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Nathan said, ‘My impression is that Professor Underhill is pretty much determined to carry on.’

‘Oh, really? He told you that?’

‘That’s the impression he gave me. But of course the ultimate decision rests with the zoo, whether they’re prepared to fund him or not. You’ll have to ask Doctor Burnside about that. He’s in charge of the purse strings.’

‘I already did.’

‘And?’

‘I don’t think that Doctor Burnside has said anything to Professor Underhill yet, but I don’t think that Professor Underhill is going to like it, when he does.’

‘Oh, really? What did Doctor Burnside have to say?’

‘He didn’t mince his words, let’s put it that way. He said that Professor Underhill has spent five years and more than two million dollars and yet he still hasn’t produced a single viable hybrid. He said that the zoo isn’t prepared to invest a single penny more into Professor Underhill’s project. He called it a “wild gryphon chase”. A complete waste of valuable resources. And I quote.’

Nathan looked across at Richard and Patti. He could feel a muscle in his left cheek begin to twitch. He said, as calmly as he could manage, ‘For your information, Mr McNamara, Professor Underhill is recognized as one of the most imaginative and ground-breaking research zoologists since Thomas Hunt Morgan.’

‘Well, that’s as may be. But he’s trying to recreate creatures that lived hundreds of years in the past, isn’t he? That’s if they ever lived at all.’

‘You’re right, yes. You’re absolutely right. But if he’s successful, he could single-handedly take medical science hundreds of years into the future, overnight. He could cure multiple sclerosis, for Christ’s sake.’

There was a pause on the other end of the phone. Nathan could almost hear the
Inquirer
reporter grinning.

‘I’m
talking
to Professor Underhill, aren’t I? Come on, Professor, admit it!’

Nathan grimaced. He should have kept his mouth shut.

‘Come on, Professor! Tell me how you feel about your project being deep-sixed.’

‘I told you,’ said Nathan. ‘Professor Underhill isn’t here today. He won’t be here tomorrow, either. Or the day after.’

‘Professor – all I want is one short quote. “Dr Burnside is a short-sighted reactionary bastard,” that’ll do.’

Nathan slowly and carefully hung up, and then sat back in his chair.

Richard was furiously blinking. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘Has something gone wrong?’

‘It’s all over,’ Nathan told him. ‘Burnside is closing us down. You might as well toss everything into the incinerator bin, what’s left of it. Then we can all go home.’

Patti said, ‘That’s it? It’s all over? No more dragons? No more gryphons?’

‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘I’ll be lucky if they put me on chimp-sexing duty. That’s if they decide to keep me here at all.’

‘But they can’t
do
that, can they?’ Patti protested.

‘Oh, they can, and they have. And do you know what the most frustrating thing is? I shall never know how close I came to recreating a mythical creature. Or how far away I was.’

‘Well,
I
think you were very close,’ said Richard. ‘Very, very close indeed.’

‘Thanks. But we’ll never have any way of knowing it, will we? Not for sure.’

Richard said, ‘Maybe I should put the embryo back in the chiller. You never know.’

‘What’s the point?’

The phone again. This time, it was Dr Burnside himself. His voice was as dry as Saltine crackers.

‘Nathan? I need to see you in my office. As soon as possible, please.’

‘It’s all right, Henry,’ Nathan told him. ‘I’ve heard the news already. You can spare me the crocodile tears.’

‘We need to discuss your future, Nathan, here at the zoo.’

‘So what are you going to offer me? Engineer, on the PZ Express? –’ that was the kiddies’ train ride that circled around the zoo – ‘everybody over forty-eight inches has to be accompanied by a small child.’

‘Come on, Nathan. I know you’re upset about this. I fully appreciate all of the research work you’ve done. You’ve made some outstanding progress in the field of cryptozoology, you know that. It hasn’t all been wasted.’

‘Not what you told
The Inquirer
.’

‘Come see me. Please. We need to see what we can profitably salvage from your research, and we need to decide which direction you’re going to go in now.’

Nathan took a deep breath. ‘There’s only one direction I’m going in now, Henry, and that’s to Fado’s, for a very large Irish whiskey.’

‘Nathan—’ said Dr Burnside, but Nathan hung up.

He put on his coat, and took a look around his office. ‘You coming?’ he asked Patti. ‘I could do with a shoulder to cry on.’

‘Sure,’ Patti said, and picked up her bag.

‘Richard? How about a drink?’

Richard said, ‘No thanks, Professor. A little too early for me. I’ll stay here and clear everything up.’

Nathan left his laboratory and walked back along the corridor, with Patti hopping and skipping to keep up with him. ‘Maybe you can find somebody else to finance you,’ she suggested. ‘You know, a big corporation like Coca-Cola or Macdonald’s. Or even the Pep Boys.’

‘Don’t you get it?’ said Nathan, as he pushed open the doors. ‘I’ve spent all of that time and all of that money and I’ve failed to come up with the goods. Nobody’s going to throw good money after bad. Especially the amount that I’m going to need.’

He stepped outside, just in time to see a big red tow truck dragging his car around the corner of the maintenance block. The maintenance man in the green coveralls was standing at the bottom of the steps, his arms folded in satisfaction.

He whistled, and ran after the tow truck, and managed to flag down the driver just before he reached the exit gate.

‘You want to unhook my goddamned car, please?’

‘Fifty bucks,’ said the driver, relentlessly chewing gum. He looked like another member of the mandrill family, except that his hair was wiry and gray.

‘Fifty bucks? What the hell are you talking about? I work here. I’m a research professor.’

‘Listen – you could be St Francis of Assisi, for all I care. Fifty bucks. That’s the tow charge. We’re a private contractor, no connection to the zoo.’

‘If you think I’m going to pay you to get my own car back, then you’re out of your mind.’

The tow truck driver shrugged. Then he switched off his engine and picked up a copy of the sports section. ‘Bad Call, Sloppy Ball Costs Phils Against Cubs.’

Nathan turned away. It took all of his self-control not to pick up the concrete-based sign saying
NO PUBLIC PARKING
and smash it against the tow truck door.

Patti came up and said, ‘Hey – they’re, like, towing your car? That’s
so
not appreciative.’

Just then, her cellphone played ‘Oops . . . I Did It Again.’ She flipped it open and said, ‘Yes? Who? Really? You’re kidding me! You’re
kidding
me! OK, then.’

She came up to Nathan and said, ‘That drink . . . I’ll have to take a rain check. Some seventy-year-old woman in Fishtown has just been arrested for strangling her spaniel. And cooking it. Spaniel cheesesteak, can you imagine?’

‘OK, whatever,’ Nathan told her. He wasn’t really listening. He took out his wallet and counted out fifty dollars. He walked back to the tow truck and held the money up in front of the driver’s open window. His hand was shaking. ‘Here you go. Here’s your fifty bucks. I surrender.’

The driver climbed down from his cab. He took the money and counted it, licking his thumb to separate the bills.

‘Do you know what my motto is?’ he said, as he tucked it into his pocket. ‘Never beat your head against a brick wall. You know why? Because it’s brick.’

Instead of going to Fado’s, Nathan drove home. He was depressed, but he didn’t relish drinking whiskey on his own, staring at his unkempt reflection in the mirror of a noisy Irish bar. Besides, it was raining again, heavily, and he didn’t feel like driving around and around with his windshield wipers flapping, looking for someplace to park.

As he arrived outside his house, he heard loud music coming from Denver’s bedroom. He opened the front door and it was almost deafening.

He went upstairs and knocked on Denver’s door. There was no answer, so he opened it. Denver and his friend Stu Wintergreen were standing in the middle of the room, their knees bent, their eyes screwed tight shut, flinging their hair from side to side and thrashing wildly at two invisible guitars.

Nathan watched them for a while. But then Stu opened his eyes and saw him standing in the doorway. He pushed Denver so hard that Denver almost lost his balance.

Denver turned around, and his cheeks flushed in embarrassment.

‘Who’s this?’ Nathan shouted, over the music.

‘What?’

‘Who’s this? Which band?’

Denver looked baffled for a moment, especially since Nathan hadn’t asked him what the hell he was doing out of school.

‘Pig Destroyers!’ he shouted back, in his hoarse-teenage voice.

‘Pig Destroyers, huh?’

‘They’re a deathgrind band from Virginia! This track is called “Rotten Yellow”!’

‘I see! They’re pretty good, aren’t they?’ He paused. ‘Pretty loud, anyhow!’

Stu blinked at him from behind his thick-rimmed eyeglasses. ‘They’re totally awesome!’

Denver gave
him
a push, as if to warn him not to be so friendly to his dad. But Nathan said, ‘OK. See you guys later,’ and closed the door.

So Denver wanted to take a day off school, and jump around in his bedroom pretending to be a Pig Destroyer? Suddenly it didn’t seem to matter any more.

It stopped raining around three p.m. The sun started to glitter on the pavement outside, and Denver and Stu put on their windbreakers and sneakers to go out. Nathan was sitting on the living-room couch with his laptop and a cold can of pale ale, and
Diagnosis Murder
was playing on the television with the sound turned off.

‘Pops? We’re going over to Stu’s house to play
Halo 3
.’

‘OK.’

Denver hesitated. ‘Tell Mom I’ll be back around six, OK?’

‘OK.’

An even longer hesitation. Then Denver said, ‘Like, ah – what are
you
doing home?’

‘I’m taking some well-deserved downtime. Any objections?’

‘No, of course not. I thought things were crazy at the lab, that’s all.’

Nathan looked at him. How could he explain to Denver that everything he had been trying to achieve for the past five years had come to nothing at all? Hundreds of tests, thousands of experiments. Hours of squinting into a microscope, until his head thumped and his eyes went blurry.

He wasn’t concerned that Denver would mock him about it, or be triumphal, because he didn’t believe that he would be. But he was worried that he might come to the conclusion that study and hard work were not ultimately worth the effort, because there was always some bureaucrat who could pull the plug on you, even if you might be inches away from success.

‘Don’t be too late, OK?’ he told Denver; he didn’t even add ‘because you have school tomorrow.’

Grace arrived home only twenty minutes later. As she was parking her car, Nathan opened the front door for her.

‘Hey – what are
you
doing home?’ she asked him, as she collected up her shopping.

‘Denver asked me the same question.’

‘
Denver
was here?’

‘I surprised him. Him and his friend Stu. They were doing a little home study. I think the subject was Intolerably Loud Music, Grade Three.’

‘That boy. I swear to God.’

‘Hey,’ said Nathan, as he followed her into the kitchen, ‘you’re the one who’s always saying we should make allowances.’

She put down her shopping sacks on the kitchen table. ‘What are we having tonight?’ he asked her, peering inside.

‘Jambalaya,’ she said. ‘You still haven’t told me why you’re home so early.’

‘You want it straight? I’m home early because I’m out of a job. Henry Burnside has decided that the zoo is no longer prepared to finance the breeding of mythical creatures.’

‘Oh, you’re kidding me! Oh,
Nathan
, I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I should have seen this coming months ago. Like you said, I probably overhyped it. I gave the zoo all kinds of unrealistic expectations. I bet they believed that they’d have baby gryphons running around by now. Maybe they even thought they could put them on public display. You know – Gryphon World. You can’t really blame them for cutting my funds off.’

‘So what are you going to do now?’

‘I haven’t given it a whole lot of thought, to tell you the truth. I’ve been too busy feeling sorry for myself.’

Grace unpacked her shopping – celery, and green peppers, and hickory-smoked pork sausages. ‘Something happened to me today, too. Something really strange.’

‘Oh, yes?’

She told Nathan about her visit to the Murdstone Rest Home, and ‘Michael Dukakis’, and Sister Bennett.

‘But what was strangest of all was that everything in Mrs Bellman’s room was dead. Not just her, although they’d taken her away by then. But her cockatoo, and her ivy plants, and even the blowflies on the window sill.
Everything
.’

Nathan frowned at her. ‘And this “Michael Dukakis” . . . he said that he’d seen a big black creature, with kind of like horns, or a crown, something like that?’

‘That’s right. He said it was black, and it was hunched over, with “jaggedy bits” on top of its head. I thought it sounded so much like your nightmare. But it couldn’t have been, could it?’

‘Wait up a minute,’ said Nathan. He left the kitchen and went to his study at the back of the house. His desk had long since been buried by an avalanche of cardboard files and newspapers and magazines, but he knew exactly where to find the books he was looking for. On the shelf next to the door there was a thin paperback copy of
Natural History
, by Pliny the Elder, and a thick volume bound in cracked black leather,
Czarny Ksiązka – The Black Book
, by the Blessed Wincenty Kadłubek.