Basilisk by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

you, yeah?’
    It was raining hard as Grace drove down to the Murdstone Rest Home, and her windshield wipers flapped hysterically from side to side. A school bus had collided with a glazier’s van on the City Avenue on-ramp, and there was a tailback of more than a mile. As she passed the scene of the accident, Grace had to drive at less than five miles an hour over twenty yards of crunching glass, while the children in the school bus stared at her mournfully.
    The rain and the broken glass and the pale children’s faces gave her a strange feeling of disquiet, as if she had fallen asleep and woken up in one of those disturbing Japanese movies like The Ring .
    She reached Millbourne just after nine thirty a.m. and turned into Glencoe Road. As she parked outside the rest home, she heard a collision of thunder, somewhere off to the north-west. She tugged her mini-umbrella out from underneath the passenger seat, and struggled to put it up. Three of its spokes were broken, so that it looked like a wounded crow.
    She hurried across the parking lot. The Murdstone Rest Home was a sprawling collection of depressing buildings, some dating from the 1920s, and others from the mid-1960s, when prefabricated concrete was in fashion. The main building was a mock-medieval castle, with a formstone fascia and a grandiose pillared porch. On the crest of the porch sat a concrete gargoyle, its head and its shoulders darkened with rain. The gargoyle was holding its chin in both hands and staring down at whoever entered the rest home with undisguised amusement, as if it knew that they would only ever leave here in a casket.
    Grace entered the swing doors at the front of the building and was immediately met by Sister Bennett and two Korean carers. Sister Bennett was a large woman, thirty-fiveish, with a florid face and fraying red hair. She had a glassy blue squint, as if she had recently had her eyes replaced at a dolls’ hospital. One of the Korean carers was very beautiful, in a flat-faced, impenetrable way, while the other was squat and ugly but always smiling and nodding. All three of them wore purple-striped blouses and black skirts and rubbery black shoes.
    ‘Doctor Underhill?’ said Sister Bennett, as if Grace had already asked her a question.
    ‘I came to see Doris Bellman,’ Grace told her. ‘She called me last night and she sounded distressed.’
    ‘ Distressed ?’ asked Sister Bennett.
    ‘Yes. She had the impression that somebody was trying to force their way into her room.’
    Sister Bennett pouted and shook her head. ‘I don’t understand. Mrs Bellman’s room would never have been locked. None of the rooms are ever locked, for health and safety reasons. And who would be trying to get into her room, even if it were? Only her carers, to check on her.’
    ‘Well, yes,’ said Grace. ‘But she called me, all the same, so I thought I’d drop by to reassure her that she doesn’t have anything to worry about.’
    ‘That much is very true,’ said Sister Bennett. ‘She doesn’t have anything to worry about. Not any more.’
    ‘Excuse me?’
    ‘Mrs Bellman has passed, Doctor Underhill. She passed last night, shortly after midnight.’
    ‘She’s dead ?’
    ‘Shortly after midnight. It was very quick. AMI.’
    ‘But she called me at eight and she sounded fine. She was distressed, yes, like I say, but she used to be a nurse herself. I think she would have known if she were just about to have a heart attack.’
    Sister Bennett had found a stray white thread on her cuff and she was tugging at it. ‘AMI, that’s what Doctor Zauber said. Could have been an embolism, maybe, from her broken leg.’
    ‘So where is she now?’
    ‘They took her to the Burns Funeral Home, around seven o’clock this morning.’
    Grace said, ‘I can’t believe it. She’s gone , just like that?’
    Sister Bennett lifted her cuff to her mouth and bit off the offending thread. ‘It’s always the toughest ones who take you by surprise, don’t