Preface

Patrick was in bed, Rachel asleep beside him. He’d had a disturbing dream. It was real, nearly tactile. And yet it was very strange. He’d encountered an enormous snake. A serpent of unknown species. But then it became a large, statuesque woman. A vast and beautiful woman. Anjea. Dilga. Julunggul. An instantiation of birth, fertility, the growth of life. He’d heard and read stories. The woman grasped him between her massive thighs, hugging him to the seat of her gender and transformed into a likeness of The Great Serpent. The coils closed about him. And he awoke, soaked in perspiration and sticky with ejaculate.

“Are you OK?” Rachel asked.

“I think so. I’m going to wash. You go to sleep.” Later, at breakfast, Patrick related his dream.

“What does it mean?” Rachel asked.

“I don’t know. In The Silver Chair, the female serpent is evil. In the Edda, Thor actually lifts a coil of the world serpent. In Egypt and Greece the ouroboros, the serpent eating its tail, is the sign of the beginning and the end being one. Birth and death. My python, the one on the wall, was female. Is female? I just don’t know.”