A Plot to Kill
It was a bright day, perhaps too bright, and Harold lay on his bed with his eyes tightly closed.
The late-afternoon winds were non-existent, except for the random gust that stirred up the heat and kept the fire burning. He would have loved a lazy, overcast Sunday, but the clouds were only thin streaks across the sky. It was summer, after all. The heat was unbearable. So he gave up after a while and sat upright on his bed. The ray of sunlight from the window behind him illuminated a shaft of atoms that whirled and rolled about the room. Then he noticed something else in the corner of his eye, a glint, like a glass turned up towards the sun.
It took him a moment to see it.
A snake, slithering on the window pane and falling into his room. Wait, did it fall? No, of course it did not. It slithered down the wall to the floor, the full six feet or so of it, which reminded him of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible being lowered into a vault stealthily with a rope. Except here, the rope and Tom Cruise were one and the same deadly person.
Its scales were olive-colored, but its belly was pale, almost white. It opened its mouth and sneered at him, and some kind of a black, inky fluid threatened to pour out and ruin his shiny tiles. Then it stood up — that’s how Harold saw it — raising a third of its body off the ground. A decent-sized black mamba, he thought. There were flaps on either side of its head, which were now stretched as if in a declaration of war.
All he wanted to do at that moment was just scream, but he couldn’t because his voice was buried under a layer of bile which had risen to his throat. “Ss — sss — ” he tried to cry, but he never got around to completing the word. So he sat frozen on his bed without moving an inch. He did not even blink.
The standoff lasted another five minutes. Then the snake dropped its body to the floor, its eyes never leaving him. It slithered under the wardrobe which stood in the corner and tucked in its tail.
He breathed a sigh of relief. The door was to the other side, so he could make a run for it and close it behind him. He would then calm himself down and figure out who to call, some popular snake-catcher, maybe, or even the police just to be sure. So he held his breath and stepped down from the bed, trying his best to not make any sound. Then he crossed the distance to the door in two giant steps and slammed it behind him.
His wife was sprawled awkwardly on the living room couch, apparently impervious to what was happening. Her bland face was turned towards the television. A smirk showed on her face, as if she always kept one ready just in case her husband was watching. It was then it occurred to Harold what he could do about the snake in his house other than just call 911. He was startled by a sudden murderous impulse that showed him a way out on two fronts, although he was himself afraid he could now afford such impulses.
Without thinking twice, he said, “Honey, you said you’d clean our room today. Well, I can’t sleep, so why don’t you do it now?” Surprisingly, his wife acquiesced.
He could almost see what was about to happen: His wife making their bed and changing the pillow covers. Then she picks up a broom and sweeps every inch of the room clean — spotless, like she usually did. She turns everything out, checks every corner, and prods every nook, leaving no chance for anything larger than a molecule to be left behind. Which meant she was going to contest Mr. Mamba sooner or later. Let the snakes settle it between themselves, he decided. It was something he couldn’t have counted on to happen by itself — but it had. He was simply going to let nature take its course and be the innocent observer. No one would ever know. The inquest would be open-and-shut.
So you can probably understand his shock when his wife returned after a while, not only unscathed, but also whistling a tune under her breath. She carried a laundry basket full of the unwashed sheets and covers, and even looked happy to be doing all the work.
Harold began to panic.
When his wife resumed her position on the couch, he carefully stepped inside the bedroom. From a distance, he stooped to the floor and looked under the wardrobe. Like he had feared, there was no sign of the snake. It was a contingency he hadn’t prepared for, because it hadn’t occurred to him as possible at all.
Wait, could it have managed to…?
He found the laundry basket propped against a wall in the hallway. He shook it with outstretched arms, then kicked it and finally tipped it over. He half-expected to see the snake come from under one of the sheets. But still, there was no sign of it.
Which meant only one thing: the snake now had access to the rest of his house.
Harold shivered. He was afraid the snake might take him by surprise from a shadow. It might be sprawled along a wall right in front of him, and he might fail to notice. His legs felt like rubber and refused to move. Could it be hiding behind the door in any of the rooms? Yes, it was likely. Or perhaps it was under the stairs in the cellar, waiting in the gloom, lurking like a ghost. Or it had scaled the walls (snakes can climb walls, can’t they?) and hid itself away in the attic — perhaps even found a niche in their huge, cavernous chandelier, and watched him from above.
Harold felt his skin crawl. Everywhere he turned, his eyes were blurred by an olive sheen. “Honey!” he cried, “I think there’s a snake in our house!”
Then suddenly, he began to run, completely terrorized. One might say that he had lost his senses, the way he shrieked breathlessly as if he had seen a ghost. Something caught his leg and he fell down on his elbows with a thud. He turned back to see his wife standing tall over him, the smirk on her face growing until it transpired into a smile.
“What the heck,” he said, propping himself up on his hands. But the snake was already onto him by then. Its coffin-shaped head told him exactly what was about to happen. It bit him right on his face, clamping its jaws on either side of his nose. A torrent of venom rushed in — or that’s how he felt. Then it bit him again. And again.
As it slithered away into the shadows, he managed to turn towards his wife, who, for some reason, was laughing. “Harold, you are so dumb!” she said, and began to laugh louder. “I was the one who put the snake into the bedroom in the first place! Ha-ha-ha!”
There was no way Harold heard her last words, because he had already begun to die. His heart might as well have been pumping water — his arms and legs felt like they were made out of stones. A dark fluid welled in his eyes, partially blinding him. His nose felt like it was stuffed with wax, and each of his last breaths were needles that perforated his lungs.
But still, he couldn’t help but wonder how it was the most evil laugh he had ever heard that rang in his ears as he slowly died.
