Cryptozoica Read online

  For a long moment, Darwin didn’t answer or lift his gaze. He murmured doggedly, “That environment must be studied.” Belleau laid a hand on his shoulder. “It will be, Charles, believe me. But the secret of the Tamtungs must be shared only among the scholars of the School of Night. We will finance a thorough study.”

  The deck shuddered underfoot as a heavy wave crashed broadside against the ship. The two men stumbled the length of the cabin. The lanterns swung to and fro. Darwin caught a fragmented glimpse of Belleau’s canteen toppling over, the cap popping free of the short metal neck. A trickle of gray-green slime spilled onto the blood-damp table.

  Crying out, Belleau shouldered Darwin aside and hurled himself forward to grab the flask. As he hastily recapped it, Darwin demanded, “Why are you so obsessed with the muck you found in that pool, Jacque?”

  The Frenchman gave him a long, searching stare. “You mean you do not know? You really don’t?”

  “No, I really don’t,” Darwin replied impatiently.

  Belleau started to speak and then smiled wryly. He glanced over his shoulder at the door, then back to Darwin. “Tell me, Charles…in your studies did you ever come across references to Prima Materia?”

  Darwin’s flesh turned clammy. “Only in the most abstract sense. Something to do with alchemy, isn’t it?”

  Belleau’s smile widened, his hands tightening around the container. “As you say…only in the most abstract sense. In the broadest terms, the concept of Prima Materia states that all particular substances are formed out of one and the same original substance. The most prevalent notion of the Prima Materia to be found in modern thought is the atomistic theory that we inherited from the ancient Greeks. In this conception, all material structures are composed of tiny building blocks of indestructible matter. The alchemists called it the ‘One Only Thing’.”

  He nodded toward the narrow ribbon of slime glistening on the table. “You’ve heard the term primordial ooze or soup, I am sure. So, if we accept that—” Belleau broke off, his body stiffening, his eyes widening. “Sacre dieu! Incroyable!”

  Darwin leaned forward. “What is it?”

  With a forefinger, Belleau pointed toward Hoxie’s body. Following his finger with his eyes, Darwin saw nothing different from the last time he had looked. Then, a stirring, a shifting of shadows caught his attention. For a second, he attributed it to an illusion caused by the flickering lamplight. Then, he felt a pressure in his lungs and a sudden loosening of his bladder.

  The slime that had spilled from Belleau’s flask mixed with Hoxie’s blood, but the fluids had done more than mingle. The sludge flowed along the trail of blood, like drops of liquid trickling down dangling threads.

  Shocked into speechless immobility, Charles Darwin and Jacque Belleau stared at the substance as it progressed up and over Hoxie’s pallid flesh, crawling toward the open gashes in his midsection. Darwin heard a faint rasping sound. Distantly, he realized the short hairs on the nape of his neck had lifted, scraping against the collar of his shirt.

  The thick fluid oozed into the largest wound, bubbling along the edges of the slashed flesh. Then Hoxie’s body began to quiver, the fingers of his hands flexing and unflexing. His limbs twitched spasmodically. Foam flecked his lips. For an instant, Darwin feared they were watching the man’s death-throes.

  Hoxie’s eyes and mouth flew open. He screamed. He jackknifed up from the waist, staring around unfocusedly. Belleau broke the chains of paralysis and threw himself atop Hoxie, bearing him back down onto the table. “Be calm, vaillant ami. You are back aboard ship in the company of your comrades. You are safe.”

  The man twisted his head around, looking toward Darwin. A little of the unreasoning terror left his eyes. “Sir—” he whispered hoarsely. “The dreams I had!”

  Barely able to speak himself, Darwin placed his hand on top of Hoxie’s, “Rest easy, there, old man. Rest easy. You have been sorely wounded, but let the doctor do his work and you’ll be right on the mend.”

  Belleau gazed at Darwin with wet eyes. In a voice made husky by awe, he said softly, “Do you agree now, Charles? We cannot let this gift be exploited by the witch-burners or their modern counterparts.”

  Darwin ran shaking fingers through his beard and hair, his senses reeling. He nodded. “I need air, Jacque. I am feeling rather faint.”

  Belleau’s face registered relief. “Go on, then. I am fine here. I will attend to my patient and we will talk later.”

  Darwin stepped out into the companionway and turned into Harper, the orderly. He held a tray bearing a bowl of biscuits and a mug of tepid tea.

  “Breakfast, sir,” he said.

  The sight of the tray made Darwin realize he was intensely hungry and thirsty. He gulped down the tea and swallowed a biscuit nearly whole. Thanking the man, he carried the mug up the stairs to the deck. Weariness and lack of sleep combined to make him feel as if he were walking through a dream. He hoped he would suddenly awaken in his bed at his home in Shropshire, with the smell of kippers and eggs in his nostrils instead of kelp.

  The ferocity of the gale slackened, but rain still fell and the slate-green sea heaved, capped with white. He walked to starboard. Although the sun had risen, he could see only gray emptiness stretching to a deeper gray on the horizon. Moving with care, he walked to portside aft. He stood at the Beagle’s rail, gazing at the dark bulks of the two islands rising from the sea. Curtains of rain blurred the view. The heavy barque creaked and groaned as she rode at anchor. The sounds were interwoven with the humming vibration of rigging as strong gusts sang through the ropes. The warm wind carried with it the musk of the tropics and Darwin felt a sudden revulsion, wishing for the icy touch of the North Atlantic breezes.

  Captain Fitzroy came to his side, slapping his open palm with a brass telescope. As if he were picking up the thread of a prior conversation, he said, “The bosun is a good shipmate, a good friend. He has sailed with me for the last two years. It would break my heart to lose him.”

  Darwin said, “I don’t believe you will, Captain. I think Mr. Hoxie shall pull through.”

  Fitzroy eyed him with suspicion and surprise. “And why do you think that, Mr. Darwin?”

  Rather than lie to the man, Darwin chose to evade the question. “May I borrow your telescope for a moment?”

  After a second’s hesitation, the captain handed it to him. “Take a final look at your Tamtungs. I doubt we will ever come back this way again. I would hazard a guess that no other ships have come this way in centuries.”

  Darwin peered through the eyepiece, sweeping the lens over the more distant and smaller island of Little Tamtung, over three kilometers away from Big Tamtung. It looked peaceful, unremarkable, with a crescent of white sand beach, palm trees and tropical ferns growing lushly on all sides. The somber verdant hue was relieved by the brilliant red and yellow blossoms of flowering plants.

  He returned his attention to Big Tamtung and the castellated cliffs of volcanic rock looming at least three hundred feet above the jungle. Through the telescope, he studied the high ramparts, briefly noting the fluttering of big wings. He tried to focus on them, but they flew from sight too quickly. He lowered the lens to the shore, watching waves crashing and breaking on the bare stone, foaming spray splashing in all directions. “When the tide is with us, we’ll weigh anchor,” said Fitzroy bleakly. “There are some places on Earth where Mankind doesn’t belong. I think that bloody island is one of them…an unending war for survival that keeps the life there dangerous and violent.”

  Quietly, Darwin intoned, “Yes, survival of the fittest…a process of natural selection.”

  Fitzroy grunted, putting his hands in his pockets. “It’s a place where man would not be among the fittest. He would be naturally selected to serve as prey.”

  Darwin didn’t reply, staring at the figure stalking out of the foliage on the far side of the beach. A shudder shook him and his mouth filled with sour saliva.

  The creature was bipedal and although there was
nothing around by which he could judge its height, he guessed it stood six feet tall. The saurian snout bore a pair of flared nostrils that dilated and twitched. The head, about the same size as that of a dray horse, turned to the left and the right upon an extended, scale-coated neck.

  Huge cold eyes, like those of a serpent’s magnified a hundred-fold, stared unblinkingly out to sea, as if they gazed directly at Darwin. A pair of legs almost as big around as some of the palm trees around the beach supported the lean body. Beads of water shone like tiny pearls on the ridge of feathers running down its spine. A muscular tail trailed out from behind, disappearing into the undergrowth. The claw-tipped forelegs were drawn up to its chest in a parody of prayer.

  Out of the foliage behind the creature stepped another figure, moving with a slow, shuffling sidestep. For a wild instant, he thought it was a man. When he realized it was only man-shaped, his tongue froze to the roof of his mouth. Shadowed by the overhanging fronds of a palm tree, Darwin could barely make out a naked body, the gray, hairless flesh glistening with moisture. Darwin’s gaze was drawn to the large yellow-green eyes, the dim light of dawn making them luminous, molten pools. The eyes radiated a savage anger, outrage and a threat.

  A cold thought, like the slithering of a reptile, crawled across the surface of his mind: If you return, you will die. All of you will die.

  Biting back a cry of fear, Darwin lowered the telescope. Panic weakened his joints, and awakened nausea in his belly. Desperately, he rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “What is wrong, Mr. Darwin?” asked Fitzroy.

  Taking and holding a deep breath, Darwin raised the telescope to his eye again. He focused on the same area, but both the creature and the man-shape were gone, as if they had never existed, except in his imagination.

  For a few seconds, he continued to scan the shore and the brushline, struggling to convince himself that what he had seen had been only a gnarled tree trunk, its bark glistening with rain and the uncertain light cast by the cloud-shrouded sun. His scientific reason told him that the monsters were no more than tricks of the light and eyestrain. His primitive gut instincts knew otherwise.

  “Mr. Darwin?” Fitzroy’s tone was peeved.

  Slowly, Charles Darwin removed the telescope from his eye and handed it back to Fitzroy. “You’re absolutely right, Captain.”

  Lines of confusion furrowed the man’s brow. “Right about what?”

  Darwin turned away, back toward the companionway. His legs trembled, and he grabbed a length of rigging to support himself.

  In a voice scarcely above a rustling whisper, he said, “You were right about the Tamtungs, Captain Fitzroy.”

  “How so?”

  Slowly, Charles Darwin answered, “In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment. There are some places on Earth where Man cannot possibly adapt. I understand that now.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Present Day, May 8th: The Island of Little Tamtung, 520 kilometers southwest of the Makassar Strait

  When Kavanaugh heard about the throat cutting, he knew exactly where to find Mouzi.

  There had been a brawl at the Phoenix of Beauty. A Papuan deckhand had gotten too rough with one of the girls and the pair of wicked little butterfly knives Mouzi always carried came out of her pockets. After Mouzi was done with him, the bouncer threw the man onto the embankment so Huang Luan could eat what was left.

  As sunset fell out of the deep blue sky, Kavanaugh came across the dead Papuan. He lay twisted over on his back, black eyes wide and glazed, his slashed throat leaking a ribbon of blood across the muddy stones. Light winked dully from a heavy silver ring on the middle finger of the man’s left hand.

  Huang Luan was barely eight inches long, although its wingspan stretched over two feet. A long beak full of serrated teeth, talon-tipped wings and unblinking onyx eyes made the raptor look like a demon dressed up in the feathers and plumed tail of a green macaw. It crouched on the Papuan’s chest, claws sunk deep into his rib cage, chewing tiny gobbets of flesh torn from the man’s double chins.

  Kavanaugh had often considered wringing the little hellspawn’s neck, but he figured Bai Suzhen would take a dim view of the decision and cut off his credit, as well as his testicles. As it was, he had presented the archeopteryx to her as a peace offering and she had grown very fond of it. He assumed she thought the feathered reptile was close enough to a phoenix to serve as her establishment’s mascot, since Huang Luan meant Beautiful Phoenix in Mandarin.

  Kavanaugh stepped around the Papuan, his hand reflexively touching the butt of the old Bren Ten holstered at his hip, just in case the archeopteryx decided it wanted to sample meat on the hoof. The creature paid no attention to him, either because it remembered Kavanaugh as the human who had first caged it, or because it knew from a prior taste-test that he wasn’t particularly palatable.

  Carefully, he worked the toe of his boot under the dead man’s back, looked around and pushed him off the embankment into the sullen waters of the cove. He slid down into them with scarcely a splash. To his disappointment, the archeopteryx didn’t sink with its meal, but squawked in outrage and flapped up to a nest atop a nipa palm tree.

  Kavanaugh hoped that since it was getting on toward dark, the monster would settle down for the night, despite the oppressive humidity. Sweat filmed his face and his T-shirt stuck to his back. The air was heavy with moisture, tainted with the thick perfume of jungle and swamp.

  The last downpour of the day had finally tapered off but the dripping of water from the interlaced tops of the trees continued with a maddening monotony. Normally, Kavanaugh didn’t mind the daily tropical storms, but at this time of year on Little Tamtung Island, leeches fell from the saturated branches along with the rain drops and set their suckers into their victims, injecting an anticoagulant into the blood to keep the wounds open.

  When the leeches were gorged, they dropped off but the wounds they left behind were slow to heal and prone to infection. No one came ashore during or after a rain shower without being instructed to check themselves regularly.

  Kavanaugh lifted his gaze from the ripples spreading around the sailor’s body and glanced toward the rust-streaked ship anchored in the flat waters of the bay. He recognized it as Mindanao’s Folly, a slow, lumbering merchant freighter that ran military supplies, food and medicines to tsunami-devastated Indonesia.

  Looking beyond the harbor, he stared at the rain clouds swelling above the black volcanic peak of the island christened Cryptozoica. Although a mile away and shrouded by mist and the blue darkness of the night, he could still see it.

  However, he didn’t see the Keying, the junk of Bai Suzhen, so he assumed she and her crew of Ghee Hin still cruised the Sulawesi Sea northeast of Sarawak, looking for cargo more profitable than that carried by old freighters.

  Bai Suzhen blamed Kavanaugh for being forced to return to her first career as a black marketeer since her legitimate investments in Cryptozoica Enterprises had hit rock bottom. Over the last two years, whenever they met, she greeted him with the same bitter, yet almost laughably formal mantra: “I, the white serpent of good fortune, am still not prospering.”

  Nor had anyone else who poured their hopes, dreams and savings accounts into the venture. Neither Kavanaugh nor his stubborn partner, Augustus Crowe were exceptions, so he had stopped feeling guilty about Bai Suzhen long ago. Her White Snake triad still owned the majority interest in the Phoenix and held the mortgage on his chopper.

  Even Howard Flitcroft had lost sixty million dollars but he hadn’t resorted to smuggling or pandering, although like Bai Suzhen, he held former USAF Captain Jonathan Kavanaugh personally responsible. In fact, Flitcroft himself coined the name “Tombstone Jack” and it fell into common usage so quickly, Kavanaugh often suspected the industrialist of paying the Tamtung Islanders to address him as such.

  Kavanaugh turned toward the Phoenix of Beauty just as the neon sign mount
ed above the veranda blazed with brilliant light. Against a yellow background, the green outline of a shapely nude woman with outspread wings in the place of arms, buzzed and flickered.

  He walked up the pathway made of crushed seashells. Bright flowers with big orange blossoms grew in borders on either side of the path. He knew Bai Suzhen had personally planted the flowers, so he took care not to brush against them. As he reached the broad steps, a mottled Tokay lizard, its scaled hide iridescent in the neon glow, darted along the wooden rails encircling the veranda.

  The Phoenix was the second largest building on Little Tamtung, which really wasn’t that much of an achievement. Built in the old Thai style with a long, gracefully upturned roof and eaves, a colonnaded façade with intricately carved bas-reliefs faced the bay. The orderly row of Bombay chairs arranged on the veranda was vacant, holding only the shadows cast by the close-growing oleanders.

  Kavanaugh pushed open the door and stepped into the interior of the club. Although it was an oasis of relatively cool air, it was not particularly quiet. The jukebox blared out the sugary Chinese lyrics of CoCo Lee and crimson-winged parrots cawed along from elaborate cages hanging overhead, making for a cacophony of gibberish.

  The main room of the club was furnished with rattan tables and wicker chairs. The slowly churning wooden paddles of the fans in the plank ceiling stirred the air but did not refresh the dank and musty atmosphere.

  Three plastic buckets half-filled with brown water betrayed a roof badly in need of repair. The green baize covering of the billiard table was as stained and threadbare as Kavanaugh’s own shirt. The bar itself was of polished black bamboo, the corners inset with brass fittings.

  Although barely two years old, the Phoenix of Beauty exuded an atmosphere of faded grandeur, emulating the colonial establishments of old Indonesia. It had been built to suggest those more opulent times, of decadent nightclubs in exotic climes, and the fact the Phoenix of Beauty had become what it sought to superficially imitate was not lost on anyone, least of all the White Snake triad of Bai Suzhen.