Basilisk (20 page)

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

H
e 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 now?’

‘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.’

‘What are you trying to tell me?’ asked Nathan, as if he didn’t know. If they hadn’t succumbed to smoke inhalation, they hadn’t been inhaling when the fire was set. They had all been dead already.

‘Well, let’s put it this way,’ said Detective Cremer. ‘It’s much too soon to jump to any conclusions. We haven’t even identified them formally. But we’d just like to know what you saw when you first went in there. Was the smoke pretty thick?’

‘Not on the first floor, no. Not to begin with. I went into two rooms off the first floor corridor, and I found a woman and a man, both dead, as far as I could tell. But there was very little smoke in their rooms.’

‘Any sign of physical injury?’

Nathan shook his head. ‘Not as far as I could tell.’

‘You went up to the second floor, too?’

‘I tried to, but it was too smoky and too hot. I opened one door, and there was a woman inside, and she was actually burning. She was, like, chargrilled. That’s the only word for it.’

Denver had just taken a large bite of cheeseburger, and he looked across at Nathan in slowly dawning disgust. He picked up his napkin and spat it out, and pushed his plate away, as well as his Oreo Twisted Frosty.

Nathan said, ‘I’m sorry, Denver. I should have waited till you’d finished eating.’

‘Oh, great. So that I could puke?’

‘I’m sorry, really I am. But that’s what I saw. I’m not an expert, but I would have guessed that the fire was started on the second floor someplace.’

‘You think that somebody might have started it deliberately?’ asked Detective Crane. Even his voice was sad.

‘I don’t know. It was very fierce, and it spread really quickly. But like I say, I’m not an expert.’

Detective Cremer drained his coffee. ‘OK, Professor. We’ll probably need to talk to you again later, if you don’t mind. But thanks for that.’

He pointed toward Denver’s half-eaten cheeseburger and said, ‘Do you mind? I didn’t have time for breakfast this morning.’

Denver said, ‘Be my guest. It’s like, you know, chargrilled. Cremated, even.’

He drove Denver back to West Mount Airy. Even though Grace was rarely home until six or seven, because of the home visits she had to make to her housebound patients, the house still seemed silent and empty, and dusty, too. Specks of dust were falling through the sunlight that shone through the living-room windows, as if they were settling on Grace’s life.

‘OK if I stay with Stu tonight?’ asked Denver.

‘I guess. I was thinking of going back to the hospital, in any case. Do you think that his parents will mind?’

‘I asked him already. He said it’s OK.’

Nathan sat on a stool in the kitchen, and opened up a can of Dale’s Ale. ‘Fine, then. I’ll call you if anything happens.’

Denver hesitated by the door. ‘Pops . . . I know that this wasn’t your fault. Well, it was your fault, kind of. But it was Mom’s fault, too. Both of you wanted to do this together.’

‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘I should have said no. I shouldn’t even have suggested it. It was much too dangerous, and I knew it.’

‘Sure, but that’s Mom, isn’t it? Always taking risks. You remember that time, when we were snowboarding, at Aspen? She was crazy, the way she was always catching air.’

Nathan nodded. ‘Don’t you worry, Denver. We’ll get her back. I promise you.’

Early that evening, Nathan went back to the Hahnemann to sit beside Grace’s bed. He took with him her favorite book,
The Process
, a dreamlike story about an American university professor crossing the Sahara.

Doctor Ishikawa had gone home, but a young blonde intern came in to tell him that Grace was stable, and that an EEG had indicated that her brain activity was normal. There was no reason to suppose that she wouldn’t eventually wake up.

Nathan sat down and took hold of Grace’s hand. God, it was cold – as cold as it had been when she had gone snowboarding and lost one of her gloves.

‘I’m so sorry, Grace,’ he told her. ‘I don’t know what else to say. I just hope that you’re having sweet dreams in there, and not nightmares.’

Grace continued to breathe softly and steadily. It was obvious that she was dreaming, because he could see her eyeballs flicking rapidly from side to side under her eyelids. But there was no way of telling if she was out in the yard, cutting her roses, or whether she was running down the corridor in the Murdstone Rest Home, pursued by the basilisk, its lungs gasping like black leather bellows.

A nurse brought him a cup of coffee and he started to read.

‘In Morocco, it is spring and the hills wash in torrents of color. One mountain is blue, the next mountain is red and the mountain behind it bright yellow with borders of purple. White valleys below are great lacy aprons of waterwort meadow, smelling even more hauntingly rotten-sweet than the orange blossom odor of honey that sets my head spinning as it pours through this train.’

He went on reading for nearly two hours, until his throat was dry. Then he left her for a while, and went for a walk along the corridor to the reception area. Two nurses were sitting at their station, and both of them smiled at him in sympathy.

‘Anything you need, Mr Underhill?’

‘A miracle would be good.’