Lost Worlds (2 page)

Georgia – the former Russian republic, now a fully fledged country in its own right. Well, that matched the place where the backpackers claimed they were located. And, of course, if there
were examples of the missing evolutionary link between apes and men still living somewhere in the world, a remote mountain range on the border between Europe and Asia was more likely than, say, a
shopping centre in Essex – although, based on some of the TV programmes he’d watched recently, perhaps man-apes in Essex weren’t as far-fetched as people might think.

On a whim, he copied the name of the girl who had posted the photograph online, and he flung it across to a fourth suspended screen. There it was immediately pasted into a specialized search
program that he’d had written a few years before. The program took any name fed into it and cross-referenced that name with a whole range of databases – census information, school and
university records, registers of births, deaths and marriages – along with social-networking sites and then parsed the information to provide a description of that person’s life in
accessible form. Within thirty seconds, Calum was reading an essay about the girl who had taken the photograph, which contained information that even she had probably forgotten about.

Various pictures of the girl were scattered through the text, showing her at different ages. He skipped over them. What she looked like wasn’t important: the fact that she was real
was
. All he wanted to know was that she had no hidden reasons for being in the Caucasus Mountains – like faking a sighting of a creature that looked like nothing known on Earth. He was
gratified to find out that not only was she real, but she had been talking about her backpacking trip well in advance, and she had no interest in practical jokes, hoaxes or unknown creatures. She
was taking a gap year before studying engineering at Warwick University. As far as he could tell, she was genuine.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard. Should he upload it to the website? It was speculative, certainly, but then what part of looking for evidence of previously undiscovered creatures still
living in the world wasn’t?

Before his brain had made a firm decision, his fingers hit the keyboard, starting up the app that would upload the photograph to his website. He quickly typed in a caption for the photograph:
Possible image of missing link in foothills of Caucasus Mountains. Is this the fabled Almast?
The app automatically linked the word
Almast
to the description already held on the
website’s database: the thousand words or so that he’d written two years ago about the Almast:

He gazed at the photograph again. Neanderthal? Or maybe one of the earlier forms of man, the ones that came before
Homo sapiens
–
Australopithecus afarensis
,
Australopithecus sediba
or
Homo erectus
?

He needed real evidence. He needed something he could hold in his hand.

A fifth screen – the one that he kept perpetually displaying his website, The Lost Worlds – flashed as the information on it updated. He swung his chair round so that he could see
it. He kept an eye on it throughout the day in case someone uploaded a new photograph, or took part in one of the discussion forums that he moderated (or, to be honest, often left to moderate
themselves). As he watched, the home page changed to display the new image – the one of the possible Almast. His caption ran beneath it.

Calum liked to think that, across the world, people were hunched in front of their computer screens staring in amazement at the image he had put in front of them. In his heart of hearts he knew
that probably wasn’t the case. Despite the fact that he had some ten thousand people who logged on to The Lost Worlds on a regular basis, he was enough of a realist to know that they
didn’t spend their lives hanging on his every word. Over the course of the next few days, most of the people who were interested in the same subject as he was would check the website out and
see the new photograph. There would be some discussion, and perhaps, if he was lucky, someone else might have a snippet of information that they could add – another photograph, or a story
they had heard from a friend.

If he was
really
lucky, then some university researcher would offer to organize an expedition to the Caucasus Mountains to look for the Almasti. The chances of that were slight, however.
Cryptozoology – the study of creatures that either shouldn’t exist at all or shouldn’t
still
exist – was frowned on in academic institutions around the world. No
researcher who valued their job or their reputation would ever get involved. Not obviously, anyway. He knew, from the ISP addresses of the computers that connected to his website, that about a
third of his regulars were associated in some way with universities or colleges. Perhaps they were students looking for something unusual, something for a laugh, but he liked to think that there
was a small core of zoology and palaeontology professors checking him out in their spare time.

And maybe, just maybe, one of them would take the plunge one day and get in touch with him.

Maybe this latest photograph would be the trigger.

‘Now remember: be nice, smile if you can and try not to get too freaked at the way Calum moves around his apartment.’

Natalie Livingstone raised her eyebrows at her mother in what she hoped was appropriately withering teenage scorn. ‘I’m always nice, I always smile and there’s nothing in the
world that can freak me out apart from mismatching shoes and handbag.’ She paused, replaying in her head what her mother had said. ‘Why – what’s freaky about the way he
moves around his apartment?’

Gillian Livingstone –
Professor
Gillian Livingstone, Natalie corrected herself in the same way that her mother corrected anyone who introduced her without the honorific –
glanced at the rivet-studded metal door that separated the two of them from the apartment of this Calum Challenger boy. ‘You know I’ve been taking an interest in Calum since his parents
died, don’t you? Between us, his great-aunt and I try to make sure that he can live the kind of life that he wants. They were my best friends, and I promised them that if anything happened
I’d make sure Calum ate properly, got a good education, didn’t spend all his inheritance on a Ferrari Testarossa and didn’t mix in the wrong company.’

Natalie closed her eyes briefly. Parents were so stupid sometimes. She’d heard the story, like,
sooo
many times before. ‘Yeah, I know. They died in a car crash three years
ago. I remember when it happened.’

‘Two.’ A brief spasm of pain crossed her mother’s face. ‘Two years ago.’

‘Right. Sorry.’

‘What I didn’t tell you is that Calum was in the car with them. He was fourteen – a year older than you were. He was . . . injured.’

Natalie had a sudden flash of horrible scarring, like from some gross horror film, and winced. She didn’t like ugly things.

Her mother must have caught her expression. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said drily. ‘He’s not a monster who has to hide away from all human contact. Looking at him, you
can’t tell quite how serious the crash was. But when he moves . . .’ She paused. ‘Well, his spine was affected. There was nerve damage.’

‘He has a broken back?’

‘Not quite. It was never actually broken, but the damage to the nerves was so great that his legs are paralysed.’

Natalie thought for a moment. ‘Oh, right. He’s in a wheelchair. That’s OK.’

Her mother shook her head. ‘Actually, no. He’s
got
a wheelchair – a very good, very expensive one, but he doesn’t like to use it. He says it makes him feel like
he’s not on a level with anyone else.’

Natalie tried to imagine what Calum Challenger did without a wheelchair. The only thought that came to mind was just too stupid for words, but she said it anyway. ‘So what does he do
–
crawl
around the apartment or something?’

‘Not quite. It’s difficult to describe. Wait and see.’ She reached out and pressed a series of keys on a security pad by the door. Somewhere behind it, Natalie heard a
buzz.

While she waited for something to happen, Natalie looked around. Behind her was a large lift – one of those you see in American movies looking like they are only half made, out of wire
mesh and metal struts, with those strange wooden doors that split horizontally in the middle and open up and down on some kind of pulley system, rather than side to side. The lift had brought them
directly up from the door that led off the street – and ‘street’, Natalie thought, was a polite way of describing the narrow cobbled alley where they had parked. The lobby area
where they were now waiting was lined in unpainted brick that was so old the corners were rounded and bits of them were flaking off. This place probably dated back centuries.

Her eye was caught by a movement above the lift. For a moment, she thought it might be a rat, and she was prepared to utter a dramatic ‘
Eugh!
’ and demand that they left, like,
right away
, but she recognized it as a camera. A closed-circuit security camera. The movement had been the camera rotating so that it was pointed directly at her.

She turned her back on it, the way she turned her back on anything that didn’t fit into her ideal world.

A few moments later the door opened.

The boy standing in the doorway was not what she had expected. He was tall – taller than her, and she was taller than average – and his nose and jaw were so perfectly formed that his
face looked like something from a Greek statue. His hair was collar length and unkempt, but in a ‘can’t be bothered’ way rather than a messy, ‘can’t look after
myself’ way. His eyes were a piercing blue, and he was standing strangely, slumped against the door frame with his left arm out of sight, but what she could see of his torso made her think of
an inverted triangle – immensely wide shoulders and thick arms, a chest that narrowed down to a thin waist and legs that were much narrower than his arms.

‘Professor Livingstone,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’

Natalie’s mother smiled. ‘Nice to see you too, Calum. I was in London for a conference, and I had some spare time, so I thought I’d come over and see how you are.’

Calum was nodding politely, but his eyes were scanning Natalie’s face. She could almost feel a spot of heat where his gaze touched, and she had to fight hard to maintain a steady,
challenging stare back at him.’

‘You brought your personal assistant?’ Calum asked.

‘No, I brought my
daughter
. Calum Challenger, meet Natalie Livingstone.’

‘I suppose you’d better come in,’ he said. He turned round clumsily, and Natalie saw that the arm that was out of sight behind the door frame was actually reaching up above
Calum’s head and holding on to a leather strap that had been screwed into the ceiling. As her eyes grew used to the dim light within the apartment, she saw that there were similar straps
– like the ones she’d seen on buses, on the rare occasions she’d had to catch a bus – hanging in a regular pattern all the way across the room.

Just at the moment her mind worked out what they were for, and her lips formed an unplanned ‘You have to be
kidding
!’, Calum Challenger reached out with his right hand for
another of the straps, and begin the process of swinging across the apartment, obviously expecting them to follow.

That, she thought as she watched him move away from them, would explain the arms and the shoulders. His upper-body strength must be amazing.

‘Freaked?’ her mother asked softly.

‘Getting there,’ she replied.

Exhausted, hot and sweating, Gecko swung in from the fire escape through the window into his flat.

It wasn’t the main window, of course. He kept that closed for security reasons – burglary was a common problem in south London. He swung in through the smaller window on the top
– the one he kept open for ventilation. It was barely large enough for a cat to get through, let alone a burglar, but he knew that if he came down the fire escape fast enough, grabbed the
right metal strut in the right place, swung round and launched himself feet-first at the small opening then he could pass right through, flip in the air and land on his feet in the centre of the
living room. There were maybe fifteen people in London who could do that – eight of them were squatting in the three-storey house where he lived, and none of the others were burglars.
Trespassers, yes; risk-takers, certainly; but not burglars.

It all went perfectly up until the point at which his feet were supposed to hit the wooden floor of his living room. His speed down the fire escape was perfectly judged; his hands gripped the
strut in the right place and didn’t slip, and his body slid right through the open window like a letter through a letter box. His clothes didn’t even touch the window frame.

The problem was that someone had put a chair in the centre of the room.

He hit it and his legs crumpled beneath him just as the chair toppled over, pushed by the force of his arrival. He hit the floor, tucking into an automatic roll, but feeling something in his
shoulder tear. With luck it was just a few muscle fibres, rather than a tendon.

He came out of the roll in a crouch, hands on the wooden boards and feet braced, ready to push himself away and run. There was nowhere to run. A man stood directly in front of him, legs braced,
hands on his hips. Another man was standing by the door to the hall. The closed door.