Basilisk (15 page)

The first door they came to was marked
Cleaning Supplies
. Nathan tried the handle but it was locked. He tried the next door, which was unmarked, but that was locked, too. The third door was labeled
Laundry
, and he was able to open that, but there was no laundry inside, only an old-fashioned floor polisher and a standard lamp with a scorched cardboard shade.

At the end of the corridor, on the right-hand side, they found gray-painted double doors with wired-glass windows in them. The doors were locked, and the handles were chained and padlocked together. The room was in total darkness, so Nathan shone his flashlight through one of the windows. It had obviously been designed as a sanitarium, but there was only one bed in it, without any sheets or blankets, and the only hospital paraphernalia was a single drip stand and a tipped-over zimmer frame.

‘Well, something must happen in here that Doctor Zauber doesn’t want anybody to know about. Otherwise, why chain the doors like this? There’s nothing to steal, is there? And look at the windows.’

Every window in the sanitarium had a black blind over it, like a photographer’s darkroom, and every blind had been taped to the window frames with black gaffer tape.

Nathan said, ‘Where would you keep a creature during the day if that creature couldn’t tolerate daylight?’

Grace stood on tiptoe and peered into the sanitarium, too. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘It could really be real, couldn’t it? And look. I’ll bet that’s where it sleeps.’

Nathan angled his flashlight toward the corner of the room. There were two large mattresses lying side by side on the floor. They were sagging and frayed and heavily stained with something brown.

‘You’re right,’ said Nathan. He turned around and looked back along the corridor. ‘The problem is, where is it now?’

‘You did bring the gun, didn’t you?’

Nathan reached behind him and pulled the automatic out of his belt. ‘Gun. And mirror.’

‘I don’t care about the mirror so long as you have the gun.’

‘I don’t want to
kill
it, Grace. That would defeat the whole object.’

‘So what do we do now?’

‘We go look for it, of course. It must be reasonably manageable, otherwise Zauber wouldn’t be able to keep it locked up in the sanatarium, would he?’ He paused. ‘I was going to train my gryphon, if it had lived. I was even thinking of hiring a professional falconer.’

‘Maybe we should call it a night,’ said Grace. ‘Now that we’ve found some evidence that your basilisk really exists – isn’t that enough?’

‘Grace, if it exists, I have to see it for myself.’

As they stood there, the corridor began rapidly to darken. A large cloud was moving across the moon, like a theater curtain, and within less than a minute, the whole extension was plunged into blackness.

Grace said, ‘Come on, Nate. We can call the police. We can call the Department of Public Welfare. They’ll take care of it.’

‘Grace—’

‘I’m frightened, Nate. I don’t mind admitting it.’

‘OK. Maybe you’re right. Maybe this
was
a crazy idea.’

Nathan felt frustrated, but he had to admit to himself that he was relieved, too. It reminded him of the time that he had tried to jump off the Kidd’s Mills bridge into the Shenango River to qualify for membership of a local gang. He had wanted to join that gang more than anything else in his whole life, but his uncle had come driving past before he could jump, and had ordered him down. He had protested loudly, and sulked, but secretly he had been deeply thankful. The Shenango was shallow, with a rocky bottom, and very cold.

He put his arm around Grace’s shoulders and steered her back along the corridor. But before they could reach the corner where the extension corridor joined the main corridor, they heard the same scraping noise they had heard before. Then a pause. Then another scraping noise, and a sound like somebody dragging a very heavy sack along the ground.

Nathan took out his gun again, and cocked it. He took his shaving mirror out of his pocket, and held that up, too.

‘Nate?’ said Grace, and this time she sounded truly frightened.

‘It’s OK. It’s OK. Let’s just take this careful.’

He edged his way toward the corner, with the automatic in his right hand and the mirror in his left. Now the scraping and the scratching and the dragging noises grew louder still, and they could hear
breathing
, too: thick, clogged-up breathing. It sounded as if some huge locomotive were approaching them.

‘Holy Mother of God,’ said Grace.

Nathan took a deep breath. He felt terrified. He felt elated. Here, at last, he was going to come face to face with a living myth. A creature that hadn’t existed since medieval days.

He stepped around the corner, and there it was, exactly as he had seen it in his nightmare. Huge and bulky and hunched, with a black bony coronet that scraped against the ceiling. It was all wrapped up in layer after layer of tattered black sacking, although he could see its claws and its scaly black feet, with a long sharp spur behind each heel. Its head was covered with sacking, too, so that its eyes appeared only dimly, as they had in his nightmare.

The creature saw him, or sensed him, or
smelled
him, because it uttered a furious and almost deafening hiss, like a bath full of scalded snakes. Its odor was overwhelming: an eye-watering mustiness as strong as cats’ urine.

Grace screamed, ‘
Nate
!’ and it was the first time that he had ever heard her scream in absolute terror. He pointed his automatic between the creature’s eyes and thought to himself:
shoot it. Shoot it now, because it’s going to tear you to pieces and then it’s going to go after Grace
.

But a commanding voice called out, ‘Doctor Underhill! Sir! You don’t want to do that!’

ELEVEN

The Black Ultimatum

A
figure stepped out in front of the creature and Grace immediately shone her flashlight across his face. It was a large-headed man, wearing a black silk shirt, buttoned up to the neck, and black pants. His steel-gray hair was slicked straight back from his forehead, and his eyes were concealed behind reflective spectacles with steel-gray lenses. He was carrying a riding crop.

‘Doctor Zauber!’ said Grace.

‘Well, of course,’ said Doctor Zauber, in his precise German accent. ‘Who else would you expect?

He raised his hand toward Nathan and said, ‘Please . . . the gun. I promise you that the basilisk will not harm you so long as it is under my control.’

Close behind him, the basilisk shuffled and swayed, and its breathing sounded more and more labored.

‘So you did it,’ said Nathan. ‘You actually bred one, and it survived.’

‘Yes! But only thanks to you, Professor Underhill! I freely acknowledge my debt to you, and your research team. Without your admirable work, the basilisk could never have come back to life.’

He turned around, and looked at the basilisk. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘it is far from a perfect creation. You can hear for yourself that it suffers from respiratory problems, and it has some serious malformation of its skeletal structure. It has survived, yes, but I don’t know for how much longer. Which is why I have appealed to you for help.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Nathan demanded. ‘You had Richard Scryman steal all of my research, and now you want to pick my brains some more?’

‘Please, the gun,’ Doctor Zauber repeated. ‘The basilisk is very sensitive to hostile intentions.’

‘You said that you had it under control,’ said Grace.

‘Of course. But only in the same way perhaps that a dog handler has a pit bull terrier under control. If anybody should show aggression to its master, the pit bull will attack,
nicht wahr
? and there is nothing that anybody can do to hold it back.’

Reluctantly, Nathan pushed the SK back into his belt. Then he took out his flashlight and shone it on to the ragged black bulk of the basilisk, lighting up its huge misshapen head and its coronet of jagged horns. In response, the basilisk’s eyes glowed a little brighter, as if it resented Nathan examining it so intently.

Doctor Zauber said, ‘You and I have been working for nearly three years in co-operation with each other, Professor Underhill. I realize that it was a partnership of which you were totally unaware, but I did not think that you would willingly share your research with me.’

‘Well, you got that right. How much did you pay him? Richard Scryman – for stealing my notes?’

‘Not so much. Richard was not so interested in the money, even though he told me that you paid him only a pittance. Just as I did, he wanted more than anything else to see a mythical creature come to life, and he realized very early on that neither of us could do it alone.’

Nathan was mystified, and incredulous, and angry, all at the same time. ‘I bred a gryphon, goddammit, from embryonic cells and DNA, and it didn’t take any help from you.’

‘Of course you did,’ said Doctor Zauber. ‘And what you did was
unglaublich
. Unbelievable. But your gryphon died inside its shell, and every other gryphon you attempted to breed would have died inside its shell, too. You were missing the one vital ingredient for success that only I possess.’

‘Oh, yes? And what is that, exactly?’

The basilisk suddenly lurched toward him, and its breathing changed to a high-pitched whine. Nathan reached for the butt of his automatic again, but Doctor Zauber clapped his hands together loudly and snapped, ‘
Halt Denk
!
An die Strafe
!’

The basilisk uttered an extraordinary noise in the back of its throat, as if it were being strangled. Doctor Zauber said, ‘It is not a patient creature, the basilisk, as you can see for yourselves. Sometimes it has to be reminded where it came from – who made it, and who can help it to survive.’

‘OK,’ said Nathan, impatiently. ‘But what is this magic ingredient that you have and I don’t? And if you were so keen to co-operate with me, why didn’t you approach me before? We could have worked together, couldn’t we? Maybe my gryphon wouldn’t have died and the Zoo wouldn’t have axed my research program.’

Doctor Zauber shook his head. ‘If I had approached you at any time, Professor Underhill, you would not have agreed to work with me. So there was no other way for me to recreate a mythical creature than to borrow your research and combine it with mine, without your knowledge.

‘Now that your program has been curtailed, however, what could I do to carry on my own research except come to you direct, and ask if you would be prepared to assist me? Together, for instance, we could breed another basilisk, much healthier and stronger than this poor specimen. We could breed your gryphon, too, and wyverns, and salamanders, and maybe even a bennu bird.

‘We could open our own clinic in Switzerland, and people would come from all over the world to be cured of incurable illnesses. Have you seen what Doctor Geeta Shroff is doing in India, with embryonic stem cells? She is even curing quadruple paraplegia, like that of Christopher Reeve, after serious sporting accidents.

‘We would be living saints, Professor Underhill. We would change the face of medicine for ever, you and I. And of course we would be very, very rich.’

‘So what is the magic ingredient?’ Grace challenged him. ‘And why don’t you think that Nathan would have agreed to work with you before?’

Doctor Zauber said, with a humorless smile, ‘Why did you come here yesterday night? And why did you come here tonight?’

‘We came here because Grace told me about Doris Bellman dying,’ Nathan retorted. ‘And her cockatoo dying, too. And her plants. And she told me that one of your residents had seen a big black creature with horns. We came here because I had two nightmares, about the same kind of creature.’

‘But you were not so sure, were you? You didn’t call the police. Well, maybe you
were
sure, and you thought: there could be a basilisk, at the Murdstone Rest Home, there could really be a real living basilisk, and whatever the risk, I must see it for myself?’

‘OK,’ said Nathan defensively. ‘But that first night I found a broken-off piece of horn in Doris Bellman’s room, and took it back to the lab and analyzed it, and then I knew for sure.
Basilisk
. The only creature in millions of years to have all three varieties of DNA.’

Doctor Zauber nodded, as in approval. Then he said, ‘You took quite a risk,
ja
, trespassing on my property? And to bring your wife, too, who is an MD, with a professional reputation to maintain? She could be struck off for such nefarious activities.’

‘You
knew
that we were here last night?’ Grace asked him.

‘Of course. You think I run a residential home for thirty-eight seniors without knowing
everything
that happens here, twenty-four hours of every day?’

He paused. This was obviously a rhetorical question; but for some reason it sounded as if he was expecting Nathan to answer.

Nathan didn’t respond; and after a while Doctor Zauber said, ‘Last night, regrettably, you arrived too late to see the basilisk. It was almost daylight, and as you are aware the basilisk must hide in complete darkness during the day. But . . . everything was not lost. You found the piece of horn that I left for you, and that was obviously good enough to convince you that the basilisk was really here. Not all of my little plans work out, you know, but this one did.’

‘So you
wanted
us to come here?’

‘
Natürlich
. I wanted to meet you, and talk to you, and show you the basilisk. I wanted to ask you if you would consider working with me, now that your own project has been canceled.’

‘Why the hell didn’t you just phone me? Or send me a message through Richard? That would have been a damn sight easier, wouldn’t it?’

‘
Easier
, Professor, yes. But I am a careful man who protects his interests. There are certain aspects involved in the breeding of mythical creatures which cross over the boundaries of medical ethics. That is why I never believed that you would agree to work with me.’