Haiku: Part 1
* * *Seven days later, halfway around the world, the sun set on a very large building. It was only three stories tall but it was wide and long, taking up acres of ground with rows upon rows of black windows and concrete. In front, at the end of a lawn the size of a football field, the word HERON stood in granite letters on the grass, four feet tall and two deep. That massive stone sign had cost more than the yearly salary of most of the people who worked there.
The parking lot was nearly empty and the lights inside were mostly out when a woman came through one of the many side doors.
Her hair was red, a deep copper, done up with many barrettes, and she carried a slim briefcase. She paused halfway down the walkway and looked around like she was about to pee in the bushes; then, seeing no one, took off her heels and walked the rest of the way to her car barefoot, an expression of relief spreading across her face. A few minutes later her tiny Prius pulled out of the lot.
She didn’t know it, but she was being followed.
It would be hard to blame her for not noticing, though. The thing that was following her was an owl.
It flitted out of the lot, above and behind her car, a small brown streak of silent feathers. It didn’t fly like an owl should; it acted more like a hawk, going up high when her car came to a stop, then using that height to dive and gain speed when she started moving again. At times it was nearly a mile behind her, but it never lost sight of her and always caught up.
When her car pulled into the lot at her apartment the owl perched on the roof of the building across the street. It watched her windows, not moving, until the lights went out.
It watched her get into bed, naked except for her underwear.
The night was warm, not hot, but being mid-August the air was thick and heavy and she slept on top of the covers. Her skin was pale, almost milky in normal light, but in the moonlight she looked pure white. Light freckles were sprinkled down her arms. Her hair spilled across the pillow in a curly auburn pool. She was a painting of Celtic stillness.
The owl watched her chest rise and fall, slow then slower, as she drifted into sleep.
It stayed that way for hours afterwards, its glassy eyes unmoving, as if lulled into a trance by the rhythm of her body. Then, sensing something that human eyes couldn’t, it spread its wings and dove towards her window.
The bedroom door was nudged open.
It happened very slowly: first a crack, then widening until it was halfway open into the blackness of the hall. There seemed to be nothing there, and there wasn’t, if up by the doorknob was where you were looking. But down by the threshold, what seemed to be shadows seemed to gather.
Something began to make its way across the floor. It was low to the ground, almost invisible in the shadows, and the path it took towards the bed wasn’t straight, but vaguely S-shaped. It seemed to leave a trail of shadow behind it, but as it got closer to the woman it became apparent that that was just an illusion: the moving darkness was part of its long body, stretching all the way out into the hall.
An enormous snake’s head passed through a sliver of moonlight on the floor.
It was a mix of light green, dark green, and black, with a black stripe that ran from its eyes to the back of its head. A massive body followed, the same colors as the head, but with spots instead of stripes. It was so long that, when its head reached the bed, half of its body was still in the hall.
After a few moments its head appeared over the edge of the bed. Its tongue flicked towards her pale foot.
It happened so fast that her eyes were barely open before it was coiled around her.
Something gripped her shoulder, and in the split second it took her eyes to snap open she had been rolled across the bed—literally flipped over twice, from the left side to the right, and lifted partway into the air at the same time. In her half-awake confusion, with one foot still in a dream and the other stepping into reality, she imagined that someone had dove into bed and was hugging her.
Tightly.
Very tightly.
Then she was blinking at the dark and struggling against a thing that she couldn’t see. She couldn’t sit up. She couldn’t move the upper half of her body at all. Her legs made crazed kicks at the darkness, shapely and white in the gloom.
Something was on her chest—no, wrapped all around her chest, just below her breasts, pinning her arms to her sides. She couldn’t sit up. She couldn’t sit up. It was soft (for a moment she thought, absurdly, that the blanket itself had come to life and was trying to pull her into the bed) but it was also heavy, too heavy to even roll over, too heavy to do anything, and it was tightening. Constricting. Her elbows dug into her sides painfully.
She tried to scream and that’s when she realized that she was already trying to scream, had been since her eyes opened, but no sound was coming out.
The blanket monster had squeezed the air out of her. She couldn’t draw in a breath.
Her panic turned red. Her hands made feeble little grasping motions down by her hips.
Maybe that moment of real panic set some ancient gears to work within her mind or maybe it was just coincidence, but her eyes finally adjusted to the dark and she saw the blanket monster for what it was. When she did she tried to scream again, her red lips parting silently in the dark.
The biggest snake she had ever seen was wrapped around her.
It was not a pet snake, or anything that belonged outside of a jungle or a zoo. It was the kind from the nature shows—the kind they show eating things like deer and caiman, the kind as long as a house. Its midsection was as thick as her waist. She thought it had lifted her into the air, but she was wrong—she had been lifted off of the bed because its midsection was as thick as her waist.
Even as her eyes guessed out the shape and her brain recognized it for what it was it was moving, coiling around her more, encircling her in the world’s deadliest hug. It moved slowly, languorously. Almost sensually. Smooth scales slid all over her body. She felt a massive coil slither over her waist then constrict around her hips and ass—it was doing that trick that snakes do, moving while seeming to stay still, wrapping her up while holding her down.
She thrashed blindly, tried to thrash. It held her still with an ease that was almost insulting. Her body was a string of licorice in the hand of a giant.
The only sound was the thump of her heels on the bed (toenails painted purple), and then silence as another coil slipped over her thighs and pinned her knees together, taking away her useless kicks. In the eerie half-light she looked like she was cocooned in darkness, with only her calves and feet poking out below and her lightly freckled shoulders and head above.
Spots began to dance before her eyes.
Her panic took on a thick, faraway quality, and she recognized that as a sign that she was passing out, and she thought, in that absurd way that thoughts have as consciousness starts to go away, that was fast.
Her struggles slowed, then stopped.
Except she didn’t pass out.
What did happen was so unreal that she thought she was dreaming again, thought she’d dreamed the whole thing (not that she was in any condition to judge real from unreal—she was half conscious and hallucinating from lack of oxygen, the way a drowning person will).
Right when she felt herself fading, slipping down the long slow drain into unconsciousness, the snake’s head appeared in front of her face. They stared at each other dully for a moment (Ashe because she was barely conscious, the snake because that was the only face it could make), and then—
It breathed on her lips. She felt it, a soft breeze on her mouth and nose.
And then it let her breathe.
The massive cocoon that was holding her tight loosened, and she sucked in a great, gasping lungful of air. So great was its control over her body that it was able to relax just that one coil—the one around her chest—while keeping the rest of her pinned irrevocably, as easily as one might hold a doll.
Then before she could scream—before she was even finished breathing in—it squeezed the air back out of her.
Ashe didn’t make any judgment on this turn of events. Lights were going off all over her field of vision. She was pretty sure that she was already dead and the afterlife just happened to be filled with snakes who, for whatever reason, wanted to control how often you breathed.
When she began to fade again it repeated it: it loosened, she sucked in a great breath, it constricted, the air passed back through her lips in a hiss. The air tasted sweet, like honey. It made her head swim. The snake seemed to be studying her as it manipulated her, its eyes implacable and blank, and it seemed to have a sense for how long it could hold her before she’d pass out; maybe it could even feel something in her body that told it when to squeeze and release. It sped up a little, bringing her back from the brink of consciousness but keeping the rise and fall of her chest slow, about that of a sleeping person.
It was like a dance.
Her vision began to clear but her head did not. She felt like she was detaching from herself, becoming an observer, watching a movie that she was starring in. The panic was completely gone. It had dissolved along with her vision the last time she’d slipped into semi-consciousness and not returned. She stopped worrying about when she’d be able to breathe again, stopped worrying about anything.
She felt like she’d been doped.
The snake’s head began to cant back and forth, in time with their breathing dance. Ashe watched. Its eyes seemed to—
Calm radiated through her like warm water refreshing a cold bath.
Then she heard—no, that wasn’t right. She sensed something, like a sound but not. It was coming from the snake’s eyes. As crazy as that was she was suddenly certain that the sound in her head was coming from the snake’s eyes, that it was thinking at her. She looked closer. They were black and empty, but the longer she looked the more certain she was that they weren’t quite empty. The blackness wasn’t quite blackness. It was a moving and swirling blackness, like oil on the surface of dark water, and beneath it was... beneath it was... she needed to look closer. Longer. She strained to see.
Calm, it thought at her—through her.
She was calm.
Docile.
She was docile.
The thoughts seemed to form on their own, whole, within her mind. She watched them, bemused: alien thoughts and images, unfolding and flowering, merging with her own.
A soft pressure began to build in her thoughts. It was an actual physical sensation: a gentle probe, touching here and there along the top of her mind, sometimes dipping in like a swimmer testing the water. She watched from below. It seemed to be searching for certain kinds of thoughts, and when it found them it would seize them, coiling around them like the thing coiled around her body, snuffing them out, replacing them with something that... as Ashe tried to find the word, it seized on that particular thought and snuffed it out.
Everywhere it went it left behind pleasant numbness. She wondered idly if it was some way of tranquilizing victims, of making them unaware while... it found that thought too, and turned it into warm light. It was seizing anything that moved.
And then it seemed to find what it was looking for: a place above the core of her thoughts, and it began to press, a pressure made of soft nothingness, massaging its way into her mind. It started slow, but then there was a sudden push—it forced its way deeper, and she gasped—finding air, because it had loosened its hold on her body and was letting her breathe, but that didn’t matter anymore—it had her mind now, and she understood that that had been the goal all along, and then she stopped understanding anything.
Her eyes went wide and her mouth opened, her chest hitching with shallow, startled breaths as she fell up into it.
Ashe was having a strange dream.
She dreamed that she began to hear the thoughts of the snake: first as images and half-grasped gestalts, then as actual, coherent thoughts. They reached out to her own mind, seeping in, tendrils of consciousness mixing with her own.
She dreamed that, after she had been made docile (that was the exact phrase the snake used as it worked: make her docile), it let her go, unwinding the massive coils in a process that took nearly five minutes, during which she thought nothing and felt nothing but smooth scales sliding against her skin from every direction.
She dreamed that it kept its eyes in front of hers the whole time, never wavering, and that when it released her body, it continued to hold her with its eyes.
When it was finished she felt something like a command thrill through her. No, not a command; more like an instruction like one gives to a computer. A line of code. A computer doesn’t have any say in whether or not it executes an instruction: it just does it, and so did she. It said close your eyes and she did.
There was movement on the bed, a faint rocking.
Something touched her legs. It was soft and smooth, like skin—human skin. It touched the sides of her thighs, then her hips, and stayed there, a gentle weight. She tried to picture what would cause that particular feeling and decided that someone was probably straddling her. Then the same thing on her arms, and a tickle on her neck and shoulders—hair, long hair, as someone bent over her.
“Open your eyes,” a woman’s voice said, and Ashe did.
One of the most strikingly beautiful women she’d ever seen was leaning over her, their noses almost touching.
She looked Native American. Her eyes were dark, a rich and deep brown, and her hair was dark also, very long and very straight. It was draped over Ashe’s shoulders, gathering in pools beside her neck on the bed. Her skin was flawless, olive and smooth, a gentle tan that ran all over her body. Even though Ashe was unable to look away from her eyes, she could tell from her peripheral vision, and from the feel of bare skin on her hips, that the woman was naked.
But her eyes... they gave Ashe the same sensation the snake’s had, the sense of losing herself, only tenfold, and the thoughts that began to mingle with hers were more human, less alien. She felt as if she were falling up into them, and at the same time, the woman was somehow sliding down into her.
It was awfully vivid, for a dream.
The voice again:
“I’m going to ask you some questions, hopefully you’ll have the answers, then you can go back to sleep and in the morning this will seem like it was just a dream. Ok?” The voice was deep, lovely, and it wasn’t so much commanding as it took command for granted.
“Ok.”
“What kind of business does your company do?”
“It’s a brokerage firm.”
“Is capturing wild animals and shipping them overseas part of that at all?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. It’s probably a private collector or trader. Do you know of anyone like that?”
“No.”
“Who do you work with that would have access to a private jet? Someone who could take it overseas and it wouldn’t seem strange?”
“A lot of people.”
Pause.
“A lot?” The voice lost its smoothness. “How many?”
“Forty or fifty, I think. Maybe more.”
“Forty or fifty? That many people at your company are that filthy rich? Seriously?”
“They’re stock brokers.” It was all Ashe could think to say. She herself was just a secretary.
The woman leaned back, letting her weight rest on Ashe’s thighs. It was an odd, not unpleasant feeling, both being treated like a chair and having the soft weight atop her in just that way, on her pelvis and down the sides of her hips. If she’d been a man who had ever had the girl on top, she would have recognized the sensation instantly.
Headlights shone through the window, panning around the room as a car turned somewhere down the street, and when the beam passed over them the woman’s eyes flashed green, like a cat’s will at night. The shape of her in the moonlight was perfect, almost startlingly so; Ashe stared, amazed, not thinking it was strange to look at another woman like that any more than one would think it was strange to be struck by the beauty of a painting. Her arms, her hair, the taper of her stomach, the curve where her breasts met her sides, her legs wrapped over Ashe’s—they had the kind of casual perfection of someone fit and in their mid-20’s, before age has started its long slow wilt.
“You can help me anyway,” the voice said. “I don’t know anything about this city. You will be my servant and guide while I am here.” She bent down again, seizing Ashe by the arms (which was unnecessary; Ashe clearly wasn’t going anywhere). “Look into my eyes.”
Ashe already was. She’d never looked anyplace else.
“You will be my pet. What are you?”
“Your pet.” And she was—it was as easy as saying it. She was a pet. Later on she would think it was a strange choice of words, but for now it was simply true.
“Good. Where’s your bathroom?”
“Down the hall on the left.”
“Thanks.” She got up. “Stay.”
Ashe stayed, docile.