Basilisk

by Graham Masterton

  Nathan turned back toward the kitchen. Denver was standing up now, both hands raised, biting at his knuckles in helplessness. His eyes were bursting with tears. ‘Pops, it’s going to kill her, Pops! Don’t let it kill her, please!’

  It was then that Nathan thought: slugs. And he remembered his mother, after it had been raining, and those huge gray limax maximus came crawling across the path, intent on eating her geraniums.

  He crossed the kitchen to the pinewood hutch which stood beside the door. Behind him, in the laundry room, Patti must have managed to twist her face away from the tentacle that was wound around her mouth, because she let out three more hysterical screams.

  ‘Nathan!’ called Rafał. ‘What are you doing? Come back! Help me! Please!’

  ‘Hold on!’ Nathan shouted back. ‘I’m coming!’

  On the second shelf of the hutch there was a line of large white ceramic jars, with green italic lettering on them. Cukier, pieprz and sól. Nathan picked up the jar marked sól and opened it. It was almost full.

  ‘Nathan!’ Rafał bellowed. ‘It is breaking her ribs!’

  Nathan pushed his way back into the laundry room. Rafał was still frantically chopping at the slug-creature’s back. He had managed to puncture its skin two or three times, because it was oozing glossy black blood, but he obviously hadn’t succeeded in piercing the bony internal keel which protected its lungs.

  Patti was in a bad way now. The slug-creature had managed to wrap two of its tentacles around her face, and the other four were tightly entwined together around her chest. Nathan knew that it would be almost impossible to cut through them, or pull them free. Slugs themselves often became entangled with each other when they were mating, and the only way in which they could get free was for one slug to eat the other’s penis.

  Holding the ceramic jar up high, Nathan circled around behind Rafał until he was almost standing on the gray frill that surrounded the slug-creature’s foot. Then he leaned forward as far as he could, placing one hand on the slug-creature’s side to steady himself. The slug-creature felt disgusting: chilly and slimy and hard, like an inflatable boat smothered in jelly. Nathan tipped the jar so that cooking salt poured steadily out of it, all across the slug-creature’s back. He kept on pouring, shaking the jar from side to side as he did so, until it was empty.

  He stepped back, dropping the jar and wiping his hand on his coat. For a few dreadful moments, he thought that he might have made a fatal mistake, because the slug-creature seemed to react to the cooking salt only by contracting its muscles even tighter, and he heard Patti gasp as even more breath was squeezed out of her.

  Then, however, Rafał said, ‘Look!’

  Where the point of his kitchen knife had managed to nick the slug-creature’s skin, milky white slime-bubbles were beginning to froth up. The slug-creature suddenly shuddered, and started to writhe, and ripple. Its skin started to melt, turning from black to liquid gray. Fumes poured off it – choking, acrid fumes that smelled like charred fish-skin.

  ‘Salt!’ Rafał exclaimed. ‘Yes! I should have thought of salt!’

  The slug-creature let out a throaty gargle of pain, like the voices of twenty different demons all moaning at once. As soon as the salt had dissolved its tough outer epidermis, it ate into its flesh faster and faster, and the pale gray juice that had once been its muscles began to pour across the laundry room floor.

  But still it wouldn’t release its grip on Patti. Even though it must have known that it was going to die, it seemed to be determined to squeeze the life out of her before it did so. Nathan went around and confronted its eerie half-human face. The fumes from its liquefying body were so thick now that they were filling up the laundry room, and Nathan had to cough, and cough again, before he could speak.

  ‘Let her go!’ he demanded. ‘You can’t survive this! You’re dying! You’re dead already! Let her go!’

  The slug-creature’s eyelids rolled and unrolled. Then – to Nathan’s horror – it spoke to him. Its voice was blurred with pain, and came from a mouth which had rows of tiny razor-sharp spines instead of teeth. But he could understand most of what it said.

  ‘You don’t understand. You should have joined him. What you and Doctor Zauber could have done together. What we all could have done together.’

  Nathan stared at the slug-creature in disbelief. Gradually, with a rising sense of pity and disgust, he began to understand what it was; or, rather, who it had once been. Its protuberant eyes were grotesque, and the expression on its face was like that of some suffering medieval saint. But he suddenly saw the distinctive nose and narrow-faced features of Richard Scryman.

  ‘Richard,’ he said. ‘Christ almighty, Richard. Is that you?’

  ‘It was our chance to make history, Professor,’ said the slug-creature. ‘It was our chance for immortality.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Richard, what did you let him do to you?’

  ‘Should have joined him,’ the slug-creature repeated. It gave a hideous convulsion as the salt melted through its muscle all the way down to its keel, its carina, and it let out a strangled cry in the back of its throat. ‘God, this hurts, Professor. You can’t imagine pain like this.’

  ‘Let Patti go, Richard. You have to let her go.’

  The slug-creature’s eyelids rolled. ‘Sorry, Professor. I’m taking this one with me.’

  ‘Let her go! What good is it going to do you, if you kill her?’

  But the slug-creature closed its eyelids, and didn’t answer.

  Nathan tried again to wrench away its tentacles, but they were like greasy ropes, and they were wound around Patti’s chest so tightly that he couldn’t even force his fingertips underneath them, to get a grip.

  ‘Goddammit, Richard!’ he yelled, but the slug-creature’s eyes remained closed, and its expression remained calm, almost beatific, even though it must have been suffering agony beyond all imagination.

  ‘Rafał!’ said Nathan. ‘Go into the kitchen! Over by the stove, there’s some copper saucepans hanging up!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Please, just hurry. Bring me two of them, big ones!’

  Rafał lumbered across the kitchen. Denver had already heard what Nathan had asked for, and he had unhooked two of the larger saucepans and was holding them out ready for him. Rafał brought them back, banging and jangling, and handed them over.

  ‘I do not understand,’ he said. ‘What can you do with saucepan?’

  ‘Watch,’ Nathan told him. ‘Watch, and pray.’

  With that, he held both saucepans by their handles, and pressed their bases against the slug-creature’s sides, like a paramedic shocking a heart-attack patient with electric paddles. Instantly, the slug-creature’s eyes bulged open, and it let out a terrible hurrrrrrrrrrrhhh!

  Its tentacles splayed open as stiff as human fingers, and they stuck out rigidly, quivering, so that Patti toppled forward on to the floor.

  Grunting with effort, Rafał stooped down and picked her up, and carried her into the kitchen.

  The slug-creature was trying to rear up, but too much of its body had now been eaten away by salt. It was shaking like a wildly speeded-up film, so that Nathan could barely focus on it, and sticky strings of mucus were swinging out of the sides of its mouth.

  ‘You never understood,’ it whispered, and then it collapsed, fuming, with a heavy, wet, rubbery sound. A clothes horse draped with sheets tipped sideways and covered it up. Underneath this makeshift shroud, it continued to crackle and fizz, as it dissolved.

  Nathan came out of the laundry room into the kitchen, wiping his hands on one of the towels. Patti was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, coughing and gasping for breath. Denver was standing next to her, holding a cup of water, his arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Patti? How are you feeling?’

  She had to take several gasping breaths before she could answer him. ‘Winded,’ she said. ‘I think it broke one of my ribs.’

  ‘Is it dead?’ asked Denver.


  Nathan nodded, and set the two saucepans down on the table. ‘That was another thing my mother taught me about slugs, apart from pouring salt on to them.’

  ‘They can’t stand saucepans?’

  ‘In a way. They need slime to slide around, but if their slime comes into contact with copper, it causes a chemical reaction that gives them a severe electric shock. That’s why some gardeners surround their plants with copper strips.’

  ‘You don’t know how delighted I am that you knew that,’ Patti told him. She reached out and took hold of his hand, and held on to it.

  ‘What do we do now, Pops?’ asked Denver.

  ‘I don’t know. We still haven’t found the basilisk bones, have we? But if you’ve all had enough of this, maybe we should go back to the hotel and try to work on Plan B.’

  ‘Plan B?’

  ‘Maybe I should tell Doctor Zauber that I will work with him . . . but only if he tells me how to wake up your Mom.’

  ‘And you seriously think that I will believe you?’ said a loud, Germanic voice.

  NINETEEN

  Hybrid

  Standing in the doorway, his face concealed by shadow, was Doctor Zauber, in his black suit, and shiny black leather gloves.

  He stepped forward into the kitchen, and stood there for a while, saying nothing, but looking at them with the tightly controlled impatience of a father who has found his children misbehaving.

  He nodded toward the laundry-room door. Fumes were still drifting out of it, and they smelled strongly of dissolving slug, squid and human being.

  ‘So . . . you have murdered your erstwhile colleague, and destroyed my latest creation.’

  ‘Self-defense, actually,’ Patti interrupted him. ‘That disgusting thing was trying to squeeze the life out of me.’

  ‘He was doing nothing more than protecting himself.’

  ‘Protecting himself?’ Denver protested. ‘Against a hundred-pound girl? Come on, man, she almost got killed!’

  Doctor Zauber raised one hand. ‘You cannot blame him. If you want to blame anybody, look no further than me. Like many of my creations, he had serious physical and psychological imperfections, one of which was intense paranoia. He perceived you as a threat to his existence, which you clearly were.’

  ‘It was Richard Scryman,’ said Nathan. ‘Well, some of it was Richard Scryman. What the hell did you do to him?’

  ‘I used a process devised by Albertus Magnus when he was Bishop of Ratisbon in the year 1261. He called it “Verwirrung”, which means “tangling”. Albertus Magnus was one of the greatest of all alchemists . . . and, as you have just discovered, his alchemy worked.’

  ‘He found out how to make slug-people?’

  ‘Not only slug-people. He discovered how to combine many different species with each other. Not just two species, but three, or four, and once he succeeded in combining five, with a creation that was woman, fish, insect, bird and dog.’

  ‘You combined Richard Scryman with a squid and a slug! For Christ’s sake, Zauber! How sick is that?’

  ‘Not sick at all, Professor. And if you had allowed him to live, he could have been of great benefit to people who are sick – with muscular dystrophy, for instance, or myasthenia, in which sufferers lack the necessary neurotransmitters for muscular contraction.’

  ‘It was still an unholy thing to do.’

  ‘Richard volunteered, my friend. He wanted to do it. He wanted to make medical history. He always complained that for all of your genius, Professor, you lack the one quality that brings a scientist the chance to be immortal. You were never prepared to make that one great leap of imagination, and entertain the idea that these mythical creatures needed not only mitochondrial DNA, but a high degree of magic, too.’

  Suddenly, Doctor Zauber had vanished. But almost as suddenly, he was standing beside Nathan’s right shoulder. ‘You will never work with me, will you?’ he said. ‘You will never have the vision, or the necessary courage. A pity that your beloved Grace will have to spend the rest of her days in a coma. The sleeping beauty of Philadelphia, with no knight prepared to cut through the thorns and rescue her.’

  ‘How the hell can you expect me to work with you when you’ve murdered all of those elderly people? And you’re going to be murdering a whole lot more.’

  Doctor Zauber shook his head. ‘No. No more old people.’

  ‘You’re not? I thought you needed their life-energy.’

  ‘Even if he has decided not to kill any more, he is still responsible for those he has killed already,’ Rafał put in, with unexpected vehemence.

  Nathan turned and looked at Rafał. He could see by the intense expression on his face that Rafał was urging him not to weaken and agree to help Doctor Zauber simply for the sake of saving Grace.

  Doctor Zauber licked his black-gloved fingertip and smoothed his right eyebrow. ‘Yes, my friend. You are absolutely right. I cannot restore the lives that I have taken. Regrettably, it transpired that they were not as useful to my project as I had first hoped. They were too old, too worn-out. They were like batteries which are nearly at the end of their life, with very little charge left in them.

  ‘That is why I asked if Richard would volunteer for the Verwirrung procedure with the slug and the squid. Richard was young, and full of vigor. It needed youth and strength for such an operation to succeed, and for the creature to survive.’

  ‘So what exactly are you saying?’ Nathan demanded. ‘You’re going to need young life-energies, instead of old ones? You’re going to start murdering kids?’

  Doctor Zauber disappeared again, and reappeared in the hallway outside the kitchen door.

  ‘Doesn’t this dude ever stay still?’ Denver complained.

  ‘You thought it was cool, the first time he did it,’ Patti reminded him.

  ‘Sure . . . but that was before he tried to have you squished.’

  Doctor Zauber said, ‘Before you finally say no to me, Professor Underhill, let me show you what I have created, using only the life-energy of the elderly. Then I will show you what you and I could do together, with all of your scientific brilliance and my magical skills and the power of vigorous young folk.’

  Opposite the kitchen door, there was another door marked Piwnica, which clearly led down to the cellar. Doctor Zauber opened it, and switched on the light. ‘Please, follow me.’

  Nathan said, ‘Whatever you’re trying to show me, Doctor Zauber, I’m not really interested. I came here for one thing and one thing only.’

  ‘You broke into my house. Why did you do such a thing? I could have you arrested, all of you. Were you looking to steal something from me, perhaps?’

  Nathan didn’t answer him. But Doctor Zauber came up close to him and looked him directly in the eye and said, ‘I am not a fool, Professor Underhill. I know what you wanted, and I also know why. But you are much too late. Those remains have been put to use now, and when you find them, you will discover nothing less than your nemesis.’

  With that, he went through the cellar door and started to go down the plain wooden staircase, his shiny black shoes clattering on the treads.

  Nathan looked at Rafał. Rafał shrugged and said, ‘What do we have to lose?’

  ‘Oh, like, only our lives,’ said Denver. ‘Supposing there’s another one of those sluggy dudes down there?’

  Doctor Zauber had paused, halfway down. ‘There is nothing down here that will hurt you, I give you my word.’

  Nathan approached the cellar door. He could smell damp, and mold, and mustiness, the usual cellar smells. But he could smell something else, too, like cats’ urine.

  ‘Please,’ said Doctor Zauber. ‘You will find this very interesting, Professor Underhill, I promise you.’

  ‘OK . . .’ said Nathan. ‘Rafał, are you coming?’

  ‘We’re coming, too,’ said Patti, taking hold of Denver’s hand. ‘There’s no way I’m going to let you guys leave us again.’

  The four of them followed Doctor Zauber down the stairs. The
cellar had a very low vaulted ceiling, and its rough brickwork was painted dark brown, which made it feel even more claustrophobic. It was lit by only two naked bulbs, so that its corners were engulfed in deep shadow.

  Up against the left-hand wall stood a large oak table, with dozens of glass storage jars and tripods and test tubes and pipettes, as well as stacks of books, some of them antique, in cracked leather bindings, with rough-cut pages. Underneath the table there were wicker baskets with dried twigs and more glass storage jars and some tarnished brass devices that looked like sextants and astrolabes.

  ‘My laboratory,’ said Doctor Zauber. ‘Perhaps not as high-tech as yours, Professor, but this is where my creations come to life.’

  As he reached the bottom of the stairs, Nathan heard a fluttering, scratching noise. He peered into the darkness and saw that the far end of the cellar had been caged off from floor to ceiling with heavy-duty wire mesh.

  Doctor Zauber beckoned him to follow him, and as he did so a cry came from the cage like a cockerel, but very much louder than a cockerel, and ending in what was almost a growl.

  Patti squealed and said, ‘Oh, shit! What is that?’

  Nathan felt a sliding sensation all the way down his back, and the charm bag around his neck began to shift and twitch. There was another cockerel cry, and then another, and now he knew exactly what Doctor Zauber was going to show him.

  Doctor Zauber went right up to the wire mesh and beckoned him again. His eyes glittered in the gloom. ‘Come closer, Professor. You have no need to be frightened. Even if it escaped, it is too deformed to hurt any of us.’

  As he said that, something half crawled, half flopped out of the shadows, a grotesque tangle of feathers and fur. It had a head like an eagle or a hawk, with a downcurved beak, and staring red eyes. It had wings, too, although they looked stunted and underdeveloped, and trailed at its sides. But its body was the body of a young lion cub, with a tawny pelt and legs with a lion’s claws.

  Nathan guessed that it was only two or three weeks since it had hatched, but it had already grown to the size of a large dog, and it would grow much larger, if it survived.