“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.”