Chapter 1

 

She did not raise her eyes to look at him. You’ve come to kill me.

He leaned in close. Yes. You knew this was to be.

Indeed, I foresaw this. You would dare do this to your own mother?

You are not my mother. Mothers nurture. Mothers love. You merely created me.

You are me. You are everything that I am, and more. For centuries, I slaved to give you the most valuable gifts from the most powerful creatures—

Do you expect me to be grateful? To be compassionate because of your intentions for me?

No. But you could allow me to simply fade away, like the rest.

You have the one gift I truly want. If I do not take it, it will fade away with you.

The gift of prophecy can be a curse. You will foresee terrible things that will befall you. I have seen them. You will have no power to stop them.

No, you had no power to change what you prophesied. But I am more powerful than you ever were. I will make sure my future is secure.

Such foolishness. Such talk is almost…human.

Ah, there is the difference. You are from the time of gods when you relied on the faith and reverence of humans to give you strength. Without them, you cannot exist. I, on the other hand…it will be my word that decides whether they—whether all things in this world—continue to exist or not.

And even though she had foreseen this moment, even though she had already known of the agony to come, the scream of the ancient goddess Nyx sliced through the endless cosmos as she was torn asunder…

 

The scream sliced through the serenity of the house with the sharpness of broken glass.

David’s head snapped up instantly at his wife’s panicked cry. He shot up from his writing desk, his daily journaling forgotten, and pursued the sound of the breathless sobbing and the manic rap-rap-rap of shoes skittering down the staircase.

“Florence?” David folded his arms around her as she flung herself at him. “Florence, calm down. What is it?”

“S…sn…sn…” Florence gulped in air as she clung to David’s shirt collar. “Snake! Upstairs… horrid, black as sin…”

David crinkled his eyebrows. Paris was not exactly a city crawling with reptiles, especially in their neighborhood. How a snake would have gotten all the way to the bedroom, let alone into the house at all, was a mystery. Yet in the eleven months that David had been married to Florence, he had never seen her fly into frenzies over figments of her imagination. She must have truly seen something to be this panicked. “All right, all right. Calm down, I’m sure it’s harmless. I’ll take it outside.”

“No, no! Do not go up there!” Florence pushed him towards the front door. “You haven’t seen it. It’s…it’s not normal.”

“Not normal? How?”

Florence took several deep breaths to steady herself. She tucked a stray strand of her strawberry-auburn hair behind her ear before replying in her crisp, elegant British dialect.

“I was in the collection room to dust my tea sets, and it was there, on the bureau. It stared at me. And I swear, this…this thing was smiling. I don’t know how to describe it, but it was smiling and leering at me. It had…” She seemed torn between embarrassment and terror. “Eyes! I mean, eyes like you and me. I swear to you, David! Human eyes!”

Such a story would have at one time made David laugh at its ridiculousness. But he had witnessed events in his life, not so long ago, that made him aware that the impossible and fantastic could, in fact, exist. Most men of eighteen, going on nineteen years, may have dismissed such a story, or at the most felt a twinge of curiosity, but David froze as a ripple of icy anxiety scurried up his spine.

“You think I’m mad,” Florence said when he did not respond.

David shook his head. “No, Florence. I want you to wait outside while I take care of it. It’s probably a garden snake. Maybe the light in the room made its eyes look different from they really are. But it may come down to me having to make a bit of a mess, so I’d prefer if you wait on the porch.” He took her gently by the elbow and started leading her towards the front door.

“What if it’s poisonous? We should go find someone who handles animals, or get a constable—”

“I’ll join you in a minute. I won’t go near it. Don’t worry.” With a firm hold, he guided her out the door and onto the stoop. The sounds of Paris rattled around them, business as usual. The day was bright and brisk, hardly the kind of weather that reflected the supposed doom slithering about inside the house.

“David, please, be careful,” Florence warned.

David smiled at her with reassuring warmth. “I’m going to close the door in case it slips past me and tries to sneak out. I’ll be back shortly.” He gave her a comforting kiss before he stepped back inside and closed the front door. The fact was, he did not want to contain the snake because it might get out and attack someone else. If it had wanted to hurt Florence, it could have already done so. Florence was correct; something was not right about this animal, and David knew this because he could already sense an achingly awful presence in the house. Perhaps it was because of his past encounters with the demonic and deadly, but he had acquired a subconscious siren in his mind that was now screaming even louder than Florence had.

This snake—this monster—had come looking for him.

Armed with an iron poker from the fireplace, David ascended the stairs with soundless steps. His hand gripped the poker handle tightly enough to cause his knuckles to turn white. He climbed to the top, looking down the hallway towards the collection room. Even from a distance, he could hear a faint rustling from that room.

His throat tightened. The collections room had originally been a guest bedroom, which he had converted into his personal “Parlor of Collectibles.” It housed his rarest books and a few special trinkets he had unearthed from oddity shops and traveling salesmen. It also was the room in which he kept one special box—a long, polished wooden case that concealed two irreplaceable gifts from…her.

No snake had need of anything in that room. No snake would try to steal anything from that room. Definitely no snake had the means with which to pry open a locked case to steal the sacred gifts held within.

No snake could do such things, but this was not a normal snake.

David crept down the hall, willing his feet not to sprint lest he alert the animal. The poker in his hand seemed to vibrate with an anticipation to bash in some foul beast’s skull. Just outside the door to the room, David paused and waited for another sound from within. The silence only made the rapid thudding of his heart feel all the heavier and sound all the louder.

He noticed the sudden stench. He didn’t realize snakes could have odors, and he couldn’t decide at first if this was a pleasant smell or a bad one. It was a meaty, earthy scent that seared his nostrils—it was potent enough that David covered his nose and mouth with the collar of his shirt. He slowly inched towards the edge of the door, tipping his head forward to look into the room.

At first, he couldn’t spot anything out of the ordinary: his bookshelves lining the walls, the glass display case of foreign coins and knickknacks, the polished bureau upon which were Florence’s china tea sets and one of David’s displayed violas, the gothic-style mirror above the bureau, the two plump crimson armchairs placed across from one another, the marble pedestal with the Grecian vase. It was all there, not a thing out of place.

There it was again. That rustling noise, a rough surface rubbing against another. It was faint enough that it wasn’t easy to determine where it was coming from—at least, not for anyone who didn’t already know what an intruder such as this would be after.

David crept towards the bureau, his eyes locked on the bottom drawer. His forehead wrinkled in intensity as he noticed the drawer had been pulled open, no more than half an inch. Using the curved tip of the poker, he hooked it onto the drawer’s handle, standing away at arm’s length as he slid open the drawer to look in.

There was the long wooden case, and a moment of relief washed over David to see it was still in its hiding place. But that little black-green tail wiggling out from between the barely parted lips of the case was new. As the drawer opened wider, a flat head wriggled out from the case and looked up at David. Two glistening, pinhead-sized eyes stared at him, and a bright red tongue flicked out, almost mockingly rather than to taste the scents in the air.

David stared at it for a little longer, and then let the hand wielding the poker drop to his side. He smirked. This is what Florence had been so frightened of? This miniscule, bug-eyed, barely six inches long…

He paused. He narrowed his eyes at the snake. The reptile stared back at him steadily, as if it had been expecting him. David noticed that its tongue was a bit too bright red, its scales a bit too glossy, its eyes a bit too aware. And indeed, those eyes were not the solid black of other snakes’ eyes, or even the yellow or green variety with slitted pupils.

Silvery-white orbs with tiny red irises locked onto him.

“Who are you?” David asked.

The petite python flicked his tongue at David again. It blinked. The snake—a species that possessed no eyelids—blinked.

David’s teeth clenched, and he brought the poker up slowly. “I don’t tolerate thieves in my house.”

The snake looked at the wooden case, and then back at David. “Oh, is this yours? I was sure this belonged to someone else.”

David was taken aback by the deep voice that came out of the tiny animal. It was a voice that was as dark and sticky as pitch, a tone that could make a tiger cower. “You’re not really a snake, are you?” he asked.

The snake curled around so its head was upside down. “And you’re not really who I think you are. You don’t look it, anyway…not right side up, not upside down. Perhaps inside out? Would you shed your skin so I can see? Or I could help you peel it off.”

“I’ve faced dragons and demons before,” David informed the snake. “I’m not afraid of you.”

The lips of the snake pulled back into an awful, hate-filled smile. “Then you’re a fool.”

The snake raised its head higher…and higher…and higher…as its body inflated, its scales elongated, and its head widened and bloated. In a few seconds, it was as tall as David, and its oily coils were spilling out of the drawer. But it was its face that made David reel back, for it was not a serpentine façade glaring at him. The red and silver eyes shrunk back into craggy eye sockets, while the protruding nose flattened into a snout and a pointed chin jutted out. The scales on the face lightened into a grayish-green hue as a wide forehead ballooned from the top. It was a human face, albeit not a handsome or remotely pleasant one.

It opened its mouth to reveal several rows of serrated teeth, and a wildly delighted look shined in its eyes. “Oh, and what fun fools are…both to play with and to—”

The poker came crashing across the right side of the snake-beast’s head. It flew backward, its head smashing into the mirror above the bureau as its coils twisted about in a frenzy. It swiped Florence’s tea sets and David’s viola clear off the bureau, and they clattered into irreparable pieces on the floor. It burst apart the drawer it had been sitting in, sending the wooden case with David’s secret gift tumbling out.

“You owe me for all those things you broke,” David remarked, readying his poker for another strike.

The snake laughed as it came back around to face him. It was hysterical, manic laughter, as if being bashed in the face by a poker was the most humorous thing the snake had ever been subjected to. “You are amusing, Sandoval! For a human to fight back against an Ilomba, is like a gazelle in the grip of a crocodile’s jaws. I hate it when humans cower and whimper when threatened, like that dainty little morsel that went screaming out of here before.”

Rage brewed in David’s gut, the heat seeping up into his chest and limbs. “Don’t you ever go near my wife again.”

The Ilomba swiveled its head from side to side. “Or else, what? Will you hit me with your iron stick again? Or maybe your sphinx will come and save you?”

David froze, his rage blotted by surprise. “How do you…you’ve been sent by Nyx, haven’t you?”

The Ilomba slithered slowly towards David, who stood his ground. “It will drive you mad, won’t it? If you don’t know the truth. You feel in control if you know everything. But why? Why live in the stifling confines of order and knowledge when madness is so much fun? To try to be in control is to be controlled. Everyone wants you to act as they do, to be ‘sane,’ so they feel safe. There is no such thing as safe.”

Everyone is out to get you! shouted one of the chipped teacups on the floor.

David watched out of the corner of his eye as the broken porcelain cup began hobbling slowly towards his foot. It did not seem strange to him, nor did his cracked viola craning its neck towards him with the shuddering of a snapped-necked swan. But he was not paying them any mind, for the Ilomba’s eyes held him, enticing and paralyzing him, blending David’s dread and fascination into a concoction beyond his logic.

The Ilomba’s scales brushed David’s leg, as the beast slinked up around his waist. “All this time, you’ve been trying to find answers to the most pointless questions, and you don’t even realize that your mind is being consumed by confusion, blinded by fear…but Madness is freedom from fear, freedom from pesky, paranoid thought…”

Don’t think! Thinking hurts! begged the painted roses in the wallpaper, twittering in childlike unison.

Above David, his mother—wasn’t she supposed to be back in Cervera with Padre and his hermosos?—sat in a fine chair on the ceiling, hanging upside down but looking perfectly composed. “What is Florence going to say about that broken tea set? Didn’t I raise you better?”

David’s reflections in the broken mirror shards began conversing among themselves. What did he say about a sphinx? Where is she? We need her right now…She could twist this snake into knots…

The books in the room began flying like bats around his head, hooting words like confused owls. Sphinx…minx…drinks…thinks…stinks…

Scary, scary, scary! chirped the teacups.

A multitude of clamoring, laughing voices clustered around David, and they nipped and scratched and dug into every inch of his consciousness. Among the throng, he heard his own voice from somewhere outside of himself. Why do I attract these monsters to myself…What if I am a monster? What if I grow fangs and claws and wings and start eating everyone in Paris?

One of David’s shoes giggled, murmuring, I bet Parisians taste like cheese…

The voices were all silenced, the talking objects rendered inanimate again by David’s agonized scream as the snake’s teeth clamped down on his arm.

Scorching pain flooded David’s arm and chest, forcing him to drop the poker. The Ilomba swatted the poker away across the floor with a flick of its tail, as it dug its fangs deeper into David’s flesh. David grasped the Ilomba’s face with his free hand, desperately trying to pry the beast off, but he could feel himself growing weaker by the second. Terror stung his heart as he watched the Ilomba bloat even bigger, and he realized that the snake wasn’t pumping venom into him—it was feeding off of him.

When the Ilomba suddenly produced a second neck, upon which sprouted a second smiling human-reptilian head, David nearly vomited.

“Shame. I was expecting more from you,” the second head said. “Don’t worry. You won’t be dead for too long…”

David stopped listening to the Ilomba long enough to realize that the wooden case that had tumbled out of the bureau was within his reach, and the lock had unclasped when the case had hit the floor.

He launched himself at the case, extending his free arm while the Ilomba clung on to his other. His sudden leap caught the Ilomba off guard, and the second head smacked against the floor as David fell heavily on his side. He got close enough to the case to flip it open. He grasped one of the items within—a dagger that curved like a basilisk’s tongue—and drove it into the neck of the Ilomba’s primary head.

The second head wailed as David stabbed again, and this time the dagger sliced clean through. The decapitated head released David’s arm, plunking to the floor, and rolling a few inches before dissolving into a pile of dark mush.

David reached for the case’s other item, a long sword that was the dagger’s brother in style and material. He staggered to his feet, both blades pointed at what remained of the Ilomba. Already, the snake was slowly deflating in size, having lost its food source.

The creature bared its teeth, its eyes bleeding fury at David, but his gaze no longer held its hypnotic power over David. Then its face melted. All its facial features dripped away in viscous sludge, leaving nothing but a smooth surface of black-and-white stripes, a convex shell of painted glass. Yet without a mouth, its raspy voice screeched. “The Night may fear you…even Death may fear you…but Madness fears nothing!”

David raised the sword over his head and brought it down with all his strength to slice the snake in half, but the Ilomba darted away, and the sword’s blade clattered on the floor. The Ilomba, returned to its puny worm size, slipped into a crack in the wall, and was gone. It left no trace of itself behind except for the oily trail of ooze that it had bled—but after a few moments, the trail fizzled and evaporated like the fading wisps of a bad dream.

David collapsed, straining to gulp air into his body. He dropped his sword and dagger to inspect his wound. The flesh around the snake bite pulsated purple, but then faded rapidly to blue, to greenish, and then returned to David’s normal skin color, that of milk-kissed breakfast tea. Even the puncture marks sealed up and smoothed over, as if concealing some horrible secret never to be uncovered.

The sound of shoes rapping up the stairs caught David’s attention. He breathed deeply, figuring that if the Ilomba had poisoned him, the effects would happen quickly and no rushing to a medic would save him. But his heart continued to beat, his body was not racked with the acidic heat of venom…although, why did his arm look so vein-riddled…and why did he feel so weak…

“David? David!” Florence rushed into the room, kneeling next to his hunched figure. “I heard a horrible crash from outside, and I thought…”

She stopped, dead silent. David turned his face up to look at her. Florence’s eyes were wide, and her breath caught in her throat. She shot up to her feet, staggering a few paces back. Her hands, the givers of gentle gestures and comforting touches, pressed against her lips to keep a scream from escaping.

“Florence…” David immediately noticed his voice did not sound the same. It was raspy, tattered. He picked up one of the broken mirror pieces on the floor and looked at himself.

An old man, with hair the shade of cobwebs and wrinkles of a lifetime of decay, stared back at him.