A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“First, she was just standing in one place and just wriggling back and forth and curving in and out like she didn’t have any spine at all. She still had on that horrible, glittery dress clinging to her like a wet glove and that ugly hood on her head and she kept making a hissing noise and sticking her tongue in and out like she was tasting something. But then, afterwards, it got even worse than that. All of a sudden she went down on the floor in a heap and began crawling around on her stomach and switching her legs from side to side, like she was a fish or mermaid got stranded outside of the water—”

“Or a snake?” I put in.

She grabs my arm. “That’s it, that’s it! Now I know what she reminded me of! Every once in awhile she’d lift her head off the floor and raise it up and look around, and then she’d drop it back again. Then, finally, she squirms over to a little saucer of milk standing next to a big packing case and she starts drinking from it, but just with her tongue, without using her hands at all.”

“O.K., Toots, get in, you’re going to town.”

“Charlie, I think you’d better notify the state asylum,” she whispers. “I think his death has made her lose her mind. She must really think she’s a snake.”

This is putting it so mild that I have a hard time not laughing right in her face. That creature lurking back there in the house doesn’t only think she’s a snake; for all practical purposes, she is one. I don’t mean in the slang sense, either. She is sub-human, some sort of monstrosity or freak that India has bred just once in all its thousands of years of history.

Now, there are two possibilities as I see it. She is what she is, either of her own free will — maybe a member of some ghastly snake-worshiping cult — or without being able to control herself. Maybe her mother had some unspeakable experience with a snake before she was born. In either case she’s more than a menace to society, she’s a menace to the race itself.

As for Mary’s tip about the asylum, what’s the sense? She could beat an insanity rap too easily. The strangeness of her ways, the far country she comes from, would be points in her favor. It would be a cinch for her to pass off the exhibition Mary saw through the keyhole as just an Asiatic way of showing grief for the departed. And even if I could get her booked in an institution, look what I’d have on my conscience, unloading her on a bunch of poor harmless nuts clipping paper dolls! She’d depopulate the place in a week. No, I tell myself, if I can only get the goods on her for the old man’s death, she goes up for first-degree murder without any fancy insanity trimmings. The rope’s the only sure cure for what’s the matter with her.

So far I haven’t got a thing, no motive and not even any evidence, and won’t have until that damned medical examiner reports to me. The law being what it is, a person’s innocent until you can prove him guilty. I can’t prove her guilty just because I don’t like how she dresses, how she hisses when she talks, how her room smells, and how she drinks milk off the floor.

I go back to the house alone. The moon’s on the late shift and now there are only three of us there — one of them a kid of twenty who’s just goofy enough to fall for this exotic vamp of death.

My footsteps don’t make any noise on the dirt road, and as I come up on the porch, the living-room windows are orange from the fire going inside. I look in through one of them and I see her and the kid there in the room. He’s standing there motionless, as if fascinated, and she’s coiled up next to him and I see one of her white arms creeping, wavering like a vine up his coat sleeve. I freeze all over with dread. Their heads start coming closer together, slowly, very slowly, and in another minute their lips will meet.

Maybe this first kiss won’t hurt him any, but I’m not in the mood to take a chance; I’d rather see him kissing poison ivy. Her head starts to weave a little and her neck lengthens in that old familiar movement. It’s the almost hypnotic slowness of the thing that gives me a chance to do something about it. I nearly take the front door off its hinges and before they can even turn their heads to look, I’ve split them wide apart with my shoulder for a wedge.

They each react differently. He flops back, and I can tell the buildup she has given him has already taken effect, because he turns sore. Maybe he’s ashamed too. She sinks back into a sort of coiled watchfulness and tries to look very innocent and harmless. She wets her lips a little.

“Watch what you’re doing!” he shouts wrathfully, and before I can get out of the way, wham, right below the ear! I go down holding onto my jaw and I feel rotten, not from the blow either. Something tells me he’s a goner, unless I can reason with him. If he won’t listen to me nothing can save him. “Vin, for Pete’s sake, you don’t know what you’re up against!”

“In the East,” she lisps, “a kiss means only friendship, peace.” But the look she squirts at me would drop an ox.