Petrified (28 page)

Nathan said, ‘Braydon – is it OK if I ask Sukie a couple of questions about her nightmares?'

Braydon frowned at him. ‘Her
nightmares
? Why would you want to do that? I mean, why is that relevant, in any way at all?'

‘You want me to be frank with you? You've told us that Sukie has been having nightmares for years about these Spooglies, right?'

‘Yes,' said Braydon, suspiciously. ‘But I don't understand why you're asking me this.'

‘I'm asking you, Braydon, because Sukie has been repeatedly having very vivid nightmares ever since she arrived here in the ICU, and because yesterday a young man was killed in my house by something which bore a distinct resemblance to one of her Spooglies.'

‘
What
? What are you talking about? The Spooglies . . . they're just something out of her imagination.'

‘I'm not so sure,' said Nathan. ‘I think that they could be real, and that they're coming to life, and your Sukie can sense them. She can
feel
them, Braydon, these Spooglies of hers. For some reason, her mind is tuned in to the Spooglies' wavelength, just like some dogs can hear whistles that are totally inaudible to the rest of us.'

‘Say, what? I don't understand what you're talking about.'

‘I know it's difficult to get your head round it. But I have strong reasons to believe that Sukie's Spooglies are very much like the phoenix I created. Mythical creatures that have been extinct for hundreds of years, but which have now been revived.'

‘Revived? Revived by who? And what the hell for?'

‘That's what I'm trying to find out,' said Nathan. He wasn't going to tell Braydon about Theodor Zauber and his efforts to turn his gargoyles back into flesh and blood. Not yet, anyhow. It was difficult enough for him to grasp the concept that his daughter's burns had been healed by a firebird that Nathan and his assistants had recreated from a classical legend.

‘OK . . .' said Braydon, with obvious reluctance. ‘But don't do nothing to upset her. Otherwise, that's it, I'm pulling the plug.'

Nathan shuffled his chair a little closer to the side of Sukie's bed. ‘Sukie,' he said, ‘is it OK if I ask you some questions about the Spooglies? You won't be upset, will you?'

‘I guess not,' said Sukie, shyly.

‘When you dream about them, are they always flying in the sky?'

‘Most of the time.'

‘Do you ever see them anyplace else, like in a building, or a house?'

Sukie nodded. ‘I never used to. But I do now. Sometimes, not always.'

‘I see. What kind of a building is it, do you know?'

Sukie shook her head. ‘They're all down in the cellar. It's dark down there but I can see their eyes shining. Their eyes are green, like green lights. And I can hear them making a noise like katydids, like
chirp-chirp-chirp
and
shuffle-shuffle-shuffle
and sometimes they scream.'

‘Wow. Do you know how many Spooglies there are, down in that cellar? Like twenty, maybe, or thirty?'

‘I can't see them very well because it's so dark but more than a hundred I think.'

‘More than a hundred? That's an awful lot of Spooglies, isn't it? Do you have any idea where this cellar might be?'

Without hesitation, Sukie pointed to the right-hand corner of her room, next to the door. ‘They're over there.'

‘What do you mean, sweetheart?' Braydon asked her. ‘Do you mean they're
here
, someplace in the hospital?'

‘Uhnh-hunh. They're over there, but a long way away.'

‘How do you know that, Sukie?' Nathan asked her.

‘Because that's where they are. I can feel them. I can
hear
them. They're over there and they're waiting to fly. They want to fly now but they're not allowed to, not yet, and that's why they're going
chirp-chirp-chirp
and
shuffle-shuffle-shuffle
and screaming.'

‘Do you know why they're not allowed to? Is somebody telling them that they can't?'

‘I don't know. It's too scary. When they fly it's going to be horrible and people are going to get torn to bits and pieces.'

Sukie was gradually growing more and more distressed. She was twisting her blanket in both hands and Braydon took her cereal bowl away in case she jolted her bed-table and spilled it.

‘When they fly there's going to be hundreds of them and nobody will be able to get away and they'll be everywhere! And they'll be screaming, and so will we! And there's going to be bits and pieces of people all over, like arms and legs and bodies and heads!'

Sukie was panting now, and her voice rose higher and higher. Braydon said sharply, ‘That's enough, sweetheart! That's it! No more talking about Spooglies, OK? They're only a bad dream, that's all.'

‘But, Daddy, they're
not
!' Sukie protested, and her eyes filled up with tears. ‘They're real! The Spooglies are real, and they're over there! I know they are! I can
feel
them! I can
hear
them!'

Nathan laid his hand on Sukie's arm and said, ‘It's OK, Sukie. I'm sorry if I upset you. You've been very, very helpful. If the Spooglies
are
real, I can tell you this: my friends and I will find out where they are and make sure that they never ever get to fly, and never hurt anybody. And we're also going to make sure that you never have nightmares about them, ever again.'

Sukie sniffed, and nodded. Braydon held her close to him and said to Nathan, ‘Maybe you and your people had better leave now. Don't think that I'm not grateful for what you've done, because I am. But all this stuff about Spooglies . . .'

‘I understand,' Nathan told him. ‘But I'd like you to know that Sukie may have saved some lives here today. Not just two or three lives, but maybe hundreds.'

‘Please,' said Braydon. ‘Just go.'

Outside the hospital, Aarif said, ‘You believed her, that little girl? You believe that the gargoyles are really there, in some cellar, in the direction in which she was pointing?'

‘Yes,' said Nathan, ‘I do.'

‘But what is the use of knowing the direction if we do not know how
far
it is, this cellar? She was pointing – what – to the south-west. She could have been pointing to the next street, or she could have been pointing toward Maryland, or West Virginia, or even further. How can we tell?'

‘That's a problem I'll have to work on,' said Nathan. ‘Meanwhile, why don't you two go back to the lab and check up on Torchy? I need to get home and sort out my house.'

Kavita said, ‘I am so sorry about what happened to Denver's friend. Do you really think it was a gargoyle that killed him?'

‘I'm sure of it. Theodor Zauber is trying to frighten me into working with him, and I have to admit that he's not far away from succeeding. That's why I want to try and find where he's stored all of the gargoyles he bought from the Eastern State Penitentiary.'

‘What will you do, if you can find them?'

‘What do you think? Smash them to pieces, before they smash
us
to pieces.'

THIRTY

Saturday, 11:47 a.m.

T
he doorbell chimed. Nathan thought it was the builders, who were supposed to come and give him an estimate for replacing Denver's bedroom window, but when he answered it he found Detective Pullet and Detective Rubik standing in the porch.

The wind was getting up, and dry leaves were chasing each other around the driveway.

Jenna said, ‘You don't need to see my shield, do you, Professor?'

‘What do you want?' Nathan asked her. ‘I already spoke with an officer from the Fourteenth District.'

‘I know you did. But he called me. The thing of it is, I've been assigned to investigate these mysterious limestone statues that keep dropping out of the sky, and these mysterious flying creatures that have been tearing people apart, and I'm beginning to come to the insane conclusion that – somehow – they are one and the same.

‘What's more, Professor, it sounds to me as if the thing that damaged your house and caused the death of your son's friend bore a very close resemblance to one of these statues and/or flying creatures.'

Nathan didn't answer, so Jenna stuck her two index fingers up on the top of her head and said, ‘Horns?' Then she flapped her arms and said, ‘Wings?'

Still Nathan said nothing, so she bugged out her eyes and pressed her nose flat with her finger. ‘Maybe it had bulging eyes and a beak?'

‘I didn't see it myself.'

‘But your son saw it, didn't he? How did he describe it?'

Nathan said, ‘You'd better come in. I think we need to talk about this.'

‘Well, hallelujah,' said Jenna. ‘He done seen the light. And about time, too.'

Nathan led them into the living room. Grace was sitting at the coffee table, filling in reports for her practice at Chestnut Hill medical center.

‘Grace, honey. These are detectives.'

‘Detective Pullet and Detective Rubik,' said Jenna. ‘We've come to ask you some questions about what happened to Stuart Wintergreen, among other things.'

‘Sit down, please,' Nathan told them.

Jenna said, ‘I've just been to see the statue we hauled out of the wetlands at Bartram's Gardens. You heard about that?'

‘Of course.'

‘Our chief crime scene investigator has identified it as a gargoyle – from Poland, originally, but shipped over here when they were building the Eastern State Penitentiary. Apparently it was supposed to be positioned on the roof to frighten the crap out of the inmates, as well as about a hundred more gargoyles, but for some reason they never got around to putting them up.'

‘I know all about them,' said Nathan. ‘I also know who they belong to.'

‘And you didn't tell me the last time I talked to you? Haven't you heard about something called “obstructing a police investigation”?'

‘I was being mortally threatened, Detective. My family was being mortally threatened. After that hospital orderly was killed, I knew that the threat was deadly serious. But I thought there was a good chance that I could track the guy down and destroy his gargoyles before he could use them to kill anybody else.'

‘Let me get this absolutely straight,' said Jenna. ‘The stone statues and the flying gargoyles, they really
are
one and the same?'

Nathan said, ‘Yes. They are. I know it's really difficult to believe, but in the Middle Ages, in Europe, there was a plague of gargoyles – thousands of them. They killed cattle, sheep, and countless numbers of people. But in the end an alchemist called Artephius found a way to turn them to stone, and a whole bunch of exorcists was sent out by the Vatican to hunt them down. The Brotherhood of Purity, they called them.'

‘So once upon a time, these gargoyles used to be actual living creatures?'

‘That's right, before they were petrified. But now this German thaumaturge called Theodor Zauber has discovered a way to turn them back into living creatures.'

‘
Thaumaturge
? What's a thaumaturge when he's at home?'

‘A magician. A sorcerer. A worker of miracles. Theodor Zauber's late father Christian Zauber was one of the greatest sorcerers of the twenty-first century, and his son has followed in his footsteps. He can do things that would make you doubt your sanity, and bringing gargoyles back to life is one of them.

‘His idea was to turn terminally ill people into human statues – just like cryogenics except that you wouldn't need the freezers. Sometime in the future – when doctors eventually find a treatment for whatever disease was about to kill them – they would be
un
-petrified, if that's the right word, and then, hopefully, cured.'

‘But?'

‘Why do you say, “but”?'

‘Because there's always a “but”. Because this Zauber character threatened to set his gargoyles on you. Why did he do that?'

Nathan explained how Theodor Zauber had found that his newly-revived gargoyles were unable to stay living and breathing for more than a few hours before they started to turn back into stone, and how they needed an almost endless supply of fresh human hearts to keep them alive. He explained how Theodor Zauber had asked him to join him in his enterprise, and give him the benefit of his cryptozoological expertise. The sorcerer desperately needed a scientist, but the scientist had said no.

‘Do you have any idea of Zauber's current location, or where he stores these gargoyles?' Jenna asked him.

‘No,' said Nathan. ‘None whatsoever.'

He did tell her, however, about Sukie Harris, and how Sukie Harris had pointed south-westward from her hospital bed.

‘She's convinced that the gargoyles are stored somewhere in that direction. But as my assistant said, that could mean that they're three blocks away, or three hundred miles.'

‘Do you think that Zauber will try to contact you again?' asked Jenna. She was frustrated and annoyed with Nathan, but at the same time she could understand that he had been trying to protect himself and his family, as well as his reputation. She had dealt with a similar case only last year, when the Black Mafia had threatened the family of a very reputable lawyer unless he represented one of their members in a drugs prosecution. Before he had given in, the lawyer's two German shepherds had been decapitated and their heads impaled on each side of his cast-iron gates.

Nathan said, ‘Yes. I'm sure he'll be in touch. He seriously believes that this petrification scheme is the future of medicine. He's convinced that it's going to make him rich and famous, and it doesn't even occur to him that killing innocent people is wrong, so long as he achieves his dream.'

‘OK, then,' said Jenna. ‘When he does get in touch, I want you to arrange to meet him. We'll be there, too.'