Bestiary (45 page)
Authors: Robert Masello
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers
Jakob and Greer stood off to one side, as Carter took it all in. Al-Kalli, right behind him, whispered, “Not a word—even to your wife—of what you see here tonight.”
Right now, Carter was just taking in the sheer size and scope of the place. The ceiling had to be a hundred feet high, and hanging just below it was a straw-covered aerie on a heavy chain. It was shaped like a huge shallow bowl, and it was swaying now, as if something had just launched itself from the perch. Carter scanned the roofline and though he saw nothing, he heard the grating cry of a swooping bird. He whirled around, just in time to see a red and gold blur, with a wingspan twice as great as a condor’s, soaring over his head.
It was like no other bird he had ever seen—and al-Kalli could tell as much, from nothing more than the stunned look on Carter’s face.
“There’s more,” he said confidingly.
Carter was still gazing up as al-Kalli guided him toward the western wall. Carter glanced at the two guards. Jakob appeared alert but unperturbed. Captain Greer, on the other hand, looked even jumpier than ever. Hadn’t he told Carter that he’d only been working for al-Kalli for twenty-eight hours? If that was true, then all of this was nearly as new and shocking to him as it was to Carter.
All along this side of the building there was a shoulder-high concrete wall, painted white and surmounted by iron bars that rose at least another ten or twelve feet into the air. From behind the wall Carter could hear strange snuffling sounds, barks and grunts, and the occasional roar. He approached it cautiously, wondering what on earth could lie behind it. The first pen—there were several, each about a hundred feet apart—had a narrow chain-mesh gate, and then another gate, about a yard inside, so that together they formed a little sealed compartment; an extra security measure, Carter surmised, to allow someone to enter the pen—for feeding or observation purposes—without permitting whatever was imprisoned here any chance of a sudden escape.
But at first he saw nothing that could escape—only a wading pond, with fresh, clear water in it and several lily pads floating idly on its surface. The floor of the pen, rolling and uneven, was covered everywhere with a layer of broken rubble, pebbles and stones colored gray and green and rust. It looked like an immense mosaic, the pattern of which could only have been discerned by rising forty or fifty feet into the air and looking down. When Carter turned to ask al-Kalli where the inhabitants were, he saw that Jakob, his arm fully extended, was holding out to him a pair of plastic goggles. Al-Kalli himself was hanging well back.
Carter took the goggles.
“You might want to put them on,” al-Kalli said, “just in case.”
Carter did, though he could not, for the life of him, see why. He stepped back into the gated enclosure and looked again into the huge pen. Maybe a hundred yards in the rear, there was a shaded enclosure, but even there he could see nothing but shadows and gloom. What was he supposed to see? Was al-Kalli so deluded that he kept imaginary creatures in gigantic, empty cages?
But the bird, the bird he’d seen was real.
He studied the rock-strewn floor again, and this time he could see just one thing strange—a blurring above some of the stones. At first, thinking it was the goggles, he took them off, breathed on them, then wiped them clean with his handkerchief. They were a sturdy pair with a snug elastic strap, but when he put them back on, the blurring continued. In fact, he saw it now in another spot. Were there steam grates, or vents of some kind, under the rocks?
“It’s not the goggles,” he heard al-Kalli say.
And then, as if it were some optical illusion, the rocks themselves moved—but not randomly, as if they were being disturbed, but as if they were alive and integrated. He blinked several times, adjusted the goggles, but the rocks now were rising up, in not one but two separate places, and they were . . . standing. The fogging recurred. What was he looking at?
And what was looking back at him?
There were eyes behind the fog, sinister eyes that held steady under a thick, gray brow. There were two creatures, on all fours now, their entire bodies—perhaps six or even eight feet long—covered with spikes and stony protuberances, exactly like the rocks they’d been lying on. The noises they made, as they lumbered in his direction, were wet and hoarse and rasping. The one in the lead—like a gravel pit come to terrible life—raised its head, coughed, and, like a hail of bullets, the spittle splatted against the wall, clung to the bars of the gate, and dotted the lenses of the goggles. Carter fell back, wiping away the gray-green smear, in shock.
He could hear al-Kalli and Jakob chuckling.
“They used to be quite accurate,” al-Kalli said. “Like cobras, they aim for the eyes.”
Carter stumbled out of the gated enclosure and whipped the goggles off altogether. Some of the mucus was stuck to his cheek, where it stung like a bad sunburn. Jakob handed him a hand towel.
“What is it?” Carter said, wiping away the gunk from his face.
Al-Kalli said, “I’m sure you scientists would have your own name for it. But in my family, we have always called it the basilisk.”
The basilisk? Carter thought. That was a mythical creature—not the thing he had just seen walking toward him with slow, deliberate steps, the thing that even now was just a few yards away, behind a concrete wall. Basilisks were . . . he struggled to remember his mythology . . . creatures so monstrous their breath alone could kill.
“Are you beginning to believe me?” al-Kalli asked.
As if in mockery, the huge red bird, alighted now on the lip of its aerie, let out a stuttering cry that echoed down and around the cavernous walls of the bestiary.
“Shall we move on?” al-Kalli said. “We have only so much time before the concert is over and my other guests have finished with their dessert and coffee.”
The entire menagerie was awake now and making itself heard. The basilisks were grunting and snorting—Carter wondered if there were more in there than the two he had seen—and as he was led toward the next double gate, he wondered if he should be putting the goggles back on.
“No,” al-Kalli said, intuiting his question, “you won’t be needing those again.” Carter handed them to Jakob, while Captain Greer, his limp more noticeable now, brought up the rear. Reluctantly, it looked to Carter.
“But you may wish to stay back a bit from the bars,” al-Kalli warned.
Carter did as instructed, and stepped only halfway into the next gate enclosure. This pen was as large as the one next to it, easily a couple of hundred feet in every direction, but where the first one had been barren and stony, this one was lush and filled with thick shrubbery and flowering plants. There was a dense carpet of weedy grass, speckled with dandelions. Fans in the ceiling directed a steady low breeze at the greenery, so that everything seemed to be in constant motion, gently undulating, swaying and waving in a delicate play of light and shadow . . . a play that was suddenly broken by a ferocious growl and a headlong rush at the bars. Carter barely had time to step back before a spotted beast, the size of a lion, had flown at the gate, its claws scrabbling at the iron bars. He had not seen it coming; he had no idea where it had even come from. It was as if it had launched itself from the lower branches of one of the ficus trees planted in the pen.
The creature snarled, its head back, and Carter saw a pair of fangs to rival those of any saber-toothed cat. But these fangs, even in his present state, he recognized were curved backward, like scimitars. The creature slipped down from the bars and stepped back, planting its paws flatly on the ground, the way a man, not a cat, might walk. Its claws were like twisted fingers, long and sharp and yellowed. Its forelegs were longer than its rear, so that it had the hunched look of a hyena, but a hyena with wings. Its massive shoulders were blanketed with a thick matt of feathery black fur, fur that right now, in the moment of its attack, had billowed out like a cape.
Again, Carter was thunderstruck.
“The griffin,” al-Kalli said simply, brushing back his ruby cuff link to glance at his watch. “There is just one more—”
But they were interrupted by a man’s voice, filled with fear and worry, carrying toward them. Al-Kalli looked displeased.
“Mr. al-Kalli, Mr. al-Kalli,” the man was calling, barely able to catch his breath, “why didn’t you tell me you were coming? If only you had told me you were coming!”
The man, a reedy Arab in an open lab coat, who looked like he had just fallen out of bed, came panting up to them. Carter noticed Captain Greer glancing at his new boss, as if wondering how this should be handled.
“You weren’t needed, Rashid,” al-Kalli said, and it was as if he’d struck the man in the face. His features froze, but then, taking in the sight of Carter—this stranger in his domain—he composed himself again.
“This is Dr. Cox,” al-Kalli explained, and Rashid nodded his head quickly. “He will be helping us.”
“Helping us?” Rashid mumbled. “With the . . . animals?” He glanced at Carter with panic. “Are you a doctor, sir, of the veterinary sciences?”
“I’m a paleontologist,” he replied.
It looked as if it took Rashid a few seconds to process that information—and after he had, he looked just as perplexed.
“Come along, Dr. Cox,” al-Kalli said, turning toward the last gate at the far end of the facility, and striding off. “You have yet to see the pièce de résistance.”
Carter, and the rest of the entourage, followed in al-Kalli’s brisk footsteps and at the last gate, al-Kalli himself stepped into the gated enclosure. “This,” al-Kalli said, leaving room for Carter to step in, too, “is the oldest and most prized of our collection.”
It was resting now, half in and half out of an enormous rocky cave raised several feet above the dirt. It lifted its massive, scaly snout, its long, leathery tongue flicking dismissively at the air. Its yellow eyes stared coldly across the vast expanse of the pen.
“The manticore,” al-Kalli intoned. “It’s a corruption of an ancient Persian word for man-eater.”
But Carter hardly heard him. He was looking at a creature more ancient than the dinosaurs . . . a reptile . . . and a mammal . . . a beast whose bones were the paleontologist’s Holy Grail. It was a monster that had ruled the earth a quarter of a billion years ago, the
T. rex
of its day . . . the most ruthless and successful predator of the Paleozoic era . . . wiped off the face of the earth in the Permian extinction . . . and named after the terrible sisters of Greek mythology who were so frightening that simply to look upon them was to die.
T. rex
of its day . . . the most ruthless and successful predator of the Paleozoic era . . . wiped off the face of the earth in the Permian extinction . . . and named after the terrible sisters of Greek mythology who were so frightening that simply to look upon them was to die.
And now he was looking right at it.
Not, as al-Kalli would have it, the manticore of legend. Not some mythical beast.
But what paleontologists had dubbed—based on a scattering of bones and teeth, some of the oldest and rarest fossils on earth—the gorgonopsian. Or gorgon, for short.
But these bones were walking, these teeth were wet, and these eyes radiated a malevolence as old as the earth itself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
SADOWSKI HAD PARKED the car a few hundred yards down the street from the gatehouse, where the low overhanging branches of a California live oak provided extra shadow. He’d been sitting there for over three hours, and every once in a while he’d been able to hear the sound of violin music being carried on the wind. But the music had stopped, and Sadowski began to hope the party would be breaking up soon.
In his lap, he had a map of greater L.A., folded open to the west side. There were little red Xs wherever he and Burt had decided would be good places to start. Several of the Xs were located right up around here, and Sadowski chose, on his own, to add a couple more. When he lowered his head, the night-vision goggles, strapped to the top of his head, teetered, and he had to flip the scope back up again.
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