Free The Sound of Seas by Jeff Rovin, Gillian Anderson

not likely,” Ben said. “Anita, please . . . this is happening for a reason.”
    The serpent expanded, thickened, seemed to take on size but not substance; it was like thick smoke with curling eddies of darkness becoming visible within. The tiny fireflies sparked and faded within as the inner clouds moved. Otherwise without features, the snake moved from the rug to the hardwood floor, writhed just feet from Anita where it suddenly stopped. It was almost as if the outer shape had suddenly frozen, while the turmoil and lights continued within. Ben began to walk toward Anita, slowly, around the shape, not sure what he was going to do. He stopped as the black snake rose like a cobra, turning toward him. Its head floated higher, bobbing from side to side until it reached the level of his eyes. A few moments after Ben stopped, the shape turned back toward Anita and moved forward, trailing neither glitter nor making a ripple on the floor. There was terror in thewide set of the woman’s mouth but she did not scream. She placed her hands hard against the frame of the hallway entrance, set her legs, and had no intention of moving.
    The shadow came right up to her, face-to-face, but it did not advance. It puffed even wider, as though pressed from within, its circumference increasing.
    As the dead, flat head of the thing continued to hover before Anita, Ben heard Jacob moaning in his room. Anita heard him too.
    â€œGoddamnit, get him now !” she said.
    â€œYou go,” Ben said, edging around the serpent and taking her place. If it moved, he intended to walk through it, waving his arms in an attempt to disperse it. But the shape just remained there.
    Anita turned and moved quickly down the hall, her footsteps on the hardwood floor the only sound in the apartment. Even the cat, Arfa, was missing, cowed by the serpent.
    Staring at the thing just inches away, Ben could swear he saw coil-like shapes moving within it, but they were indistinct, like images only visible from the corner of the eye, vanishing when looked at directly. They were hypnotic, wormlike and writhing. But they were not like maggots feeding on a carcass; they were a dark, tightly coiled network from which the serpent seemed to be made. That must be what the madame had meant by “they.” He saw now that where the coils touched, the sparks appeared.
    Ben looked at the featureless head, studied the tiny whorls nearest to him. Each one seemed to grow as the snake inflated and then there were smaller snakes inside those other snakes, on and on, deeper into the black pall—
    He heard a thumping sound from behind.
    â€œAnita?”
    â€œShhh!” she said. “Come.”
    Ben backed slowly from the serpent. Jacob’s door was the first on his right, Caitlin’s room beyond it. The bathroom was across the hall. He edged backward but the serpent didn’t advance. He didn’t think itwas because his eyes were locked on the thing; it had to be something else.
    When he reached the bedroom door, Ben saw Jacob standing on the bed, amid the strewn pages of his Captain Nemo comic book. He was facing the wall between his room and Caitlin’s. The boy was sobbing and drumming on the wall with the heel of his palm.
    â€œMom . . .” he wept softly. “Mom . . .”
    Anita shook her head hard, as if to say don’t wake him . She hovered nearby, her arms open to catch him in case he fell backward. Whether it was a nightmare or night terrors, Ben left that up to the therapist. He turned from Anita back to the serpent.
    It filled the entrance to the hallway but did not approach. It undulated slightly, diffusing the sun but not dimming it: the serpent seemed to have a nimbus, an amber glow as ephemeral as the snaking shape itself. It reminded him then of Wadjet, the Egyptian snake goddess whose images he had come across while researching the Galderkhaani language in ancient hieroglyphics.
    Ben