The Doctor and the Serpent

Doctor Edward Kidder unfastened the buttons on his waistcoat, smiling wanly out of the carriage window, the maroon silk curtains flapping daintily in the breeze kicked up by the horses. He ran a hand over his thinning hair – a once vibrant strawberry blond now waning to a ghostly grey – smoothing back the wisps dislodged from the slight wind slipping in through the open slot.

He had been called out on an emergency – some old woman, rich by her means for the dweller of such a small village – had taken a ghastly tumble down the front steps of her abode as she had ventured out with her basket of treats to visit her family in Inverness. That’s what the telegram had implied, anyway, in Kidder’s mind, which had begun to wander to the nature of his patient as he settled into the journey. The old woman’s cart had apparently been waiting, the driver propping open the door trying to conceal a thin grimace of impatience as she stopped to admire her rain-soaked gardenias, when she had misplaced her foot on the steep stone stairs and clattered onto the cobbled walkway with an enormous thump. The driver, his sense of care for his own career, Kidder supposed, had kicked into action, leaping towards the woman and sending villagers trundling idly past to call for a doctor.

It so happened that Kidder was the closest doctor on call, and the only one not on visit in one of the more urban locations. He had offered to make the brisk journey into the neighbouring village to attend to her condition. From the telegram, the woman had sounded portly, likely saturated from years of good living, and thus may have been more severely affected by the fall than one her age whose build was lithe and springy. Like a pack of butcher’s meat she had likely pounded into the uneven cobbles and suffered a sharp dagger of pain to the chest, causing her clogged heart to sputter; or perhaps a laceration would appear upon the great slab of beef that was her carefully-stockinged shin as an upturned, unfixed cobblestone licked her ruddy flesh. The telegram hadn’t been entirely clear on the end result.

Kidder had left his warm crackling fire and doting Irish Setter Arnold with great reluctance, throwing on his cloak and snatching his leather medical case into his hand with a bitter flourish, the slightly worn handle digging unpleasantly into his palm. It felt all the more unpleasant in the knowledge that he should not be making such an excursion during one of his rare moments of peace. But, as he had clambered dexterously into the carriage waiting for him at the end of his pathway, he had weighed the negative of disturbing his hours of leisure against the positive that he would get to pass the loch, and his mood, consequently, brightened.

The loch had mesmerised him from childhood. As a boy his mother and father had taken him there, settling with a large blanket and wicker picnic basket upon one of the humongous green hills almost sealing the loch in a great sky-bound bowl. He had munched happily on beef and pickle sandwiches, being one of those rare children of his age to enjoy the murderously bitter taste, and had allowed his eyes to sweep the loch’s surface, his gaze seizing any glint or ripple in the water. Its vast depths had always fascinated him, but also scared him – just a little.

His father was a good-humoured man, who cared for their family deeply, but every so often he would reprimand his son. Playfully, sometimes. Other times, less so. It was all in the service of teaching good manners, he had constantly assured. If there was any hint of insolence from Kidder, his father would snap that the creature in the loch would leap out of the water and swallow him whole. A moody pout following such a threat would be greeted with “Och, we might as well throw him in their now, Catherine, eh? Let the beast have him!”

His mother, a thin woman with striking green eyes set into deep sockets and sunshine hair – a few shades above his, which had been tainted by his father’s dark complexion - billowing about her shoulders, had tutted and busied herself with unloading the picnic basket. While Kidder was impassive in the face of his father’s threats, knowing they were not as serious as other occasions where a palm might be risen to strike him across the cheek, he had still cast a wary eye towards the loch, searching the lazy ripples for a sign of something more sinister.

Now, as he rattled alongside it in his carriage, the childish edge of fear had vanished, and Kidder could do nothing but remark silently upon its beauty. The grey clouds, a staple in this part of the Highlands, broke apart in just the right places for beams of pastel light to stream through and bounce off the waters, as deep and boundless as the sky it mirrored. Its midnight colour was rich and oddly inviting. If April time in Scotland wasn’t so cool, he would have indulged in childish impulsivity and asked the carriage to stop momentarily, if only to dip his toes in the water’s edge. He was that kind of man – one who appreciated the innocence in all things, still, and one that lived to balance work and play. Emily had often taught him so while she had been alive.

The dirt road that parted the trees littering the bank of the loch was uncomfortably ridged and rocky. Kidder could almost feel every notch and rock the carriage traversed as it sped towards his patient. He was jolted off his cushioned seat several times – perhaps by a large branch or child-sized boulder – nevertheless, it caused him to roll his hazel eyes towards the roof of the vehicle in exasperation as he smoothed back his tousled wisps for a third, fourth, fifth time. Still, the horses ignored his mental weariness with the ordeal, and pressed on, the sound of their hooves pounding in his ears like a royal percussion set.

Just as he returned his gaze to the loch for the second time, drinking in the tranquil sight that caused his heart to ache so fondly with that familiar sickness of nostalgia, Kidder felt the carriage rattle to a halt. He was promptly thrown against the interior of the box-like frame, his cheek smacking against the wall separating him and the driver. Flustered, and brushing himself down frantically, Kidder’s brow furrowed, and he cried out of the window, “What on earth is going on out there?!”

His hands spilled over the fabric of his cloak, drawing it tightly around himself. It was a forest green velvet; heavy and expensive. He loved it very much and thought it best to wear when introducing he and his service to the potential patients in a neighbouring town. It validated him as quite the desirable, well-off practitioner, with an array of happy, paying patients under his belt. Kidder waited, holding his breath for the driver’s apologetic grumblings, but he never heard them.

It was then that he heard the horses scream.

Their screeching was wild and ear-splitting, and it tore the nerves in his stomach to shreds. It was a ghastly sound, a spectral sound – like the wailing of banshees on a moor in a romantically gothic novel his late wife had often frequented the pages of. It caused his shoulders to shoot up about his ears.

He cringed.

Must be some sort of stray beast in the road, he thought, fumbling with the ornate handle of the carriage door. Blocking the way – perhaps a stray dog or seal or – Good Christ, the din was deafening. It seized every bone in his body and turned the marrow to ash. The horses were terrified of something, though whatever it was he was sure it would be no trouble for he and the driver to dislodge. The poor man likely had his hands full trying to rear them back from whatever it was, and Kidder still had a patient to attend to. Luxury out the window, Kidder kicked the door open and hopped onto the road.

It had begun to rain. That was the first thing he noticed, as he eyed his boots, now sunken into the freshly dampened earth. He let out a small tut – they had been a gift. Emily had carefully picked them out for him. His thin lips formed a hard line of irritation.

“Driver, the horses seemed spooked,” He began, rounding the side of the carriage so as to greet the commotion. His eyes had still not left his mud-caked boots, which were now acquiring a thick layer of twigs and sludge to their expensive leather toes. “Let me give you a hand soothing the poor beasts-“

Kidder raised his gaze.

The horses were bucking violently at the sight before them. Their eyes, wide and bloodshot with the adrenaline coursing through their velvet sinews, were bulging in their long skulls. Frantically they tried to bust free from their constraints – to snap and twist at the buckles tying them to the dead weight of the stationary carriage. Their whining was still pitched at a chorus of unearthly screeches.

The driver was frozen in his seat. His hands were splayed in a tableau of reactionary fright, and his tweed cap had tumbled from his sandy hair to soak in an increasingly muddy puddle below him. His pinched, sallow face had paled to the colour of the sky above him – a sickly grey-white. His bright blue eyes were fixed, unmoving from the sight before him, his mouth frozen in a grotesque silent scream.

Kidder felt the breath leave him as he followed the driver’s line of vision, not wanting to acknowledge the owner of the large shadow that was strewn across the entirety of the horses and carriage, but eventually, having to. He felt heat creep into the pockets of his cheeks, his hands burning white hot fire and pulsating, painfully numb at the same time. His body, all of a sudden, grew stealthily still, the insidious fear setting deep into his muscles. Had a stranger passed, he may have been mistaken for a modern version of the Roman bust – stonily frozen. His pulse pounded in his temples and a high-pitched tone bled into the insides of his ears, ringing and ringing. For the first time in his academic career, he felt as if he were going to faint.

A large beast was sprawled across the narrow road that was barely concealed by the thin pines that stripped the way, siphoning it weakly from the loch’s banks. The beast’s thick hide was grey and scaled - elephantine was the only word that sprung into Kidder’s numbed brain. Instead of limbs it possessed humongous flippers, reminiscent of teardrops and as big, almost, as Kidder himself, who stood at an immodest 6“1. They crushed the supple earth beneath them, pushing it into large, leaf-shaped prints. They were, Kidder supposed, to make the creature adept at an aquatic life. Its huge body was finished by a bony tail, long enough to slip between the trees on the opposite side of the road and nestle happily between their gnarled trunks. Kidder’s eyes flickered helplessly to the creature’s head, which was welded to the end of an incredulously long neck. The neck, Kidder noted, was close to the earth – not raised to a tremendous height and fairly in line with the rest of its body. The head was small and oval-shaped, a pair of gleaming yellow eyes with serpentine slits for pupils darted inside its flat skull.

It was only then, when his eyes drew upon the sight of that formidable hydra-like skull, that Kidder noticed the thin veins of blood coursing down the creature’s neck. In its jaws hung the lifeless body of a deer, its spindly legs battered and broken in numerous places. Its slender neck lulled sadly, just outside of the creature’s rows of splinter-like teeth, which sat unevenly in its gums, like gravestones sunken into the earth of an aging churchyard.

The creature had turned its slender neck towards Kidder as he had emerged from the carriage, and its pale eyes seemed to be burning the image of him into its mysterious brain. It seemed his father had not been lying when he had threatened the perilous venture of a dunk into the loch – they had, unsuspecting to him, been true.

Kidder began to slowly emerge from the paralysis of his fear. It felt as though he were wading through a sea of knee-height treacle. Making sure his eyes did not move from the beast, Kidder stumbled, his feet blind over the pitfalls of the sopping earth, over to the driver, hoping his movements would be concealed from the creature by the flurrying of the horses’ limbs.

“What the devil is that thing?!” He whispered hoarsely; his voice cracked with a desperate, consuming fear. This creature, whatever it was, defied all knowledge in the largely rational world he preferred to live in. It was beyond science; beyond all academia he had encountered. Never in a book in his life had Kidder stumbled across the likeness of such a beast.

Well, perhaps in those lavishly illustrated folk tales his grandmother had bestowed upon him as a small child.

But even then, the Kelpies of Scottish legend veered far too diversely from this monster, with its grey skin and hovering, snake-like neck. It was too reptilian for the fantastical tales of the water spirits guarding the loch. It was abysmally and painfully real, and terrifyingly ancient. Kidder got the sense that it had existed long before most things. The only thing that had existed before it, perhaps, was the loch itself. Even then, Kidder was unsure.

The driver said nothing to his question. Kidder dared his eyes to leave the creature for a moment, if only to implore his guide for an answer.

Nothing. A deadly silence pieced by the occasional screams of the horses, and, Kidder noticed with an inward shudder, the rhythmic rush of hot breath slithering through the creature’s slit-like nostrils.

“We have to – to move!” Kidder exclaimed, his hands grasping the driver’s wrists. He tried to ignore the faint, but always acrid, smell of urine as he moved closer to the driver in his attempts to shake him from his petrified state. “NOW!”

Kidder’s voice was reaching an anxious crescendo. The beast had noticed. The deer still clutched in its jaws flopped sickeningly as it hovered closer to them. The closer it got, the wilder and more manic the horses reared and kicked. If they did not leave now, the monster would surely drop the deer carcass and lunge, or flop or lurch – whatever it did, however it moved! – in the direction of the sorry stallions, Kidder thought, panic running in his veins, cooling his blood to ice. Then – how would they escape? Through the trees? Their cover was surely no match for the immense size of the beast, who would surely snap their trunks like drug shop cigarettes under its scaly belly.

Kidder was alerted to the shrieking horses again, noticing their piercing cries had reached an unbearable height. The creature swerved its serpentine head towards them, and its jaw widened just enough so that the limp body of the deer tumbled from its teeth, its blood-soaked fur tugging and tearing against the jagged knives lining the leering mouth. It hit the floor with a wet thud, its amber eyes, round and glassy, staring into sky. Its wide lids, paralysed in an eternal bulge of fear, collected water as the rain around them began to pick up. Kidder felt that irrational pang of sympathy for the poor thing, only before arriving at the realisation that either he or the driver, or perhaps both, could soon find themselves in the same position.

The creature let out a screaming hiss – a thin metallic sound which reminded Kidder of water struggling free from a crack in the body of a burst pipe. He recoiled, his booted feet slipping through the muddy earth to retreat behind the edge of the carriage. He watched as the innards of the creature’s large purple mouth flashed dangerously at the horses. Its eyes had begun to glower with particular ferocity at the flailing horses and Kidder drew to the conclusion that the horses were angering the creature. Its neck swung dangerously close to them and it emitted another grating hiss.

Not quite aware of where his brain was taking him, he edged carefully around the carriage until his hands found the intricate straps trapping the horses to the cart. His eyes flitted constantly from the straps and back to the creature, monitoring its progress. Perhaps if the horses were gone, the creature would calm and slip back into the waters of the loch with its deer. Perhaps the creature would simply ignore Kidder and the driver, if they stayed still enough, and it would go on its way. Either way, Kidder – or anyone for that matter – could see that the horses, in their helpless panic, were exacerbating the situation. He wrestled with the securely tied straps, which were straining and contracting from the wild motions of the horses. Finally, he managed to loosen them, and the leather bindings fell away. The horses made no delay in breaking off, sprinting around the cart and in the opposite direction to the grotesque creature. Their hooves thundered on the dirt road, and as the sound grew distant, Kidder reclined against the carriage, a sinking feeling blooming in the pit of his stomach like the nauseating aftermath of an unpleasant meal.

The creature, disappointed by the loss of the horses, considered the two men for a moment.

Just say still, Kidder thought, his chest heaving under his loosened waistcoat. He was painfully aware of the sudden tightness of his neatly tied collar. He would have torn it away from his collarbone with haste, but he did not want to draw the creature’s attention to him any more than he already had done.

The impassivity of those beastly eyes almost drove Kidder insane, in that split second, waiting for an enactment of its inevitable decision. Them or the deer. Then, without warning, the engorged creature’s long, vertical neck made a lightning jab into the air between it and the carriage. Kidder watched as the beast’s oval head closed around the driver’s, pinching his skull between its two crocodilian jaws. The driver’s screams were sharp and then suddenly siphoned as the creature’s teeth sank into the stubble-ridden flesh of his neck. There was an awful crunching sound as the creature strained and crushed the driver’s skull under its tongue, as easily as if it were a chicken’s egg. Kidder’s mouth hung limply in a horrified scream, but one that could not be heard over the squelching noise of the driver’s cranium collapsing in on itself. Blood, viscous with the saturated sludge of brain parts, spilled over the creature’s mouth and splattered onto the floor. The noise reminded Kidder of rain-swelled drainpipes expelling their contents after a particularly violent torrent. He swayed dangerously on his feet, his head swimming with the image before him. It was something he would never unsee. His stinging eyes flickered shut for a moment and it was still there, in the darkness, imprinted against his fluttering lids.

The creature inclined its long neck towards the earth and released the driver from its oral clutches. The man’s body thudded against the earth.

There was no head left.

Just a mess of neck tendons and fractions of scattered skull-bone.

The creature admired its kill before its eyes darted to the quivering doctor, who was now clutching the side of the cart to keep himself upright.

Kidder weighed up the imminent events in his head.

A flash of pain, if its kill was the same method as the one it had enacted upon the driver. He was experienced enough to know that if his neck snapped in the creature’s mouth – and it certainly appeared strong enough – then all that would greet him would be…

Well what would greet him? He had never been an overtly religious man. Would there merely be a curtain of black that fell across his vision and then the swirling weightlessness of death carrying him to God knows where?

All of those patients flirting with death on a daily basis under his eye and yet, he had never spared the reality of mortality much thought at all.

Maybe when those teeth sank into his neck and his pain was replaced by darkness, a searching hand would come out of it and pull him briskly into the light. Perhaps it would be Emily, her bright blue eyes, kind face and trailing auburn hair illuminated angelically by the cool light of heaven.

Wishful thinking, Edward, he scorned himself silently, as he stared into the menacing eyes of the beast.

It blinked in his direction, the onyx slits that sat in the pale-yellow iris swivelled slightly as it roved across his comparatively small frame, contemplating its next move. A gush of warm air shot from its dragonish snout, protruding through the misty sheath of rain descending from the open sky.

Kidder’s rapid breath froze in his lungs. He held it there.

The creature scooped the deer from the ground, its jaw snapping into the potted belly of the doe so that fresh blood oozed over the minute grooves of matted fur. The monster continued with a now almost bored expression, its flippers digging into the soft earth of the track, pushing itself clumsily towards the trees. The bows parted with wailing creaks as it clamoured between them, its long neck bending low as the sloped earth curved towards the pebbled edge of the loch.

Kidder watched it lumber over the bank, its prey latched safely in its powerful jaws. His breath began to escape in broken gasps and sighs, his teeth chattering from the coolness of the rain that had started to sink into the heaviness of his thick clothes, though he had barely noticed.

The creature ambled towards the water, its flippers dislodging the pebbles at the loch’s edge as it went. Kidder could not help but stare, transfixed as it dipped its head into the blue waters, staining the surface crimson with the deer’s blood. He noticed that it was far less comfortable on land. Perhaps, in all its years of existence, capturing land mammals was only a more recent venture. Kidder could only wonder. A cloud of scarlet signalled its departure into the midnight mass, its grey body slithering into the depths. With a lazy flick of its tail the creature disappeared. All that remained were the ripples created by its spade-like flippers. And soon, they vanished too.

Kidder fell back against the carriage, his legs finally giving way as the adrenaline in his veins finally lost its grip. His back hit the passenger door with a thump and a bolt of pain exploded in his shoulder blade, but he could barely feel it – it felt distant, somehow.

He sat there for quite some time, the rain flattening his greying wisps against the peaks of his forehead. His chest rose and fell rapidly as his brain searched itself for a photographical replay of the events that had just befallen him. The most vivid of all was the driver’s head shattering with an unpleasant crunch between the monster’s teeth.

Shakily, Kidder eventually rose to his feet. His cloak was heavy with damp and the ends of it were caked in mud from where it had tucked under him as he sat and mulled over the attack. Freeing himself from it by fumbling with the ribbon tie at his collarbone, his shoulders rolled pleasantly with the sudden lightness as it slipped from them and landed with a squelch onto the mud at his feet.

Kidder heard something then.

A mundane sound – a typical sound.

Rippling water.

A perfectly normal sound that signified the wind picking up against the deep waters of the loch.

Or.

Or the emergence of the great aquatic lizard who had disposed of the deer and was in want of a more fulfilling prey.

Kidder spent no time trying to find out the source of the sound. It probably just the wind, yes – the wind that blew sheets of cold rain into his face. But that silent, creeping uncertainty was present enough to make Kidder break into a sprint. He darted through the trees, his boots scooping the moist earth like spoons as he bolted as far away from the loch as possible.

Maybe he would find one of his estranged horses on his way and ride it back to town.

Yes, he had rode as a young boy, the habit wouldn’t die quite so easily.

He hoped.

Somewhere in the neighbouring village Mrs Tedworth would be sprawled on the cobbles of her pathway where she had fallen. Unconscious, maybe, or bleeding profusely from a large gash on her plump leg.

Kidder thought of her and considered hailing a ride into the town where he was most needed. Then, his ears rang with the sound of the driver’s head splintering in a thousand places, trapped in the snake-like head of the mysterious water-beast.

He ran decidedly in the opposite direction, his legs pumping until they seemed poisoned with the burning of lactic venom. Still, onward he ran.

Find another doctor, he thought, sour and careless.