Snake Handlin' Man by D. J. Butler Page A

anything. They were ghosts, figments in a vision. Still, it was strange that they seemed to see him back. By a rack of underpants printed with fading images of Space Ghost and Quick Draw McGraw they turned again, and charged down towards the basement. Eddie wasn’t sure what to expect, and whatever it was he might have imagined, it wasn’t what he saw.
    He stopped, several steps from the bottom, and stared. The basement was thronged with people. It might have been a Kitchenwares Department once, but the shelves and tables of merchandise had all been shoved to the walls to make a great empty space in the center of the floor. In the center of the floor lay a dog on a low-end kitchen table, a charcoal barbecue grill full of smoldering incense, and two figures.
    The mongooses stood beside Eddie on the steps, rearing up and hissing.
    Miriam was unmistakable.
    She towered above him, voluptuous and dark and naked. Eddie gulped, trying to concentrate and not be distracted by the sheer lush sexual power that oozed out of her full lips and breasts, her thin neck and large eyes. It helped that from the hips down she became a huge, blue-scaled serpent. Her human body was ordinary in size, he realized; it was the serpent half that coiled up and pushed her off the floor, made her tall and menacing and monstrous. Her hair helped bring him back to his senses, too—it was a sleepy, rustling mass of blue snakes. In her hand she held a long flake of glassy black stone over the dog, like a primitive surgeon about to cut into a patient.
    Aaron was almost as easy to identify. He looked like Phineas, a tall, gaunt, blond man wearing a trench coat. Only where human hands should have protruded from the sleeves of his coat, Aaron had snakes’ heads instead.
    The ceiling was a sheet of ice, and white, naked bodies hung from it by their necks. A buffeting gale that Eddie could almost feel chewed at their flesh and made them sway back and forth like human wind chimes.
    The two lovers stood in a central space empty but for the dog on the table. Surrounding them was a crowd, chanting words Eddie didn’t recognize, beating small hand drums and playing sistra. A sistrum was a brass rattle from ancient Egypt that looked something like the hollow metal head of a hairbrush with loose rods jammed through it. Eddie knew what they were because of Bible class, way back when, and he knew what they were because they were related to the tambourine.
    Damn tambourine. Should have said guitar player .
    At the edge of the crowd, standing in four points that approximately made the four corners of a square, were totem poles. They were wooden and crude, and each had only one figure carved on it. The nearest looked like a monkey’s head, and, taking them in at a glance, Eddie thought he saw a dog and a bird and a human. They looked vaguely Egyptian, or at least they looked like someone’s bad imitation of Egyptian art. All of them had long strips of cloth bandaged around their eyes.
    Eddie’s arm really hurt, and he didn’t know why.
    The dog on the table whined, and only then did Eddie register what was actually going on in the scene in front of him. The dog was alive, but its ribcage was cracked open, exposing heart, lungs and other things Eddie couldn’t immediately identify, in a soupy mass of blood, organs and living flesh. Ropes held the dog to the table, but it might also be sedated—it wasn’t struggling. A row of stone bowls lay on the table beside the animal, and each bowl held a little puddle of meat, like sorting bowls for a butcher.
    Miriam—the lamia, Eddie forced himself to call her in his mind—stooped and grabbed the heart out of the dog’s chest, severing the connecting arteries with a single swift slice of her stone knife.
    “Ayayayayayay!” she wailed, and in a single gulp she devoured the heart while it was still beating.
    The dog’s whine became a yowl, but then Aaron leaned over it, the snakes’ mouths that served him for fingers