Free Basilisk by Graham Masterton Page A

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.
    He brought them back to the kitchen and opened