“Dad! You can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“Snakes will bite you.”
Dad shakes his head. “No, Monty was a good snake. He wasn’t a violent one or anything. He didn’t have any poison in him.”
“Venom,” Bobby says. “He didn’t have any venom in him.”
“Whatever the fuck. Who cares? The point is. He was my snake. And then one day, I come home from school and guess what? The terrarium’s empty. The lid’s been knocked off somehow and Monty’s nowhere in sight.”
“He escaped?”
Dad nods. “He escaped.”
“Where did he go?”
“We weren’t sure at first. I searched up and down the house the rest of the day, tearing everything apart trying to find him, but he was nowhere in sight. Almost like he’d never existed at all, you know? Like we made him up.”
“Like an imaginary friend?” Bobby says.
“Yeah, just like an imaginary friend, but that couldn’t be, right? I mean, we had the terrarium and everything. He’d been real. But where did he go?”
“Maybe someone broke in and stole him?”
Dad doesn’t respond at first. His focus seems to drift off to the corner of the room. Then he snaps back awake. “You know, that’s funny.”
“What?”
“Of all the possibilities that ran through my head back then, when I was a kid, I don’t think that ever even occurred to me, that some… some house burglar might’ve been responsible. Some guy, some weirdo pervert going around sneaking into all the houses in my neighborhood, stealing everybody’s pets.”
“I hope he didn’t put them all in the same bag,” Bobby says. “Not all pets get along. Sometimes they fight.”
“That’s very true. Sometimes pets fight.”
“Well what happened?”
“We started hearing noises in the walls. Like, loud thuds. Crawling.”
Bobby goes wide-eyed. “The snake got into the wall?”
“Exactly.”
“But how?”
“My old house growing up, we used to have a real bad issue with mice. I remember sometimes waking up in the middle of the night, sitting up in bed, and seeing them on my bedroom floor. Just… I don’t know what they were doing. I used to think they were watching me sleep.”
“Do mice watch people sleep?” Bobby asks, concerned.
“These mice did.”
“I don’t think I like mice.”
“Nobody does, son.” He massages his temple, wincing. “But not long after Monty disappeared into the walls, something happened.”
“What?”
“The mice also disappeared.”
“Where’d they go?”
“Monty started eating them all. I think he got into the wall by slithering into a mouse hole, then just slaughtered every last one of those fuckers. Ate them up one by one. Total goddamn buffet.”
“Wow. He must’ve gotten so fat.”
“The fattest snake in Texas.”
Bobby points at the rattlesnake on the bathroom floor. “This one’s fat, too.”
Dad nods. “He’s a big boy.”
“What do you think is in his belly?”
“I don’t know, Bobby.”
We sit and watch the snake lounge for a while. What else can we do? The thing has us hostage.
“Wait,” Bobby says later on. “What ever happened to Monty, Daddy?”
“What?”
“Did you ever see him again, after he went into the walls and ate all the mice?”
Dad nods, a sudden sadness washed over him. “Only one more time.” He hesitates, refusing to look at us. “One night, almost a year after he escaped, I woke up in bed to something tight around my throat. It was him. It was Monty. He’d come back to me.”
“What?” Bobby says, excited. “Wow!”
“Yeah.” Dad sighs. “Slithered up into my bed and wrapped himself around my neck. Scared the shit out of me. I started screaming and freaking out. My mom, your grandmother, she comes running in and flips on the light, sees me in bed with my snake around my neck and screams just as loud as I did.”
“Then what happened?”
“Well. I unwrapped Monty from my neck and discovered he was dead. That’s what happened.”
“Dead? How?”
Dad shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess it was just his time.”
Bobby pouts. “That’s a sad story, Dad!”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He closes his eyes and leans against the mirror. “You know, I’ve thought about that night a lot, and there’s something I’ve never been able to figure out.”
“Figure out what?” Bobby asks.
“Whether or not he came back because he wanted to be with someone he loved as he died, or…”
“Or what?”
He leans forward, eyes open, expression blank. “…or if he was trying to take me with him.”
“I used to be dead,” Amy’s telling me. It’s the day after Joe died. The bathroom’s gone. The snake’s gone. My family’s gone. My body melts down the drain and transports me to Amy’s house. Empty again. We ditched the rest of the day following our homeroom teacher’s announcement, went back to her place. Her parents will be at work until five or six. Until then, we have the house to ourselves. Under other circumstances we might be taking advantage of this alone time with more pleasure. Today, however, we hold each other on the couch in the living room, trying not to cry and failing. Well, at least I’m failing. Amy seems bizarrely calm about the whole thing.
“I know,” I tell her. “You told me.”
“But haven’t you ever wondered what changed? What fixed me?”
“Sure.” She’s ignoring the fact that I’ve asked her before, numerous times actually, and she’s always dodged the question.
“It was a spell,” she says now.
“Like what we did to Joe?”
“…Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“We’re talking, like, super black magic shit.”
“The tongue spell wasn’t black magic?”
“More like black magic for beginners. Amateurs.”
I sit up from her embrace and face her on the couch. “Amy. He died. We killed him.”
“I know. We fucked up.”
“We?”
She nods. “We’re in this together, aren’t we?”
I hesitate, thinking it wasn’t my idea to seek hoodoo vengeance, but it wasn’t like I’d tried to stop her, either. I’d been fully on board until the real consequences sunk in. Claiming anything else would only be hypocritical and false. “Yes.” Our fingertips connect. “We’re in this together.”
She smiles faintly. “Thank you for not abandoning me.”
“I would never.”
She leans over and kisses me. I kiss her back. Then she parts from my mouth and whispers, “It was a necromancy spell.”
“A what?”
“Necromancy.”
“Like, raising the dead?”
Amy nods. “I found one buried on the occult subreddit. No one really took it seriously. It only had a couple comments. Something that was posted and ignored. But I found it.”
“That’s what we used on Joe?”