Basilisk

by Graham Masterton

‘I could have called for a taxi.’

  ‘No, never mind. I was practically passing here anyhow.’

  They left the building. As they went down the front steps, Grace looked around and said, ‘Oh . . . they’ve gone. I was going to go over and say hello.’

  ‘Who’s gone?’

  ‘Richard, and Doctor Zauber.’

  ‘Richard Scryman?’

  ‘That’s right. They were sitting in Doctor Zauber’s car, right over there. I knew it was Doctor Zauber because of his registration plate, DOCZ.’

  They climbed into Grace’s SUV. Nathan said, ‘Did you know that they knew each other?’

  Grace shook her head. ‘I had no idea. You wouldn’t have thought they had much in common, would you?’

  They drove out of the zoo and headed north-east. The expressway was a river of red stop lights, and although West Girard Avenue was clogged up, too, at least the traffic appeared to be inching its way forward. It was raining too hard to set the windshield wipers to interval-wipe, and not hard enough to prevent the wiper blades from making an annoying rubbery squeak.

  Nathan said, ‘Richard told me this morning that he’d found himself another job. Well, he wasn’t cast-iron certain that he’d got it, but he seemed to be confident enough. And he said that the pay was pretty good. Maybe he’s going to be working for Doctor Zauber.’

  ‘But what would he do? He’s a biologist, not a care worker.’

  Nathan was silent for a while, as they waited to turn on to North Thirty-Third. Then he said, ‘What’s he like, this Doctor Zauber? Do you know anything about his background?’

  Grace shrugged. ‘He’s German. Well – he has this very strong German accent, anyhow. I don’t know how long he’s been running the Murdstone. Maybe three years, four. So long as I can remember, anyhow.’

  ‘But think about it: Doctor Zauber knows Richard, and Richard knows as much about the Cee-Zee project as I do, and there’s a basilisk roaming around the Murdstone.’

  ‘Come on, Nate. You suspect that there’s a basilisk roaming around the Murdstone. You don’t know for sure.’

  Nathan reached into his inside pocket and took out a clear cellophane envelope with the sawn-up pieces of antler in it. ‘Oh, I’m sure, sweetheart. And this is the evidence.’

  Grace glanced over at him. ‘You analyzed it?’

  ‘I did, and it’s a piece of horn, very similar to a deer’s antler. But I tested its DNA and what do you know? It has three types of DNA. Mammal, bird and reptile, combined.’

  ‘So what kind of a creature is that? A flying deer, with frogs’ legs?’

  Nathan smiled – amused, but triumphant, too. ‘There is only one living animal which combines all three types of DNA, and that’s the duck-billed platypus. The platypus has fur, and it lays eggs, and the male platypus has venom, too, like a snake. Its genetic make-up goes way back more than one hundred and seventy million years, to a time when almost every creature on earth was some variety of reptile.’

  ‘But platypuses don’t have horns, do they? Or is it platypi?’

  ‘No, they don’t. And as far as we know, there was only ever one creature which possessed all three types of DNA, as well as horns, and that was the basilisk.’

  Grace edged in front of a truck, and the van driver blasted his horn at her, and gave her the finger. In return, Grace gave him the sweetest of smiles.

  ‘Somebody’s done it, Grace,’ said Nathan. ‘Somebody’s created a Cee-Zee hybrid, and it’s survived.’

  ‘And you’re thinking—’

  ‘Of course I am. It must be Doctor Zauber. Who else could it be?’

  ‘But Doctor Zauber isn’t a biologist.’

  ‘How do you know? You don’t know anything about him, except that he runs the Murdstone Rest Home.’

  ‘I can’t get my head around this.’

  ‘There’s no other explanation – well, none that I can think of. Maybe he’s been using the rest home as a front for a Cee-Zee project. You need a license for this kind of research, unless nobody knows that you’re doing it.’

  ‘You really believe that?’

  ‘It fits the evidence, doesn’t it? Maybe the Murdstone is more than a front. Maybe that’s where Doctor Zauber gets his funding. There’s a shitload of money in rest homes, especially from old folks who go to meet their Maker before their time, like Doris Bellman. Legacies, unclaimed investments, jewelry, real estate, you name it.’

  ‘It just seems incredible, the whole thing.’

  ‘I know, but the first biologist who creates a viable mythical creature, he’s going to be rich and famous. He’s going to go down in history.’

  Grace drove in silence for a while. Then she said, ‘You really think that Richard has been feeding Doctor Zauber with all of your results?’

  ‘I don’t know. I sure hope not. But it wouldn’t be the first time that a lab tech has sold his soul, would it? He bought himself a new car a couple of months ago, do you remember me telling you? A Saturn Sky. It wasn’t brand new, but I always wondered how he managed to afford it, on what I’ve been paying him.’

  ‘Nate – you can’t be certain about this. You don’t want to start making accusations unless you’re sure.’

  ‘Can you think of any other reason why Richard should have been talking to Doctor Zauber? Why should Doctor Zauber have been there at the zoo at all? It was only by sheer chance that my car was towed and you came around to pick me up. Richard must have thought that I had left already. But even if I had seen him together with Doctor Zauber, I wouldn’t have known who Doctor Zauber was, would I?’

  Grace was silent for a while, thinking. Then she said, ‘I have to admit that it all sounds horribly convincing. What do you think we ought to do now?’

  ‘Go back to the Murdstone. Find the basilisk. Confront Doctor Zauber with the living evidence that he’s stolen my research.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Call the cops, I suppose. Have him charged with whatever crime it is to lift somebody else’s lab results. Zoological espionage, I don’t know.’

  The traffic began to ease and ten minutes later they were turning into their own driveway. Grace switched off the engine but she didn’t immediately get out of the truck.

  ‘What?’ Nathan asked her.

  ‘I don’t know. I have a very bad feeling about this, that’s all. I think we ought to talk to the police first, instead of trying to find the basilisk ourselves. If there is no basilisk, we’ll look like a couple of idiots. If there is – and it can really do what you say it can do – kill you just by looking at you – well, it could kill us just by looking at us.’

  Nathan took hold of her hand. ‘Grace – I have to see it for myself.’

  ‘OK, then,’ she said, although she didn’t look happy. ‘But don’t blame me if Denver ends up as an orphan.’

  ‘By the way—’ Nathan began. He was going to tell her about the dead birds that he had found in the yard.

  ‘Yes?’ she asked him.

  ‘Nothing. I was wondering what you’d decided to make for dinner, that’s all.’

  ‘Do you want to go back to the Murdstone tonight?’

  ‘The sooner the better.’

  ‘In that case, order yourself a pizza. I’m going to take a shower, and change, and pour myself a glass of wine. I’m going to be way too tense to think about chopping up capsicums.’

  They reached the Murdstone almost dead on midnight. The skies had cleared and the moon was high and disconcertingly bright, so that the street looked like a stage set. They had to keep very close to the hedge as they made their way to the rear of the buildings, because there was scarcely any shadow.

  The blind that covered the staffroom window was drawn down only to halfway. Inside, they could see a Korean carer watching TV and sewing, while a white orderly with a shaved head was sprawled on the couch with a large pack of cheese Doritos in his lap.

  Nathan ducked down below the level of the window ledge and crouched his way
along to the back door. Grace followed him. She was wearing a black knitted hat to cover her shiny light-brown hair, a black rollneck sweater and tight black jeans. Nathan had said that she looked more like a James Bond girl than a family doctor. She said that he looked like Brad Pitt, in Fight Club, only scruffier.

  ‘This time, we’ll start off upstairs,’ Nathan whispered.

  ‘OK. The upstairs corridors are like an H. Two long ones, joined by a short one in the middle. But at the top of the H, there’s also an extension going off to the right – a single long corridor leading to the linen stores and the sanitarium, and there are some other rooms, too, but I don’t know what’s in them. Supplies, I expect.’

  Nathan took hold of the door handle, and gently squeezed it downward. ‘Remember what I told you . . . if you see something big and black, with shining eyes, don’t look at it, whatever you do. Turn your face away, hold up your mirror toward it, and get the hell out of there, prontissimo.’

  ‘What if it catches me?’

  ‘I won’t let it catch you.’

  ‘But what if it does?’

  ‘I won’t let it. But keep your eyes tight shut.’

  He opened the door and they stepped inside. They listened for a moment, and then they crept past the strap-hanging monks. Wheel of Fortune was playing on the television inside the staffroom, very loudly. The back door clicked behind them, and at the same time the orderly suddenly shouted out, ‘Make it a habit! That’s the answer! Make it a habit!’

  They froze for a moment, pressing themselves close to the coats, but the orderly didn’t shout out anything else. Even if he had heard the door clicking, he was obviously too comfortable on his couch to get up and investigate.

  Once they had passed the staffroom, they switched on their flashlights. Grace led the way along the corridor toward the stairs. There was a strong smell of boiled fish in the building, which must have lingered since suppertime.

  They reached the foot of the staircase. Halfway up the first flight of stairs there was a tall leaded window, so the hallway was filled with moonlight. They both stopped, and listened. Somewhere on the second floor, a woman was weeping: not loudly, but hopelessly. The weeping of somebody who knows that life is never going to get any better.

  ‘You’re still sure you want to do this?’ Grace whispered.

  Nathan nodded. ‘I have to, sweetheart. This means everything. This is the Holy Grail, as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘All right, then. But God knows what I’m going to say if we get caught.’

  ‘Doctor Mark Sloan never gets into trouble, when he investigates crimes.’

  ‘Doctor Mark Sloan from Diagnosis Murder? Dick Van Dyke? You’re crazy. You know that?’

  Nathan mounted the stairs, with Grace close behind him. The moonlight was so bright that they didn’t need their flashlights, and Nathan switched his off. He had almost reached the second-floor landing when he heard the deep creaking of floorboards, followed by a sharp scraping noise.

  He stopped, with only two stairs left to climb.

  ‘Did you hear that?’

  Grace nodded. Her face in the moonlight looked very white, as if she were a ghost of herself.

  Nathan hesitated. For nearly half a minute, all he could hear was the hissing of water in the Murdstone’s plumbing. Presumably somebody had flushed a toilet somewhere, or run a bath, and the cold-water tank was filling up. The weeping woman was silent now, although some old man had started to cough.

  ‘Come on,’ said Nathan. He stepped up on to the landing and switched his flashlight back on, pointing it along the corridor. At the very far end a door opened, and a figure appeared. Grace gasped, but it was only an elderly resident, with white hair and red-rimmed eyes and a red plaid dressing gown. The old man raised his hand to shield his eyes from the flashlight, and then he disappeared back into his bedroom, closing the door behind him.

  Grace said, phewf! in relief. ‘For one moment there—’

  Nathan took hold of her hand. ‘Let’s take a look down here first. If Zauber has been doing any lab work, my guess is that he’ll have used the sanitarium, and the stock rooms.’

  ‘As long as we don’t get any more surprises like that. I don’t think my heart will take it.’

  They walked along the corridor as soft-footedly as they could, until they reached the extension. Nathan took a quick peek around the corner, but the extension corridor was deserted, too. All he could see was the moonlight, shining in squares through the windows.

  The first door they came to was marked Cleaning Supplies. Nathan tried the handle but it was locked. He tried the next door, which was unmarked, but that was locked, too. The third door was labeled Laundry, and he was able to open that, but there was no laundry inside, only an old-fashioned floor polisher and a standard lamp with a scorched cardboard shade.

  At the end of the corridor, on the right-hand side, they found gray-painted double doors with wired-glass windows in them. The doors were locked, and the handles were chained and padlocked together. The room was in total darkness, so Nathan shone his flashlight through one of the windows. It had obviously been designed as a sanitarium, but there was only one bed in it, without any sheets or blankets, and the only hospital paraphernalia was a single drip stand and a tipped-over zimmer frame.

  ‘Well, something must happen in here that Doctor Zauber doesn’t want anybody to know about. Otherwise, why chain the doors like this? There’s nothing to steal, is there? And look at the windows.’

  Every window in the sanitarium had a black blind over it, like a photographer’s darkroom, and every blind had been taped to the window frames with black gaffer tape.

  Nathan said, ‘Where would you keep a creature during the day if that creature couldn’t tolerate daylight?’

  Grace stood on tiptoe and peered into the sanitarium, too. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘It could really be real, couldn’t it? And look. I’ll bet that’s where it sleeps.’

  Nathan angled his flashlight toward the corner of the room. There were two large mattresses lying side by side on the floor. They were sagging and frayed and heavily stained with something brown.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Nathan. He turned around and looked back along the corridor. ‘The problem is, where is it now?’

  ‘You did bring the gun, didn’t you?’

  Nathan reached behind him and pulled the automatic out of his belt. ‘Gun. And mirror.’

  ‘I don’t care about the mirror so long as you have the gun.’

  ‘I don’t want to kill it, Grace. That would defeat the whole object.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘We go look for it, of course. It must be reasonably manageable, otherwise Zauber wouldn’t be able to keep it locked up in the sanatarium, would he?’ He paused. ‘I was going to train my gryphon, if it had lived. I was even thinking of hiring a professional falconer.’

  ‘Maybe we should call it a night,’ said Grace. ‘Now that we’ve found some evidence that your basilisk really exists – isn’t that enough?’

  ‘Grace, if it exists, I have to see it for myself.’

  As they stood there, the corridor began rapidly to darken. A large cloud was moving across the moon, like a theater curtain, and within less than a minute, the whole extension was plunged into blackness.

  Grace said, ‘Come on, Nate. We can call the police. We can call the Department of Public Welfare. They’ll take care of it.’

  ‘Grace—’

  ‘I’m frightened, Nate. I don’t mind admitting it.’

  ‘OK. Maybe you’re right. Maybe this was a crazy idea.’

  Nathan felt frustrated, but he had to admit to himself that he was relieved, too. It reminded him of the time that he had tried to jump off the Kidd’s Mills bridge into the Shenango River to qualify for membership of a local gang. He had wanted to join that gang more than anything else in his whole life, but his uncle had come driving past before he could jump, and had ordered him down. He had protested loudly, and
sulked, but secretly he had been deeply thankful. The Shenango was shallow, with a rocky bottom, and very cold.

  He put his arm around Grace’s shoulders and steered her back along the corridor. But before they could reach the corner where the extension corridor joined the main corridor, they heard the same scraping noise they had heard before. Then a pause. Then another scraping noise, and a sound like somebody dragging a very heavy sack along the ground.

  Nathan took out his gun again, and cocked it. He took his shaving mirror out of his pocket, and held that up, too.

  ‘Nate?’ said Grace, and this time she sounded truly frightened.

  ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. Let’s just take this careful.’

  He edged his way toward the corner, with the automatic in his right hand and the mirror in his left. Now the scraping and the scratching and the dragging noises grew louder still, and they could hear breathing, too: thick, clogged-up breathing. It sounded as if some huge locomotive were approaching them.

  ‘Holy Mother of God,’ said Grace.

  Nathan took a deep breath. He felt terrified. He felt elated. Here, at last, he was going to come face to face with a living myth. A creature that hadn’t existed since medieval days.

  He stepped around the corner, and there it was, exactly as he had seen it in his nightmare. Huge and bulky and hunched, with a black bony coronet that scraped against the ceiling. It was all wrapped up in layer after layer of tattered black sacking, although he could see its claws and its scaly black feet, with a long sharp spur behind each heel. Its head was covered with sacking, too, so that its eyes appeared only dimly, as they had in his nightmare.

  The creature saw him, or sensed him, or smelled him, because it uttered a furious and almost deafening hiss, like a bath full of scalded snakes. Its odor was overwhelming: an eye-watering mustiness as strong as cats’ urine.

  Grace screamed, ‘Nate!’ and it was the first time that he had ever heard her scream in absolute terror. He pointed his automatic between the creature’s eyes and thought to himself: shoot it. Shoot it now, because it’s going to tear you to pieces and then it’s going to go after Grace.

  But a commanding voice called out, ‘Doctor Underhill! Sir! You don’t want to do that!’