A huge blast of scorching air came out of the room, and he had to shield his face with his hand. Inside, the drapes were blazing, and so was the bed. It was like a funeral pyre. A black-faced woman was lying on it, her hair and her skin shriveling up in front of his eyes, her nightgown already in flames. Nathan knew then that he was much too late. Even if Doctor Zauber were here, he would have burned to death, and so would the basilisk. But he didn’t believe for a moment that Doctor Zauber was the suicidal type; or even the type who would want to go out in a Wagnerian blaze of glory.
He retreated down the stairs, and along the corridor. The smoke was very much thicker now, and his eyes were streaming. As he approached the back door, he heard Richard shouting, ‘Stay there! Stay there! The fire department is coming!’
He came out of the back of the rest home, wrenching the plaid scarf away from his face and taking three deep gulps of fresh air. Richard was standing about twenty yards away, staring up at the roof.
‘Stay there!’ he repeated. ‘I can hear the sirens already! They won’t be long!’
Nathan looked up, too. Standing right on the edge of the third-story parapet was ‘Michael Dukakis’, in yellow pajamas. His arms were spread wide, as if he were giving a benediction to the whole world, and his wild white hair was flapping in the wind.
‘I saw the beast!’ he screamed out.
‘Hold on!’ Nathan called up to him. ‘We’re going to get you down!’
‘I saw the beast! The great black beast! I saw it going from one bedroom to the next! I saw the lightning that flashed from its eyes! I know what it was doing! It was dealing out death!’
‘Michael!’ Nathan shouted back at him. ‘Michael, stay where you are! The fire department will bring you down with a ladder!’
He broke into uncontrollable coughing, and spat up smoke-blackened phlegm. Richard tried to clap him on the back, but Nathan twisted himself away.
Richard backed off, his hands held high. ‘I’m sorry, Professor. I’ve told you I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry?’ Nathan coughed. ‘All this – this is all your fault! And you’re sorry?’
‘For Christ’s sake! I didn’t start this fire!’
At that moment, however, there was a high-pitched scream from the roof. They both looked up and saw that flames were leaping out of the center of the building. ‘Michael Dukakis’ was on fire. His white hair was alight, and two tall flames were rising out of his back, like angels’ wings.
‘Holy shit,’ said Richard.
But there was nothing that either of them could do, except watch as ‘Michael Dukakis’ burned. He stood there for almost a minute, on the very edge of the parapet, while the fire consumed him. Anybody else would have jumped. Anybody else would have fallen, deliberately, rather than be burned alive. But whatever obsessions he had, whatever delusions had taken hold of his mind, they kept him there, on the edge of the building and the edge of sanity. Perhaps he thought that this was the final punishment which God had always had in store for him, and he deserved it.
At last, however, he pitched forward from the roof. The flames that engulfed him made a fluttering sound as he fell. He hit the asphalt with a flat, complicated thump, and lay there, burning furiously from head to foot, with his grinning teeth gradually appearing, and then his ribcage, and then his shinbones.
With a howling of sirens and a honking of air horns, the Philadelphia Fire Department arrived, three red-and-white Kovatch pumpers, followed almost immediately by four red-and-white ambulances. Nathan and Richard both backed away as the fire officers rolled hoses round to the back of the buildings, and emergency medical teams brought out breathing equipment and gurneys.
Within minutes, water was being sprayed on to the Murdstone Rest Home from three sides, and teams of firefighters were entering the building with oxygen masks. The water drifted across the parking lot like a heavy shower of rain.
The emergency medical commander came up to Nathan, closely followed by the chief fire officer. The EMS commander was black, and very stocky. The chief fire officer was even more heavily built, but ginger, with a bristling gray moustache.
‘Sir?’ asked the EMS commander. ‘Were you the individual who called nine-one-one?’
Nathan nodded, and coughed.
‘Do you have any idea how many people are still inside?’ the chief fire officer asked him.
‘I’m not sure. I could only make it as far as the second-story landing. But Doctor Zauber told me that he had thirty-eight residents. All elderly. I don’t know many staff were here. But there are five that I know of – Sister Bennett and two Korean carers and two male orderlies. There are probably more.’
The chief fire officer turned away and spoke into his radio transmitter. He listened to a distorted voice talking back to him, and then he turned to Nathan again. ‘Anybody still alive, as far as you know? Did you hear anybody shouting out for help?’
Nathan shook his head, and pointed toward ‘Michael Dukakis’, who was now covered up with a silver fire-suppressant blanket. ‘Only him, when he was up on the roof. I went into three rooms, two on the first floor and one on the second. I found a woman and a man on the first floor and they were both dead. The woman upstairs – well, she was just about cremated.’
The chief fire officer took a notebook out of his breast pocket, and a ballpen. ‘If I could have your name please, sir.’
‘Nathan Underhill. I’m Professor of Cryptozoology at Philadelphia Zoo.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Crypto-zoology. We call it Cee-Zee. It’s the breeding of hybrid embryos. Stem-cell research.’
‘Can I ask what you were doing here?’
‘I came to see Doctor Zauber, he’s the owner. Well, maybe he’s not the owner, but he runs the place. Or did. I wanted to ask him for some scientific data.’
‘You think he’s still in there?’
‘I really don’t know. Somehow I doubt it.’
‘Oh, yeah? Why’s that?’
‘I don’t have any proof, one way or another. He may be in there. He may be dead. But I don’t think that Doctor Zauber is the kind of man who ever intended to end his life in a burning rest home.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning I’m totally not sure if he’s in there or not. But I think he’s one of life’s survivors.’
The chief fire officer asked Nathan over a dozen more questions, most of them related to what he had seen when he first entered the building. Where had the fire been blazing at its hottest? Which way had the smoke been blowing? Which doors had been open, and which had been closed? Had he smelled anything like gasoline or kerosene? Were the fire alarms sounding?
‘No,’ he said. ‘I can tell you that for an absolute fact. I didn’t hear any fire alarms.’
The chief fire officer moved on to talk to Richard. Meanwhile the EMS commander came up to him and said, ‘How are you feeling now, sir?’
‘I’m OK, fine. A little chesty.’
She touched her upper lip with two fingers, to indicate that Nathan had smoke smudges under his nostrils. ‘All the same, we need to check you over. Smoke inhalation can seriously damage your throat and your lungs, and it can poison you.’
‘I’m fine. I’ll be fine.’
‘You think so? I have never known anybody to be fine, after going through something like this, either physically, or psychologically. So come over to the ambulance with me, and we’ll have you checked over.’
Nathan hesitated, and then he nodded. He was exhausted, and he recognized that it was time to give in, and allow this woman to take care of him.
‘I saw some TV documentary about stem-cell research,’ she told him, as they walked around to the front of the building, where the ambulances were parked. ‘Isn’t that where you grow human babies inside of chickens’ eggs? Or is it the other way around?’
‘Something like that,’ he replied, and attempted to smile. He sat down on the rear step of the ambulance, and two paramedics helped him to take
off his borrowed coat. One of them shone a flashlight down his throat and up his nostrils.
‘It’s a little sooty up there,’ the paramedic remarked. ‘But lucky for you there’s no thermal injury. No burning. Didn’t even singe your nose-hairs.’
He wiped Nathan’s face with a medicated paper towel and put an oxygen mask on him, while the other checked his pulse and his blood pressure.
‘You seem like you’re OK. But I just want you to sit here for a little while. You’ve had a shock, and shock can have a delayed effect on you, you know? Hit you when you least expect it.’
Nathan pictured Grace, lying waxy-faced in the Hahnemann IT unit, and thought: you don’t need to tell me what shock can do to people. But the paramedic was friendly, and reassuring, and just at the moment Nathan badly needed people around him who cared about his welfare.
He was still sitting at the rear of the ambulance when a girl’s voice said, ‘Hey – looky here! It’s the Dragon’s Egg Egghead!’
He turned around and pulled down his oxygen mask. It was Patti Laquelle, in her puffy red squall and her sparkly red boots. A little way behind her came a listless gum-chewing young man with a ponytail, wearing a navy-blue Flyers fleece and toting a Sony video camera.
‘Professor!’ she said. ‘What are you doing here? You haven’t been hurt, have you? Jerry, would you believe it, this is Professor Underhill, who was trying to hatch all of those medieval dragons and stuff.’
Jerry shrugged as if he could care less, and carried on chewing, and looking around.
Nathan said, ‘I was visiting somebody here, that’s all, when the place went up. I went in to see if I could rescue anybody, but none of them stood a chance.’
‘How many dead in total? Do you know?’
‘I don’t have any idea. You’ll have to ask the fire department, or the police.’
‘Is it OK if I interview you? It won’t take long.’
‘No . . .’ Nathan stood up, and took off his oxygen mask. ‘My wife isn’t too well . . . she’s in the hospital. I have to go see her.’
Patti said, ‘I’m sorry. I hope it’s nothing too serious. Maybe I can call you later.’
‘Yes, maybe.’
The paramedics were busy in back of the building. Part of a wall had caved in and two firefighters had been hurt. There was a whole lot of shouting going on, as well as the constant roaring of the pumpers, and the clattering of water as it poured down the sides of the building.
Richard was standing on his own. He gave Nathan a quick, sheepish glance, and for a moment Nathan thought he was going to come over and try to apologize yet again. Nathan turned away. Right now, he didn’t think that he would ever get over his anger at Richard’s betrayal, and what he and Doctor Zauber had done. He walked back to his car, took out his cell and called Denver at the hospital.
‘Denver? It’s Dad. Any news about your mom?’
‘I talked to the nurse about ten minutes ago. She’s not getting any worse, but she’s not getting any better, either. Listen – are you coming back down here?’
Nathan said, ‘Please, Denver – hang in there for another half-hour, will you? I really need to take a shower and change my clothes.’ He didn’t tell him why. Denver had enough to worry about right now.
‘OK, Pops. But don’t be too long, will you?’
Nathan looked across at the smoking ruins of the Murdstone. Most of the front was burned out, except for the porch, where the gargoyle was still perched, grinning at him through the drifting smoke. Before he could do anything more, he needed to know if Doctor Zauber had survived the fire. Only Doctor Zauber knew how basilisks stole people’s life-energy from them, and if there was any conceivable way of giving it back.
He pulled his automatic out of his belt, and stowed it in the glovebox. His shaving mirror was in there already – the one he had taken with him in the hope of deflecting the basilisk’s lethal stare. He was just about to close the glovebox when he noticed that the back of the mirror had been discolored into rainbow patterns, like any metal when you heat it. He took it out, and turned it over, and the face of the mirror was shiny black.
Maybe it had worked – partially, anyhow. Maybe it had deflected some of the basilisk’s stare, so that Grace had been shocked into unconsciousness, but not killed.
He sat looking into the blackened mirror for a long time. He could still see his face in it, like a ghost, but he had the feeling that he could see more than that. He had the feeling that he was being shown a clue.
All of the medieval books that he had read about basilisks had claimed that mirrors were essential to ‘throwe back at the beast its essentiale evil, and thus destroie it,’ but even the more detailed accounts made no mention of the mirrors turning black. He would have thought that this effect was so striking that at least one writer would have mentioned it.
He dropped the mirror back into the glovebox and started the engine. He had never felt so alone, and so completely lost. It was like finding himself in the suburb of some foreign city, without a streetmap. But at the same time he had never felt so determined. He was going to find Doctor Zauber, if Doctor Zauber was anywhere to be found, and he was going to reawaken Grace.
The morning wind blew a great black roll of smoke across the street, and for a second it looked to Nathan like a monstrous parody of the basilisk, with its hunched back and its branching horns. He pulled away from the curb, and headed toward home.
FOURTEEN
Night of the Hunters
He returned to the hospital at a quarter after two. Denver was waiting for him on the front steps outside, looking tired and jittery.
‘Any change?’ Nathan asked him, but Denver shook his head.
‘The nurse said her brain was like a jammed-up computer. You know, when a program won’t respond. Everything’s in there, no brain damage. But it’s all, like, locked.’
Nathan put his arm around his shoulders. ‘We’ll find a way to unlock it, I promise you.’
Denver frowned at him. ‘You have a really bad bruise on your cheek, just there. How did that happen?’
‘I went back to the Murdstone Rest Home. The whole goddamned place was on fire. It looked like somebody had tried to burn it down.’
‘What? You’re kidding me!’
‘It’s OK. I went in there, to see if anybody was still alive, but it was too goddamned hot for me to go too far. I called the fire department, and the EMS. That’s why I had to go back home and clean up. I was stinking of smoke.’
‘Jesus. Was anybody hurt?’
‘There must have been some casualties, yes.’
‘But what about what’s-his-name? Doctor Zoober? Was he there?’
‘I went in. I came right back out. That was all I could do. It was like an inferno.’
‘But what if he was burned up in there? What are we going to do about Mom?’
‘I don’t believe he was in there, Denver. The guy’s too wily.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Look,’ said Nathan. ‘Let me go see Mom. I’ll tell you all about this later.’
‘You’re OK, though?’
Nathan looked at him; at his eyes that were just like Grace’s. ‘I’m all right,’ he reassured him, squeezing his arm. ‘I just don’t think I’m going to be joining the fire department anytime soon.’
He left Denver in the wait room and went up to the IT unit to see Grace. She was lying there, still white-faced, and when he lifted her hand from the blanket her fingers were still deeply cold, as if she had just been rescued from the bottom of a lake. Doctor Ishikawa came in, with a clipboard under her arm.
‘Ah, Professor Underhill!’ she smiled. ‘Yes – your son told me that you were a professor.’
‘Not a professor of anything that can lift my wife out this coma.’
‘All the same, you should try to be optimistic. I’m a little worried about her blood pressure, which is lower than it should be, but her vital signs are generally good.’
‘So what do we do n
ow?’
‘We will just have to wait. It might do some good if you spend some time with her, talking to her.’
‘I will. I’m just going to take my son out and buy him something to eat.’
‘The hospital canteen is good. You should try their vegetarian lasagna.’
‘Unh-hunh. He only eats Wendy’s.’
He kissed Grace on her chilly, unresponsive lips, and stroked her hair. He wanted to say, ‘Come on, Grace, stop pretending that you’re unconscious. I’ve had enough of this game,’ but he knew that it would be futile. He left the room. Two men in gray raincoats were waiting for him outside, one of them with spiky white hair and a nose like a motor-horn bulb, the other nearly six-feet-five, with a long, lugubrious face and very sad eyes.
‘Professor Underhill? I’m Detective Cremer and this is Detective Crane.’
‘Oh, yes? How can I help you?’
‘You witnessed the fire this morning at the Murdstone Rest Home. In fact a couple of other witnesses said you acted real courageous.’
‘I only did what anybody else would have done.’
Detective Cremer sniffed, and tugged at his nose. ‘The thing of it is, I’ve had a preliminary report from the medical examiners, and I need to ask you some questions about what you found when you went in there.’
‘I found dead people.’
‘Yes, sir. But I’d like to ask you what the precise circumstances were.’
Nathan said, ‘I’m taking my son to Wendy’s, why don’t you come along?’
Detective Cremer looked at his wristwatch. ‘OK, sure. I could use a cup of coffee.’
They all walked to Wendy’s on North Broad Street. They found a table by the rain-spotted window, and ordered three coffees and a traditional cheeseburger for Denver. Nathan wasn’t at all hungry. He could still smell burning bodies in his nostrils, although he knew that he was imagining it, most likely.
‘So far we’ve located twenty-six victims,’ said Detective Cremer. ‘Obviously the MEs haven’t had the time to examine all of them, but they’ve given five of them your cursory once-over, and the interesting thing is that none of them died from smoke inhalation.’
Basilisk Page 15
