Scared of snakes? Yeah, probably best you don't read this serpentine horror short story!
I wrote this piece for Hawk & Cleaver's 'The Other Stories' podcast.
Snake Island (or Ilha da Queimada Grande as it is known to most) is situated off the coast of Brazil and is often described by many as a place where ‘nightmares are real’. Humans haven’t inhabited it for many years but there were occasional visitors - scientists gathering data on the various species of serpent that populated the landmass. There were snake smugglers too, the brave and the stupid, the kind of man willing to risk life and limb to collect venomous reptiles to sell to the highest bidder back on the mainland.
But that wasn't why Brendan and Sam had travelled to the treacherous island. They'd paid those with knowledge of the place a huge sum to get them across the water, a journey that took well over 2 days due to the crew’s insistence that they needed to avoid the patrols of the Brazilian Navy. They'd paid even more to the experts they knew could be bought who provided them with anti-venom in vials that could have been tap water for all they knew.
The island is home to over 4000 snakes or 1-5 snakes every square metre, which means any unfortunate guest of the island had to be incredibly careful where they put their feet while walking and even more careful if they decided to take a piss anywhere.
When the boat arrived at the island a dingy took the pair to the coastline. There was no beach, just jagged and slippery rocks covered in green algae. Their guide gave them some basic instructions in broken English but Brendan was hot-headed and overexcited, ignoring most of the words from the sailor as he admired the vast green hilltops of the island. They tied the boat to a wooden stump and dismounted, helping each other across the ice-like surface that their boots found it almost impossible to grip onto.
The heat was unbearable, and Sam, usually the calmer of the two, was cursing at the top of his lungs.
“Fuck me sideways, it’s hot!”
Their destination was an automated lighthouse in the centre of the jungle. The journey there was laborious and slow, the overgrown terrain not allowed the men a direct route. They used machetes to carve a path through, often having to swing at vipers and serpents to deter them from lunging with unholy sharp fangs.
It was those snakes, the golden lanceheads, which despite their average size of half a metre long, had flesh-melting venom that made their bites deadly.
Sam thought that Brendan’s show of violence might agitate the animals, but he was unflinching and continued to threaten the snakes.
“Slippery motherfuckers!”
They wore specialised thick walking socks and had gaffer taped the bottom of their trousers and cuffs of their shirts as São Paulo locals who told various stories of injury and death had advised them.
They were sodden with sweat by the time they reached high ground and near exhaustion by the time they found the lighthouse, a faded white beacon amongst the lush green.
They soon found what they were looking for - their former partner, dead at the top of the building with a large rodent nesting in his hollowed out rib cage. He'd been eaten by something, most of his bones picked clean and his mouth open wide to reveal discoloured pegs that used to be teeth. His eyes were gone too, morsels pulled out of his skull. His tongue looked like a flap of burnt leather.
Sam threw up but Brendan was made of sterner stuff and immediately searched the satchel that had come to rest at the corpses feet. The diamonds were there, and at quick glance he could tell that it was all of them. None had been lost, which is what their employer had been worried about.
Sam was leaning over the edge of the tower, wiping the vomit from his lips with his sleeve when he let out a strange noise that sounded like a balloon deflating.
He stood at the top of the stairwell and looked down into the gloom, watching with horror as a gargantuan serpent slid up the stairs with terrifying grace, it's yellow scales flickering with sunlight as it surmounted the lighthouse.
“Holy sh – "
Sam was confused - the experts had showed them pictures of all of the snakes, the dangerous ones and the harmless ones, the ones that would bite and the ones that would avoid them, the ones that meant 'game over' if they pierced your skin. But this one was huge, bigger than anything Sam had seen - in books or in documentaries or in his worst nightmares. It looked prehistoric, longer than a bus and like it could effortlessly crush one as well.
“What the fu – “
Its head was colossal - it's tongue tasting the air, looking for the humans. It's eyes were black like the darkest night and as it grew ever closer Sam knew that this was the terrible secret the island had harboured - the reason humans were forbidden. This freak of evolution, this apex predator, was top of the food chain.
Sam had never felt more scared. He tried to alarm Brendan but he couldn’t say a word, the snake’s mouth was already wide - the fangs oozing with clear liquid and the serpent hissing with otherworldly ferocity.
It lunged forwards and snapped it’s jaws closed around Brendan’s torso as Sam ducked under the twisted body of the snake, tripping and falling down the lighthouse stairs clumsily and breaking ribs, a wrist and a leg as he plummeted to the bottom. Every ounce of air seemed to leave his body as his broken frame hit the ground, the impact somehow not being enough to render him unconscious.
He groaned with immeasurable pain as he looked up, the twisting shape of the immense snake as it swallowed his friend whole briefly blocking out the brightness of the vibrant sun. He watched with horror as the shape of Brendan’s still live body slipped down the throat of the serpent and when he realised that he could not move he knew that he was next.
Ilha da Queimada Grande would be his final resting place, all that was soon to be left of him just a pile of festering, half-digested bones. It was then, due to the shock, that Sam drifted into the embrace of unconsciousness. At least he wouldn’t be awake when he was eaten.
Ben Errington
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