Basilisk (12 page)

‘
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 peered 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.

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.’