Basilisk by Graham Masterton Page A

thing that Grace noticed was that the two ivy plants on either side of the window were shriveled up, as if they hadn’t been watered for months. She went across and felt their leaves. They were totally dry, and they crumbled between her fingers. Yet only yesterday they had been flourishing.
    She stood by the window for a while, watching the raindrops dribbling down the glass. Then she suddenly realized that, apart from the sound of the rain, and the distant drone of vacuum-cleaning, Doris Bellman’s room was silent.
    She turned around. A frayed beige pashmina was draped over Harpo the cockatoo’s cage, but Harpo was making no noise at all: no squawking or scratching or pecking at his bars. Grace went over and lifted the pashmina off. Harpo was lying on the bottom of his cage, one claw raised, his puffy blue eyelids closed.
    Grace stood in the middle of the room. She had come here to feel the last echoes of Doris Bellman’s life, but instead she felt another kind of resonance, like the dying chord of a full-size church organ. She couldn’t exactly understand how, but she felt a strong sense of panic . Even the photographs of Doris Bellman’s family seemed to be staring at her in desperation, as if they had witnessed something terrible, but had been powerless to stop it.
    She looked at her own face, in the mirror with the frame made of seashells. ‘What happened, Doris?’ she whispered. ‘Give me some clue, will you?’
    She turned around and gasped. The squat and ugly nurse had appeared in the doorway, and was standing there grinning at her.
    ‘Excuse me, yes please, I have to service this room now.’
    ‘Have you informed Mrs Bellman’s relatives?’
    ‘Excuse me?’
    ‘Her relatives.’ Grace repeated, and pointed to the photographs. ‘Has anybody told them that Mrs Bellman has passed?’
    The carer shrugged but didn’t stop grinning. ‘I do not know about this. Ask Sister Bennett.’
    ‘All right,’ said Grace. ‘But you shouldn’t touch or move any of Mrs Bellman’s things until her next of kin gets here.’
    ‘Yes,’ said the carer, although Grace didn’t think that she had the faintest idea what she was talking about.
    ‘What’s your name?’ she asked her.
    ‘Phuong,’ said the carer.
    ‘Well, Phuong, do you have any idea of what happened in this room last night?’
    ‘Yes. Mrs Bellman die.’
    ‘I know that. But – look – her pet cockatoo is dead, too, and so are her plants.’
    The carer nodded. Grace thought: I really don’t know if I’m getting through here .
    ‘Phuong – everything that was living in this room yesterday is now dead. Everything .’
    The carer blinked at her, but obviously couldn’t understand what she was trying to say. Grace turned to the window to show her the curled-up ivy, and it was then that she saw four or five bottle-green blowflies lying on their backs, behind the drapes.
    ‘Did you see anything last night? Did you see a man, all dressed up in black, with maybe some kind of spiky hat on?’
    ‘No man, no.’
    ‘He would have been very big, and hunched over. Like Quasimodo, you know? Or, obviously, you wouldn’t know. Or maybe you heard a noise, like somebody dragging a heavy sack.’
    The carer shook her head and continued to shake it.
    Grace hesitated for a moment, and then she said, ‘Did you hear Mrs Bellman scream?’
    It was then, though, that the door was pushed open wider and Sister Bennett appeared. ‘Doctor Underhill? I’m sorry, but we really have to get on and service this room. We have a wait list, you know, and a new resident will be arriving here tomorrow morning.’
    ‘What about Mrs Bellman’s things?’
    ‘I gather that her son is flying in from Houston tomorrow. All Mrs Bellman’s possessions will be cataloged and locked away in our property store. They’ll be perfectly secure.’
    ‘I’m sure they will. But before you do that, don’t you think the police ought to take a look at this room, just the way it