Bestiary

by Robert Masello

  Jakob steered the golf cart into a clearing within a few yards of the huge double door, then stopped it. He remained seated, as did Captain Greer, but al-Kalli got out and gestured for Carter to come with him. He walked off, taking a gold cigarette case from the breast pocket of his suit jacket. He held it out to Carter, who declined.

  “Of course you’re right,” al-Kalli said, lighting one nonetheless. “It’s a nasty habit, but I can’t entirely give it up. And these I have specially made for me in Tangier.”

  He drew on the cigarette, his eyes narrowing but remaining firmly fixed on Carter. Then he exhaled, the fragrant smoke—it smelled to Carter less like tobacco than cloves and cinnamon—spiraling above their heads. “I pray I do not live to regret what I am about to do.”

  At first, Carter thought he must be joking—was he referring to having the cigarette?—but then he felt a sudden chill. Al-Kalli was referring to something else, and he wasn’t joking.

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t do it,” Carter replied. “Why take the chance?”

  “Because I must trust someone. And I believe I can trust you.”

  Why he would think that—having spent no more than a few hours, total, in his company—Carter couldn’t guess. Any more than he could guess what al-Kalli was contemplating.

  “What I am about to tell you, you can never tell anyone. What I am about to show you, you cannot show to anyone else. Unless—and until—I advise you otherwise. First of all, is that understood?”

  Carter hated to agree to anything so vague, and al-Kalli noted his hesitation. “Please do not fear—I am not running a white slavery ring or planning a terrorist attack. On the contrary, no one owes more to this country than I do. But will you give me your word, as one gentleman to another?”

  “Yes,” Carter replied. Although he hated to admit it, his curiosity had been piqued.

  Al-Kalli nodded, drawing again on the cigarette. “You won’t be sorry,” he said. “Indeed, you will be very grateful that you did.”

  Carter doubted that, but kept quiet, waiting for more.

  “I have in my possession, as you will soon see, the most remarkable collection in the world.”

  Collection of what?

  “Walk with me a bit.”

  As they strolled beneath the boughs of the trees, along the winding gravel path, Carter caught glimpses, now and then, of the twinkling lights of the city, far, far below and way off in the distance. He was glad that he could see the lights because it rooted him in reality even as al-Kalli told him a story too fantastical to believe. A story that, had anyone else tried to palm it off on him, he would have dismissed out of hand. But coming from al-Kalli, it had to be taken seriously—and even so, it was nearly impossible to credit.

  For time immemorial, al-Kalli explained, his family had owned a menagerie. Or, as he called it, a bestiary.

  “Yes, Beth has told me about The Beasts of Eden. She says it’s the most astounding illuminated manuscript she’s ever seen.”

  Al-Kalli paused. “It’s not the book I’m speaking of. It’s the actual bestiary; the book is merely a . . . guide.”

  Now Carter was confused. The book, so far as he knew, contained pictures and text describing such imaginary creatures as griffins and gorgons, phoenixes and basilisks. Medieval inventions, allegorical motifs. What was al-Kalli saying? Did he own a bunch of poor mutant animals, two-headed calves and three-legged ponies and other unfortunate creatures salvaged from traveling circuses?

  “The animals in my care exist nowhere else. They have not existed for eons, if you believe the standard wisdom.” He snorted. “If you believe the standard wisdom, most of them have never existed at all.”

  Carter began, for the first time, to question al-Kalli’s sanity, and his own safety. Was he taking a moonlight stroll, with two hired thugs in a golf cart not far off, in the company of a lunatic billionaire?

  Even if al-Kalli sensed his doubts, he went on as if he knew they would eventually be silenced. The animals had been carefully tended to, and bred, in the desert palaces his family owned not only in present-day Iraq, but in other remote regions of the Middle East—“most notably the Empty Quarter, as it is known, of the Sahara Desert.” But with all the geopolitical changes in the region, “and of course the rise of Saddam Hussein, the situation gradually became untenable.” The al-Kalli family had forged an unholy truce with the dictator that had held for many years, but in the end, Saddam’s greed and lust for ultimate and unchallenged power had led to its unraveling. Without providing much in the way of detail, al-Kalli alluded to a catastrophe inflicted on his family, and a sudden, costly exodus. “What I was able to save of the bestiary, I saved. But you will soon see for yourself.”

  “Why?” Carter asked. “Why me?”

  “Because who else on earth could understand, could appreciate, such a miracle?”

  Carter was flattered, but still unsure what to make of any of this.

  “But first,” Al-Kalli said, “I know I have to convince you that I’m not mad.”

  Carter saw no point in protesting.

  “I know what you’re thinking, and I would think so, too.” He dropped the cigarette butt on the gravel and ground it underfoot. “So, shall I prove my case?”

  Carter glanced over at Jakob and Captain Greer, who were conferring in front of the doors to the hangar—or zoo, Carter suddenly thought—and considered his options. He could refuse, but what kind of a position would that leave him in? Al-Kalli would consider his own position already compromised, and might now regard Carter as a potential threat. And it certainly wouldn’t help out Beth, whose access to The Beasts of Eden might suddenly be restricted or even revoked. On the other hand, if he were to accept al-Kalli’s invitation, he would be entering into some sort of complicity with him—and al-Kalli didn’t strike him as the kind of man who let you out of a deal very easily.

  Al-Kalli waited, and in the distance Carter could hear the screeching cry of one of the peacocks. Maybe that was it—maybe al-Kalli thought peacocks were phoenixes. Maybe he had a crocodile in his zoo and thought it was a sphinx. Maybe he had a snow white horse and called it a unicorn. Maybe all of this was some long-inculcated family delusion, and all Carter would have to do, once he’d passed through those sealed doors, was feign astonishment and swear a bond of eternal secrecy. How hard could that be?

  And, if he were perfectly honest with himself, it would satisfy his own gnawing desire to know the truth. It was like some fairy tale now. What was hidden in Ali Baba’s mountain cave?

  “Okay, you’re on,” Carter said with a lightheartedness he did not feel.

  Al-Kalli nodded in the direction of Jakob and Greer, and as he walked Carter toward the facility, the doors swung smoothly open, just as if someone had indeed muttered “Open, Sesame.”

  As Carter passed inside, powerful blowers overhead made his clothes flutter around his body; his hair felt like a thousand fingers were mussing it all at once. The air being expelled had the strong odor of musk and fur and dung on it. And the moment they were all inside, the doors swung shut again.

  Jakob and Greer stood off to one side, as Carter took it all in. Al-Kalli, right behind him, whispered, “Not a word—even to your wife—of what you see here tonight.”

  Right now, Carter was just taking in the sheer size and scope of the place. The ceiling had to be a hundred feet high, and hanging just below it was a straw-covered aerie on a heavy chain. It was shaped like a huge shallow bowl, and it was swaying now, as if something had just launched itself from the perch. Carter scanned the roofline and though he saw nothing, he heard the grating cry of a swooping bird. He whirled around, just in time to see a red and gold blur, with a wingspan twice as great as a condor’s, soaring over his head.

  It was like no other bird he had ever seen—and al-Kalli could tell as much, from nothing more than the stunned look on Carter’s face.

  “There’s more,” he said confidingly.

  Carter was still gazing up as al-Kalli guided
him toward the western wall. Carter glanced at the two guards. Jakob appeared alert but unperturbed. Captain Greer, on the other hand, looked even jumpier than ever. Hadn’t he told Carter that he’d only been working for al-Kalli for twenty-eight hours? If that was true, then all of this was nearly as new and shocking to him as it was to Carter.

  All along this side of the building there was a shoulder-high concrete wall, painted white and surmounted by iron bars that rose at least another ten or twelve feet into the air. From behind the wall Carter could hear strange snuffling sounds, barks and grunts, and the occasional roar. He approached it cautiously, wondering what on earth could lie behind it. The first pen—there were several, each about a hundred feet apart—had a narrow chain-mesh gate, and then another gate, about a yard inside, so that together they formed a little sealed compartment; an extra security measure, Carter surmised, to allow someone to enter the pen—for feeding or observation purposes—without permitting whatever was imprisoned here any chance of a sudden escape.

  But at first he saw nothing that could escape—only a wading pond, with fresh, clear water in it and several lily pads floating idly on its surface. The floor of the pen, rolling and uneven, was covered everywhere with a layer of broken rubble, pebbles and stones colored gray and green and rust. It looked like an immense mosaic, the pattern of which could only have been discerned by rising forty or fifty feet into the air and looking down. When Carter turned to ask al-Kalli where the inhabitants were, he saw that Jakob, his arm fully extended, was holding out to him a pair of plastic goggles. Al-Kalli himself was hanging well back.

  Carter took the goggles.

  “You might want to put them on,” al-Kalli said, “just in case.”

  Carter did, though he could not, for the life of him, see why. He stepped back into the gated enclosure and looked again into the huge pen. Maybe a hundred yards in the rear, there was a shaded enclosure, but even there he could see nothing but shadows and gloom. What was he supposed to see? Was al-Kalli so deluded that he kept imaginary creatures in gigantic, empty cages?

  But the bird, the bird he’d seen was real.

  He studied the rock-strewn floor again, and this time he could see just one thing strange—a blurring above some of the stones. At first, thinking it was the goggles, he took them off, breathed on them, then wiped them clean with his handkerchief. They were a sturdy pair with a snug elastic strap, but when he put them back on, the blurring continued. In fact, he saw it now in another spot. Were there steam grates, or vents of some kind, under the rocks?

  “It’s not the goggles,” he heard al-Kalli say.

  And then, as if it were some optical illusion, the rocks themselves moved—but not randomly, as if they were being disturbed, but as if they were alive and integrated. He blinked several times, adjusted the goggles, but the rocks now were rising up, in not one but two separate places, and they were . . . standing. The fogging recurred. What was he looking at?

  And what was looking back at him?

  There were eyes behind the fog, sinister eyes that held steady under a thick, gray brow. There were two creatures, on all fours now, their entire bodies—perhaps six or even eight feet long—covered with spikes and stony protuberances, exactly like the rocks they’d been lying on. The noises they made, as they lumbered in his direction, were wet and hoarse and rasping. The one in the lead—like a gravel pit come to terrible life—raised its head, coughed, and, like a hail of bullets, the spittle splatted against the wall, clung to the bars of the gate, and dotted the lenses of the goggles. Carter fell back, wiping away the gray-green smear, in shock.

  He could hear al-Kalli and Jakob chuckling.

  “They used to be quite accurate,” al-Kalli said. “Like cobras, they aim for the eyes.”

  Carter stumbled out of the gated enclosure and whipped the goggles off altogether. Some of the mucus was stuck to his cheek, where it stung like a bad sunburn. Jakob handed him a hand towel.

  “What is it?” Carter said, wiping away the gunk from his face.

  Al-Kalli said, “I’m sure you scientists would have your own name for it. But in my family, we have always called it the basilisk.”

  The basilisk? Carter thought. That was a mythical creature—not the thing he had just seen walking toward him with slow, deliberate steps, the thing that even now was just a few yards away, behind a concrete wall. Basilisks were . . . he struggled to remember his mythology . . . creatures so monstrous their breath alone could kill.

  “Are you beginning to believe me?” al-Kalli asked.

  As if in mockery, the huge red bird, alighted now on the lip of its aerie, let out a stuttering cry that echoed down and around the cavernous walls of the bestiary.

  “Shall we move on?” al-Kalli said. “We have only so much time before the concert is over and my other guests have finished with their dessert and coffee.”

  The entire menagerie was awake now and making itself heard. The basilisks were grunting and snorting—Carter wondered if there were more in there than the two he had seen—and as he was led toward the next double gate, he wondered if he should be putting the goggles back on.

  “No,” al-Kalli said, intuiting his question, “you won’t be needing those again.” Carter handed them to Jakob, while Captain Greer, his limp more noticeable now, brought up the rear. Reluctantly, it looked to Carter.

  “But you may wish to stay back a bit from the bars,” al-Kalli warned.

  Carter did as instructed, and stepped only halfway into the next gate enclosure. This pen was as large as the one next to it, easily a couple of hundred feet in every direction, but where the first one had been barren and stony, this one was lush and filled with thick shrubbery and flowering plants. There was a dense carpet of weedy grass, speckled with dandelions. Fans in the ceiling directed a steady low breeze at the greenery, so that everything seemed to be in constant motion, gently undulating, swaying and waving in a delicate play of light and shadow . . . a play that was suddenly broken by a ferocious growl and a headlong rush at the bars. Carter barely had time to step back before a spotted beast, the size of a lion, had flown at the gate, its claws scrabbling at the iron bars. He had not seen it coming; he had no idea where it had even come from. It was as if it had launched itself from the lower branches of one of the ficus trees planted in the pen.

  The creature snarled, its head back, and Carter saw a pair of fangs to rival those of any saber-toothed cat. But these fangs, even in his present state, he recognized were curved backward, like scimitars. The creature slipped down from the bars and stepped back, planting its paws flatly on the ground, the way a man, not a cat, might walk. Its claws were like twisted fingers, long and sharp and yellowed. Its forelegs were longer than its rear, so that it had the hunched look of a hyena, but a hyena with wings. Its massive shoulders were blanketed with a thick matt of feathery black fur, fur that right now, in the moment of its attack, had billowed out like a cape.

  Again, Carter was thunderstruck.

  “The griffin,” al-Kalli said simply, brushing back his ruby cuff link to glance at his watch. “There is just one more—”

  But they were interrupted by a man’s voice, filled with fear and worry, carrying toward them. Al-Kalli looked displeased.

  “Mr. al-Kalli, Mr. al-Kalli,” the man was calling, barely able to catch his breath, “why didn’t you tell me you were coming? If only you had told me you were coming!”

  The man, a reedy Arab in an open lab coat, who looked like he had just fallen out of bed, came panting up to them. Carter noticed Captain Greer glancing at his new boss, as if wondering how this should be handled.

  “You weren’t needed, Rashid,” al-Kalli said, and it was as if he’d struck the man in the face. His features froze, but then, taking in the sight of Carter—this stranger in his domain—he composed himself again.

  “This is Dr. Cox,” al-Kalli explained, and Rashid nodded his head quickly. “He will be helping us.”

  “Helping us?” Rashid mumbled. “With the
. . . animals?” He glanced at Carter with panic. “Are you a doctor, sir, of the veterinary sciences?”

  “I’m a paleontologist,” he replied.

  It looked as if it took Rashid a few seconds to process that information—and after he had, he looked just as perplexed.

  “Come along, Dr. Cox,” al-Kalli said, turning toward the last gate at the far end of the facility, and striding off. “You have yet to see the pièce de résistance.”

  Carter, and the rest of the entourage, followed in al-Kalli’s brisk footsteps and at the last gate, al-Kalli himself stepped into the gated enclosure. “This,” al-Kalli said, leaving room for Carter to step in, too, “is the oldest and most prized of our collection.”

  It was resting now, half in and half out of an enormous rocky cave raised several feet above the dirt. It lifted its massive, scaly snout, its long, leathery tongue flicking dismissively at the air. Its yellow eyes stared coldly across the vast expanse of the pen.

  “The manticore,” al-Kalli intoned. “It’s a corruption of an ancient Persian word for man-eater.”

  But Carter hardly heard him. He was looking at a creature more ancient than the dinosaurs . . . a reptile . . . and a mammal . . . a beast whose bones were the paleontologist’s Holy Grail. It was a monster that had ruled the earth a quarter of a billion years ago, the T. rex of its day . . . the most ruthless and successful predator of the Paleozoic era . . . wiped off the face of the earth in the Permian extinction . . . and named after the terrible sisters of Greek mythology who were so frightening that simply to look upon them was to die.

  And now he was looking right at it.

  Not, as al-Kalli would have it, the manticore of legend. Not some mythical beast.

  But what paleontologists had dubbed—based on a scattering of bones and teeth, some of the oldest and rarest fossils on earth—the gorgonopsian. Or gorgon, for short.

  But these bones were walking, these teeth were wet, and these eyes radiated a malevolence as old as the earth itself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  SADOWSKI HAD PARKED the car a few hundred yards down the street from the gatehouse, where the low overhanging branches of a California live oak provided extra shadow. He’d been sitting there for over three hours, and every once in a while he’d been able to hear the sound of violin music being carried on the wind. But the music had stopped, and Sadowski began to hope the party would be breaking up soon.