was able to lift it down and lean it up against the wall. I peered through the glass.
It was a good-sized enclosure, about eight feet on all sides, with a twelve-foot vertical clearance. Basilisks liked to roost in trees when they were courting, which just added to their resemblance to weird, scaly chickens. Ferns and other leafy plants surrounded their artificial stream. The trees were empty. As for the basilisks themselves, they were still asleep, curled up in hard little balls of what looked like granite.
This was the dangerous part. I picked up one of the feeding sticks and slid open the hatch at the side of the basilisk enclosure. Neither basilisk moved, not then, and not when I threaded the stick through the opening and used it to nudge them gently. They were both as hard as, well, rocks, and entirely unresponsive. I removed the stick and shut the hatch before allowing myself a very small sigh of relief.
The basilisks hadn’t killed Andrew. Judging solely by their surface hardness, they’d been asleep for months.
My relief passed as quickly as it had come. Dee didn’t kill Andrew. The basilisks didn’t kill Andrew. And since that accounted for all the known petrifactors on the zoo grounds, that raised one very large, very unpleasant question:
If they hadn’t killed him, then who had?
Six
“Everything is dangerous when looked at from the right angle. Mice fear cats, cats fear dogs, dogs fear bears, and bears fear men with guns. It’s often just a matter of perspective.”
—Thomas Price
Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, attempting to surreptitiously search the zoo grounds for a creature capable of converting living flesh into stone
I WALKED SLOWLY DOWN the path connecting the tiger garden to the main courtyard, trying to keep my eyes on the ground without being too blatant about it. My glasses weren’t helping. I’d swapped my normal pair for a pair with tinted lenses, and the prescription was slightly off, making it harder to be sure of the details in the bushes around me. I made a mental note to visit the optometrist as soon as possible. I hadn’t been hunting petrifactors in the wild since arriving in Ohio, and I’d allowed my tools to get outdated. That was a good way to get myself killed.
My current search was running off one major assumption: that Andrew had been killed by something low to the ground, like a cockatrice, rather than something arboreal, like a basilisk, or something human-shaped, like a gorgon. I was basing that assumption on the area where he’d been found, which had had plenty of bushes, but no trees and very little foot traffic.
We’d be able to narrow down what had killed him after I got a look at the autopsy report. If I was wrong, all I would have lost was a few hours. It was a risk. It was also a necessary short-term decision. If Andrew had been killed by a gorgon, they were probably long gone by now, or else had an agenda I didn’t understand yet. Either way, if our petrifactor was a gorgon, no one else was likely to be in immediate danger.
But if I was right—if the local gorgons were too smart for this kind of stunt, and there was a wild basilisk or cockatrice loose in the zoo—I couldn’t afford to wait for the results. I needed to find the thing that had killed Andrew before anyone else got converted into garden statuary.
At least Lloyd had confirmed my guess about when Andrew arrived at the zoo, and hence when he was likely to have been petrified. The old security guard had looked at me oddly for asking. Hopefully, he wouldn’t tell the police that I’d come to him to tighten up my alibi. And if he did . . .
Well, I’d figure something out. That was part of my job, after all.
Something rustled in the bushes to my left. I tensed, my hand tightening around the mirror in my coat pocket, and prepared to spring . . . only to see one of the zoo’s endless supply of Canada geese waddle into the open. It looked at me disinterestedly before waddling on, feet
It was a good-sized enclosure, about eight feet on all sides, with a twelve-foot vertical clearance. Basilisks liked to roost in trees when they were courting, which just added to their resemblance to weird, scaly chickens. Ferns and other leafy plants surrounded their artificial stream. The trees were empty. As for the basilisks themselves, they were still asleep, curled up in hard little balls of what looked like granite.
This was the dangerous part. I picked up one of the feeding sticks and slid open the hatch at the side of the basilisk enclosure. Neither basilisk moved, not then, and not when I threaded the stick through the opening and used it to nudge them gently. They were both as hard as, well, rocks, and entirely unresponsive. I removed the stick and shut the hatch before allowing myself a very small sigh of relief.
The basilisks hadn’t killed Andrew. Judging solely by their surface hardness, they’d been asleep for months.
My relief passed as quickly as it had come. Dee didn’t kill Andrew. The basilisks didn’t kill Andrew. And since that accounted for all the known petrifactors on the zoo grounds, that raised one very large, very unpleasant question:
If they hadn’t killed him, then who had?
Six
“Everything is dangerous when looked at from the right angle. Mice fear cats, cats fear dogs, dogs fear bears, and bears fear men with guns. It’s often just a matter of perspective.”
—Thomas Price
Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, attempting to surreptitiously search the zoo grounds for a creature capable of converting living flesh into stone
I WALKED SLOWLY DOWN the path connecting the tiger garden to the main courtyard, trying to keep my eyes on the ground without being too blatant about it. My glasses weren’t helping. I’d swapped my normal pair for a pair with tinted lenses, and the prescription was slightly off, making it harder to be sure of the details in the bushes around me. I made a mental note to visit the optometrist as soon as possible. I hadn’t been hunting petrifactors in the wild since arriving in Ohio, and I’d allowed my tools to get outdated. That was a good way to get myself killed.
My current search was running off one major assumption: that Andrew had been killed by something low to the ground, like a cockatrice, rather than something arboreal, like a basilisk, or something human-shaped, like a gorgon. I was basing that assumption on the area where he’d been found, which had had plenty of bushes, but no trees and very little foot traffic.
We’d be able to narrow down what had killed him after I got a look at the autopsy report. If I was wrong, all I would have lost was a few hours. It was a risk. It was also a necessary short-term decision. If Andrew had been killed by a gorgon, they were probably long gone by now, or else had an agenda I didn’t understand yet. Either way, if our petrifactor was a gorgon, no one else was likely to be in immediate danger.
But if I was right—if the local gorgons were too smart for this kind of stunt, and there was a wild basilisk or cockatrice loose in the zoo—I couldn’t afford to wait for the results. I needed to find the thing that had killed Andrew before anyone else got converted into garden statuary.
At least Lloyd had confirmed my guess about when Andrew arrived at the zoo, and hence when he was likely to have been petrified. The old security guard had looked at me oddly for asking. Hopefully, he wouldn’t tell the police that I’d come to him to tighten up my alibi. And if he did . . .
Well, I’d figure something out. That was part of my job, after all.
Something rustled in the bushes to my left. I tensed, my hand tightening around the mirror in my coat pocket, and prepared to spring . . . only to see one of the zoo’s endless supply of Canada geese waddle into the open. It looked at me disinterestedly before waddling on, feet
Similar Books
