Basilisk (6 page)

‘I don’t know yet. We might have a band practice. I’ll call you, OK?’

‘How’s the band coming along?’

‘It’s OK, but we need a new drummer. I don’t know what’s happened to Chesney. He’s total crap.’

‘Chesney’s parents are getting a divorce. You can’t blame Chesney if he’s got his mind on other things, apart from drumming. Like you shouldn’t get so upset if your father doesn’t give you as much attention as you think you deserve.’

Denver tossed his spoon into his half-finished cereal. ‘I don’t think I deserve
any
attention, as a matter of fact. At least, that’s what Pops has always made me feel like. I sometimes wish I was a dragon or something. Maybe then he’d
look
at me, at least. Maybe he’d even ask me how my day was.’

‘Your father loves you. You don’t even realize how much.’

Denver stood up and tipped the remains of his bowl into the InSinkErator. But he dropped his spoon into it, as well as his cereal, and said, ‘
Shit
.’

‘Here,’ said Grace, opening up one of the kitchen drawers and taking out a pair of tongs. ‘Fish it out with this.’

But Denver reached his right hand into the InSinkErator as far as his wrist.

‘Denver – take your hand out! You should never do that!’

‘What, in case I accidentally switch it on, and grind my hand off? Do you think Pops would pay me some attention if I did that? Like, I’d probably scream, wouldn’t I? And think of the blood! He’d have to repaint the entire kitchen. Bummer.’

‘Denver, take your hand out of there right now. You shouldn’t even joke about it.’

Denver gave her a wide-eyed, exaggerated stare, like a mad person, and reached toward the ‘on’ switch. Grace snapped, ‘
Don’t
!’

She remembered a friend of hers at high school, Jill Somersby, who had given her that same pretend-crazy stare, the morning before she had taken an overdose of paracetamol. Grace had found out two weeks later that Jill had been sexually abused by her stepfather ever since she was five. And in later years, during her medical training, she had come to realize that teenagers often pretend to be joking because they don’t know how else to show the world how deadly serious they are.

Denver took his hand out of the InSinkErator and triumphantly held up his cereal spoon. ‘Did I scare you?’ he grinned.

‘No. You just annoyed me.’

‘Oh, well. At least I got
some
reaction out of you, yeah?’

It was raining hard as Grace drove down to the Murdstone Rest Home, and her windshield wipers flapped hysterically from side to side. A school bus had collided with a glazier’s van on the City Avenue on-ramp, and there was a tailback of more than a mile. As she passed the scene of the accident, Grace had to drive at less than five miles an hour over twenty yards of crunching glass, while the children in the school bus stared at her mournfully.

The rain and the broken glass and the pale children’s faces gave her a strange feeling of disquiet, as if she had fallen asleep and woken up in one of those disturbing Japanese movies like
The Ring
.

She reached Millbourne just after nine thirty a.m. and turned into Glencoe Road. As she parked outside the rest home, she heard a collision of thunder, somewhere off to the north-west. She tugged her mini-umbrella out from underneath the passenger seat, and struggled to put it up. Three of its spokes were broken, so that it looked like a wounded crow.

She hurried across the parking lot. The Murdstone Rest Home was a sprawling collection of depressing buildings, some dating from the 1920s, and others from the mid-1960s, when prefabricated concrete was in fashion. The main building was a mock-medieval castle, with a formstone fascia and a grandiose pillared porch. On the crest of the porch sat a concrete gargoyle, its head and its shoulders darkened with rain. The gargoyle was holding its chin in both hands and staring down at whoever entered the rest home with undisguised amusement, as if it knew that they would only ever leave here in a casket.

Grace entered the swing doors at the front of the building and was immediately met by Sister Bennett and two Korean carers. Sister Bennett was a large woman, thirty-fiveish, with a florid face and fraying red hair. She had a glassy blue squint, as if she had recently had her eyes replaced at a dolls’ hospital. One of the Korean carers was very beautiful, in a flat-faced, impenetrable way, while the other was squat and ugly but always smiling and nodding. All three of them wore purple-striped blouses and black skirts and rubbery black shoes.

‘Doctor Underhill?’ said Sister Bennett, as if Grace had already asked her a question.

‘I came to see Doris Bellman,’ Grace told her. ‘She called me last night and she sounded distressed.’

‘
Distressed
?’ asked Sister Bennett.

‘Yes. She had the impression that somebody was trying to force their way into her room.’

Sister Bennett pouted and shook her head. ‘I don’t understand. Mrs Bellman’s room would never have been locked. None of the rooms are
ever
locked, for health and safety reasons. And who would be trying to get into her room, even if it were? Only her carers, to check on her.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Grace. ‘But she called me, all the same, so I thought I’d drop by to reassure her that she doesn’t have anything to worry about.’

‘That much is very true,’ said Sister Bennett. ‘She
doesn’t
have anything to worry about. Not any more.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Mrs Bellman has passed, Doctor Underhill. She passed last night, shortly after midnight.’

‘She’s
dead
?’

‘Shortly after midnight. It was very quick. AMI.’

‘But she called me at eight and she sounded fine. She was distressed, yes, like I say, but she used to be a nurse herself. I think she would have known if she were just about to have a heart attack.’

Sister Bennett had found a stray white thread on her cuff and she was tugging at it. ‘AMI, that’s what Doctor Zauber said. Could have been an embolism, maybe, from her broken leg.’

‘So where is she now?’

‘They took her to the Burns Funeral Home, around seven o’clock this morning.’

Grace said, ‘I can’t believe it. She’s
gone
, just like that?’

Sister Bennett lifted her cuff to her mouth and bit off the offending thread. ‘It’s always the toughest ones who take you by surprise, don’t you think? You get some doddery old dear who has everything wrong with her you can care to mention, and she lives to see her hundred-and-second birthday. Then you get a sharp-tongued survivor like Doris Bellman, and what happens? You turn your back for half a minute, and when you turn around again, they’re staring at you like they’re still alive, and just about to say something to you, but they’re dead as a donut. Gone,
poof
, and there you are! Standing in their room, right next to them, but in actual fact you’re all alone.’

The squat and ugly nurse smiled, and nodded.

Grace checked her watch. ‘It looks like I didn’t need to come here, after all.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sister Bennett. ‘If I’d known you were coming, I would have called you.’

No you wouldn’t
, thought Grace. But then she didn’t totally blame her. The carers at Murdstone were no different from the nurses at any other institution for the very old and the very sick. Everybody they cared for was going to die, most of them very soon, so they never allowed themselves to become attached to them. They couldn’t be expected to live their lives in constant mourning. On the other hand, that was no excuse for them to be indifferent to their charges, or cruel.

‘Do you think I could take a look at her room?’ Grace asked her. She didn’t really know why she wanted to, but maybe it would give her a last sense of Doris Bellman’s presence: the young nurse who had gone out to Europe, in the closing stages of World War Two; and the old woman who had been neglected by her family, and had passed her closing years with nobody except a cockatoo for company, and no view but a parking lot, and some blue-painted drainpipes, and a small pentagram of cloudy sky.

‘Be my guest,’ said Sister Bennett. ‘Just be warned that we haven’t had time to service it yet.’

Grace walked along the corridor to Doris Bellman’s room. On the way, she encountered an old man staring out of one of the windows. He wore a drooping brown bathrobe with his pockets crammed with crumpled tissues, and brown corduroy slippers, and he had a wild white shock of hair like Albert Einstein. As he turned toward her, she saw that one lens of his spectacles was covered up with silver duct tape.

‘Didn’t you bring the car round yet?’ he snapped at her, as she approached.

‘I’m sorry?’

He frowned down at a wristwatch that wasn’t there. ‘We’re going to be late, at this rate! We can’t afford to be late! We’ll miss the overture!’

Grace stopped. ‘It’s OK. You don’t have to worry. We have hours yet.’

He stared at her with one milky blue eye. ‘Are you sure? I don’t want to disappoint her. She’s been looking forward to this for months.’

‘You won’t let her down, I promise you.’

‘Ah! Well, that’s all right, then. But you won’t forget to tell me when you bring the car round?’

‘Of course not. Do I ever?’

She was about to continue on her way toward Doris Bellman’s room when the old man snatched at her sleeve. He smelled sour, like the inside of a cupboard that hasn’t been opened in years. ‘You will be super careful, won’t you?’

‘I always am.’

He glanced furtively along the corridor, right and then left. ‘I’ve seen it for myself. They try to pretend that I’m losing my marbles, but they can’t fool me. I’ve seen it.’

Grace gently pried his hand away. ‘I really have to be going. I hope everything goes well tonight.’

‘I didn’t see it face to face,’ the old man continued, as if he hadn’t even heard her. ‘Lucky for me that I didn’t, if you ask me. But I opened my door and looked out of my room and I was just in time to see it disappearing around that corner.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Grace, ‘I don’t follow you.’

The old man narrowed his one visible eye. ‘You’re not one of them, are you? One of the gang of witches that run this place?’

‘No, I’m a doctor. I came here today to see Doris Bellman, but they tell me she passed in the night.’

The old man furiously shook his head – so furiously that Grace was almost afraid that it was going to fly right off his shoulders. ‘
Pass
? Doris Bellman didn’t
pass
. She was
taken
. It came for her, when the dark was at its darkest.’

‘
It
being . . .?’

‘Who knows? Who knows what it is? But I swear to you on a roomful of Bibles, I saw it. Not face to face, no ma’am. Lucky for me that I didn’t, if you ask me. But it was disappearing around that corner and it was huge and it was black and it was all hunched over, and there were kind of jaggedy bits on top of its head.’

Grace thought:
my God, that sounds just like Nathan’s nightmare about the sack-dragger
. But then she thought:
no, how could it
? Nathan had been dreaming about his mythical creatures, but who could tell what terrors this old man had been dreaming about? Nobody shares their nightmares, whatever Jung had said about all of us having a collective unconscious.

She looked at her watch. Time was ticking by, and she had a meeting with the hospital acquisitions board in less than three-quarters of an hour.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘maybe we could talk about this some other time, when I’m not in so much of a hurry. Do you want to tell me your name?’

The old man narrowed his eye again. ‘You’re not going to snitch on me, are you? You’re not going to rat on me to those witches?’

‘Of course not. Why should I do that?’

The old man glanced along the corridor again, just to make sure that nobody was listening. Then he said, ‘Michael Dukakis’.

‘Michael Dukakis?’

‘That’s right. Michael Stanley Dukakis.’

‘Not by any chance the same Michael Stanley Dukakis who ran against George Bush in the 1988 presidential election?’

The old man grinned with pleasure. ‘That’s right! You recognized me! Not too many people do! It’s been a few years, though, hasn’t it? Quite a few years, you know, and time takes its toll.’

He suddenly stopped grinning, and looked reflective. ‘Should have beaten him, though, Bush. Should have licked him good and proper. Asshole.
Him
, I mean. Bush, not me.’

‘Well, OK, Michael,’ said Grace. ‘Next time I visit, I’ll ask for you, OK, and we can sit down and you can tell me all about this
it
that you saw.’

He seized her sleeve again and pulled her very close to him, so that when he spoke his spit prickled her face. ‘It was
hunched over
and it was black and it was all covered up in these raggedy sacks. And it had horns on top of its head. Or maybe a crown of sorts. And I prayed that it wouldn’t turn around and see me. I prayed, believe me. But lucky for me it didn’t. It disappeared. But I could still hear it.’

Grace took hold of his hand, trying to ease herself loose. His fingers felt like chicken’s leg bones.

‘It made this kind of
shuffling
sound,’ the old man told her. ‘Like it was tired, and old, and weary, but it wasn’t going to let nothing stop it, not for nothing.’

‘I really have to go,’ said Grace.

The old man abruptly released her. ‘Sure you do. Don’t want to waste your precious time, listening to me blather. What time are you going to bring the car around?’

‘I’ll come get you, I promise.’

The old man nodded, and noisily sucked his dentures. ‘Know what my father used to say? “If life was a bet, slick, I wouldn’t take it”.’

Grace left him and walked along to Doris Bellman’s room. She noticed that Mrs Bellman’s name had already been removed from the slot beside the door. She opened it and stepped inside.