Basilisk (19 page)

‘Well, that’s a risk I’ll have to take.’

He opened the back door. Inside, the corridor was hazy with smoke, but it wasn’t too thick yet. He lifted one of the monk-like coats off its coat hook, and struggled into it. There was a plaid scarf tucked in the pocket, which he pulled out and tied around the lower part of his face.

Richard caught at his sleeve. ‘You can’t go in there, Professor! It’s too dangerous!’

‘I don’t think I have any choice, do you?’

‘But who’s going to breed those Cee-Zees, if you don’t?’

‘Is
that
all you care about? Goddamn it, Richard, you’re even more obsessed than I am!’

He tugged himself free, and set off along the corridor. Behind him, silhouetted against the smoky sunlight, Richard called out, ‘I’m sorry! I’m really, truly sorry!’

He opened the staffroom door. There was nobody in there, although the TV was still on, playing a
Spongebob Squarepants
cartoon. He went further along the corridor, opening every door that he came to. A closet, filled with blankets and laundry. An empty bedroom with a bare bed in it, and no drapes at the windows. A staff toilet, with the seat up.

The smoke began to grow thicker and more eye-watering, and Nathan started to cough. All the same, he pulled down the scarf for a moment, and shouted out, ‘Zauber! Doctor Zauber! Are you in here anyplace?’

There was no answer, only the crackling of the fire in the upper stories, and the
twang-snap
! of windows breaking in the heat.

He reached the room that Doris Bellman had occupied, and opened the door. A new resident had moved in, because there were china figurines on the table on which Harpo the cockatoo had once had his cage, and a large family photograph on the wall, all smiling at him through the smoke.

He drew back the drapes to let some light in. At first he thought the bed was empty, because all he could see was a huddle of pink loose-woven blankets. But then he saw curls of white hair, on the pillow, and he tugged back the blankets and shouted out, ‘Ma’am? Ma’am! You have to wake up, ma’am! There’s a fire!’

The elderly woman in the bed didn’t stir. She must have been eighty-five to ninety years old, with high cheekbones and a hooked nose, and skin that was blemished with large coffee-colored moles. She was wearing a bottle-green hand-knitted bedjacket.

‘Ma’am!’ Nathan repeated. He took hold of her bony shoulder and shook her. She could have been drugged, or deaf, or both.

‘Ma’am, you have to get out of here! The place is on fire!’

He leaned over her, with his cheek close to her open mouth. He couldn’t feel her breathing.

‘Ma’am, wake up!’ He started a coughing fit, but at the same time he managed to place his fingertips against the woman’s neck to feel her carotid pulse. He waited for twenty seconds, but he couldn’t feel anything. He was pretty sure that she was dead.

He stood up. He didn’t have any choice but to leave her where she was. He left the room, closing the door tightly behind him.

‘Doctor Zauber!’ he yelled out. ‘If you’re there, Doctor Zauber, if you’re trapped, all you have to do is shout!’

Still there was no answer, and now the fire was raging even louder, as if it were a huge beast with a voracious appetite, devouring banisters and floorboards and doors and window frames. Smoke billowed down the staircase, thick with sooty sparks.

Nathan opened another door, and switched on the light. On the bed, lying on his back, was an emaciated old man in a blue striped nightshirt. Both of his hands were drawn up to his chest, like a praying mantis. His pale blue eyes were open and his toothless mouth was gaping. On the nightstand beside him stood a brass-framed sepia photograph of a young man in naval uniform, with a battleship in the background.

Nathan left him, too, but he was seriously beginning to question what had happened here. There had been very little smoke in either of the rooms that he had entered – not enough for anybody to die so quickly of smoke inhalation – even if they were old, and their lungs were weak.

Coughing, he managed to climb the stairs to the second-story landing, but here the smoke was so dense that he had to crouch down low. He made his way crabwise to the first door that he could find, and reached up to open it. The aluminum handle was hot, but he decided to risk it anyhow. He pulled it down, and gave the door a kick.

A huge blast of scorching air came out of the room, and he had to shield his face with his hand. Inside, the drapes were blazing, and so was the bed. It was like a funeral pyre. A black-faced woman was lying on it, her hair and her skin shriveling up in front of his eyes, her nightgown already in flames. Nathan knew then that he was much too late. Even if Doctor Zauber
were
here, he would have burned to death, and so would the basilisk. But he didn’t believe for a moment that Doctor Zauber was the suicidal type; or even the type who would want to go out in a Wagnerian blaze of glory.

He retreated down the stairs, and along the corridor. The smoke was very much thicker now, and his eyes were streaming. As he approached the back door, he heard Richard shouting, ‘
Stay there
!
Stay there
!
The fire department is coming
!’

He came out of the back of the rest home, wrenching the plaid scarf away from his face and taking three deep gulps of fresh air. Richard was standing about twenty yards away, staring up at the roof.

‘
Stay there
!’ he repeated. ‘
I can hear the sirens already
!
They won’t be long
!’

Nathan looked up, too. Standing right on the edge of the third-story parapet was ‘Michael Dukakis’, in yellow pajamas. His arms were spread wide, as if he were giving a benediction to the whole world, and his wild white hair was flapping in the wind.

‘
I saw the beast
!’ he screamed out.

‘Hold on!’ Nathan called up to him. ‘We’re going to get you down!’

‘
I saw the beast
!
The great black beast
!
I saw it going from one bedroom to the next
!
I saw the lightning that flashed from its eyes
!
I know what it was doing
!
It was dealing out death
!’

‘Michael!’ Nathan shouted back at him. ‘Michael, stay where you are! The fire department will bring you down with a ladder!’

He broke into uncontrollable coughing, and spat up smoke-blackened phlegm. Richard tried to clap him on the back, but Nathan twisted himself away.

Richard backed off, his hands held high. ‘I’m sorry, Professor. I’ve told you I’m sorry.’

‘You’re
sorry
?’ Nathan coughed. ‘All this – this is all your fault! And you’re
sorry
?’

‘For Christ’s sake! I didn’t start this fire!’

At that moment, however, there was a high-pitched scream from the roof. They both looked up and saw that flames were leaping out of the center of the building. ‘Michael Dukakis’ was on fire. His white hair was alight, and two tall flames were rising out of his back, like angels’ wings.

‘Holy shit,’ said Richard.

But there was nothing that either of them could do, except watch as ‘Michael Dukakis’ burned. He stood there for almost a minute, on the very edge of the parapet, while the fire consumed him. Anybody else would have jumped. Anybody else would have fallen, deliberately, rather than be burned alive. But whatever obsessions he had, whatever delusions had taken hold of his mind, they kept him there, on the edge of the building and the edge of sanity. Perhaps he thought that this was the final punishment which God had always had in store for him, and he deserved it.

At last, however, he pitched forward from the roof. The flames that engulfed him made a fluttering sound as he fell. He hit the asphalt with a flat, complicated thump, and lay there, burning furiously from head to foot, with his grinning teeth gradually appearing, and then his ribcage, and then his shinbones.

With a howling of sirens and a honking of air horns, the Philadelphia Fire Department arrived, three red-and-white Kovatch pumpers, followed almost immediately by four red-and-white ambulances. Nathan and Richard both backed away as the fire officers rolled hoses round to the back of the buildings, and emergency medical teams brought out breathing equipment and gurneys.

Within minutes, water was being sprayed on to the Murdstone Rest Home from three sides, and teams of firefighters were entering the building with oxygen masks. The water drifted across the parking lot like a heavy shower of rain.

The emergency medical commander came up to Nathan, closely followed by the chief fire officer. The EMS commander was black, and very stocky. The chief fire officer was even more heavily built, but ginger, with a bristling gray moustache.

‘Sir?’ asked the EMS commander. ‘Were you the individual who called nine-one-one?’

Nathan nodded, and coughed.

‘Do you have any idea how many people are still inside?’ the chief fire officer asked him.

‘I’m not sure. I could only make it as far as the second-story landing. But Doctor Zauber told me that he had thirty-eight residents. All elderly. I don’t know many staff were here. But there are five that I know of – Sister Bennett and two Korean carers and two male orderlies. There are probably more.’

The chief fire officer turned away and spoke into his radio transmitter. He listened to a distorted voice talking back to him, and then he turned to Nathan again. ‘Anybody still alive, as far as you know? Did you hear anybody shouting out for help?’

Nathan shook his head, and pointed toward ‘Michael Dukakis’, who was now covered up with a silver fire-suppressant blanket. ‘Only him, when he was up on the roof. I went into three rooms, two on the first floor and one on the second. I found a woman and a man on the first floor and they were both dead. The woman upstairs – well, she was just about cremated.’

The chief fire officer took a notebook out of his breast pocket, and a ballpen. ‘If I could have your name please, sir.’

‘Nathan Underhill. I’m Professor of Cryptozoology at Philadelphia Zoo.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Crypto-zoology. We call it Cee-Zee. It’s the breeding of hybrid embryos. Stem-cell research.’

‘Can I ask what you were doing here?’

‘I came to see Doctor Zauber, he’s the owner. Well, maybe he’s not the owner, but he runs the place. Or did. I wanted to ask him for some scientific data.’

‘You think he’s still in there?’

‘I really don’t know. Somehow I doubt it.’

‘Oh, yeah? Why’s that?’

‘I don’t have any proof, one way or another. He may be in there. He may be dead. But I don’t think that Doctor Zauber is the kind of man who ever intended to end his life in a burning rest home.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning I’m totally not sure if he’s in there or not. But I think he’s one of life’s survivors.’

The chief fire officer asked Nathan over a dozen more questions, most of them related to what he had seen when he first entered the building. Where had the fire been blazing at its hottest? Which way had the smoke been blowing? Which doors had been open, and which had been closed? Had he smelled anything like gasoline or kerosene? Were the fire alarms sounding?

‘No,’ he said. ‘I can tell you that for an absolute fact. I didn’t hear any fire alarms.’

The chief fire officer moved on to talk to Richard. Meanwhile the EMS commander came up to him and said, ‘How are you feeling now, sir?’

‘I’m OK, fine. A little chesty.’

She touched her upper lip with two fingers, to indicate that Nathan had smoke smudges under his nostrils. ‘All the same, we need to check you over. Smoke inhalation can seriously damage your throat and your lungs, and it can poison you.’

‘I’m fine. I’ll be fine.’

‘You think so? I have never known anybody to be fine, after going through something like this, either physically, or psychologically. So come over to the ambulance with me, and we’ll have you checked over.’

Nathan hesitated, and then he nodded. He was exhausted, and he recognized that it was time to give in, and allow this woman to take care of him.

‘I saw some TV documentary about stem-cell research,’ she told him, as they walked around to the front of the building, where the ambulances were parked. ‘Isn’t that where you grow human babies inside of chickens’ eggs? Or is it the other way around?’

‘Something like that,’ he replied, and attempted to smile. He sat down on the rear step of the ambulance, and two paramedics helped him to take off his borrowed coat. One of them shone a flashlight down his throat and up his nostrils.

‘It’s a little sooty up there,’ the paramedic remarked. ‘But lucky for you there’s no thermal injury. No burning. Didn’t even singe your nose-hairs.’

He wiped Nathan’s face with a medicated paper towel and put an oxygen mask on him, while the other checked his pulse and his blood pressure.

‘You seem like you’re OK. But I just want you to sit here for a little while. You’ve had a shock, and shock can have a delayed effect on you, you know? Hit you when you least expect it.’

Nathan pictured Grace, lying waxy-faced in the Hahnemann IT unit, and thought:
you don’t need to tell
me
what shock can do to people
. But the paramedic was friendly, and reassuring, and just at the moment Nathan badly needed people around him who cared about his welfare.

He was still sitting at the rear of the ambulance when a girl’s voice said, ‘Hey – looky here! It’s the Dragon’s Egg Egghead!’

He turned around and pulled down his oxygen mask. It was Patti Laquelle, in her puffy red squall and her sparkly red boots. A little way behind her came a listless gum-chewing young man with a ponytail, wearing a navy-blue Flyers fleece and toting a Sony video camera.

‘Professor!’ she said. ‘What are
you
doing here? You haven’t been hurt, have you? Jerry, would you believe it, this is Professor Underhill, who was trying to hatch all of those medieval dragons and stuff.’