Page 95 of Snake

Knox

I’m exhausted, but I can’t fall asleep. It has nothing to do with the three different breaths surrounding me. Mason’s, long and deep. Silas, short and shallow. Nim’s...so even, so light, I keep checking to make sure her chest is still rising and falling.

It’s because I don’t dare close my eyes.

In the past, every day was torture. A battle. A fucking nightmare. But sometimes Lorenzo would go out of town. That was when our family broke out of our dented, damaged shells and opened to the light. To hope.

I have no memories before the age of six. Some scattered ones between then and when I turned thirteen. But those days when Lorenzo wasn’t at home, they’re the most vivid. The ones I cherish, even to this day. We’d always get out of the house. Mom would take us to go watch a movie at the drive-in theater, or we’d go eat at the diner, or go swimming at Scarstone Lake. Those were the only times we could pretend we were a normal family.

Happy.

But those days never lasted. Lorenzo loved to torment us, so he’d always tell us when he was coming back. He’d give us at least a day’s warning, sometimes more.

Those nights, waiting on his return, I’d feel like this. Dull and heavy with exhaustion. Mind numbed by the pressure between hope and despair. There, on the cusp of a normal, happy life, knowing the one I really lived would always be filled with pain and desolation, I became trapped.

I don’t feel trapped now, but I’m just as desperate for this moment to last forever.

But nothing can stay the same. If something doesn’t change, then it stagnates. Eventually rots. That’s what happened to the Pellegrino family. We couldn’t change anything—us kids, we were too young, and our mother, too weak. So we stagnated. Then we all began rotting on the inside.

Mother had drugs to help her through. What did my sisters and I have? I guess I had the Serpents. My sisters became monsters—both at home and at school.

But none of it could contain the rot.

It consumed my mother after I began studying at the Academy. A few weeks in, I decided not to go back to the Pellegrino mansion horror show.But Mason was insistent I join him at a party in town. I wasn’t even meant to be anywhere near my house that weekend. If it hadn’t been for Mason…

No, not Mason.

Christ.

I rub my eyelids with my fingers, trying not to wake anyone around me. These thoughts always come to me in the dead of night. They say three a.m. is the witching hour, but they’re wrong. It’s the haunting hour. It’s when the ghosts of the past come back and play havoc with your mind.

It’s what happened that day, nearly four years ago. I was at Mason’s house hours after the party. I’d passed out for an hour before sitting up in a cold sweat.

Sasha had woken me up. I realized the instant I was awake that it had been a dream—or maybe a nightmare—but that didn’t change the way her bark echoed in my ears.

The mind is a fucked up thing.

I tried waking Mason, but he was passed the fuck out. So I made that journey I’d made so many times when I was a kid—the round-about route taking me from Mason’s backyard into mine, briefly delving into the boundary of the Silverash forest on the way.

I don’t know what would have happened if Sasha’s urgent bark hadn’t woken me up.

I wouldn’t still have a family, that’s for sure.

When I opened the house, I knew something was wrong. Lorenzo had been out of town the previous week, but he’d told us he was coming back on Sunday. This time, he told us four days in advance.

I guess my mother couldn’t stand the anticipation anymore.

But fuck it, I’ll never understand why she thought Cecelia and Mariella couldn’t make that decision for themselves.

I found them in their rooms. Cecelia in hers, Mariella in hers, my mother in hers. All fast asleep. Oblivious. That’s what I thought, anyway. But they were a little too quiet. A little too peaceful.

That’s when I realized they weren’t sleeping.

That’s when I realized they were dead.

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