“It had a crack in it,” Piper said. “The egg. Just a little one.”
That couldn’t be good.
I ought to just snag the birds right now, stuff them back inside their cages. Let them squawk all night if they wanted. Tuck in Piper on the air bed, and then go back to bed myself. Talk Taj into coming over tomorrow night when Aunt Pen was at her book group. Let him deal with whatever was happening downstairs.
I looked down at Piper. Her face was eager, alive.
And I could feel it too, thrumming through my blood, cutting crosswise against my fear: That eagerness. That wanting to know.
Whatever hatched out of that egg … whenever it did hatch … it would need food.
Wouldn’t it?
“Listen, Piper,” I said. “If I let you come down with me, will you promise to do what I say?”
Piper nodded.
“Then stick close behind me. And be careful on the stairs.”
I opened the basement door; Stella and Luna swooped down into the dark. I switched on the light and followed.
Thunder again—closer than before. At the bottom of the stairs I stopped, waited for Piper, took her hand. We walked past the furnace, the lawn furniture, the plastic bins. Just ahead lay the stack of tattered cardboard boxes. Stella and Luna were perched on the rim of the box with the egg. Watching.
We squatted beside the box. In the dim light I could see a gash in the egg, some kind of fissure between the sections.
“It’s bigger now,” Piper said.
“What is?”
“The crack.”
It was thin at the ends, the crack, but it gaped open in the middle. Wide enough that I could see inside.
Something dark in there. I could smell something, something dampish but not unpleasant.
The egg lurched, and I heard a soft ripping sound. The crack grew longer, wider. Something poked out of it, something small and hard to see.
Thunder boomed.
The birds flapped their wings. I jerked backward, lost my balance, and sat down hard on the cold, concrete floor. I leaned forward, knelt, fixed my gaze on the thing in the slit, unable to look away.
It was a claw.
The tiny, needle-sharp tip of a curving claw.
7
THANK YOU, MR. FRANZEN
EUGENE, OREGON
Your ostrich has a single claw.
It was a ridiculous thought, I knew it was ridiculous the moment it occurred to me, gaping down at whatever was trying to get out of that egg.
The claw wiggled, disappeared.
Your ostrich has a single claw and only two toes, to aid it in running more swiftly.
Mr. Franzen, sixth grade, Highland Drive Elementary. He was always going for what teachers call “enrichment,” which was actually great. I knew all sorts of random factoids, thanks to Mr. Franzen.
“Brynnie?” Piper reached for my hand. I closed my hand around hers, small and warm. “What is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’m thinking maybe some kind of really big bird.”
Your emu, by contrast, has three toes in a tridactyl arrangement.
Weird how some of this stuff sticks. But how many toes, I wondered, does your dodo bird have? Or something equally strange?
’Cause it could be something like that. It actually could. Not a tropical bird, of course—not in Alaska. But maybe something new, unknown to science. Your basic cryptid species. Which would be seismic cool. Only not right now, with both Mom and Dad gone.
Thunder rumbled. Piper squeezed my hand. Stella and Luna stretched up and flapped their wings. I could feel a charge in the air, an electric buzz that tingled at the roots of my hair.
The claw reappeared, raked against the seam in the egg, lengthening the crack.
Okay, so what was I supposed to do now? If some kind of strange cryptid thing was hatching in the basement, how was I supposed to keep it alive?
Stella leaned toward the egg, her topknot flared. I copped a quick ken.
Not worried. Curious.
The egg rolled a little. The claw strained. A bit of pleathery eggshell gave way with a soft pop. The gap widened; it was now a wedge of darkness sliced out of the surface of the egg.
Inside, I could see something gray and glistening and wet.
Didn’t look all that birdy. What other kinds of things hatched from eggs? Lizards? Turtles?
Light flashed in the window; thunder boomed. The birds, startled, took off. They circled the room, landed on another box, higher up the stack. The gray thing pressed against the fissure in the egg. Then, suddenly, the head was out.
Eyes tightly squinched shut beneath sticking-out bony brow ridges. No beak, but wide nostrils at the end of a long, narrow snout. No feathers, but a bony crest on its head, covered with some kind of loose, wrinkly, skinlike stuff with a fuzzy micro-fiber nap.
Piper let out a gasp. I scrambled backward, pulling her with me, heart pounding in my throat.
Okay, so we could definitely scratch ostrich off the list.
More like a lizard, maybe. Some megaweird kind of lizard.
With fur.
The head swiveled around, nostrils dilating, like it was sussing out its new world by smell. It made a sound—a hoarse, grating, pathetic, rusty-hinges squeak. Made me borderline cringe, but still it somehow had that pull on me—that feed-me, take-care-of-me pull, like kittens at the pet store or Stella when she was little. Except this thing was totally creep-out strange and, like, damp.
It struggled pitifully to break out of its shell, still squeaking. I halfway wanted to pry the egg apart to help it and halfway wished it would duck back inside and disappear forever.
The thing gave a massive lurch, ripped the shell wide open. It slithered out—all of it—and lay panting on the crumpled papers.
Thunder again. Far away. Rain pinged against the metal window wells and gurgled in the downspouts.
I pulled Piper into my lap. She looked up at me. “Brynnie?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t think it’s a bird.”
Right.
I leaned forward, studied the thing. Still heaving for breath. Heartbeat pulsing in its throat.
Yeah, it must be some kind of lizard. About the size of Asteroid, the neighbor’s little cat, and covered with that grayish, dampish, microfiber skin/fur stuff. Its head seemed far too big for its body, far too heavy for its spindly neck to support. It was allover skinny, with lots of hard little bumps and nodules. Four legs. Long, ridged tail. Mostly bones and skin and claws.
Ugly.
Seismic ugly.
The claws, I saw, weren’t bidactyl, like your ostrich claws. Or even tridactyl, like your emu claws, but … I counted. What was the Latin prefix for “five”? Pent? As in pentagon? Pentdactyl? Pendactyl?
Suddenly, I remembered a time when Mom had told me about another lizard. Super-rare. Someone had done some work with the microbes in its mouth and found, in the early experiments, that they seemed to degrade PCBs. Like, made them go away.
But hadn’t that been some kind of tropical thing? It wouldn’t have come from Alaska.
Would it?
So maybe this was something else?
The thing lifted its head, sniffing. It had that prehistoric look, like crocodiles and possums. Like it had been around since way before we got here. We as in humanoids. Eons and eons before.
A shiver jolted through me, an under-the-skin tremor: a premonition that I’d stumbled onto something way beyond me, something huge and primordial and …
What was that word Mr. Franzen had used when he was talking about raw power in nature? Things like volcanoes and hurricanes, things like black holes and nebulae and quasars?
Oh, yeah. Sublime.
It cranked up with the annoying squeaking thing. Pathetic-sounding, but bossy too. It must be hungry. Had to be. It flicked out its tongue. Skinny. Pink. Forked.
Your snake has a forked tongue. It tastes particles on the air, and that’s how it learns w
hat’s in its environment.
Thank you, Mr. Franzen.
By the way, Mr. Franzen:
What the hell is this?
8
MR. LIZARD
EUGENE, OREGON
“Piper,” I said, “would you go upstairs and get my laptop?”
“Why?” Piper asked.
“I need to figure out what this thing is. So we know what to feed it.”
“Okay,” Piper said.
“Unplug it first. The laptop.”
“I know.”
“Don’t drop it.”
“I won’t.”
“And don’t wake Aunt Pen.”
“I won’t!” Piper scowled. “I’m not a baby.”
I watched as she shuffled her ducky slippers toward the stairs. I could have snagged the laptop way faster by myself. But it didn’t seem like a good plan to leave Piper or the birds down here alone with the baby lizard-thing. It looked helpless, but you never knew. Some lizards were really quick. They could grab a bird, say, and stun it or kill it in a fraction of a second. Some lizards had poisonous spit.
Thunder in the distance. I could still hear rain tapping against the window well, but the worst of the storm seemed to have passed. Stella and Luna leaned down from their perch. I synched with Stella and felt a sort of friendly curiosity.
I bent to study the lizard, careful to stay out of spitting distance. Whatever that might be.
Long, lizardy body. Long, lizardy tail. Raised crest all down its spine. Kind of alligatory/crocodilian—except for that nappy skin/fur. Bulbous eyes, squeezed shut. Darkish almost everywhere but in the little patches where it was starting to dry, where it looked pinky-tan. I could smell it now—a warm, animal-baby smell, and something else, something that seemed familiar.
The thing was still squeaking. And shivering.
Did lizards shiver when they were cold? I seemed to remember they just shut their bodies down. Went dormant. But definitely it looked like a lizard. A huge one. Maybe some random, cryptid lizard that nobody even knew about.
Now it started making another kind of sound—little sucking, smacking sounds.
Hungry sounds.
It stumbled around in the box, searching blindly. Then, with a hopeless squeak, it sighed and flopped down onto the wadded-up newspaper.
Honestly? I didn’t think it could spit or stun or kill anything at the moment. I collected the pieces of its shell and moved them into a corner of the box.
Stella lit on the edge of its box, cocked a curious eye, and whistled. Luna sailed down beside her, skootched right up against her. Stella nibbled at Luna’s feet.
“I hate to break it to you, ladies,” I said, “but this is not a bird. I don’t think it’s going to be your friend.”
Piper didn’t take long. I pulled up a patio chair and fired up the laptop.
“It’s shivering,” Piper said.
“I know.”
“I think it’s cold.”
“Yeah, listen,” I said. “Does Aunt Pen have a heating pad? Have you ever seen one? Like what Dad puts on his back when it’s sore?”
“Aunt Pen put a hot water bottle in my bed.”
“Really?”
“She put it by my feet.”
“Could you get it?”
“Okay.”
She shuffled off again. I searched “large lizards.” There were several: the Australian water dragon, the Chinese water dragon, the bearded dragon, the Gila monster, the Komodo dragon.
Dragons and monsters. Perfect.
I couldn’t tell what kind of lizard this guy was because of the weird skin/fur, which hid its markings and ridges so I couldn’t compare them to the pictures online. I was guessing it was a baby thing, the skin. Probably it would molt. But so far I found no pictures of baby lizards.
Still, all the big lizards had five toes. So did our guy. Ours looked more birdy than lizardy, but maybe that was a baby thing too. Maybe the toes would change.
Food! What about food?
Turns out, lizards can be herbivores, carnivores, or omnivores. Which didn’t help at all.
“I got it!”
I looked up. Piper was clutching the hot water bottle to her chest. “Hey, good job, Piper. Let’s set this up.”
I filled the bottle with hot water from the sink near the washing machine. I tucked it into the lizard’s box, right next to its belly. I made sure not to actually touch the damp skin/fur. Eesh. I knew the bottle wouldn’t stay warm for very long. And hopefully the thing wouldn’t pop it with its claws.
I pulled up a chair for Piper. She settled in, took a long, phlegmy hit off her inhaler.
“You okay?” I asked.
She nodded.
Poor kid.
Well, what do baby lizards eat?
The water dragons seemed to be omnivorous, so far as I could tell. Bugs and leaves. You were supposed to feed them greens with plenty of calcium, like dandelion greens and kale.
No problem there. Since Mom disappeared, our backyard was practically a dandelion farm.
The Gila monsters were straight carnivores. Small mammals, lizards, birds, and eggs.
Yikes. I checked out Stella and Luna, close enough that the lizard could maybe reach out and zap them with its tongue. Not likely, though. It was too scrawny, too weak. But still. I kenned Stella, asked her to move back to that higher box. This time, she obeyed, and Luna followed.
Fabulous.
The Komodo dragons, as it turned out, were carnivorous too. But worse. Much worse. Deer, goats, pigs, dogs … children.
Children?
I scrolled down. They weren’t exactly poisonous, apparently, but they had horrible, festering bacteria in their mouths. They’d killed adult humans too. They were known to dig up human cadavers in cemeteries and eat them.
“Omigod.”
“What?” Piper asked.
“Uh, never mind.” No need to give her nightmares. For now, this was just a helpless baby. I clicked on another link. “Hey, I think I found something.”
“What?” Piper asked.
The two most popular foods for baby lizards: crickets and mealworms.
“We’re fresh out,” I muttered.
“Out of what?”
“Crickets and mealworms.”
“When did we have crickets and mealworms?”
Excellent question.
The lizard raised its head and started squeaking again. Such a needy little critter. But the noise triggered my old sleep-dep headache, made it hard to think. Piper slid off her chair and leaned toward the thing, fingers outstretched.
“Don’t!” I said. “You don’t know where it’s—”
Been, I almost said. You don’t know where it’s been. I was starting to channel Aunt Pen. “Seriously, Piper. It might have poisonous—”
The forked tongue darted out and struck Piper’s hand. Piper squealed and jerked backward.
Spit. Poisonous spit.
I dropped the laptop. Grabbed Piper’s hand. Held it up to the light and inspected it.
It looked okay. So far. “Does it hurt?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Well feel it. What does it feel like? Is it, like, burning, or …”
Piper shook her head.
I let out a breath. “Look, we don’t know very much about, uh, Mr. Lizard. So let’s not touch him. For now. And let me know if that starts to hurt.”
Piper nodded. She looked a little scared.
I folded in the flaps of the lizard’s box. Interlocking them, just in case.
Web surfing again. On a site called The Cold-Blooded Gazette, I found an article about feeding sick lizards.
Baby lizards would be like sick lizards, right? They’d both have tender stomachs, right?
I scrolled through the article. The Cold-Blooded Gazette liked a liquid diet for sick lizards. Especially strawberry ReliaVite.
Aunt Pen sometimes drank something thick and pink for lunch. Strawberry ReliaVite, perhaps?
I took Piper’s hand, examined it again. Still fine. “Come upstairs with me,” I said. “I need your help with something.”
I headed for the stairs, with a warning ken to Stella, who, with Luna close behind, had hopped onto the closed box and was pecking away at the cardboard. If Mr. Lizard weren’t so feeble, he might be able to bust right through those flaps. The ladies would be snacks.
But they were probably safe for now.
I searched the pantry. No ReliaVite. But I did find something else. Slendah. Strawberry Slendah.
Close enough.
Hopefully, Aunt Pen wouldn’t miss just one can. I handed it to Piper, then got a small bowl from the cupboard.
Downstairs, the lizard was squeaking again, but softer, maybe getting hoarse. I shooed the birds off the box, pried open the flaps. I took the Slendah from Piper, popped the tab, poured a little into the bowl, and set down the bowl inside the box. The thing suddenly stopped squeaking. It beelined for the bowl, scrabbling its little toenails against cardboard, shoving the newspaper aside, making those smacking sounds again. It flicked out its tongue. Not actually into the bowl but just above it.
I picked up the bowl, hoping the thing’s tongue would touch the Slendah, maybe clue it in that the pink stuff was food. But now it backed away, stopped flicking its tongue, and started squeaking again.
“Lap it up!” I said. “Do I have to do everything for you?”
Faint, gray light was beginning to seep through the basement window. It wouldn’t be long before Aunt Pen woke up, and then …
More than anything, I wanted to gather up Piper and the ladies and take everybody upstairs. Shut the door on the stupid thing. Let it live or die, whatever.
But I couldn’t. It was Mom’s. She’d found it, collected it, put it somewhere to keep it safe. It must be important to her.
Back to the laptop. The Cold-Blooded Gazette. Force feeding, it said. With a syringe.
Hmm. I had a thought. “You stay here,” I said to Piper. “Don’t go near Mr. Lizard, and shoo the birds away if they get near. Don’t touch it, whatever you do.”
I hurtled up the stairs, hunted through the kitchen, through every single drawer.
Not there. Where did Mom keep hers?
I found the roasting pan way back in a corner of the pantry. When I lifted the lid, there it was:
Ancient, Strange, and Lovely Page 4
