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DevotedSub's Taboo Collection
Monsters After Midnight
Vol. 3
Eleven monster stories
Part One — The Serpent's Maw
Mamacita was twenty-six years old, and she had spent four days hacking through a rainforest that hated her guts.
Her machete arm was a dead slab of meat. Her boots were soaked through and squelching. Her khaki shorts and her black sports bra were glued to her body with sweat, and the stone doorway she'd finally uncovered in the side of a vine-choked hill was the most beautiful thing she'd ever laid eyes on.
The temple didn't appear on any map. The local guides in the village wouldn't speak its name — one old man had crossed himself and walked away when she showed him the rubbing. The records she'd dug out of a mildewed colonial archive in the capital called it the Serpent's Maw, a ruin abandoned for a thousand years, and the last page of the surveyor's journal said, in shaky ink: it is not empty. something coils in the dark. god forgive me, I am going back in.
Mamacita went in anyway. She was that kind of woman — the kind who read a warning and heard an invitation.
The air inside was cool and thick, smelling of wet stone and burnt old incense and something else, something musky and animal and male that made the back of her neck prickle. Her headlamp cut a white cone through the blackness and found walls covered in carved scales — row after row of serpentine reliefs, coiling around pillars, wrapping every doorway, every lintel, every inch of stone. At the far end of the long chamber stood an altar of black volcanic stone, slick-looking, and on it, a shape.
She froze with her hand on her machete.
It was a man. It was not a man.
He sat — coiled — on the altar, his upper body bare and carved like something out of myth, skin dusk-gold and patterned with dark diamond markings that ran down his arms and ribs and disappeared below his navel. Below his navel there was no waist, no legs — only a massive serpent's body, emerald and black, thick as a tree trunk, wound around the altar in slow lazy loops that flexed with impossible power. His face was severe and beautiful, black hair falling past his shoulders, and his eyes — molten amber, slit-pupiled — opened slowly as her light found him, fixing on her with the patience of something that had waited centuries.