Basilisk

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Doctor Underhill?’ said Sister Bennett, as if Grace had already asked her a question.

  ‘I came to see Doris Bellman,’ Grace told her. ‘She called me last night and she sounded distressed.’

  ‘Distressed?’ asked Sister Bennett.

  ‘Yes. She had the impression that somebody was trying to force their way into her room.’

  Sister Bennett pouted and shook her head. ‘I don’t understand. Mrs Bellman’s room would never have been locked. None of the rooms are ever locked, for health and safety reasons. And who would be trying to get into her room, even if it were? Only her carers, to check on her.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Grace. ‘But she called me, all the same, so I thought I’d drop by to reassure her that she doesn’t have anything to worry about.’

  ‘That much is very true,’ said Sister Bennett. ‘She doesn’t have anything to worry about. Not any more.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Mrs Bellman has passed, Doctor Underhill. She passed last night, shortly after midnight.’

  ‘She’s dead?’

  ‘Shortly after midnight. It was very quick. AMI.’

  ‘But she called me at eight and she sounded fine. She was distressed, yes, like I say, but she used to be a nurse herself. I think she would have known if she were just about to have a heart attack.’

  Sister Bennett had found a stray white thread on her cuff and she was tugging at it. ‘AMI, that’s what Doctor Zauber said. Could have been an embolism, maybe, from her broken leg.’

  ‘So where is she now?’

  ‘They took her to the Burns Funeral Home, around seven o’clock this morning.’

  Grace said, ‘I can’t believe it. She’s gone, just like that?’

  Sister Bennett lifted her cuff to her mouth and bit off the offending thread. ‘It’s always the toughest ones who take you by surprise, don’t you think? You get some doddery old dear who has everything wrong with her you can care to mention, and she lives to see her hundred-and-second birthday. Then you get a sharp-tongued survivor like Doris Bellman, and what happens? You turn your back for half a minute, and when you turn around again, they’re staring at you like they’re still alive, and just about to say something to you, but they’re dead as a donut. Gone, poof, and there you are! Standing in their room, right next to them, but in actual fact you’re all alone.’

  The squat and ugly nurse smiled, and nodded.

  Grace checked her watch. ‘It looks like I didn’t need to come here, after all.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sister Bennett. ‘If I’d known you were coming, I would have called you.’

  No you wouldn’t, thought Grace. But then she didn’t totally blame her. The carers at Murdstone were no different from the nurses at any other institution for the very old and the very sick. Everybody they cared for was going to die, most of them very soon, so they never allowed themselves to become attached to them. They couldn’t be expected to live their lives in constant mourning. On the other hand, that was no excuse for them to be indifferent to their charges, or cruel.

  ‘Do you think I could take a look at her room?’ Grace asked her. She didn’t really know why she wanted to, but maybe it would give her a last sense of Doris Bellman’s presence: the young nurse who had gone out to Europe, in the closing stages of World War Two; and the old woman who had been neglected by her family, and had passed her closing years with nobody except a cockatoo for company, and no view but a parking lot, and some blue-painted drainpipes, and a small pentagram of cloudy sky.

  ‘Be my guest,’ said Sister Bennett. ‘Just be warned that we haven’t had time to service it yet.’

  Grace walked along the corridor to Doris Bellman’s room. On the way, she encountered an old man staring out of one of the windows. He wore a drooping brown bathrobe with his pockets crammed with crumpled tissues, and brown corduroy slippers, and he had a wild white shock of hair like Albert Einstein. As he turned toward her, she saw that one lens of his spectacles was covered up with silver duct tape.

  ‘Didn’t you bring the car round yet?’ he snapped at her, as she approached.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  He frowned down at a wristwatch that wasn’t there. ‘We’re going to be late, at this rate! We can’t afford to be late! We’ll miss the overture!’

  Grace stopped. ‘It’s OK. You don’t have to worry. We have hours yet.’

  He stared at her with one milky blue eye. ‘Are you sure? I don’t want to disappoint her. She’s been looking forward to this for months.’

  ‘You won’t let her down, I promise you.’

  ‘Ah! Well, that’s all right, then. But you won’t forget to tell me when you bring the car round?’

  ‘Of course not. Do I ever?’

  She was about to continue on her way toward Doris Bellman’s room when the old man snatched at her sleeve. He smelled sour, like the inside of a cupboard that hasn’t been opened in years. ‘You will be super careful, won’t you?’

  ‘I always am.’

  He glanced furtively along the corridor, right and then left. ‘I’ve seen it for myself. They try to pretend that I’m losing my marbles, but they can’t fool me. I’ve seen it.’

  Grace gently pried his hand away. ‘I really have to be going. I hope everything goes well tonight.’

  ‘I didn’t see it face to face,’ the old man continued, as if he hadn’t even heard her. ‘Lucky for me that I didn’t, if you ask me. But I opened my door and looked out of my room and I was just in time to see it disappearing around that corner.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Grace, ‘I don’t follow you.’

  The old man narrowed his one visible eye. ‘You’re not one of them, are you? One of the gang of witches that run this place?’

  ‘No, I’m a doctor. I came here today to see Doris Bellman, but they tell me she passed in the night.’

  The old man furiously shook his head – so furiously that Grace was almost afraid that it was going to fly right off his shoulders. ‘Pass? Doris Bellman didn’t pass. She was taken. It came for her, when the dark was at its darkest.’

  ‘It being . . .?’

  ‘Who knows? Who knows what it is? But I swear to you on a roomful of Bibles, I saw it. Not face to face, no ma’am. Lucky for me that I didn’t, if you ask me. But it was disappearing around that corner and it was huge and it was black and it was all hunched over, and there were kind of jaggedy bits on top of its head.’

  Grace thought: my God, that sounds just like Nathan’s nightmare about the sack-dragger. But then she thought: no, how could it? Nathan had been dreaming about his mythical creatures, but who could tell what terrors this old man had been dreaming about? Nobody shares their nightmares, whatever Jung had said about all of us having a collective unconscious.

  She looked at her watch. Time was ticking by, and she had a meeting with the hospital acquisitions board in less than three-quarters of an hour.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘maybe we could talk about this some other time, when I’m not in so much of a hurry. Do you want to tell me your name?’

  The old man narrowed his eye again. ‘You’re not going to snitch on me, are you? You’re not going to rat on me to those witches?’

  ‘Of course not. Why should I do that?’

  The old man glanced along the corridor again, just to make sure that nobody was listening. Then he said, ‘Michael Dukakis’.

  ‘Michael Dukakis?’

  ‘That’s right. Michael Stanley Dukakis.’

  ‘Not by any chance the same Michael Stanley Dukakis who ran against George Bush in the 1988 presidential election?’

  The old man grinned with pleasure. ‘That’s right! You recognized me! Not too many people do! It’s been a few years, though, hasn’t it? Quite a few years, you know, and time takes its toll.’

  He suddenly stopped grinning, and looked reflective. ‘Should have beaten him, though, Bush. Should have licked him good and proper. Asshole. Him, I mean. Bush, not me.’

&n
bsp; ‘Well, OK, Michael,’ said Grace. ‘Next time I visit, I’ll ask for you, OK, and we can sit down and you can tell me all about this it that you saw.’

  He seized her sleeve again and pulled her very close to him, so that when he spoke his spit prickled her face. ‘It was hunched over and it was black and it was all covered up in these raggedy sacks. And it had horns on top of its head. Or maybe a crown of sorts. And I prayed that it wouldn’t turn around and see me. I prayed, believe me. But lucky for me it didn’t. It disappeared. But I could still hear it.’

  Grace took hold of his hand, trying to ease herself loose. His fingers felt like chicken’s leg bones.

  ‘It made this kind of shuffling sound,’ the old man told her. ‘Like it was tired, and old, and weary, but it wasn’t going to let nothing stop it, not for nothing.’

  ‘I really have to go,’ said Grace.

  The old man abruptly released her. ‘Sure you do. Don’t want to waste your precious time, listening to me blather. What time are you going to bring the car around?’

  ‘I’ll come get you, I promise.’

  The old man nodded, and noisily sucked his dentures. ‘Know what my father used to say? “If life was a bet, slick, I wouldn’t take it”.’

  Grace left him and walked along to Doris Bellman’s room. She noticed that Mrs Bellman’s name had already been removed from the slot beside the door. She opened it and stepped inside.

  The room was exactly as it had been the day before yesterday, except that Doris Bellman had gone. Her bed was still unmade, and her gray loose-weave shawl was lying on the floor beside it. A tumbler of water stood on the nightstand, with bubbles in it. Her little leather-covered travel clock had stopped at twelve after twelve.

  The first thing that Grace noticed was that the two ivy plants on either side of the window were shriveled up, as if they hadn’t been watered for months. She went across and felt their leaves. They were totally dry, and they crumbled between her fingers. Yet only yesterday they had been flourishing.

  She stood by the window for a while, watching the raindrops dribbling down the glass. Then she suddenly realized that, apart from the sound of the rain, and the distant drone of vacuum-cleaning, Doris Bellman’s room was silent.

  She turned around. A frayed beige pashmina was draped over Harpo the cockatoo’s cage, but Harpo was making no noise at all: no squawking or scratching or pecking at his bars. Grace went over and lifted the pashmina off. Harpo was lying on the bottom of his cage, one claw raised, his puffy blue eyelids closed.

  Grace stood in the middle of the room. She had come here to feel the last echoes of Doris Bellman’s life, but instead she felt another kind of resonance, like the dying chord of a full-size church organ. She couldn’t exactly understand how, but she felt a strong sense of panic. Even the photographs of Doris Bellman’s family seemed to be staring at her in desperation, as if they had witnessed something terrible, but had been powerless to stop it.

  She looked at her own face, in the mirror with the frame made of seashells. ‘What happened, Doris?’ she whispered. ‘Give me some clue, will you?’

  She turned around and gasped. The squat and ugly nurse had appeared in the doorway, and was standing there grinning at her.

  ‘Excuse me, yes please, I have to service this room now.’

  ‘Have you informed Mrs Bellman’s relatives?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Her relatives.’ Grace repeated, and pointed to the photographs. ‘Has anybody told them that Mrs Bellman has passed?’

  The carer shrugged but didn’t stop grinning. ‘I do not know about this. Ask Sister Bennett.’

  ‘All right,’ said Grace. ‘But you shouldn’t touch or move any of Mrs Bellman’s things until her next of kin gets here.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the carer, although Grace didn’t think that she had the faintest idea what she was talking about.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked her.

  ‘Phuong,’ said the carer.

  ‘Well, Phuong, do you have any idea of what happened in this room last night?’

  ‘Yes. Mrs Bellman die.’

  ‘I know that. But – look – her pet cockatoo is dead, too, and so are her plants.’

  The carer nodded. Grace thought: I really don’t know if I’m getting through here.

  ‘Phuong – everything that was living in this room yesterday is now dead. Everything.’

  The carer blinked at her, but obviously couldn’t understand what she was trying to say. Grace turned to the window to show her the curled-up ivy, and it was then that she saw four or five bottle-green blowflies lying on their backs, behind the drapes.

  ‘Did you see anything last night? Did you see a man, all dressed up in black, with maybe some kind of spiky hat on?’

  ‘No man, no.’

  ‘He would have been very big, and hunched over. Like Quasimodo, you know? Or, obviously, you wouldn’t know. Or maybe you heard a noise, like somebody dragging a heavy sack.’

  The carer shook her head and continued to shake it.

  Grace hesitated for a moment, and then she said, ‘Did you hear Mrs Bellman scream?’

  It was then, though, that the door was pushed open wider and Sister Bennett appeared. ‘Doctor Underhill? I’m sorry, but we really have to get on and service this room. We have a wait list, you know, and a new resident will be arriving here tomorrow morning.’

  ‘What about Mrs Bellman’s things?’

  ‘I gather that her son is flying in from Houston tomorrow. All Mrs Bellman’s possessions will be cataloged and locked away in our property store. They’ll be perfectly secure.’

  ‘I’m sure they will. But before you do that, don’t you think the police ought to take a look at this room, just the way it is?’

  Sister Bennett stared at her as if she had said something in a foreign language. ‘The police? What on earth for?’

  ‘Well . . . Mrs Bellman called me at home and said that somebody was trying to break into her room. And the last time I saw her, she was sure that somebody was walking up and down the corridors at night, like a prowler. And one of your residents told me that he saw some kind of intruder, right outside his room.’

  ‘Oh, really? And which particular resident would that be?’

  ‘I met him in the corridor,’ said Grace. ‘He was wearing a brown bathrobe. He said his name was Michael Dukakis but I don’t suppose for a second that it really is.’

  Sister Bennett laughed – an abrupt, humorless scurry of laughter. But her glassy blue eyes remained totally hostile.

  ‘Mr Stavrianos is suffering from senile dementia,’ she said. ‘He sees gorillas in the woods around the grounds. He sees giant lizards in his bathtub. He thinks he’s some world-famous conductor, and he’s always late for his next big concert.’

  ‘I see.’

  Sister Bennett stooped down and picked up Doris Bellman’s shawl. ‘Don’t let it worry you, doctor. You get used to it, after a while, working in a rest home. All the delusions, all the paranoia. These people’s brains are coming unraveled, and all we can do is try to keep them as calm as possible and protect them from harming themselves.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Grace. She still thought that the police ought to be notified of Doris Bellman’s death, and the terrors that she had expressed, only hours before she died. But Sister Bennett was probably right. The black, hunched-up sack-dragger was nothing more than an old woman’s nightmare, the same kind of nightmare that frightens little children, and there was a strong possibility that she had told ‘Michael Dukakis’ about it, so that he was convinced that he had seen it, too.

  Besides, thought Grace, I really need to get going. I can’t afford the time to hang around here for hours, talking to bored and skeptical detectives, while Sister Bennett gives me her death stare in the background.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave it all to you.’

  When she emerged from the Murdstone, she found that it had stopped raining. The rainclouds had passed over the Delawa
re River, toward Camden, trailing their dirty gray skirts behind them, and now the sun was shining.

  In the corner of the parking lot there was a large green dumpster. She dropped her broken umbrella into it, and promised to buy herself a new one. As she walked back to her car, she turned around and looked back, although she didn’t know why. The Murdstone’s roof was dazzling, almost as if the building were on fire. But it was the gargoyle on the crest of the porch which caught her attention. It was grinning at her mockingly, as if it knew that she had just conceded defeat to Sister Bennett.

  So you chickened out, did you? Couldn’t be bothered? But what if that sack-dragger is really real, and is going to go shuffling along those corridors night after night, claiming one old person after another?

  She climbed into her car and started the engine. Her eyes looked back at her out of the rear-view mirror, expressionless. For the first time in years, she felt a complete lack of certainty. She had absolutely no idea what she ought to do next.

  SEVEN

  The Black Book

  At the same time that Grace was leaving the Murdstone, Nathan was arriving at the research wing at the Philadelphia Zoo. As he drove in through the entrance gates, he saw two TV vans, one from WHYY and one from the public broadcasting system WCAU, as well as a small crowd of TV and newspaper reporters.

  Without slowing down, he circled around a huge reflecting pool of rainwater in the middle of the parking lot, and sped back out again. He drove around to the rear of the laboratory block and parked his car next to a battered green truck that stood outside the maintenance department.

  One of the maintenance staff immediately waddled out, in green zoo coveralls. He had a bulbous nose and a gingery buzzcut and near-together eyes like a mandrill. ‘Can’t park there, fella.’