Petrified Page 11

  ‘Go on,’ Jenna coaxed her.

  ‘Well, that was that. The screaming stopped and then this stone statue dropped out of the clouds and hit the road and smashed into smithereens.’

  ‘OK. But after the statue fell into the road, did you happen to see the creature fly away?’

  Mrs Blessington stared at her as if she were retarded. ‘You don’t understand, Detective. The statue was the flying thing.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Blessington. I don’t quite get it. This statue was carved out of solid limestone. It had wings, for sure, but there was no way that it could have used them to fly.’

  Mrs Blessington gave Jenna a dismissive sniff. ‘There! I told you that you wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Blessington. I’m just finding it very hard to make any sense out of this. First of all you saw a dog or a monkey or a dwarf, with wings, flying through the clouds?’

  ‘That’s right. It was very high up, so I couldn’t be sure exactly what it was.’

  ‘Then you heard screaming and the statue fell out of the sky and into the road?’

  Mrs Blessington nodded.

  ‘But you didn’t see the flying thing fly away, and you’re trying to tell me that the statue looked exactly like it?’

  ‘It didn’t look like it, detective. It was it. It flew into the clouds and somehow it turned to stone.’

  ‘In mid-air?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jenna looked at Dan and raised her eyebrows. ‘Thank you for your help, then, Mrs Blessington. Maybe we’ll need to talk to you again, but on the whole I think not.’

  ‘Because you think I have senile dementia? That’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, Mrs Blessington. I don’t. But, you know, sometimes our senses can play tricks on us. We perceive things in a different way from the way they really are. You know, like mirages in the desert, seeing water where there is no water. Optical illusions.’

  ‘It was one and the same creature, Detective, only it had turned into stone. I would swear to that on the Holy Bible, in a court of law. That was what happened. That was what I saw. But I don’t have to explain it. Explaining it, I thought that was your job.’

  Dan escorted Mrs Blessington back to the cemetery. Jenna looked at Ed Freiburg and Ed Freiburg was grinning.

  ‘What?’ Jenna demanded.

  ‘Don’t take it out on me,’ said Ed Freiburg. ‘I’m only the guy who puts the bits back together.’

  ‘It’s a statue, Ed. Statues cannot flap their wings and fly. Period.’

  ‘Of course not. But I think you’ve got to look at this whole thing differently.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You shouldn’t be asking yourself: how come these statues are falling out of the sky? You shouldn’t even be asking yourself how they got up there in the first place, because the fact is they did get up there, and there has to be some kind of logical explanation for that. What you need to be asking yourself is, why are they up there?’

  ‘How the hell should I know why they’re up there? Maybe they’ve decided to migrate to Florida for the winter, like the birds.’

  ‘If you could fly, just by flapping your arms, would you?’

  ‘Of course I would.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I could, that’s all.’

  ‘Precisely, Jenna. Right answer.’

  FOURTEEN

  Wednesday, 9:17 p.m.

  Nathan opened his eyes to find Grace sitting next to him. Usually, she was so placid and composed that she reminded him of one of those medieval paintings of angels. This evening, though, she looked angry and agitated. Her short brunette hair was all messed up and her green-gray eyes were as dark as a stormy sea.

  ‘Hi,’ he slurred. He was still recovering from the general anesthetic. He lifted his left hand and saw that it was covered by a large polythene glove. Inside the glove, his fingers were mottled red and tightly curled over, although he wasn’t feeling any pain. A cannula had been inserted in his right wrist and connected to both a saline drip and a morphine dispenser.

  ‘Why the hell did you do it?’ Grace snapped at him. ‘There are plenty of ways to win an argument without setting yourself on fire.’

  ‘Not this argument.’

  ‘I don’t understand this at all. Haven’t you always said that you get your own way by persuasion, not by violence? You’ve told Denver that often enough.’

  ‘This wasn’t violence. I didn’t hurt anybody else.’

  ‘It was violence. It was violence against yourself, and Ron Kasabian, and most of all it was violence against me and Denver. How are you going to make a living with only one hand?’

  ‘I won’t have to, believe me.’

  ‘Oh, no? I talked to Doctor Berman after your operation and he said that the burns were so deep that your hand is going to be permanently scarred and contracted. It could take months for you to heal, and I’m still going to end up with a husband who has one hand and one monkey’s paw.’

  ‘Grace, sweetheart, I knew exactly what I was doing, believe me. Ron was going to pull the plug on us. We got as far as creating the phoenix, for sure, but the whole project is going to be meaningless unless we can show what the phoenix is for.’

  Grace shook her head. ‘You’re crazy. You’re crazy and you’re thoughtless and I’m very, very angry with you. In fact I hate you for doing this.’

  Nathan reached out and tried to take hold of her hand, but she snatched it out of reach.

  ‘Don’t you believe in me any longer?’ he asked her. ‘For all of these years, you’ve always believed in me. Even when I couldn’t find funding. Even when every research institute between here and Seattle turned me down flat.’

  Grace’s eyes were crowded with tears. ‘Supposing I set fire to myself? How would you feel about that?’

  ‘Not very happy, it’s true. But this is different. Ron Kasabian refused to pay for any clinical tests on burns patients, so what option did I have?’

  ‘What are you telling me, Nathan? You mean you deliberately turned yourself into a guinea pig?’

  ‘Come on, Grace. I couldn’t ask anybody else to do it, could I?’

  ‘Do you know something? You’re much crazier than I thought. I thought you did this because you were angry. I thought you did it to shock Ron Kasabian. But you didn’t, did you? You did it coolly and calmly and deliberately.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t exactly cool and calm. And it hurt like hell.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say. You’ve left me speechless.’

  ‘Don’t say anything yet. You can give me a hard time if this doesn’t work out, but I can promise you that it will.’ He paused, and then he repeated, ‘I promise you.’

  Grace tugged a tissue from the box beside Nathan’s bed, and wiped her eyes. He felt terrible, hurting her like this, but Ron Kasabian hadn’t given him any other choice, apart from abandoning the cryptozoological program altogether, and that would have been like asking Vincent Van Gogh to give up painting.

  ‘Do you have your cell with you?’ he asked her. ‘I want to call Aarif.’

  ‘You don’t have to call Aarif. Aarif is right outside – and Kavita, too.’

  ‘I’m touched. I really am.’

  Grace gave him a tight, humorless smile. ‘Yes. Touched. I guess that’s one way of putting it.’

  Aarif and Kavita came into the room. Kavita was carrying a bouquet of purple orchids and a box of maple candies, while Aarif had brought a selection of books and magazines, including Playboy and National Geographic. They dragged chairs over to his bedside and sat looking at him with a mixture of admiration and disbelief.

  ‘How does it feel now, Professor – your hand?’ Aarif asked him. He was wearing a brown knitted skullcap and a floppy brown sweater, and he looked more like a member of the Taliban than a research zoologist.

  ‘It’s starting to throb some,’ Nathan admitted, in a hoarse, whispery voice. ‘But I have morphine on demand if it starts to
hurt too much. How’s Torchy?’

  ‘Oh, Torchy’s fine,’ said Kavita. Her glossy black hair was parted in the center and braided, and she was wearing a black turtleneck sweater and at least a dozen Navajo bead bracelets. ‘He’s eating well, all of his vital signs are excellent, and he really seems to have adapted to his environment. He’s even started to warble. I’ve made some recordings.’

  Aarif said, ‘We are not being closed down immediately. Mr Kasabian is giving us a month to wind up the project and finish up all of our notes.’

  ‘Oh, very generous of him,’ said Nathan. ‘Hopefully, that’s as much as we’re going to need.’

  ‘You should not have burned yourself, Professor,’ Aarif told him, in a grave tone. ‘You should have thought of what they say in Egypt, that the barking of a dog should not disturb the man on a camel.’

  ‘I understand what you’re saying. Unfortunately, this particular dog happens to finance my camel.’

  ‘I’ve told Nathan myself that it was a crazy thing to do,’ Grace put in. ‘Crazy, and selfish.’

  ‘But it is done now, Doctor Underhill,’ said Aarif. ‘We cannot extinguish a flame that is now only the memory of a flame. We have to do everything we can to restore Professor Underhill’s hand. I presume, Professor, that you will be wanting me to extract stem cells from the phoenix and bring them here.’

  ‘First thing tomorrow,’ Nathan told him.

  ‘Are you going to tell Doctor Berman what you’re doing?’ asked Grace.

  ‘Of course not. He’d be too worried about a malpractice suit if anything went wrong.’

  ‘But what would happen to you, if anything went wrong?’

  ‘Grace – nothing is going to go wrong. I’m injecting myself with avian pluripotent stem cells, that’s all, which potentially have the capability of rapidly healing burns. The very worst that can happen is that nothing happens, and that I’m stuck for the rest of my life with this monkey’s paw, as you call it.’

  ‘Well, terrific. But I still think you need to tell Doctor Berman, out of professional courtesy, if nothing else.’

  ‘I’ll think about it, OK?’

  ‘No you damn well won’t. I know you.’

  Kavita stood up and walked around Nathan’s bed and laid her hand on Grace’s shoulder. ‘Doctor Underhill, I know that you must be finding this very frustrating and very hard to understand. But Aarif and I have been working every day with Professor Underhill on the phoenix project and we both have such faith in what he is doing, and such respect for what he has achieved.’

  ‘Well, so do I,’ said Grace. ‘But to burn his own hand, for God’s sake—’

  ‘I was as shocked as everybody else,’ said Kavita. ‘But many pioneering scientists take terrible risks with their health and even their lives. Think of Marie Curie. She used to carry test tubes of radium around in her apron pocket, and she died of anemia. Think of Jeremiah Abalaka. He injected himself six times with HIV-positive blood to test his AIDS vaccine. Or Daniel Carrion, who infected himself with pus from a chronic skin lesion, to prove that it also caused Oroya fever. Which it did, and which killed him.’

  Grace looked up at her and said, ‘All right, Kavita. I’ll give it five days. But if I see any deterioration in Nathan’s condition, I’m going to tell Doctor Berman myself.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Nathan. ‘Five days will be plenty.’

  Grace stood up. ‘I should go now. Denver will be home at ten thirty, and I’m sure you three have a whole lot to talk about.’ She leaned over and gave Nathan a kiss.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve upset you so much,’ he told her. ‘But trust me – please.’

  ‘Let’s wait and see,’ she said. ‘But this is one time when I really want you to prove me wrong.’

  FIFTEEN

  Thursday, 2:36 a.m.

  Jimmy Hallam loved to cycle at night. Whirring along the Schuylkill River Trail in the early hours of the morning made him feel like a superhero, out on a secret mission while the rest of the city slept.

  The rain had eased off about an hour ago, but the trail was still wet and shiny and reflected the street lights as much as the river that ran beside it. During the day, there was a constant stream of walkers and joggers and roller-skaters and skateboarders, but at night it belonged almost exclusively to Jimmy.

  Tonight, Jimmy was on the lookout for Biters, a gang of teenage vampires who had invaded Fairmount Park. He was Heatseeker, who could detect people hiding in total darkness because he had infrared vision. Whenever he caught sight of a Biter running between the trees, he focused his eyes on it and the vampire evaporated in a haze of blood.

  Heatseeker was a character he had invented himself. He spent almost every evening in his bedroom, drawing graphic novels. His hero was the comic book artist Todd McFarlane, who had drawn Spider Man and Spawn, but Jimmy knew that he was still very far from being as good as him. He had sent some of his drawings to Marvel Comics, but they had been returned with a polite ‘sorry, Jimmy, you have some potential, but a long way to go yet’.

  Heatseeker was rock-jawed and muscular, and wore a dark red outfit with a staring red eye emblazoned on his chest. Jimmy on the other hand was skinny, with mouse-brown hair chopped into an undercut, a receding chin, and a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down when he talked. He was twenty-one years old and he was still a virgin. In fact he had never had a serious girlfriend, although he and Elaine Draper from art college sometimes went to the movies together, and picked over the quality of the animation afterward in Bootsie’s burger restaurant.

  Heatseeker, however, had a ravishing assistant called Melona, who had abundant black curls and enormous breasts and who always wore a skimpy red leotard and glossy red thigh-boots.

  Jimmy had almost reached the Columbia railroad bridge,where the trail temporarily parted company with Kelly Drive and curved right out over the river. Heatseeker had to be especially alert here, because the vampires sometimes clustered under the brick arches of the bridge, and rushed out at unsuspecting passers-by.

  He scanned the trail ahead of him, moving his head methodically from side to side. After a few moments he lifted his wristwatch to his lips and said, ‘I’ve just eyeballed three Biters hiding in the shadows. I’m going to wait till the last moment, and then zap all three of them together. Three bloodsuckers with one stare.’

  ‘OK, Heat,’ he replied. ‘Affirmatory.’

  As he cycled under the bridge, he focused his eyes into the darkest corner of the arch, and called out, ‘Adios, suckers!’ The three Biters scrambled out of the shadows toward him, hissing with hatred, but with one penetrating stare he turned them into nothing more than a fine fog of scarlet droplets, which drifted away on the wind.

  He punched the air as he emerged on the north side of the bridge. Heatseeker had triumphed again, keeping the city safe from Biters and other supernatural predators. Philadelphians would never be aware that he was protecting them while they slept, but Heatseeker never expected acclaim or any reward. It was enough for him to know that the forces of evil would never prevail.

  He continued to pedal fast alongside the black,reflecting river. In the distance he could hear police sirens, and the soft, ceaseless rumbling of a city of a million and a half people. But then he heard another sound – a sharp, repetitive flapping, as if somebody were shaking out a groundsheet. If they were shaking out a groundsheet, however, they were doing it impossibly high above his head. The sound seemed to be coming from directly above him.

  Freewheeling, he looked upward. At first he could see nothing but the clouds, tinted orange by the sodium street lights. But then he glimpsed a dark shape flying fast and high above the river, parallel to the trail on which he was cycling. It was far too big to be a bat, although it had wings like a bat, and its body was all the wrong shape for a bird. With every beat of its wings he heard flap, flap, flap, and there was something about that flapping that really frightened him. It was so measured, so unhurried, as if the creature knew exactly whe
re it was going and what it intended to do; and what it intended to do was serious harm.

  Jimmy didn’t know why he felt that way about it, but the feeling was so strong that he almost lost his balance, and he brought his bicycle to a juddering stop.

  He watched the creature flying northward up the river, but it had flown only about a half-mile when it turned and wheeled around, and began to fly back again, heading his way. The flap, flap, flap began to grow louder, and then he heard the creature howling. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t a bird. It sounded more like a wolf, or even a man imitating a wolf.

  Jimmy watched it for a few more seconds, but then he was suddenly filled with a flood of terror. The creature was diving directly toward him, and as it did so it was gathering speed. The darn thing was after him, he was sure of it. He twisted his handlebars around and began to pedal furiously back toward the Columbia Bridge.

  He turned his head only once. The creature was less than fifty feet behind him, and the flapping of its wings was so loud that it drowned out everything else – the police sirens, the sound of traffic, even the noise of a helicopter that was flying over Wynnefield Heights on its way to the airport. He glimpsed the creature’s face, too. It had stubby horns and huge staring eyes and a large curved beak, but unlike a bird its beak had two curved teeth protruding from it.

  It howled at him again, that dreadful echoing howl. He yelped out loud in fear and pedaled even faster. He was only a few yards from the shelter of the bridge now, and he prayed that he could make it. He could hear himself sobbing as if somebody else were sobbing close behind him.

  He almost made it. He was less than six feet from the brick arch where the Biters had been hiding when one of the creature’s claws tore into the back of his head, right through hair and skin and striking his skull with a loud knocking noise. He screamed and pitched forward out of the saddle, while with one thunderous flap of its wings, the creature flew upward and sideways to avoid colliding with the bridge. Even so, its claw was still buried in the back of Jimmy’s scalp, and it was so heavy and traveling so fast that it ripped off his hair and half of the flesh from the right-hand side of his face, pulling out his eye and tearing off his lips.