by Jonah Buck
When they pulled up beside the Venture, Englehorn tossed a rope up onto the yacht and threw the ends into a knot. Part of the boat’s side railing had been torn off, and a couple of windows were smashed in on the sides, but Denise couldn’t see up onto the deck yet.
No one came out to greet them. No voices cheered for rescue. The only greeting they received was a surprisingly cold ocean breeze that cut right through Denise’s jacket.
“Hello?” Captain Englehorn shouted. There was no response. “Hello?” he tried again. They all waited for a moment, but the only sound was the hush of the wind.
“Check it out, Captain,” Hobhouse said.
Grabbing a length of railing overhead, Englehorn used a busted-out porthole to boost himself up onto the deck. He looked back down at them for a moment before slipping out of view.
Nothing happened.
Englehorn didn’t say anything. The Venture creaked and groaned as it bobbed in the waves, but there was no other sound. Denise strained her ears, wondering if she could at least hear the man walking along the deck in his boots, but there was nothing.
“Englehorn?” Hobhouse called. “Captain?”
There was no response.
“I’m going up,” Hobhouse said. He grabbed the railing and clambered up the side of the yacht.
Denise waited a moment, but Hobhouse didn’t stick his head over the side of the railing to wave them up either. Almost a full minute passed. The crew fidgeted in their seats. They didn’t like this any more than Denise did.
Finally, they heard a voice, surprisingly quiet. It was from Hobhouse. “You guys should see this.”
Everyone followed Englehorn and Hobhouse up onto the deck. Denise went last, hauling herself up until her face was level with the deck.
At first, all she could see were the backs of everyone’s shoes and legs. She pulled herself all the way over the railing and found herself staring at everyone’s backs.
Pushing her way through the group, she finally saw what had captured everyone’s attention. The wooden deck was marred by dozens of sets of deep gouges. Some of them chewed all the way through the surface of the wood and opened up ragged slits to the areas below decks.
A number of the gouges also featured dark stains nearby. Sometimes, the stains were small, no more than a few spattered droplets. In other places, they were big, where some dark liquid had been splashed and smeared across the whole deck. The sun had washed some of the color out of the stains, but they were still a visible maroon.
As if to remove any doubt about where the stains came from, a few bones lay scattered across the deck. A jawbone, cracked roughly in half, lay near the feet of Captain Englehorn.
Obviously, the Venture had not merely blown out to sea during a storm. There had been a crew aboard when this happened. How big of a crew, Denise couldn’t say. The bones scattered around could have come from multiple people of just one very thoroughly dismembered individual. A stump grinder would have a harder town reducing a person down to less.
Denise bent down on her knees and put her hand up against one set of gouges. The four deep scratches were set significantly further apart than her own fingers. They looked like claw marks, but Denise didn’t know of anything big enough to make such huge scores in the wood. Perhaps a truly monstrous bear could do something like this, but there was no place for such an animal on a boat this size.
“I think I’ve seen enough,” Captain Englehorn said at last. The rest of the crew nodded along with him. “We’re not going to find anyone to help here.”
“Right,” Hobhouse said. He bit his lip. “Alright, let’s head back to the ship. Englehorn, make note of our coordinates. Then, I want you to scuttle this boat. We’ll tell the authorities later that we confirmed it sank. All hands lost.”
“Wait. Scuttle it? Why?” Denise asked. “Maybe a bigger ship can tow it into a port and find out what happened.”
“No, we’ll sink it. What happened here is pretty self-evident, and the family of whoever this is would probably be best off not knowing the full truth. Something clearly attacked this boat and devoured everyone on board. That’s both good and bad news.”
“How in the world is that good news?” Denise asked.
“It means that the stories I followed out here are true. This is what we came out here to find. This is the whole purpose of the expedition.”
“If that’s the good news, I’m afraid to ask what the bad news is.”
“You’ll be stuck on the island with whatever did this.”
“Peachy.”
FOUR
CHIROPTIARY
Night had fallen over the Shield of Mithridates as it continued north into the very heart of the Indian Ocean. They were hundreds of miles from anything but their destination.
Whereas before Denise had been excited to finally get off this ship and find some space away from Balthazar and the other hunters, now she was a lot less enthusiastic. She’d told Gail and Harrison what she’d seen aboard the Venture before Englehorn holed the ship and it sank beneath the waves.
Right now, the entire hunting team was seated in the dining room, albeit spread out into the groups they’d settled into. Denise sat with Gail and Harrison. Shinzo Takagari sat by himself, his eagle asleep in its cage now that it was dark. Balthazar, Silas, Creighton, Dr. Marlow, Andris, and Jubal all sat in a tight little cluster.
Silas looked bored to tears by his present company. He caught Denise looking in his direction and nodded politely.
Normally, all ten hunters wouldn’t sit in the same room at once. However, Herschel Hobhouse had requested they all meet here tonight after dinner. Supposedly, now that they were as far away from prying eyes as they could get, he felt Yersinia’s corporate secrets were being adequately protected.
They were all finally about to learn what the hell they were supposed to be doing and why it might be worth one hundred thousand dollars. The room buzzed with murmured conversation, part anticipation, part bravado meant to paper over fear after discovering the fate of the Venture.
“Maybe it’s just because I didn’t see it with my own eyes, but I’m still not convinced. A giant animal? On a boat that size? How does that even happen? Some sort of sea monster? Because let me tell you right now, I do not have the sort of equipment to hunt the Loch Ness Monster,” Harrison said.
“All I’m telling you is what I saw,” Denise said. “The deck was scratched all to hell by enormous claw marks, and something had torn apart at least one person aboard that boat. I can’t rule out other possibilities, but it looked like an animal attack. A bad one.”
“There’s other possibilities. Maybe whoever died on that yacht was trying to fix a piece of faulty equipment, like a motor with a big propeller. Something goes wrong, the propeller chews them apart, slices up the deck, and falls overboard. Seabirds take care of the rest of the body, so it looks like the accident was even worse than it already was.”
Denise actually liked that possibility a lot more than what her own mind pointed to. A freak boating accident was a lot easier to accept than some sort of beast doing that and then vanishing without a trace.
There were problems with Harrison’s idea, though. “I dunno. The scratch marks were all over the place, but they were consistent. Four big cuts, every time. Like a big claw. I don’t think a piece of mechanical equipment would do that.”
“Let’s just suppose for a moment that it was a creature,” Gail said. “I’m not saying it was. I’m not saying it wasn’t. But let’s just think like it was for a minute or two here. Do you think that’s what could have gotten the dishwasher who disappeared last night?”
“I don’t know,” Denise said. “I mean, unless it came out of the water, I don’t know how it would attack anyone on a boat, and the deck of this ship rides a lot higher off the surface than that little yacht. Plus, nobody has found any huge claw marks anywhere on the Shield of Mithridates. Given the way that yacht was torn up, I’d expect at least a little damage around here.”
“A little damage and a lot of screaming. People don’t get eaten alive quietly,” Harrison added.
“That too,” Denise said. She still didn’t like the coincidence, though. So far, they were missing a member of the crew, and they’d also found another vessel where everyone aboard had been massacred. Any enthusiasm she might have had for this excursion was going straight down the crapper.
At that moment, Herschel Hobhouse entered the dining room and found his way to a table at the front of the room. The murmuring swirling through the room died down and then faded to nothing. Even looking tired from a long day, Hobhouse’s enthusiasm was evident. It shone through his dark eyes, grabbed the audience by the shoulders and said, listen up because I’ve got something to say. His presence immediately commanded the room.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for your patience with me over this long journey. I know I haven’t been completely open with you, but that’s by design. This has been my pet project since I joined Yersinia, and at first, no one at the company believed in it. Since then, I’ve slowly convinced enough of the right people to authorize this. This project has been my baby from day one, and I didn’t want it being jeopardized by sending a trail of whispers to rival companies. However, we’ve reached the point where it’s necessary to inform everyone just what their roles are in this scheme of mine. Thank you for being intentionally strung along. Here’s what I haven’t told you. Here’s what only a handful of people not on this ship know. We’ll reach Malheur Island tomorrow.”
“And what can we expect to find there?” Balthazar rumbled at him.
“Frankly, I don’t know. At least, not exactly. What I can tell you is the evidence I have for what I’m hoping to find on that island. Or rather, what I’m hoping you’ll find. They say that good management often just involves finding a collection of skilled team members and getting out of their way, that’s why I wanted the very best and brought all of you along on this expedition.”
Harrison raised his hand. “Sure. Great. I don’t want to stop you from stroking my ego here, but what was the name of the island again?”
Herschel looked annoyed at being interrupted. “Malheur Island.”
“Could you spell that?” Harrison asked. Denise and everyone else in the room looked at him. Hobhouse shrugged and spelled it out, and Harrison nodded his thanks.
“Anything else?”
“Nah. We’re good.” Herschel tried to find his place in his notes again while Harrison leaned over close to Denise and Gail. “You don’t grow up in New Orleans without picking up at least a little French. Malheur is the word for ‘calamity’ or ‘woe.’”
Hobhouse found his place again. “Let me give you a little history about what you’re getting into. A French trading vessel discovered the island in the 1600s while sailing toward the East Indies. They left a few of the crew behind to set up a trading post. When the traders came back a couple of months later, they found nothing but destroyed shacks and the bloated remains of the men they’d left behind.
“No one else attempted to colonize the island for another two hundred years or so. The Dutch claim this island as part of their extensive empire in the East Indies. On several occasions, they’ve attempted to survey Malheur Island, to build outposts there, or otherwise add some sort of administrative center. None of these attempts have succeeded in the slightest. In fact, none of these attempts has lasted more than a month.
“Furthermore, small ships have been known to go missing when they sail near the island. You all saw evidence of what happens to them today. Most vessels avoid the area, in part because there’s nothing else out here and in part because the stories have scared most would be explorers off.
“There’s a small population of islanders living on Malheur. Occasionally, traders will stop by and swap goods with them for spices, but they’ve established their village behind a large wall on a peninsula of the island. There have been a couple of attempts to study them by anthropologists, but those expeditions have gone just like all the others. No one has attempted any major venture on Malheur since the Great War.
“Everything on the other side of that wall is untamed jungle and rough terrain. That’s where I want you to focus your searches. “
“This sounds like a dangerous place. I’m starting to see why Yersinia is paying us so much,” Silas said.
“Indeed. It is dangerous. However, you are the most prepared group to ever set foot on the island. Unlike the occasional hapless Dutch administrator, you all have experience in survival situations. You know how to establish safe base camps, protect yourselves from wild animals, and handle wilderness survival situations. After dropping you off with all your supplies, the Shield of Mithridates will retreat to a safe distance away from the island and wait for news from you.”
“And what, pray tell, are we actually supposed to be looking for on this island? You still haven’t told us what we need to hunt to earn that hundred thousand dollar reward,” Creighton said.
“Ahools. And ideally, you won’t be hunting them. Not like something you would track for sport at least. Hopefully, you’ll be able to capture a few of them alive.”
“Ahools? And what exactly is an ahool?”
“An ahool is a legendary species of bat said to inhabit the darker corners of Indonesia. They’re large, ferocious predators that live in jungle caves and emerge during the night to carry off just about anything smaller than themselves.”
“And just how big are these ahools supposed to be?” Denise asked. The largest bat in the world was the flying fox, with a wingspan of about five feet. However, they weighed less than five pounds. Being generous and outright doubling the size of a flying fox to ten feet across, the animal still wouldn’t weigh very much. Most of a bat’s size was in its wings. Their bodies were tiny, frail little things. How hard could it be to trap even a large bat and throw it in a cage?
“Imagine a grizzly bear with wings,” Hobhouse said.
“Wait. Hold on a minute here. That has to be myth and exaggeration. There’s no such thing. A bat that size would be able to carry a person away,” Denise said in disbelief.
“Yes. Yes, it would. And the scene on the Venture was strikingly similar to how I would imagine the aftermath of a gigantic bat attack.”
That shut Denise right up. Most of the reason she couldn’t quite accept the Venture as an animal attack was simply because there was no animal still there. It was on a yacht. Unless the creature fell into the sea, where would it go? How would it even reach the Venture out on the ocean? But those problems went away if whatever had attacked could simply fly away.
Well, shit.
“Okay, so explain this to me. Why exactly do you and Yersinia want giant bats? Yersinia is a biomedical company, is it not?” Gail asked.
“Indeed it is. Yersinia is a global leader in everything from pharmaceuticals to hospital equipment. So I can see how the connection might not be obvious at first. There’s essentially four reasons why Yersinia is interested in Malheur Island and the creatures that we hope inhabit it.
“The first reason is more than a little self-serving. We think that anything that exhibits the sort of growth characteristics of an ahool probably has interesting biological properties. That’s the reason we’re willing to lay so much money on the table. To survive, an ahool would need to reach maturity fairly quickly, which would require almost unprecedented growth for a mammal and put its body under incredible strain. Yersinia wants to study one of these animals up close, to test out its body chemistry. Putting a human through similar growth pressure would almost certainly kill us, so if we can understand how another mammal does it, we might be able to develop drugs that help the human body cope with traumatic physical experiences. That’s the goal at least. We might discover something completely different. For all we know, the only economic value of a gigantic bat might be nitrate-rich guano for use in fertilizer.
“The second reason is also more than a little self-serving. Yersinia would
love the good press of discovering a new species, especially one as spectacular as the ahools. We would have a wave of interest directed our way, and with it, a secondary wave of investment dollars.
“The third reason is related to the second, but it’s a little more high-minded. If your expedition succeeds, and you discover a colony of ahools living on Malheur Island, then we’d like to work with the Dutch government and transform the island into a nature preserve.”
Hobhouse looked directly at Denise as he spoke. If he specifically requested her for this expedition, as Roger Pick said, then he must know the reason she had quit the hunting business. He must know that she’d only agreed to go in the first place because this wasn’t a true hunting expedition. Curiosity and money had helped get her on this ship, but she still wouldn’t have come along if the purpose was just to blow holes in a bunch of animals.
“Think of this as the environmental justice reason. Far too often after mankind has introduced itself to a new species, that species has gone extinct. Dodo birds might have proven economically valuable, if not for medical research then maybe for meat production, if mankind hadn’t driven them extinct. But this is about more than that. I think we lose something that can’t be measured in purely economic terms when we destroy another species like that. There’s something fundamentally unjust about eliminating an entire class of creatures through our own negligence.
“Worse yet are the times we intentionally slaughter a species until it no longer exists. Fourteen years ago, the very last passenger pigeon on earth died at the Cincinnati Zoo. A century before that, up to five billion passenger pigeons existed in North America, sometimes all but blotting out the sun for days at a time as they moved on their annual migrations. What happened? They were considered a cheap source of food, so people would simply aim shotguns up into the sky and kill hundreds at a time. They’d take whatever they wanted and feed the rest to the dogs, if they didn’t just leave them to rot. The very last bird in the wild was shot and killed in 1900. Yet, it didn’t have to be this way. Even a tiny amount of foresight could have prevented the total elimination of the species, and yet they were senselessly annihilated anyway.