Slick as a Whistle
It was one hundred and one degrees by 9:30 AM with a vulgar sun splayed high in the chlorine-blue sky on the day the desert swallowed me whole.
“Though I walk through the Valley, there are others who crawl.”
It was carved into the wall outside of the restaurant where we ate. Curious, I worked my finger into the groove of the letters and hissed through clenched teeth when the rough wood caught my skin and splintered. When I finally gripped the shard between my fingernails and pulled it out, a red bead of blood sprang up like a mushroom. I pushed the fleshy pad of my finger against the wall and when I peeled it off, a perfect ruby fingerprint was in its place.
“You shouldn’t do that,” a hoarse voice, bleached bone white by the sun like a cow skull, teased from behind me. I turned to see an older woman deeply creased skin and long gray hair in two loose braids draped over her shoulders. She was wearing a long denim overall dress with a faded red gingham long-sleeved button-down underneath it. On her feet were black leather boots gone creamy with layers of dust. She smiled widely at me, crinkling that papery skin and revealing a haphazard scattering of small, sharp-looking teeth.
“You shouldn’t do that,” she repeated. “Bad luck to spill blood in the desert.”
I felt a trickle of sweat slip down the back of my leg from the crease of my thigh as I looked at her long skirt and sleeves. Irritated, I tugged at my own clothes. I could see the half-moons of wetness beginning to form beneath my breasts, darkening the dove gray fabric of my T-shirt.
“Aren’t you hot?” I asked.
“Who are you talking to?” I jumped, startled, and turned back to see my husband, eyebrow cocked quizzically.
“Grady! You scared me. She was just saying—” I nodded toward the old woman, but when I glanced at where she’d been standing, there was nothing but a small cloud of dust billowing out from beneath a tall pile of rocks. Beyond that, a Joshua tree hunched half toward the soil and half toward the sky, as though it couldn’t decide whether growth was worth the risk.
“Well, that’s a little concerning,” Grady grimaced.
“Check this out though,” I pointed to the words carved into the wall. “Careful though if you touch it. I gave myself a pretty bad splinter.”
He squinted and partially read the words aloud. “…there are others who crawl. What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s with the fingerprint?”
I held up my finger, still oozing red. “I told you I got a splinter.”
“I just got one too, when I was closing the bathroom door. It kept getting stuck so I had to yank it and—” he held up his left thumb and shrugged. A tiny gash, the blood already drying brown, ran perpendicular to the crease where his fingertip met his thumb’s second joint.
“Bad luck to spill blood in the desert,” I said, thinking of the woman’s small, sharp teeth.
In three hours Grady would be gone.
*
Maybe if we’d driven home right then we would have been fine. But we’d already paid for the weekend and we’d been looking forward to it for months. A trip to the desert is the kind of vacation that sounds relaxing when you’re trapped in the city, dreaming of infinite skies streaked purple-blue at dusk, sweet slushy cocktails in swimming pools, heat so dry and all-encompassing it bakes the brain smooth again.
The reality is this: Our car nearly overheated on the drive out there; the heat was oppressive, antagonistic; the beautiful but barren desert landscape made my heart clench with despair.
“Maybe we should’ve gone to the mountains instead,” I’d said quietly last night, pushing the wet label on my beer bottle into a gummy strip with my thumbnail, afraid to look up at him. This had been my idea, after all. And I’d been complaining all day.
He didn’t say anything. Just laughed once in that cruel way that makes me feel like a bad joke.
I went to bed early. I could see his dark silhouette out on the deck, under the too-big moon. He sat up for hours, just staring at the sky. When he finally came in, he didn’t say anything, didn’t try to touch me. Tomorrow will be better, I thought. This is just residual stress from work, from the drive, from the heat. From too many years together? I elbowed that thought in the ribs and kicked it down the stairs of my mind.
When I opened my eyes in the morning he was staring at his phone. He didn’t turn to look at me. “Supposed to be 104 today,” he said. I couldn’t tell whether he was still annoyed or not so I lifted his arm and burrowed underneath it, into the nook of his armpit. “Are you mad at me?” I cooed in the most annoying baby voice I could manage. He started laughing and I knew it was okay.
“You’re so stupid, Ry,” he whispered, kissing me.
*
So the plan that morning was to drive out into the desert and see what we could see, without dying of heatstroke. It would be too generous to call it a hike, but we figured if we brought plenty of water and stayed within sight of the car, we could manage. We’d been driving for about half an hour or so, getting farther and farther from the small if rapidly gentrifying downtown, with its self-consciously quirky shops selling vintage clothing and curios, its bougie weed dispensaries and small-batch liquor stores, and into a part of the desert where not many tourists stopped on their weekend jaunt. We passed two different bars that didn’t seem to have names, just neon beer signs sizzling in dirty windows with men smoking cigarettes out front, glaring at us from under their ball caps as we drove by; a grocery store that had the word “MEAT!” cheerfully emblazoned on the wall in red paint, dripping blood like an old horror movie poster, above a mural of cows running away from a butcher brandishing a cleaver above his head, their long eyelashes cartoon-cute, their mouths rounded into O’s of fear; and a small school that looked completely abandoned behind a rusted chain link fence, its main doorway covered with crudely nailed two-by-fours and honest-to-god tumbleweeds wedged beneath the slide and the see-saw on the playground. It was like someone had tried to start a town out here and then thought better of it.
It was in the this charming setting when we realized I’d forgotten to grab the water.
“Do we have to stop?” I asked as we made a U-turn and pulled up in front of the grocery store with its garish mural.
Grady unbuckled his seat belt and killed the engine, turning to me. “Ryla, it’s almost midday and we’re in the middle of the desert. If we don’t get some water, we will literally die.”
My tongue was already clinging to the roof of my mouth unpleasantly; it clicked when I talked. I knew he was right.
The inside of the grocery store was no more inviting than the exterior. Dusty shelves lined narrow aisles; there didn’t seem to be any name brands at all, just glass jars without labels half-full of mystery liquids, Lord-knows-what pickling inside. It was sweltering hot, with not even so much as a single fan for relief. The air was so thick I could feel it settling on my upper lip. I didn’t even see a meat counter. But the entire perimeter of the ceiling was lined with dried snakeskins, strung up like ghoulish Christmas garland, criss-crossing the room and hanging so low in the middle you’d have to duck to avoid them. Their rattles and heads were still intact, their mouths open wide to display hooked fangs.
“Hello?” Grady called. From a stool in the back corner, she rose and came toward us, more agile than a woman her age had any right to be. I recognized her immediately — the woman from earlier that morning — and I could see by the way she grinned that she recognized me too.
“Hello again,” she said, looking only at me. Her words were friendly enough but her tone was tinged with menace. “I remember you.”
I shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah, uh…how are you?” I asked awkwardly.
Grady glanced at me sideways, but cut straight to the point. “Do you have any bottled water? We’re kind of in a hurry. Trying to beat the sun.”
She laughed, a dry gurgle from the back of her throat. “Can’t beat that sun. Ain’t no way.” Her eyes stayed trained on mine, then shifted downwards, taking in my bare legs in my shorts. “Going out there in that? Those legs look mighty tempting.”
I felt a surge of feminist indignation, and then I realized she was referring to the dead snakes lining the walls.
“Gotta stay covered up.” She raised her hands, twisting her wrists from side to side to show off her long sleeves, buttoned tightly against her flesh. “Little heat never hurt no one. But las serpientes, they might. They’ll swallow you right up, slick as a whistle.”
“What are you telling them?”
From behind us, a low voice made me jump. We turned to see a woman, similarly dressed and with features not unlike the older woman’s, save for her hair, which was long and glossy black. Her voice was so resonant and slow, and the air so still, that my eyelids began to get heavy. I made a fist and dug my fingernails into the palm of my hand to stay alert.
“Don’t you know where you are?” she asked us, smiling faintly. “In the valley?”
Grady was getting testy again. “Death Valley is hours from here.”
“El valle de las serpientes oscuras,” she smiled.
“The Valley of the Dark Snakes?” Grady repeated. Her lips parted as she grinned wider. She had the same small, sharp-looking teeth as the older woman. My stomach clenched. “What the fuck is that?”
“We learned to respect them here,” she murmured. “They called this valley home long before we did. Some call them gods.” She smiled again. “We learned how to keep them happy.”
“Hey…let’s just go,” I said to Grady, my voice rising. “Let’s just go back”
“You’ll need these.” She held two bottles of water up. “I’ll take care of you up front.”
Still uneasy, I followed Grady and the woman toward a counter strewn with a random assortment of objects — a compass, a bottle opener shaped like a cactus, an intimidatingly large Bowie knife, and a seemingly antique cash register, the kind that looks like it hasn’t been used in years and wouldn’t work if it was. Grady handed her a five dollar bill and she slid open the drawer of the register to count his change.
Behind the counter, there was a plaque engraved with the same phrase I’d seen earlier outside of the restaurant, when I’d first encountered the old woman. “Though I walk through the Valley, there are others who crawl.”
“Whoa, what’s that? The town motto or something? Ry, isn’t that—” Grady reached forward to touch the plaque when suddenly, the old woman sprang up like a shot and sank her teeth into his arm, wrapping her lips around his wrist and working her jaw, driving her teeth in deeper as Grady howled in pain and shock.
“Stop! What are you doing!” My scream was high-pitched and sounded alien, like it was coming from somewhere else, someone else. “Stop!” Grady continued screaming, making sounds I’d never heard him make before. He was trying to pull his arm away from the old woman but she was gripping him tightly with her hands on either side of her mouth. I watched in horror as her throat rippled, as though she was drinking from him, or injecting something into him with her saliva. Blood and a viscous golden liquid began to run out from around her lips, dripping onto the floor in syrupy ropes. I could hear an alarm, a single, unrelenting note, and then I realized it was my own scream pealing out of me like a bell as I tugged on Grady’s other arm, swung my purse toward the old woman’s head, anything to make her stop.
And then, she was done. She released, drawing her head back, and smiled at me, her sharp teeth stained red. I could see the two pricks in Grady’s forearm still streaming. We stood like that, suspended in disbelief, and then the spell broke like a fever.
“Are you insane?!” I bellowed with a ferocity I didn’t know I had in me.
The older woman slinked wordlessly away, toward the back of the shop, and I lunged toward her before Grady pulled me back, weakly. “Ry, I need to go.”
“He startled her,” the younger woman said, without the faintest hint of an apology in her voice. “He shouldn’t have done that.”
“You’ve got a lawsuit on your hands! I swear to God!”
“Ry…” I looked at Grady then, at his face gone white and wet with sweat. “I need to go.”
Still shouting over my shoulder, I helped Grady out of the store and back to the car. He was holding his arm and staring at the wound, obviously in shock.
“I think I need a doctor,” he said softly as I sped away from the curb and back toward the town.
“Yeah, of course. You’re gonna be okay,” I said, casting a glance at his arm out of the corner of my eye. I was afraid to look at it directly.
“It looks bad.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
“Hey! Hey, I need you to stay awake, okay? We passed an urgent care in town earlier. I’m sure they’re open by now. She’s just some crazy old bitch, right? How bad can it be?”
Grady was silent. I glanced over. He looked asleep, or worse.
“Grady!” I screamed. His eyes fluttered open.
“Ry, I need to pull over.”
“We can’t, baby, we need to get you to a doctor so you don’t get an infection.”
“Ry…” He swallowed hard, and heaved. “I need to pull over. I’m gonna throw up.”
Reluctantly, I pulled over. The tires chewed into the dirt shoulder and we skidded to a stop and Grady threw his car door open, retching into the sandy soil. The sun was directly overhead; it was just past noon.
“You ready?” I asked, my voice drum-tight even as I tried to make it sound soothing. I heard a sound like a duffel bag being dropped out of a window, and then a low moan. Grady had collapsed onto the ground.
“Grady!” My panic garbled the word — it was barely a name, barely language. Just the panicked cry of an animal. I reached for him but he was too far away. I threw my own car door open and ran around to his side, to help him up.
He was gone. Nothing left but his sunglasses, snapped in two, and a pile of vomit that streaked outward toward the desert, as though something had been dragged through it. His car door was still open, the dinging rhythmic and maddening as a heartbeat. I screamed and fell to my knees, sharp rocks digging into the flesh of my exposed legs.
“Grady!” I howled again. A lament.
A hot wind whipped my hair across my face, spit grit into my eyes. And then nothing.
The sun shone straight down. Impassive and cruel.
*
As the midday melted into late afternoon, I was walking. To where, I didn’t know. I figured if I just started walking away from the car and stayed in a straight line I wouldn’t get lost. It wasn’t my best plan, I’ll admit, but at least I had a very clear objective: I had to find Grady. The longer I wandered, the more remote my chances of achieving this goal seemed, but at the same time I just couldn’t understand it. How could he have disappeared? There one minute and gone the next.
I had plenty of time to think about the old woman too, and the bite. How bizarre it had been to witness, the way I’d left my body in terror and how I still didn’t feel like I’d returned to it. Everything that had happened since we’d stopped the car in front of that store had been like a terrible dream.
I reached down for my abdomen, pinching the flesh of my belly between the nails of my thumbs and index fingers and digging in, hard. I screamed in pain and frustration and let go. Guess it wasn’t a dream. Seemed like it was worth a shot though.
My eyes welled wet and tears dripped down my cheeks and into the corners of my mouth. My tongue lapped up the salty warmth — I hadn’t had any water since the morning, and I couldn’t afford to waste the moisture. I had taken off my shirt hours ago and put it on my head as a sort of makeshift sun shield, and I could feel the sunburn curdling the exposed skin on the back of my neck and my shoulders. I eased my bra straps further down my arms, where they wouldn’t cut into my raw skin so much, and rolled up the bottom of my shorts as high as they would go. I knew I needed the protection of the fabric, but I was hot, so hot, and my hope was dwindling with each step.
Periodically I would pause to scream Grady’s name with all the force I could muster. I bellowed his name until my voice gave way and my legs shook and I had to bend over, gasping, to catch my breath. There was never any answer. My voice just dropped into the dry earth with a dull thud and became another one of the valley’s dried out, empty husks. I turned around, shielding my eyes. I could no longer see the car, the road. I didn’t even have my phone. The gravity of the situation hit me at last, and I nearly buckled. But then I saw the rock pile.
It wasn’t much, really — certainly no mountain — but it was high enough to give me a little bit of a vantage point if I could just scramble up it. It took everything I had to get started, but then I thought of Grady’s lips, his kiss, the warmth of him as I pressed against him in bed, and I climbed.
The pile wasn’t high, but it was plenty treacherous, and I stumbled more than once. Focus, Ryla, I told myself, The very last thing you need is a broken ankle. A broken ankle meant certain death, for me and for Grady. I pushed on.
At the top, the valley sprawled before me, vulgar. It’s not that it felt hostile — it didn’t — it was more of a feeling of indifference, like it didn’t care if I was there, like it didn’t make a difference whether I lived or died. I guess it didn’t, really. But I cupped my hands around my mouth anyway and prepared to scream. Just as I’d filled my lungs, I felt it: The sharp prick on the back of my leg, the electric needles sinking into the meat of my calf, just above my Achilles tendon. I screamed then, but not the way I’d intended. My tongue couldn’t find his name. I dropped to my hands and knees, gripping the rough granite to steady myself as I tried to see what had bitten me.
There was nothing there, save for the vampire pinpricks oozing blood and a milky yellow liquid on the back of my leg. Beneath me, in the darkness between the rocks, I could see something moving. I scrambled backwards, but the movement put pressure on my leg and I cried out again, low and toneless like a wounded animal. For one wild second, I convinced myself that maybe it wasn’t a bite after all, maybe I had scratched my leg climbing up the rocks, maybe it was something else entirely. But then the low throb began, like a heartbeat in my veins, and I felt myself sinking down, down into the dead dry earth. I fell backwards on my elbows, woozy, and a wave of nausea rippled through my stomach. I turned myself over, my forehead on a boulder, and heaved into the darkness between the rocks. I could feel my stomach turning itself inside out, expelling the last of that breakfast burrito, the last bit of nourishment I’d had. From somewhere deep within, dimly, I wondered if vomiting up my last meal meant I would starve to death even faster.
I shouldn’t have worried about that.
When I woke up the sky was streaked pink and violet, and the sun was near the horizon. The day’s warmth still lingered but a cold wind whispered across my legs and arms. I tried to push myself up, but I felt too weak. Something filled my mouth; I ran my tongue across my teeth and spit onto the rock next to my head. Blood.
Curious and confused, I reached into my mouth and gently probed my tender gums. My finger came out wet and red, and I remembered the splinter from that morning, remembered leaving my bloody print on the wall, the warning of the old woman. Bad luck to spill blood in the desert. With that same damned mouth that bit Grady. I spit again, defiant, and tried to stand.
My knees gave way. I vomited. The world went sideways. Then it went black.
*
My eyes fluttered open. Hey, I thought, almost delirious with relief, I don’t feel so bad! I was even hungry. Should I stand up? Should I try to find something edible? Should I scream Grady’s name one more time?
I don’t know when I passed out again, but when I dreamt it was about the butcher from the mural. He was chasing me, and I was running on all fours, heavy like a cartoon cow. He kept grabbing my tail and pulling it taut, slicing bits of it off with his cleaver, an inch at a time. My tail would coil and strike like a snake in response. He laughed and hissed. My mouth calcified into an O of terror.
When I woke up, I was screaming.
Midnight, or close to it. I had no way of knowing what time it was, really, just that there was no more sun and no more warmth. No more hope.
I was still on the rock pile, surrounded by my own filth: Piles of vomit here, a splatter of blood there. My leg oozed, it was hot to the touch. The moon stained the sky silver.
This is how I’m going to die, I thought, clear-headed. How long does it take to die of dehydration? I wondered. I moved my tongue in my mouth and tasted blood, tried to swallow, and couldn’t. I thought of Grady, wondered where he was, if he was suffering more or less than I was.
It was then that I heard it.
A smooth, shuffling whisper, a shudder, a hiss. I shifted onto an elbow and tried to will my eyes into focus. In the distance the earth was moving, the sand, the soil; low to the ground, shrubbery shook. But what was it? I would have been scared if I’d had the energy.
I would have been terrified.
They crested the rock pile all at once, a score of them, a hundred, half a dozen — I couldn’t tell. My eyes went in and out of focus; I felt sweat cold and clammy on my forehead, the backs of my knees. I couldn’t remember where I was, who I was. I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t remember how.
They slithered up the rocks, impossibly agile. Their bodies long and lithe, pure muscle, their scales shining iridescent black under the cold desert moon. Las serpientes, I thought, las serpientes oscuras. I remembered suddenly and wildly, and I wanted to cry out, to say, “I’m not ready yet! I’m not dead, I remember!” but there were no words in my mouth, they couldn’t find their way to my lips from my brain, and before I knew it they were upon me.
The old woman was herself and yet not herself, but I recognized her eyes, and I knew she recognized me. As she unhinged her mighty jaw and took in my feet, my ankles, my calves, my knees, I could feel her cold smoothness, her incredible strength as it closed around me, as I slid into her, slick as a whistle. When she reached my thighs, she began to clamp like a vise, to squeeze, and I felt my femurs buckle and break, and I tried to cry out but I couldn’t, I tried to move but I couldn’t.
“Though I walk through the valley,” I whispered, “though I walk through the valley…though I walk through the valley…” but I couldn’t remember the rest, and there were none there who could have heard even if I did. As the night sky went dark and closed like an aperture above me, I felt my ribs shatter, puncturing my lungs and heart. I was still alive when she began to digest.
I could still see it as my mind darkened like the desert sky, the words gouged deep in that splintering wood: Though I walk through the Valley, there are others who crawl.
Deep in the dark of the valley, there are.
***
Melissa Pleckham lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Ken, and their two dapper tuxedo cats, Sandya and Bela. Her work has been featured in or is forthcoming from Francesca Lia Block's Lit Angels Literary Journal, Rooster Republic Press, DarkWinter Literary Magazine, Sliced Up Press' Sand, Salt, Blood sea horror anthology, Flame Tree Fiction, Luna Luna, and more. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association. She also plays bass and sings for the garage-goth duo Black Lullabies. Find her online at melissapleckham.com or on social media at @mpleckham.