Too bad it didn’t have snakes. But the written story sure would. “Serpent’s Revenge,” I thought of as a headline, or “Curse Comes True.” Something like that. Editors generally think up their own anyway so I didn’t really care. I cared more about the photos because a picture is worth a thousand words, quite literally, because they pay about the same when they’re published. If a small portion of the several hundred publications that were InfoMedia customers used even one of my photos, it could mean big bucks.

I pitied the deceased professor and was sorry for the loss of life but I didn’t know him and journalists have to be insensitive sometimes – okay, most of the time. The news business is a tough business, which is why I prefer features.

I continued with my photographer's dance -- bending and stretching, jitterbugging about for the right angle, composition, and background. Documented the scene, above, around, below. Especially the pit. Two electrical output lines ran from the Yamaha generator down into the pit. One had several loops and coils lying haphazardly on the ground before it went over and the other had very cord showing, had been pulled down.into the excavation.

The pit itself was about fifteen feet deep and ten feet in diameter at the bottom, the steep sides sloping down to a flat base. The electrical cord with shorter play above had a loop wound around one of the legs of the terrarium before it went to a small motor on a shaft sticking up out of the ground at a slight angle. The other electrical cord went to a pair of unlit lights on a tripod. There were lengths of pipe stacked in a lean-to on one side of the ladder and on the other side were a couple of shovels and buckets with hand tools inside.

I filled one digital media card with photos, popped the wafer of plastic out of the camera and inserted another and took a few more mostly redundant shots.

Lisa approached me, a warning in her eyes. Going to tell me to stop? She came close, touched my camera hand with trembling fingers, said, "I know you. Can you help me? I...I can't trust anyone local, they’re all against me. You've got to help me or I could be next."