Basilisk

by Graham Masterton

  Grace said, ‘Nate, don’t.’

  Nathan stared back at Denver, trying to face him down. But then shook his head and said, ‘Why don’t you just get to bed, kid, and sleep it off? I can’t hurt you nearly as much as your head will, in the morning.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’ Denver challenged him. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve cracked a joke! Mom – did you hear that? Pops just cracked a joke! Must have been all that practice you’ve been getting, cracking eggs!’

  Nathan seized Denver’s sweatshirt and pulled him so close that their noses were almost touching. He was trembling, but he knew that it wasn’t Denver’s fault. It was his own rage that nearly five years of painstaking laboratory work had come to nothing. Instead of a shining, preening gryphon, all he had was a trayful of sticky feathers and a few lumps of liquefying flesh.

  ‘Get to bed,’ he said, releasing Denver’s shirt.

  ‘You suck,’ said Denver. ‘You really, really suck.’

  ‘I said, get to bed. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’

  Denver lurched along the landing toward his bedroom door. As he passed Grace, he stopped for a moment, and said, ‘Give Pops some of your St John’s wort, Mom. That’ll calm him down. Natural medicine for ever!’

  ‘Don’t you talk to your mother like that!’ Nathan snapped.

  ‘Or what?’ Denver retorted. He staggered against the wall, knocking a picture crooked. Then he held up the can of beer and said, ‘Here! Take it back! I don’t need any compensation from you! Doctor Freakenstein!’

  He threw the can of beer at Nathan, as hard as he could. It missed, and struck the antique china vase at the end of the corridor, chipping the rim.

  Nathan didn’t say anything, and he didn’t move. He had taught himself several years ago not to let his temper overwhelm him. All the same, he had to grip the banister-rail very tightly as Denver spun around and staggered into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

  Grace took hold of Nathan’s arm and led him back to bed. ‘He’s drunk,’ she said. ‘We all say things we don’t mean when we’re drunk. He’ll apologize tomorrow.’

  ‘Why should he? That’s exactly what I am – Doctor Freakenstein. I’m not even good at it, either. In five years, what have I actually managed to produce? Twenty-eight unfertilized eggs, and one dead gryphon. He’s absolutely right. I suck.’

  They heard a loud crash, which sounded like Denver tripping over his own jeans as he tried to take them off. This was followed by the banging of a toilet seat, and then the unmistakable sound of Denver being torrentially sick.

  At last Denver fell into bed, and the house was quiet. As exhausted as he was, however, Nathan couldn’t sleep, and lay with his arms around Grace, feeling her ribcage and listening to her breathing.

  He kept seeing the gryphon’s orange eye, staring at him helplessly from the gray jelly of its own putrefaction. He thought about the wizards and the sorcerers who had first created such hybrids – not just rats crossed with salmon, or hawks crossed with cats, but much larger beasts, like dragons and hippogryphs – half gryphon and half horse.

  He thought of the poem by Ludovico Ariosto, which he had quoted in his first presentation to the Philadelphia Zoological Society, when he was asking them for funds.

  No empty fiction wrought by magic lore,

  But natural was the steed the wizard pressed;

  For him a filly to a griffin bore;

  Hight hippogryph. In wings and beak and crest,

  Formed like his sire, as in the feet before;

  But like the mare, his dam, in all the rest.

  It sounded so bombastic now, so full of shit. How could he have thought that he could really breed a gryphon, leave alone a hippogryph? How could he have been so arrogant?

  Grace murmured, and turned over. Nathan turned over, too. The illuminated clock on his nightstand said two seventeen. His eyes closed, and he started to slide into sleep. But then he heard Denver stumble into the bathroom again, and the toilet seat clattering, and the groaning of a young man who swears by all that’s holy that he will never drink alcohol again, like ever.

  FOUR

  Post Mortem

  It was still raining the next morning, and a blustery wind was blowing from the north-west. Nathan’s designated parking space had been taken up by a delivery van from Emsco Scientific Supplies, so he had to park his black Dodge Avenger under the trees on the opposite side of the parking lot, where it would inevitably get covered in wet leaves and bits of branches and bird droppings.

  He had nearly reached the laboratory steps when he heard footsteps hurrying up behind him, and the jostling of a waterproof coat.

  ‘Professor Underhill! Professor Underhill!’

  He turned around. A pretty blonde girl in a puffy red squall was jogging across the parking lot toward him. She was wearing bright red rubbers with sparkles on them, and a red knitted hat with bunny’s ears on top of it.

  ‘Professor Underhill! Sir! May I talk to you, please?’

  ‘It depends what about.’

  The girl bit off one of her gloves with her teeth and dug into her pocket for an identity card. ‘Patti Laquelle, from The Philadelphia Web,’ she panted. ‘I’m so glad I caught you!’

  ‘The Philadelphia Web? You mean the online newspaper?’ Nathan wasn’t impressed. The Web was the digital equivalent of The National Enquirer, full of stories about the marital indiscretions of minor TV celebrities and bungling local bank robbers and budgerigars that could whistle ‘Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Mighty is your name.’

  Most of the media had been deeply skeptical about Nathan’s cryptozoological project when the zoo had first announced it, but the Web had mocked him more than most. ‘Dragon’s Eggs Could Be Miracle Cure For Everything That Ails Us, Claims Philly’s Would-Be Wizard.’ After that, he had responded to all media inquiries about his progress with only the dullest and most technical of answers, and over the years the media had gradually lost interest. Until today, anyhow.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ms Laquelle. But I’m busy right now, and I’m a half-hour late already.’

  ‘But I need to ask you about your gryphon!’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Your gryphon, Professor. Come on, I know that you managed to fertilize a gryphon’s egg.’

  ‘OK,’ said Nathan, defensively. ‘I never made a secret of it.’

  ‘No. But you haven’t exactly shouted it from the rooftops, have you?’

  ‘It’s difficult, complicated stuff, that’s why. Not exactly Web material. If you’re really interested, I published a three-thousand-word article about it in The American Journal of Genetics – November seventeenth last year.’

  ‘You did? Wow – I don’t know how I could have missed that.’

  ‘You and about three hundred and three million other people. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘So how’s the little monster getting along?’

  ‘It’s growing, and we’re keeping a close watch on its development. That’s all. It’s taking a little longer to hatch out than we thought it would, but – well – there’s absolutely no precedent for what we’re doing here, is there?’

  ‘You mean it hasn’t hatched already?’

  Nathan opened the laboratory door. ‘Listen, Ms Laquelle. As soon as anything happens, you’ll be the first to know about it. I promise you.’

  ‘You’re sure it hasn’t hatched already?’

  ‘No, it hasn’t. Now I really have to get going.’

  ‘How come I heard from a very reliable source that it did hatch, but it was stillborn?’

  He hesitated, still holding the door open. ‘I can’t imagine why you should think that.’

  ‘Meaning that it did hatch, and it was stillborn?’

  ‘Meaning that I can’t tell you anything, because there’s absolutely nothing to tell you.’

  Patti Laquelle came up the steps and stood very close to him, frowning up at him as intently as if she could read his mind. She had a spattering of freckles across th
e bridge of her nose and her blonde fringe was sparkling with raindrops. She reminded him of a girlfriend he used to go out with, when he was only fifteen.

  ‘That’s not true, Professor, is it?’ she asked him.

  ‘Ms Laquelle—’

  ‘Please, call me Patti. I know what’s happened, Professor. I know it’s all gone wrong. And I have to file something about it. You can’t expect me not to.’

  Nathan was silent for a very long time. Then he said, ‘Who leaked it?’

  ‘You know I can’t tell you that. But if you explain to me exactly how the gryphon died, and why, I won’t have to speculate, will I? I won’t have to write “How Did Philly’s Would-Be Wizard Get Egg On His Face?” Don’t forget that all the other media are going to be after you, too, as soon as this story breaks. “Breaks” – sorry! But you know I’m right. It’s going to be a feeding frenzy.’

  Nathan hesitated. Then he said, ‘Come along inside,’ and opened the door wider.

  He led her into his office. Richard hadn’t arrived yet, to open up the refrigerator and take out the gryphon’s remains. All the same, Nathan sniffed, twice, and he was sure that he could still smell it.

  Patti took off her squall. Nathan took it from her and hung it up on the coat stand. ‘Kind of big for you, this coat.’

  ‘It belonged to my last boyfriend. Lars, would you believe? He was a skiing nut. Me – I always hated skiing. Trudging up hills, sliding back down again. I could never see the point.’

  ‘You want some coffee?’

  ‘Sure. Black. No sugar.’

  Nathan spooned coffee into the cafetière on top of his filing cabinet. Without turning around, he said, ‘You’re right about the gryphon. It died yesterday evening, just after eight. It was fully grown, but it never made any attempt to pip – that is, to hatch itself. Too feeble, I guess.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I cracked the egg myself, with a hammer. But when I opened it up, I found that the gryphon was in what you might call an advanced state of decomposition. In other words, it had putrefied.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’

  ‘It died a few seconds later. There wasn’t a hope in hell that we could have revived it.’

  He poured boiling water on to the coffee grounds. ‘It’s too early to say what went wrong. It could have been a bacterial infection, it could have been some kind of chromosome disorder. It could have been some genetic problem that I can’t even begin to understand.

  ‘All I know is that the people who want to see this project shut down are going to have a field day.’

  Patti said, ‘I’m sorry, Professor. Truly.’

  ‘Why should you care?’

  ‘Well – what a gas it would have been, wouldn’t it, if you had managed to pull it off? A real live walking talking gryphon! Well, maybe not talking, but squawking. You could have made a fortune! I could have made a fortune! Think of the syndication rights!’

  ‘For Christ’s sake. I’m a molecular biologist, not P.T. Barnum.’

  ‘So what do you want me to post on the Web?’

  ‘Why are you asking me? You’ll write whatever you feel like. “Gryphon’s Egg Is A Big Fat Zero.” “Gryphon Egg Project Goes Pear-Shaped.” Who knows?’

  ‘No, seriously.’

  Nathan poured them each a mug of coffee. ‘Why don’t you just remind people of what I’m working on here?’

  ‘OK. Why not?’

  He smiled and shook his head. ‘I’m not sure I trust you.’

  ‘Try me, why don’t you? I won’t call you a “would-be wizard”, I promise you. Nor a “zany zoologist” either. Although you are a zoologist, aren’t you? And what you’re doing here, it is kind of zany, you have to admit.’

  ‘Ms Laquelle – Patti – I’m not breeding these so-called mythical creatures for their entertainment value. I want them for their embryonic stem cells. Hopefully I can use them to cure people who have diseases that are currently incurable – like Alzheimer’s, and cystic fibrosis, and motor neurone disease, and Huntington’s.’

  ‘That’s such an incredible idea,’ said Patti. ‘But if these creatures are mythical, they’re like imaginary, aren’t they? They never really existed.’

  Nathan said, ‘Some paleontologists absolutely refuse to believe in them, yes. But there’s a whole mountain of documentary evidence that they did exist, going right back to Sumerian times. Descriptions, drawings, accounts of their habits and behavior. All from highly reliable sources.

  ‘They were amazing, some of these creatures. Jackals with enormous wings, that could fly. Birds that lived for hundreds of years. Lizards that could heal themselves, even when their skins were burned to a cinder. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, he was a zoologist, too, although not many people know that. He was supposed to have owned a three-headed dog that could remember everything. What one head forgot, another head remembered.’

  ‘That sounds exactly like my grandma,’ said Patti.

  Nathan opened a drawer, took out a file, and handed her a woodcut of a gryphon sitting on its nest. ‘You know who drew that? Albrecht Dürer, in 1513. His drawings of exotic animals were so accurate that they were still being used in schoolbooks three hundred years after his death.

  ‘There are plenty of remains, too. Only last October they found a gryphon skeleton at the foot of the Altai Mountains, in the Gobi Desert. The official interpretation was that it was the bones of a young protoceratops. Hardly anybody had the nerve to say what it really was. In fact only one paleontologist came out and said that it was almost certainly a gryphon. The head of an eagle and the body of a lion.’

  Patti stared at the woodcut for a long time, and then handed it back. ‘I still find it hard to believe. You actually bred one of these.’

  ‘Well, I did, yes, even if it did die. And if the zoological society doesn’t decide to cut my funding, I’m sure that I can do it again. And – in time – I think I can breed any other kind of hybrid you care to mention. Gargoyles, wyverns, hippogryphs. Maybe a cuegle, even, which can grow extra limbs for itself. Imagine that, you lose a leg, you can grow yourself another one.’

  ‘Can I see it?’ asked Patti.

  ‘The gryphon? Not unless you want to lose your breakfast.’

  ‘I didn’t eat breakfast. Only grapefruit juice. Come on, let me take a look at it.’

  ‘OK . . . but no photographs, mind. Not until after the necropsy – and, even then, only maybe.’

  Nathan led her across the laboratory to the stainless-steel refrigerators. Patti stood a little way away while he slid open the drawer with the gryphon’s embryo in it. Even though it had been chilled, it still smelled just as foul.

  He used a glass stirring rod to point out its head and its beak and its claws. He lifted its feathers so that she could see how wide its wingspan would have been.

  ‘It’s fantastic,’ said Patti, with her hand cupped over her face. ‘If I didn’t know it was for real, I would have thought you just sewed them together, a bird and a lion cub.’

  At that moment, the door banged open, and Richard came into the laboratory, closely followed by Keira and Tim.

  ‘Professor?’ he asked, hanging up his limp khaki raincoat. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Impromptu press conference,’ said Nathan. ‘This is Ms Patti Laquelle, from The Philadelphia Web. She’s going to make us famous.’

  ‘The Philadelphia Web?’ asked Tim. ‘As in, “My Grandmother Ate My Schnauzer”?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ said Patti. ‘Only it wasn’t “schnauzer”, it was “chihuahua”.’

  FIVE

  Sack-Dragger

  Denver was still sullen at suppertime, toying with his chicken-and-pepper stew and hardly saying a word.

  ‘I won’t ask how your necropsy went,’ said Grace. ‘Not while we’re eating, anyhow.’

  Nathan poured himself another glass of white wine. ‘Let’s just say that I still don’t have the first idea what went wrong. It was very a virulent infection, that’s
for sure, but what kind of bacillus it was and where it came from—’

  Denver threw down his fork. It bounced across his plate and landed on the tablecloth. ‘Didn’t you hear what Mom said? Do you really think we want to hear about bacterial infections while we’re trying to eat our supper?’

  Nathan said, ‘OK. OK. I’m sorry. But you don’t have to toss your cutlery around.’

  Denver pushed back his chair so that it tilted and fell over. ‘Forget it. I’m not hungry now. I’m going out.’

  ‘Sit down and finish your supper.’

  ‘What? And listen to you talking about pus and infections and decomposing gryphons? Don’t you ever give it a rest? Don’t you ever think that we don’t want to hear about it?’

  Nathan looked down at his plate. He was trying hard not to lose his temper, and he took a very deep breath to steady himself.

  Grace said, ‘Denver . . . you need to apologize. Your dad’s had some really difficult problems to deal with. His whole future at the zoo could depend on this. The last thing he needs is you stamping your feet like a two-year-old.’

  ‘Oh, he’s had some really difficult problems to deal with, has he? So we have to sit here and listen to all this disgusting stuff about dead creatures that should never have been alive in the first place, is that it? While we’re eating, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Denver,’ said Nathan, in a very quiet voice. ‘Shut up.’

  Denver jabbed his finger at him. ‘You think you’re the only person in this house who’s allowed to have an opinion, don’t you? I don’t count for anything! Do you know what I’ve been doing at school lately? Do you have any idea? Of course you don’t! Did you know that I was thrown off the basketball team?’

  ‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘I didn’t know because you didn’t tell me.’

  ‘You want to know why? Look at you – you don’t even want to know why!’