“San Juan.”
“That’s... Mexico?”
“Puerto Rico.”
“I knew that. Filming?”
“You betcha. Look, cuz, this connection’s shitty, so I’ll just get down to it. You heard about Anthony Peregrine?”
“Who’s that?”
“What do you mean, who’s that?”
“I’m guessing he’s...” Theo lowered his voice. Nobody was eavesdropping. Passers-by passed by, nobody cared. He was just another Manhattanite, on his phone. Still, discretion was your life. You were a member of a highly exclusive club and you took pains not to advertise the fact. “One of us.”
“Hell, yes, he’s one of us.”
“But I can’t put a name to... the name. I don’t keep tabs on us all.”
“Well, Anthony Peregrine is Aeneas’s latest alias. Or rather, was.”
“Was?”
Theo felt something in the pit of his stomach, not quite fear; unease, fear’s handmaiden.
“They’re saying he’s dead,” said Chase.
“They’re saying? Who’s saying?”
“Couple of news feeds. Reports from Argentina. I got a ping from Google Alerts earlier today.”
“You Google Alert us?”
“Hey, you may not keep tabs. I do. It’s fun to know what the relatives are up to.”
“The very distant relatives.”
“It’s not like we have family reunions. Anyhow, that’s not the point.”
“No. The point is he can’t be dead. Aeneas can’t be. That’s not possible. Unless he’s switching to a new identity.”
“Yeah, but that’s not how we do it, is it?” said Chase. “We don’t fake our deaths. Not any more. Because it’s too hard nowadays. You can’t just get hold of some stranger’s corpse, mess up its face and pass it off as your own. Forensic pathology has put paid to all that. So we just duck out discreetly and go be someone else. That’s the way.”
“Maybe Aeneas has decided to go old-school.”
“He’s a damn idiot if he has. And Aeneas is many things, but a damn idiot isn’t one of them.”
“How is he supposed to have died? Do you know?”
“Something to do with an avalanche, seems to be the gist of it. Killed in, by, under, an avalanche in the Martial Mountains, down in Tierra del Fuego.”
“So then it must be a mistake. Must be someone else called Anthony Peregrine. That or it’s misidentification of the body. Either way, they’ve got the wrong guy.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. But I’d like to know for sure, one way or the other.”
“Me too,” said Theo. “You have a number for him?”
“Nope. You’re the only family member I keep in touch with – which is a tragedy for at least one of us.”
“If not both.”
“So I’m volunteering to go down there and do some nosing around. I’m not expecting you to tag along. The great Theo Stannard doesn’t leave Manhattan, does he? Superstar thriller writer, with his swish Gramercy Park apartment and his ten-grand-a-year health club and his cute twenty-something publicists with the tits and teeth.”
“Not fair.”
“But accurate. But as a matter of fact, I don’t mind going alone. I’m nearer, and there’s no point both of us having a wasted trip, if that’s what it turns out to be.”
“Okay. Works for me.”
“I can’t leave Puerto Rico for another two or three days. I’m at the tail end of... something. You know. Business to finish. We’ve wrapped, but there’s one last thing to take care of.”
“A world free of monsters.”
“Got it in one, cuz. But when I’m done with that, I’ll fly south, see what’s what.”
“Appreciated,” said Theo. “It’s almost certainly nothing, but keep me posted anyway.”
“Will do. And Theo? Remind me. Who’s got a constellation?”
Theo groaned. “For fuck’s sake...”
“Yeah, but out of the two of us? Is it me or you? Let me think...”
“That never gets old, Chase.”
“Sure doesn’t,” said Chase Chance brightly, and hung up.
“YOU LOOK GLOOMY. Preoccupied.”
So said Cynthia as Theo sidled back into the restaurant and retook his seat.
“Do I? Shouldn’t. Not with that book deal in the offing.”
“What’d he say? Chase Chance, Monster Hunter?”
“He was just – just touching base. That’s all.”
“Representation?”
“Didn’t find out. Didn’t come up.”
“Ah well. I’ll keep badgering you. You know I will.” She added, “You do seem worried, though.”
“I’m not.”
Not yet, he added mentally.
He resumed eating his meal. The food was excellent; he ought to be enjoying himself, but he wasn’t.
Cynthia rattled on, in her way. Contract fine print. Royalty thresholds. Foreign markets. A hint of Hollywood interest. Potential this. Probable that. Avenues to pursue, calls to make, trees to shake. Theo heard, but didn’t listen.
Aeneas was dead?
Couldn’t be.
If he was, what did that mean for the rest of them?
THREE
El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico
CHASE CHANCE STALKED through the rainforest. He knew his prey was nearby. He knew, too, that his prey was aware he was there.
The beast had gone to ground. It seemed to have sensed that the man tracking it was no ordinary being. He was implacable; he was nemesis. Chase could almost smell its terror. But terror did not make it any less dangerous. Quite the opposite.
This was the creature he and his camera crew had been pursuing for two weeks, seemingly without success. They had camped out at the edge of the El Yunque National Forest and ventured in every night, shooting on high-def video with a low-light image-intensifying attachment. Along with innumerable mosquito bites, they had gathered a hundred hours of footage. There’d been no direct contact with their quarry, but enough creepy moments – rustles in the undergrowth, flashes of retinal reflection, eerie animal calls – to fill out forty-three minutes of running time and generate another nail-biting, ratings-grabbing episode. Chase Chance, Monster Hunter never actually found any of the monsters he hunted, but viewers didn’t seem to mind, aside from a few online grousers who thought that the show was all foreplay and no fuck. The thrill, for the folks at home, was the search, the atmosphere, the possibility...
Chase, in fact, had spent most of the two weeks deliberately steering himself and the crew away from where the creature was. He had figured out the location of its lair pretty early on: somewhere in the strip of forest between the western bank of the Icacos River and the El Toro Wilderness Area. Its trails and spoor all led in that direction.
Consequently, he had made sure to stay east of the Icacos, pretending, with all his pop-science authority, that he was busy narrowing down the creature’s whereabouts. At one point, out of sight of the crew, he had adapted a mongoose’s pawprint in the mud with his knuckles, then drawn it to their attention and speculated whether it might well belong to the animal they were looking for. Both Joey the cameraman and Ahmed the sound guy had fallen for the ploy, as had production assistant Mary-Anne, usually the sceptic in the group. All three became a little more agitated, a little more panicky. Upping the crew’s anxiety levels was part and parcel of the show’s appeal. If Chase could get them spooked and apprehensive, their excitement transferred to the viewers. Result: subscription channel gold. An audience of four million, domestic, on average. Double that, worldwide.
Chase Chance was US television’s premier cryptozoological adventurer. As the show’s credits voiceover put it, “He chases the animals that are rumoured to exist, that aren’t supposed to exist, that should not exist.” Over three seasons so far he had gone after yetis, lake monsters, giant earthworms, outsized felids, pterosaurs, owlmen, mothmen, apemen, prehistoric fish, flightless bird
s, every conceivable kind of cryptid. Wherever one reared its head, or allegedly did, there he and his crew went. Nepal, Mongolia, the Australian Outback, Congo, Cambodia, Cornwall – Chase and team crisscrossed the planet, racking up thousands of air miles in their ceaseless quest. Every time, they came home empty-handed, with nothing to prove conclusively that any such beasts were to be found. That, it seemed, was the abiding message of Monster Hunter: there are no monsters. Chase would say as much in his to-camera piece at the end of each episode. He would deliver a spiel about hoaxes, misunderstandings, wrongly interpreted evidence, over-credulousness, the human love of a good mystery. He would say he continued to want to believe, but he hadn’t yet found anything to make him believe.
It was pure baloney.
There were monsters.
And Chase had dedicated himself to eradicating each and every one of them.
Often his investigations turned up nothing whatsoever; the cryptids were genuinely bogus, just local folklore or tourist board flim-flam. Still, he got an episode out of it, airtime filled, no harm done.
Then there were the occasions when he happened upon a real cryptid. Something outside the standard taxonomy. Something anomalous. A throwback to a bygone age.
And he would destroy it.
THIS WAS ONE of those occasions.
His prey was a chupacabra.
For two weeks, Chase had gone to great lengths to disprove the existence of the legendary “goat-sucker”, which had first been spotted in Puerto Rico in the mid-1990s before cropping up elsewhere in the world. A rash of recent sightings by villagers living on the periphery of El Yunque had drawn the Monster Hunter team to the region. A couple of goats had turned up dead, their throats torn out, which seemed to put the matter beyond doubt. A chupacabra was once again at large, slaughtering livestock in its trademark fashion. The wounds were large and ragged, so it was impossible to judge whether or not vampirism had taken place, but the goats’ bodies were sufficiently bloodless that it seemed likely.
Chase had got Joey to shoot footage of a feral dog wandering between houses in one village. Through deft editing and use of commentary, it could be implied that the dog, or another like it, was responsible for the goat deaths. It helped that the animal was stricken with mange. Traditionally a chupacabra was hairless, with spikes on head and back. When people as far afield as Maine and Russia thought they had seen one, what they had in fact seen was a disease-ridden hound with patches of spiky, clumpy fur.
Then, for Chase, it had simply been a case of misdirection, keeping his crew keyed up and jumpy in the rainforest after dark, while artfully avoiding places where they stood any real chance of running into the chupacabra.
The three of them – Joey, Ahmed, Mary-Anne – were presently on their way back to Burbank, to start piecing the show together in an editing suite. Chase had elected to stay on in Puerto Rico for another day or so, to “soak up the culture,” he had said. No sooner were they off to the airport, however, than he was back up in El Yunque.
Hunting.
The rainforest, this morning, was all water. Mist hung, streams burbled, leaves dripped. The tree canopy blocked out the sun, but the heat was still tremendous. The air was burning soup. Chase, soaked with sweat, trod through the green, mountainous terrain, stepping over vast rosewood and teak roots and brushing aside giant ferns. A frog screeched shrilly – a five-centimetre-long coqui, as loud as it was tiny. A macaw cawed. Hummingbirds shimmered.
Chase could not allow himself to be distracted. There was only one animal he was interested in right now. The rest were just background noise.
The chupacabra’s lair was close; just over the next ridge. Chase slowed his progress. Every footstep counted. Every movement must be steady and careful. Stealth was all.
He climbed the incline, placing his feet with precision in the thick loam, toe to heel, so that he wouldn’t slip.
He recalled a time. The first time. His first ever monster. He remembered how he had journeyed to her home, an abandoned Hittite temple beyond the river Okeanos, which was reputed to be the source of all of Earth’s fresh water, in the region that would come to be known as Mesopotamia. He remembered how he had approached her and her two sisters backwards, guiding himself by the reflection in his shield. He remembered how he had lopped off her snake-haired head with a sickle and stuffed it in a carrying bag, for later use, never once catching its grey, baleful gaze.
Every hunt thereafter had had its moments, its own risks, its own challenges.
But none would ever be quite as terrifying and exhilarating as that first, his victory over the Gorgon Medusa. It had been the moment when he realised his destiny, when he finally understood why he had been born and what he was meant to do with his life. When he stopped being just the bastard son of a god – Zeus, who had impregnated his mother Danae in the form of a shower of gold – and became Perseus, slayer of monsters.
HE MISSED THAT sickle. It had been the ideal weapon. A gift from Hermes, its adamantine blade never needed sharpening. Its heft was just right, perfectly balanced in his hand. It cut almost without effort, finding no resistance in the thickest of hide or the densest of bone. He had surrendered it to Odysseus as part of the divine weapons amnesty, the covenant made among the demigods some five centuries BCE. Not a day went by when he didn’t regret that decision, even though it had been for the common good.
The combat knife he used these days was a decent implement, no question. A Kizlyar Voron-3, the preferred hand weapon of Russia’s Spetsnaz special forces. Fixed-blade. Damask steel. Textured grip. Blood groove. It killed, and killed well.
But it wasn’t his sickle.
At last he crested the ridge. Below, in a shallow valley, grew a massive mahogany. Its trunk was split at the base; within this fissure the chupacabra had made its nest. The hollow conical space was the size of a tepee. Nice, cosy and dry.
The beast was waiting for him in there. For all his precaution, it would have heard him coming, scented him. Had Chase simply gone stomping towards it, making no effort to be furtive, it would have bolted. That was how it avoided the tour parties and foraging villagers that strayed onto its home turf. The moment it caught wind of them crashing through the forest, it ran away, returning once they had gone.
With this hunter, the chupacabra sensed that its only chance was concealing itself. Biding its time. Lurking in the darkness of its lair until an opportunity came.
An opportunity to attack.
Chase understood the creature. He understood its desperation. It knew there was no point in fleeing, not from him. Hope of survival lay in sudden, overwhelming force. Do or die. Kill or be killed.
And so it went.
The chupacabra charged. At breakneck speed, it launched itself from the fissure.
It was as ugly as a nightmare. A metre high from paws to haunches, hunched, leathery, brown-grey like a bat, with a stubby muzzle and wide-spaced, tar-black eyes. It snarled as it ran, exposing primary fangs as thick as fingers and a host of splayed secondary fangs like needles, all glistening with slobber. Its claws kicked up sprays of leaf mould. Its spikes were raised, like bristling hackles. Its expression was a concentrated, ferocious scowl.
Chase planted his feet, knife at the ready, braced to meet it.
When it was within striking distance, the chupacabra sprang.
Chase, lightning-quick, ducked.
The beast sailed over his head, but it landed solidly and spun round with barely a pause. Snarling still, it rushed him again. Chase side-stepped and slashed. The chupacabra evaded the knife thrust, twisting like an eel, so that he nicked its flank rather than ripping open its belly. It yipped in pain but was instantly back on the offensive. It wasn’t just operating on fight-or-flight adrenaline now; it was affronted, angry.
Jaws wide, fangs bared, it scuttled in low. Its target was the soft parts, the stomach, the genitals. A crippling bite.
Chase skipped backwards, away, knife to the fore. The chupacabra halted, then feinted. Chas
e stood his ground. The beast feinted again. He stayed stock still. The chupacabra was trying to learn about him. It wanted to see which way he tended to go when threatened, left or right. Then it could exploit that when it attacked for proper.
Smart little fucker.
A third feint, but Chase sprang a surprise by lunging straight at it. The chupacabra, caught on the hop, felt a powerful hand grab it by the scruff of the neck. Next thing it knew, its head was being pressed into the forest floor. The knife was poised, point downward, above its eye.
It fought back, writhing, legs flailing. A claw raked Chase’s knee.
Son of a bitch!
He recoiled instinctively, letting go of the chupacabra, which in a flash righted itself. Chase had had the upper hand, a perfect kill position. A lucky swipe of the paw had cost him that. Once more, he and the creature were on an equal footing.
The cut in his knee wasn’t deep, but it hurt and hindered movement. The chupacabra went on the attack with renewed ferocity, a rapacious glint in its eye. It had drawn blood, something it never expected to. Perhaps this predator was not as unbeatable as it had first thought.
What followed was a flurry of close-quarter violence. The chupacabra dived, gnawed, danced, leapt. Chase fended, grappled, swerved, retaliated. Together, face to face, they swung about in rough circles. Everything outside of their fight ceased to matter. Monster and demigod vied with all their might for supremacy. Both knew that the struggle would end only when one of them was dead or incapacitated. Both were determined not to be that one.
It was a battle of attrition. Soon the chupacabra was riddled with stab wounds, some of them long scratches, a few penetrating. Chase had lost a chunk of meat from his left forearm and had a couple of lacerating bites on his legs. Blood glistened in the murky green rainforest light. The leaves of various flowering bromeliads around them were spattered with it.
As if by mutual consent, the combatants parted. Exhausted, panting, they eyed each other across a metre of clear ground. The earth between them had been churned up by their feet, as though a small localised hurricane had struck. Loam-dwelling insects, disturbed, exposed, crawled to find shelter.
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