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

“What’d you make me do that for? I feel—” He tries to get to me and totters. Then I guess he knows what it is — for just one minute he knows what it is — that’s all the time he has to know it in.

I get him onto the bed — that’s all I can do for him — and the rest of it happens there. He just says one thing more. “Don’t let me, will you? Charlie, I dowanna die!” in a voice like a worn-out record running down under a scratchy needle. After that, he’s not recognizable as anything human any more.

I can’t do anything for him, so I just turn my face to the wall and shut out the rustling with my hands clapped to my ears. “Charlie, I dowanna die!” He isn’t saying it any more, it’s over already, but it goes on and on. For years I’ll probably hear it.

After awhile I cover him over without looking and I go to my own room. I’ve got a job to do — a job no one but me can do. While I’m in there, there’s a sort of fluttery sound for a minute outside, as though something whisked itself along the hall and down the stairs just then. That’s all right, I took care of the doors and windows before I came up. “Charlie, I dowanna die!” No, no insanity plea. Not this time — that’s too easy. An asylum’s too good.

I get my gun out of the closet where it’s been since we came here, and I break it. Two slugs in it. Two are enough. I crack it shut again and shove it on my hip. Then I take a long pole that’s standing in a comer, the handle of a floor-mop or something, and I go across the hall to her room. She’s pounding on the door downstairs. I can hear her shaking it, clawing at it, trying to get out of the house. She can wait.

I shift the chicken coop around so it faces my way, and zing, zing, zing goes the wire netting. Then I step back and prod the hinged slat open with the end of the long pole. Then I dig the pole into the bedclothes and loosen them up. There’s no wire mesh over the place that the one movable slat covers. There’s sort of a wicket left in it there, and out through that wicket comes the hooded head, the slow, coiling, glistening length of one of the world’s deadly things, the king cobra of India! I see Veda’s twin before my dilating eyes. The same scaly, gleaming covering; even the same marking like a question-mark on its hood! Endless lengths of it come out, like gigantic black-and-green toothpaste out of a squeezed tube, and I want to throw up in revulsion. Twelve feet of it — a monster. The story might have ended then, right in the room there — but the thing is torpid, sluggish from the cold climate and its long confinement.

It sees me, standing back across the room from it. Slowly it rears up, waist high, balancing on tightening coils for the thrust. Quickly the horrid hood swells, fills out with animosity. There’s not a sound in the room. I’m not breathing. The pounding and the lunging at the door downstairs has stopped some time ago. And in the silence I suddenly know that she’s come back into the room with me, that she’s standing somewhere right behind me.

I dare not turn around and look; dare not take my eyes off the swaying, dancing funnel of death before me for an instant. But I feel a weight suddenly gone from my hip. She’s got my gun!

Over my shoulder comes a whisper. “You’ve locked death into the house with you.”

The split second seems to expand itself into an hour. She edges her way along the wall until she comes into my range of vision. But my eyes can’t even flicker toward her. I know my own gun’s on me. But rather that than the other death.

Suddenly, I dip on buckled knees. I heave the long pole out from the bed like a fishing rod. A scarlet blanket and sheet come with it. The sheet drops off on the way, the blanket, heavier, clings to the end. The loathsome, fetid mouth of the thing below it has already gone wide. The blanket falls in swift effacement, covers the monster in stifling folds just as its head has gone back in the last preparatory move.

A fraction of an instant later, there is a lightning lunge against the blanket. A bulge appears there which soon is gone again — where the snake’s head struck after its spring. After that, everything is squirming, thrashing, cataleptic movement under the folds as it tries to free itself.

There’s a flash of fire from the wall and my hand burns — but if I drop that pole I’m gone. I wield the mop-handle in my bleeding, tortured hand, making it hiss through the air, flattening the blanket under it. It breaks in two under the terrific impacts, but I keep on with the short end of it until there’s no life under that blanket any more. Even then I step on the mess and grind and stamp with my steel-rimmed heels until the blanket discolors in places.