’s voice, by a trick of the subterranean acoustics, sounded as if he were just beneath the lip of the cave’s opening, and startled Paul into falling back. “By the way, I’m gonna kill you when you get down here, you sonofabitch.”

Paul’s relief was so profound that tears welled in his eyes and he hastily wiped them away with his sleeve. “Where are you? I can’t see you from up here.”

“I’m about ten feet south, I think, of my ruck... and the snakes. They seemed to want to stay in the sun, which is fine by me. When the pulley snapped and the rope whipped up against the lip, it swung me clear of them... at least for now. It’s the only luck I’ve had today... the pulley broke some of the fingers on my right hand, Paul.”

Paul understood this to be bad news indeed; it meant that Josh could do very little in his own rescue. “That’s okay,” he answered, attempting to sound sure of himself. “How many feet is it, do you think, from the cave opening to the floor?”

A slight pause followed this question, as Josh calculated. “Thirty, give or take a few feet.”

Paul trusted Josh’s judgment in this matter... he was always the better climber. “All right then, we’ve got plenty of rope here. Can you unhook yourself?”

“Yeah, right, I’m gonna untie and let you pull up the rope. That would be real intelligent.”

Paul knew he deserved that, but sighed with exasperation nonetheless. “Listen, Josh, if I wanted to leave you, I’d just untie my end and drop it down the hole, dismantle the tripod, and go home.”

There was another pause as Josh digested this piece of obvious truth. “That’s what you were gonna do, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Paul replied honestly. “Yeah, it was.”

“My fingers are broke, I told you. I don’t know if I can.”

Paul could hear the pain and fear in Josh’s voice. “Josh, I won’t leave you, I promise. Just stay in your harness and send the rope up.”

After a few moments, Paul could feel vibrations in the woven fibers he held, then Josh called out, “All right! It’s free... You better not leave me, you sonofabitch. I’m still gonna kick your ass when this is all over!”

Paul began to haul the line up and coil it at his feet. Once he had Josh’s end he quickly routed it over the top crosspiece of the tripod and left several feet to dangle over the hole. The other end he secured around the bole of an old-growth oak that leaned over the shale-covered clearing. He knew their rope to be one hundred feet long, which was just enough, with a little extra, he hoped, for his purpose. Returning to the tripod, he carefully rigged the dangling line beneath his armpits, cursing himself for not having brought any of his own gear, and knelt down once more.

“Josh, what are the snakes doing?”

“Nothing much... waiting for you, probably,” he answered with a lame attempt at humor.

“No, seriously, have they moved at all? I’m thinking they might move with the sunlight.” Paul glanced up at the sun edging its way into the western sky. The day was getting on.

“Yeah,” Josh called back excitedly. “Yeah, I think they are. They’ve moved away from the pack some.”

“That’s good,” Paul said. “ ’Cause I’m going to drop a big coil of rope down there and I don’t want to rile them up too much.”

“Oh shit... wait, wait, let me get a handful of rocks or something.” Paul could hear Josh scrabbling amongst the stones with his good hand for missiles. “Okay, go ahead.”

Reaching beneath the tripod and across the two-foot aperture, Paul tugged the heavy coil to the edge and let gravity pull it in. This was followed by a muffled thump and a slight tug on his chest. Without waiting, lest his nerve fail him, Paul seized the rope that dangled opposite him and gave it a good tug, satisfying himself with the corresponding pull on his armpits, and began to lower himself into the snake hole. As he sank into the darkness, Josh began to yell. “Jesus Christ, Paul, you’ve really stirred ’em up! They’re going everywhere!”

From his lofty vantage point, Paul could now see the beam from Josh’s helmet lamp swinging wildly about the cavern floor, and just discernible beneath his friend’s wild shouts arose the dry, rasping murmur of hundreds of scaled bodies intertwining and disengaging simultaneously, in menacing petulance.

“Josh,” Paul called out. “Don’t move around! Stay where you are and throw rocks at those that come near you! They’ll settle down in a few minutes and go back to the sunlight.”

Paul could see Josh with his back against the cave wall, futilely chucking stones with his uninjured left hand, but as he was right-handed, his efforts were having little effect other than to gain the snakes’ interest. Each rock that landed amongst them received several cursory strikes. Paul, dry-mouthed and sweating profusely, continued to lower himself, hand over hand, to the floor of the cave. Now that he was much closer, he thought these reptiles to be copper-heads, but wasn’t sure... Vanda would have known at a glance; she seemed able to name every creature that crawled, swam, or flew. “Josh, settle down and try not to move your feet... they’re attracted to the vibrations in the earth... that’s how they hear you.” Vanda had taught him that, as well.

As Josh’s light whipped from side to side, Paul made out a possible solution. “Josh, there’s a big rock to your left. Just ease over and step up onto it.”

Like a small child at an adult’s command, Josh did as he was bidden, sliding his feet ever so carefully as he edged along the wall, and hooting like an owl at each movement on the ground around him. With almost comic exaggeration, he took a slow, giant step up upon reaching the rock and placed one booted foot on top; then with a final hoot, snatched the other up to join the first. Once he was sure of his balance, he aimed a sickly, frightened grin up at Paul and then froze into spelunking statuary.

As Paul hung suspended ten feet above the surface of the cavern, the serpents did, indeed, begin to lose interest in the previous commotion and began to make their way singly and in writhing knots back towards the waiting patch of late-winter sunlight — a thousand crawling exclamation marks coalescing into a rustling heap of drowsy venom. Fortunately for Paul’s plan, that saving ray of warmth steadily, if almost imperceptibly, moved further into the recesses of the cave and drew the cranky reptiles with it. Paul resumed his descent and gingerly placed his feet upon the earth. Without untying the rope, he softly walked the short distance to where Josh perched like some lonely, subterranean lighthouse.

“Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s get you the hell out of here.”

Placing a trembling hand on Paul’s shoulder to steady himself, Josh stepped carefully down and allowed himself to be led to where his backpack still lay. Once there, Paul unrigged himself and quickly and expertly tied a bowline knot in the end of the rope and clipped the carabiner on Josh’s harness through the loop.

“All right, then,” he said, giving the line a slight tug. “Josh, I’m going to haul you up, but you’re going to have to help even though you’ve got a busted paw. Here’s how it will work: Using your good hand, you pull with me each time I say ‘Heave.’ In between, release while I hold down here, and reach up for another handful for the next heave. Got it?”

“Yeah,” Josh answered uncertainly. “But what about you?”

“Once you are up top, drop your end back down to me; I’ll tie myself off and haul myself back up the same way I came down. Nothing to it.”

Josh looked dubious. “You think this is going to be easy?”

“No,” Paul answered truthfully. “No, I don’t.”

“Who’s to say I won’t just walk off and leave you, once I get out? You’d deserve it.”

“Here are my car keys so you don’t have to walk all the way back to town,” Paul said, fishing them from his pocket and making to hand them to the other man. “You can just tell Vanda we got separated down here and you couldn’t find me. That should make you both happy.”

Josh studied Paul for several moments, then roughly folded Paul’s fingers around the keys with his good hand. “Just get us out of here before those snakes get curious again; I’ll straighten your sorry ass out when we get up top.”

Paul pocketed the keys, then took a good two-handed grip on the rope. Josh did the same with his left hand. “Ready?” Paul asked. Josh nodded. “Heave!” Josh rose several inches into the air. “Ready... heave!” Another few inches were attained. Inch by straining inch Josh began to ascend. With sweat running freely into his eyes and down his ribs, Paul wondered if he was truly up to this task; even if he was able to get Josh to the surface, he now doubted he would have the strength remaining to haul himself out afterwards.

He needn’t have worried, for when Josh was only about ten feet from his starting point, they both became aware of a new sound that now seemed to have entered the snake lair. Josh noticed it first and called down, “What’s that? You hear something, Paul?”

Paul, grateful for a chance to rest, belayed the rope and listened. In the echoing silence there was something — a faint, repetitious ping, the sound of a pipe expanding with the heat or contracting with the cold. Paul threw his head back and peered upwards. “Josh,” he began, then was cut off by the squeal of fatigued metal unwillingly assuming new form. With a great clang of alarm the tripod surrendered its only useful shape, tossing Josh back into the darkness in rebuke. The cavern floor received him with even less ceremony, driving the wind from his lungs with its unyielding soil, while from behind them the dry agitated hum of shifting scales filled the darkness once more.

After graduation, the three of them had simply returned home to the small city nestled in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains where they had all grown up. Paul had found it remarkable, and somewhat mysterious in a pleasant kind of way, that Vanda and he had never crossed paths during those early years. She had attended public schools, he had attended the parochial schools of his diocese; she had lived in a blue-collar enclave surrounding the now defunct mills, he had been brought up in an old, leafy, upscale suburb; she had spent her first two years of advanced schooling at a community college, out of financial necessity, he, and Josh, of course, had gone straight to university out of high school; whereas he had been thoroughly indoctrinated in his Catholic faith, she was vague on the subject of religion and checked “No affiliation” on the few forms that requested such information. Everything about her, in his eyes, was spontaneous and her own; as unlike the carefully prepared Paul as he could want. She was the wildness that he unconsciously sought on his and Josh’s many journeys into the great forests and mountains yet could never release within his own soul.

It amused and pleased him that she had, for his parents’ sake, agreed to be married within the Catholic faith, which required out of religious necessity that she be baptized in the same. Even the months of instruction that preceded this sacrament drew not one word of complaint. If anything, she had appeared to devote to it the same studious inquiry as she had her primitive-cultures courses, though with a bemused tolerance that was sometimes coupled with astonishment at some of the more esoteric “mysteries” of the Church. Yet, for Paul’s sake, and more importantly his parents’, she had submitted cheerfully enough. Her only rebellion had been her insistence that the wedding Mass be celebrated out of doors, and in her choice of colors in bridal wear. These expressions of herself had delighted Paul, and he didn’t care a penny that her conversion was less than genuine.

However, as to her father’s absence on the day of their wedding, and indeed, as to his disappearance from her family altogether, her candor disappeared. It was the only subject that Paul could not draw her out on. Though in Paul’s eyes Vanda was often mysterious, as all natural creatures are, it was only in the matter of her father that he glimpsed a furtive side of her personality, and it troubled him as a limp in a pet might worry its owner — the suffering animal cannot speak and explain the source of its pain, therefore the loving master must carefully knead its muscles and bones and probe its paws until the source of discomfort is discovered and relieved. He did so with wine one night.

It was after dinner, towards the end of their first year of marriage, as they lay curled together on the living room sofa. The night air was soft, as it sometimes is in early spring, laden with the scent of honeysuckle and the warming earth, and playing over their naked bodies as it billowed the curtains gently to and fro. They were on their third glass of wine, celebrating the end of a work day for no other reason than they were young and still in the first blush of their love. Paul lay snug against his young bride’s backside, his arms wrapped tightly round her. “Do you ever miss your old man?” he had asked softly.

He was answered with an immediate tension in Vanda’s body, and silence. He could feel her withdrawing from him and regretted the question but could not call it back. Then, after what seemed a very long time, she had replied in a quiet, level voice, “Of course I do, Paul, he’s my father. Every girl needs a father.”

“Yeah,” he had said just as quietly, desperately thinking of how to continue the exchange he had encouraged.

But she had slid from his arms like mercury and padded across the bare wooden floors towards the bathroom, supremely indifferent to her nakedness and all the more magnificent to Paul because of it. Then she had turned and faced him, her only adornments her ever-present bangles, necklaces, and jangling earrings, and said, “He wanted to be more than just a father, Paul.”

“Oh,” was all he could think to reply, as he did not understand her meaning; and with that she had withdrawn into the shower.

He awoke in the small hours of that night with his heart beating like something caged and furious within his chest, and turned to his wife. The shadows of branches outside their window played restlessly across her glowing skin in the moonlight and Paul had reached out a hand to touch her, then held it back in pity. He had not wished to wake her and have her see his face, for he had come upon the meaning of her earlier statement in the black depths of a dreamless sleep and would not have her see the horror and pity he feared might be mirrored there. Instead, he had lain back on his pillow once more and waited for his heart to slow its pace, and knew that he loved Vanda all the more for having the strength to create herself into the lovely, free-spirited woman that he so adored, in spite of her father’s unnatural attentions and the stain of darkness that must surely dwell within her as a result.

Josh lay groaning and clutching his rib cage with his good hand; the light from his helmet lamp a will-o’-wisp playing restlessly on the thin rocky shell that separated Paul and him from the lighted world above. His companion’s face appeared above him, grey and etched with lines of strain and fear. “You’ve killed us,” Josh informed him through gritted teeth.

Paul knelt beside him and, uncharacteristically, seized his hand. “I’m so sorry, Josh. I’m so sorry. I haven’t been thinking right. Ever since I found... did you bust a rib?” he asked, suddenly aware of Josh’s labored breathing and grimacing face.

“Yeah, I think I did. But never mind about that now; that’s the least of our worries. Help me over to those rocks before they find me lying here.”

“They” had been drawn by the impact of Josh’s fall, and as Paul’s head whipped up in alarm, the sound of their approach was made all the more sinister by the stygian darkness that lay outside their faint circle of light. With a gasp, he heaved Josh to his feet, ignoring his moans, and the two men shuffled as silently as they could toward a heap of rubble that lay at the foot of a nearby wall. As gently as he could in their haste, Paul helped Josh up onto a large, flat-topped boulder, and quickly joined him. Breathing hard, they looked back to the spot where the rope still dangled beckoningly in the dimming illumination of Josh’s lamp, and became aware by degrees that the floor was no longer flat, but heaving and alive. “Jesus Christ,” Josh breathed.

“They’ll go away,” Paul promised, only half believing it himself. “They’re just irritated with the commotion. They’ll go back to the sunlight; they have to... for the warmth.” He glanced back hopefully to the patch of sunlight that had lain at the back of the cave, and found that it had wandered to the cavern’s limits, and would soon begin to climb the far wall where the snakes could not follow. The sun was rapidly descending in the winter sky and both men shifted closer to one another in the gathering chill and gloom.

“How much longer do you have on those batteries?” Paul asked, meaning the miner’s lamp.

“Not long,” Josh replied tonelessly. “An hour, maybe.”

“Any spares?” Paul persisted.

“Yeah,” Josh answered. “Right over there,” he pointed at the backpack smothered in reptilian life. “Wanna get ’em?”

They fell into silence.

After a while Josh spoke again, “After you found what, exactly?”

Paul answered immediately, his thoughts never far from the discovery that had inspired their current circumstances. “The pregnancy test... it was positive. She’s going to have your baby.”

“My...” Josh began, then started to laugh; the echoes flying back and forth in the darkness.

“If you keep that up, I’ll kill you for sure, and right now.” Unseen by Josh, Paul fingered the hilt of the survival knife he wore on his belt.

“No, no,” Josh began, winding down. “Not me... not mine... no way!”

Paul turned a miserable face toward his friend. “Oh, and why’s that?”

“Had ’em snipped, that’s why. I’ve been neutered!” Josh began to cough with a liquid sibilance; caught his breath and resumed. “No way I was gonna get snagged into marriage and kids. That’s not for me... never will be. Besides all that, I’ve never made it to first base with her. If we’re gonna be truthful, and we may as well at this point, I would have if she’d have let me. She makes me a little crazy, I guess, always has really, but it never happened, Paul. So, if you wanted to kill me for being a bad friend with impure thoughts, then I guess you’ve got me dead to rights, but if it’s for this baby, then you’ve got the wrong man.”

Paul stared at his friend in stunned silence as the implications of what he had said began to make themselves felt. He knew that Josh was telling the truth; he had known him long enough to know. “Then who...” he began.

“What about you, for starters?” Josh interrupted him, still chuckling and coughing uncomfortably.

Paul turned away for a moment before speaking, then drew a deep breath. “Can’t... we tried for a long time, but nothing. We both went to the doctor and had a few tests run. It was me... I can’t.” He lapsed into a shamed silence.

“Well, who’s the lucky man?” Josh said.

Paul’s head sank onto his drawn-up knees. “Shut up, Josh. Just shut up.”

“Maybe we can ask her ourselves before long; she knows where we are.”

Paul’s head snapped around. “She does? I didn’t tell her... under the circumstances,” he finished lamely.

“No... but I did. She called me last night, said you were acting strange and for me to keep an eye on you. So when you showed up this morning wanting to go caving, I gave her a call while you were loading the car. She knows this area as well as we do now, and I pinpointed it pretty well, based on what you had told me. She’ll come looking soon and see the equipment up top.”

“Will she?” Both men glanced uneasily at the dwindling patch of sunlight that now had climbed the wall of the cave and threatened to vanish altogether in the greater shadows of the distant ceiling. Sundown was upon them and they could feel the temperature dropping perceptibly.

Josh switched off his lamp to conserve the batteries and the two men sat in shivering silence staring up at the hole they had descended through. As they watched, the sky dimmed and grayed, leached of color by the retreating sun, until the small opening faded into the surrounding blackness of their subterranean prison and vanished altogether. Paul and Josh shifted ever closer until they were sitting back to back in the darkness to ward off the dank cold.

“Just divorce her, Paul. She’s not worth all this,” Josh spoke into the silence.

“No, I can’t; you know that... and so does she,” he finished in a whisper.

Josh mulled this over, thinking how he had never been as serious as his friend in religious-studies class. In fact, he had never been as serious as Paul about anything. “For crying out loud, exceptions can be made; even by the almighty Church. She’s pregnant with somebody else’s baby, for Christ’s sake!” He regretted the harsh choice of words as soon as they were uttered.

“No, it’s not just that, Josh. I just can’t... or won’t, I guess. I love her.”

“I feel sorry for you, Paul,” Josh said gently. “And you don’t even know who she’s been seeing.”

“No,” Paul agreed. “Now I don’t have the slightest clue. Nothing’s changed, you see. That’s why I figured it had to be you; you’re always around. We’ve gone along in the same pattern for years — she goes to work; I go to work; two nights a week she drives back up to college for her graduate studies. And before you ask, I pay the tuition bills and I’ve helped her do research work for Professor Rais, so, yes, she really is...” He left the sentence unfinished; remembering the first words Vanda had ever spoken to him. A rush of familiar scenes swirled through his mind; memories now made unwholesome by the poison of unwelcome revelation. While above them, somewhere in the distance, arose the faint growl and grind of an approaching four-wheel-drive vehicle.

“Listen,” Josh whispered. “You hear that?”

They both stood silently in expectation. The motor coughed and was extinguished. Paul guessed that the vehicle had arrived at the spot where he and Josh had parked, what seemed like a lifetime ago. Whoever they were, they would have to make the rest of the way on foot.

Josh hastily switched on his helmet lamp and aimed its failing beam at the cave’s entrance; then both men waited, listening intently for the scrabble of loose stone that must accompany their rescuer’s arrival. As they stared upward, Paul became aware of the cold, winking stars that were now visible in the distant firmament, while at the very limit of their portal to the living world, a slice of the moon peeked over the edge like the eye of a mischievous giant. From above, the rattle of stone and scree announced the arrival of their salvation.

Josh began to hop up and down and shout, “Hey, we’re down here! We’re down in the cave!” The cracked rib pressing into his lung prevented him from continuing and he lapsed into a fit of painful coughing that silenced his pleas. Paul said nothing and waited.

Far above, he could just make out the hiss and murmur of voices in subdued debate. The softer, higher voice appeared to be demanding something of the other. Then, after a pause, the rope that led to the surface was released and fell to join Paul and Josh in the pit.

Even as Josh struggled once more to his feet to cry out in consternation, Paul could just make out the silhouette of someone peering down into their tomb. The cold glow of the moon framed the long hair of their executioner, making it shimmer with silver streaks, even as Josh’s lamp captured the flushed face. With a cry, Professor Rais vanished from their sight, and shortly thereafter, the clanking of the metal tripod could be heard as its wreckage was dragged down the slope, and the last evidence of Paul and Josh’s plight was removed.

Josh began to weep, and Paul sat down next to him and placed his arm over his friend’s shoulder, but said nothing. He had hoped to see Vanda one last time, and was dumb with sorrow that she had deprived him of even this final consolation.

Drawn to the only heat remaining in the cave, the serpents washed up against the foot of the boulder upon which the two friends waited in a restless sea of scales, and the largest amongst them reared up from the press of the others questing for purchase. Paul leaned back and closed his eyes, instantly conjuring the familiar vision of Vanda dancing naked but for her Gypsy jewelry beneath a bright, pitiless moon, though this time there lay at her feet the prostrate victims of foreign and merciless gods.

© 2008 by David Dean