The Tall Grass

by Benway

He awoke earlier than intended, but put that down to the strangeness of the place. He had been to India once before, but had never left Mumbai. That city and its Western luxuries might as well have been half a world away. He swung his legs off the edge of the bed and groped for the cigarettes. She stirred beside him, her head rising from the pillow.

"Time's it?"

"Not time yet. Smoke."

She lay her head down and he watched as her breathing slowed and her body relaxed into sleep. He rose to his feet slowly and deliberately, then made his way out to the balcony. He stood on the left as he had been told by the porter to do. The frequent earth tremors had taken care of the right-hand corner, and he was amazed than any of it was still attached to the building. The Victorian engineers had built the place to last.

He lit up, looking east. A row of hills hid the sunrise from him, but the ochre glow above them heralded the day to come. At least up here, there was almost an entire day usable before it became too hot to do anything but collapse.

Mad dogs and Englishmen fight battles against mutant criminals in the heat of Calcutta at a summer mid-day, he decided. They had been prepared for it, unlike the Americans that they had been asked to apprehend. After ten minutes, it was all over and SHIELD were whisking the prostrated bastards off to wherever it was that SHIELD took people who did dangerous things with anthrax, and they were left there in West Bengal with nothing to do. Kurt and Piotr had left almost immediately, but Kitty had stolen some air miles off an arms dealer and had gotten them one-way tickets back to London for the following week. She had set the random number thing on her palmtop going, and had randomly selected the train from Howrah that taken them up here. What would you have done if the train had taken us somewhere dangerous? he had asked, but she had just smiled and told him that she would have selected another random number. It wasn't dangerous at all up here. If anything, it reminded him a bit of the Lake Country, although there definitely weren't any monkeys in Windermere.

The hotel wasn't anything that would have made Michelin, and he wasn't sure that it would even make Lonely Planet. Still, there were no bugs in the bedding, and none of the food that they had eaten had attacked them. She hadn't been very happy about the meat in everything, but then, as she said, they were in the north and it was all part of an adventure. They had spent a day in the forest on the back of an elephant, or a heffalump, as she insisted it was called. They had spent the day before hiking up a mountain to a famous local temple to some sort of God of perpetual arousal, and it had given them both lot of ideas that they had spent most of the previous evening exploring. Her smile in the guttering candle-light came back to him, and he turned back to look at her.

The cigarette in his hand burned itself out while he was thinking, and he was lighting another when he saw it. The first rays of the sun had come over the hills, and were just starting to illuminate the small temple in the meadow across the road from the hotel. It was very small, and he had to look carefully to make it out. It was a colour that he could not have imagined, and he knew that he had to have a closer look. He carefully made his way across the room and quietly closed the door behind him. The lobby was empty, as was the road, except for a pair of painfully thin old men dragging a dead animal behind them. He waved to them and set off across the grass. He heard something from behind and turned to see them yelling something at him. It might have been English, but the way they spoke it up here, it was impossible to make out. It sounded too matter-of-fact to be a warning, so he waved and turned back to his quest.

It took him no more than five minutes to reach the old temple compound, dedicated to one of the many Gods or Goddesses in the Hindu pantheon. It might have been old before most of the ruins that he knew from home had even been built, but the remains of the candles and the offerings indicated that it was still considered by someone to be a holy place. He looked for the low wall that he had seen from the balcony, and found it. That which he had seen was still there, in all its iridescent beauty. The orchid was large and possessed an unimaginable rainbow of hues. It nestled in a cranny in the rock wall, far above the earth. He knew about them from a bore in the foreign office. Air-breathers, the old man had called them. He started at it for some time before he became aware of the gentle hissing, just out of sight to his left.

He turned his eyes, not his head, and he was very glad of it. It had risen from the wall, its hood opening out a good foot above the top of the wall. Its mouth was open, its fangs extended. The morning sun reflected off its dark scales, making it at least as beautiful as the orchid. Sudden moves were dangerous? Did they seek heat, like the vipers back home? They were deadly, he knew that. His former employers had kept them and milked them for their venom. He tried to remember who had told him about the damn things. Malik. The only Indian he knew who had actually been to India. Malik, who lived his entire life in Surbiton except for a four week package holiday to Trincomalee. Malik had said the snakes were deaf, but that they could be hypnotized by  rhythmic swaying motions. He began to sway. The snake seemed unimpressed. It drew itself it up taller and drew back slightly. He increased the frequency of his swaying and began to sweat. It's hypnotizing _me_, he thought numbly. A small arm shot out suddenly, sweeping it off the wall. It landed in the bush with a thud and slithered away. She took his elbow and phased him.

"Why didn't you burn it?"

"I didn't want to. It was beautiful."

She stared at him, obviously annoyed.

"Haven't you got enough sense to stay out of the grass?"

He had been in the tropics before, and he had been told of the risks, but most snakes were smart enough to slither away from the flames.

"How could you be sure you were faster? Why didn't you just phase us?"

She looked even more annoyed for a moment, but then her stone face fractured into a grin.

"What were you trying to do?"

"Hypnotize it, like one of those holy men with the horn and the pot."

"It wasn't that kind. It was the kind that spits in your eyes and blinds you. It's slow, though, not like a rattler. I had plenty of time."

He reached for the orchid.

"If you pick it, it will die."

That was obvious, but then, it would die. It would look beautiful for a few hours, then waste away to nothing. He dropped his hand to his side.

"What?"

"So will we."

"Yeah, but we've got a lot of living to do first. Come on."

She led him back to the road, phased. The two old men were still there when they reached the edge. They didn't appear to be surprised to see two Europeans walking as ghosts through the reeds.

Back in the room, as she began to pack, he went out on the balcony again and watched the two men drag the goat down the road until they vanished around a bend out of sight.

FIN.

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