Nathan strained his ears. From one of the upper floors, very faintly, came the plaintive cry of some old man calling out vainly for assistance. ‘Nurse! Nurse!’ Apart from that, though, all he could hear was the endless, irritating grinding of the outdated air-conditioning system.
Grace said, ‘That’s funny. I thought I heard a kind of a scraping noise.’
‘Scraping?’
‘I don’t know. It’s hard to describe exactly.’
‘I don’t hear anything.’
They listened some more, but there was nothing. Even the old man had stopped crying for help. Nathan turned his flashlight on to the door of Doris Bellman’s room.
‘Let’s take a look inside, shall we? There won’t be anybody in here, will there?’
‘No. Sister Bennett said the next resident won’t be coming till tomorrow – well, later today.’
Nathan tried the handle. The door was unlocked. He eased it open and shone his flashlight inside. The bed was made, and ready for its new occupant. The birdcage had been taken away, as well as the ivy plants. All of Doris Bellman’s photographs had gone, as well as her crucifix, although there were shadowy marks on the wall where they had hung for so long.
The room smelled strongly of Dettox.
‘Nothing here,’ said Nathan. But he hunkered down and shone his flashlight into the corners of the room, and under the bed.
‘What are you looking for?’ Grace asked him. ‘Come on – I really think we need to get out of here.’
‘Basilisks were supposed to have been like lizards, they were constantly shedding their scales. I was just hoping that this baby might have left one or two of them behind.’
‘Hurry up,’ Grace urged him. ‘I’m sure I can hear somebody coming.’
Nathan was about to leave the bedroom when he saw what looked like a black stick, protruding two or three inches from the back of the nightstand. He bent down and picked it up, and examined it closely. It wasn’t a stick, but a fragment of black horny material, like an antler. He showed it to Grace and said, ‘What do you make of this?’
Grace peered at it closely but she wouldn’t touch it. ‘It could be anything. I don’t know. Piece of a broken walking-stick?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll take it back to the lab and analyze it.’
He dropped the black stick into his shirt pocket, and quietly closed the door of Doris Bellman’s room. It was then that they heard another scraping sound, much louder this time, much sharper, and followed by a complicated shuffle.
‘What’s that?’ said Grace. She was frightened now.
‘Whatever it is, it sounds like it’s coming closer.’
‘Nate, I seriously think we should go.’
There was yet another scrape, and then a harsh, high-pitched whine, like somebody trying to breathe with clogged-up lungs. Grace started to head back toward the stairs, but Nathan caught hold of her arm.
‘Grace – wait up – it sounds like it’s just around the corner. Come on, sweetheart, if it’s really here, I need to see it.’
‘No – we need to go. I’m sorry. This is crazy.’
She tugged herself free, but as she did so, a shadowy figure appeared around the corner of the corridor. It stood there, swaying slightly. It was hunched, and it appeared to have spines on top of its head, but it didn’t look nearly as bulky as Nathan had expected it to be. After all, whatever had made its way along this corridor to Doris Bellman’s room had been tall enough to scrape furrows in the ceiling.
He shone his flashlight at it, and he saw at once that it was an elderly man in a sagging brown bathrobe, with his hair sticking up. One lens of his eyeglasses was covered up with silver duct tape, but he lifted his hand to shield his other eye. ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded. ‘What time is it? Didn’t you bring the car round yet?’
‘Michael?’ said Grace. ‘Michael Dukakis?’
‘That’s right. Who is that? You want to take that flashlight out of my face?’
‘It’s OK, Michael. We’re just making sure that you’re safe.’
‘Michael Dukakis’ came shuffling toward them in his worn brown slippers. ‘None of us is safe. Not one of us. Not while that creature’s still here. It took Doris and it’ll take the rest of us, if we give it the chance.’
‘Have you seen it again?’
‘Michael Dukakis’ shook his head. ‘Haven’t seen it, but I’ve sure heard it. Late last night, dragging its way down the corridor. Went past my room, and paused awhile, and I swear that I could hear it breathing. I was lying there, and I was sure that it was going to come for me, but in the end it moved on. But who knows, it could be my turn next time around.’
‘What time did you hear it?’ Nathan asked him. ‘Can you remember?’
‘Exactly. I was waiting for them to bring the car round. I was late. The overture was supposed to start at eight o’clock, and they were five hours and eleven minutes late.’
‘So, one eleven?’
‘Five hours and eleven minutes late, exactly. Saw it on my bedside clock.’
Outside the windows of the Murdstone Rest Home, the sky was growing paler and paler. Nathan said, ‘We’d better leave before anybody sees us. It’s too late now, in any case. Not dark enough for a basilisk.’
‘What time are you bringing the car around?’ asked ‘Michael Dukakis’.
‘After breakfast, I promise you,’ said Grace. ‘Meanwhile, why don’t you go back to bed and catch yourself a few more zees?’
‘Michael Dukakis’ thought about that, and then nodded. ‘You’re a good woman, Belinda. Always said you were. You always took care of me, didn’t you, even when Ruby passed over, God rest her poor bewildered soul.’
Nathan and Grace left ‘Michael Dukakis’ still talking to himself. They made their way down the stairs and along the corridor to the back of the building. The door to the staff quarters was still closed, and the television was still playing loudly – Gilligan’s Island.
‘That hair, I could run my fingers through it – up to the elbows,’ and then a burst of studio laughter.
They let themselves out of the back door, into the gradually lightening day.
NINE
Test of Loyalty
As soon as they got home, Nathan took a long hot shower. He stood in the shower stall with his head bowed and the water turned on full, trying to wash the madness out of his brain. But he couldn’t wash away the image of the white blind-eyed face that had appeared on the ceiling, and the huge black creature that had reared up at the end of his bed, with eyes that had frozen him right through to his backbone.
‘Look at the beast. Look into its eyes. Then you’ll know for sure.’
He came into the kitchen after his shower to find that Grace had made some espresso coffee and wholemeal toast. He tore off a piece of paper towel and laid the black stick on top of it.
‘That is disgusting,’ Grace complained. ‘I wish you’d take it off the counter. Come on, Nate, you don’t know where it’s been. It could be dried feces, for all you know.’
Nathan picked it up and examined it closely. It was a little over five inches long and about three-quarters of an inch in diameter. It was dry and brittle, and only weighed a few grams.
‘It’s not shit, I promise you. I’ve been studying zoology long enough to know shit when I see it. This is definitely bone – the broken-off point from some animal’s antlers, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘You’re talking about a deer, something like that?’
‘I won’t know for sure until I take it into the lab and analyze it properly. But the incredible thing about antlers is that they are the only known regeneration of a complete and anatomically complex appendage in a mammal. It’s like losing your hand, but then growing another identical hand, just like that.’
‘Well, surprise, surprise, I happen to know that,’ said Grace. ‘But whatever it is, can you please put it someplace else?’
Nathan scraped the stick with the edge of his knife, and pee
red at it again. ‘Definitely bone. Almost certainly antler.’
‘Nate—’
‘The thing is, right up until early last year, nobody knew how antlers regenerated. Deer and moose and elks, every twelve months, their antlers drop off. But how do they grow another rack, exactly the same as the rack they grew the year before, and so darn fast? Sometimes they grow as much as one centimeter in a single day. But Hans Rolf at the University of Göttingen has just discovered that the regrowth of antlers is caused by the activation of resident stem cells.’
‘Well, I didn’t know that,’ Grace admitted.
‘Neither did I, until last year. That’s because the whole antler-research thing is still in its infancy. But if this is a piece of basilisk antler, and it contains resident stem cells, then it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that these stem cells can be activated to help people to grow back fingers they’ve had amputated, or toes, or even their arms or their legs . . . Well, come on, Grace, who’s the mad scientist now?’
Grace looked at the black stick without much enthusiasm. ‘You still think it came from a basilisk?’
‘What else? It didn’t come from any species of deer that I recognize. If anything, it looks like a piece of a stag beetle’s antler, except that it’s way too big.’
‘I don’t know. It’s not that I don’t believe you, Nate. It’s not that I don’t want to believe you. It’s just that I don’t think you ought to jump to conclusions.’
Nathan carried the black stick across to the window and set it down on the sill. He rinsed his hands and then he returned to the counter. Grace poured him a cup of coffee while he spread a thick layer of boysenberry jelly on to his toast, and cut it in half.
‘I’m not going to get my hopes up, Grace, I promise you – not until I’ve taken it to the lab and run some basic tests. But something has been prowling around the Murdstone Rest Home, hasn’t it? whether it’s human or animal or God alone knows what. And that something left this piece of bone behind.’
Grace was silent for a moment. Then she reached over and laid her hand on Nathan’s arm. ‘Nate . . . Supposing they don’t let you?’
‘Supposing they don’t let me what?’
‘Go into the lab. Analyze it.’
‘They haven’t sacked me yet, sweetheart. They’ve pulled the plug on my funding. But I’m still contractually beholden to those bastards, and so long as I am, I’m going to use their facilities.’
Denver appeared, pale-faced and puffy-eyed, with his hair sticking up like a parrot’s crest. He was wearing a crumpled khaki T-shirt with Get The F Out of Iraq printed on the front, and a droopy pair of mustard-yellow boxer shorts.
‘Good morning, favorite and only son,’ said Nathan. ‘How did you sleep?’
Denver opened the fridge door and stared into it for almost half a minute, blinking. Then he took out a carton of orange-juice and poured himself a large glassful. Had Nathan and Grace not been here, he would have glugged it straight from the carton, but he knew what they would say, and his brain couldn’t take nagging at eight fifteen in the morning.
‘You want some toast?’ Grace asked him.
Denver climbed up on to one of the stools and shook his head.
‘What are you doing today?’ Nathan asked him. ‘Anything special? Band practice?’
Denver shook his head again. He was silent for a long while, trying to focus on his glass of orange juice, but then he said, ‘Did you guys go out last night?’
Grace glanced at Nathan. Nathan said, ‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’
‘What did you go out for? It must have been three thirty in the morning.’
‘Nothing. We couldn’t sleep, that’s all. We went for a drive and we saw the moon set.’
Denver frowned at them. ‘You went for a drive, at three thirty in the morning? Like, I know you guys aren’t exactly normal like normal parents, but when did you ever do anything like that?’
‘Last night,’ said Nathan. What else could he possibly tell him? That he and Denver’s mother had gone basilisk-hunting in an old people’s rest home?
Denver said, ‘OK. I guess you’re old enough to do whatever you want. But I thought I heard somebody walking around the house while you were out.’
‘You must have dreamed it,’ said Nathan.
‘Unh-hunh. I was totally awake, man. Somebody came up the stairs and along the corridor and stopped outside my bedroom door. I thought it was you, but it couldn’t have been, because I heard you come back later.’
‘I’m sure you dreamed it,’ Nathan told him. ‘I put the alarm back on when we went out, and nobody could have gotten into the house while we were away without setting it off.’
Denver shrugged. ‘I heard what I heard, that’s all I can say. Whoever it was, they stopped right outside my bedroom door, like they were listening, or waiting, or something. I could hear the floorboards creaking. I could hear them breathing, man, like they had a headcold or something.’
Grace glanced up at the railroad clock on the kitchen wall. ‘I’d better take a shower. I have a practice meeting at nine thirty.’
Denver said, ‘How about a ride to school, Mom?’
‘OK . . . but aren’t you going to have any breakfast?’
‘Sure. As soon as my teeth wake up.’
Nathan sat and watched him while he poured himself a bowlful of Cocoa Crunchies and then drowned them in milk.
‘Denver – if you hear anything like that again, you’ll call me, OK? You won’t open the door, you’ll just shout out “Pops!”? Or if I happen to be out, call me on my cell.’
Denver blinked at him. ‘Why? What was it?’
‘I don’t know exactly. But some pretty outré things have been happening. They’re probably harmless, but I’m not really sure yet.’
‘Outré? What’s outré?’
‘Like, weird. Things like your hearing somebody outside of your bedroom door when there’s nobody there. Things like—’
Nathan hesitated. He wasn’t sure if he ought to tell Denver about his nightmares, or his visions, or whatever they were. Denver had heard something, too, and maybe he needed to be warned that something was prowling through their consciousness, even if it wasn’t actually prowling through their home. But he didn’t understand himself what it was that he had seen, or imagined that he had seen, and he didn’t want to alarm Denver for no good reason.
‘Things like what, Pops?’ Denver was waiting with milk dripping from his cereal spoon.
‘I’m not too sure. Maybe you could call them phenomena.’
‘What’s phamononama?’
‘Like when you see things and hear things but they’re not really there.’
‘Like being high? You and Mom – you haven’t been, like, smoking anything, have you?’
Nathan managed a slightly twisted smile. ‘Not recently. But yes, it’s a little like that.’
‘I get it,’ said Denver, and nodded, and nodded. ‘Don’t worry, Pops. I won’t tell anybody, I promise. Especially the cops.’
After Grace and Denver had left the house, Nathan poured himself another cup of coffee and walked through to the sunroom. He picked up that morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer and was about to sit down and read it when he noticed three birds lying on the patio right outside the sunroom windows.
He went up to the windows and looked at them more closely. There were two gray jays and a crow, lying only a few inches away from each other. They didn’t appear to have any superficial injuries, but there was no doubt that they were stone dead. Their eyes were closed and the morning breeze was ruffling their feathers.
Nathan unlocked the sunroom door and stepped outside. It was then that he saw that the entire back yard was strewn with dead birds – at least half a dozen more jays, and a scattering of warblers, and another two crows. They looked as if they had simply fallen out of the sky. He felt distinctly unnerved, as if he had walked into one of those 1960s science-fiction movies.
He prodded one of the jays
with a stick. It rolled over on to its back but neither of its wings appeared to be broken and it hadn’t lost any of its tail feathers.
Nathan had heard of flocks of birds being brought down by lightning or by sudden downdrafts. But there had been no electric storms around West Airy last night, and although the wind had picked up since daybreak, and it was now quite blustery, the birds that he could see in the sky above him were soaring, not falling.
Maybe these birds had been poisoned, but he couldn’t imagine how, or by what. Crows and jays and warblers didn’t feed together. Jays were notorious for their boldness, and often walked into human habitats – houses or tents or trailers – looking for scraps. But if they were out in a field or a garden, crows would almost always chase them away; and warblers would never come anywhere near either of them.
He went back into the house to fetch his camera. He walked around the yard, taking twenty or thirty photographs of the dead birds, from every angle. Then he put on a pair of rubber household gloves, and picked up the bodies of a jay and a warbler and a crow, placing them carefully into a small cardboard box lined with crumpled-up newspaper.
He looked around. He couldn’t help thinking of The Black Book, by Bishop Wincenty Kadłubek. ‘The church floor was strewn with dozens of dead swallows that had been nesting in the rafters, and hundreds of dead flies.’
Maybe Denver had heard something, creeping around the house last night. Maybe something was walking this world that didn’t take any notice of locked doors, or alarms – something that could strike other creatures dead just by staring at them – like these jays and these crows and these warblers.
He gathered up the rest of the bodies, and dropped them into the trash. He didn’t want Grace to find them, if she came home before he did; and if they had been killed by poisoning, he didn’t want any of the local cats to eat them, or take them back to their owners, as trophies.
Nathan arrived at the zoo shortly after ten fifteen a.m. The wind was still gusty, and the clouds were tumbling overhead like mongrels, chasing each other.
As he turned into the gates, he saw a silver private bus parked outside, and a group of fifteen or twenty people standing around talking. He could see Henry Burnside there, too, tall and patrician, with his white lion’s-mane hair and his large nose and his heavy tortoiseshell spectacles, wearing a red-and-green plaid coat. Nathan had forgotten that today was the day that Dr Burnside was going to be hosting a presentation for the zoo’s principal investors.
Basilisk Page 9
