Uriah Loam

The world is crawling with snakes. And some snakes are more special than others. In the deepest shadows of nature, there slither ultra-rare, almost magical serpents whose origins and biology have been left a total mystery. And these so-called “phantom snakes” might just be the missing piece for Wally Carlisle and Sadie Svenson, a couple who have endured virtually every challenge man and beast could throw at them.

When the International Serpentarians Club selects Sadie to compete in their phantom snake collection challenge, it’s a miraculous opportunity. Winning would not only give Sadie and Wally the money to start their life together, but it would earn Sadie the prestige she needs to fulfill her dream of becoming a herpetology professor. The two agree to scour the world for rare snakes, dominate the contest, and have their happily ever. However, the conniving Dr. Salaam Ander, a disgraced academic and Sadie’s advisor, isn’t willing to let his star student–and ticket to redemption–escape his grasp so soon. Can Sadie and Wally survive the ultimate test of their relationship? Or does the serpent’s legacy of lies run deeper than they’re prepared for?

1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

“The rich and diverse heritage of serpent collectors makes it difficult to pinpoint the precise origin of their craft. However, among the first documented serpentarians was Captain Morby Lulles, Victorian explorer and amateur naturalist. The phantom species catalogued by Lulles—some of the loveliest and most sought after in Oceania to this day—sparked interest throughout the Atlantic world and helped to formalize serping as a sport and artform.”

This is what the International Serpentarian Club website has to say about rare snake collecting (or “serping”), and it’s basically right—except for a few details. The esteemed Captain Lulles was a sludgy and shriveled-face man whose mind was addled with rum when it wasn’t addled with rage. His famous “catalogue” of snakes was a crude series of scribblings that conveyed little more information than that the Captain desperately needed antipsychotics. Thankfully for humanity, though, Lulles’ crew managed to decode his deranged doodles and share them with Oxford, where they were further refined and published. And, as it turns out, Lulles, a man who spent most of his time stumbling, had actually stumbled into a grand scientific discovery. The snakes he described were so unlike any other species that they became an academic obsession. Never since the Dark Ages had scholars faced descriptions so fantastical: Lulles described vipers whose venom caused divine visions; shimmering cerulean specters that wriggled a few feet above the twilight sea before disappearing; monsters so wide and so long that their slithering sounded like the roar of wildfire. Darwin himself puzzled over these findings.

It didn’t take long for other explorers to start looking for these exotic snakes, and they found them. They found them on every continent, in every kind of environment, with every bizarre and inexplicable adaptation imaginable. They were dubbed “phantom snakes,” because unlike regular serpents, their populations could not be tracked, they could not be bred in captivity, and, even when their extremely finicky habitat conditions were satisfied, they tended to die early and mysteriously. Keeping these phantom snakes became a gentleman’s sport; there was a time when a man’s status was directly proportional to how many creeping reptiles he had crawling around his drawing room.

The phantom snakes, true to their name, would vanish from the public mind in the coming decades. As elites became obsessed with petroleum and plutonium and personal computers, serping fell out of vogue; only the tacky and the dusty had snake collections anymore. Of course, the phantom snakes were poked and prodded by all manners of scientific tests, but nothing interesting was found beyond what the first bumbling explorers knew. The snakes’ abilities were, to researchers, no more interesting than those of ordinary snakes; if they couldn’t cure disease or generate infinite power, it was better to leave them be. With the government and the universities disinterested, that left the phantom snakes in the custody of a select group of adventurous nerds and their parent organization, the International Serpentarian Club. And thank God for that.

. . . 

Wally Carlisle, at nine years old, couldn’t care less about phantom snakes, or snakes of any kind. Currently, he was trapped on a jet, sitting bolt upright, gripping the sides of his seat and biting the inside of his lip. He turned his eyes towards his mother across the aisle (he was too paralyzed to move any other part of his body), but thought better of it and simply shut them tight.

Wally’s mom, a thin and rather ostrich-like woman in her 50s, had made it a point not to look in her son’s direction if she could help it. She’d look at her laptop and her notebook and keep looking at them unless the plane caught fire. Wally was the kind of stubborn child who would resist everything his mother said, and Mrs. Viola Carlisle was the kind of stubborn adult who wouldn’t hesitate to pick a fight with a nine-year-old. Isolation was the best policy here.

They were headed for the Australian city of Cordelia, a little seaside capital famous for its parks, its theaters, and—to the zookeepers and pet shop owners of the world—the Cordelia Wildlife Brokerage. This firm negotiated wild animal trades between nations; not a panda nor koala nor hissing cockroach changed hands without going through Cordelia’s meticulous lawyer swarm, of which Wally’s mom was a senior member. She was a dogged litigator with a library in her mind and acid in her tongue, and she never quite dropped her threatening demeanor. Everything from her sneer-crinkled, bun-pulled face to her garish, poison-dart-frog wardrobe screamed “stay the hell away”—and yet here were she and her son, trapped on a cross-continental trip together, an arrangement that took about two weeks (and a lot of hollering) for the family to agree upon. Wally’s dad, a third-rate cardiologist, was caring for an anonymous politician in some conveniently hard-to-contact region in the heart of Africa, so it was off to the Land Down Under for Viola and Wally.

Nineteen hours and one ocean later, the Carlisles’ plane touched down in Cordelia. Viola dragged her son about five blocks from the airport to their hotel, where she planted him on the bed and gave him a stern briefing.

“Alright, Mrs. Svenson is on her way, and as soon as she gets here, I’m gone. I’ll be at their house to pick you up at eight tomorrow.”

Wally, half-listening, bobbed his head around to take in the room’s fancy trappings and trimmings. His eyes settled on the window.

“Wally, look at me.”

Wally looked at her.

“If Mrs. Svenson has to call me, so help me God, you’re staying in Australia. Do you understand?”

Wally nodded, his absent eyes lolling about like the fluid in a Magic 8 Ball.

Viola pinched his chin and turned his face towards hers, to show that she was serious. “I’m serious.” She was a little too jet lagged to muster the desired degree of wickedness, but Wally got the message. He nodded somberly this time.

Right on cue, Mrs. Svenson started woodpeckering away at the door. “Viola? It’s me! I’m here! I brought Sadie! It’s five! It’s Sunday! I’m here! Viola!”

Viola hurried to let her in, mostly because Mrs. Monica Svenson would’ve narrated her whole autobiography if she didn’t.

“Viola!” Monica hugged her like a feral cat latching onto a leg. “My God, you look different! And I know I must look different! And Sadie, well, she wasn’t even born—you can’t look much more different than that! HAHAHAHAHA!” Her laugh sounded like she was actually saying the word “haha” over and over.

“Thanks for taking Wally, Monica. Text me if y—”

“Oh! Not. A. Problem. If I can take care of this one,” she aggressively tousled little Sadie’s hair, “I can do anything, and I mean anything!” She knelt down to Wally’s eye level. “Hey there, little man, you ready to have a fun night out with your Aunty Monica?”

“Aunty” Monica had the facial proportions of a cheap doll and the warped Cheshire grin of an evil clown. Wally recoiled in fright as if a centipede had just been held up to his face. Monica gave another hearty “HAHAHAHAHA” and tousled Wally’s hair. Viola had already disappeared down the hallway.

What Mrs. Svenson considered a “fun night out” was really a night of her leaving the children unsupervised while she skittered around the mall looking for the “good” flannel jackets (“Those Filipinos know their wool!” were her exact words). She thrust a wad of cash into Sadie’s coat pocket and a slightly bigger one into the guest of honor’s, told them to “get yourselves a big ol’ cookie,” and vanished into shops unknown.

They did indeed get themselves big ol’ cookies, one each, and they shivered on opposite ends of an open-air bench eating them in silence. The pitter-patter of Australia’s umbrellaed masses surrounded them: starchy businessmen seeking silver watches, parents being led around to toy stores as if by sled dogs, black-clad gaggles of teen loiterers looking for ever-tackier clothes and more obnoxious music. The steady burble of people, the smell and sight of gray and darkening rain, and the gentle reflecting glow of the shopfronts would’ve made it almost serene. But, Wally being Wally, he wanted to be anywhere but there. Having wolfed down his cookie, Wally crumpled up the paper, shoved it into his pocket, and whipped out his videogame system.

Sadie, who had taken her mother’s instructions to “get along with Viola’s boy” as a sacred order, scooched closer, her cookie still a good few bites away from being finished. 

“What game is that?” she asked.

Wally pretended not to hear.

“Is that the new Maniac Dragon game?”

“Yeah,” Wally grunted.

“Well you shouldn’t play it in the rain,” she lectured.

“It’s only drizzling,” snorted Wally.

“You still shouldn’t play it in the rain.”

“I’m leaning over it; it’ll keep the rain off.” Wally hunched forward violently and scowled to make his point.

“Even a little bit is bad for it. It could short-circuit and shock you!”

“I know what I’m doing,” Wally snapped.

Sadie stared off into the distance and chewed her cookie, the weight of authority on her mind. This Wally kid was her responsibility, she decided, and by God, he wasn’t getting electrocuted on her watch. She set down the cookie and grabbed at Wally’s game system.

“HEY!” he shouted.

“You’re gonna hurt yourself!”

“STOP IT!” For how loud Wally was wailing, he might as well have been getting his liver snatched instead of his game machine.

Then, of course, the device broke. The kids’ tug-of-war ripped its two screens in half, and both displays went black. They each held a half, each staring as if the other had just popped into existence that very second.

Then, of course, all hell broke loose. Wally screamed at Sadie. He threw the remnants of her cookie on the wet ground and stomped them into dust, and he would’ve done the same to Sadie herself had a group of concerned strangers not stepped in to break up the squabble. Sadie stood frozen, staring at her new self-proclaimed mortal enemy while a strange woman in a big olive overcoat comforted her and promised to buy her a new cookie.

Needless to say, Wally was punished that night. His mom closed the door of the hotel room and took out the desk chair the same way other parents might take out a belt or a switch. Wally, firmly situated in his chair of shame, then received a verbal assault from a woman who once made the Korean Environmental Minister leave a room in tears. She went on and on about how he was a disappointment, about how he was a beast disguised as a boy, about how becoming a mother to him was the greatest curse that could befall a woman, and a whole list of other things that no self-respecting parent would ever let leave the darkest corners of their subconscious. But stinging as they were, these weren’t the words that Wally remembered from the Cordelia trip.

After hearing about the mall incident, Monica made her daughter write a letter to Wally apologizing for the broken game. (She herself also wrote a lengthy apology to Viola, to which she attached money to buy Wally a new game. The amount she attached could have bought over a dozen new games.) A couple of weeks later, Wally received Sadie’s letter, written on lavender stationery and sealed in a matching, sticker-adorned envelope. It read:

Dear Wally Carlisle,

I am very sorry for breaking your game at the mall. I hope you like the new one you get. I hope we get to play again later.

Sinserely,

Sadie Svenson

P.S. I got Maniac Dragon. If I see you again I’m going to beat you!!

As he stood in the driveway reading this letter, the greatest fluke of Wally’s life occurred. His few, disparate memories of Sadie—his bitter first playdate, his Mom’s vague descriptions of her boss’s bright little science fair champion, and now this letter—combined in a way that, if the event were replayed a million times over, probably never would have happened again. His mind played an impossible, irreplicable trick on him: it shoved the few known facts about this hitherto-irrelevant girl towards a conclusion that was as beautiful as it was ridiculous. Wally fell in love with Sadie.