Cryptozoica (28 page)

“How did they find out that out?” Kavanaugh asked skeptically.

“I’m getting to that, be patient. After Jacque Belleau’s first and only visit here, several subsequent secret expeditions were mounted by the School of Night. Once photography came into fashion, we were able to maintain something of a pictorial record. That is how some people associated with the School learned about the Tamtungs…Arthur Conan Doyle, for one.”

Crowe eyed him distrustfully. “You’re joking.”

“Not at all. Doyle read a few documents, saw a few photographs and wanted to expose the entire undertaking to the world. But we threatened him with ridicule if he revealed the truth of Big Tamtung. Inasmuch as his scientific credentials were already held in contempt due to his spiritualist beliefs, he agreed to write an altered account as fiction. And that is how
The Lost World
came to be written.”

“That’s a little hard to swallow,” Crowe said.

“Not so much,” Honoré said musingly. “It’s common knowledge Doyle based Sherlock Holmes on a real person, a medical doctor named Joseph Bell. Disguising an island in the South China Sea as an isolated plateau in the Amazon isn’t that much of a stretch.”

“Other people over the centuries came across clues to the existence of Big Tamtung,” Belleau continued, “but the School of Night always managed to deflect those who came too close. Over time, true reports became so associated with legends, like those of the Isle of Demons, they were never taken seriously”

“Why?” demanded Kavanaugh. “If this society of yours is devoted to preserving knowledge, why fight so hard for so long to keep Big Tamtung a legend? Wouldn’t the fields of biology and paleontology be advanced if the legend were actually revealed to be fact? Wouldn’t this place be the ultimate living laboratory for naturalists?”

“Yes,” Belleau drawled, voice heavy with sarcasm. “It also would be the ultimate living testament to anti-evolutionists, the creationists, the purveyors of the intelligent design ‘theory’.” He crooked his fingers to indicate quotation marks.

Bai narrowed her eyes. “I don’t understand.”

“If Big Tamtung was simply thrown out into the world,” answered Belleau, “without strict controls on the release of information, then science as we know it would be awash in controversy. Nothing would ever be accepted from the scientific community, not new technologies, and not even new medicines. Religious pundits all over the world would vie with one another to claim Big Tamtung as the absolute proof of creationism. The danger of entering a new Dark Age, where the church once again wields more influence than scientific thought is a very real one. Reason would be subsumed by superstition. That part of our collective history should never be repeated.”

Everyone stared at the little man, surprised into silence. Then Kavanaugh cast a sideways glance at Honoré. “And you called me paranoid.”

The corner of Honoré’s mouth lifted in a smirk. “Aubrey isn’t as paranoid about religion taking Big Tamtung away from him as he is the pharmaceutical companies.”

Crowe frowned. “What?”

Honoré stared levelly at Belleau. “The reason why the School of Night in general and the Belleau family in particular was so obsessive about keeping Big Tamtung a secret under their influence is a little less grand than maintaining the purity of scientific thought. The profit motive figures into it very, very prominently.”

“If that’s the case,” Kavanaugh said, “why didn’t the School of Night interfere when we found the place and formed Cryptozoica Enterprises?”

Belleau chuckled contemptuously. “We didn’t have to take any punitive action against you—your own inherent incompetence ensured the enterprise’s failure. An eco-tourist destination resort—
really?
  However, I will admit that several of the tabloid newspapers that we influence were eager to amplify the claims of fraud and hoax. Even if reputable scientists became curious as to the veracity of Cryptozoica, they shied away from the huckster stink of it all.”

“Clever planning,” Bai said bitterly. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me, Madame. Thank Tombstone Jack here. He couldn’t have done a better job of discrediting Cryptozoica than if he were working under a full scholarship from the School of Night.”

The flickering firelight made it difficult to read Kavanaugh’s expression, but tendons stood out in relief on his neck. “You still haven’t explained how your great-great-grandfather discovered the history of this place and what he
really
found here.”

Belleau leaned back, half-reclining beside Oakshott. He gave the impression of enjoying all the attention immensely. “Jacque wasn’t quite certain of what he found, but he had his suspicions…particularly after he copied several columns of Enochian glyphs. That’s how he learned the history of the Tamtungs, by deciphering the alphabet. Turn to the last page there if you would, Honoré.”

She did so, gazing at several columns of symbols canted at different angles away from a square central junction. She said, “These look like the same ones that were carved into the pillars.”

“They aren’t. My great-great-grandfather copied them from the sides of a stele, a monolith. Now, very carefully, bend the page in the middle in thirds. Don’t fold it, just bend it.”

Frowning in concentration, Honoré fumbled with the Mylar sheet, following his instructions.

“
Mad
magazine used to have a feature like that on the inside back covers,” Crowe commented dryly. “It would give you a different picture than what you thought. What’s this one show?”

Honoré didn’t respond for a long moment. Then her eyes widened as she stared at the arrangement of glyphs. She breathed, “It can’t be.”

Belleau chuckled. “Oh, it
be,
darlin’. It very much be. The term DNA wasn’t coined until long after Jacque’s death and it wasn’t until 1937 that an X-ray showed DNA had a regular structure.”

“This isn’t just a helix pattern,” Honoré argued, “this is a Holliday junction… specific to genetic recombination.”

Belleau sat up, eyes reflecting the firelight like two polished mirrors. “Exactly! The secret of the Darwin journal and of Big Tamtung is that a non-human species raised humanity up from the ape.”

He paused, as if he intended to say more, then asked, “May I have another piece of beef jerky, please?”

May 13
th

Kavanaugh turned to look at Bai. She was still asleep, her dark hair spread across the green pillow like an ebony fan. Her lips were quirked in a faint smile, as though her dreams were pleasant. She lay beside him in nude, damp exhaustion, the sheet tangled across her hips. He leaned down and kissed her on the corner of the mouth.

Bai’s eyelashes flickered open and her dark eyes studied him gravely. She pressed up against him, the sweat-slick smoothness of her bare breasts sliding over his chest. She whispered, “I was dreaming about you.”

“Poor way to spend your time,” he replied.

“No,” she said drowsily. “There was a message.”

“What message?”

Bai’s eyes opened inhumanly wide and they blazed forth with gold-green fury. She hissed,
“If you return, you will die, Jack!”

Kavanaugh awakened instantly, his upper body snapping erect and dislodging Honoré’s head from his shoulder. For a split second, he wasn’t certain what had woken him, and then he realized it wasn’t a sound but rather a sudden change in one. The steady chirping of the cicadas had risen in volume, clamoring wildly as they welcomed the rising sun. The change in the sound had penetrated even his dream.

Honoré groaned and pushed away from him, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. Kavanaugh blinked and when his vision swam into focus, a he saw Bai Suzhen sitting opposite at him, staring, her face as immobile and grave as if carved from ivory. He shifted further away from Honoré who rolled her neck, working out the kinks.

The first rays of sunlight penetrated the canopy of the treetops, glistening on the fat drops of dew that dripped down from the leaves. In the tropics, the damp air of the jungle condensed among the towering trees and drizzled down until the air grew warmer.

The sky filled with a palette of blazing colors. As the sun climbed higher in the sky, then the cheerful notes of songbirds grew louder. Everyone slowly stirred in the campsite. A few wisps of smoke curled from the ashes of the fire. Oakshott stood leaning against a fallen tree, rifle in his arms. Kavanaugh didn’t ask who had tended the fire all night—he really didn’t care.

After Aubrey Belleau refused to answer any further questions, insisting they all rest up for the next day’s journey, Kavanaugh, Crowe and Mouzi had tried to keep alert. They watched for any opportunity to jump Oakshott and disarm him. That opportunity never arrived. Kavanaugh did not remember falling asleep, certainly not with Honoré Roxton’s head on his shoulder.

Belleau looked damnably clear-eyed and refreshed. He bustled about the camp, clapping his hands, admonishing everyone to make themselves ready, chanting “Hey-up, heigh-ho, let’s go!”

“Oh, please, Aubrey,” Honoré moaned, massaging her temples. “This isn’t a health farm in Bath.”

After washing down mouthfuls of power bars with swallows of bottled water, the seven people arose and stiffly moved southward through the jungle. Hanging from the trees, looped from the branches were rope-thick vines, acrawl with insects. The heavy, humid air produced a greenhouse atmosphere. Honoré took off her Stetson and used it to fan her face.

The narrow trail they followed snaked through the forest. Insects and butterflies darted back and forth across the path and from their hiding places deeper in the jungle came shrill, warning cries. Once Honoré grabbed Kavanaugh’s arm and pointed upward. He caught a glimpse of an archaeopteryx perched on a branch high above them, staring down with beady, suspicious eyes.

Birds plumed in rich reds, deep greens and brilliant yellows cawed raucously. Tiny flying lizards glided short distances through the air above their heads. Frequently, they heard snorts, which Kavanaugh attributed to the wild tapirs.

Within an hour of leaving the camp, a rain began to fall, a warm, wet drizzle that compounded their misery. Insects buzzed in clouds all around them, biting and flying, seemingly dedicated to achieving the single goal of crawling into mouths and eyes. Swatting and waving at the bugs, the group walked under arches made of massive trees leaning against one other. They scrambled over broken trunks lying on the ground, blocking their path.

“These trees look like they’ve been pushed over,” muttered Belleau, glancing around anxiously. “By the same huge beast we heard last night, perhaps.”

“No,” said Crowe. “It’s the rain. Some of the trees are over two hundred feet tall and after a couple of good monsoon-type rains, the ground gets spongy, the trees soak up thousands of gallons of water, and they can’t support their own weight. They fall right over.”

“That’s comforting,” said Honoré.

“This little rain isn’t enough to do much,” replied Mouzi, scratching at a bug-bite. “Except to make us feel like bags of waterlogged crap.”

Favoring her bruised leg, Bai Suzhen stumbled on a root and nearly fell, but Kavanaugh managed to catch her and ease her down on a bed of soggy ferns. The warm rain, mixed with perspiration, streamed down her face, plastered her black hair to her head. She breathed heavily, her face flushed.

“Aubrey,” Honoré called, “let’s take a rest break.”

“Not yet,” the little man snapped over his shoulder.

“Bai Suzhen needs to take a breather,” Crowe said.

Belleau came to a stop and glanced back at the woman with annoyed eyes. Then he cut his gaze over to Oakshott. The big man transferred the rifle to his left hand and yanked Bai Suzhen to her feet with his right. The woman’s eyes flashed, her hand tightening on the hilt of the jian sword.

“What the hell is your hurry?” demanded Kavanaugh angrily.

“I want to get to the escarpment before dark,” Belleau replied. “While there is still light enough to explore.”

Oakshott waved the carbine toward the south. “March.”

Within half an hour, the rain slackened and ended but still the trickle of dripping, seeping water was everywhere. Wet heat arose from the ground, giving the jungle the stifling feel of a steam bath with the outtake pipes at maximum.

The giant trees became less frequent, the overhead canopy less dense. Kavanaugh was surprised by the glimpses of open sunlight. The rain forest gradually changed over to a savannah of rich green grass carpeting a hilly terrain. The treeless slope ahead of them inclined to a hogback ridge.

To the south, the black bulk of the escarpment reached into the sky. The air around the summit was clear, but the permanent haze collected among the tumbled gray-green boulders at its base like an umbrella. It looked so far in the distance, it seemed they couldn’t possibly reach it in a week, much less a day.

Belleau halted, wiping the perspiration from his neck with a white linen handkerchief. “We can afford to take a rest break.”

Everyone dropped to the ground where they stood. Even Oakshott sank down. Although the breeze gusting over the tableland wasn’t particularly cool, it felt fresher than the thick air trapped in the jungle. After passing around a bottle of water, Honoré asked, “Aubrey, what did you mean by non-human race raising humanity up from the ape?”

The little man shrugged. “I thought I was quite clear.”

“You weren’t, let me disabuse you of that right now. I presume you meant the entity you called the anthroposaur. Surely you’re not postulating that an advanced reptilian race descended from dinosaurids actually co-existed with man?”

“Why not? Consider the Troodon…paleobiologist Dale Russell speculated that a theropod species like the Troodon would have grown more intelligent and taken on a more humanoid appearance if not for the K-T event.”

“Yes,” Honoré conceded wryly. “But there was the K-T event. Besides, even if such a species existed, where is the historical record?”

Belleau gestured with both arms. “It’s everywhere, in every culture, but like so much else, the knowledge was suppressed or dismissed as folklore. The mass of history definitely indicates the knowledge of an archaic science in the past.”

Honoré nodded reluctantly. “True, but it’s never been attributed to any single civilization.”

“Of course it hasn’t,” he retorted bitterly. “But nor has any conventional historian ever identified the teachers of the ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Sumerians. So why couldn’t these culture-bearers have been a race of anthroposaurs descended from the Troodon? Almost every one of them, from the Mayan’s Kulkulcan to Mesopotamia’s Oannes was associated with serpents or reptiles.”

Honoré gazed at him in dismay. “Linking legends with reality is not rational thought, Aubrey.”

Belleau laughed. “Rational and irrational thought are divided by time frames. At the time Charles Darwin and my great-great-grandfather set foot here, the general belief in England was that Earth and man had been created simultaneously in 4004 BC. That was the prevailing wisdom less than two hundred years ago. Is it rational?”

“Of course not, but just because—

A hooting cry rolled across the savannah. Hoarse and haunting, it held a deep bass note. Kavanaugh felt the ground tremble, ever so slightly, beneath him. He jumped to his feet. Within a second, everyone else did too.

They stared in silent awe at the huge creature lumbering slowly across the grassland from the fringes of the jungle. Its leathery hide was the color of pewter mixed with a yellow-green, the texture not unlike the skin of a rhinoceros. The four-legged animal moved in a relaxed saunter, dragging a short tail behind it. A great bony hood curved up at the rear of its skull.

Five horns sprouted from its head—two long ones above the eyes, a medium-sized horn on the snout and a pair of shorter, tusk-like protuberances curved out on either side of its jaw hinges, like truncated sabers. The tip of its left fore horn was broken, leaving a jagged stump.

The animal looked to be at least fifteen feet long, from the beak-like mouth to the tip of the muscular tail. It stood six feet high at the shoulder.

“Triceratops,” muttered Belleau.

“Quinterotops,” Crowe corrected. “With all those degrees, didn’t you ever learn how to count?”

Shading her eyes with her hands, Honoré intoned, “Five toes on both the front and back feet…the fan of the frill is broader and edged with longer, sharper points of epoccipitals, not unlike the earlier Styracosaurus. Two extra horns at the end of the frill. The frill itself is more rectangular than the Triceratops. Although the Triceratops was one of the last dinosaur genera to appear before K-T, this is a cousin
chasmosaurine ceratopsian
—the Anchiceratops.”

Mouzi regarded her with incredulous eyes. “I dare you to say that again.”

The creature halted suddenly and turned its head slowly, looking behind it. Then, it broke wind explosively, lifted its tail and dropped a pile of dark green feces three feet high. It began walking again, tail swaying from side to side.

“It’s heading in our general direction,” Honoré said excitedly. “Let’s follow it.”

“Not too closely,” Kavanaugh said. “We don’t know what it had for breakfast and I’m not inclined to find out.”

Without argument, the seven people fell into step a score of yards behind the Quinterotops as it ambled across the grassland and up the slope. It sniffed at the multi-colored wildflowers growing among the high grasses but didn’t sample any.

Honoré ran ahead and took up a position several yards to its left, snapping a series of shots with her Nikon. Once the animal cast her a sour glance over its shoulder and opened its mouth to reveal a battery of blunt, powerful teeth, arranged much like those of a camel.

“Although it has changed from the Anchiceratops,” Honoré said, peering through the viewfinder “it’s apparently still an herbivore, judging by the shape of its jaws and teeth. The Quinterotops probably uses the nasal horn to uproot tubers and the side spurs must be a defensive adaptation to protect their underjaws from small carnivores that attack from below.”

Kavanaugh came up beside her during her monologue. “Interesting.”

She lowered the camera, eyes rapt. “Interesting? The Quinterotops is completely fascinating.”

“I didn’t mean that,” he said lowering his voice. “I meant that it’s interesting that Aubrey has had his satphone since yesterday afternoon and has yet to place a call to Jimmy Cao.”

Honoré blinked, trying to shift her concentration to a non-ceratopsian topic. “What do you think that means?”

“Maybe nothing at all. Or it could mean that Aubrey has had a change of heart about partnering up with the Ghost Shadows, or he has business he wants to complete before he meets up with Cao again.”

She nodded reflectively. “That pool…those ruins we saw the pictures of, perhaps.”

They began walking, following the trail of stamped down grass made by the Quinterotops. Everyone else climbed up the slope ahead of them, although Oakshott let them know he closely monitored their progress.

In a voice barely above a whisper, Kavanaugh asked, “What did you mean that Aubrey was afraid of pharmaceutical companies?”

Honoré pushed back the brim of her hat. “Aubrey believes his grandfather discovered the equivalent of a universal panacea here on Big Tamtung. He calls it Prima Materia.”

Kavanaugh frowned. “What the hell is that supposed to be?”

“Prime matter. It’s part pseudoscience, part superstition, and half complete rubbish. There’s a very old belief that all life on Earth sprang from a single source. Darwin referred to it as a warm little pond of ooze. Aubrey believes that Darwin was speaking in code, referring to the pool of prime matter Jacque Belleau found here.”