Basilisk (10 page)

‘
You won’t leave me, Nate, will you
?’ said Grace, and turned over, so that her hand accidentally struck his shoulder.

‘No,’ he reassured her, even though she was fast asleep. ‘I won’t leave you. I promise.’

At last his eyes began to close. His mind was still churning over and over, but his exhaustion was gradually dragging him off to sleep. He kept seeing flickering images of the gryphon, and the resentful way in which the gryphon had stared at him with its single orange eye. And he could hear Dr Burnside’s voice in his ears, whispery and harsh. ‘
We need to discuss your future, Nathan, here at the zoo
.’

‘Future?’ said a thick, guttural voice. ‘You have no
future
.’

Instantly, he opened his eyes, and raised his head. He looked around the bedroom, frowning. He thought for a split second that it had been Grace talking to him, but then he lifted his eyes toward the man’s white face on the ceiling. The man had opened
his
eyes, too – eyes that were totally white and apparently blind.

I’m dreaming
, Nathan told himself.
I’m having another nightmare
.

‘You think so? How can you possibly be dreaming, with your eyes open?’

The man’s lips moved, but somehow his words and his lip movements didn’t quite synchronize, as if his voice had been dubbed. His eyes opened and closed in a mechanical way, like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

I’m dreaming because you can’t be real. You’re nothing but shadows, on a badly plastered ceiling
.

‘What?
You
of all people should know the difference between dreams and reality. You’re the one who wants to breed gryphons, and gargoyles, and bennu birds.’

Yes, but those creatures, they’re not dreams. They all existed, once, and I can bring them back to life
.

‘Like the basilisk?’

If there
is
a basilisk, yes
.

‘You doubt it? How do you think that Doris Bellman died? What do you think it was that old Mr Stavrianos saw outside his room? And what kind of a beast did
you
see, when you had that nightmare?’

I’m having a nightmare now
.

‘You think so?’ the man challenged him, and his eyelids blinked even more rapidly. ‘Then what do you make of
this
?’

Nathan looked down toward the foot of the bed. A black shape was rising up from the floor. It was huge, and hunched, with a complicated array of twigs or horns on top of its head. Like before, it was covered in layers of tattered sacking, and out of the sacking two claws emerged, gleaming in the moonlight.

Oh shit
, said Nathan.
This time it’s real, isn’t it
.

‘Maybe it is. Maybe it’s not. As I say, my friend,
you
are the expert on the difference between dreams and reality.’

The black creature began to drag itself around to the side of the bed. With every breath it was wheezing and whistling, as if its lungs were clogged with phlegm, and Nathan could smell again that nauseating combination of dust and decaying poultry.

He leaned over the side of the bed and groped frantically around for his baseball bat. But even as he did so he thought:
stop, don’t, this really isn’t real. It wasn’t real the last time and it isn’t real now
.

‘Look at the beast,’ the man told him. ‘Look into its eyes. Then you’ll know for sure.’

With a harsh grunt, the black creature tossed its head, so that it threw back the stringy rags that half-covered its face. The bedroom was still too dark for Nathan to be able to see clearly what it looked like, but he thought he could make out a beak, of sorts, and rounded white cheeks. He was frightened, but at the same time he was mesmerized. Could this really be a genuine basilisk? If it was, where had it come from, and how had it managed to get into his house?

‘Look into its eyes,’ the man repeated.

Nathan cautiously raised his hand in front of his face. If the myths were true, a real basilisk could kill him stone dead with one stare. But how could it be? It was madness. It was nothing but a nightmare.

The creature’s eyes glowed very dimly at first, like two white lights seen behind layers of grimy net curtains. But very quickly they began to shine brighter, until they were blinding. Nathan closed his eyes tightly and turned his face away.

He felt a cold corrosive sensation that started on his scalp and then crawled slowly but inexorably down the back of his neck and his shoulders and his chest. It was more painful than anything that he had ever experienced in his life – like being frozen and scalded, both at once. As it burned his stomach and started to creep down toward his genitals, he opened his mouth to scream, but the cold was so stunning that he couldn’t find the breath. It felt as if a flask of liquid nitrogen was gradually being poured all over him, freezing his skin and penetrating right through his flesh to his bone marrow.

Stop
, he cried out.
It hurts too much. Call it off
.

‘Now do you believe that it’s real?’

What
?
What do you mean
?

‘Tell me if you believe that it’s real. That’s all I’m asking.’

Yes, anything. Yes, it’s real. Call it off, for Christ’s sake, it hurts
.

‘Nathan!’

He opened his eyes. Grace was shaking his shoulder and shouting out, ‘Nathan!
Nate
! Wake up! What’s the matter?’

He stared at her. Then he reached across and switched on his bedside lamp. The black creature had gone, if it had ever been there. When he looked up, the white face on the ceiling had disappeared, too.

‘Did you have another nightmare?’ Grace asked him.

He nodded. ‘The same nightmare, only it was ten times worse. And so goddamned
real
.’

‘The creature with the horns?’

‘It’s a basilisk, I’m sure of it.’

‘Nathan—’

‘It’s a basilisk, Grace! I don’t know why the hell I’ve been having nightmares about it. I’m not even sure that they
are
nightmares. They’re more like – I don’t know –
visions
. It’s
alive
. And it’s like somebody’s trying to tell me that it’s real, and it’s out there someplace. And I’m sure that it killed Doris Bellman.’

He swung his legs out of bed, went across to his closet and took out a pair of jeans.

‘What are you doing? It’s twenty after three.’

‘I’m going to the Murdstone Rest Home. If that creature is actually there, I’m going to find it.’

Grace said, ‘Nate, this is totally crazy. You can’t go wandering around the Murdstone in the middle of the night, you’ll get yourself arrested.’

‘I have to go, Grace – even if it’s just to satisfy myself that it doesn’t exist.’

‘Leave it till the morning, at least. I’ll come with you. We could go together and talk to Doctor Zauber about it.’

‘Unh-hunh. If there
is
a basilisk there, we won’t be able to find it tomorrow morning. It’s totally nocturnal. During the day, it hides itself in the darkest crevice it can find, and sleeps.’

Grace climbed out of bed, too, and watched him in frustration as he pulled on his dark blue sweater. ‘You’ve had a nightmare about it, that’s all.’

‘Two nightmares.’

‘OK, you had
two
nightmares. But lots of people have recurring nightmares. I’ve had recurring nightmares since I was three years old, about being chased through Strawbridge’s furniture department by the wolf from
Little Red Riding Hood
. You can have a nightmare a thousand times but that doesn’t make it any more real.’

Nathan pointed upward. ‘I just saw a man’s face, right there on the ceiling.’

‘You saw
what
?’

‘A man’s face, molded right out of the plaster.’

‘Nate, for goodness’ sake. You’re tired, you’re stressed, your project’s just been canceled. How about I get you a couple of Somnapril and you come back to bed?’

‘I’m going to the Murdstone. I have to. The man spoke to me.’

‘The man on the ceiling?’

‘That’s right. He knew who I was, and all about my mythical creature project. He told me that Doris Bellman was killed by a basilisk, and that your senile old friend in the bathrobe saw a basilisk, too. He
showed
me a basilisk, for Christ’s sake. It came rearing right up from the end of the bed. It was black, and it had horns, and it had eyes like headlights.’

‘You had a nightmare about a monster and a man’s face on the ceiling and that’s why you’re going to drive ten miles at three thirty in the morning and break into an old folks’ rest home?’

‘Not a nightmare. Not a dream. A vision. And, yes.’

Grace came up to him and brushed his hair with her hand. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Come back to bed.’

She was trying to calm him down but Nathan was too fired up. ‘Everybody said I was out of my mind when I first suggested my Cee-Zee program. But I was proved right, wasn’t I? I did actually breed a gryphon, even if it died. And I could do it again. And next time, I’m going to make sure that it survives.’

‘Nathan, I have total faith in you, and I’m not the only one. Remember what Professor Jung Choi said about what you were doing? “Daring,” he said. “Cutting-edge zoology.” But that’s why you
have
to stay focused. So many people have so much respect for you. Even Henry Burnside.’

‘Burnside? You’re kidding me.’

‘Believe me, Nate, you should have heard what he said about you at that fundraiser last month. If he had only had the resources, he would have gone on financing you. But he simply doesn’t – and the zoo’s trustees have all gotten cold feet.’

Nathan shook his head. ‘Maybe I’m totally off beam. I mean – I don’t have any empirical evidence whatsoever. But something’s come alive out there, and it’s so close to what I’ve been working on for so long that I can practically
feel
it.’

Grace thought for a while, and then she said, ‘OK. So you want to go to the Murdstone and take a sneaky look around?’

‘I want to see this sack-dragger that Doris Bellman told you about. I want to see this hunched-up monster that “Michael Dukakis” saw in the corridor.’

‘And if you get caught, what do you say then?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nathan admitted. ‘But I’m sure that I can think of some plausible explanation for being there. Maybe I could say that I’m checking the place out with a view to sending my old man there, but he’s practically blind, so I thought it would be a good idea to see what it’s like in the dark.’

Grace shook her head. ‘You’re mad, you know that? The archetypal mad scientist, from
The Twilight Zone
.’

‘Grace – if somebody has successfully bred a basilisk – I
have
to see it. I have to know for sure. It would be the single most significant scientific breakthrough since DNA.’

‘OK, OK. Go. But I’m coming with you.’

‘You can’t.’

‘What do you mean, I
can’t
? I know the Murdstone like the back of my hand, and I can show you how to find Doris Bellman’s room, and I can show you exactly where “Michael Dukakis” saw his hunched-up figure.’

Nathan said, ‘Weren’t you listening, when I was reading out that stuff from Bishop Kadłubek’s
Black Book
? The basilisk can kill any living thing just by staring at it.’

‘So why is it OK for
you
to go looking for it, but not
me
?’

‘I’m taking some precautions.’ He went to his nightstand, opened it, and took out the black SK automatic that he had never used, not even once.

‘You’re going to trespass in an old people’s rest home in the middle of the night and you’re going to take a
gun
?’

‘That’s not all.’ He went into the bathroom and came out with his circular shaving mirror.

‘A gun, and a shaving mirror?’

‘In old Polish legends, the way that people beat the basilisk was to hold up a mirror and the basilisk’s stare was turned right back on it.’

He went to his closet, took out the black necktie that he only ever wore to funerals, and knotted it around the mirror’s folding stand. Then he hung it around his neck and buttoned his shirt up over it.

Grace said, ‘I think we should call the police.’

‘And tell them what? That there’s some kind of medieval monster prowling around the Murdstone Rest Home, and you know that for sure because your husband had two nightmares about it?’

‘No – that my husband is thinking of breaking into a home for seniors, and he’s armed and unhinged.’

Nathan lowered his head. ‘Grace, I
know
this sounds nuts. But it’s my whole life’s work. Recreating these creatures – it’s what defines me. It’s what they’re going to put on my headstone, when I die.
He Made Mythical Monsters
.’

Grace came up to him and kissed him. ‘OK, Nate. But you’re not going alone. We’re husband and wife, remember?
Hart to Hart
. If you absolutely insist on doing this, then I absolutely insist on coming along with you to watch your ass, because your ass is very precious to me, as well as the rest of you.’

It took them less than twenty-five minutes to drive to Millbourne. There was hardly any traffic around, apart from a mechanical street sweeper and three buses crowded with tired-looking shift workers.

‘Now
that’s
a rare sight in Philly,’ said Grace, as they overtook the street sweeper. ‘Even rarer than a basilisk, probably.’

Nathan said, ‘You don’t have to mock me. If there’s nothing there, I’ll admit that I’m ready for the funny farm. But at least let’s check it out, OK?’

‘I’m not mocking you, Nate. I’m trying to lighten the mood, is all.’

They crossed the Schuylkill River. The moon was sinking toward the horizon, and the smoggy atmosphere had turned it blood-red. Another blood-red moon was rising from the river to meet it.