“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 vulnerable while they’re small, so we keep them out of the main pen for the first few months.” He indicated a row of glass tanks against the back wall of the barn, beyond the egg trays. “Come and see.”
The tanks were like miniature versions of the wire pen, with sand on the bottom and piles of rocks. The creatures inside didn’t seem as interested in hiding as those in the bigger pen. A half-dozen of them, each the size of a pet rat, crowded up against the glass; and when their long, hairless tails writhed they had the look of nestling snakes, although their lumpy little bodies were covered with fine, pale down. The creatures also had claws on their bony front feet, but no back legs that Lucinda could see. She shuddered as the blunt little snouts banged against the glass.
“They don’t use their poison to kill prey when they’re this small, but mostly for self-defense,” Gideon said. “And they’re so small it’s not a stream of it they shoot but a mist-you might not even know you’d inhaled it until paralysis started to set in. Hence, I’m guessing, the idea that a basilisk can turn a man to stone with a mere look.” He nodded vigorously. “Hungry. Do you want to see me feed them?”
Suddenly it was too much for Lucinda. She stumbled back, retreating as far from the scuttling creatures as possible until she had the second-floor railing at her back. She felt like she might faint or throw up.
“Hey, you okay?” Tyler asked. He actually sounded like he meant it.
“Yes, I’m just… ” She took a deep breath.
“Come and see something else,” said Colin kindly. “The flying snakes are in the next pen. They’re rather pretty.”
He was right. A tree stood in a generous, wide tub, and the red and black and gold snakes hung from its branches. Every now and then one of them would snap open pale wings like a Japanese lady’s fans and glide to the ground. The largest wasn’t much longer than Lucinda’s forearm, and their enclosure didn’t stink like the cockatrice cages.
“That’s a spice tree,” said Uncle Gideon. He had finished feeding the basilisks and come to join them. “Frankincense, to be specific, the resin that we are told the three wise men brought as a gift for the baby Jesus.” He smiled a hard little smile. “It’s harder to keep the tree alive than the winged snakes.”
“Whoa,” said Tyler suddenly. “Flying snakes. Are there flying monkeys here too?”
“Only one on the whole farm,” Uncle Gideon said. “She’s a real rarity.”
“I saw her! The night I saw the dragon!”
“You did, did you?” Gideon shook his head. “I’m surprised. Zaza is usually shy of everyone, even us. That’s why we let her have her freedom. Actually sometimes we don’t see her for weeks.”
“Her name is Zaza?” Tyler said it like he was memorizing something important-like a cheat code for a game he was playing, Lucinda thought. She just wanted to get out in the open air again, to somewhere that didn’t smell like reptiles.
Farther along the second floor there was another pen, this one just a flimsy chicken-wire fence. The floor was covered with shallow pans of water. A number of slow, docile-looking creatures sat in the water or crawled stiff-legged across the floor. It was only when Lucinda looked at one that stood unmoving that she realized what made them so unusual.
“They have heads at both ends!”
“Awesome!” Tyler leaned over the rail, which made the light material buckle a little and earned him a poke from Uncle Gideon.
“Don’t break my cage, boy, we’ll have amphisbaenae all over the place. Yes, they do seem to have two heads, don’t they? An amphisbaena’s back is a decoy, it turns out-a tail with scales that look just like the creature’s eyes, mouth, and nostrils on the other end. A myth put to rest, this one. Still, they don’t exist anymore on earth-except right here.”
“Why is that, Uncle Gideon?” Tyler asked.
“Well, well, well,” said Uncle Gideon with a hard smile. “That inconvenient curiosity of yours just won’t let up for a minute, now will it?”
Lucinda could see the look in Tyler’s eye. “What do you expect?” he said. “We’re surrounded by magical animals, but you won’t even-”
“Stop right there!” cried Uncle Gideon, causing strange sounds to rise from cages all around. “Magical-what utter garbage! All of these animals, boy- all of them -have at some time been alive in Earth’s history. Apart from our work here they are all now completely extinct, as far as we know. These are real animals, as created by Nature, and if I hear any more fairy-tale nonsense from you,” Gideon spluttered, “why, I’ll… ”
Tyler said, “Well, it’s DNA, then, isn’t it? Making monsters by, like, gene splicing… ”