“Golem?” he called.
The golem stood up and turned, grinning his creepy, not-quit
e-Mack-like grin.
Mack screamed. Screamed like a little girl.
Attached to the golem’s arms, thighs, ankles, belly, and neck were a dozen brown snakes. Each was maybe three feet long, maybe four. Mack wasn’t going to measure them.
“Aaaahhhh!” Mack yelled.
The golem hesitated. Then he yelled, too, in a pretty close approximation of Mack’s own voice.
“Snakes!” Mack yelled.
“Snakes!” the golem repeated.
“W-w-w-w-why?” Mack stammered.
The golem looked down at the snakes. He plucked the one from his neck and held it out to see it better. The snake hissed and writhed and twisted to sink its fangs into the golem’s wrist.
“The man put them in the window,” the golem said. “I don’t know why.”
Mack had not previously suffered from ophidiophobia, although he was pretty sure he would start soon enough.
As mentioned earlier, Mack noticed things. And he remembered the things he had noticed, even when those things involved class field trips to the zoo.
“That’s an Australian brown snake, dude!” Mack said.
“Yes, of course, the zoo trip,” the golem said.
Mack felt his insides churning. “It’s one of the most poisonous snakes on earth.”
“Yes, yes, it is,” the golem said, and nodded, pleased to have accessed Mack’s memories of this normally useless fact. “It doesn’t seem to be bothering me.”
One of the snakes was eyeballing Mack. Fangs buried in the golem’s arm, it was looking straight at Mack. It was not a pleasant look.
He had to get rid of them. It was going to be tough explaining a dozen poisonous vipers to his parents. He and the golem had to get them. Get them all. But how?
“Walk to the kitchen,” Mack said.
The golem did.
The snakes were like weird hair extensions hanging from odd parts of him.
“Okay, this is going to be gross,” Mack warned.
He threw the switch for the garbage disposal.
The golem detached the first snake and tried to urge it into the roaring hole.
Mack took his barbecue fork and, with extraordinary care and much flinching, pushed the snake in.
Grrrchunkchunkwgheee!
The snakes were not geniuses, that much was clear. They didn’t seem to have the sense to let go of the golem and run for it. A second snake followed the first.
Grrrchunkchunkwgheee!