The Stone Serpent, page 1
THE STONE SERPENT
By Nicholas Kaufmann
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Crossroad Press digital edition 2022
Copyright © 2022 Nicholas Kaufmann
Cover design by David Dodd
ISBN: ePub Digital Edition - 978-1-63789-752-2
ISBN: Trade Paperback Edition - 978-1-63789-751-5
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
Nicholas Kaufmann is the Bram Stoker Award-nominated, Thriller Award-nominated, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated, and Dragon Award-nominated author of seven novels, including the bestsellers 100 Fathoms Below and The Hungry Earth. His short fiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, Interzone, and others. In addition to his own original work, he has also written for such properties as Zombies vs. Robots, The Rocketeer, and Warhammer. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Bibliography
100 Fathoms Below (with Steven L. Kent)
Chasing the Dragon
Die and Stay Dead
Dying Is My Business
General Slocum’s Gold
The Hungry Earth
Hunt at World’s End
In the Shadow of the Axe
Still Life: Nine Stories
The Stone Serpent
Walk in Shadows
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Praise for The Hungry Earth:
“Kaufmann drops you right into the psilocybin-fueled action and doesn’t hold back when describing the manic and monstrous details of this nature-strikes-back horror yarn.” — Fangoria
“The Hungry Earth is a pulse-pounding Horror novel with a terrifyingly plausible premise and puts a fresh spin on familiar tropes.” — Ink Heist
“Jack Finney meets Michael Crichton meets 21st century spores. Nicholas Kaufmann’s The Hungry Earth is a fast-paced thrill ride through a scarily plausible fungal nightmare.” — Paul Tremblay, bestselling author of Survivor Song and The Cabin at the End of the World
“Nicholas Kaufmann’s The Hungry Earth is required reading for anyone who loves tightly plotted horror. It’s a gleeful throwback to the best body horror of the ‘80s, updated with a modern premise. His best work to date. Devour it, before it devours you!” — Sarah Langan, bestselling author of Good Neighbors
“If you’re like me, The Hungry Earth will make you squirm out of your skin. Nicholas Kaufmann offers up an unputdownable blend of gruesome body horror and fast-paced suspense that will have you looking suspiciously at mushrooms for a long time to come.” — Ray Garton, author of Live Girls and Ravenous
“Kaufmann’s The Hungry Earth is eco-horror at its finest. With vividly drawn characters and a protagonist you’ll want to follow through additional books, the plight of Sakima and its denizens resounds with emotional intensity and accelerates with the verve of the best medical thrillers. Visceral, detailed, impeccably researched. And all too real for comfort.” — John Hornor Jacobs, author of A Lush and Seething Hell: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror
For Alexa, always.
“There is poison in the fang of the serpent, in the mouth of the fly and in the sting of a scorpion; but the wicked man is saturated with it.”
― Chanakya, Chanakaya Neeti
Table of Contents
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AFTERWORD
1.
* * *
Malachai Applewhite was halfway to Sakima when he started to turn to stone.
It began with his left leg, radiating outward from a sharp pain in his ankle. The leg was numb now. When he touched it, it wasn’t flesh he felt under the material of his pants. What he felt was hard and unyielding. What he felt was stone.
His right leg remained unchanged, at least for now. He could still work his car’s accelerator and brakes. Thank God for small miracles.
The irony made him smirk behind the steering wheel. Here he was, thanking God when in so many ways it was God he was running from. No, who was he kidding? It was his father he was running from. The man had kept Malachai under his heel his whole life. He’d finally had enough. This morning, before anyone was awake, he sneaked out of his family’s house. With a pang of regret, he thought of Meredith, the little sister he’d left behind. He knew she wanted to leave with him, but she was just fourteen, still a kid. He didn’t know if he would be able to take care of her when he got to Sakima. He hoped she would forgive him for leaving without her, but he doubted it. He knew if the tables were turned, he wouldn’t forgive her.
As he’d gotten into his car, he felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his left ankle out of nowhere. That was the start of it.
For all his left leg’s numbness, there was an excruciating, burning pain r the edge of it. Whatever was happening to him, it was spreading, moving up his leg and into his groin, transforming flesh into stone. The very idea of it was impossible, and yet, somehow, it was happening to him. What part of him would change next? His stomach? His chest? He was hot with a fever. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, but it was drenched again a moment later. He fought to concentrate on the road. He had to get to Sakima.
Elijah’s burning chariot, pulled by fiery horses, moved through the clouds above him.
It’s not real, he told himself. It’s a delusion from the fever.
Was any of this real? How could a man turn to stone?
As he turned onto the exit for Sakima, his sweaty hands slipped on the steering wheel. The car lurched to one side. Car horns blared all around him, followed by one loud blast from a passing semi. He grabbed the steering wheel again and quickly brought the car under control. A woman with big hair and sunglasses drove by in a BMW and flipped him the bird.
Pain crawled across Malachai’s gut. He put his hand inside his shirt and felt rough, hard stone. The indentation of his belly button was still there, solid as marble, like sticking his finger into the navel of Michelangelo’s David. More pain flared, this time in his right leg. Soon, it too would turn to stone, and then he would lose control of the car altogether.
He had to reach Sakima before that happened. His friend Sam Templeton was waiting for him there with an offer of a safe place to stay while he set up a new life away from his father. Malachai wiped feverish sweat from his brow. The pain was worse now. He wanted to double over in the driver’s seat, curl up like he used to do when he was a kid with a stomach ache, but he forced himself to concentrate on the road. He had to keep driving.
The burning chariot peeked out from behind a cloud like a fiery celestial body, a second sun blazing in the morning sky. It was following him.
It’s not real!
He closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them again, it was gone. He was losing his mind.
Or maybe he was dying and the chariot had come for him. That was what had been drilled into his head all his life, wasn’t it? That his soul would be carried up to heaven as long as he lived a pious life? Did he believe that anymore? Had he ever?
Malachai pulled out the phone he’d bought in secret. No one knew he had it, not Meredith and certainly not his father. His father would have destr
Was he being punished? Was that what this was? Was God so angry with him for leaving that He decided to turn Malachai to stone like he’d turned Lot’s wife to salt? Her sin had been to look back when she fled Sodom. Malachai had left home without looking back. It wasn’t fair.
Following the directions Sam had given him, Malachai turned onto MacLeod Avenue, once the busy main thoroughfare of downtown Sakima but now mostly a graveyard of closed shops and restaurants. Everywhere, there were boarded-up windows and FOR RENT signs. Some of the buildings were still blackened from the fires last year. Even in the isolation of his own village, Malachai had heard what happened here. Mass hysteria, or maybe it’d been some kind of virus. He was hazy on the details, but he seemed to remember the CDC was called in.
The burning pain moved up his torso. It was getting harder to breathe by the moment. His lungs were turning to stone inside him. He struggled to suck in air.
His field of vision darkened around the edges. He felt the car wobble beneath him as his hands slipped off the wheel. Car horns blasted a warning, but they sounded a thousand miles away. Malachai was only dimly aware that he’d crossed the double yellow lines in the middle of the road and was speeding toward the sidewalk. The smell of burning rubber came to him through the windows. He heard screeching tires and saw people dash out of his way, but it was like he was watching it unfold on a distant TV screen. No more than a mild curiosity.
He could no longer breathe. Too much of his body had turned to stone, and it was still spreading. He wished he had more time. He would have liked to know what life was like away from his father. He would have liked to know what freedom felt like. He’d been so close.
The tires spat and crunched as his car mounted the sidewalk. It crashed to a stop at the base of a streetlamp. More car horns blared, including his own. But to Malachai, who watched with stone eyes as the fiery chariot came down to collect him, those horns were the trumpets of God calling him home.
2.
* * *
Dr. Laura Powell approached the large glass case hesitantly. Inside, hanging off a thick iron hook, was a human ribcage. It reminded her of something out of a horror movie, the grisly trophy found in the lair of a serial killer. What it didn’t look like was art, although that was precisely what it was meant to be. To Laura’s trained medical eye, she could tell the ribcage wasn’t real. It was fashioned from 3D-printed plastic, but it still left her feeling unsettled. She looked down at the gallery catalog in her hands. Printed in big letters across the cover was THE LUMINOUS FLESH: THE CONSTRUCTION AND DISSEMINATION OF THE HUMAN BODY BY THE NEW YORK ART COLLECTIVE STUDIO L.P. KELNER.
Booker Coates’s reflection appeared in the glass as he came up behind her. Broad-shouldered and a good half-foot taller, he dwarfed her own reflection. The overhead lights cast a glare on the rich brown skin of his bald head.
“Thanks for bringing me here,” he said, brushing a hand over his tightly trimmed goatee. “I’m definitely going to have nightmares tonight.”
She grinned at him, though she knew he was only half joking. Booker was no stranger to nightmares. He’d been having them on and off for a year now, ever since the spores of a mutant fungus had infected the people of Sakima. Under the fungus’s thrall, friends and neighbors turned violent, hunting them like animals, determined to infect them as well. Booker had nearly died in a car crash that left one of his legs wrecked. These days, it wasn’t unusual for him to moan and thrash in his sleep, tortured by the memories. When it happened, she did her best to calm him, but she wasn’t immune to nightmares herself. Unlike Booker, she had been infected by the fungus, which she’d come to know as the God of Dirt. Occasionally, she would wake up in terror, convinced she could still hear the God of Dirt calling to her from the depths of Dradin Park. On those occasions, she would lie still in bed, holding her breath and listening, but there was only ever silence. The quiet outside—and the quiet in her head—was proof that the God of Dirt really was gone.
She took Booker’s hand and pulled him closer to the glass case. It was his first week of summer break as Sakima, New York’s newest high school science teacher, and Laura was determined to find fun things for them to do together so they could make better memories to replace the bad ones. A day trip to the Storm King Arts Center in New Windsor sounded like just the thing, only she hadn’t expected to find the Museum Building’s gallery filled with glass cases containing replica human bones like something out of a state fair’s haunted house.
She looped her free arm through his and nodded at the large stainless-steel dial at the bottom of the glass case. “Would you like to do the honors?”
He shrugged. “Sure. What’s the worst that could happen? It’s already horrifying.”
Booker turned the dial slowly to the right. According to the instructions, the dial increased the humidity level inside the case, which was supposed to stimulate the formation of crystals.
Sure enough, as he turned the dial, milky white crystals formed like frost along the bones of the ribcage. Sharp and glistening, they built outward in a fractal pattern, growing larger, filling the spaces between ribs and reaching toward each other like lovers yearning to be joined. Booker turned the dial farther, and the crystal growth accelerated until it formed a latticework that filled the entire ribcage, giving the bones the semblance of a body again, albeit a crystalline one that twinkled and gleamed.
Fed by the humidity, the crystals continued growing, spiking outward, expanding past the ribcage into the empty air around it like cellular growth gone mad, turning the makeshift body into something alarmingly alien and misshapen.
Booker turned the dial all the way to the left, back to its starting point. Fans sucked the humidity out of the glass case, and the crystals began to retreat. Laura watched them shrink and let go of each other, returning the shape in the glass case to a simple human ribcage.
“It’s beautiful, in a way,” she said.
“That’s one word for it.” He took the catalog from her and read aloud. “‘Each growth pattern is different. It is the viewer’s interaction with the installation, in terms of how much or how little humidity they permit, that creates its own crystallization process. A unique structure of luminous flesh. A new and different human form given life with one turn of a dial, and returned to a state of death with another.’ Huh. Charming.”
Laura took the catalog back from him and tucked it under one arm. The small gallery was crowded with visitors examining the contents of multiple glass cases positioned around the room. Nearby, a young girl of about ten watched in awe as her mother turned a dial and a skeletal arm grew fuzzy with white crystals.
“Do you want to try one of the others?” Laura asked.
“I’d rather get some air,” Booker said.
He led the way out. He still walked with a limp. It was more prominent in cold, damp weather. On a beautiful June day like today, Laura was certain no one would notice it but her.
Outside, the sky was a perfect cloudless blue. The wind blew warm and gentle, and brought with it the smell of freshly cut grass. The Museum Building was the only enclosed space in Storm King’s open-air art center. It stood atop a hill that overlooked the 500-acre grounds, offering a spectacular view of the large-scale sculptures that dotted the landscape, gigantic pieces of modern art fashioned from iron and steel, built to weather the elements.
Booker put his arm around her as they took in the view. “Victor would have loved it here.”
Victor Cunningham had been like a father to Booker ever since Booker was a child. He died trying to save them from the fungus. In his will, he left Booker his house, a rustic wooden split-level deep in the woods on the edge of town. It had come as a surprise, almost as much of a surprise as an angry old recluse like Victor having a will at all. Booker still didn’t know if he was going to keep the property or sell it. For sentiment’s sake, she hoped he would keep it. Victor would have hated to see it fall into anyone else’s hands.
