"What's that?!” he asks and, advancing, he discovers, horrified, two feet that stretch out under the other side of the bed.

  "That's Marina,” says the woman behind him and stabs him once and then again, while grabbing him strongly by his hair and pulling his head back. His painful cry is lost like a crazy whisper in the rain hammering against the window. His legs don't hold him anymore and he falls down. The woman removes the apron, cleans her hand, wipes the knife, and drops both weapon and apron on the still-shaking body. Then, with the white handkerchief, she cleans the door handle and goes straight to the jewels and the money on the bed.

  Outside, it rains.

  Story and translation (c)2008 by Rodolfo Pérez Valero

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  Fiction: THE WISDOM OF SERPENTS David Dean

  David Dean is Avalon, New Jersey's new chief of police. EQMM has had stories from cops who also write fiction before, but this may be our first contributing chief. Chief Dean has worked full-time on the force through all of his many years of writing. Yet he rarely writes about cops, and even when he does, his tales are not procedurals.

  When Josh spied the writhing ball of serpents that he was being lowered into, he cried out to his best friend belaying him into the cave from above, and his descent was mercifully halted. He dangled some twenty feet above the knot of snakes that glistened in the shaft of sunlight that pierced the aperture through which he had entered, and called out in a shaky voice, “Snakes, Paul! There's a bunch of snakes in here!"

  After a moment's pause, his descent was resumed.

  "Paul! Paul! Did you hear me? Pull me up ... there's snakes down here,” Josh pleaded.

  As Paul continued to feed the rope through the pulley on the tripod, he contemplated just letting go and allowing Josh to hurtle the remaining distance to the fate that awaited him in the snake hole; packing up the caving gear and leaving. But his plans had failed to take into account that as it required two hands to lower Josh to his hideous death, his ears remained open to his friend's piteous cries, and so he faltered and the pulley squeaked to a halt once more. Then he remembered the home pregnancy-test kit so carelessly discarded by Vanda in the bathroom waste basket and thought, All you have to do is open your hands ... just release. Within his gloves, water began to seep from his palms.

  "Paul, can you hear me? What are you doin'? It's not funny, dude! Pull me up right now! I mean it, man! I'm gonna kick your ass if you don't!"

  The voice that wafted up through the hole in the earth was fainter now. Paul guessed that Josh now hung a scant twenty feet above the torpid nest of vipers that lay below.

  "Pull me up ... please! I think they know I'm in here! They're starting to move around a lot. We're best of friends, for God's sake! I don't know what you're thinking, Paul, but it's not true! We've been friends all our lives!"

  It was true, from boyhood to manhood, twenty-eight years’ worth of friendship lay between them. Compared to their lifetime relationship, Vanda was a recent addition. Paul had met and fallen in love with her his senior year of college, and they had married the following year. Five years of marriage. Seen in a certain light, she was almost an interloper, and considering the recent events that had brought Paul to this lonely place in the mountains, a poisonous one, not unlike the hibernating snakes that lay waiting at Josh's feet.

  In keeping with his nature, Josh had been a most pliant victim; never questioning Paul's story of prehistoric pictographs inadvertently discovered while on a winter day's ramble in the mountains. Paul had found it almost distressingly easy to convince the easygoing Josh that today's trek was simply to be a “sneak preview” in preparation for a detailed exploration of the cavern when the weather warmed, hence, there was no need of rappel racks or ascenders—Josh had only to relax and play tourist as Paul lowered him into the pothole for a quick peek at their discovery.

  Of course, there were no cave paintings that Paul knew of, even though the story of his chancing upon the vertical cave was entirely true. He had only just missed falling through the flush opening the day before. No one could have been more surprised, as this was an area of mountains well known to Josh and Paul ... Vanda, too. When he had lowered a flashlight down to have a look, he had at first thought he was looking at a floor of boiling mud. Once his eyes had adjusted, however, he had understood what he was seeing and contemplated for several moments flinging himself down amongst them.

  The rope began to swing violently from side to side and Paul guessed that Josh was attempting to climb back up under his own steam. Without ascenders, this would be a formidable task, even for someone as strong as Josh. Suddenly, he was aware of the tremendous strain on his own arms, shoulders, and the great muscles between his shoulder blades. His gloves were staining with the moisture squeezed from his palms as he struggled to maintain stasis against Josh's exertions.

  From below came a strangled cry; silence; then the rope snapped taut, nearly snatching Paul off his feet. Josh had lost his grip and fallen back to the end of the rope, gaining nothing for all his effort. From deep within the earth, Paul could hear his friend groan. It was impossible to tell whether it was from pain or despair. The line that suspended Josh swayed gently from side to side, and after a few moments there came the unmistakable sound of weeping.

  "You're a bastard, Paul,” Josh called up. “I don't know why you're doing this, but it's wrong! She's just messed up your mind ... mine too, for that matter.” Paul could hear the tears of self-pity in his friend's voice. He had always been the weaker of the two, even if he was the larger and stronger. “But it's not like you think, if that's what this is all about. Not at all, man. Is that what you think? Paul? I know you can hear me up there. Answer me, damn it ... please.” Paul could hear him crying again.

  Paul tried to think of the answer he could give that would adequately explain why he was killing his best friend—a succinct indictment of a friend's betrayal and a wife's infidelity. But the words remained bound up in a heart seething with hurt and anger, and oddly, with the loss of a companion that was yet to come. A great wave of aloneness washed over him and rendered him mute with future bereavement.

  Big, athletic, handsome, not-too-bright Josh. Always the bachelor; the perennial third wheel at Paul and Vanda's dinner table. Six years after college and he still opened cans for dinner. Hapless, helpless Josh, and the women loved him for it. Ever the affable “catch” to whom married women loved to introduce their single friends, and who remained their friend long after the affair was over and marriage never proffered. The high-school star athlete who simply grew into the game-winning coach. The friend Paul had tutored through every grade, including college, and shared more meals, beer, and adventures with than he could possibly recall; the near constant companion of countless camping trips, hiking excursions, rafting expeditions, mountain-climbing forays, and caving adventures. The steady, strong arm that had shielded Paul from harm on numerous occasions and had probably saved his life more than once. The same friend that gravity and exhaustion would soon snatch from his grasp whether he willed it or no.

  The rope began to swing wildly and Paul knew that Josh was attempting to save himself once more. He could discern his steady, exhausted huffs as he pulled himself hand-over-hand up the rope. Paul wondered if Josh had thought to divest himself of the heavy backpack he wore. The pulley swayed from side to side as Josh attacked the rope and, alarmingly, the motion began to be mirrored by the metal tripod that it hung from and that straddled the hole in the earth that he had been lowered into. The stakes that anchored the frame to the stony soil began to work themselves loose and the violent motion transferred itself to Paul as well, causing him to rock from foot to foot. He understood instantly that he would not be able to hold on much longer if this was allowed to continue, and the choice of saving or killing Josh would no longer be his.

  "Josh! Stop climbing! You're going to rock the whole frame over if you keep it up!” The rope continued to switch back and forth like a windshield wiper as Paul struggled for purchase. “Josh, stop it! Do you hear me?"

  Slowly, the rope's movements began to subside and Paul was able to relax somewhat, in spite of the fire that was spreading through his muscles. From below he could hear that Josh had started to cry once more and detected within the sobs that note of despair that denotes extreme exhaustion. The line shuddered once, twice, and then a third time. Josh had dropped back to the end of the rope by degrees.

  "Help! Help me, somebody, please!” Josh's tired voice echoed up from the cavern.

  Paul could stand it no longer. “Josh, I'm gonna pull you up! Shed the pack and I'll pull you back up!"

  There was a pause, and then through the blood singing in his ears, Paul heard a distant thump. “The snakes didn't like that,” Josh called out. “Not even a little bit!” Josh began to laugh as if it was the funniest thing in the world, and Paul pictured the riled serpents striking the rucksack again and again in their impotent fury, and found nothing funny about it.

  "Hold on, Josh, here goes!” And with that, Paul began to back away from the hole, digging the heels of his boots into the flinty soil with each wrenching step, red-faced and panting with exertion, and inch by gut-straining inch began to reverse the unequal tug-of-war with Josh's two hundred pounds and unrelenting gravity.

  Then the pulley gave way.

  In an instant gravity regained the upper hand and Paul was being pulled rapidly toward the lip of the hole. Even as he registered that the eyebolt that had connected the pulley to the tripod had snapped, sending the heavy pulley sliding down the rope towards the helpless Josh, he also saw the hole yawn wider to receive him as well. Freed from the fulcrum provided by the frame and pulley, the rope snapped against the lip of the aperture and began to hum and smoke against the rough edges, dropping Josh ever closer to the angry, waiting snakes, even as it effortlessly dragged Paul to the same fate. From beneath the earth, Paul heard a sharp cry of pain as the pulley struck Josh's hands where they clasped the lifeline.

  Without conscious thought, Paul sat suddenly and spread his legs, at once lowering his center of gravity and allowing the dirt and stones gathered painfully between them in his headlong rush to further slow him with additional weight and drag. The now useless tripod appeared to rush forward and he lined up the soles of his boots with its legs. With a jolt of agony to his knee joints, he impacted, and held, even as the line went slack and a low wail drifted up from the snake pit, punctuated by almost comical hoots of unrestrained terror. Josh was in amongst the snakes.

  * * * *

  When Paul had discovered the hole the day before, murder had not been in his thoughts, but once he saw what lay within, the plan had sprung full-blown into his head. Just like that, he had gone from wronged husband and friend to murderer, when a mere twenty-four hours before, it had been he who was the victim.

  It had been the pregnancy test that had finally opened his eyes, though why it should have taken that, Paul could not fathom. Surely, everything that he had needed to know had lain before his eyes for some time, yet it had required a small, mass-produced medical device that was sold over the counter in every local pharmacy to provide the spark that burned away his blindness. It was like Vanda to be so careless.

  She had blown into their lives like some primal feminine force during the first month of their senior year, as Paul and Josh sat hunched over a map of their next backpacking trip—a whirlwind of long black hair and colorful scarves, dog-eared textbooks and swirling skirts, that suddenly commanded their secluded spot in the student center. With a great sigh, she had sunk onto the sagging sofa next to Paul, allowing her books and papers to cascade onto the coffee table and their terrain map, her great silver earrings tinkling as she threw back her head to stare at the ceiling. After a moment, she had raised herself to regard the two young men she had intruded upon, fixed her grey eyes upon Paul's, widened them dramatically, and announced, “Professor Rais is going to be a problem."

  Paul had no idea to whom she was referring or what his expression must have been that day, and he had not bothered to look over at Josh for confirmation of this apparition. It had been enough, at that moment, to simply look back into Vanda's eyes—eyes that had sought his and, remarkably, not Josh's. “I believe he expects me to study in my senior year,” she added; then, turning to the map, she asked abruptly, “What's all this?"

  "We're going ... planning,” Paul had corrected himself, “a backpacking trip."

  "Really,” she had said. “I'd like to do that sometime."

  For the briefest of moments, Paul had studied her profiled face, strikingly white and smooth as porcelain, her ebony tresses tangled in amongst the dozen necklaces that hung over the tabletop from her slender neck. An image floated unbidden before his mind's eye of her wildly dancing in a lonely clearing, naked but for her outlandish jewelry and glowing beneath a hunter's moon. That had been it. “Wanna come?” he had asked.

  She had regarded him quizzically for several heartbeats, an animal sensing a trap, and then calmly nodded while reaching over and removing a smudge of chocolate, the remnant of an earlier energy bar, from his chin with her tongue-moistened thumb. Her unexpected touch had paralyzed him, even as she had deigned to finally notice Josh, who had sat slack-jawed throughout this spell-weaving. With a broad smile, she had offered him her hand, which he clumsily grasped.

  The three were seldom apart from that day forward, except during the prophesied interference of the demanding Professor Rais, her anthropology teacher and chair of her department, and something of a local celebrity for his travels to distant jungles where he immersed himself in the culture and rites of primitive societies. That year had flown by, filled with countless hikes and climbs, and even a week spent in the wilderness of the Great Smokies during a heartbreakingly beautiful spring.

  Vanda was everything Paul had fantasized on that first meeting, unremittingly feminine, yet elemental, in some indecipherable way. She seldom had to be helped along, even on the most arduous journeys, and her joy in nature was unbridled and infectious. It had seemed to Paul that she had subtly influenced his view of the natural world—no longer did he see it as a primeval struggle betwixt man and nature, one in which he and Josh were challenged to master, but slowly and through her eyes, he began to perceive it as some type of cooperative venture, a partnership between the three adventurers and the untrammeled land. She had dashed about from one to the other of them, tirelessly pointing out the salubrious properties of hitherto unnoticed flowers, ferns, and leaves, laughingly providing unlikely foods from mosses and mushrooms for her reluctant followers. That which Paul and Josh had marched forth to conquer with their youthful strength and bravado, they found to have willfully surrendered to their enchantress. Paul would not have been surprised to have seen birds perched on her shoulders or wolves lying at her small, booted feet, as he too had been snared without the least violence.

  Like everything else in their relationship, it seemed their marriage had come about as surely and naturally as a new season. It had appeared to simply unfold before Paul's eyes like the warm sun that rose above the treetops and reflected off the still, blue lake on the shore of which they took their vows. Josh, uncomfortably stuffed into a rented tuxedo, had nervously acted the part of Paul's best man. The bride had worn green: a diaphanous layering of gossamer materials that accentuated her ample bosom and tiny waist while trailing to the earth about her ankles even as her delicate green shoes peeked out from the foliage. She had worn her dark, luxuriant hair up in a complicated arrangement of braids and ribbons, surmounted by a crown of tiny wildflowers, which only served to somehow accentuate the superabundance of her shining tresses—a raven-haired Tinker Bell arrayed for the Solstice Ball.

  The only jarring note that Paul could recall was his mother's rather shocked comment on first viewing the bride on her wedding day. With a small cry, she had raised a white-gloved hand to her mouth and gasped to his father, “Oh my Lord, Edwin, she looks like a heathen princess,” just loud enough for Paul to have overheard as he awaited Vanda at the makeshift altar.

  A second moment had occurred at the giving-away of the bride: The exotic Professor Rais, looking tall and rather elegant in his tailored tux and with swept-back, shoulder-length graying hair, had stumbled slightly on the way to the lake's edge, betraying his somewhat advanced stage of inebriation, and managed to step on the bride's hem. The sound of rending material was only just matched by the suppressed groan from the feminine members of the assembled. Yet the bride appeared to take no notice and proceeded with her unsteady stand-in (Vanda's father had not been heard from for many years) to her waiting groom. Rais, flushing somewhat, manfully squared his narrow shoulders and hastened to keep up.

  Once their goal had been reached and the bride safely delivered, if somewhat the worse for wear, he breathed the noxious fumes of his earlier imbibements over the happy couple, then attempted to kiss the bride on the lips through her veil. With a small shove from Vanda's gloved hand, he had disengaged and stumbled hastily away, suddenly visibly and obviously intoxicated. Her smile for Paul, radiant behind the green veil and like some exotic and beautiful creature glimpsed within its lair, had swept away the awkwardness of the moment, and Paul as well. He had wished to never be free of her from that time forth.

  * * * *

  Paul crouched at the edge of the hole and listened, but no sounds came from within. Far below, in the patch of sunlight that reached the cavern floor, he could make out Josh's backpack, but his friend was not with it. “Josh,” he called down. “Josh!” Silence, laden with reproach, wafted up to him with the cold draft from the cavern. The pack shifted slightly and appeared to tip to one side; something long and sinewy gathered itself atop it to better enjoy the meager shaft of sunlight, and appeared to stare up at him. The cavern floor undulated within the circle of illumination, the snakes so thickly intertwined that only when one's triangular head or sharp tail separated from the writhing mass could Paul comprehend that it was not one living, multi-tentacled creature in uneasy repose. He drew back from the edge, grateful there was no tension on the rope, then thought of Josh still tethered to the other end down there in the dark, in the midst of serpents. “Josh!” Paul cried out once more as remorse and terror for his friend flooded his heart. “I'm coming down. I'm sorry ... so sorry! Do you hear me?"