There were lots of likely places-wild, untended areas with heavy tangled brush, fallen trees, piles of leaves and dead branches. More of the city's poverty; no money available to the Parks Department to hire enough grounds men to prune and chop and clear and haul away. He moved slowly and methodically, resisting the impulse to look at this or that rock, to plunge into an inviting thicket.
When he heard a patter of footsteps he was taken by surprise. It was a black kid, running-the first human being he had seen since he had entered the park. Soon there would be others. He watched the kid for a moment.
He himself was a jogger and, compared to his own stride, this kid's was sloppy and disjointed. He watched until the kid disappeared behind a rise, heading toward the north end of the park.
Aside from a single crumpled dollar bill, a few coins, a pack of cigarettes, and a condom tucked away in a packet of book matches, Alvis Parkins's pockets were empty. There was nothing to identify him.
Together with his effects, he was taken to the morgue, where he was tagged and assigned to a chilled drawer. Among other injuries, his neck was broken and badly lacerated, and the fang marks were obliterated. Not that anyone would have looked for them on the body of the victim of an auto accident.
The police began a routine effort to find his survivors. But there were no fingerprints on record, and nobody made a missing persons inquiry. His aunt, the only one who might have done so, was accustomed to the boy being absent for days at a time. Eventually, the Medical Examiner's post-mortem examination would turn up evidence that Alvis had been bitten by the snake in the park, but it would be ten days before the autopsy was performed, due to a heavy work load and the fact that several autopsists were on vacation. Since the cause of his death seemed clearly evident, Alvis Parkins was a low-priority case.
Thirteen
Within thirty-six hours after Jeff's well-publicized death, the mood of the public had taken a sour turn-from ruefully amused acceptance of the snake as an appropriate symbol of their city's magnetic genius for attracting disaster to something approaching mass neurosis. Much of it was hysterical and self-hypnotic. People began to talk about "that crawly feeling in the legs." Some, before sitting down in a restaurant, would lift a tablecloth to look under the table; others would leave a play or concert or film before it was finished because they kept imagining snakes crawling around their feet in the darkness. The worst were those who began to suspect their own apartments, hesitating to enter a dark room for fear a snake might be lurking there, looking under their beds, shaking out their blankets. Some conjured up snakes curled up on the floorboards under their feet when they drove their cars. Some went so far as to check their pockets or handbags before venturing in for a handkerchief or a coin. All over the city, people took to sitting in chairs with their feet tucked under them.
The new mood was nourished by the almost daily occurrence of what the newspapers took to calling "snake associated" deaths. These events dulled all but the most insatiable appetites for sensation.
The first of these incidents took place in an apartment on Third Avenue, in the Seventies. A man, returning home in the evening, tiptoed toward his balcony, where his wife was watering her plants, and tossed a large kapok-filled novelty snake at her feet, at the same time screaming a warning. The woman whirled around, saw the snake almost under her foot, and recoiled from it in a spasm of revulsion. She struck the guard rail of the balcony with both feet off the ground, and with such force that she somersaulted backward, and fell to the street twenty floors below.
Another man planted a similar snake in his wife's bed. She got under the cover, felt something odd, and turned on her bed lamp. (Many suggestible people, these nights, were turning on their bed lamps, only to discover that the "snake" was their own sweat trickling down their legs.) The woman leaped out of bed when she saw the snake, screamed, staggered toward the bedroom door, and fell dead of heart failure.
In a crowded movie house near Bloomingdale's, a voice (whether female or a male screaming in falsetto was never established) called out, "Snake! The snake is here!" A few people rose reflexively, and then the entire audience was on its feet. In the panicky rush toward the exits people were injured badly enough to be hospitalized, and a young man who was trampled underfoot died when fragments of his shattered eyeglasses were driven into his brain.
After the theater was emptied the police searched the house but found no snake.
In the incident at Macy's department store, two people died, and more than a hundred and fifty were injured. This time, there was a live snake involved. It appeared suddenly in the aisles on the main floor, one of the busiest and most crowded in the huge store. Several women saw it at the same time and uttered piercing screams. The snake scudded over the floor in a panic of its own, then disappeared behind a counter. It was a long snake with a slender body and a small head. When it was found, after the entire floor had been cleared, and the casualties had been taken away in ambulances, it was identified by a Museum of Natural History herpetologist as a black racer, a thoroughly harmless snake but one which superficially resembled a black mamba. This suggested that the release of the racer in the store was the work of a sophisticated and sinister intelligence. The perpetrator was never found, although the police checked patiently and doggedly into the stories of several witnesses who claimed to have seen a shifty-eyed man carrying a wicker basket.
On a Friday, at a few minutes past three o'clock in the morning, two couples-well-dressed, in their early forties, suburbanites, as it turned out, winding up a night on the town-emerged from a nightclub in the East Fifties. While the doorman went off to find a cab, the two couples, almost anachronistically dressed in evening clothes, waited under the lighted marquee. At that hour, the rest of the street was dark.
Suddenly, one of the women let out a prolonged, piercing scream of terror.
The others, shocked and startled, followed her pointing finger to a snake crawling toward them out of the darkness. The men pushed the women, both of them now screaming, toward the door of the nightclub. The second man, a burly six-footer, stood his ground, and, as the snake came close to him, leaped into the air and landed on it with both feet. The man jumped back. He heard wild laughter somewhere in the darkness up the street, and realized that the snake was made of metal, covered by plastic painted to simulate a snake's skin; it moved on a tread that gave it both its forward thrust and its articulated serpentine motion.
The bulky man began to run up the street, shouting, toward the continuing sound of laughter. The other man and the two women came out of the club.
They heard the pounding footsteps and shouts of the bulky man diminishing. Then the footsteps stopped, and they heard a scuffling sound. There were more shouts, a series of thuds, a cry of pain. The second man shook himself out of his daze and ran up the street after his friend.
He found his friend stamping repeatedly on the already bloody and mashed face of another man, and it took all his strength to pull his friend away, meanwhile shouting, "Charlie, that's enough, you'll kill him.
Charlie, for God's sake, you're killing him."
In the event, it turned out that the trickster, who, as the autopsy later showed, had been drinking heavily, was already dead, his neck broken before the stomping had begun. When the police arrived, they were noncommittal, but at least three people among the crowd that had gathered on the scene said, with almost the identical phrasing, "There ain't a jury in the whole city that would convict him."