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I tried to say more, but I couldn't and it didn't seem too important really, nor too remarkable.
I collapsed back on the couch and lay there and Snuffy went away, taking the lantern with him and on the roof above me I heard the pattering of rain.
I went to sleep with the patter of the rain.
And woke up with rattlesnakes….
2
Fear saved me—a brutal, numbing fear that froze me for that few seconds which allowed my brain to take in the situation and assess it and decide on a course of action.
The deadly, ugly head reared above my chest, pointing down into my face and in a fraction of a second, in so short a time that only a high-speed camera could have caught the action, it could have struck, with the curved and vicious fangs erected for the strike. If I had moved, it would have struck. But I did not move because I could not move, because— the fear, instead of triggering my body into instant reflex action, stiffened me and froze me, the muscles knotted, the tendons rigid, and gooseflesh popping on my skin.
The head that hung above me seemed chiseled out of bone, sparse and cruel, the little eyes shining with the dull luster of a newly-broken, but unpolished stone, and between the eyes and nostrils the pits that served as radiation-sensing organs. The forked tongue flicked in and out, with a motion not unlike the play of lightning in the sky, testing and sensing, supplying the tiny brain that lay inside the skull with the facts of this creature upon which the ~ snake had found itself. The body was a dull yellow, marked by darker stripes that ran around the body, flaring out into lopsided diamond patterns. And it was big—perhaps not so big as it seemed in that fear-laden moment, while I stared up into its eyes—but big enough so that I could feel the weight of its body on my chest.
Crotalus horridus horridus—a timber rattlesnake!
It knew that I was there. Its eyesight, poor as it might be, still would provide some information. Its forked tongue gave it more. And those radiation pits would be measuring my body temperature. It was dimly puzzled, more than. likely—as much as a reptile could be puzzled. Undecided and unsure. Friend or foe? Too big for food and yet perhaps a threat. And at the first sign of threat, I knew, those deadly fangs would strike.
My body was stiff and rigid, frozen into immobility by fear, but in another moment, I realized, even through the haze of fear, that immobility would pass and I would try to get away, try hi desperation to get beyond the creature's reach. But my brain, still befogged by fear, but working with the cold logic of desperation, said I must make no move, that I must remain the frozen chunk of flesh I was. It was my one chance to survive. A single motion would be interpreted as a threat and the snake would defend itself.
I let my eyelids slide down, as slowly as I could, so that I needn't even blink, and lay in darkness while bile-tinged gorge rose in my throat and my stomach churned in panic. I must not move, I told myself. No stirring, not a single finger twitched, not a tremor in the body.
The hardest part of it was to keep my eyes closed, but I knew I must. Even so much as the sudden flicking of an eyelid might cause the snake to strike.
My body screamed at me—every muscle fiber, every nerve, all my prickling skin screamed to get away. But I held the body still—I, the mind, the brain, the thinking. And the thought crept in unbidden that this was the first tune in my life that the brain and body had been so utterly at odds.
My skin seemed to crawl beneath the mincing impact of a million unclean feet. My digestive tract revolted, knotting and twisting. My heart was beating so hard that the pressure of the blood ru
And still the weight hung there upon my chest. I tried to calculate the attitude of the snake by the pattern of its weight upon my chest. Had it changed position? Had something triggered that snakish brain into aggressive action, was it even now pulling its body up and back into the S-curve that was preliminary to a strike? Or was it lowering its raised head, preparatory to moving on, satisfied that I was no threat?
If only I could open my eyes and know! It seemed more than flesh could bear not to see the danger (if there should be danger) and, recognizing it, brace one's self against it.
But I kept my eyes closed—not tight shut, not squeezed tight, but closed as naturally as I could, for there was no way to know whether the movement of the facial muscles involved in the squeezing of the eyes tight shut might be enough to alarm the snake.
I found myself trying to breathe as shallowly as I could, for breathing was movement—although I told myself that by now the snake must have become accustomed to the rhythm of my breathing.
The snake moved.
My body tensed at the feel of it moving and once tensed, I held it tensed. It moved down my chest and across my belly and it seemed to take a long time for the extended body of it to travel the entire way and finally to be gone.
Now! my body yelled—now is the time to get away. But I held the body quiet and slowly opened my eyes, so slowly that sight came back gradually, a little at a time, first blurred sight through the eyelashes, then through narrow slits, and finally open eyes.
When they had been open before, I had seen nothing but the ugly, flattened, skull-shaped head pointing down into my face. But now I saw the rock roof that loomed four feet or so above my head, slanting downward toward my left. And I smelled the dank odor of a cave.
I lay, not upon the couch where I had gone to sleep to the sound of rain upon the roof, but on another slab of rock, the floor of the cave. I slanted my eyes to the left and saw that the cave was not deep, that it was, in fact, little more than a horizontal crevice weathered out of an exposed outcropping of limestone.
A snake den! I thought. Not one snake, perhaps, but probably any number of them. Which meant that I must remain as quiet as possible, at least until I could be sure there were no further snakes.
Morning light was slanting into the front of the crevice, touching and warming the right side of my body. I rolled my eyes in that direction and found that I was looking down a narrow notch that climbed up from the main valley. And there, down in the notch was the road that I had driven and there was my car as well, slanted across the road. But of the house that had been there the night before there was now no sign. Nor of the barn, nor the corral or woodpile. There was nothing at all. Between the road and where I lay stretched a hillside pasture spotted with clumps of heavy brush, tangles of blackberry thickets, and scattered groups of trees.
I might have thought it was a different place entirely had it not been for my car down there on the road. The car's being there meant this was the place, all right, and that whatever had happened to change it must have happened to the house. And that was crazier than hell, for things like that simply do not happen. Houses and haystacks, corrals and woodpiles, and cars with their rear ends jacked up do not disappear.
Back in the rear of the cave I heard a slithering sound and a dry rustling and something went very swift and hard across my ankles and lit with a crunching noise in a pile of winter-dried leaves just outside the cave.
My body rebelled. It had been held in fear too long. It acted by an instinct which my mind was powerless to counteract and even as the reasoning part of me protested violently, I had already jackknifed out of the cave and was on my feet, crouching, on the hillside. In front of me and slightly to my right a snake was streaking down the hillside, going very fast. It reached a blackberry thicket and whipped into it and the sound of its movement stopped.