"Snake in His Bosom" (1977/1983)

The main character in “Snake in His Bosom” is Emil Fuerst, who owns a world-renowned security firm (“Safety Fuerst”). Lafferty’s story has three characters. It can be enjoyed literally as a story about a life-or-death game with betrayal: so, first, the plot, told straight.

On the day of the story, Fuerst is playing what he calls a Hunter-and-the-Hunted game with a master burglar known as Gatto. It is a duel meant to test his security system and Gatto’s cunning. The setting is Emil’s personal fortress-house, the most secure building in the world. The agreed-upon stakes are the lives of either Emil or Gatto; Emil’s wife, Sarpa, goes to the winner.

Throughout the evening, Emil experiences growing anxiety. He hears phantom footsteps and sees Gatto’s image on his security monitors. Sarpa assures him that his screens are clear and the house is silent.

As the break-in continues, we learn that Emil is in contact, via a radio-telephone, with his junior partner, Benedict Kingfisher, who is supposedly homesick with the flu. Benedict reassures Emil that the electronic security net has not been penetrated. Lafferty builds tension, and then Gatto suddenly appears after seeming to have broken through nonexistent wooden doors and ascended nonexistent stairs. Benedict then reveals himself on the video viewer. He admits that he is Gatto and that he has been hiding inside the house for two days. Using an intimate knowledge of Emil’s security systems, he has manipulated the sensory data and the electronic receptors.

Then it gets worse. Sarpa betrays Emil by triggering a trapdoor, which drops her and Emil into a reinforced iron-fencing room in the basement. Benedict joins them. It turns out that Benedict has been manipulating Emil in their fencing games for some time, inflating Emil’s confidence. The two then duel using short épées, a specialized weapon Benedict has mastered in secret. Benedict wounds Emil. We learn that the plan was orchestrated by Sarpa. Bleeding out, Emil hears the sh-klaup footsteps, and Benedict tells him they are the footsteps of death.

“Snake in His Bosom” is not a very well-known Lafferty story, having appeared in Chris Drumm’s Snake in His Bosom and Other Stories (1983), a small cluster of idiosyncratic Lafferty, even by Lafferty standards. As I said, the story can be enjoyed straight, as if it were only about the duel between Emil and Benedict, with Sarpa betraying Emil. Somewhat interestingly, the story also relies on the kind of betrayal one finds in Lafferty’s unpublished short story “Goldfish,” and there may even be an Easter egg hinting as much. Emil says that not even a goldfish could get into his fortress, and goldfish have tried.

I think the story is also two other things, both allegorical. On one level, it belongs to the genre of psychomachia, in which aspects of a soul battle with one another. That could be unpacked, but what makes the psychomachia especially interesting here is that it’s being played out through a body betraying itself. Lafferty suffered a heart attack at the beginning of the 1970s, and it would be a debilitating stroke in 1994 that largely incapacitated him until his death in 2002. His health was troubled in other ways during those years.

Setting aside the psychomachia, “Snake in His Bosom” does a few things to make the body-betrayal allegory hard to miss. The fortress-house is a stand-in for an invulnerable body. This is the hubris of good health, or the confidence that comes from the silence of the organs. The betrayal comes from within, and it shows up first as a corrupted sensation. In the story’s sequence, Emil’s hands shake, the signals go fuzzy, he hears humming, and footsteps that he is told are not coming from outside. His own security systems feed him false certainty and false alarms at the same time:

“Emil, don’t be so jumpy. The detector has not gone on ‘third signal.’ Nothing at all is happening, except maybe to you internally.” “Oh? I was sure for a moment that the detector had gone on ‘third signal.’ I guess that it hadn't, but the whole detector is pretty fuzzy now . . . they’ve all developed a humming sound that is very close to the alarm signal.” “No, Emil, they haven’t. They’re absolutely silent.”

Throughout, the security system parallels a body becoming unreliable in its most basic functions of perception and control. Right from Lafferty’s poetic epigraph, “Eats Hinges and Doors,” the story says the danger comes from the inside. Sarpa reads Emil’s body before any intruder can be proven. He is symptomatic: “jittery and jumpy,” with “hands . . . . shaking.” Then he says the approaching footstep he hears is a “slurred step,” the step of a stroke-victim, foot-dragging in half-death:

“That's the sound of heavy footsteps on old wooden passageways,” Emil said with his glance darting all around in a sort of amused apprehension. “It's the classical ‘slurred step.’ Both ghosts and zombies make this slurred sound, as do also persons who have had strokes. This is the foot-dragging sound of those who are dead in at least some detail. It is caused by the destruction of the tendon—”

The story moves from outside in, and soon it treats the house as if it were Emil’s nervous system, beginning to turn on its owner. Emil picks up signals, but Sarpa says nothing is happening except maybe “internally.” Emil’s detector feels “fuzzy,” and he hears a near-alarm hum. Sarpa says it is “absolutely silent.” When Emil says nonexistent monitors are showing impossible images, she says he's losing his grip.

Lafferty moves slowly through a body betraying itself. At the beginning of the story, he describes Emil as a mastiff-like figure, physically strong. This sets up being undermined. As the story overlays Emil’s body and the fortress, Sarpa says that not even God could enter without the night’s code. Emil clings to the idea that he can’t be cut off; he relies on a monitored lifeline to his partner even while that partner is supposedly ill, yet he feels the connection tighten as his reality contradicts itself: spaces that “aren’t there,” stairs he knows shouldn’t exist, a door handle that shouldn’t exist but turns anyway. Sarpa herself says that what seems imagined suddenly feels solid. Even when Benedict says that the perimeter hasn’t been penetrated and that the “intruder” is only an image Emil can see through, the story snaps the theme into focus when Sarpa says that no one entered, but someone was “already here,” followed by Benedict’s admission that he has been sabotaging the receptors that feed Emil his world:

Emil was in fencing togs of his own design, purple and red, skin-tight, shimmering with small, light speckles or scales or point-turning armor. But everybody looks a little jittery in fencing togs, always.

Emil's purple and red fencing suit is the musculature of an anatomy textbook, which is why it fits so snugly. Benedict confirms the origin of the final sounds:

“Believe me, Emil, they are none of mine, none of my doing. You are fey, man! Haven't you known that about yourself? They are the footsteps of death that worry you so, and you are the only one who can hear them.”

For those who love Lafferty and his work, it should be a terrifying story, like “Rang Dang Kaloof” and “Thieving Bear Planet.” I find it a little hard to reread.

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