In the single, confused, intimate moment he and Abby had shared, the first thing that had struck him about her — beyond her beauty and grace — had been her lack of a belly button.
Abe sat in his car and spent a long time wondering what this meant.
* * *
Somewhere below the North Sea — 1997
THE SERPENT BLINKED the rush of tainted salt water from its eyes, felt the seas acidity working at its scales, snorted out the stench of unnatural filth and rot that permeated the ocean, and yet still it reveled in this wonderful new existence. Where it had come from the floating had been of a different kind, and the simple pleasure of life had been absent for so long. Existence had been of a moment, a space between heartbeats, a point of potential rather than the endless sea of sensation it was now experiencing. It had no memory of that place other than a long, blank eternity, and each instant that passed by now was the richest it had ever known. It swooped deep and startled a school of small fish; it rose up and felt the alien heat of the sun on its slick spine. It had been back for years, yet life was as exquisite as ever.
There were other things with it down here in the ocean. It had sensed the huge shadows deep down, and occasionally it sank lower to feel their weight. Deeper than light could go, they floated in ocean currents of their own making, great masses of life that seemed to carry their own gravity with them. The serpent saw and understood, sensed their common source, and yet still it feared these things. They went beyond the scope of its senses. They were as big as the world, and the one thing the serpent's father had communicated before setting it free was that the world was something to fear. The serpent knew that the world would poison it, eat it, kill it, and forget it. Scared by these thoughts — angered as well — it was happy that the vast shadows were doing their own thing. Its father had created them as well; they were on its side.
Something bade it rise. It cut through the water and broke surface to sunlight. It swam that way for a while, dipping in and out of the waves and playing with them. To its side swam other things, with tentacles and suckers and faces it had never known before. To its other side ... Father. He stood on the huge ship and stared down at his creations, smiling, talking, setting the air aflame with words that lit on the serpent's skin and burned their way inside. It was a gentle sensation, as if something warm were pressing itself in through its scales, and as it sank below the waves again, it began to make sense of what its father was saying.
And it prepared.
* * *
The shape closed in later that day.
The serpent sensed it from a great distance. It was a solid, dark presence in the ocean, something unnatural and clumsy that hacked at the sea instead of stroking it, slashed it apart to move instead of shifting with the water. This thing traveled with a confidence that was unfounded. It sent probing tendrils of sounds ahead, and the serpent and other shadows swallowed them up. It exuded other signs as well, scents and signals that marked it as something definitely not of the ocean but rather something here to destroy.
Unclean, the serpent's father had said. Poison ... filth ... rancid ...
When the visitors sounding struck the fathers ship and became confused — echoes, spiralling back and forth and casting the sea in a less friendly tune — the serpent knew that it was time to act.