The shadow passed the cages of the cobras, asps and rattlesnakes without slowing. It found what it wanted in the final blocked-off pen at the far end of the main visitor's room on the other side of a sheet of one-inch-thick Plexiglas.
A plaque set below the exterior window was etched with the legend P. Molurus. Below that, in smaller letters, was written Indian Python.
The thing that had been Remo Williams paused before the sheet of heavy reinforced Plexiglas.
Remo could see himself in the glossy reflective surface of the glass-walled python cage, but everything seemed strange and distant. It was as if he were a faraway spectator to his own actions. His face, crawling with shadows, was a hollow-eyed death's-head.
When the demon force had taken over his mind, Remo had been helpless. He saw the image of the malevolent combatant that had raged within him since his encounter at the Truth Church ranch strike out at the more docile form. He did not know if the blow had struck home, but at the point when the outstretched hand of the evil combatant would have landed, both creatures had fled from his vision.
The dimensionless black plain on which they had stood was with him still, but it was now vacant, devoid of any life.
The moment they had vanished, Remo Williams had died, as well.
He remembered the look of anguish on Chiun's face when the old man realized that he had lost him to the Pythia. He recalled vividly his flight from Folcroft. He
296
remembered skulking through the streets of Rye like some mongrel dog.
A full day of restless wandering for the soul that now controlled Remo's body had passed. And he had watched it all from a surreal vantage point, back behind his own eyes.
Superimposed above all the images flashing before him was the vacant black battlefield. Remo had the intense feeling that there was something lurking over the alien horizon. Something more deadly than the spirit of the Pythia now controlling his actions.
The reptile house at the Bronx Zoo reappeared before him in a haze. His own face in the window of the python tank was washed-out and lifeless. A skull clinging to a thin mask of flesh.
A hand flew out before him. Remo recognized it as his own. It struck the side of the tank, and a vertical crack appeared beneath the tips of his slashing fingers. The thick Plexiglas split into two neat halves, and the thing that controlled Remo popped one side from its frame and set the heavy sheet of glass on the floor beside the tank.
A sudden hop, and he was gliding wraithlike through the cage. The leaves from a dozen different transplanted subtropical bushes brushed silently against his shins as he moved.
It was humid inside the cage, and the thing that had taken possession of Remo smelled the air like an alert hunter.
Behind it and unseen, something large and dark uncoiled from the low-slung branch of an artificial tallow tree.
Remo somehow knew what was happening. The
297
mingling of minds had produced a dim form of understanding within him.
It was the snake. The snake held some kind of significance.
He saw visions, more images across the limitless black plain.
The evil combatant returned, but this time he was alone. He appeared almost as an infant in this vision and he wore on his back a quiver full of arrows. In his hand he held a golden bow.
All at once there appeared before the young combatant a great serpent. It moved to attack the boy. Quick as a flash, the youth's hand sought a quivered arrow and launched the deadly missile into the head of the massive creature. The small warrior repeated this motion again and again, spearing the hapless creature with arrow after arrow until at last its great pointed tail flopped lifelessly to the ground.
It was dead.
The image vanished. Remo was again in the reptile cage.
The serpent. Its death was somehow part of a rebirth.
But not of the Pythia. It was the rebirth of something much vaster. Something far more terrifying. Something hunkered down over the far side of the horizon of his mind.
As his thoughts returned in the cage, some lucid part of Remo's brain told him that something was at his ankle.
Like a spectator to his own actions, his head looked down, allowing Remo to see what his body had felt.
A fat, gleaming brown rope was wrapped around
298
his right leg. It was banded and spotted in hues of chocolate and mud.
The thing moved and Remo fell.
Palm fronds slapped against his forehead. Remo landed face first in a tuft of tall sawgrass.
A cool pressure surrounded his waist.
The slow, crushing sensation didn't faze the presence of the Pythia in Remo's mind. As the snake's scaly coils slid up around his chest, it remained calm. As if the python sought this cold encounter.
As the unblinking head looped higher, the massive body rippled almost imperceptibly while wrapping its neck around Remo's throat. He felt a growing pressure against his windpipe.
The python, purchased from an East Indian zoological society, was over thirty feet long and had not eaten in days. While it was normal for a python to attack smaller animals, it wasn't unheard of for a snake as large as this one to attack and suffocate something Remo's size. Especially when hungry.
The creature's amber eyes looked directly into Remo's own as it constricted its muscular coils harder.
With every exhalation, the python squeezed Remo's rib cage. Every intake of breath that followed was shallower and less charged with oxygen than the one before. Inexorably the python's shrinking body was starving Remo's lungs of the one element that fueled the sun source that was Sinanju.
Oxygen.
The alien force in Remo's mind seemed almost to mock the efforts of the huge reptile. As the snake strove harder to crush the breath from the warmblooded mammal trapped within its constrictor coils,
299
the demon within Remo slowly extracted a hand from the living bonds.
Remo watched as his own hand swatted the creature's flat head, almost as if the Pythia was remonstrating a badly behaved pet.
Immediately the python's coils dropped into loose ropes. It flopped to the cage floor.
Shedding the last clinging coils, the thing that possessed Remo stood.
In the thicket of carefully tended jungle, the reptile stirred. It had only been stunned. The flat, blunt head swayed back and forth, as if adjusting to the vibrations it felt through the bottom of the cage.