Bestiary

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Beth pulled the curtain back and took a peek into the garden.

Agnes Critchley was out there, just as she’d expected, pruning her roses.

She let the curtain fall back, and sighed. She felt guilty about trying to avoid her — after all, the Critchleys had been nice enough to take them all in after their rented house in Summit View had gone up in flames — but she just wasn’t up to another chat about gardening and pest control right now. Living in the Critchleys’ guesthouse was a blessing, but it did have its price.

Joey was in his playpen, happily banging plastic blocks together, while Carter tried to work the end of a ruler into the cast holding his fractured left arm together.

“You want some help with that?” Beth asked.

But Carter shook his head. “It’s best if I learn to do these things for myself,” he said with mock solemnity.

“Anything I can do for you instead?”

Carter laughed. “What? Is Agnes outside?”

Beth nodded, caught.

“So you’re a prisoner until she leaves?”

“Something like that.”

Joey, hearing his father’s laugh, laughed, too, and tossed a red block out of the playpen.

Beth stooped to pick it up, and Carter said, “If you really need something to do, you could help me lace up my hiking boots.”

Beth frowned. “That would be aiding and abetting something that I think is a bad idea.”

“I know that,” Carter said, “but I’ve got to get some exercise. You want me to get fat?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” she said, though secretly she had to admit that she would. She bent down and started lacing up the boots — tightly — so there wouldn’t be any other accidents. She had had all the drama, and all the terror, she ever wanted in her life. She had seen things that would haunt her for the rest of her days. Her hair hadn’t exactly gone gray overnight, but there were definitely a few strands here and there that she had had to touch up.

She could feel Carter looking down at her as she tied the boots, and she knew, without even asking, what he was thinking. Ever since the Fourth, he had looked at her with a depth of affection, and protectiveness, that made everything before it pale in comparison; it was as if she and Joey had been restored to him by some divine providence and he was determined not to take any chances with them ever again.

It was a miracle, she supposed, that he was willing to leave her today to go hiking. Instead of worrying about his recuperation, she should have been encouraging him to go. It was a good sign, really.

“That alright?” she said, pulling the laces snug one more time.

“Perfect,” Carter said, tapping the new boots on the floor. Everything they owned had been lost in the fire. Their clothes, their books, their furniture, their photos… along with, most notably for Beth, the secret letter from Ambrosius of Bury St. Edmunds. When Beth had run home that day from the Getty — which had withstood the walls of flame like the impregnable fortress it was designed to be — she had, tragically, brought it with her.

And now it was gone.

As was, presumably, The Beasts of Eden, too. Al-Kalli’s estate had been razed… and with him in it, from what Carter had told her.

All Beth had now was a collection of files and translations, notes and printouts, all pertaining to a mythical object that no one could see and that she could never again produce. The most beautiful and original illuminated manuscript the world had ever known, by the greatest and most innovative artist of the eleventh century, whose masterpiece would never be seen.

Champ barked, and ran to the door. Beth could hear Del exchanging pleasantries with Agnes Critchley outside.

“David Austin English roses,” he was saying. “They do need their water.”

“Yes, they do,” Agnes trilled back. “They’re thirsty fellows.”

How did Del know anything about roses? Beth was always amazed at the variety of topics Del could expound upon.

She opened the door, and Del — his white hair tied up in a blue rubber band, wearing shorts and a loose Lakers T-shirt — said, “I’m selling magazine subscriptions to work my way through college…”

Beth gave him a hug, and Joey squealed. He liked his Uncle Del.

“Anybody here ready for a hike?”

Carter stood up and with his right hand hoisted his backpack onto one shoulder. “Rarin’ to go.”

“You sure it’s okay if I take him away for a few hours?” Del said to Beth.

“Just promise to bring him back in one piece.”

Del shook his head. “He’s not in one piece now — you expect me to fix him?”

Carter threw his plastered arm around Beth’s neck and gave her a tender squeeze. He loved the smell of her hair, the feel of her shoulders, fragile but firm. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. We’ll barbecue.”

As he turned to go, he took one look back, and Beth was already bending down to take Joey out of his playpen. “You want to go and see the lovely roses?” she was cooing.

He left the door open — the garden was large and immaculately manicured, not only by Mrs. Critchley, now off in another quarter, but also by a regular crew of Mexican gardeners. Del’s truck was parked on the quiet street outside the gates.

“Where we going?” Carter asked as he tossed his backpack into the cab and climbed in.

“Temescal,” Del said, settling behind the steering wheel.

“Isn’t that completely burned out?”

“Probably. But that’s why I need to go there.”

“Need?”

“Got something to show you.”

Carter couldn’t argue with that. He had shown Del plenty… from creatures who had thrived ages before the dinosaurs to the burial site of the La Brea Woman… and her long-lost partner.

A few days before, on the pretext of going to the Page Museum for a teleconference, Carter and Del had met with James Running Horse, the leader of the NAGPRA protestors. They had wanted the remains of the La Brea Woman and Man to be buried in a spot sacred to Native Americans, and Carter felt he had been led, by means that were still a mystery, to a fitting resolution. He’d started by showing Running Horse the broken mano stone that had been discovered in 1915, when the bones of the La Brea Woman had been excavated.

“It’s a mano, used for manual chores like—”

“I know what it is,” Running Horse had said, witheringly.

Carter let that pass. “But look at the striations on it, and the way that it has been broken in half.”

“So?” Running Horse replied. “Lots of these are found broken.”

“Not like this,” Carter said. “Not against the natural cleavage plane, and not defaced like this. This was done deliberately, as punishment or retribution.”

Running Horse said, “The Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act is not about manos or arrowheads or pottery shards. It’s about bones, Dr. Cox. Human bones.”

“So it is.”

“So show me where you have stashed the bones of my ancestors, and I will take them and put them where they belong.”

“They’re already there,” Carter said.

“Where?” he shot back skeptically.

“I’ll show you.”

Del turned and walked across the closed lobby of the Page Museum — Carter, not wanting to start up any further ruckus with Gunderson about what he was planning, had picked a time when the museum was officially closed — and into the atrium garden.

It was a beautiful afternoon, late in the day, and birds were twittering in the branches of the gnarled gingko tree. The garden, open to the blue sky above, was cradled within the glass walls of the museum, and today, more than ever before, Carter felt what a magical place it was. Small and tranquil, traversed by a single quiet footpath, its running stream inhabited by nesting turtles and glittering orange koi… it was as close to the primeval landscape of the region as any of present-day Los Angeles was likely to get. It was like stepping back into a tiny patch of the Pleistocene epoch, and as Carter led Running Horse toward the waterfall at the back, he hoped that some of that feeling was rubbing off on him, too.

“Very nice,” Running Horse said, “but I’ve been in here before.”

Carter wasn’t sure the magic had worked yet. He paused beside the burbling waterfall, and let Running Horse soak up the peace and the harmony of the place. Del hung respectfully back, like a funeral director.

“I want you to do something for me,” Carter said.

Running Horse didn’t look amenable. His dark eyes were obdurate and his chin was set.

“I want you to take that stone, the one right there, from the center of the waterfall.”

Running Horse looked at the waterfall splashing down a short rock face and into a small elevated pool. “Why?”

“Because I want you to see something.”

Running Horse stepped off the pathway and onto the grassy earth. He was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, and he stopped to roll up the sleeve before leaning close to the little fall and retrieving the glistening rock.

When he turned back, Carter was holding out the mano the La Brea Woman had been found with. “Now compare them,” Carter said. “Put them together.” It had come as a sudden revelation to Carter — and he hoped it would have the same effect on Running Horse.

Running Horse took the woman’s mano and joined the two together between his hands — the pieces fit perfectly.

“And look at the defacing marks,” Carter said.

Running Horse lifted the stones and studied them more closely. He could see that the slashes and cuts neatly meshed.

But he still didn’t understand what all of this was leading to.

“The bones of the La Brea Woman were brought here, and buried here,” Carter said, “by some means I do not begin to understand.”

Running Horse remained silent.

“And that stone was placed there, in the waterfall, as a marker. A tombstone.”

Running Horse waited still.

“We — that’s Del and I — have buried the bones of the La Brea Man beside them,” Carter explained. “We believe that these two people were together in life, and that they were killed, perhaps because of some transgression, together at the end. The stones prove it.”

“Here?” Running Horse finally said, in a voice still fumbling toward comprehension.

Carter gestured at a spot of freshly smoothed earth, away from the path, in the shade of a tree.

“This is where they lived,” Carter said, “and this is where they died.” Carter gestured at the lush foliage and babbling brook. “This is a world they would know, even today.”

Running Horse stood silent, contemplating all that he had just been told. Carter and Del moved away to allow him some time to commune with his thoughts, and when he turned toward them again, he said simply, “Then let it be.” He replaced the broken mano in the waterfall, and nestled beside it the other half. Under his breath, he chanted some words, unrecognizable to Carter, then bent down and touched the recently turned earth with the flat palm of his hand.

When he stood up, he didn’t offer to shake hands with Carter, or speak any words of reconciliation, but he didn’t challenge him or argue anymore either. He walked out of the atrium garden, letting the glass door close slowly behind him, and Carter had neither seen nor heard anything from him since…

And there had been no further disturbances in the museum at night.

“You see the L.A. Times today?” Del asked now, as he steered the truck through the morning traffic on Pacific Coast Highway.

“Nope,” Carter said, laying his cast on the center armrest. They sure made trucks a lot nicer than they used to.

“There’s a big photo of that Derek Greer, the man of the hour.”

Carter knew he should have been following the news more closely, but he just couldn’t bear to. There was too much he didn’t want to think about.

“He’s the one who pointed the cops to those Sons of Liberty bastards,” Del went on. “The leader, some guy named Burt Pitt, was caught at the Mexican border, of all places. Now I guess he wishes the borders were more open than they are,” Del said, with a grim chuckle.

Even as they drove along PCH, a ribbon of highway that hugged the ocean shoreline, Carter could see, in the hills and palisades, burn scars where the fires had swept down through the chaparral before running out of fuel on the concrete roadway and the broad beach beyond. But in their terrible progress the flames had destroyed hundreds of houses, consumed untold millions in property, and taken dozens of lives.

But what Carter was looking for, as he scanned the cliff-sides, was something else.

Del had the radio on — a country-western station, of course — and he tapped his fingers on the wheel in time to the music. The singer was claiming that there was a reason God made Oklahoma, but Carter hadn’t been paying attention, so he didn’t know what it was.

At the turnoff to the Temescal Canyon hiking trail, there was a chalkboard sign saying that, although the trails were open, it was advisable only for experienced hikers to proceed. “Fire danger still exists,” the sign said. “Report any indications of fire immediately.”

“And hey, look at that,” Del said, pointing to another sign in the lot where the parking validations used to be dispensed. “Parking fees have been waived.” Nothing pleased Del more than a bargain. “God help me, I’m starting to love this town.”

Carter had never seen such a turnaround. For a guy who had hated L.A. — its noise, its commotion, its traffic, its phonies with cell phones welded to their ears — Del had made a near miraculous conversion. And it was the Fourth of July — or Götterdämmerung, as Del liked to refer to it — that had made the difference. On that day, he had seen things in Los Angeles that no other place on earth could ever have offered. He had seen creatures — living and breathing and hunting — whose petrified bones he had studied all his life. He had seen, on al-Kalli’s lawns, a glimpse of a prehistoric world hundreds of millions of years old. And even in the fires — the raging, deadly, uncontrollable conflagration — he had seen the power of nature unleashed, and he had seen the city scourged, like Sodom, and in his eyes reborn to a rough kind of beauty. He rooted for Los Angeles now.

Which explained, Carter thought, the purple and gold Lakers T-shirt.

Del hopped down out of the driver’s seat, his green canvas knapsack slung over his shoulder. Carter got out more carefully — his body was still plenty battered and bruised. In the fall from the Mercedes, he’d sprained both ankles, broken one arm, dislocated one shoulder, bruised several ribs, and scraped the skin off both shins. He didn’t look so good in his hiking shorts, but then, there didn’t seem to be anyone around to notice. The parking lot was empty, and as they started up the trail, they saw no sign of any other hikers. Or even much wildlife. Everything was preternaturally quiet, and the air still smelled of cinder and ash. The fires had beaten jagged and unpredictable paths all through the Santa Monica Mountains and the nature preserves, cutting wide swaths down the sides of some hillsides, while leaving others unscathed. Even in Summit View, where Carter had been found unconscious by a fire crew, some of the houses had been reduced to a pile of ash, while others, just across the street, had sustained nothing but smoke damage.

He’d been back there only once since the fire. He’d had Beth drive him to the crest of Via Vista, or what was left of it, and he’d looked over the side of the cliff, where the Mercedes had disappeared. Several hundred yards down, turned over on its back like an eviscerated turtle, he could see the black and twisted wreckage of the car; he half expected the klaxon to still be making some feeble noise.

But there was nothing; no sound, and no sign of the gorgon who had ridden it down. The trees and brush down there were largely intact, as were large parts of the park-lands to the north. Had it crawled off to die in the brush? Had it been cornered, and consumed, by a sudden change in the fires, a gust of Santa Anas that had blown the flames all around it?

Or was it still out there, somewhere, foraging in the tens of thousands of acres that made up the vast preserves, learning to survive in this altogether new world?

For all the misery it had nearly brought him, Carter hoped that it was — and that, when he was in better shape again, he would be able to go in search of it.

“You see those photos,” Del asked, without turning around on the trail, “the ones from the cell phone cameras? They were showing them again last night on the news.”

“I’ve seen them,” Carter said — grainy shots, taken through the smoke, by people stuck in their cars on back roads, of a huge and lumbering creature crashing through trees and, in one case, slinking through a culvert under a freeway. A fire department helicopter, bringing a huge bucket of water up into Bel-Air, got its own long-distance shots, but from so high above, and through all the swirling smoke, it looked as much like an armored vehicle of some kind as it did a creature of legend and lore.

And no one, from the witnesses to the authorities, had any idea what to make of it, or what to do about it if they did. The city administration had its hands full with the more immediate problems — thousands of displaced people, a conspiracy of arsonists to round up and prosecute, sporadic but continuing smaller blazes, disaster relief to claim from the feds (and then find some way to dispense). The Godzilla stories had been put on the back burner, as it were, everywhere but the tabloids and the Fox network.

“So what did you want to show me?” Carter asked, stepping carefully over the rocks and boulders strewn across the hiking path; many of them looked as though they had come loose in the fire and just recently tumbled to rest down here.

“My home away from home,” Del said, “if it’s still standing.”

Carter had no idea what he was talking about until they came to a fork in the trail and Del headed to the right, to the more arduous route — the one that Carter now remembered they had taken on their previous expedition up here. He also recalled passing an abandoned old cabin covered with graffiti. If Del imagined that it was still standing…

All around, Carter could see the charred remains of the trees and brush that had once afforded so many animals, from gray quail to the occasional bobcat, a refuge and a home. But now the landscape was more desertified than ever, with only an occasional weed or patch of grass poking its head up above the layer of ash and cinder that coated the ground.

The cabin, which had at least sported a roof and walls the last time they had come past here, was now nothing but a pile of charred timbers, melted glass, and broken bricks. The blackened branches of a scorched sycamore reached out toward it as if in consolation.

“Any special reason you wanted to come back here?” Carter asked. “Were you expecting some mail?”

“You laugh,” Del said, “but I was living here lately.”

Carter stopped. “You were what?”

“Living here,” Del said, treading carefully through the ruins, his eyes on the ground.

“Why? What was so bad about your sister’s million-dollar condo on Wilshire Boulevard?”

“It was a million-dollar condo on Wilshire Boulevard. It gave me the willies just being there. Out here, I didn’t have a valet trying to park my truck, I didn’t have horns honking all night down on the street, I didn’t have my brother-in-law freaking out every time I tried to play some Willie Nelson on his sound system.”

“Out here you didn’t have a sound system,” Carter pointed out.

“I had a battery-operated boom box,” Del said, stopping in front of a blob of twisted black plastic, the size of a toaster now. “And this was it.”

Carter now understood why they were there and he, too, looked around at the rubble and ash at his feet. “Anything else I should be looking for?” he said.

“I had a propane stove, a few clothes, not much.” He kicked over one of the fallen timbers. “Can’t imagine anything else made it through the fire either.”

Carter helped to make a desultory search through the wreckage. Here and there he saw the glint of a twisted spoon, the metal buttons from a workshirt, a sliver of glass. He was just about to give up when a lizard skittered across the toe of his boot, and looking down, he saw the sunlight pick up a trace of something blue. He crouched down and cleared away some of the debris. Under it all, he saw a turquoise stone, and when he pried it from the earth, it came up on a tarnished silver chain. There were several more turquoise stones attached to it… making a necklace.

Carter held it up. “This yours?” he asked Del, brushing away some of the clinging dirt.

Del came closer. “Nope,” he said, turning it over in his fingers. “Never saw it before in my life.”

But Carter already knew he had seen it himself. He had seen it that terrible day in Pit 91, the day when Geronimo — a.k.a. William Blackhawk Smith — had jumped down and slashed him with the knife. The day Geronimo had died, swallowed alive in the tar pits.

He heard the cry of a bird overhead, and saw a hawk circling… just as he’d seen one the first time they’d come here.

And he knew at that moment whose home this had originally been.

“But it’s not an ancient artifact of any kind,” Del said, handing it back. “That chain is machine-made.”

He wandered off in search of any other remnants of his life, and once he was gone, Carter put the necklace back in the dirt, and covered it over. The hawk, perched on a limb of the sycamore now, cried again.

In the end, all Del was able to retrieve was a pair of army field binoculars, miraculously spared by the fire; they were still in their steel case, and under a bunch of bricks. “Not a total loss,” he said, stepping free of the burned boards and cinders, and climbing back toward the trail.

Carter turned to follow, but not before casting one more backward glance at the last remains of the cabin, and the hawk keeping watch from the blackened branch above it.

They continued on up the trail, toward the waterfall near the top, but it was all so different now; where the hillside had been dense and thickly overgrown, now it was spare and wide open. Most of the trees were down, but those that remained were just skeletal figures, black and bare of leaves. The scrub brush was just clumps of furze, affording almost no cover for the myriad creatures that would once have taken shelter below it.

At a turn in the trail, Carter stopped to catch his breath. Beth was right; he had to take it easy. He had been lying around for a couple of weeks, his body had taken a pretty bad beating, and the sweat was starting to trickle down into the cast on his arm. Del, who’d been pushing on, noticed and came back.

“You need a break?” he said, offering Carter his canteen.

Carter nodded, while showing Del that he had his own water bottle in his knapsack. He took a swig, and then another, while gazing out over the devastated canyon below.

“You don’t think you’re still going to see them, do you?” Del said, and Carter knew exactly what he was talking about. He and Del had discussed the creatures from the bestiary often — what precisely they were, what Carter had been able to learn about them in the brief time he’d had on al-Kalli’s estate, whether or not the fire had consumed them all, entirely. The beasts that had probably died on the grounds of the estate in Bel-Air — the basilisks, the griffin — would never be found, Carter was sure. Al-Kalli’s teenage son, Mehdi, and his attorneys had sealed off the place, and Mehdi would make sure that his family’s secret treasure — even if now it was only a pile of bones — would remain a secret forever.

As for the gorgon, Carter wasn’t so sure. But he hadn’t told Del — he hadn’t told anyone — about his encounter with the creature in Summit View. That was his own secret — his and Beth’s. One day, when he was back in shape, when the world had returned to some kind of normalcy, he would pursue the matter, he would try to find out what had happened. He would confess it all to Del, and together they could mount their own private expedition.

But not just yet.

“Here,” Del said, handing Carter the field binoculars. “I’m going to head up to the crest. Why don’t you take a breather?”

Carter hated to admit it, but Del was right. He should take a break.

“Thanks,” he said, sitting down in the dirt. “You might be right.”

“I’m always right, Bones.”

Del set off toward the waterfall, and Carter took a deep breath and looked out over the canyon; the Santa Monica Mountains rose up on the other side, their ravaged flanks showing the sweeping path of the flames. Beyond them, and just visible past their peaks, lay the tranquil blue of the Pacific, shining in the hot summer sun.

Carter kneaded his calves, where the skin was still tender, and flexed his ankles, still sore from their sprains. He stretched his long legs out in front of him. The sun felt good, like a hot pack. He wondered what Beth and Joey were up to. Had Beth dared to venture outside and run the risk of a gardening conversation? The Critchleys had made it clear that they could stay as long as they liked — in fact, Carter thought they rather liked having a Getty curator in their guesthouse — but Carter knew that he had to start looking for a new apartment soon. The housing on the west side was at a premium right now, with so many displaced Angelenos, but there were some buildings not all that far from the Page Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits that were still advertising summer specials.

He’d look into it when he went back to work on Monday.

For now, he would just enjoy the downtime.

Off in the distance, he could see a few spots on the mountainsides where the chapparal had not been burned off, and a couple of others where there were even signs of new growth; yellow flowers had popped up, in profusion, in one area to the northwest. Even from here, Del would know exactly what they were. He’d miss having Del around, he thought, but he knew that his friend’s university leave was running out, and he’d have to be heading back up to Tacoma soon.

A tiny spot of red, flickering like a flame, appeared among the distant yellow flowers.

Carter’s heart stopped.

His hand reached into his knapsack, fumbling for his cell phone.

Was it a hot spot? A place where the fire, even now, was still burning?

But then the red spot… moved.

He put the cell phone on the ground and picked up instead the field binoculars Del had left with him.

He kept his eyes on it while unsnapping the steel case, taking out the binoculars, unfolding them.

The red spot moved again, and this time he noticed that it seemed to move with some deliberation, traveling from one clump of the yellow flowers to another.

He put the binoculars to his eyes, quickly trying to focus them.

He found the scorched crest of the mountain, then moved down, and across, to find the yellow flowers.

He twisted the dial again, gently, to gain greater focus.

And there it was, the red spot — only now he could see that it was larger than he had thought, and that it could expand and contract.

When it moved again, he saw that it had a shape — the shape of a bird.

A huge bird.

And now his heart beat faster than ever.

He followed its path as it spread its wings, caught a sudden updraft, and drifted on the wind to another patch of flowers. He lost it for a moment, glanced over the top of the binoculars to get a fresh fix, and then found it again.

Its hooked beak, its scarlet feathers, its massive wing-spread were all unmistakable.

Instinctively, he stood, never letting his lock on it waver.

And he thought again of the ancient lore of the phoenix, the immortal bird that rose, renewed, from its own blazing pyre… and he could see how it might have appeared that way. With its wings folded, it looked like a beam of light, but when it spread them again, it was like a bouquet of flames, opening up and out. It moved with all the incandescence and unpredictability of fire.

Had Del seen it, Carter wondered, from his perch higher up the trail?

The bird paused — Carter couldn’t see what it was doing, its body obscured by shadow — before it suddenly raised its head and Carter could again see its glittering eyes. Had it sensed something, even from this great distance? Did it know it was being watched?

It seemed impossible, but then, the creature itself was an impossibility.

It unfurled its curved wings and glided off the mountain-side, traveling from light to shadow, its crimson body like a beacon of flame against the black and defoliated mountain-side. And then, suddenly, it changed course, sweeping toward a gap in the mountain range, toward a wedge of blue ocean far off on the horizon. With one beat of its wings, it swooped into the narrow pass, and with another it went nearly through. Carter tried to adjust his focus, but he was losing it. The phoenix was becoming just a tiny scarlet dot, like a spot of blood from a pricked finger.

It beat its mighty wings one more time, and by now, though he had lost it in the distance, Carter knew that it must be over the ocean… sailing out of sight, sailing toward the sun.

He put the binoculars down… and wondered if he, or anyone, would ever see it again. A part of him — the paleontologist, the man of science — desperately wanted to; nothing so wonderful should ever be lost to the world. Not again. But there was also another part — a part that was strangely closer to his heart, his spirit, a part that had been alive in him ever since childhood — that hoped the phoenix would vanish for good, flying into the sun forever.