Shadow Creatures (2 page)

‘I wish I was on one of them,’ Calum said, almost whispering to himself. He jumped when Gecko replied.

‘Going to where?’

‘Anywhere. Everywhere.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve always wanted to travel. My parents travelled all the time, but they left me here. Now I just . . . watch as other people
do the travelling.’

‘With your money, you could fly anywhere you wanted to,’ Gecko pointed out. ‘The airline people could get you on to and off an aircraft with a wheelchair, and put you in First
Class, where you would have lots of room –’ He caught himself. ‘Yes, of course. You would not like the fuss.’

‘I would need someone babysitting me all the time,’ Calum said. ‘In a foreign country, in a foreign hotel, I wouldn’t be able to do anything for myself apart from go to
sleep and wake up again. At least here I can be self-sufficient. The apartment has been organized for me that way.’

‘You could charter a private aircraft,’ Gecko pointed out. ‘And you could buy a house in some exotic foreign location and have it fitted out with straps and labour-saving
gadgets and anything else that you need, including specially imported Coca-Cola and coffee beans. You can afford to make a safe nest for yourself anywhere you want. Have lots of them, all around
the world.’

‘And then just stare out of the window at the other people playing on the beach, and swimming in the sea?’ Calum shook his head bleakly. ‘If I want to watch other people having
fun, I can link in to any webcam that’s connected to the World Wide Web, anywhere in the world.’ He sighed. ‘What you don’t understand is—’

‘Wait!’ Gecko held a hand up. ‘Wait for a moment. Watch where the sun is just going below the horizon.’

‘Watch for what?’

‘You’ll see.’

Calum suddenly realized what Gecko was doing. ‘Oh, it’s the Green Ray, isn’t it? I’ve heard about that. You know it’s just an atmospheric mirage caused by the last
rays of the sun refracting through the heated atmosphere? I’ve seen photographs, and videos, on the Web.’

‘But you’ve never seen it in real life,’ Gecko pointed out. ‘The sun is just about to dip below the horizon. It is safe to look at. Keep watching.’

Calum did as he was told, knowing that he wouldn’t see anything worth the effort. He knew the physics of the situation. It was a visual effect caused by geometry and optics. Nothing
special.

The sun was merely a rim of light on the horizon now, set against a watercolour sky of purple, orange and red. A few moments passed and the sun was merely a line of brightness.

And then, for a moment, a green flash seemed to radiate upward from the point where it had slipped beneath the horizon. Calum gasped. Just for a moment it was there, like some beacon being
broadcast up into the universe, and then it was gone, leaving an after-image on his retina. Had he really seen it, or had it only been an illusion?

‘Was that worth it?’ Gecko asked from the gathering darkness.

‘I suppose,’ Calum said, but his voice was shaky. He hadn’t anticipated the effect on him of actually seeing the Green Ray there in front of him, its light directly shining
into his eyes, not as an image on a screen.

Maybe he
was
missing things by staying in his apartment all the time, he mused. Maybe he
ought
to get out sometimes, and see the world.

A cold wind blew across the roof, making him shiver again.

‘Have you seen the Green Ray before?’ he asked Gecko.

‘Many times, in many places,’ the boy replied, ‘but I never get tired of it. It is a moment of wonder and mystery in a world that seems to be trying to suck the wonder out of
everything.’ Calum could feel him turn and stare. ‘And I know there is a simple physical explanation for it, but I would prefer just to be able to marvel at the fact that the universe
can still provide moments like this.’ He paused. ‘
Now
do you want to go back?’

‘Yes,’ Calum admitted. He looked over at the roof window again. ‘I’m just wondering how.’

‘Ah,’ Gecko said slowly. ‘I may not have thought this through fully.’

‘Really?’ Calum asked. ‘You think?’

It was morning, and Tara Fitzgerald was sitting in a coffee shop in the Charing Cross Road, sipping at a green tea (with honey) and checking the internet on her tablet.

The coffee shop was located on the first floor of a bookshop – once upon a time the largest in the world, apparently, with over fifty miles of shelf space. The coffee shop was a recent and
very welcome addition, with decent drinks and very good cakes, all in a pleasantly ramshackle environment. She loved it there. It was certainly more relaxing than her room in the college hall of
residence. She had also spent a lot of time in the college library, but the fact that a mysterious multinational company had tracked her down and harassed her there a few months before had freaked
her out, and she now felt that the stacks of books towered over her like toppling tombstones if she sat among them too long. So she had tried various coffee shops in the area until she’d
found this one.

She hadn’t quite recovered yet from the few days that she had spent in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, in search of the fabled Almasti. It had all happened so quickly. At the
beginning of one week she was a lonely student in London who spent most of her time trawling the internet, and by the end of the week she had a group of new friends and she was in a foreign country
being held captive by Neanderthals, or whatever the Almasti were. She still felt breathless.

And her friends. What an odd bunch. There was Calum, with his partial paralysis and his iron will to keep moving and not accept any help; Gecko, with his gymnastic ability to get over, under and
around obstacles, usually at height; Natalie, whose flashes of honesty and decency shone through her normally prickly and spoilt demeanour like rays of sunshine through rainclouds; and the solid,
dependable but slightly distant Rhino.

Natalie was flying in with her mother tonight. Tara wasn’t sure whether or not to head over to Calum’s apartment. She liked hanging out there, but she didn’t want to overstay
her welcome. She’d done that before, with groups of people that she thought were friends but who turned out just to be tolerating her. One of the most hurtful things that had ever happened to
her had been when she had been at a sleepover and overheard two supposed ‘friends’ talking privately about her. One of them had said, ‘Well, we only let her come in because
she’s your friend,’ to which the other one replied,
‘My
friend? I thought she came here with
you?’

Tara had left then, and never gone back.

Would Rhino be there at Calum’s? That was the big question. He had turned up a couple of times over the past few weeks, mainly to finish up some paperwork and give Calum an invoice for
‘services rendered’, but he wasn’t really part of the group. He wasn’t really
integrating.
Maybe he was feeling isolated, left out. Maybe it was because he was older
than the rest of them.

Maybe she should just keep herself to herself and let him make his own decisions.

She took another sip of green tea, and grimaced. The idea of giving up caffeine was great, but the taste didn’t match the smell, even sweetened with honey. It didn’t do much to keep
her awake either. Maybe she should just cave in and go back to the coffees she used to drink, and put up with the trembling and the heart palpitations.

Calum managed to put away a fair amount of that special Mexican Coca-Cola that he drank, she noticed. That had a lot of caffeine in it. How did he manage to process it all without showing any
symptoms?

Her tablet beeped. Putting down her green tea, she tapped the screen to bring it back to life. The ‘Notifications’ tab indicated that she’d had an email. She quickly checked
it, and found that it was actually an automated notification from one of the many software search-bots she had created and sent roaming around the World Wide Web like little scavengers, looking for
particular things. One of them had found something.

She booted up the search-bot controller app that she’d written, and selected the particular bot that had sent her a successful
ping.
The other search-bots were looking for phrases
in emails or on websites that might match things that Calum Challenger was interested in – cryptids, Neanderthals, monsters and so on – but this one was particularly interested in
images. It scanned through thousands of JPEGs, GIFs or whatever every second, looking for particular shapes. A few years ago Tara would have been lucky if a search-bot could locate a shape like a
dog in a photograph labelled ‘dog’, but they were now so sophisticated that they could not only identify a whole range of animate or inanimate things in a single photograph but could
also decide how large or small they were, based on the things that were around them.

Which is why Tara was now looking at a photograph of a giant rat.

One of the many images that the search-bot had been looking for was that of a rat – facing left, facing right, dead, alive, it didn’t matter. It was just looking for a rat. That was
one of the search terms that Calum had specified – Tara wasn’t sure why. Having found a rat, the bot would then check its size. If it seemed unusually large, then it would send Tara an
email with a copy of the image. Nine times out of ten the images were of rats in situations where perspective made them look larger than they really were, but, on examining this particular image,
the rat in it was huge. Not elephant-sized, but still pretty impressive: about the size of a fully grown Alsatian, but bulkier. The bot had sent Tara a photograph of a grinning Asian man holding a
turtle. The rat was in a cage in the background. The man gave the rat its scale.

Tara found that she’d stopped breathing, and took a sudden gulp of air. The rat looked completely ordinary until you realized its unusual size. It was side-on to the camera, and Tara could
clearly see its beady black eye and its blossom-like ear.

Calum would want to see this. He’d told Tara that there had been intermittent reports from locals in Indonesia of colonies of giant rats living in the jungles, but nobody had ever taken a
photograph or brought a body back for examination. And now here was one, sitting meekly in a cage somewhere.

Actually, maybe not ‘meekly’. Its mouth was open slightly, and Tara could see the glint of large incisors inside.

She checked the metadata that the search-bot had thoughtfully included in the email, just in case the image had been taken from a horror movie and was just a rather good special effect rather
than something real. Interestingly, the website from which it had come was part of the ‘shadow’ internet – the massive collection of web pages that deliberately stopped themselves
from being indexed by search engines, keeping themselves hidden so that you actually had to know the web address to find them – or have a set of sophisticated search-bots like Tara did. They
didn’t want to be found by casual browsers because they were either borderline illegal or, frankly,
completely
illegal. This particular website was hosted in China, which was
interesting too. She used her tablet web-browser to navigate to the site, and moved up until she hit the home page.

She gasped.

The banner on top of the website proudly proclaimed, in English:
Xi Lang’s Emporium of Unusual Pets!
The main space was taken up by several images of lions, crocodiles, a
sullen-looking gorilla and a really big snake. All were in strangely inappropriate settings like landscaped lawns, outside swimming pools and flagstone patios. A message underneath the photographs
read:
You have a desire for some strange or exotic animal, and we can supply it, direct to your door! Come inside and take a look!

Interesting. Interesting and rather creepy Tara had known of course that some people with more money than sense kept pets that you wouldn’t or couldn’t fit into a normal house
– Michael Jackson had kept a chimpanzee, for instance – but she had never thought to wonder where they got them. Of course, it made sense that there would be a middleman, a facilitator
who could offer these animals for sale the way a normal pet shop would offer kittens or puppies.

It was almost certainly illegal. There were international laws against trafficking in endangered or dangerous animals, but that didn’t stop some people from wanting them. They were status
symbols.

She scanned through several pages, grateful that she had hacked her tablet’s settings so that anyone else – like the owners of the website she was currently looking at – would
think that she was based somewhere in Russia. After Nemor Incorporated had managed to track her location within a few seconds of her hacking their website from a desk in her college library, she
had invested in some seriously hardcore security apps. Or, rather, Calum had invested in them for her. He had his own sophisticated computer set-up, but he knew that she was better than him at
digital technology. That was the thing about Calum – he could be arrogant and selfish, but he did recognize talent when he saw it.

There were no other obvious cryptids on the site apart from the possible giant rat, and there were no other images showing the rat. The fact that it was in a cage suggested that it was for sale,
but the mysterious Xi Lang wasn’t advertising it. Maybe it was a special commission. Maybe it had just come into his warehouse, wherever that was, and he was still trying to work out what it
was and how much he could charge for it.

That was a point – where
was
this warehouse? Checking all the web pages, Tara couldn’t find any details. Just because the website said it was based in China didn’t mean
anything, of course, despite the obviously Chinese name of the site’s supposed owner. She opened a separate browser window and set her search-bots looking for any information on
Xi
Lang
and/or his
Emporium of Unusual Pets.
Even if he was trying to disguise his location, they would probably find it.

And they did. Within a few seconds Tara was looking at a scanned image of a receipt from one Xi Lang to a company named Celebrity Services Inc. for the sum of US$100,000. The item purchased was
described only as ‘Biological Specimen’, but Tara was pretty certain that the specimen would have been alive. The address on the invoice was a location in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Which was,
technically, in China.