Lesson Seventeen: Snakes in the Class

  

             Jon glanced out the hallway window.  It was dark out, and yet it was only 5:00 p.m. He shook his head.  I hate this time of year he thought to himself.  Because it was the middle of winter, darkness enshrouded life early for several months.  It often made work more difficult because Jon couldn’t just do what he needed to do outside because it was too dark to see.  But what could he do?

  Jon’s shift was normally a morning one.  But today, Jon was in late because he’d been called in to deal with a smoke detector problem. And on top of that it was a Friday night. Jon had walked around the building checking to make sure everything was okay after he’d replaced the smoke head and reset the fire panel.  He just wanted to be sure there weren’t any “real fires” that might have started while the fire system was offline for the last hour.

  Jon neared the science wing.  This was his last stop before coding out and heading back home.  It was dark inside the building and the darkness outside created a scenario wherein it was almost like wrapping darkness inside of darkness.  Even his trusty Maglite was having difficulty penetrating the thick gloom.  Of the four science rooms in this area, Jon thought he’d swing through the one farthest from civilization. That science room used to be an old boiler room before the building was remodeled a few years back.  To reach this room Jon had to go down a short hallway that dead-ended at a door.  Going through the door, Jon stepped down four steps into a dark, lab-like area that housed the biology classroom.  Having previously been a boiler room, it contained hidden areas and side rooms where equipment for the heating system used to reside.  Concrete pillars protruded from the floor and pierced the ceiling as they held up part of the building overhead.  As Jon cast the light from his flashlight around the room, eerie shadows grew and shrank with the movement of his beam.  Jon stepped inside.

  Jon didn’t mind the creepiness of this room since he knew the school inside and out. He knew every hidden nook and cranny and had been there long enough to see the building remodeled a couple of times.  So, he knew that where current walls now existed often enclosed empty areas behind them that were blocked off during a reconfiguration. 

  Jon wanted to check this room because the science teacher, Mr. Horace Scarey, not only taught biology, he also had a few animals he kept in his room as part of his curriculum.  He had a few rats, insects, an ant colony, frogs and snakes.  Of the creatures in his room, Jon was most fascinated by the snakes. 

  Jon didn’t like snakes, but he had a compelling intrigue regarding them.  He knew they weren’t slimy, or dangerous, at least not Mr. Scarey’s snakes, but still their ability to slither, creep, crawl and writhe in total silence and with such stealth piqued Jon’s curiosity.  Sometimes during class, Jon would drop by and watch Horace handle the snakes and show the kids.  They were very friendly and accommodating considering how much they were handled.  It’s almost as if they knew they were the center of attention and wanted the adoration given them by the hundreds of kids that saw them each year.

  Jon walked across the room with his Maglite in hand.  Shadows bounced off the walls and cabinets and an occasional glint and reflection of his beam would bounce off one of the glass enclosures on the opposite side of the room.  Jon made his way through the labyrinth of desks and chairs and finally reached the glass snake terrarium.  He looked around and behind the enclosure trying to see where the snakes were hiding.  Since the terrarium was filled with sticks, grass, rocks and other things for the snakes to hide in, it was often difficult to see them.  Plus, the terrarium was rather large measuring two feet wide by two feet high by six feet long.  This gave the serpents plenty of room to move about.  And since there were only two snakes both about two feet long, they could easily curl up and hide without anyone seeing them, although their tiny, beady eyes were probably watching whoever was peering into their enclosure at any given time.

Jon stopped in front of the terrarium and carefully peered inside.  His eyes roved around the enclosure like searchlights scanning the night skies. He looked under the twigs, peered around rocks, searched the clumps of grass and willed the sand to part to expose the hiding places of the snakes.  But to no avail.  Jon could not see them anywhere. Jon stepped back to one end of the terrarium and again scanned the entire length of the terrarium looking for any movement, any indication as to where the slithering creatures might be hiding.  After a solid ten minutes, Jon’s shoulders drooped and he straightened up and stretched his aching lower back. He stood in dismay and utter disbelief realizing that he couldn’t find two small snakes in a finite-sized enclosure. 

As Jon turned to leave and make his way back through the darkened maze of a room, his eye caught movement in the right side of the terrarium. Freezing in place, Jon turned and leaned down to get a closer look.  Again, he saw movement.  And then he saw the snake.  I knew you guys were here somewhere Jon mumbled, a wry smile creasing his face.  But Jon’s mind raced with caution and bewilderment.  His brain told him something wasn’t quite right.  The movement almost looked like it was out-of-sync with the size of the terrarium.  It was as if the movement were farther away, like looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.  Jon squinted and looked harder.  And then it struck him.  The snake he saw was not in the terrarium.  It was BEHIND the terrarium!

Jon’s heart jumped in his chest so hard that he literally felt it bounce off his rib cage.  Terrified that the snake would crawl around the terrarium and attack him, Jon started backing up very slowly keeping a close eye on the serpent.  In the dim twilight of the room and his flashlight beam, the snake’s eyes glistened like tiny golden jewels as he stared deep into Jon’s soul.  His tiny tongue, forked, long, green and quick flicked in and out of his mouth like a diabetic needle meant to draw blood.  Jon’s eyes looked like huge, golden cookies as he slowly began to leave the room in reverse.

Carefully reaching behind him, Jon cautiously made his way through the maze of desks, chairs and supporting pillars.  Never once did he take his cookies off the jewels that stared back at him in the murky gloom and never once did he blink.  As he retreated some ten feet from the terrarium, Jon suddenly realized something horrifying.  Where was the second snake?

Jon’s heart beat even harder.  It felt as if it was leaving a dent on the underside of his ribs it was pounding so hard.  Frantically he began to glance this way, that way and back again toward the first snake. Jon was so terrified that he failed to ascertain how far backwards he had trekked.  At that moment, Jon miscalculated his steps and tripped over a desk.  Falling backwards, his arms flailing, Jon’s Maglite flew out of his hand and bounced off the wall behind him.  It hit the floor, rolled in a semi-circle and stopped where it shone across the floor toward the counter where the terrarium sat.  The beam was split into several shafts of light as it was cut by the legs of the chairs and desks. This added an eerie luminescence to the room and cast the terrarium in a dark, haunting shadow. 

Sitting up like a Jack-in-the-box, Jon’s eyes immediately were trained on the spot near the terrarium where the jewel-eyed creature had been.  He blinked once, twice, three times but in shock Jon realized the snake was gone.  Now Jon had two serpents to fear in the darkness. 

Crab-walking backwards while trying to regain his stance, he plowed into a pillar behind him dropping him to his butt.  Jon’s furtive eyes quickly moved back and forth with lightning speed scanning the room like a radar beam in search of the missing ophidians. Coming face-to-face with these creatures would almost certainly cause immediate death, or so he felt.

Jon got to his knees and stood up.  Leaning down and quickly retrieving his Maglite, Jon quickly shone the beam in all directions.  He was looking for any movement he could see in this translucent haze.  Jon glanced over his right shoulder toward the classroom door.  Quickly estimating the distance between himself and the door, Jon began to move toward the room’s egress. Ever aware of his situation and what he was in fear of, Jon never once stopped his continual scan of his surroundings.  A sudden noise to his left stopped Jon in his tracks.  A sound like sandpaper on wood filled his ears.  Jon had no idea what was causing the sound, but he didn’t like it.  It ran shivers down his spine.  His arms bubbled with gooseflesh.

Wanting to leave the room even faster than before, Jon turned to run the last few feet to the door.  His Maglite in hand, he turned, stepped forward and was instantly blind!  Jon’s mind raced trying to understand what had happened.  Instinctively he reached up to his eyes to feel for the sudden cause of his loss of vision.  When he did, he felt something smooth and cool on his face and as his hand began to remove it he realized it was one of the snakes that had dropped down from an overhead light and had draped itself across his face.  Jon screamed a silent scream, his voice non-existent and his mouth agape.  Realizing that his hand still held the snake, Jon flung it across the room.  He heard a muffled “thump” as it hit the wall and then heard the tell-tale sounds of the snake brushing against something in the dark as it crawled to who-knew-where. 

Lifting his Maglite once again, Jon shone it toward the exit.  He was only a few feet from escape.  He had four stairs to climb and then freedom.  Quickly his mind calculated what he needed to do.  Run, jump four steps, sail through the door and run as fast as he could to the end of the short hallway.  Within milliseconds of this calculation, Jon’s feet began to move. Oblivious to the obstacles blocking his path, he plowed through desks and chairs toward freedom and safety. But it was not to be.

As his forward momentum propelled him forward, his body followed.  As his front foot left the floor to move and his back leg followed, his eyes saw the golden jewels of the second snake sitting on the penultimate step. He was neatly coiled as if he were a living slinky.  His tongue flicked the air detecting all elements of his surroundings.  Unfortunately, since Jon’s body was already “in flight” with both feet off the floor and his center of balance tipped forward in a position of flight, he couldn’t stop fast enough to avoid the serpent just ahead. 

Trying to throw all his senses and bodily movements in reverse, Jon’s body contorted itself into a pretzel as it tried to stop, turn, twist, jump, and move all at the same time.  His ophthalmic cookies were bigger than ever and his brain pulsed with neural activity at speeds greater than that of light as it tried to signal his body to respond. To an onlooker, Jon’s body looked like some martial arts warrior as it sailed through the air in a twisted, flailing form, gravity slowly dropping him in a beautiful laws-of-nature arc onto the second-to-the-last step just inches ahead. Jon closed his eyes waiting for the impact of his face with the ophidian. 

His mouth agape, his eyes closed and his body in motion, Jon’s face squished squarely into the body of the coiled serpent.  His mouth felt the soft, cool skin of the snake slide across his lips.  His nose could smell the reptilian odor of this coiled, living mass.  His hands attempted to stop his forward momentum but both hit the snake head-on right alongside his face.  As his feet followed the sudden stop of his head and body, he crumpled in a heap on the steps with the snake underneath him.  Jon attempted to scream, but instead got a mouthful of the snake’s body slithering across his tongue.  Jon nearly fainted.

Jon’s brain had shut down the pain portion of his body and was in flee mode.  Scrambling like a newborn on ice, Jon couldn’t stand up quick enough or with any grace whatsoever.  The snake too did not want to die and it was squirming as fast as possible to get away.  However, with his limited vision, all he could do was move in any direction possible!  And he did, right down Jon’s shirt.

Before Jon had stood completely erect, he realized where the snake had gone.  Frantically, he tried to reach in and remove it.  But it was too deep.  The snake had fallen to the bottom of his tucked-in shirt and was burrowing as fast as possible to get out.  Finding a small indentation near Jon’s belt buckle, the two-foot ophidian burrowed his head downward and underneath Jon’s belt.  Jon felt his cool, smooth body sliding across his belly and down his inner thigh.  Instinctively, Jon squealed in terror and ripped at his pants.  The snake continued to move south.  Since Jon’s pants were a bit tighter at the bottom than the top, the snake found the space to move in becoming restrictive.  The snake began to panic.  As it tried to force its way out, it realized the area between the pants and Jon’s skin was tight, maybe too tight.  Making a U-turn, the snake started back up Jon’s leg.  Jon felt what was happening and was jumping up and down trying to dislodge the serpent like a man on a hot plate.  As he did, the snake would fly up and down inside his trousers. Jon screamed like a baby.

The muscles in the snake’s body and his instinctive abilities to navigate rough terrain enabled him to endure the constantly up-and-down movement of Jon’s jumping.  Thus, the snake could continue his ascent creeping toward the top of Jon’s pants.  Jon reached down and ripped his shirt out of his pants in hopes of grabbing the snake and jerking it out of his clothing.  However, Jon’s constant jumping created a comical scene as the snake’s head bobbed in and out of the top of his pants as it tried to extricate itself to freedom.  The Jack-in-the-Pants ophidian had lost some of the mischievous gleam in its eyes. Instead, they had morphed into orbs of blackness.  Dilated jewels of death beamed in and out of Jon’s pants.  Jon tried catching it on each exit from underneath his belt and each time he missed.  Panicked, Jon jumped harder.  The snake in turn squirmed faster and more franticly.  And then, with one mighty jump, the snakes body emerged six inches beyond Jon’s waist-girded, belt-encircled body.  Grabbing the snake by the head, Jon pulled quick and fast removing the snake from his clothing.  In terror, Jon flung it backwards over his head.  In the distance, he heard something like wet bacon slapping against skin.  It was then that he heard the scream of another human.

Jon turned to see who was there.  His shirt torn from his pants and hanging askew, his belt loose from the buckle due to the quick extrication of the serpent, his hair tousled and his eyes now the size of pies, Jon found himself staring into the serpent entwined face of Horace Scarey.  Jon’s heart quit beating and sank to the bottom of his rib cage.  He felt it beating in the pit of his stomach. 

Jon shakily turned around and illuminated the room by turning on the room’s lights.  There, amongst overturned chairs and desks stood Mr. Scarey. He had entered the back of the room from an outside door that was rarely used.  He’d returned to pick up a few things he needed to grade papers over the weekend.  Horace reached up, delicately picked the snake off his face and returned it to the terrarium.  He then scanned the labyrinthine classroom and spotted the second snake coiled in the far corner of the room.  Without saying a word, Horace made his way through the maze of toppled furniture and retrieved the second ophidian.  He put it back in the terrarium, closed the lid and latched the cover tight.  Then he turned to Jon.

Jon hung his head sheepishly. 

“So, what happened here,” Horace asked.

Jon slowly raised his head.  He looked at Mr. Scarey. “I was just locking things up for the night and came in to check on the snakes.  Then I noticed they were out of the terrarium and that’s when all hell broke loose.  I tried to leave but was accosted by these serpents.”

Horace chuckled under his breath. 

“These guys are harmless.  They wouldn’t hurt a flea.  You know that.  You’ve seen me work with these guys for years.”

“I know.  It just freaked me out,” Jon stammered.

Horace continued.  “One of the students must have left the lid unlatched and they escaped.  They’re always looking for a way out.  Sorry they scared you so badly.”

Jon smiled weakly. 

“Sorry.  I didn’t mean to cause trouble and really didn’t mean to throw that snake on your face.  In all the commotion, I didn’t even hear you come in the back way.”

“Don’t worry about it.  No harm done.  Why don’t you get home?  You probably need some rest after this ordeal.”

Jon knew he was right. 

“Thanks Horace.  I do.  See you Monday.”

Horace nodded and turned to get the items he’d come for from his desk.  Jon turned and walked up the four steps into the short hallway.  He locked Horace’s door and headed back toward his office. After signing out for the night, Jon headed home. 

He pulled into his driveway and parked.  As he approached the front door his three-year-old son greeted him at the doorway. 

“Daddy, daddy you’re home!”

“Hi Elmer,” Jon said with a gleam in his eye. He hugged his son and kissed him on the forehead. 

“Daddy.  Look what I have!”

Jon’s eyes looked at his son’s tiny hands.  As if in slow motion Elmer reached out and handed Jon a snake.  Jon almost dropped his boy on the ground.  Jon stared dumbfounded at Elmer.  Then he saw Elmer’s lips moving.  As if hearing him speak like he was under water he heard a distant voice exclaim, “Mommy bought this for me today.  Isn’t it cool!”