Basilisk

by Graham Masterton

  Dr Burnside was just about the last person in the world that he wanted to talk to right now, so he stopped, backed up, and drove around to the maintenance area where he had parked on his previous visit. This time, there was no sign of the mandrill-like maintenance man. He left his car close to the retaining wall, by the steps, right in front of the NO PARKING sign.

  When he walked into his laboratory, carrying his cardboard box, he found that Richard and Keira were already at work. Bat Out Of Hell was playing on the sound system, while Richard was preparing microscope slides of the decomposed gryphon, and Keira was busily typing on her laptop.

  ‘I’m updating all of our results,’ Keira told him, before he had even had time to ask her.

  He leaned over her shoulder and looked at the columns of figures that she had entered under Embryonic Circulation: Second Stage.

  ‘We’re not beaten yet, Keira,’ he told her. ‘We might have lost the skirmish, but the campaign goes on. And – hey – I like that perfume you’re wearing.’

  ‘Gucci Rush.’ She smiled at him.

  He laid the cardboard box on the workbench next to her. ‘There’s something you can do for me. There are three dead birds in here. I found them in my yard this morning, along with a whole lot more. I’d like to know why they died.’

  Keira peered into the box, and said, ‘Does this have anything to do with the Cee-Zee program?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure. Maybe. But if you could do it just as a favor to me.’

  ‘Okay . . . anything’s more exciting than blood-pressure statistics.’

  ‘Thanks, Keira, I won’t forget you for this, when I’m accepting my Nobel Prize.’

  He went over to Richard. ‘Richard – how’s our late lamented gryphon coming along?’

  ‘I should finish up the necropsy today, apart from the last of the bone-marrow tests.’

  ‘Today? You’re not going to rush it, are you? I want you to test for staphylococcus, too.’

  Richard looked embarrassed. ‘Dr Burnside came in to see us. He said I should wrap it up as soon as possible, and send the results over to Dr Bream. He said the Cee-Zee program was officially terminated.’

  ‘I see. He’s going to find you another project to work on?’

  Richard was cultivating an angry red zit on the end of his nose, which Nathan found it hard not to look at.

  ‘As a matter of fact I’ve been negotiating a research position with somebody else,’ he said, without looking at Nathan directly.

  ‘Really? Who? Do they pay better? I sure hope they pay better.’

  ‘Yes. They do. They pay pretty good.’

  ‘What kind of research is it? Nothing as cutting edge as this, I’ll bet. Well, nothing as wacky.’

  Richard gave him a disconnected shrug, but said nothing.

  ‘Well . . . good luck to you, Richard,’ said Nathan. ‘You did some terrific work for me here. Maybe we didn’t quite manage to finish what we started, but we made some amazing progress, didn’t we? We really broke the mold.’

  He looked around. ‘Where’s Tim, by the way?’

  ‘Job interview,’ said Keira. ‘He’ll be back first thing tomorrow, to finish up his notes.’

  ‘Something zoological, I hope?’

  ‘Kind of. The Wistar Institute. Research assistant for Dr Hui Hu.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t waste any time.’ Nathan didn’t want to make any remarks about ‘rats’ and ‘sinking ships’, although he felt like it. On the other hand, he could hardly blame Richard and Tim for looking for new and better-paid employment. Laboratory assistants in almost every other animal research program earned more than they did – even the technicians who worked for Super-Dog Foods, in Leola. They used to joke about it: you get paid twice as much to feed ’em as you do to breed ’em.

  He went into his office, took off his brown-leather Indiana Jones jacket and changed into his lab coat. On his desk, he found a long message from the zoo’s human resources manager, Norman Berliner. ‘Now that your cryptozoological project is being wound down, could you please supply the Zoo management with an up-to-date inventory of all unused chemicals, as well as a complete list of writing paper, envelopes, print cartridges and paperclips.’ He rolled the message up between the palms of his hands and tossed it toward the wastebasket on the other side of the room, and missed. Norman Berliner could put that request where he didn’t need Ray-Bans. And why were HR managers always called Norman?

  However, there was also a note from Patti Laquelle, saying simply, ‘Sorry to hear what happened, muchacho! Give me a call anytime and I’ll take you to Fado’s and buy you that very large Irish whiskey.’

  He took the black stick fragment from his pocket and carried it through to the laboratory.

  ‘What do you make of this?’ he asked Richard.

  Richard took it, and inspected it closely. ‘It looks like a piece of horn, of some kind. Where did you get it?’

  ‘Let’s just say that I came across it by happenstance.’

  Richard held the stick under a magnifying lens. ‘There’s some abrasion, on the tip. Natural wear and tear, by the look of it. I’d say that it’s a broken-off tusk, or an antler. But I wouldn’t like to guess what species of animal it came from.’

  ‘Me neither. But I’m going to run some tests on it.’

  He took the stick over to the other side of the laboratory. To start with, he took a small surgical saw out of his drawer and sawed the stick into inch-long sections, so that he could see if there was any difference in its chemical composition from its tip to the point where it had broken off, as there usually was with deer antlers.

  By mid-afternoon, they had played all of Bat Out Of Hell and all of Dead Ringer and they were halfway through Santanas’ Abraxas. Even Richard had to pause in his work to perform ‘Samba Pa Ti’ on his air guitar, his eyes squeezed tight shut and his teeth clenched together.

  Nathan had tested the antler for dry matter such as collagen, ash, calcium, phosphorus and magnesium, as well as proteins and lipids. He had isolated uronic acid and sulfated glycosaminoglycan, along with chondroitin sulfate and keratan sulfate.

  Chemically – as he had first suspected – the black stick was very similar to a deer antler. Nathan began to think that Grace was right, and that his ‘basilisk’ had been nothing more than a nightmare, after all. Maybe the stick had been exactly what Grace had first suggested: the broken-off tip from some moose antler that somebody had used as a walking-cane. Outside the laboratory window, the rain began to fall, lightly at first, then heavier and heavier, and he heard indigestive rumbles of thunder.

  A little after three thirty p.m., Keira came over. She had untied her hair and let it fall loose.

  ‘Professor? I’ve run preliminary tests on all three birds. None of them have suffered any physical injury that I can detect. Like, they didn’t fly into a plate-glass window, or get hit by the blades of a wind turbine, or an airplane.’

  ‘What about toxicology?’

  ‘I haven’t screened them for everything yet. But they haven’t ingested Avitrol or any proprietary bird poison. They weren’t gassed or asphyxiated and they didn’t inhale any airborne pollutants over and above the average for Philadelphia County.’

  ‘So what did kill them?’

  Keira said, ‘Almost certainly, they died from multiple-organ failure. Their hearts hemorrhaged, and then their lungs, and then their livers. Shortly afterward, their brains.’

  ‘That sounds like shock.’

  Keira nodded. ‘The symptoms are absolutely typical.’

  ‘So . . . what kind of shock? Any ideas?’

  ‘Not so far. Like I say, they weren’t physically injured and they weren’t poisoned. I would say that something frightened them – so much so that they simply dropped down dead. It happens, especially to sensitive birds like cockatiels. You can handle one too much and it dies. You don’t have a neighbor with a very scary cat, do you?’

  ‘My neighbor has a cat, yes. But scary? Tha
t fat furball wouldn’t scare a mosquito, let alone a whole bunch of birds.’

  ‘I’ll run some more tests, if you want to, but I’m ninety-nine per cent certain that’s your cause of death. Subendocardial hemorrhage, induced by catastrophic nervous trauma.’

  ‘Thanks, Keira. I appreciate it. You can go home now, if you like.’

  ‘I’m not in a hurry, Professor. Besides, I didn’t finish logging our statistics yet.’

  ‘Don’t bother. You can leave them. If Dr Bream wants a five-year profile of systolic blood pressures, he can work it out for himself. Listen – I’m real sorry about the way this turned out, this whole project. Do you have any idea what you’re going to do now?’

  ‘In the long term, no. I might take some time off and visit my sister in San Francisco.’

  She peered at the screen of his spectrometer. ‘What are you doing there? Can I help you?’

  ‘I’m analyzing what I’m pretty sure is a fragment of some animal’s antler.’

  ‘An antler? Like a deer antler? You know that they use deer antlers in Chinese medicine? They grind them up and they’re supposed to make men more virile.’

  ‘And do they?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Keira blushed. ‘I never had a boyfriend who tried it.’

  ‘Well, if it does work, I guess it gives a whole new meaning to the word “horny”.’

  TEN

  Hidden Message

  As the day went on, the sky grew darker and darker, and Nathan grew increasingly frustrated and disappointed. He had been hoping that the antler would prove to belong to some mythological creature – if not a basilisk, then a gargoyle, or a wyvern. At least it would have given him some ammunition to take back to Henry Burnside and make a last-ditch effort to rescue his Cee-Zee program.

  Keira came over and gave him a hug. ‘I’m going to go now, Professor. But thanks for everything. It’s been wonderful.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he told her. ‘If they ever give me funding again, you’ll be the first person I come looking for.’

  She smiled up at him, and he was surprised and touched to see that she had tears in her eyes. She sniffed and laughed and said, ‘I’m just being sentimental. But it seems such a pity, doesn’t it, after we’ve done so much hard work.’

  Outside, lightning flickered, and the laboratory was shaken by another burst of thunder. At the same time, his CE machine suddenly blinked and whirred into life and printed out the first of his DNA results.

  He tugged out the sheet of paper, and carried it across to the coffee machine. He refilled the machine with his right hand while he held the DNA results in his left. He wasn’t expecting the printout to show him anything special. Doh, a deer, a female deer.

  As he studied the DNA pairings, however, and as the coffee machine started to gurgle, he began to feel a shrinking sensation in his scalp. It was the same sensation that he had experienced when his gryphon had first begun to show stir inside its egg. His scalp was shrinking, his skin was shrinking. His whole life was shrinking, as if by comparison with what he had just discovered, it had less and less significance.

  He left the coffee machine and went back to his bench. He printed out the DNA results a second time, to make absolutely sure that he wasn’t making a mistake. But there was no doubt about it.

  According to the test, this piece of bone may have been chemically close to a fallow deer antler, but its DNA showed that it had broken off a creature that was not only part mammal and part bird – like his gryphon – but part reptile, too. All three genetic codings, tangled together in one living being.

  He stood up. Keira had left about ten minutes ago, but Richard was still here.

  ‘Richard! Take a look at this!’

  Richard swung around on his chair and pointed to the phone that he was holding to his ear. ‘Won’t keep you a moment, Professor!’

  Nathan studied the DNA printout again. He was so overwhelmed by what he had found out that his hand was shaking. It was like suddenly understanding how God had created the world, and everything in it.

  Richard snapped his cell shut and came across the laboratory.

  ‘Professor? Did you find out what it is?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, but then he stopped himself.

  He suddenly found that he didn’t want to share this discovery, not just yet. It was too overwhelming, and he hadn’t had time to consider all of its implications. It was going to change lives, maybe millions of lives. It was going to change his life, for sure. He felt the same way he had on the day that Denver had been born: he had left it until early evening before calling his parents or Grace’s family and telling them the good news. He had just wanted to keep it to himself, for a few hours.

  Not only that, Richard was going, and he hadn’t yet told him where. Nathan had no reason at all not to trust him, but if he was no longer working on a cryptozoological project, there was no reason why he needed to know.

  He tried to sound disappointed and offhand. ‘It’s exactly what it looks like,’ he said. ‘A piece of fallow deer antler.’

  ‘Oh. OK. I thought you were going to say it came from something really rare, like a muntjac. All the same . . . antler is pretty interesting stuff.’

  ‘Sure. But it’s not going to save the Cee-Zee program for us.’

  Richard said, ‘I guess not. It’s a darned shame.’ He took out a crumpled handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘I’m just about finished now. I ran a second test for super-strep. But I still don’t think that bacterial infection was the primary COD.’

  ‘So what was?’

  ‘I wish I could tell you. I’ll give you all of the results that I’ve completed so far, but it’s still hard to say why the poor little guy didn’t make it. Maybe we need to re-examine its DNA. It has so much jabberwocky – much more than any other creature I’ve ever tested.’

  Nathan said, ‘OK. Thanks, anyhow. I’ll take everything home tonight and go through it.’ ‘Jabberwocky’ was what they called DNA codings that didn’t appear to play any obvious part in developing a creature’s growth – genetic junk mail – and all creatures had a certain amount of it. It was like creating a human being by specifying ‘fingersballoonsearscakeslegstoespencils.’ But ‘jabberwocky’ sometimes contained hidden messages that revealed exactly why a particular species always turned out the way it did.

  Richard said, ‘I really want to thank you for all of the help you’ve given me, Professor. Without you . . . without this project . . . I’d probably still be in Kutztown, analyzing pig semen for the Farm Bureau.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me where you’re moving to.’

  Richard looked embarrassed. ‘I’m not one hundred per cent sure that the job’s in the bag, that’s why. They’re supposed to be getting in touch with me today.’

  ‘Well, good luck. And you will keep in contact, won’t you? We’re not finished with Cee-Zee yet. Not by a long way.’

  As Nathan was hanging up his lab coat, George the janitor knocked at his office door.

  ‘Leaving us, then, Professor?’

  ‘News travels fast.’

  ‘Well, they’re going to rent this laboratory to some cat-worming company. I have to get it all spruced up by Monday morning.’

  ‘I’m going to miss you, George.’

  ‘Can’t say the feeling’s mutual, Professor. Maybe the next person to take over this office will make sure that their coffee cups are empty before they toss them in the trash.’

  ‘Sorry, George. What else can I say?’

  He left the laboratory and walked out of the building. The wind had dropped but it was still raining – that fine, persistent drizzle that can soak you right through in minutes. He took out his car keys but when he reached the place where he had parked his car, he discovered that it had gone.

  He stood there for a few moments, breathing deeply. That bastard. That mandrill-faced bastard. I’ll bet he was watching me out of his window when I was first parking here. Now the maintenance department was closed, and in
darkness, and the zoo’s administration office would be closed now, too, so he couldn’t even find out the name of the tow-truck company.

  He took out his cell and called All City Taxi. They could come to pick him up but not for forty minutes, because of the traffic. He was just about to call Star Taxi when his cell warbled and it was Grace.

  ‘Do you want Mexican chicken for supper or chili?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Genuardi’s, shopping. Where are you?’

  He told her what had happened. He used four swear words: one for his car, one for the tow-truck driver, and two for the maintenance man.

  ‘That’s OK,’ she soothed him. ‘I can pick you up on the way home. I’m almost done.’

  He went back to his office, opened up his battered brown briefcase, and took out Richard’s necropsy results.

  George came back in, carrying a mop and Nathan’s empty trashcan.

  ‘Can’t get enough of the place, huh?’

  ‘My car got towed. That gorilla in maintenance snitched on me.’

  ‘Hey, ex-squeeze me, that person you’re calling a gorilla, that’s my cousin Teddy.’

  ‘In that case I feel sorry for you, sharing your genes with a throwback like him.’

  ‘He has his own. He doesn’t have to share mine.’

  Nathan stared at George narrowly, for any hint that he was pulling his leg. But George started mopping, and tunelessly whistling between his teeth, and Nathan decided not to take this conversation any further.

  Grace took nearly a half-hour. When she came into the laboratory, her hair was bedraggled and she looked tired, with pale purple shadows under her eyes.

  ‘The traffic!’ she said. ‘What a nightmare.’