Shift: A Novel

Washington, DC

November 15, 1963

It was easy to climb the snake ladder once you set your mind to it.

He’d been afraid the snakes were going to bite him, but soon enough he realized they couldn’t—if they opened their mouths the ladder would come apart and the snakes would fall to their deaths in the canyon below, which was inexplicably filled with camellias. Camellias made from cut glass.

Well, a lot was inexplicable really. Like why he was climbing a snake ladder, or why it led to a giant nest woven of tubes and wires, or why there was a baby sitting inside the nest.

His baby.

His and Naz’s.

He wasn’t sure how they’d made a baby, since all he’d done was squeeze her breasts—which had been much larger than he’d thought they’d be, and browner, too—and he was a little surprised their child was still an infant, since it had been almost three centuries since the last time he’d seen her. But he didn’t worry about that, just as he didn’t worry about why the infant was the size of a rhinoceros. It was his baby—his and Naz’s—and it was calling him. He had to go to his son.

He himself had grown so old that his wrinkles had turned to scales. Well, less snake scales than lizard skin. His fingernails had grown into claws, and his hair had been replaced by a dorsal ridge that extended from the top of his head to the tip of his tail, which hung down several feet lower than his legs. He didn’t remember when any of these changes had occurred, but he accepted them at face value because they were what he saw when he looked in the mirror, or when he closed his eyes for that matter. There were mirrors inside his eyelids now, and they reflected him more perfectly than any looking glass ever had.

He was nearly at the top of the ladder now. The snakes hissed and writhed in his grasp, but none bit him. For all he knew they were his friends and not his enemies. It was hard to tell these days.

He glanced up. The tubes and wires and plates of soldered steel that made his son’s nest were familiar for some reason, although he couldn’t remember where he’d seen them before, and even though they weren’t transparent he could still see the boy’s shadow through their tangled mass. His chubby legs splayed in front of his torso, his pudgy arms batted at the air. The nest itself was huge. As big as a pile of towels in the laundry room of a prison. Given the size, the boy must be seven, eight feet tall. BC wondered if he had been born this big or grown to this size. It would have been a painful delivery for Naz.

He reached the lip of the nest sooner than he expected, toppled over the edge into its hollow cradle. The boy was even bigger than he’d imagined. Eight or nine feet tall from the bottom of his diapered rump to the wisp of hair on his otherwise bald head, which was easily five feet in diameter. Except … except the head wasn’t a head.

It was a bomb.

An old-fashioned bomb, perfectly spherical, with two chalk circles marking the boy’s eyes and a single line stretching from ear to ear for a mouth. The coil of hair growing from the head was actually a fuse, and the fuse was burning. For some reason its glowing end reminded BC of the tip of a cigar, but before he could figure out why, the fuse reached the bomb with a little pfft of smoke.

BC braced himself, but all that happened was that the mouth opened with a clockwork whir, revealing row after row of slimy, sharp teeth and a sulfurous glint coming from the back of its throat. BC squinted. It was Naz’s ring.

Tell Chandler, the mouth said, opening wider and wider.

“Tell him what?” BC said.

Tell him about me, the mouth said, and then, darting forward, it swallowed him whole.

The beat cop who found BC on the corner of Chesapeake and Seventh Street SE nudged the moaning man with his foot.

“Buddy? You okay?”

He rolled BC over, and a wave of whiskey-soaked breath bathed his face. Underneath it, though, the officer smelled something sweet and smoky. Marijuana. And a large dose of urine as well. The bum had pissed his pants.

“Fuckin’ beatniks,” he said, and this time his toe caught BC squarely in the jaw. “Let’s go, buddy. It’s into the tank with you.”

As he hoisted BC onto his shoulder, a picture fell out of the bum’s expensive-looking jacket. It took the officer a moment to sort out the tangle of legs and arms—he counted six of the former, but only five of the latter. He hoped the missing limb had merely been cropped from the frame.

“A pervert, too, huh? What the hell is this world coming to?”