Basilisk by Graham Masterton Page A

inside. Inside, on the left-hand side, over a dozen overcoats and hats were hanging on pegs, like a crowd of strap-hanging monks. There was no light in the hallway, but the door to the staff quarters was directly opposite, and the nurse had left it a few inches ajar. Nathan could see the arm of a red-upholstered couch, and part of a coffee table, and a bookshelf crammed with dog-eared paperbacks. On the wall hung a framed poster for Bartram’s Garden, with a flowering tulip tree.
    He tried the door handle. Its spring made a scrunching noise as he pulled it downward, but the door was unlocked. He turned to Grace and said, ‘OK? When we get in there, which way should we go?’
    ‘Straight ahead, to the end of the corridor, then left. Then immediately right, and up four or five stairs.’
    ‘You ready?’
    ‘Ready as I’ll ever be.’
    Nathan opened the door wider and they stepped inside. Behind the door to the staff quarters they could hear some crackly old horror movie playing on the TV, with the sound turned right down. The orderly was complaining about the hours he had to work. ‘Never even gave me no notice – thinks I can change my shift just to suit him – I got kids to pick up from school.’
    ‘You should not tolerate it, Newton,’ the nurse replied. Her voice became louder as she approached the door, and for a heart-stopping moment Nathan and Grace thought that she was going to open it and find them right outside. Instead, however, she closed it, leaving them in almost total darkness.
    Nathan took out his flashlight and switched it on. He shone it down the corridor in front of them, and Grace said, ‘Come on, let’s go. You know what some of these seniors are like. They only sleep for a couple of hours. We don’t want one of them raising the alarm.’
    They hurried down the corridor, turned left and then right, and then up the stairs.
    ‘Here,’ said Grace. ‘This was Doris Bellman’s room, right here. And if you go that way, that’s where I met “Michael Dukakis”.’
    ‘Did he tell you exactly where he saw that hunched-up monster of his?’
    ‘It would have been there , coming round that corner, heading this way.’
    ‘So it could have been coming to attack Doris Bellman?’
    Nathan shone his flashlight up and down the corridor. The pale brown carpet was wearing out in places, and its pile had been furrowed by a vigorous going-over with a vacuum cleaner, but there were no signs of any claw marks. There were stains and scratches on the wallpaper, although there was nothing that couldn’t have been caused by wheelchairs bumping into the walls, or coffee being spilled.
    However, when he pointed the flashlight upward, it did look as if something had scraped the ceiling – and quite recently, too. There were four or five parallel ruts in the plaster, nearly a quarter of an inch deep. They ran all the way from the corner where ‘Michael Dukakis’ had glimpsed his hunched-up monster, ending up abruptly in a wild cross-hatch pattern about four feet away from Doris Bellman’s door.
    ‘Will you take a look at that?’ he said, hoarsely. ‘I mean, what do you think caused all of those grooves?’ He reached up with his left hand, and stood on tiptoe, but he couldn’t even touch the ceiling, let alone scratch it.
    ‘That thing I saw in my nightmare—’ he began, but Grace said ‘ Listen !’ and lifted up one finger. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Did you hear that?’
    Nathan strained his ears. From one of the upper floors, very faintly, came the plaintive cry of some old man calling out vainly for assistance. ‘ Nurse ! Nurse !’ Apart from that, though, all he could hear was the endless, irritating grinding of the outdated air-conditioning system.
    Grace said, ‘That’s funny. I thought I heard a kind of a scraping noise.’
    ‘Scraping?’
    ‘I don’t know. It’s hard to describe exactly.’
    ‘I don’t hear anything.’
    They listened some more, but there was nothing. Even the old man