Petrified (3 page)

‘OK, Kavita, that's great,' Nathan told her. ‘Just give me a moment and then we'll be good to go.'

He went through to his office, picked up his phone, and punched out his home number. As he waited for Grace to answer, he could see his reflection in the office window, in his white lab coat. Forty-five years old, but very young-looking for his age. Nobody ever believed that he and Grace had a son of nineteen.

Grace sounded out of breath when she answered him.

‘Sorry,' she panted. ‘The rain eased off so I went out for my run.'

‘I've decided to start the test right now,' Nathan told her. ‘I guess I could have waited until tomorrow morning but I'm worried that the nematode might have grown too mature to metamorphose by then. So – listen, I don't know what time I'm going to get home, if I get home at all.'

‘I'm beginning to suspect that you've got yourself another woman, not a worm. I miss you.'

‘I miss you, too, sweetheart. But tonight's the night. Wish me luck, won't you?'

‘You don't need
luck
, Nathan. You're the best there ever was. Oh, before I forget – you had three phone calls today. A young man, by the sound of it. He was
very
persistent. I think he must have been German, by his accent. Or maybe Russian, or Polish. Something like that.'

‘Did he leave his name?'

‘No, but he said he'd be sure to call back tomorrow.'

‘What did he want?'

‘He said he had something very important to discuss with you. He kept saying, “
I vont to
leave no stone unturned, tell Professor Underhill that
.”'

‘Hey. Very convincing accent.'

‘Well, it wasn't quite as thick as that. But he must have repeated it five times at least. “
I vont to leave no stone unturned
.
He vill understand
.”'

‘Sounds like a nut job to me. Just hang up on him if he calls again. Listen – I have to go. It's T minus two minutes.'

‘I love you, Nathan.'

‘I love you, too.'

He hesitated for a moment. He felt like saying something more, like telling Grace that she was more important to him than all of the scientific breakthroughs he had ever made, or ever would. But he knew she understood that, and he hung up.

When he came out of his office, Aarif said, ‘Everything is ready, Professor! We are all prepared! Video running, infrared running, ultraviolet running, audio on!'

Nathan took one last look at the phoenix-worm lying at the bottom of its glass case. Aarif had constructed its nest exactly in accordance with J
ā
bir's description in
The Book of Stones
– out of oak branches, cinnamon sticks, frankincense, spikenard and twigs of Yemeni myrrh. The myrrh twigs were clustered with thorns, but they didn't seem to cause the phoenix-worm any discomfort. Its skin-surface was gently rippling, and the two glistening sensors just above its mouth were repeatedly rolling and unrolling like a snail's eyes.

‘Look at you, Grubby,' said Nathan. ‘Only a mother could love an ugly bastard like you. That's if you had a mother, which you don't. If anybody's your mother, it's
me
.'

He paused, and then he turned to Aarif and Kavita and said, ‘Hard to believe that Grubby cost upward of eight and a half million dollars, isn't it? Let's hope we're not about to watch all of that investment going up in smoke.'

Aarif swung open a glass panel on the left-hand side of the case and reached inside. He arranged the twigs so that the phoenix-worm was completely covered over. Then he attached a strong magnifying glass to an adjustable chrome stilt, and set up a halogen lamp to direct an intense spot of light into the branches. Even before he had lowered the panel and closed up the case, the dry oak twigs had started to smolder, and a thin wisp of smoke was curling up into the air.

It would have been more practical to light the fire with a match, but in
The Book of
Stones
, J
ā
bir was adamant that the nest had to be ignited ‘as if by the rays of the sun, shining through a jewel'.

‘It is burning, Professor!' said Aarif, clenching his fists in excitement. Already the first thin tongues of flame were flickering up from the nest, and the Pyrex cabinet was filling up with clouds of blue smoke.

Nathan wished that he could have attached electrodes to the worm's outer skin, to monitor its nervous responses, but he had been anxious to follow J
ā
bir's instructions to the letter, and J
ā
bir had insisted that ‘the phoenix-worm be not bound nor tied nor trammeled in any way, nor marked with dyes or henna, nor tattooed'.

In countless previous experiments, Nathan had already seen the consequences of trying to recreate mythical creatures without adhering strictly to the ancient formulae. It didn't work and it could be highly dangerous. If this experiment failed, he knew that he would risk losing his sponsors' money. More than that, though, he didn't want anybody to get themselves injured, or even killed. As he had warned Aarif and Kavita over and over, ‘We're not dealing with pets here, or even zoo animals. We're dealing with primeval birds and beasts and reptiles, and sometimes a mixture of all three, with powers that we can't even begin to understand. What's more, they've never encountered humans before – unlike wolves and bears and coyotes and alligators – so they have absolutely no fear of us whatsoever.'

FOUR

Monday, 6:22 p.m.

I
nside the vivarium, the flames crackled even more briskly. The oak branches began to char, and the spikenard curled up, and the thorny cuttings of
commiphora myrrha
were all reduced to fragile black prickles. There was a strong, aromatic smell of burning spices.

As the nest was reduced to ashes, the phoenix-worm itself gradually reappeared, and Nathan could see that its pale gray skin was starting to shrivel and flake off in the heat. Underneath its skin, however, its flesh was glowing dull red, like a hot coal; and as Nathan watched it, it began to glow brighter and brighter. Within a few seconds, it was incandescent, not like a hot coal any longer, but more like a white gas mantle. It was so bright that Nathan could hardly look at it.

‘Can you see if it is metamorphosing, Professor?' asked Aarif, shielding his eyes with his hand. ‘There is so much shining! So much smoke!'

Nathan said, ‘I don't know yet. To tell you the truth I can't see a goddamned thing.'

Now the phoenix-worm burned more intensely than ever. Even through the thick fire-resistant glass, Nathan could hear a low flaring sound as it burned. The flames leaped up fiercer and higher until they filled the whole vivarium, and as minutes went past they showed no signs of dying down. Nathan began to feel the heat on his face, and he stepped back two or three paces, as did Kavita.

‘It is
incredible
,' said Aarif. ‘How long can such a small creature burn? And all of the oxygen inside the vivarium, that must be used up. This is against all of the laws of physics!'

At that moment there was an explosive crack, and the front glass panel of the vivarium broke in half diagonally and dropped out on to the floor. Flames rolled out with a hungry roar and enveloped Aarif's video cameras, almost as if the blazing worm was angry at being filmed. Aarif dodged forward to rescue them, but the flames came rolling out again, and he had to back away, both arms crossed in front of him to protect his face.

The heat that came blasting out of the shattered vivarium was overwhelming. Papers strewn on top of the laboratory workbenches caught fire and whirled up into the air. Bottles of chemicals exploded, one after the other. Even the varnish on the floor burst into flames. There was a sharp click, and fire-suppressant F-200 gas began to hiss out of the pipes in the laboratory's ceiling, but to begin with, even that seemed to have no effect.

‘
My cameras
!' screamed Aarif.

But Nathan shouted, ‘Forget them! Just get the hell out of here!'

They hurried to the door. Nathan opened it and pushed Aarif and Kavita outside, but then he unhooked the fire extinguisher that was hanging beside it and turned back toward the blazing vivarium.

‘
Professor
!' said Aarif.

‘Call nine-one-one!' Nathan told him. He hit the button on top of the fire extinguisher and slowly started to walk back toward the vivarium, spraying foam from side to side. But the flames continued to blaze with undiminished ferocity. In fact they almost seemed to
eat
the foam that he was spraying at them. The heat was searing. Nathan could feel his forehead and his cheeks scorching, and one by one, the three remaining glass panels in the vivarium cracked and fell out.

‘Professor!' called Aarif. ‘The fire department will be here in just a few minutes!'

Nathan gave the wreckage of the vivarium a last spray of foam before his extinguisher ran out. He dropped it on to the floor with a clang and retreated toward the door.

He was only halfway there when there was a devastating bang, and for a split second the whole laboratory was filled floor-to-ceiling with fire. Nathan was thrown against the wall so hard that he was stunned and dropped to his knees. Aarif rushed to help him and started hitting him repeatedly on the back of the head.

‘What the hell are you doing?' Nathan protested.

‘Your hair is alight, Professor. I am putting you out.'

‘Is it? Are you? OK, thanks.'

Aarif helped Nathan to his feet. Nathan turned around and saw that the fire had extinguished itself. Nothing was left of the vivarium but its twisted metal frame and its ventilator hood, and two workbenches were scorched and littered with broken glass. Apart from that, however, the damage was superficial. The fire may have burned at an unfeasibly high temperature, but it had burned for only two or three minutes.

Nathan walked across to the remains of the vivarium, his shoes scrunching on shattered glass. He sniffed. The laboratory reeked of smoke, but something else, too, like joss sticks from his student days.

Aarif said, ‘Maybe I had better call the fire department and tell them that we have no need of them after all.'

‘No . . . they'll want to come and take a look. In any case, the company will have to have the fire marshal's report before they can claim on their insurance. We don't want them accusing us of negligence, do we?'

‘It was not our fault. How could we have foreseen this fire would be so intense? It defies all scientific principles.'

‘Trying to recreate mythical creatures, Aarif –
that
defies all scientific logic, too.'

Nathan picked up a long steel rule. He bent over the remains of the vivarium and started to poke through the heaps of hot ashes.

J
ā
dir had written that each phoenix was supposed to live for five hundred years. When its time came, it flew to the ancient city of Heliopolis, city of the sun, which used to be located five miles to the east of modern-day Cairo. There, it built a nest out of branches and spices, and crept inside, and died, and became a phoenix-worm. Then the rays of the sun set the nest alight, and out of the flames a new phoenix appeared.

‘
Zip
,' said Nathan. ‘It didn't work, did it? I'm beginning to think that J
ā
dir never
did
create a phoenix, not for real. Maybe everything he wrote about it was a legend. You know – like something out of
The Arabian Nights
. Like genies, and dragons, and flying carpets.'

He scraped aside the last of the ashes with the edge of the steel rule, and then stood up straight. ‘I don't know how the hell I'm going to explain this to Ron Kasabian. He's going to cut off our funding for sure. And he's certainly not going to give us any more money to create a wyvern.'

Aarif was trying to salvage his camera equipment, but the heat had shattered all of the lenses and the legs of his tripods had collapsed.

‘I believed so much that this would work,' said Aarif, shaking his head. ‘I believed it with all of my heart.'

‘Well, I'm sorry,' said Nathan. ‘It's always the same with science. You work your butt off for year after year, and in the end you come up with squat. It's not surprising that you get so many mad scientists.'

‘
Professor
,' said Kavita.

There was an odd inflection in her voice, which made Nathan turn around and say, ‘What is it, Kavita? What's wrong?'

Kavita was staring up at a ventilator hood on top of the burned-out vivarium. Nathan frowned at her and then he looked up to see what she was staring at. On top of the ventilator hood he could just make out a silhouette that looked like a bird's head with a hooked beak.

At first he thought it might be an optical illusion, an angular arrangement of shadows on the ceiling. But then the head jerked sideways, opened its beak, and let out a high, harsh cry.

‘Aarif!' said Nathan. ‘Aarif – up there, on top of the vent!'

Aarif looked up, too, and then he turned to Nathan with a widening smile on his face. ‘You did it, Professor! You did it! I was sure that you could do it!'

‘You mean
we
did it, Aarif. Me and you and Kavita.
We
did it. And I think I need to apologize to J
ā
dir, for doubting him.'

‘I will bring the stepladder,' said Aarif, and hurried off to the storeroom to fetch it. Nathan crossed over to the far side of the laboratory, where a large parakeet cage was standing ready on a workbench. When he had ordered this cage, he had believed that he was tempting fate, and that he would never be able to create a living phoenix to put inside it. But at last he had done it. He had brought to life a living creature that for centuries had been known only as a myth.

Aarif came back with the stepladder and set it up beside the remains of the vivarium. Nathan made sure it was firm, and then climbed up it very slowly, so that he wouldn't startle the phoenix with any sudden moves.