Cuckoo Snake

Cuckoo Snake
by
Bobby Derie

It was the year that the State of Deseret came up before the Congress, or the one after or before, and my sister and I paid our morning visit to the hens in their coops, saluting the queen but never the cock, as momma had taught us. We had with us the little wire basket, for there were but four or six eggs, maybe more or less, and momma was at the stove cutting bacon. We set the table as momma went to breaking the eggs into a skillet, and Jeb had come in with the milk when momma gave out such a scream I thought as like the Yankees had all come to murder us at our tables, but it was only a bunch of skinny little snakes and a bit of blood crawling about among the yolks in the pan. Now momma was fit to be tied and was to take it as an omen, but Jeb just laughed and told her about cuckoo snakes, and this is what he said as he said it, with only a word more or less.

Now the cuckoo snake is like the cuckoo bird, for it likes to place its eggs in the nests of others and let those cuckoo’d mothers roost their stepchildren, but it does not place its eggs in the nests of other snakes, but the nests of birds, and this is how it is done: just as the cuckoo bird will knock out a momma bird’s own eggs to place her own, the cuckoo snake will stretch up its jaws and swallow one of the momma bird’s eggs whole, and then pass its own egg out of its body and leave it there. So quick and so clever is the cuckoo snake that can do this in only a few minutes, provided the hen leaves off the nest for a bit—and even then, it is said that there are some cuckoo snakes so slow and subtle in their sneaking, they’ll go and do it right when the momma bird sits atop her nest at night asleep, moving inches in hours, and not bothering her a bit. Those snake eggs sit there and in three weeks or a little less will hatch out a snake brood, which can be bad for they will eat the other eggs if they haven’t hatched yet, and the broody hen will like to abandon the nest.

Most Yankees will not countenance the cuckoo snake, because they have never seen it, those in from the Midwest would decry such a thing as impossible and unnatural, and even down the eastern cost into the south, in the Carolinas and Georgia there are few that would be credulous to such a thing. This is because the cuckoo snake is not in the north or east, but only in the south and west, out where the prairie gives way to dusty foothills and brush, but not yet into the desert proper. For it is a peculiar thing of the cuckoo snake in that it has feathers of a sort, though not proper feathers like you might see on some honest bird, but rather long, soft scales that trail out and split into fine fingers, like cornsilk but stiffer, if you can imagine such a thing. These feathers give to the cuckoo snake many advantages, for they are said to help disguise it as it sneaks up on the nest, and when bundled up asleep or played dead looks like no more than a bundle of moltings, and the warm down does allow them to stay out longer than rattlers or brown or green snakes during the cold months, and so active longer on the edges of farms and ranches, where they might get to chicken coops and duck ponds.

The Indians greatly prize the feathery skins of the cuckoo snake, and maybe again this is why so few Yankees and even good Southern men and ladies will credit such a thing, for you could get up to a dollar a skin in trade goods for a nice big one, which looks like nothing more than a feathered sock when the head is cut off and the guts are cleaned out, and so there was a great hunt for them when the white man first came, and now they are scarce. Still, even today many a father has set their boys to spend idle hours outside the chicken coop with a ready stick, keeping an out for any sign of a cuckoo snake, for a dollar is still a good bit of money.

Why the Indians want the cuckoo snake, there are not many that know, for even a half-breed will not speak of it with a quart of liquor in him. Yet I once met a Yankee that had traveled long in Mexico, and was very red in the face and burned because of it, and he said that down that way there were cuckoo snakes the size of crocodiles, and that the Indians down there had many legends and superstitions and even worship toward the things, but he was only a Yankee and it may be he lied, or else the sun had scrambled his recollection somewhat. For I ask you, if there was such a cuckoo snake of such a size down Mexico-way, what bird nest could it prey upon to roost its eggs?

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Among the Faithful

Among the Faithful
by
Bobby Derie

Wet and tired, the Reverend crawled out of the sea, puking salt water and body aching from the travel to this strange shore. They found him on the soft-packed sand of the beach, antennae waving in curiosity, mandibles clacking as they took in his collar, the icon at his breast. Hands lifted the Reverend above the rising tide, over the dunes, and a broad plain of warm green grass towards a tiny steeple in the distance.

The building was square with a steep roof that rose to a pyramidal point, unadorned by any cross, and it was painted white. A yard had been carved out of the grassy sward, dotted with small gray obelisks, and a sea-shell path led to the double doors, and through the bare entry-hall. From his vantage point, the Reverend looked up at the wooden arches that held up the ceiling and thought of the ribs of a ship, turned upside down, or as something Jonah might have seen in the belly of the fish…

They laid him, not on the altar, or in front of it, but next to it, by a kind of podium, then retreated. The journey had let him recover a modicum of his strength, and now he drew himself up to survey the room. That it was a church, he was fairly certain, and laid out in roughly the Anglican manner – a central aisle for the procession, with the pews on either side. Though they were not quite pews, not as he had known them, for they were shaped for bodies that could never sink into a proper seat, and they were filled by multi-segmented bodies with glassy eyes and waving antennae.

The Reverend looked at where the cross should have hung, above the altar—and it was there, plainly carved and unadorned by suffering Christ, suspended by a pair of wires. The numbness of events took him. If there had been no cross, he might not have seen this as a Christian church. If there had been a mocking, beetle-crab Christ suffering on it, he might have accepted some fantastic parallel to Christian worship, or else a parody of it. Here now though, against that sea of expecting faces, he dragged his carcass to his feet, to stand behind the podium. He was as struck to the spot as a young man fresh from seminary, faced with his first congregation.

So he sang the opening mass. And they answered.

Where a human congregation would utter their amens and hallelujahs, the congregants murmured a buzz-clicking response, uniform and in unison. They chittered the proper rhythm as he led them through the Lord’s Prayer, and maintained silent during the admittedly confused and abbreviated sermon choked out from a throat still ravaged by salt-water. The Reverend paused before the sacrament of transubstantiation. The elements were plain and unadorned, a plate of unleavened bread and a pale carafe of musty wine. For a full minute, he paused in consideration, then made the signs and spoke the words, meditating a prayer toward God, and broke the bread, and tasted the vinegary wine. They filed forward, to kneel as best their forms allowed before the altar rail—towering slitherers, and thin dark-shelled dams with soft-shelled pinkish-white kinder in their arms, and the Reverend dispensed the bread and the wine and the blessings.

They filed out, when he had done, save for one with a brown shell, whose pale cilia had begun to turn from black to white, and with antennae that drooped low. In response to its gesturing, I followed it outside the church, on a well-worn path of hard-packed earth around the side to a small series of rooms with off-white plaster walls built into a hillock. The Reverend inspected it in a few moments—a bed chamber, as near as he could judge, with a wooden cradle supporting a round, cup-like mattress of woven reads, covered with sheets and blankets of finer thread; a kitchen with an assortment of copper pans and a flat-topped iron stove, the fire within fueled by woven twists of grass; a sunken tiled pool into which an artificial waterfall emptied, then drained out by grate in the floor, which he guessed as both toilet and bath; and a round chamber with a honeycomb built into the walls, most of the cubbies filled by scrolls—a study. When the Reverend was done with his explorations, he found the congregant had already left.

He counted that day as Sunday, and counted the days to the next Sunday, when the congregants returned, filing once more into the strange undulating pews.

The first days had been ones of recovery, and then discovery. He had walked to the beach, and stared at that endless ocean, finding no trace of his vessel, or any human craft, then returned to his rectory to experiment with what foods they had left him were good to eat. His efforts were half those of a bachelor, and half of the wary shipwreck victim; strange meats were burnt for fear of disease and parasites, and then merely out of preference, until after three days the binding diet got to him and he varied it a little with the local fruits and vegetables provided by the congregants, boiled to what he hoped was a mushy sterility.

There had been visitors—once, to drop off more food; a second time, to trim the encroaching grasses on the outermost markers; and a third time when a congregant made slow pilgrimage to a particular marker, obsessively rubbing its mandibles together, and stayed before it for a long time before leaving a small bleached skull at the base.

The scrolls in his study were of no language he knew, though he had little training in that regard beyond his ecclesiastical Greek and Latin, with a smattering of French from his schoolboy days. This might as well have been the hieroglyphs of Egypt or China for all his erudition, and nowhere in any of them could he find a map or illustration beyond a few photoplates that showed members of the congregant’s race in various poses.

His second sermon consisted of a series of questions, posed to the congregation, which none of them seemed to give any response to, though a few antennae bobbed more as the pitch of his voice rose. Unable to elicit an answer, he continued with the prayers and the blessing, and the service soon concluded.

When they filed out, the Reverend followed the line of congregants, along a road cut from the endless tall grass, to their village. It was a rather small affair. The majority lived in homes similar to his rectory, turning off from the main road into clusters of low-domed hills from which doors and windows peeked. Some trundled into the town proper, with square rectangular buildings of wood and brick, full of shops and offices. None there answered his questions, though they stopped to listen when he spoke, and bobbed their heads and turned away the minute he halted his speech. In time the day dimmed, and he returned to the rectory to burn and boil another supper.

He mapped the town in a week, but as the third Sunday loomed had made no progress toward an escape. His third sermon to the inscrutable congregants was once again filled with questions, and the admittance that he was a prisoner of his own ignorance.

For the first season, the weeks between Sundays became lonely periods of prayer, meditation, and contemplation, separated by the familiar rituals performed with alien congregants. He spent days and nights writing out what he could remember of the Bible, to read over those old words again as part of the lesson. In the village, he spoke of God and Christ to the smaller congregants he took as children, and when that failed to elicit a response tried only to teach them human language, but without much success.

The seasons changed. Dams he had seen swell brought chubby infants for blessing and baptism, and he made the sign of the cross on them while avoiding the tiny mandibles. Some were brought stiff and wrapped in silken shrouds, to be buried in the yard and he would emerge in a somber mood to commit the remains to the earth, and a small obelisk would be placed on the fresh plot.

There were Sundays when he spoke of the apostles as missionaries to strange lands, and how he envied their gift of tongues; and there were Sundays when he questioned his purpose aloud, whether all this was some cruel parallel to his cherished religion, a dancing monkey here for the amusement of alien folk who might go to church every week yet never know the teachings of Christ, to go through all the rituals and know nothing of the intent and mystery behind them, or the glory that might await them, yet they seemed so steadfast and content in their attendance—and to every sermon, every Sunday, they would buzz and click their strange amen.

The seasons became years. The children grew and approached him in pairs, and he performed the ceremonies of marriage. One by one the congregants would turn from hale, black and shiny of shell to brown and crinkled, their cilia bleached by time, their antennae hanging low over bulbous heads. Many Sundays he would visit them in their strange cradle-beds, when they were too weak to come for communion, and deliver to them the alien host and vinegary wine.

His last sermon was one of temptation. Now withered and grey, his collar worn and much-scratched, with eyes that failed him when he tried to re-read the Bible he had copied out as best he might from memory, and teeth that had become rotten nubs, he spoke of the temptations of his life. Not the temptations of the flesh, for the congregants were so strange to him he had never once been inclined to engage them in that way, but the temptations to give in to fear and despair. For he had wondered early on what might happen if he were to substitute the words and prayers, or carved strange images, or done anything but act like a priest, just to see what response that might elicit from the congregation of the faithful, but he had not done so. He spoke of how he had wondered, when first he was marooned on this strange shore, about whether to simply leave the parish he had found, to abandon the village without a priest and seek out once more his own kind.

Yet he had not. The Reverend had remained true to himself and his calling.

The final week after that final Sunday, when he was found stiff and still in his cradle-bed, the whole town turned out to crowd the carefully-cropped lawn around the building with the tall steeple. One among them chittered in the rhythm of a prayer-song, and the others buzzed and clicked their amen. Then the Reverend was laid down in the ground, among the faithful.

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The Gnol of the Jackalnapes

The Gnol of the Jackalnapes
by
Bobby Derie

Spinach Vrba followed a path of rose petals up into zher boudoir, where Catsup was waiting. The red-lit lights were on, cast strange shadows over the bed and tussled sheet, and from the hidden speakers boomed the steady build of the wire music. Spinach felt the hair rise on zher arms.

Then Catsup strode out from the ink-red shadows, bubbicles dappled with freckled, slinky cloth displaying zher soft curves. Zhe swished and swayed to the booming plectrum-plucks, sashaying softly before grabbing Spinach by the pants and pulling zher into bed.

Vrba pulled off zher shirt, feeling the cool sweat already on zher ribs, but Catsup shoved zherself down to grab the clitterock, and pulled zher in for a kiss. Mandiflanges tangled in the cuntiform vocaboxes, playing over inner and outer lips, fork-licked the nubble bumps and tasted the tangy juices. Together they grabbed and pulled and caressed each other’s turgid nips, then pressed each other breast-to-breast, Catsup’s swoll flaggid lumps crushed against the tender titicles of zher lover.

With mounting frenzy zhe wrenched the pants and underthings down, to gain the throbbing tumescence and fasten her cungash upon it, drawing Vrba deep into zher depths. While thus engaged zher pleasantly plump ashcleave bounced in front of Spinach’s face, and zhe enjoyed the sight for a few moments, then moaned and began to abfelch the eager suckling orench, mandiflange probing those forbidden depths.

Zhe stayed like that for some time, sweat and saliva and sweet secretions dripping from crotch to chin, until Vrba reached zher peak, and unable to contain zherself released the jasm from zher penilect, and painted those plump cungash lips with salty pearls.

They rested then in that perfect moment, Vrba panting and spent with that wonderful aching emptiness, yet zhe knew that Catsup had not yet finished, and turned to resume zher ministrations…and then Catsup gave that dirty little smile that set Spinach’s ovaromb aflutter, and help up the phallikon.

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The Old Black Magic

The Old Black Magic
by
Bobby Derie

It was an age of quiet deaths at midnight and knives in the dark, when a life could be bought and sold for a few words, and men and women filled the bars and taverns to drink in stolid silence, each lost in their own worries and ruminations. The city was a wounded beast that panted in the dark, black swathes lightless where the power had failed. Traffic had been routed away from the broken arteries and toppled towers, grasses grew on the rubble that still choked the streets, which people still walked because the cabs had all gone and the train was a snarled knot of steel. The people walked with eyes downcast to see not the toppled towers, and to miss not the sudden gaps where the paving stones gave way, and stopped to listen from time to time for the snicker of a knife unfolding in the dark, or the terrible drone of the aeroplane, then hurried on to fight for their space at the bar, where dourly sober celebrants poured the harsh, foul medicine into dirty cups held in eager hands. One such priest of gin was M'Kenny, and as the hour passed he traded his apron to another, to take his own position at the end of the granite-topped bar.

Except this night, M'Kenny put on the flat cap with the brim brought down level with his brows, and the faded jacket of the revolution - still in one piece after sixty years, though the trousers had long since worn out - and stepped into the dry, hot night. There was lightning in the air, flashes like gunfire in the heavens lit the gaping, broken windows of the towers, which even in their ruination stretched above the surly ground-hugging anthills of the common city, and sirens gave out their dying banshee squalls. M'Kenny crossed the broken streets and vacant lots, up hills whose earth had been buried under cement in decades past and were half-forgotten save in the names of old roads and alleyways, to where the cement pyramids of bollards blocked the traffic to the festering wounds of the city. The graffiti scrawl gave way to the field of crosses and eternal plastic flowers which had formed the first, spontaneous monument to the tragedy; and in the wake of all that came after the only one yet to be erected, or likely ever to be.

M'Kenny found him in the shell of a library with a shopping cart, sifting through the books for those least eaten by mold, insect, and rat. There was nothing to the man, no trace of muscle beneath the baggy clothes, the unkempt beard with its twisting knots of black and grey, and the heavy metal rings covered his fingers like armor, some stretching past the second knuckle. The bartender imagined the old man stopped in an ally, running his hands against the wall, scraping sparks to flitter for a moment in the darkness. Between the old man's fingers, M'Kenny caught peek of a pentagram on the book's cover.

"Magic." M'Kenny breathed the word, tasted the reek of rotten paper. "Black magic."

"Oh yes," The old man said, without looking at him. "Nothing but."

"Why?"

The old man let the question hang in the air for a moment, then the book dropped from his hands, to collapse at the top of the pile by his feet. M'Kenny saw no trace of a smile nor frown on his features, no wrinkle of concentration; the old man's forehead was as smooth and unblemished as the glass image of a cathedral saint, nor did his hands or voice shake.

"Come with me."

M'Kenny followed the old man through ten thousand years and ten rows of history, to a stairwell that had become an open sewer when the lights had gone out, and the smell lingered still. There was a steel door in the basement, blue paint chipped and scratched, a single red bulb burning above it like a guardian eye, and the old man unlocked it with a jangling key and they went in.

All the antechambers of hell could not have matched that basement, furnished with all the stolen images of a benighted city, five thousand year old devils worn and gray sat roost over upstarts of leering plastic; naked succubi danced with rings of skulls, all black skin and pointed, upturned breasts, tongues lolling like desperate bitches in heat, eyes painted with heavy rings of kohl, and from the ceiling hung impotent satans in a council, to look down at the rows and rows of books. Those volumes varied from heavy leather, the dye worn off with age, to flimsy things with garish, floppy covers. Certainly every devil and demon and dark spirit that man had ever dreamt lived in those pages, ever spell and rite, all the black instructions for human sacrifice, psychic vampirism, the capturing of souls and dying breath, the ruin of children and the foulest necromancies, and more - all this M'Kenny grasped and thought and imagined under the unfamiliar flicker of fluorescent lights, and the old man watched him.

"All this is shit." The gestured with his arm, taking in with the arc the mountains of Hallowe'en skulls, the pentagrams and animal bones, the masses of literature. Turning, the old man turned his back on M'Kenny and walked down an aisle, deeper into the place, and the barkeep followed. There was a story as they walked, the dry voice rising and falling into the gravelly death metal growl of a chronic smoker or a wound to the throat. How early he had discovered it, in his father's things; of the child's spiralbound note-book he had kept to write down the spells and magic words he found, and how he would practice them. The early flirtation with religion that first delighted and then disquieted his parents, and those early blasphemies. Years of discovery, reading, teaching; he had knelt at the feet of others, buggered and been buggered, then paused on reflection and cast off the virgin altars once more for rumination and introspection. Afterwards, he was more selective in the old monsters he served, harder with his questions, more ruthless in his methods. The young old man began, finally, to conceive the scope of the things he had done and said and sought for, the vast shape of darkness that had lain under history, behind it, unrecorded save when some inquisitor or merchant kicked down the door and dragged it into the light - and each time it was a poor and bedraggled shell of a thing, often poor and ill-educated, wretches drawn to darkness that answered prayers more venial and immediate than the light - and hadn't the religions great and small spoken of such things, for countless centuries, all the way that man had faltered and stumbled and striven to build something of this vast and hostile world, fighting at every turn, over every bit of fruit and foot of land? How could there not be, at the end, something in it, something behind it, some dark science or truth that those in power had wished to conceal, prevent, stamp out, and diminish?

"It doesn't work." The old man told him. They stood in a circle - not a pentagram, but a square within a circle, with a cross and letters or words in Hebrew and Greek, that smelled of copper and piss and incense. There was a human skull resting on a glass-fronted book cabinet full of spiral-bound notebooks. M'Kenny stared at it, saw his own reflection overlaid on its empty sockets. It looked realer than the others. Smaller, miscoloured, less perfect.

"None of the rites or rituals or formulae achieve any physical effect. There is no objective existence of demons or dark gods, no familiars to summon or hellfire to unleash on your enemy." The old man took a long spiral of paper, struck flint with those heavy metal-covered hands, and used it as a taper to light candles around the edge. "Though I find them comforting."

The robes came off. There were wiry muscles there beneath sagging skin, a map of pain - crisscrossing scars, bands of raised flesh, dark lines where salt or soot had been rubbed in the wounds, pebbly rashes, ragged scabs, and faded tattooed letters and spirals covered every inch of him, so even the grey body hairs came sprouted sporadically, wherever the pores had not been destroyed or healed over.

"Black magic - and white - have a subjective reality, if they have any reality at all. We may experience things beyond what we consider normality, that seem to defy the laws that we know, that conform to the fantasies of occult lore. Drugs, fasting, meditation, trance states, biofeedback experiments, lucid dreaming - to trick our brains into a new state of perception or being," the old man squatted in the center of the circle, dangling manhood in line with the one of the arms of the cross "Even then, sometimes the drugs are shit."

There was a blade in the old man's left hand. He gripped it overhand, point scratching lines on the right wrist, blood dribbling onto a glyph.

"Then why all this?" said M'Kenny, staring at the circle, the library, the skull.

"Because this is all there is. No demons, no hell, no black magic beyond these pages. Men have fought and bled for this. Is it not beautiful to you, the vast construct of the imagination? Is it not a tradition as worthy of preserving as any other? Do you think there are none that look for it in their hour of need, that find hope and comfort in the desperately mumbled spell, the flash of a knife and the welling of blood, the infant's cry silenced forever?" The old man flicked the blade, spraying a few drops of sour blood on M'Kenny's face. "We need our monsters in the dark, our bogeyman in the shadows. If they do not exist, then we will make them exist, and if needs be become them. The fallen angel rising to meet the descending ape."

It was an age where men died and their killers never saw their eyes, where the greatest atrocities were greater and the smaller ones less, so that all the world lived on the edge of the knife. There was a city that wore the scars less proudly, that reclaimed stolen blocks by inches, and whose people ducked as if afraid the very sky would fall on them. A bar stood open every day, and never wanted for custom, nor brake the silence of a people holding their collective breath, each lost in themselves. A man named M'Kenny took his seat at the end of the bar, and drank without tasting, and stared without seeing. Then maybe he slept, and it was his shift again. Sometimes it may have been an old man came in, M'Kenny's steady hand would shake a little, and the old man would have a quiet word with a young man who was never to be seen again, or those heavy rings would scrape the granite counter and leave a chickenscratch symbol that M'Kenny did not like the look of, but could never quite rub out.

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