I sat on my bed, unable to dream, unable to think about anything except Stheno. I had gone to DeSelby's to die, but instead I had been given a message. Go see her. Whoever or whatever she was. In the space between mirrors.
There was a slight problem with that: I had no idea how to get to the "space between mirrors." Stheno obviously could, but me? No clue. What was I supposed to do?
It was then that I had an idea. It was probably a stupid idea, but it was better than trying to sleep again and dream about dead friends.
I went to the store and bought two full length mirrors, then brought them back to my motel. I set them up next to one another, each one mirroring the other, creating an infinite loop. Snakes represented infinity, right? Well, that's what I had read.
I stepped in between the two mirrors and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. I felt supremely stupid. I looked at the multitude of mes in the mirror and suddenly I saw that one of them was moving, yet I was standing still. The other me leaned forward and waved. I waved back, echoing him. He motioned for me to start walking.
I stepped outside the mirrors, but as I did, I realized that I wasn't in my motel anymore. I was in a gray room. There were still the two mirrors, but they were in the center of a room I had never seen before. A room I was now in.
There was a door to the side, so I walked over and opened it. The sun was so bright and blinding outside that I closed the door as quick as I could. Before I did, I saw a vast desert.
"Did you see?" a voice asked. I looked around, but couldn't find where it came from. "Did you see my desert? I have carefully cultivated it, made it ready, made it suitable for my purposes. You don't like deserts, do you, Boyd Walker?"
"Who are you?" I asked.
"You're father took you to a desert once," the voice said. It sounded feminine, that was all I knew. "He told you to stay in the truck and not look as he buried a body, but you did. You looked. Like Lot's wife, you looked back and saw something terrible."
I could see a shadow now, a shadow where the voice was coming from. It looked like a snake, but then it didn't, it looked like a woman. "What do you fear, Boyd Walker?" it asked.
I slipped my hand in my pocket and gripped my gun. "Not much," I said.
"No, not much," the voice said. "But what you fear is what you deny. You kill people, do you not?"
"Bad people," I said. "No woman, no children."
"And that makes it good?" the voice said. "That makes it right? Just because you do not heed your darker impulses?"
"What?" I said. "What are you talking about?"
"Why you kill," the voice said. "Why you fight. You are afraid of what you would become. You are afraid of being cold blooded, Boyd Walker. But you are. You cannot deny yourself. You are one of my children."
The shadow finally came into the light and it looked like a woman, but her skin was covered in scales, beautiful shining scales. "And I am the Mother of Snakes," she said.
I took out my gun and shot as many times as I could. Blood burst from her chest and I ran, I ran back to the mirrors and as I looked in them, they shattered around me, they cut my clothes and my skin, but I closed my eyes and ran and when I opened them I was back in my motel.
I was covered in cuts and was bleeding profusely. The wound in my shoulder had reopened, too. I needed to get to a hospital.
I dropped my gun on the floor and left my room.
No comments:
Post a Comment