Half-Off Ragnarok

Eight

In the kitchen of an only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio, trying not to collapse from the sudden intense pain

“ALEX!”

Shelby’s shout snapped me out of my shock. I clapped my hands over my face—too little too late—and kicked the door, sending reverberations through the glass.

“Shoo!” I shouted. “Go on, get out of here! You’re not welcome!” I kicked the door again. The pain in my eyes was immense, burning and freezing at the same time. I kicked the door a third time before staggering backward, bellowing, “Sarah!”

I had asked her to be good. She had promised. Being good meant staying out of sight, and Sarah kept her promises. She didn’t answer me.

“It’s gone, Alex, whatever it was, it’s gone.” Shelby grabbed for my elbow, trying to find purchase on my moving arm. “What’s wrong? Let me see.”

“No.” I closed my eyes tightly, gritting my teeth against the urge to shout for Sarah again. “Can you please get me to the kitchen table?”

“Alex, this really isn’t the time—”

“Please!”

She went momentarily silent before she said, “All right, Alex. There’s no need to shout.” Her hand caught my elbow. “It’s this way.”

“Thank you.” The pain was like nothing I had ever felt before. It was definitely something I never wanted to feel again.

“What’s going on? What was that thing? What’s the matter with your eyes?”

“I don’t know what it was, but you’re going to need to trust me for a minute, okay?” If only the backyard had been better lit. I hadn’t been able to see the thing that got me well enough to tell whether or not its wings had feathers. Feathers would mean basilisk; lack of feathers meant cockatrice. “My cousin is in the other room. She can’t hear me with the TV on. Go get her.”

“Alex . . .”

“Please.” The pain in my eyes wasn’t getting better, and in this situation, that was a good thing. Stone doesn’t hurt.

There had been a thick pane of glass between me and the creature, even if it wasn’t properly polarized, and petrifaction is known to be less effective at a distance. Those factors combined might be enough to save my vision.

“I don’t understand any of this.” Shelby sounded more irritated than frightened. Good. Irritation was easier to work with.

“Just go get Sarah, please. She’ll be able to get the first aid kit.”

“All right—but you’re going to explain everything,” snarled Shelby. I heard footsteps as she moved away, followed by the sound of the kitchen door swinging open. I slumped in my chair, resisting the urge to rub my eyes. That would just cause me more pain, and might result in structural damage.

Everything was dark. I tried to focus on the last thing I’d seen, the creature on the back lawn with the wildly flapping wings and the serpent’s tail. Feathers or no feathers? The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that its wings had been more like a bat’s than a bird’s, but that could have been wishful thinking, me refusing to acknowledge that this could be my fault. If its wings weren’t feathered, it wasn’t one of my basilisks.

How would one of the basilisks get this far from the zoo? The thought was compelling. Basilisks aren’t fast movers, and they’re extremely territorial, especially when the females get broody. If the zoo basilisks had managed to escape, they should have gone to ground on the spot, refusing to be budged.

The door banged again as Shelby returned. “Alex? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Did you find Sarah?”

“This is a positively appalling way to make an introduction, but yeah, I found her,” said Shelby. “She’s getting that first aid kit you wanted. Now are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“Can we take this one step at a time for right now? Can you go to the fridge, please? There should be a bunch of bottles of water with different colored caps on the second shelf. Get one of the green-capped bottles. Please.”

“I know they say ‘please’ is a magic word, but it doesn’t actually control the universe, you know.”

“Shelby! I’m trying to not freak out right now, so please, can you go along with my seemingly irrational demands until we reach the point where I am capable of explaining myself in a calm and rational manner? Please?”

There was a pause. Finally, Shelby said, “The green lid, you say?”

“That’s the one.”

The kitchen door swung open again, followed by the soft sound of bare feet against the floor. “I found the first aid kit. It was not in the land of talking bluebirds, although they’re very loud right now. Alex, what did you do?”

“I locked eyes with a petrifactor,” I said. “Sarah, can you read right now?”

There was a momentary pause before she said, “Not reliably. Numbers are easier.”

“Okay. We can work with this. Shelby, give the bottle of water to Sarah and take the first aid kit. I need you to look for a vial labeled ‘belladonna.’”

“What in the world would belladonna be doing in your first aid kit?”

The pain in my eyes was starting to fade. I couldn’t tell if that meant my nerves were becoming overloaded, or if it was a sign that the damage was getting worse. Either option was bad. “Hopefully, saving my vision. Once you’ve found the belladonna—it should be a clear liquid—look for a jar of bilberry jam.”

“You keep jam in your first aid kit. Alongside the belladonna.” Now Shelby sounded outright skeptical. That wasn’t good. I wanted her to help me, not call the authorities to report my nervous breakdown.

“It’s a very specialized first aid kit,” I said, as patiently as I could. “Once you have the belladonna and bilberry, you need to mix them into the water Sarah’s got. Then—”

“What, there’s more? Should I be getting a cauldron?”

“A cauldron would be lovely,” said Sarah.

“We’re getting off track here,” I said sharply. “There is a small refrigerator in the pantry. Open it. On the second shelf you will find a rack of antivenin. Get the vial labeled ‘P. cockatrice’ and bring it here.”

“Alex, this is madness. If you’re really hurt, we need to get you to a hospital, not sit about playing chemistry lab with your cousin.”

“A hospital wouldn’t help me,” I said. “Now please.”

Something about my voice must have gotten through; maybe it was the desperation. There was a pause before Shelby sighed and said, “Oh, what the hell. It’s not like I had anything better to do this evening.”

I groaned, and stayed where I was, hands clapped over my face, as I listened to my girlfriend and my cousin mixing the substance that might—if fate was kind and I’d been correct in my split-second taxonomical classification—save my eyesight. It was the longest five minutes of my life. Sarah occasionally offered murmured corrections, equally divided between “useful” and “complete non sequitur.” It would have been entertaining if I hadn’t been in so damn much pain.

“How much jam?” asked Shelby.

“Three large tablespoons full.”

“And how much belladonna?”

“The same.”

Shelby muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “moron” and kept rattling around the kitchen, the clatter of her shoes followed by the softer padding of Sarah’s bare feet. I heard the pantry door open. “Second rack?”

“That’s the one. Be careful with the vial. It’s all we have, and there’s none back at the reptile house.”

“I can’t see why you think you need antivenin, you only looked at the thing—”

“Please.”

Shelby sighed. “I’m a fool for not loading you straight into my car and rushing you to the emergency room,” she said. There was a soft thud on the table in front of me. “The gunk you asked us to mash up is near your right elbow. Mind you don’t spill it, although what else you’re going to do with it is a mystery to me.”

“I’m going to apply it to the affected areas,” I said. I lowered my hands. The unyielding darkness that had replaced the room did not change.

Shelby’s gasp was followed by Sarah saying serenely, “Don’t worry, Alex, I caught the antivenin before it could hit the ground.”

“Well, that’s my nightmares sorted for the next week,” I said sourly as I began feeling around the table for the jar of jam, belladonna, and purified unicorn water.

“Alex, your eyes,” said Shelby.

“I know.” My right hand found the jar. I picked it up, sticking the first two fingers of my left hand into the thick goop that it contained. Scooping out a generous dollop of the stuff, I began smearing it on and around my eyes. It didn’t sting, but the pain was still there, burning and freezing deep inside. I kept scooping and smearing until I had practically covered the top half of my face. Gingerly, I set the near-empty jar aside.

“The antivenin, please,” I said, holding out my left hand.

“Oh, Alex . . .” whispered Shelby. The familiar shape of an antivenin vial was pressed into my hand. I unscrewed the cap with my right hand—the one without sticky fingers—and said, as cheerfully as I could, “Let’s hope this works, okay?”

Then I drank the contents of the vial in a single long gulp that burned all the way down.

The trouble with many cryptids—the trouble, and the reason we cryptozoologists sometimes resist allowing them to be reclassified as part of the so-called “natural world”—is that their capabilities defy many of the things we currently pretend to understand about science. How can anything turn flesh to stone? No one knows, but the petrifactors still manage to do it. Why do bilberries counteract petrifaction? Again, no one knows, although there were some fascinating rumors about bilberries improving eyesight during World War II. (They weren’t entirely false. Eastern Europe has a terrible basilisk problem, and anyone who wanted to avoid being taken prisoner behind enemy lines needed to be prepared for a few unpleasant encounters. Bilberries could save your life, if you swallowed them while you still had a throat made of flesh.)

Unicorn water isn’t actually the cure-all that legend claims it is, but it’s the purest thing known to man, cleansed down to the molecular level. That makes it the perfect sterile solution for something like this, since there was no chance of contamination before the seal on the bottle had been broken. I had applied the topical ointment. I had used the right ingredients. Now I just had to hope that I was as good at this as I thought I was.

If I die this way, Antimony is going to decorate my statue for the holidays for the rest of time. I could practically see myself turned to solid gray stone, standing on the front porch of the family home, with tinsel and Christmas lights wrapped around my neck. The thought was horrible and hysterical at the same time. I laughed.

It hurt.

That was a good sign. I kept laughing, and it kept hurting, until I figured out where in the pain I had left my hands and used them to push myself upright. Peeling my cheek away from the kitchen table took some doing; I had been slumped over long enough for my jam-based facial mask to start turning sticky and trying to gum me down.

“Can I get a wet washcloth please?” I rasped. Speech hurt even more than laughter. I swallowed hard before adding, “And a glass of milk? I need to counteract some of this acid.”

“Alex!” Shelby sounded like she couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted to be stunned, delighted, or furious. “Are you all right?”

“We’ll know in a second. I don’t want to open my eyes until I’ve wiped this stuff off.”

“I’ll get it,” said Sarah. There was a scrape as she pushed back her chair, and she went padding away across the kitchen. The water in the sink started a few seconds later.

“I thought you’d just committed suicide,” said Shelby in a hushed tone. “Alex, your eyes . . .”

“It’s an allergic reaction to the thing that was out back. I’m just glad you didn’t see it.”

“A visual allergy? Alex. Don’t treat me like I’m an idiot. There’s no such things as visual allergies.”

“Sure there are. Haven’t you ever seen a pattern that made you feel dizzy, or an optical illusion that gave you a headache? Visual allergies exist. This is just a little more severe than most.” Something warm and wet was draped across my hand. “Thanks, Sarah.”

“Okay,” she said serenely.

“That’s Sarah for ‘you’re welcome,’” I said, and began using the towel to wipe away the jam that covered my face. I kept my eyes closed while I was working, trying to pretend that the sinking feeling in my stomach was anything but terror. If we’d been too slow getting the treatment prepared, if the proportions were off, if any one of a dozen things had gone wrong . . .

The pain had stopped. I clung to that. Even if my eyesight was gone, I wasn’t going to turn to stone. That was better than the alternative.

Wiping the last of the jam away, I cautiously cracked my eyes open. I immediately slammed them shut again as the light assaulted my retinas. “Okay, ow,” I said.

“Alex?” demanded Shelby.

“The petrifaction didn’t have time to penetrate his retinas, but there’s still strain,” said Sarah, sounding distracted, like she was explaining something that really didn’t matter. “It’s going to take time for his eyes to adjust to the kitchen’s light levels. There’s no dimmer switch. There was a clapper for a while, but Angela likes to watch opera on DVD. The applause would make the lights go wild. Martin took it out.”

“Is that so?” said Shelby. She sounded faintly baffled. Not an uncommon reaction when Sarah decided to go off on a tangent.

“I’m okay,” I said, and raised one hand to shade my eyes as I carefully opened them again. The kitchen came into view, blurry and over-bright, but visible, beautifully, blessedly visible. I could have laughed, except that I was afraid that if I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop again until I had all the panic out of my system. I did cry, both from relief, and from the pain of the light lancing into my eyeballs. It was a good pain, though, a clean pain, far removed from the grinding agony of petrifaction.

“Alex?” said Shelby.

“That sucked.” I lowered my hand and reached for my glasses, blinking as I tried to clear away the blurriness. The table, cluttered with items from the first aid kit, was the first thing to come into focus. Then came Sarah, who was sitting across from me with a quizzical expression on her face, like this was the most interesting thing she’d seen all week. I managed a faint smile for her. “Hi, Sarah. Thanks for your help.”

“There’s a period of adjustment that comes with the sudden loss of a primary sense,” she said. “You would have had difficulty making the ice cream sundaes you promised me.”

“That’s true,” I said. I realized that she could just as easily be describing herself: without easy access to the telepathy she’d depended on since birth, she was essentially “blind.”

“Are you really all right?” asked Shelby.

I turned to her, and blinked, suddenly struck by just how beautiful she was. The faint blurriness of my vision made the white hem of her dress look like actual clouds, and the kitchen light was reflecting in a corona around her head. All that, and she’d just saved me from an unidentified cryptid. If I hadn’t been afraid I’d topple over if I tried to get out of my chair, I would have been tempted to propose on the spot.

“I’m going to be fine,” I assured her. “We got the antivenin into my system fast enough, and the stuff you mixed up with the jam was enough to fix the superficial damage.”

“So you’re fit? Intact and stable?”

“I think so.”

“Oh, good.” Shelby was abruptly on her feet, sending her chair toppling over backward. It was still falling when my eyes focused on the important part of this scene: the pistol she was holding in her hands, with the barrel aimed squarely at Sarah’s chest. “Now that we’ve got that taken care of, let’s move on to the important things. Like extermination.”

Well, crap.