Basilisk

by Graham Masterton

  They walked through the bright cobbled streets to the intersection of Kupa and Izaaka. Nathan felt as if they ought to have theme music playing as the four of them made their way along the crowded sidewalks, like The Magnificent Seven or Gunfight at the OK Corral.

  The buildings on either side of them were four and five stories, gray and flat-fronted, like the buildings he had seen in wartime newsreels about the invasion of Poland. Most of them were being remodeled now, but a few of them still had empty, shattered window frames, and were pockmarked with shrapnel scars.

  Up above them, the sky was a piercing pale blue, with fragmented white clouds that had drifted here all the way across southern Germany and the Czech Republic.

  They turned into Kupa Street. Thirty yards to the left there was a narrow alley, and on the corner of this alley stood a tall angular house, four stories high, rendered in gritty gray concrete, with peeling brown shutters and empty window boxes. A rusty yellow plaque with the number seventy-seven was attached to the wall beside the front door. The door was painted a dull maroon color, with a brass knocker in the shape of a hammer. There were two bell pushes, one labeled R. Cichowlas and the other labeled Walach.

  ‘Robert Cichowlas was the artist who rented the top-floor studio,’ said Rafał. ‘The Walachs . . . I don’t know. I think they worked for some tourism company.’

  Nathan said to Denver, ‘Want to try the bells? Just to see if anybody answers.’

  Denver pressed both buttons. They waited and waited, while tourists and shoppers elbowed past them on the sidewalk, but nobody came to the door.

  ‘Try again,’ said Nathan. ‘And knock this time, too, just in case the bells don’t work.’

  Denver pressed the buttons again, holding each of them down for almost half a minute, and then he banged on the door with the hammer-shaped knocker. They could hear it echoing inside the house.

  Patti came up to Nathan and peered down the front of his leather jacket. ‘How about your charm bag? What’s that telling you?’

  ‘Not a peep,’ said Nathan. ‘Although I don’t know what it’s supposed to do if there is somebody home.’

  ‘Cough? Scream? Rattle? Didn’t your witch lady tell you?’

  ‘No. But she said that I’d know if it happened.’

  ‘Maybe it whistles Dixie.’

  Rafał said, ‘I think we can assume there is nobody here. There is a side window which overlooks the alley.’ He opened his tweed coat, just enough for them to be able to see the handle of the screwdriver that he was carrying in his inside pocket. ‘Denver, please to come with me. You will find it easier to climb inside than me.’

  There was nobody in the alley except for an old woman in a black shawl sitting on a wooden chair more than fifty yards away. She was leaning back with her eyes closed, with a ball of red wool and a half-knitted sleeve in her lap, basking in a foot-wide slice of sunlight that was falling between the tenement buildings opposite. A mangy Pomeranian lay asleep at her feet.

  Nathan and Patti stood in the entrance to the alley, pretending to have an animated conversation together, to distract the attention of passers-by along Kupa Street.

  ‘So where do you want to go next?’ Nathan demanded.

  ‘I don’t know!’ snapped Patti. ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘I don’t know! You choose!’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Patti. ‘We sound like those crows in Dumbo.’

  Meanwhile, resting his shoulder against the wall, so that he kept his back to the old woman in the wooden chair, Rafał took out his long, wide-bladed screwdriver. He forced it into the side of the window frame, an inch below the catch. He looked around, just to make sure that nobody was watching, and then took hold of the screwdriver in both hands and wrenched it sideways. The wood was so rotten that he cracked the frame apart, which loosened the screws that fastened the catch.

  Denver clawed the window open, while Rafał got down on one knee and clasped his hands together to give him a boost. Denver took one step back, and then jumped up on Rafał’s hands and dived over the window sill like an acrobat. Nathan heard a clattering sound, and then a crash, like a vase breaking, and Denver saying, ‘Shit.’

  ‘Denver?’ called Rafał, trying to keep his voice down.

  Denver’s face appeared at the window. ‘It’s OK, Raffo. I’m fine. Broke some jug, that’s all.’

  He hesitated for a moment, looking around, and listening. Then he said, ‘Doesn’t seem like there’s anybody here. I’ll let you guys in, OK?’

  Rafał carefully closed the window and wedged it shut with a triangular splinter of wood. He came back to join Nathan and Patti and the three of them returned to the front door. Denver opened it almost at once, and said, triumphantly, ‘Tah-dah!’

  ‘You should be a burglar when you grow up,’ Patti told him, as they stepped inside.

  ‘You think so? So what are you going to be, when you grow up?’

  ‘Come on, you two,’ Nathan interrupted them, ‘we have some serious searching to do.’ But he knew that they were only bantering like that because they liked each other.

  Doctor Zauber’s house was gloomy and cold inside, because it was so deeply overshadowed by the buildings that surrounded it. The interior looked as if it hadn’t been redecorated since the war. The wallpaper was covered in tiny red-and-yellow flowers, but on one side of the staircase they had been erased completely by years of shoulders rubbing past, and up on the landing they had faded to a pale sepia color, as if they were real flowers that had dried up and died. The doors and the skirting boards and the banisters were all painted dark brown, and the paint was scabby and cracked.

  ‘Rafał and I will start looking up in the attic,’ said Nathan. ‘Why don’t you guys start searching down here?’ He opened the door on the right-hand side of the hall, and peered inside. ‘Living room,’ he said. It was stuffy and dark, with thick net curtains that were heavy with dust, and overcrowded with 1930s-style furniture. A large mirror hung over the fireplace, so that they could see themselves standing in the doorway, looking in.

  ‘Looks like a dining room next door, and a kitchen in back. You’ll need to search through every closet and every drawer. If you think you’ve found what we’re looking for, don’t touch it. Just yell out.’

  Denver and Patti went into the living room and started to tug open the drawers of an elaborate walnut cabinet. ‘Take a look under the chairs, too,’ Nathan told them.

  He and Rafał climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing. A chandelier with two of its five bulbs missing hung from the ceiling like a giant spider. The ceiling itself was cracked all the way across and stained with brown blotches of damp.

  ‘If you fix up this house, you make yourself fortune,’ said Rafał. On the wall beside him hung a reproduction of a sour-looking monk, with a sinister-looking monastery in the background, and a sky that was peppered with rooks. The picture was rippled with damp, which made the monk look as if he had leprosy.

  They climbed up the next flight of stairs, and then the next. Rafał was wheezing by the time they reached the door to the attic, and he punched his chest with his fist. ‘I need to take more exercise,’ he said. ‘Not so much beer, not so much potatoes, not so much kiełbasa!’

  Nathan cautiously opened the attic door. It was brighter in here than it was downstairs, because there were six large skylights in the ceiling, although the three south-facing skylights had dark gray roller blinds drawn down over them. This was Robert Cichowlas’ studio. It smelled strongly of oil paint and turpentine and stale cigarettes, and there was a long wooden table crowded with half-squeezed tubes of paint, like wriggling metal worms, as well as jars filled with brushes and paint-dotted palettes and multi-colored rags. At the far end, up against the brick chimney breast, there was a single bed with a grubby green quilt dragged over it.

  Twenty or thirty oil paintings were stacked against the attic wall, as well as charcoal studies and pencil drawings and sketchbooks. On an easel in the center of the room st
ood a half-finished painting of a thin naked woman standing in a forest. Her head, however, was not the head of a woman, but of a wildly staring cat, with yellow eyes.

  The painting of the head was highly detailed and so realistic that Nathan could almost imagine the cat-woman leaping out of the canvas. There was something both frightening and pathetic about her, as if she knew how grotesque she looked, and wished that she were a normal woman again, even if she had never been strikingly beautiful.

  Rafał looked around the studio, sliding open the drawers in the artist’s plan chest, and rummaging through the sweaters and jeans that were heaped untidily in one of the triangular closets underneath the eaves.

  Nathan knelt down and looked under the bed, and under the mattress. Then he turned to Rafał and said, ‘I thought your realtor friend told you that Doctor Zauber had ended this guy’s lease.’

  ‘He did. But maybe he could find no place to store all of his things, and Zauber allowed him to keep them here.’

  ‘But there are so many clothes here. And – look – next to the washbasin. A razor, and a toothbrush. He must still be living here.’

  They searched the attic thoroughly, looking through cardboard boxes filled with letters and photographs torn out of magazines, as well as books and diaries and bundles of pencils and a plaster hand taken from a store-window dummy. Nathan even took a steel ruler from Robert Cichowlas’ table and pried up two ill-fitting floorboards, but found nothing underneath except plaster dust and a mummified rat and a crumpled pack of Extra Mocne cigarettes.

  ‘There’s something not right here,’ said Nathan. ‘I can feel it.’

  ‘Well, maybe,’ said Rafał. ‘But maybe not. Maybe Zauber kept him on here simply because he wanted his rent. Even monsters like Zauber need money.’

  They took a last look around the attic and then went downstairs to the third floor, where the three main bedrooms were. When they opened the first bedroom door, it was immediately obvious that the Walach family were still here, too. There was a high, old-fashioned double bed, covered with a rose-colored satin eiderdown. On one pillow lay a neatly folded pair of blue-and-white striped pajamas. On the other pillow lay a brushed-cotton nightgown, with a frilly collar.

  Rafał turned the key in the closet and opened it. It was full of clothes – mostly dresses, but a brown fur coat, too, and two men’s suits. It smelled strongly of moth repellent. On top of the closet there were two hatboxes and a small leather suitcase.

  ‘Looks like your friend was misinformed,’ said Nathan. ‘Maybe he was wrong about Doctor Zauber, too. Maybe he hasn’t moved back in here.’

  Rafał shook his head in bewilderment. ‘He was sure. He said that Doctor Zauber had even come into his office to sign all the necessary papers.’

  ‘Yes, but if he hasn’t moved back in here, we’re wasting our time. The question is: if he’s not here, where the hell is he?’

  They checked the other two bedrooms. One was clearly a teenager’s room, with posters for Coldplay and Oddział Zamkniȩty, one of the biggest Polish rock bands. In one corner there was a small white desk with a laptop on it, and a black canvas chair with six or seven T-shirts and two pairs of jeans thrown over the back.

  The third bedroom was a young girl’s room, with three shelves that were crowded with Barbies and Bratz and stuffed pandas and teddy bears.

  ‘That’s it, then,’ said Nathan, closing the door behind him. ‘This whole thing is a total bust.’

  He turned to go back downstairs. As he did so, however, he felt an extraordinary shriveling sensation in his chest and his upper arms, as if he had been electrocuted, and he almost lost his balance. He swayed, and held on to the banisters for support.

  ‘Nathan?’ asked Rafał. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  Nathan felt another convulsion, even more painful than the first, and this time his heart seemed to stop in mid-beat, and hesitate before it started up again. He pressed his hand against the front of his coat and realized that the pebbles in Zofia Czarwonica’s charm bag were shaking and clattering and jumping around as if they were alive.

  He dragged the bag out from under his coat and held it up. It was rattling so wildly that it looked as if it were filled with struggling scorpions, as well as stones.

  ‘He’s here,’ he told Rafał. ‘Zauber’s here. Zofia said that I’d know it, as soon as he came close.’

  As soon as he said it, he heard a girl screaming. She was so high-pitched and she sounded so terrified that it took him two or three seconds before he recognized that it was Patti. At the same time, Denver shouted out, ‘Pops! Pops! Help us! Pops!’

  Nathan launched himself down the staircase, four or five stairs at a time. Patti’s screams grew shriller and more panicky, and Denver was so frightened that he was almost roaring.

  ‘Pops! Help us! It’s got her! Pops!’

  Nathan reached the hallway with Rafał clambering down the staircase close behind him. He almost tripped on a loose-weave mat at the bottom of the stairs, but he managed to grab the newel post to steady himself, and to swing around and hurry toward the back of the house, where the screaming and the shouting was coming from.

  He burst into the kitchen. It was cold and gloomy, with a yellow blind drawn down over the window. The walls were tiled in white and green, and there was a large pine table in the center of the room, with a streaky marble top. Copper saucepans hung from the ceiling, like church bells.

  Denver was crouching in the corner, next to the old-fashioned sink. As Nathan and Rafał came in, he shouted hoarsely, ‘There! She’s in there! I tried to get her free but I couldn’t!’

  On the far side of the room there was another door, half open. Inside, it was even gloomier than the kitchen, but Nathan could make out the corner of a white-enameled washing machine, and white towels hanging from a wooden frame.

  Patti was in there, with whatever it was that caught her, and she was still screaming, although her screams were becoming more like sobs.

  Nathan shouted, ‘Patti! It’s OK! We’re coming! Patti!’

  He crossed the kitchen floor and kicked the door wide open. At first he couldn’t understand what he was looking at, because Patti and her assailant must have fallen against a clothes horse, and they were all tangled up in sheets and pillowcases, so that they looked like two struggling ghosts.

  But then Patti twisted herself sideways, and desperately reached out her hand to him, and he understood what was holding her.

  It was a huge gray creature, as large as a man, but much bulkier than a man. It had a dome-shaped head, with bulbous black eyes, and glistening pale-yellow eyelids around them that kept on rolling and unrolling, like a snail’s. Yet underneath its eyes it appeared to have a man’s face, with a man’s nose and a man’s mouth, although its lips were dragged downward, as if it were disgusted by its own existence.

  It was clinging to Patti with six gray tentacles, rope-like and slimy and constantly waving. The main part of its body was a big shapeless sack, covered with thick corrugated skin.

  It had a nauseating smell, like strong human body odor mixed with rotten shellfish.

  ‘Patti!’ Nathan shouted at her, trying to make himself heard above her screaming. ‘Patti, you have to calm down! Patti! Take hold of my hand, and try to calm down! Patti!’

  He gripped Patti’s hand and it was cold and slippery with the creature’s slime. He tried to tug her free, but the harder he pulled, the tighter the creature wound its tentacles around her. It was holding her around her hips and around her waist and around her breasts, too. One tentacle kept waving and flapping in her face.

  Rafał came up right behind Nathan. ‘Holy Mother of God,’ he said. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

  ‘Get me free get me free get me free!’ screamed Patti. ‘I can’t stand it! Get me free!’

  She kept kicking and struggling, and Nathan tried to grab one of her ankles, but the instant he took hold of her, one of the creature’s tentacles wound itself even more tightly around her
leg, and made it impossible for him to pull her away.

  Patti kept on begging and screaming, but then the creature wound a tentacle around her mouth, and all she could manage was a muffled bleating.

  ‘No question,’ said Nathan. ‘It’s a living, breathing Schleimgeist.’

  Rafał took off his glasses, because they had been smeared with foul-smelling mucus, and tried to wipe them on his sleeve. ‘One third squid, one third slug, and one third man. Why would Zauber want to breed anything like this?’

  ‘Let’s just get Patti free.’

  Rafał went back to the kitchen table. He noisily pulled out the drawers underneath the marble top, and found a whole selection of knives and forks.

  ‘Here!’ he said, holding up a ten-inch boning knife.

  He pushed his way back into the laundry room. The slug-creature had dragged Patti into the corner now, and it was winding its tentacles tighter and tighter around her chest, until she was gargling for breath. Rafał dodged to the left, and then to the right, with the carving knife held low. Then he stabbed the slug-creature in the side, twice, as hard as he could.

  The slug-creature let out a harsh, angry screech, but the point of the knife hadn’t even pierced its skin. Rafał stabbed it again, and then again, and then again, but he couldn’t make any impression at all.

  ‘It is too solid!’ he panted. ‘It is like rubber! Like – medicine ball!’

  Nathan was tugging at the slippery gray tentacle that was wound around Patti’s mouth. It had slipped between her lips and was pressing up against her tightly clenched teeth. She was staring at him, her eyes wide with fear. But the tentacle was far too muscular for Nathan to pull it away.

  Rafał was holding the knife in both hands now, and furiously stabbing at the slug-creature’s sides, grunting loudly with every stab. But he couldn’t even make it bleed.

  ‘It’s no good,’ Nathan panted. ‘Slugs don’t have exterior shells, but they can contract their bodies so hard that almost nothing can hurt them.’

  ‘So what can we do? We cannot just stand here and let this monster crush her alive!’