Free Basilisk by Graham Masterton Page B

them up.
    ‘What?’ asked Grace.
    ‘This creature . . . it killed everything in the room, right? Look what Pliny wrote about a serpent called a basilisk: “There is not one looketh upon its eyes, but hee dyeth presently”.
    ‘And see here: “He killeth all trees and shrubs not only that he toucheth, and that he doth breath upon also. As for grasse and hearbs, those hee sindgeth and burneth up, yea and breaketh stones in sunder, so venimous and deadly is he”.
    ‘“He creepeth not winding and crawling by as other serpents doe, but goeth upright and aloft from the ground with the one halfe part of his bodie.” It also says he wears a coronet or a diadem, on his head.
    ‘And what did your “Michael Dukakis” tell you? The creature he saw had horns on his head.’
    Grace said, ‘I don’t know. He frightened me. The whole thing frightened me. If you hadn’t had that dream, or whatever it was, I would have said that he had senile dementia, and left it at that. But – I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Maybe there is some kind of creature. But I don’t know how there can be. It’s unreal.’
    But Nathan opened the black-leather book and said, ‘You only have to read this. It was written by Saint Wincenty Kadłubek, who was Bishop of Kraków, in Poland. In the year 1218 he unexpectedly resigned and went to live with the Cistercian monks in an isolated monastery at J ę drzejów. Nobody knew why he had resigned, not until this book was published, about thirty-five years after his death.
    ‘It says here that one April night he was holding a Midnight Mass in St Andrzej’s Church when “the darkest of creatures appeared from the shadows, all swathed in many black robes, and with a black crown of thorns upon its head”. This creature “breathed upon the assembled worshippers with the foulest and coldest of breath, and stared at them with eyes that shone like two terrible lamps”.
    ‘According to this, the congregation all fell to the floor, more than thirty of them, but the bishop was dragged out through a side door by three of his priests, and he escaped. “The next morning, when they dared to venture back inside, they found no sign of the creature, but that all of the congregation still lay where they had first fallen, and that the church floor was strewn with dozens of dead swallows that had been nesting in the rafters, and hundreds of dead flies”.
    ‘Not only that, listen – “all of the flowers with which the church had been decorated had dried up and shriveled, as if they had been scorched by a fire”.’
    Nathan closed the book. ‘The way you found Doris Bellman’s room, that was pretty much the same, wasn’t it? Everything was dead. The flowers, the birds. Even the flies.’
    ‘But a basilisk , creeping around the Murdstone? How can that be?’
    ‘I feel the same way as you, Grace. I don’t know what to believe. But that thing I saw in my nightmare, and that hunched-up monster that “Michael Dukakis” saw, going around the corner, and that “darkest of creatures” that Bishop Kadłubek saw in Kraków – they’re all so similar, don’t you think? And they’re all just like Pliny’s description of a basilisk.’
    Grace came around the kitchen table and laid her hands on his shoulders. ‘Nate, let’s be serious. You only dreamed about this creature, you didn’t see it for real. And “Michael Dukakis” is suffering from senile dementia, so you can hardly call him a reliable witness. His real name’s Stavros, or something like that. As for your Polish bishop – well, they were all very superstitious in the Middle Ages, weren’t they? Not only that – April? It was probably Lent, and he hadn’t eaten for days, and he simply imagined it.’
    Nathan looked away. Grace was probably right.
    ‘Suppose for a moment that it really is a basilisk?’ Grace asked him. ‘Where could it have come from? The world’s leading expert on mythical zoology is you , and you haven’t been