Black Magic Woman (35 page)

Christine Abernathy's gaze did not linger over Morris's naked body, but this was not due to any vestigial sense of decency on her part. Once you've had sex with demons, the charms offered by humans of either gender will hold very little appeal ever again.

Using a long wooden match she had made with her own hands, she lit the five squat black candles, which were also her creation. Then she touched the small flame to a chunky, yellow substance that she had placed in a small brazier, which immediately began to emit a thin stream of aromatic smoke.

She then combined several ingredients from a number of different bottles, jars, and small boxes. These she crushed with a mortar and pestle until they were reduced to a fine powder, which she transferred to a small, blood-red bowl.

She brought the bowl over to the part of her work table that contained the pentangle. This was not drawn on the table, but rather carved directly into the wood itself. Christine Abernathy had done this years ago, with painstaking slowness and care, so as to avoid having to redraw the symbol each time she wished to work magic. She thus saved considerable time and also protected herself against the ever-present dangers of a miscalculation in the pentagram's construction.

Reaching into the bowl with her left hand, she took a handful of powder and began to trace with it, letting the material trickle out to form a specific pattern within the pentagram. Then she repeated the process, took more powder, and did it again. And again.

After a few moments, the pentagram was full of the lines she had drawn there, long and sinuous and winding, each one the same shape: the shape of a snake.

Then she brought over to the table a very old book. Cabalistic signs were inscribed on its cover, which was made of material that only a handful of forensic experts would have recognized as human skin. Christine Abernathy opened the book to the page she had marked previously with a black ribbon.

She began to read aloud the first words of the spell.

For an instant, he flashed on his parents' old house in Austin, with its archaic steam heating system. Even Texas gets cold sometimes, especially when a blue norther makes its day down from Canada. There were plenty of January mornings when young Quincey would wake up to hear the radiator in his bedroom hissing away with the build-up of steam that had come from the boiler in the basement.

Morris frowned. This place was far too modern to use steam, and besides he had the damn air conditioning on, not the heat.

Suddenly he heard it again—that prolonged, inexplicable hissing sound.

Then he saw the snake crawl out from under his bed.

Morris was no expert on reptiles, but anybody who watches TV or goes to the movies learns what certain kinds of snakes look like, especially the varieties that present an instantly recognizable threat to the hero, or some other character on the screen.

Morris had seen the first Indiana Jones movie,
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
three or four times. As a result, he was pretty sure he knew just what he was looking at.

Shaking off a momentary sense of disbelief, Morris made himself focus on the two most salient facts of his situation.

One: there was a King Cobra in the hotel room with him.

Two: the large reptile was between him and the door.

There were more hissing noises from under the bed. A moment later, another snake crawled out to join the King Cobra. Morris did not recognize this one, but a few seconds later it was joined by something that he did find familiar.

Even after all these years, he had not forgotten what a rattlesnake looked like.

Morris was about to run back into the bathroom and slam the door when a stir of movement from in there caught his eye. He looked just in time to see a deadly Water Moccasin crawling out from the shower stall he had so recently vacated. He'd seen those in Texas, too.

Two seconds later, a naked Quincey Morris was crouched atop the hotel bureau, watching in horror as more and more snakes appeared from underneath the bed. He recognized at least one more variety of cobra, this one smaller than the first and differently colored, and he was pretty sure he saw a couple of Copperheads among the growing collection. The others weren't familiar to him, but he had no doubt they were deadly poisonous, just as he had no illusions about who had sent them. Christine Abernathy, he realized, was done creating illusions. She had decided to play for keeps this time.

He looked around desperately. The phone was across the room, which meant it might as well be on the moon. Besides, what would he tell the hotel operator—"I'd like to report a couple of dozen snakes in my room." She'd probably just tell him to sleep it off.

The snakes were slithering around the room now, examining the furniture, and each other, curiously. They were showing little interest in Morris at the moment, since he was too big to eat, and was posing no immediate threat to them. Morris thought he probably had a few minutes' grace to figure some way out of this predicament.

Then he heard the thin "crack" as the cheap wood of the bureau began to give under his weight.

Several of the snakes were looking Morris's way now, reacting to the sound. Their two-pronged tongues flickered in and out, testing the air for more vibrations.

Panic screamed for attention within Morris's brain, and he crushed it down savagely. He then tried to figure out what he could do to survive if the bureau collapsed and sent him tumbling into that mass of crawling, squirming death.

He knew that snakebite, even from the deadliest reptile, is not instantly fatal. It often takes an hour or more for an untreated adult victim to die.

But that was from one bite. What about twenty bites? Thirty? And even if he made it into the hall, how long would it take to persuade someone to call an ambulance for the naked lunatic who was raving about a room full of poisonous snakes? And what hospital anywhere near Salem was likely to have a supply of antivenin on hand? Eastern Massachusetts was hardly snake country.

Until now, that is.

There was a grinding sound as more of the cheap wood that made up the bureau began to give way beneath his feet.

Morris realized the bare toes of his right foot were touching something hard on the bureau's top. He glanced down, saw that it was the hand mirror that Libby Chastain had given him back at the hospital.

What had she said? "Keep it with you, when you meet Abernathy," something like that. He had thought at the time that Libby was trying to say that the mirror had a spell of some kind on it.

Moving cautiously, he reached down and grasped the little mirror. Bring it up to his face, he looked in it, and was unsurprised to see the face of a man who looked scared shitless.

He didn't know what he was expecting the mirror to do, but nothing happened.

A few feet below, the snakes kept writhing and swarming.

But no alarm was tripped by the monitors, and no doctor or nurse came by to observe these highly unusual events.

The bureau had fallen on top of some of the snakes. Morris wasn't sure if any had been killed or hurt, but it was clear that the rest had been thrown into a frenzy by the crash. Several of the reptiles had reared up, hissing like mad, while the rest glided restlessly around the room, looking either for something to attack, or for a way out—Morris wasn't sure which.

Then something appeared at the foot of the bed—the head of the King Cobra. Morris had noticed earlier that the deadly snake was at least six feet long, and it was using some of that body length to rear up and examine this large, warm-blooded creature that was causing all the fuss in its new territory.

Morris and the snake stared at each other for a long moment. Then the King Cobra began to crawl up onto the bed.

Some of this frenetic activity finally tripped one of the alarms wired to Libby's monitors, and an ICU nurse came hustling over to see what had happened. Nurse Greta Beck's eyes widened as she took in the patient's convulsions, as well as the monitor readings, which appeared to have gone completely haywire.

Greta Beck wasted no time gawking. She sprinted to the nearest telephone and called a Code Blue for the ICU.

Morris had just decided that his best chance, such as it was, lay with a sudden dash to the door of the room. He would almost certainly pick up several poisonous bites on the way, but at least he would then be out of the room, and able to close the door against these crawling horrors.

Then maybe he could get someone to call an ambulance. And maybe Morris would still be alive when it arrived. And maybe they would have something at the local ER that might be useful against snakebite—even multiple bites from the kinds of snakes that had never been seen around here.

Yeah, and maybe pigs might fucking fly.

But the alternative was to give up—just roll up and die in the middle of this snake pit.

You just didn't do that—not in Morris's family.

The first Quincey Morris had fought the good fight right up to the very end, and the hell with the odds. He had been the start of a long line of Morrises, men and women both, who had devoted themselves to the struggle against the darkness. Not because the Morrises were a bunch of sanctimonious Holy Joes with martyr complexes—but because once you have looked upon the true face of evil, you have no choice but to fight against it, assuming you want to retain any self-respect at all.

Many in Quincey Morris's family had suffered for their commitment. Some had lost their lives over it.

But not one of them had given up. Ever.

Morris began to flex his calf muscles in preparation for the leap off the bed. It was likely that his sudden movement would prompt an attack by the King Cobra. Morris would just have to take the huge snake's bite and keep moving, just as he would almost certainly have to absorb other bites on his way to the door.

He stared into the King's Cobra's black, unblinking eyes.
Okay, motherfucker, get ready to take your best shot, because
—

Something was happening.

Morris thought at first that his vision was going, because the King Cobra in front of him seemed to be… blurring.

Did I pick up a bite from one of these fucking things already and didn't even notice? Am I dying? Is that what this is?

But he realized that his view of the rest of the room remained clear—it was only the snake in front of him that was losing definition and substance. For Morris, it was like watching a Polaroid picture develop, except in reverse. The King Cobra was just fading away.

He risked a glance toward the floor where the other snakes had been slithering around. For an instant his vision seemed to pick up an after-image of their wriggling, hissing forms—and then they were… gone.

Morris looked back toward the King Cobra—but there was nothing to see, except the wrinkled bedspread. The great snake had disappeared.

Remaining where he was, Morris looked carefully around the room, but not a single reptile could be seen. He listened hard, but the only sounds were the hum of the air conditioner and Morris's own labored breathing.

After a few more seconds, Morris felt his knees start to buckle. He let them, and sat down hard on the bed. He started trembling then, all over, like a man pulled from an icy river.

Had that bitch Abernathy been playing with him again? He decided that probably wasn't the case this time. A few more seconds, and Morris would have picked up enough snakebites to put him beyond medical help. No, she hadn't been fooling around—this had been intended as the killing stroke.

What, then?

He realized he still had Libby's mirror in his right hand. In fact, he had grasped it so tightly that he had hair-thin cuts from the mirror's edge across his thumb and palm.

He opened his hand, wincing at the cramps in his fingers, and let the mirror fall on to the mattress. Had Libby's spell on the mirror banished the snakes before they could do their deadly work?

And if the snakes had been dispersed by Libby's magic,
where the hell did they go?