Chapter Seventy-Five
Seventy-Five
Method
I have to think and not panic. I might be drifting through my life, but I’m on Loor for a reason and I have a job to do. The number one item on that job description is to keep the animals safe.
There’s something in the binder about what to do in the event of a snake escape but I can’t remember what it is. I rush downstairs, head already spinning a little from the alcohol, and grab the binder from the coffee table.
Flicking through the pages, I find the right section and exhale. Given that only a few hours have elapsed since I failed to shut the vivarium sliding door, it’s highly likely that Cedric is still somewhere in the house, which means all I have to do is track him.
I go from room to room shutting all the windows and putting cushions in front of the kitchen white goods, so he can’t get behind them.
Then I’m ready to set up my tracking traps. I can do this. I just need one kitchen staple.
Standing on a chair, and groping in the farthest reaches of the topmost kitchen cupboard, I find it. An enormous, very full bag of flour.
I carry it to the threshold of every room and pour it in a thick line across all the internal door openings, leaving the doors themselves flung back.
When I’m done, I pray for Cedric to be a particularly exploratory type of corn snake who won’t spend his one night of freedom curled in a dark place, and then I pass out in a drunken sleep on the sofa.
*
In the morning, although I’m hungover to hell and bleary-eyed, I feel like a kid on Christmas Day, because I see it straight away. The flour line dividing the lounge from the downstairs bedroom where I first met Caleb has been mussed up and there’s a faint, vanishing trail of flour leading towards the bed.
Somewhere in this room, Cedric is hiding out.
It takes me an hour to find him, because he’s managed to wedge himself behind the heavy oak chest of drawers, in a deep groove between the back panel and the feet.
Overjoyed, I lift him gently so as not to startle him and he looks at me balefully through his tiny, red eyes.
He’s cold to the touch and barely moving in my hands, and I’m terrified his body temperature has dropped dangerously low in the night. I rush upstairs to get him back into his vivarium and under his heat lamp, and when I’m sure he’s finally safe, I sit back on the carpet, and weep.