Free Horror Show by Greg Kihn

the locals. Albert felt sure that they were the work of some older, more advanced culture.
    The surface of the silver had been meticulously polished. It wasn’t perfect, as a machined modern piece would have been, but it looked damn close. The tolerances were obviously hand-wrought.
    The striker was an animal’s cloven hoof.
    After the sun had set, the priest selected a man from the village, and, against the victim’s will, he was dragged forward and tied to a stake set firmly in the ground. This, only after much protesting and lamenting, was met with cautious resignation by the rest of the villagers.
    The unfortunate man’s fate appeared sealed, and no amount of argument would change it.
    A ring of wood and dried shrubbery was placed around both the man and Albert’s party and lit with a torch of burning pitch. All those involved in or witnessing the ceremony were within the circle of flame.
    In the center stood the tied figure. The flickering light of the fire played across the man’s terrified face. He screamed and pleaded in an unintelligible tongue, his limbs straining valiantly against the rough fiber of the rope to the point where it cut into his skin and blood began to ooze.
    The priest stepped forward and marked the victim’s forehead with ashes.
    Albert’s native translator began to shake and seemed mortally afraid of what was about to transpire. He became reluctant to translate the words of the high priest, reluctant to be a party to the damnation of this poor creature’s soul.
    The victim howled and fought the bonds that restrained him.
    Albert had to shout at his translator to continue. Within the ring of fire, the priest, his assistant, the translator, and Albert stood facing the center. The bound man continued to struggle.
    The high priest said a few words, chanted what Albert believed to be the name of the demon, then struck the larger metal fork with the cloven hoof striker.
    It made an unbelievable sound, a low vibration that seemed to rattle Albert’s very soul. The ominous tone filled the night. The insects stopped singing. The sound grew until the vibration became painful to hear.
    The priest then struck the second fork, and its vibration joined the first, oscillating in and out of the sympathetic harmonics of the two wildly dissonant notes. The combination began to have a strange effect on Albert. Intoxicating and hypnotic, it insinuated its way through his eardrums and into his brain, canceling out all else.
    With an effect like rolling thunder, Albert felt his internal organs vibrate. He felt as if he were standing next to railroad tracks while a train rumbled past.
    He blinked, trying to hold back a steady flow of tears that began involuntarily to stream down his face. Looking around, he could see that every man in the circle was crying.
    The tuning forks hummed with a sustained tone that defied the laws of physics.
    His eyes were drawn to a shimmering cloud, hovering a few feet above the tied man’s head.
    The head of a huge, glistening, horned snake materialized, coming into focus before Albert’s incredulous eyes. It wavered for a moment, then snapped onto the body of the bound man with a terrible finality, wrapping its wet coils around the hapless native and crushing him like a piece of meat. The coils flexed, then tightened. Albert listened for the sound of bones snapping, but the only snapping he heard was the crackle of the fire as it sputtered around them.
    A terrible metamorphosis then took place.
    The sinuous body of the snake began to blend into the body of the man, melding into his shape and taking on the characteristics of a human form. The blue-green scales melted into arms, legs, a torso. The form of a human emerged from the coils of the reptile as if being sculpted from living tissue by a master artisan.
    Albert wiped his weeping eyes as the snake-man was born before him, the skin reptilian, iridescent, but with a form suggesting humanity.