“As it happens, my mother sent me here to ask Gideon something.”
Ragnar was still frowning. “Mr. Goldring is here? I thought he was ill this morning and was going to stay in bed.”
Colin shrugged. “He changed his mind. My mother wasn’t very happy about it, but you know how Gideon is-”
Just then something screeched, a noise like failing car brakes. Lucinda jumped. “What was that?” she demanded. “You said the dragon was gone!”
“Don’t be such a baby,” Tyler growled.
She wanted to slug him. Like he wasn’t ever scared of anything! How about when Mom tried to get him to eat sushi?
Ragnar patted her shoulder. “I said no dragon. But the other serpents-this is their home too.”
“And not just reptiles,” Colin said helpfully. “Almost all of our cold-blooded animals live here. There are amphibians and some… well, not fish, exactly.”
“Their water must boil,” she said. “It’s so hot in here!”
“We turn up the heating lights while Meseret is gone,” Ragnar explained.
“Why?” asked Tyler.
Colin was happy to show what he knew. “Most of the time, she contributes a lot of the warming of this place all by herself.”
Tyler scowled. “What, she breathes fire on everything?”
“No, Tyler.” Colin said “Tyler” like he was an elementary school teacher. “Just with body heat. She’s extremely large and she’s warm-blooded.”
They crossed the open area inside the doors and trooped up the stairs behind Ragnar, who didn’t look quite so big in this building. The second floor ran like a giant balcony all the way around the interior of the massive barn, leaving the middle open. From up there Lucinda could see the huge, empty expanse of straw-covered concrete where the dragon usually lay.
“Gideon is probably in the cockatrice pen,” said Colin.
“Well, perhaps, then, we show those to you, if Gideon is there,” Ragnar told Lucinda and Tyler. “But everyone must wear the eye shields.”
“Goggles,” Colin translated.
A large wire enclosure took up much of this side of the second floor, and someone was moving around inside it. The figure straightened up when it saw them and gave a jerky wave with a garden-gloved hand. Lucinda could tell it was Gideon only by his skinny shape and his bathrobe, since his head was covered by something like a beekeeper’s hood, which made him look like a very badly dressed space alien. It came to her suddenly that she didn’t know what frightened her more-the animals or this stranger, this supposed relative, who, out of the blue, seemed to have claimed their lives.
Scattered on a table near the beginning of the wire mesh lay thick plastic goggles, each with its own elastic strap, and the kind of paper masks people wore in hospitals. Ragnar passed Lucinda and Tyler one of each, but Lucinda only stared at hers with dismay. “Do these cocky-whatsits have diseases? I don’t want to catch some snake disease.” She heard Tyler snort but ignored it. Someone had to be practical.
“Not for disease.” Ragnar pulled on the goggles and tugged the mask into place-the elastic barely stretched around his big head and bushy beard. “For spit.”
“What?”
“You’ll see,” said Colin. “Don’t worry, Lucinda, we’re not going inside the pen. They’re too nasty-and they bite, also. But it’s the spitting you really want to avoid.”
“Gross!” she said.
“Excellent!” said Tyler.
Uncle Gideon came out of the pen, being careful to latch the door behind him. Lucinda could see movement inside, but the enclosure was full of boxes and boards piled haphazardly and it was hard to make out what was actually in there. Gideon pulled off his hood and gave them an uncertain look. Lucinda, though she quaked inside, determinedly met his gaze. Gideon said, “What did you think of the unicorns?”
“It was amazing,” Lucinda said. “They’re beautiful!”
A broad grin spread across Gideon’s face. “Aren’t they?” he said. “Aren’t they?”
“Where do they come from?” asked Tyler.
“Yes, when I see them running, I believe that what we’re doing here is worth every dollar and every drop of sweat.” Gideon mopped his brow with his sleeve. He was wear ing ordinary pants under his bathrobe, but had bedroom slippers on his feet instead of regular shoes. “And in here we have the cockatrices and the basilisks. Don’t take those goggles off until we tell you it’s all right.”
“What are they?” she asked. “Ragnar said they spit.”
“Yes, yes. But it’s perfectly all right.” He frowned.
“Haven’t you even heard of these creatures before? Devil me, what happened to teaching children the classics? Basilisks go clear back to Pliny the Elder in ancient Rome-although old Pliny could have learned a thing or two from taking a tour of our little zoo.” He wiped his forehead again. “For one thing, he’d find out that the cockatrice and the basilisk are actually the same creature.”
“I don’t know what either of those are,” said Lucinda, trying to peer more closely through the wire without actually touching it. She was very nervous something might jump out at her. Considering the brightness of the lights overhead, the pen was quite dark and it was hard to make out anything. “Cockastripe?”
“Cock-a-trice,” said Gideon. “A medieval monster, or at least it was in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when it started to show up in bestiaries. Head of a rooster, tail of a serpent. And basilisks were supposed to be dragons that could kill with their eyes-just by looking at someone!”
Lucinda took a step back. “But that’s not true, is it?”
Gideon laughed. He seemed stronger than he had the night before. Maybe Mrs. Needle’s medicine was helping him. “There’s a grain of truth in most mythology, children. Ah, look there.” He pointed to the corner of the cage where a quite remarkably ugly creature the size of a turkey had scrambled up onto a pile of wood to stand looking at them. From neck to long, draggled tail, it was covered with scales, between which poked straggly feathers, but its head was bare. At first Lucinda thought it was some kind of vulture, but the beaked face wasn’t quite right. Then she saw that the beak was actually a snout full of little needle-sharp teeth. It lifted up a huge, bony claw and nipped at it for a moment, then put it down and tipped its head to stare at them again, yellow eyes unblinking.
“It’s horrible!” said Lucinda.
“I daresay it thinks the same about you,” Gideon pointed out in a grumpy voice. “But no animal is horrible, girl. Not one. They are all as they are made by Nature.”
“Why does it have feathers?” Tyler asked. “It doesn’t look like a bird.”
“No, it’s not. As best I can tell, it’s something closer to a late dinosaur-feathered, like an archaeopteryx. But one thing about it is rather horrible. Ragnar?”
Ragnar shook his head as though he didn’t approve, but he walked to a part of the pen nearer the cockatrice and banged on the wire with the flat of his hand before pulling back quickly. As the creature turned its hairless head toward him he stepped away. It kinked its neck and then jabbed its head as though trying to cough out something stuck in its throat. A stream of clear liquid splashed on the wire where Ragnar’s hand had struck.
“Poison,” Gideon said cheerfully. “And not a nice one. Isn’t that fascinating? Won’t do much more than irritate your skin, but if it got in your eyes you’d be blind-hence the goggles. And if you swallowed it you would be very sick, if not dead, which is why we have the surgical masks. Now come on and I’ll show you the earlier stage of the life cycle-the fearful basilisk!” The skinny old man strutted along past the end of the wire enclosure, bathrobe flapping like the robe of some tatterered king. He seemed different today-happier, calmer, almost like a normal old man. Lucinda stepped wide around the spot where the poison had splashed on the fence.
The group stopped in a little bay between pens. Metal trays, each with its own lights-as if it needed to be any hotter in here!-had been set up side by side, perhaps a dozen in all. The bottoms of the trays were covered with straw, and each tray held from one to a half-dozen eggs. Lucinda could see they weren’t chicken eggs. They were too round, and slightly saggy, like Ping-Pong balls someone had baked in an oven.
“The cockatrices tend to eat their own eggs in captivity, we’ve found,” Gideon said. “And the young are
