The Venemous Serpent. Brian Ball
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one of the men moved. He tried again, for all was ready. Mortar had been mixed. A coffin lay open. Lead sheeting gleamed in the yellow light. But the thunder had unmanned the parishioners. Its terrible pounding, and the accompanying blue-white lightning, had confirmed their belief that the Devil himself was striding across the night to keep one of his creatures from their vengeance. In vain the priest pleaded. He spoke of the nightly visitations of the things that lay within the grave-windings, of good men lost and children savaged, but it was to no avail. Even as he argued, the priest thought he saw a shadow of movement where one white, icy hand lay hidden.
Lightning bathed the hurdle again, and a pale, watery gleam of sustained light picked out the stones, the alabaster blocks, and the bright engraving.
The priest trembled. “Moonlight!” he groaned. He summoned all his resolution and shrilled to the palsied men: “Since you fear to look on her face, see how a priest of God can do your work for you! Be forever ashamed, men of Stymead!”
Saying this, he picked up the broad-bladed knife and sliced into the sodden linen of the shroud. Too wet to give easily, it resisted his unskilled efforts. But he cut, and cut, and the windings parted. Slight whimpering noises came from the hypnotised men around him.
“Leave be, priest!” implored someone. “Leave be the terrible thing, in God’s Name!”
“In God’s Name I shall destroy the venomous serpent!” he shrilled.
And then the form was revealed.
All had seen it but the priest. He had been summoned on this night when the creature and its frightful familiar had been tracked to its lair; but by the time he arrived, the hurdle was ready and the body enshrouded. Now, he saw the ivory skin, the deep black hair, the vile red lips, the half-smile, the fangs, the taloned fingers, the sensuous, evil curves of the beautifully-formed body all for the first time; and the small, sleeping thing at the feet of what had been the Lady Sybil de Latours. He might have been fascinated, or revolted, or stupefied, for it was also the first time he had seen a beautiful, naked female body.
One white, taloned hand moved.
The priest shrieked high and long, an animal noise like that of a dying night thing. His parishioners echoed the yell. Thunderclaps roared back, and the eyelids of the sleeping, sated woman-thing began to flicker.
The priest let the knife slip, just as had the swine-butcher. It jangled once again. And then the priest fell to the ground.
The sound of metal on stone brought some of the men from their helpless swooning fright. A small man crept forward in spite of the stirrings of the dreadful creature on the hurdle.
Thomas, too, recovered. He growled, anger in his voice:
“How is the priest?”
“Dead—stark dead!”
More men growled fiercely into their heavy beards.
“In God’s own House!”
“A man of little account, but a good priest nevertheless!” Thomas called. “And dead by the touch of the Beast!”
It was so, for a mark glowed on the dead cheek where the icy hand of the night-creature had rested.
“Stay!” roared the swine-butcher as the others began to move. “Stay—we have work to finish!”
Some cowered further away, others waited.
Thomas spoke briefly.
“The priest said it must be done in a certain way, then the thing cannot trouble us again—who will help, who amongst you is man enough to destroy the creature?”
“Will you be butcher?” asked the small man.
Thomas shuddered.
“I cannot do it,” he said simply. “I cannot go near the fangs and the talons.”
Those that had made for the porch turned back. They saw the corpse-like figure of the woman had not moved again; but they saw too that the nostrils distended in time with the slight rise and fall of the exquisite breasts.
“What are we to do, masters?” asked the small man.
“Bury her deep!” Thomas said. “And the small beast with her!”
“And the curse is gone?” asked someone.
“I know not,” Thomas said simply. “But the Holy Wafer blessed by the Bishop is here—let us seal the lead three times and place the Holy Wafer on the seals.”
“And mix the mortar with Holy Water!” called a mason.
“And use the Nail of the True Cross to hold the brass engraving down!”
“And then hide all under the alabaster,” said Thomas. He shook himself. He looked down at the dead priest once more. “That done, we say nothing of tonight. Is it sworn?”
And now a shaft of pale weak moonlight did steal across the altar and towards the ice figure on the hurdle. As if in anticipation, the blue-veined eyelids of the night-woman twitched slightly.
There were men who recognized the danger. A brave man flung the grave-wrappings over the corpse, and this was the signal for a bout of furious activity in the chancel. Thomas himself took a chisel to the bright brass, gouging with all his strength. Within an hour, the only sign of the night’s weird happening was the figure of the dead priest stark across his own altar and the gleaming white alabaster monument that hid the burial-place.
CHAPTER TWO
Sally burst into our crafts shop with the yell that means she thinks our fortune is made. I’ve heard it many times, but we still had trouble finding the rent.
“Andy, we’re rich! Leave that trendy junk and see what your beautiful true love had discovered!”
She wins no prizes for modesty, Sally Fenton, but she’s truthful. I can’t think where she gets her features and figure: her mother turns the scale at a hundred and eighty, and her father is a bald, skinny clerk with a face like the late Jimmy Durante (and if you don’t know him from the old movies, he’s a nose and a set of ears looking for a weather-worn gargoyle). Sal is ripe and luscious of body, tall and big-busted, and with a heart-shaped face; she’s blonde in the dull-gleaming ashy way of many German women; her eyes are dark blue, and she had promised to marry me when I got her pregnant. She tells me she loves me, and I have to believe her. We had been together for four months.
I had met her at art school. We were both nineteen. After a few months of it, we counted our money, borrowed what we could, and told our lecturers that we thought school was the last place for an artist to practise; fornication, politics, and drugs, yes, but not art. Three agreed with us; one asked if he could come along when he learned our plans, and two said we were stark raving mad to give up the chance of freeloading for a few years. No one thought we should stay. We had to disappoint the volunteer—I’m not in the least liberal-minded when it comes to Sally—and we left to the cautious good wishes of everyone.
We had already found the place where we were to try to earn a crust. It was a stone barn built around 1710, and derelict. I saw that it would easily adapt for a crafts workshop and saleroom, and that we could knock up a partition or two to make a bedroom and kitchen area. The farmer who owned it drove a hard bargain.
It was February when we moved in, and by March the place was habitable. That was when the first Peak District tourists took to their cars and sallied forth to buy expensive junk in the small towns of the High Peak. In the Middle Ages, robber-barons used to levy a toll on travellers who used the passes over the Backbone of England: now, it’s the gift-shops. I didn’t feel any compunction about joining them. If people want to buy plaster casts of gnomes at twice Woolworth’s prices, why shouldn’t they buy mine? We sold candles, too, garish objects in purple and yellow.
They went well at first. I also picked up bits of interesting junk from the industrial towns nearby—I had a regular arrangement with a couple of scrap-merchants. Anything that would go on my shelves