Neanderthal

by John Darnton

  “It could be useful. Useful, hell. It would mean no other country could ever challenge us. At the very least we had to be sure no one else got it.”

  “The Russians.”

  “Right.”

  “And they got here ahead of you.”

  “I don’t know that. They weren’t even supposed to mount an expedition.”

  “Who is behind the Institute?”

  “Who do you think? The government. Not the CIA exactly, more of an offshoot, although there’s always a lot of fighting over that.”

  “Why?”

  “Use your head. Psi research has always been big: extrasen­sory perception, telekinetic powers, nonverbal communication, UFOs—a lot of that; we practically wrote the book on the Roswell incident—alien sightings, transmogrification of matter. You name it, we’ve done it.”

  “But the name: Institute for Prehistoric Research?”

  “We’ve used a lot of different names over the years—different names, different college campuses. For a long time in the seventies we were the Institute for Investigation into Paranormal Phe­nomenology. When this cryptozoology broke, it was important enough to surface under a new name.”

  “And Eagleton?”

  “A spook. An old Cold Warhorse.”

  Matt danced around the question that was forming in his mind. “Let me ask you something else.”

  “Feel free,” Van replied sarcastically.

  “If you knew where these creatures were, why send Kellicut?”

  “The whole point was we didn’t know. The one we got was an accident. This is a big place, in case you haven’t noticed. We needed Kellicut to lead us to them. He was our point man.”

  “Did he know about the CIA?”

  Van produced a crooked smile. “No, he’s as dumb as he looks. He’s in it for the science, just like you guys.”

  Matt exhaled slowly with relief.

  “Why did he send the skull?”

  “To throw us off the track. He sent a note with it saying that all the Neanderthals were dead, that this was the last one. He knew we’d date it.” Van sneered. “He didn’t know we had already captured one.”

  “So he didn’t send the skull to us?”

  “No.”

  “He didn’t ask for us at all?”

  “No.”

  “But we got a note. Susan got it at the hotel in Khodzant when Sharafidin slipped it under her door.”

  “That wasn’t Sharafidin. It was me.”

  “It was Kellicut’s handwriting.”

  “Forged.”

  “Why?”

  Van grinned again. “To make sure you’d come. One more piece of bait. I thought you might back out.”

  Matt was quiet. Everything was falling into place now. As he thought back over the events since they began their ascent, Van cackled again. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The NOMAD.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You think it’s dead. You’re wrong. It’s been beaming its location all this time.”

  Matt felt a quiver of fear. “Beaming it to who?” he asked.

  “Whom,” Van corrected. “Whom do you think? Eagleton, the Institute, the U.S. Marine Corps, the whole goddamn world.”

  “So they could be on their way right now?” Matt was aghast.

  “They are on their way. I wouldn’t be surprised if they showed up in a few days.”

  Matt cursed. “They’ll bring the whole thing down. They’ll stop at nothing to get the power. They’ll hunt down every last one if they have to.”

  He looked squarely at Van. He remembered an academic paper of Van’s he had once read on nonverbal communication among the Kung bushmen, the brilliance and scientific promise it revealed. “What about you?” he demanded. “Doesn’t science mean any­thing to you?”

  “Yes,” Van retorted evenly, “it does. Everything. My whole life. Science is the only thing between us and chaos. It gives us control, protection, power.”

  Matt walked back toward the village, not caring if Van came along or not, but the man followed close at his heels, again the beaten cur.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” Van said, pointing up to the moon taking shape in the darkening sky. “See that? In another few days it will be a full moon. That’s why they were getting ready to sacri­fice me. Now they’ll have to come down here to get me—or get someone else.”

  In his small frontline headquarters, as he liked to think of it, Eagleton was ensconced like the proverbial bullfrog on a lily pad. The building was a Quonset hut especially adapted to his requirements. It had a concrete floor so he could spin his chair around, but there was no protective shield of disinfectant. To his horror, he had found a spider lurking in a corner web in the first two hours.

  The trip had been rough. With his chair strapped in the center of the plane, he felt conspicuous, at stage center, while various assistants moved in and out of their seats, pouring drinks, flirt­ing, gossiping. Some of the gossip was about him, he was sure. He didn’t sleep for fear that he would look ridiculous slumped there, possibly with his mouth open. As expected, when he was carried off the plane he sensed the darting looks. He had missed most of the scenery, and the two windows in the hut were too high to see out of easily. Even at the base of the mountain he felt the difference in altitude, but then he was especially sensitive to such changes.

  And now he was dealing with Kane again, never a pleasant chore. The colonel had given him a rundown on the training. Reading between the lines, and not from anything the man said di­rectly, it didn’t sound as if the team was ready for action, at least on this kind of assignment. Now Kane had fallen silent as he looked at Eagleton’s footlocker, which was upended and divided into shelves crammed with books. His eye had landed on the thick well-thumbed green volume of On the Origin of Species.

  “Ever read it?” Eagleton demanded.

  Kane shook his head.

  “Pity. It’s a remarkable book. It took Darwin two decades to produce it. He had all the ideas as soon as he stepped off the Beagle—we know that from his notebooks—but he dithered about with his studies on barnacles, falling ill at the drop of a hat, walking up and down the same garden path, becoming a recluse. Do you know what held him back all that time? I have a theory.”

  Kane shook his head again.

  “His wife,” said Eagleton. “His upright churchgoing wife. There he was, about to unleash the most subversive and powerful idea upon the world—the idea that man was not created by God or in God’s image—and he was afraid of his wife.” He exploded in laughter. “And I’ll tell you something else I bet you didn’t know.” Kane looked bored. “Nowhere does he actually use the word ‘evo­lution.’ Because, you see, he did not conceive of nature’s work as a progressive continuum, an ascent. All those drawings and car­toons that start with a lowly primate and end with Homo sapiens striding ahead confidently are misconceived. There are no such things as ‘higher animals.’ We’re really all the same in this churn­ing swamp. Some are on top in one millennium, others in another, but all of us are struggling, striving, and changing and none is in­herently superior to another. There is no grand design.”

  Eagleton could see that Kane wasn’t interested and, in truth, he wasn’t either. It was his usual gambit. “Kane,” he said with an air of finality, as if they had been talking about something else all along, “today makes it five weeks since we lost contact. I want you and your men on that mountain tomorrow at first light.”

  The same juices that made Eagleton babble on so nervously, that sense of being ready to leap over the edge toward unpredictable adventure, made Kane feel calm and in control. “Yes, sir,” he replied coolly.

  The attack came at night. In their bower, Matt and Susan were not expecting it. The darkness was crystal clear with stars that stood out against the velvety blackness except in the west, where an al­most full moon hovered above the valley’s rim. There was no wind. The drums had stop
ped a few hours earlier, but Matt had scarcely noticed. Most of the hominids were in their huts. They had been acting listless since the drumming started that evening days ago, as if they were waiting for disaster to strike, but whether the atmosphere of resignation came from foreboding or from af­tershocks of the earthquake was impossible to tell.

  First came the screams. They were blood-lusty yells that struck the heart like arrows, a universal cry from vocal cords that Matt and Susan had never heard before, oddly low in pitch yet loud. They were instantly recognizable as the sounds of warriors charging and were followed by yelps of fear and pain and then the cries of mayhem, as clubs rained down upon bodies.

  Susan was running by Matt’s side, her hair streaming across her face; he could read the terror in her eyes and in the drawn lines of her pale cheeks. Seconds after fleeing they stopped beneath a tree at the top of a small hill and, looking back in the dim light at the bower a hundred feet away, thought they saw a thrashing, the branches and leaves collapsing, and the shadowy movement of squat bodies with a distinctive rolling lope poking around the debris. They waited a minute to catch their breath, then took a roundabout path that led to the village from behind.

  It looked as if a hurricane had struck. Branches and rocks were scattered everywhere and huts were ablaze, sending columns of flame and smoke into the night sky. In the smoke haze, figures dashed around screaming. It was not hard to tell them apart; the attackers wore skins and their faces and upper torsos were smeared with gashes of red, blue, and black. They carried torches and heavy clubs, occasionally raising them to smash the supports of huts, bringing them down and then igniting them. Their bleeding victims were running in panic and frantically seeking escape in all directions.

  In the center of the chaos, with the gun holster still around his neck, was Kee-wak, his eyes dark under the shadow of his brow ridges and his body glistening. He raised one hand in triumph, holding a club by the handle and shaking it at the night sky, and let out a ferocious scream of victory. At that moment, Matt and Susan saw a figure emerge from the shadows, moving slowly toward him and carrying a spear in one hand.

  “Lancelot,” whispered Susan, reaching for Matt’s hand.

  As the figure approached, Kee-wak broke off his scream and turned slowly toward him. Lancelot drew closer. All movement seemed to stop as the renegades froze and watched. Kee-wak stretched himself to his full stature, the black-and-white skin around his head glowing red in the fire, the feathers around his wrist bristling. He stood immobile except for his right arm, which lowered the club and held it behind him, ready to swivel with his pelvis, just as he had done in killing Rudy. Lancelot raised the spear in his right hand and approached still closer. Matt drew an imaginary trajectory through the air straight at the jeering savage. He stared at Kee-wak’s chest. The heart, he thought, aim for the heart! He tried to imagine Kee-wak falling backward, a look of surprise gripping his face, with his chest cavity torn open and spilling blood. Suddenly, almost imperceptibly, Kee-wak froze all but his head, turning it slightly to one side and then the other in that odd lizard-like movement, as if he were searching out something. For a moment he looked uncertain.

  Then Lancelot let fly. The shaft flew through the air fast and powerfully. It arched gracefully, gathering speed as it went, but a split second before it found its target, Kee-wak, spinning faster than seemed possible, thrust up his club to meet it. He smashed it down and it landed with a rattle upon the ground. Kee-wak drew his lips back to show his yellow teeth and walked over to Lancelot, who stood his ground. As he raised up the club and brought it down, Lancelot lifted up an arm to deflect the blow, but there was a deathly crack as the heavy wood smote bone. Lancelot’s arm fell to his side, and he crumpled to one knee from the pain. Kee-wak stood above him for a long moment before raising the club once again and bringing it down with a loud thwack on the back of Lancelot’s skull. Lancelot fell face forward, spilling blood that soon formed a perfect circle around his head, like a red halo.

  Matt felt Susan’s grip tighten. He knew it wasn’t safe to remain so near, but he felt they should withdraw slowly and tactically. Probably only the excitement of the raid and the thrill of the show­down between Lancelot and Kee-wak had prevented the creatures from detecting them so far. Even now, Kee-wak, standing over the lifeless body in triumph, and poking it with the tip of his club, had apparent fits of distraction, as if on some level he was already aware of them, and from time to time he raised his head in a way that made Matt’s gut tighten, as if he were sniffing out invisible currents.

  Matt could see that Susan was fighting panic, and he too tried to impose a calmness at the center of his being, out of fear—a super­stition really—that panic would somehow attract attention, like a red flag fluttering in the breeze. Slowly they stepped backward in the underbrush, closing their eyes periodically, careful not to set any branches quivering.

  Soon they came to the path again. It was dark now because the smoke from the huts blotted out the moon, so they could see only a few feet ahead and had to move cautiously. The screams and sounds of havoc receded as they followed the path, skirting the edge of the village and then approaching it from the other direction. On this side it appeared deserted. Susan stumbled and looked down; she had tripped over a body. She recoiled in horror and clasped her hands to her face.

  “Matt, I don’t think I can do this. I don’t think I can take much more.”

  “I know. I feel the same.”

  “That was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. He’s pure evil.”

  “And to think that Kellicut believes he is a higher specimen.”

  “Where is Kellicut?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “What if they’ve got him?”

  As if by some unspoken agreement, they turned and moved toward the village again, creeping behind the ruined huts. No one was about and the shouts sounded far away. The smoke hung low and dense, an acrid fog. They stopped to rest behind a hut and crouching there in the darkness, heard a low moan from inside the hut. Slowly they moved around to the entrance.

  Van was lying on the ground, rolling back and forth as if he were wounded. But in the moonlight they could see no blood. He gripped his temples with both hands and looked up at them with a hopeless and strangely vacant expression. They rushed over to him, one on each side, and sat him upright. His body was limp and he was perspiring heavily.

  “What is it?” Matt asked. “For God’s sake, are you hurt?”

  Van nodded but it was hard to tell whether he was trying to say yes or no. He gulped with difficulty, as if preparing to talk, and then holding tightly on to Matt’s arm, he said, “I told you they’d come. I knew they would. They’re after me.”

  “Don’t be crazy. You have no idea what they’re after. If they wanted you, they’d know where to find you.”

  “They have.” Van winced again, rubbed his eyes and steeled himself. He stood up, ran his fingers through his hair, then leaned down and swatted the dust out of his trousers, a gesture that Matt recalled from their first meeting at the dig in Djibouti. “Well,” he said with an eerie calmness, “time to go. They’re waiting right out­side.”

  Susan and Matt moved to the edge of the hut and peered through the woven branches. The clearing outside that had been empty only moments before was filled. The creatures had arranged themselves in a semicircle facing the entrance. Suddenly the pounding of drums began only a few feet away, setting up a distant echo off the valley walls. Kee-wak stood directly in front of the hut, gripping the holster in one hand and his club in the other. He was standing on a log, which made him even taller; as he eyed the entrance expectantly, surrounded by the drumming, smoke, and fire, he looked like a demonic force of nature.

  “This didn’t work out the way it was supposed to,” Van said at last. He looked them both in the eye and shook his head. “Remember that note you got back in the hotel?” he said. “That bit about some of us not being fit representatives of our species? I wrote that. An
d I was thinking of myself. But it’s not true, you know.” Then he squared his shoulders and stepped outside.

  24

  The moment they saw Van, the creatures froze. The drummers stopped with their hands in midair, the noise dropped away, and the dust and smoke floated in a night breeze that was soundless ex­cept for the distant crackle of flames. Van strode into the semicircle, an actor commanding center stage. Watching through the slats of the hut, Matt and Susan could see only the back of his head, held high, and his erect bearing. They thought they could read expres­sions of astonishment in the creatures’ faces despite their heavy lines of ocher, which turned them into masks of childlike cruelty.

  Van stopped directly before Kee-wak, now standing erect on the ground in front of the log, and looked him straight in the eye, not with Rudy’s supplication but arrogantly. He turned his back on the huge creature to walk in a circle, and as he did so Matt and Susan saw his eyes were blazing. He completed the circle, stood again be­fore Kee-wak, leaned back, and spat at him. The spittle landed on Kee-wak’s cheek and dripped onto his painted chest.

  The others sprang into action, as if Van’s act of defiance had broken a spell, and surrounded him so that he disappeared under a tangle of flailing arms and clubs. At one point his head rose above the melee, held by a fist that clenched his hair. They pinned him to the ground, then clasped his hands behind his back and tied him to a wooden snare. They bent his legs back, until the knees snapped and he cried out in pain, and tied his feet to the back of his thighs so that he lay on the ground on his belly, trussed like a bird before the oven.

  Van’s mouth was unobstructed and he made the most of it. He screamed obscenities, half in hysteria and half in anger. Turning his head so he could look up at Kee-wak, he yelled, “You son of a bitch, we’ll get you. Sooner than you think, we’ll get you!”

  Four of the creatures stooped, picked him up almost gently, and placed him upon the log, balancing him so that his head and neck extended into thin air. Then they unfastened the snare, wrapped his arms around the log, reattached it so that he was hugging the stump of wood, and brought a round rock, thin and as large as a flagstone, which they placed under his chin. Its edge was as sharp as a guillotine; merely swallowing made it cut into Van’s throat, re­leasing a tiny trickle of blood that ran down his white flesh into the hair of his chest.