Death and taxes and ... why did it have to be snakes
Garnett Radcliffe's 'Pit of Screams' (1938) turns clerking into a death match
I was first mesmerized by snakes when I was 6 or 7. We lived in a crooked green house on the top of a hill that sloped down through our backyard, past our neighbor Fadwa’s garden, and into a giant swamp. There were lots of strange creatures in that descent behind our house.
My memory of growing up there is at once fuzzy and vivid. I likely misremember a common woodchuck for an elusive backyard badger, an owl for The Raven, and a bull snake for a python, but I’ll swear until my dying day that I once really, truly saw a godlike boy entranced by a fistful of snakes.
I was playing catch with my brother next to our detached garage that was next to our old Lebanese neighbor’s garden. Fadwa used to harvest small green squash from her vine-y lost world and stuff them with rice and spicy meat. She cooked up these legendary kousa in the kitchen at the back of her first-floor candy shop. My father still dreams about Fadwa’s kousa.
I don’t remember them as well as he does, but I can vividly recall the snakes that surrounded Fadwa’s garden and lived everywhere in our backyard. Snakes, when growing up, were my normal.
This day was a common, sunny Midwestern one. Fadwa’s garden burst with verdant chaos. An older boy, MB, joined my older brother and me. My brother and I were playing catch, but MB was preoccupied with something else. On a little slope falling into Fadwa’s garden, he was raking up the garter snakes that were sunning themselves. Handful after handful, MB scraped the unsuspecting creatures off the warm, weedy lawn and deposited them in his big, shallow grey tub. There, they slithered in a knotty boil. Some slipped free over the edge.
MB held up his prized tub in one hand. In his other was an infinite tangle of scales and stripes and heads and tails. Again and again, this Medusa-Boy flexed his writhing catch toward his jaw and just ... MB just smiled.
My brother and I had stopped playing catch. We stood back. My eyes froze. I had turned to stone.
Where did all those creatures come from? Fadwa’s garden? Our garage? Why was MB smiling while he was being bitten on his arm? On his hand? Again and again, snake bite after snake bite, he just looked closer at them, daring them to bite his face. Dear god, why was Medusa-Boy smiling?
I know now. MB was smiling because he looked invincible.
This mesmerizing moment came back to me while reading Garnett Radcliffe’s “Pit of Screams” (19381). The short story is part of Guilty Creatures: A Menagerie of Mysteries (2022), a collection edited by Martin Edwards.
“Pit of Screams” is a nasty little chiller about power, sadism, revenge, and, yes, snakes. Not as many snakes as Raiders of the Lost Ark, but close.
The subject of the story is an unlikely one. Set in India, a powerful Rajah suspects three people might be cheating him out of his entitlement: tax money. The Ministry of Finance and two of his dutiful tax clerks are the prime suspects. The Rajah turns to his Pit of Screams to ferret out the truth. Our narrator, a British businessman man visiting the Rajah, witnesses the whole sadistic spectacle.
The Rajah first sends his Minister to the pit—no trial, no hesitation. There’s a tall pole in the middle of the pit. The Minister climbs up and begins to tire. When he begins to scream, the pit fills with vipers:
When the snakes reared themselves around the foot of the pole to stare at their victim they looked pretty, like flowers straying in the breeze. They were Togara vipers, long and thin with mottled bodies and green and red hoods. From the top of the poles they must have looked like tulips.
The Minister falls.
As grimly beautiful as death can be, I’d say.
For the two clerks, the Rajah gathers a crowd and devises a contest so he can at least keep one (and keep his taxes rolling in). He gives the clerks empty ledgers and two competing stacks of bills. Whoever is the fastest and error-free in tallying the taxes due escapes the pit. The loser gets to climb the pole and, as the narrator and the Rajah and his faithful look on, tire, scream, and inevitably fall to the snakes.
“Pit of Screams” is suspenseful because Radcliffe forces us to observe the action, beat by beat. The narrator’s gaze ties our senses inextricably to the desperation. Take how he describes one of the clerk’s race to finish before the other:
Hirnam Singh’s eyes flickered and we saw him crouch low over the table. He must have heard the scratching of Chirandah Dass’s nib like the hooves of a pursuer. His hand was like a brown spider darting across the page. The files passed from the “IN” tray on his left to the “OUT” tray on his right as quickly and precisely as if they were being carried on a conveyor belt through a machine.
Because there is precision in these details and metaphors, the author’s fixation becomes our fixation. The effect is suspense. It’s stressful. It’s thrilling. It’s a textbook example of how to torment readers: prevent them from looking away.
I remember MB, the Medusa-Boy, precisely because he paused to make me look at his defiance of danger. Sure, he was holding garter snakes. These innocent creatures couldn’t bite through pieces of paper much less his skin. But I was 6 or 7. I didn’t know garter snakes were harmless. MB was holding these wiggling, snapping strange things I wouldn’t dare hold. He was being attacked and pretending it was something to be admired for. MB, to my eyes, was a death-defying god.
The vision of MB playing with snakes was impossible to look away from then; it’s impossible to forget now. Perhaps it is the main reason I respond to “Pit of Screams” so personally.
All I know is that a strong memory and a good story are alike in one key way: their residual powers can be measured by their intensity of unrelenting details.
It definitely appeared in Suspense in 1958 and likely in Argosy in 1938. The editor couldn’t verify the date by publication, and I can’t get my hand on either source. Given its postcolonial take on an offended British gentleman encountering the uncivilized horrors of a faraway interior, I’ll go with 1938.
"There, they slithered in a knotty boil." I love this line so much. Moments of innocent wonder have such a potent capacity for mythmaking. This is a beautiful piece, Alexandyr!
Alex keeps getting better and better. I eagerly look forward to his next post.