Basilisk (24 page)

‘I believe in being totally open-minded.’

‘OK. I’m prepared to accept that even if
I
don’t believe in black magic, Doctor Zauber does, and he’s going to be acting accordingly. So when I find him –
if
I find him – I’ll watch out if he tries anything that looks like sorcery.’

‘When
you
find him? What about me?’

‘You don’t want to come to Poland, do you?’

‘Of course I want to come to Poland. This is my story and I’m sticking with it. Who found you that item from EIN?’

‘I don’t know, Patti. It could be genuinely dangerous. Especially if Zauber has actually managed to create another basilisk.’

‘I like dangerous. Besides, you need me. My mother was Polish, and I know what
bigos
is.’

SIXTEEN

Night Flight

W
hen Denver arrived home, they drove together to the Trolley Car Diner on Germantown Avenue. It had been raining again, and the lurid neon lights on the Trolley Car’s façade were reflected in the black asphalt of the street outside. They found themselves a booth at the end of the diner and ordered fried chicken and soft-shelled crabs and strawberry shakes. The jukebox played doo-wop music.

Denver said, ‘You’re going to
Poland
? How long for?’

‘I don’t know. As long as it takes to find Doctor Zauber.’

‘So what am I supposed to do?’

‘I want you to stay here and keep an eye on Mom for me.’

‘Yes, but if what you say is true, and you need to find this Zauber dude before Mom can wake up, what’s the point of my staying here? If I come to Poland, too, I can help you to look for him. You can always call the doctor to check on Mom.’

Nathan looked at Patti and Patti shrugged.

‘Come on, Pops,’ Denver urged him.

‘OK,’ said Nathan. ‘You can be my back-up. But I want you to stay well clear of Doctor Zauber, if we find him. I don’t want you ending up in a coma like your mom. Or worse than that, dead.’

He wasn’t sure if Denver would be more of a hindrance than a help, but on reflection he would rather have him close to him, where he could make sure that he wasn’t getting into any trouble. And Denver was right: he could call the hospital at any time to check on Grace, and Poland was only half a day away. ‘Let’s finish up here and then we can go home and pack.’

They left the Trolley Car around nine. Patti promised to come around at seven thirty in the morning, well in time for their American Airlines flight from PHL. Nathan took Denver home, and logged on to his computer to book an extra ticket to Kraków. Then, while Denver packed his bag, he drove down to the Hahnemann to see Grace.

The room was dimly lit, and Grace lay there as pale and silent as if she were dead. It was only when he bent over her to kiss her that he could feel her breathing.

‘Grace, sweetheart, I’m going away for a few days, but I’ll come back as soon as I can. I promise you, I’m going to find that Doctor Zauber and I’m going to get you out of this coma, and I’m never going to mess with any of those Cee-Zee creatures, ever again. They say you shouldn’t try to be smarter than God, don’t they, because you never can be, and you’ll get your comeuppance sooner or later.’

The Egyptian-looking nurse had silently entered the room, and had been standing in the corner watching him. When he realized that she was there, he turned around and said, ‘Hi . . . I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘Where are you going?’ she asked him.

‘Poland. There’s something I have to do there – somebody I have to find. I’m not sure how long I’ll be away. You will take good care of her, won’t you? You have my cell number, you can call me any time at all.’

‘Of course we will take care of her, Mr Underhill. She appears to be quite stable, at the moment. Doctor Ishikawa does not anticipate any dramatic changes.’

She came up to him, and laid her hand on his arm.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘You are feeling helpless, but there is nothing more that you can possibly do.’

We’ll see about that
, thought Nathan. He glanced across at the crater in the wall, where the door handle had dented the plaster.
Wherever you are, Doctor Zauber, I’m coming after you, and I’m going to find you, and you’re going to give me my wife back
.

‘What is it?’ asked the nurse.

‘What do you mean, “what is it”?’

‘I don’t know. Ever since your wife has been here, I have sensed something in this room. I don’t know how to explain it.’

She looked around. ‘You know – it is almost like somebody else is here, watching her. I have never felt like that with a patient before. Please – I don’t mean to alarm you, or upset you. But I thought you ought to know.’

‘There
is
somebody watching her,’ said Nathan. ‘I can’t explain it, either, but that’s the reason I have to go away.’

The nurse reached up with both hands and unfastened the catch of her necklace. She drew the pendant out from underneath her uniform and gave it to him. He held it in the palm of his hand and frowned at it. It was an ankh, an Egyptian cross, studded with black pearls. It was still warm from her skin.

‘Take it with you,’ she said. ‘It will help to protect you from bad things.’

‘No, I can’t. Supposing I lose it?’

‘You won’t lose it. You will bring it back to me safe; and when you do that, your wife will wake up.’

Nathan looked at her narrowly. Was she aware of something that he wasn’t? She was talking to him as if she knew exactly why Grace was in a coma, and why he was going to Poland. She was talking to him almost as if she had seen Doctor Zauber, too.

‘Thank you,’ he said, but he deliberately said it as if he was expecting an explanation.

‘Just go,’ she told him. ‘Go and come back. Don’t be worried. I’m a nurse, remember, and when you are a nurse you see things that nobody else sees. You see people very close to dying, with all of the color bleached out of their eyes. You see their spirits, like shadows standing in the corner. You see their souls.’

‘Thank you,’ Nathan repeated; but this time he meant nothing at all but
thank you
.

‘I know where your wife is,’ said the nurse. ‘I know what kind of lands she is walking through. Once you discover how to do it, you will call her back, I promise you, and she will come to you.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘Because I was trained to watch people, and the way they behave. I was trained how to recognize fear, and worry; but I was also taught how to recognize bravery, and hope.’

‘It’s more than that, though, isn’t it?’

‘Mr Underhill, all of us have somebody who takes care of us, whether we know it or not.’

‘If you say so, nurse.’

‘You can call me Aisha. It means “alive”.’

Nathan gave Grace two more kisses, once on the lips and once on the forehead. He couldn’t bear to leave her but there was no other way.

‘God keep you safe,’ said Aisha.

Nathan walked out of the hospital and headed through the rain toward the parking structure. He didn’t really understand how Aisha had any inkling of what he was intending to do; but he felt reassured and grateful that she was looking after Grace.

Outside the parking structure, a skinny young man was standing in a corner, trying to keep out of the rain. He wore a brown woolen hat pulled down over his ears, and a baggy parka.

‘How about a little change, man?’ he called out, in a thin, nasal voice.

Nathan dug into his pocket and came out with a handful of pennies and dimes and quarters. The young man looked down at it disdainfully. ‘Is that all? I haven’t eaten in three days.’

‘It’s enough for an egg McMuffin. Sorry if it isn’t enough for you to score.’

‘I put a curse on you, man.’

‘Listen,’ Nathan told him, ‘if you don’t want the change, I’ll take it back.’

‘Then take it!’ the young man shouted at him, and showered the coins in his face.

Nathan stood there for a moment, half inclined to grab the young man and shove him up against the wall, but then he simply shook his head, and said, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’

‘Lucky? You call this lucky?’

‘You’re alive, you’re conscious. You have all of your faculties. What more do you want?’

‘What the fuck you talking about, man? I’ve told you. I’ve put a curse on you. There’s nothing going to go right in your life, ever again.’

Nathan walked away, and up the corrugated concrete ramp. As he reached the top, he turned around and saw the young man crouching down on the sidewalk, picking up the coins that he had scattered.

It took thirteen-and-a-half hours to fly to Kraków, changing planes in Chicago to the national Polish airline, Lot. Denver slept most of the way, with his MP3 player attached to his ears. Patti worked on her laptop for a while, moving her lips as she wrote, but then she folded it up and she fell asleep, too.

Nathan closed his eyes but he could think only of Doctor Zauber, and his white plaster face in the wall. Over the roaring of the engines and the hissing of the air conditioning, he could even hear Doctor Zauber’s voice.

When we die, nobody really cares. Nobody misses us. The carousel of life keeps on going around and around, and up and down, with everybody screaming and laughing
.

He had the terrible feeling that Doctor Zauber was here on the plane, leaning over him and staring into his face. He abruptly opened his eyes. He couldn’t stop himself. But it was one of the flight attendants, leaning over him to tug Patti’s blanket to cover her shoulder.

‘I’m sorry,’ she smiled. ‘I did not mean to disturb you. Is there anything you would like? Coffee? Or a drink, maybe?’

‘Thanks. Maybe a glass of red wine.’

After that, he didn’t bother to try to sleep, but sat there nursing his glass of wine. Outside, it was already daylight, and the window shades were glowing with sunshine, although it was only four in the morning in Philadelphia. He still hadn’t finished his wine before the flight attendants began to serve breakfast.

Denver opened his eyes, blinked and yawned. ‘What’s happening, Pops?’

‘Breakfast.’

‘What, already? I was having this really scary dream. All of these statues came to life and they were chasing me.’

‘Just as well you woke up, then, before they caught you.’

They landed in Kraków at two thirty in the afternoon, leaving the sunshine five thousand feet above them and bumping downward through thick gray cloud. It was raining hard, and the raindrops crawled diagonally across the windows as they tilted and dipped toward the runway.

Rafał was waiting for them in the terminal of John Paul II International Airport. Nathan was surprised how much older he looked. He was a big, stocky man with short-cropped hair that had turned white since he had last seen him, and a heavy gray moustache like a yardbrush. He had bulbous cheeks and a bulbous nose and bulbous blue eyes, and he wore tiny steel-rimmed spectacles.

His droopy brown raincoat looked as if it belonged in a Cold War secret-agent movie, like
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
.

‘Well, well! Nathan!
Witają Polska
! Welcome to Poland!’

He gave Nathan a huge, bearlike hug and slapped him on the back. He smelled strongly of tobacco and wet raincoat.

‘And this is your son! Welcome to Poland, young sir! And who is this charming young lady?’

Patti held out her hand. ‘Patti Laquelle,
Philadelphia Web News
. Pleased to meet you, sir.’

Rafał took hold of her hand and kissed it. Patti blushed and said, ‘First time anybody ever did
that
to me!’

‘Old Polish courtesy,’ grinned Rafał, showing tobacco-stained teeth, ‘Now, you must be very tired. I will drive you to your hotel, and you can maybe rest for a while. Then we can meet for a drink and some food and talk about what you need to do here.’

He had a silver Renault Espace waiting for them outside. He helped them to load their suitcases and then he drove them eastward toward the city.

‘I have booked you rooms at the Amadeus, near the Grand Square, which is very convenient for the Old Town and the Jewish Quarter. It is old-fashioned hotel but I think you prefer it. Maybe you do not have much time for seeing sights, I don’t know.’

Nathan said, ‘I don’t think we will, I’m afraid. You heard about all of those old people who were burned alive in a bus?’

‘You mean here, near Kraków? Yes, of course. But what does that have to do with Doctor Zauber?’

‘I suspect it has everything to do with Doctor Zauber,’ said Nathan, and he told Rafał about his encounter with Doctor Zauber and his basilisk at the Murdstone Rest Home, and what had happened to Grace, and how so many of the Murdstone’s residents had been killed by fire.

Rafał shook his head. ‘All for this “life-energy”? This is very hard to believe. If anybody else but you had told me this—’

‘Rafał, I saw it with my own eyes. Otherwise I wouldn’t believe it, either.’

Although it was raining, the streets of Kraków were teeming with tourists wearing plastic capes and carrying umbrellas. Rafał drove them past the old stone walls which had once surrounded the city, and pointed out the baroque turrets and elaborate spires of Wawel Castle, on a hill overlooking the River Vistula.

‘In medieval legend, you know, a terrible dragon lived in a cave there on Wawel Hill. The story goes that some stupid boys did not believe it existed, even though the village elders told them to stay well away. The dragon had been hibernating for hundreds of years but the boys went into the cave and woke it up. After that it came out every day, killing and eating cattle and sheep and even some people when it caught them unaware.

‘The dragon was killed in the end by a wise alchemist called Krakus. He mixed up a paste of nitrate, tar and sulfur, and coated six dead sheep with it. He left the sheep outside the dragon’s cave and the dragon came out and ate every one of them with a single bite. Inside its stomach the paste started to burn like fire, and so the dragon flew down to the Vistula and drank and drank as much water as it could.