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Panic set in and Barton tried to run, but found his feet would not move.
Now Messenger drew a black hood from the pocket of his coat and pulled it over his head so that his face was shadowed and only his mouth could be seen as he said, “You have lost the game. So now, in the name of Isthil and the balance She maintains, I summon the Hooded Wraiths and charge them to carry out the sentence.”
The wraiths lack the Master of the Game’s drama and imagination, appearing simply as tall, hooded shapes, without any opening for a face, without anything visible beyond their sinister clothing. What was beneath that hood? I prayed I would never learn.
They stood before the weeping boy, and one waved a hand above the deepest part of the pool of blood. From that blood it rose, a triangular head as large as a football, slitted eyes incapable of feeling, empty of soul, and then scale upon scale, foot after foot, until the snake, perhaps twelve feet long, lay writhing and twisting, its malevolent gaze focused on its collapsing prey.
“No,” Barton begged. “No, no, this is wrong, you can’t do this. There are laws! You can’t . . . I’ll confess! I’ll go to the cops! I swear to God, I will go to the cops, I’ll tell them everything!”
“That’s what you should have done,” I muttered, angry at him not just for the murder he had committed, but for causing me to endure this helpless witnessing of his agony.
“I’ll do it! I swear, I’ll do it!”
But the serpent was with us, the punishment had been decreed, and there was no hope of escape.
With liquid speed the snake whipped its tail around Barton’s legs and pulled him to the ground. That tail held like a rope, indifferent to his kicks, indifferent to his cries.
Then the python’s mouth unhinged, allowing that baleful jaw to extend, to widen. Large enough at last to swallow both his feet at the same time.
I saw the feet still kicking, bulging through the scaled skin below the snake’s head.
Barton screamed now, no words, just screams. His hands were free, and he pounded on the snake’s head; but aside from a few insolent blinks, the snake did not pay his efforts any notice, but pulsed obscenely and drew the boy deeper, up to his knees.
From there to his thighs took perhaps five long, long minutes. Barton’s voice was ragged, blown out, a hoarse, rasping, animal sound.
I would not have thought that serpent’s jaw could widen any farther, but this is a species able to swallow small cows, given time, so widen it did; and now the snake’s teeth were biting into Barton’s waist, undulating up and down its length to gorge itself on the living boy.
No human with a shred of humanity within her could possibly watch this without sickening, and I am still only human. I lost the contents of my stomach, retching violently in response to all the chemicals a body releases upon seeing the intolerable.
“We have to stop this,” I whispered to Messenger. “It isn’t right.”
Messenger said nothing.
“It . . . hurts,” Barton managed to say. “I . . . can’t breathe.”
Those were the last words he spoke, for now the snake had his chest, and Barton’s breathing was shallow and desperate. With each exhalation the snake tightened its grip, so that each breath shortened the next.
3
I PRAYED THEN TO MY OWN GOD, NOT TO ISTHIL who I served and despised, but to the God in whom I still believed and hoped was watching, for it all to end.
But there was no succor for Barton Jones, who had murdered.
The snake had swallowed Barton’s entire length with only the head and arms still free.
He looked at me then, Barton did, with eyes that no longer pleaded for mercy but simply needed to see something human and real. I think he believed my face would be the last thing he would ever see.
His body was now a huge bulge in the snake’s body, but he no longer writhed or kicked. The blood was being squeezed from his lower body, and the air from his lungs.
Then, with a final powerful undulation of that snake’s whole twelve-foot length, Barton Jones was gone.
The snake closed its jaws over fingers, and suddenly, without a sound or a warning, it was gone.
Barton Jones lay now on the clean tile floor of his classroom. He was not covered in blood. He was not covered in the bodily fluids that had been squeezed from him. He merely lay, a boy, barely breathing, eyes squeezed shut, motionless and silent.
I knew he was not dead. I knew that all of it had been an illusion. But when an illusion can be seen and smelled and tasted and touched, it ceases to be something even the strongest mind can resist believing.
The snake was real to Barton Jones. It was real to me.
