Alexander Death(64)

“I don't think these are doing anything,” Jenny said.

Alexander grinned. “Tell me about your earliest memory.”

“Like Egypt? Or Africa?”

“This lifetime.”

“Oh.” Jenny thought. “I was outside in the yard, like two or three years old. I don't remember what I was doing. But I saw this snake—a huge rattler—crawling around below this log. And for some reason, I thought it would make a fun little toy.”

“You liked the rattle.”

“Maybe. I thought it was kind of cute. But when I picked him up...” Jenny looked at Alexander. He could probably guess what came next, but he just waited attentively, his eyes watching hers. “Well, he died. The Jenny pox made him bleed everywhere. My dad got really pissed at me for playing with rattlesnakes.”

As she told the story, she thought she could hear a sound like rattling, but at first it seemed like an echo of her childhood memory. Then the rattling grew louder and multiplied, as if the forest were filled with diamondback rattlers.

“Do you hear that?” Jenny asked.

“The sound of the jungle?”

“Not exactly...” Jenny heard the rattle behind her, loud and strong, and she whirled around to look at the temple.

A feathered serpent was carved above the doorway on the far left, its squarish jaw open and pointed tongue protruding, its scales rectangular with a dot carved inside each one. When they'd arrived, the serpent figure had been folded in on itself in stack of coils.

Now the serpent's head was sliding forward across the front of the temple, towards the middle door, while layer by layer its body unfolded and stretched out behind it. The serpent opened its jaw wide and ate the hieroglyphic birds carved on the lintel of the middle door. Then it flowed on across the face of the temple, towards the door on the right.

“Do you see that?” Jenny whispered. She looked at Alexander. His face kept shifting and melting in front of her eyes, changing from one face to another to another, all of them somehow familiar to Jenny. The only constant was his dark eyes, watching her while the rest of his face kept changing.

“I see you,” Alexander said. “All of your faces like masks, nested inside each other like a Russian doll.”

“I see you, too,” Jenny said. “All of you.”

The snake rattled again. It swallowed the hieroglyphs above the third door, then turned inward and began flowing away into the temple wall, as if it had found some hole in which to burrow.

Then its head and body curled down into the doorway, but it was no longer a stylized relief carved in stone. Instead, it was a live snake, its head as big as a lion's, its body as thick as a man. It was identical to the snake from her first memory, except that thousands of actual diamonds glittered among the scales on its back.

“Tell me you're seeing that,” Jenny whispered.

The snake extended out of the doorway, its head gradually dropping lower as more of the body flowed out of the doorway, until its head was just above the stone floor.

“What are you seeing?” Alexander asked. His voice seemed to echo around her, along with the thousands and thousands of snake rattles.

“A snake,” Jenny said. “It's huge. And it's coming toward us.”

“Don't be afraid.” Alexander took her hand.

“It's not real, is it?” she whispered. The snake moved silently across the stone tiles, towards her feet.

“It's more than real,” Alexander said.

“That's not what I wanted you to say.” Jenny watched the huge head approach her. The snake rose up in front of her like a charmed cobra, its bottomless black eyes staring into hers. Its rattle sounded as loud as a drum in her head.

“Don't show it any fear,” Alexander's voice said, somewhere. Jenny couldn't see him, only the vast snake raising up above her now.

“Yeah...I don't know if I can do that,” Jenny whispered.

The huge diamondback's head rose a few feet above Jenny, and then the snake froze, its eyes still locked on hers.

“Nice snake,” Jenny whispered. Her whole body was shaking, but she knew better than to make sudden moves around a poisonous snake, even if it was just a hallucination. “Good snake...”

The snake's jaws opened, revealing fangs the size of butcher knives. Then its head darted down at Jenny, and its venomous fang sank deep into her right temple. She could feel it skewering her brain, flooding her head with hot poison.

“Alexander!” Jenny cried out. The snake tore loose, ripping away a sizable chunk of her face. Jenny screamed and toppled forward, toward the steps.

She caught her balance and found her feet sliding forward on stone. She was reminded of moments when she'd been about to go to sleep, when suddenly she would feel her feet slip out from underneath her and then feel herself falling, even though she was lying in bed. Then she would regain her sense of balance.