by Guy d'Armen
A wave of adrenaline shot through the adventurer’s body raising both his senses and reflexes. He quickly pulled the deadly dynamite off his belt and threw it into a nearby tree.
In a flash of fur and teeth, a canine that stood nearly six foot-tall at the shoulder leapt out of the brush toward Ardan. Its body was covered in a thick red fur. It had teeth that were nearly two inches long, and at least an inch wide, and claws that held the same dimensions.
In less than a second, the beast had reached Ardan, but the super-man’s reflexes allowed him to sidestep it and use his spear to quickly strike the monster on its side as it went by. The beast skidded to a stop a few feet past Ardan. The massive canine growled and tensed his legs to charge once again. Again, Ardan’s amazing body moved faster than the creature’s and he launched his hunting knife at the canine before it was able to spring at him. The knife buried itself in the beast’s shoulder, sending a spray of blood into the air.
After Ardan had thrown the knife, he’s taken two steps back into a thicket. The beast roared in a mixture of pain and hunger and then sprang again. As it reached mid-air, the doctor was crouching low so that both he and his spear were hidden by the vegetation.
Ardan drove the back end of his spear into the ground and positioned the tip at the edge of the bushes. As the beast came in, Ardan quickly lifted the tip so that it was pointed at its mouth. He held the spear in place as the beast’s own weight drove it into its mouth and through the back of its skull, ending its existence.
The beast’s body twitched as Ardan shifted his spear, causing the dead animal to slump to the ground.
The scientist bent down to examine the slain creature. He looked at it carefully, taking mental notes on its attributes, in particular its height and weight. After his survey was complete, he spoke aloud to himself:
“A Dire Wolf—just as I suspected. Now, to confirm if my hypothesis about where you come from is correct or not.”
Ardan scooped up the dead Dire Wolf in his powerful arms and carried it over to the tree where he had tossed the dynamite.
Ardan lifted the Dire Wolf over his head and placed it upon a branch of the tree. He felt that he needed to return to Gévaudan with the carcass in order to prove to the townspeople that the beast was not some supernatural monster sent to slay them, but rather simply a large animal. Securing the carcass of the Dire Wolf to the tree branch would ensure that none of the local animals would try to eat it and distort its appearance.
Once the remains were secure, Ardan closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and refocused his mind and body. After he had calmed down, he again inhaled deeply. The night time air had no sooner entered his nose than he was able to detect the odor of water and soil mixing to form mud.
Ardan tightened his grip on the dynamite and began moving quickly in the direction of the mud.
Doctor Francis Ardan was an extremely intelligent human being and he was well aware that the success of most of his adventures rested not on the implementation of his unique physical skills, but rather the work and time that his mind put into a quest before he embarked on it. He had spent hours not only researching the original Beast of Gévaudan, but also the atmospheric conditions present at the time of the first beast’s attacks. He had also researched the accounts of other people who had reported encounters with strange beasts in the past, and all of the information pointed to what he thought was an inescapable conclusion.
Ardan stopped moving forward when he not only came to a spot where the scent of the newly-formed mud was the strongest, but also to a large fissure torn into the ground. He estimated it to be over thirty feet long and twenty feet wide. He looked into the fissure and all that he could see was pitch black darkness. He quickly walked to the nearest tree and tore one of its branches off. He then pulled a small piece of cloth from his pocket and tied it to the end of the branch. Next, he lit a match and held it to the cloth, creating a makeshift torch. With it blazing above his head, he walked over to the crevice and dropped the torch into it.
It flickered as it fell; the light from the burning branch reflected off of a smooth surface and further lit up the cave. When it hit the bottom, roughly thirty feet below him, Ardan heard a small splash which quickly extinguished the torch. From the way the light had reflected, he was now certain that his hypothesis regarding the origins of both beasts was correct.
Ardan quickly broke another branch off of a tree and tied his rope around the trunk of the oak. Next, he tied the other end of the rope around his waist and then made and lit another torch before walking over to the fissure.
He took one look down into the darkness below him before jumping into the cave below. He had only given himself about ten feet of rope from the opening so he ended up being suspended well above the cave floor. He held the torch above his head as its light reflected off the smooth ice that lined the walls of the cavern. He then shook his head in disbelief at what he saw trapped within the ice.
The slowly melting walls of the cave held prehistoric animals of all kinds trapped within an icy prison. Ardan saw several other Dire Wolves frozen, as well as Woolly Mammoths and Saber-Toothed Cats. Intermixed with these were several dinosaurs. At a quick glance, he was able to identify a stegosaurus, a triceratops, and even a terrifying tyrannosaurus. He looked farther down the cave and saw a tunnel that ran deep into the ground, with ice lining its walls as far as he could see. The sight of these creatures and the descending tunnel confirmed several hypotheses that his keen mind had been working on.
Aside from the attacks of the original Beast of Gévaudan, there was one other well-documented instance where Ardan found a verified report of prehistoric animals appearing on the surface. At the turn of the century, Paris had been attacked by several species of dinosaurs and other prehistoric mammals in an event that the press had dubbed the “Panic in Paris.” The animals had rampaged through the city before suddenly dying off. The attack was later reported to have been caused by an underground cave that had held all of these animals frozen in ice in suspended animation. The year of the attack was a particularly hot year, as was this one, and the year of the original Beast of Gévaudan attacks.
Scientists at the time of the Panic in Paris believed that the cave these animals were frozen in must have been opened and exposed to heat from the surface, which had melted the ice and freed the animals. Ardan had come to believe that, based on reports of hot weather during the attacks of the historical Beast, that it had been a prehistoric animal frozen below ground and freed in the same fashion as those from the Panic in Paris. He also believed that, given another hot summer, history would repeat itself and once more free a prehistoric animal from an underground cavern.
When Ardan looked almost directly below him, he could see two gaping holes in the ice. He looked up briefly and determined that the spots where the holes were located were the ones likely to be exposed to the most sunlight. That was the reason why the two Dire Wolves trapped there had thawed out faster than the other animals.
The excessively hot temperatures around the times of both attacks would also have affected the people of Gévaudan, making them more prone to abnormal behavior and mass hysteria. The heat didn’t only free the Dire Wolves, but it created situations where the people of the region were most likely to panic and prove unable to deal with the threat. Ardan shook his head as he considered how the heat might have literally inflamed imaginations, creating werewolves, cursed princes, and tiger-men. Had the people of Gévaudan simply remained calm and tackled the beast as just another animal, they most likely would have been able to stop it.
Ardan was also convinced that, given a little more time, the Dire Wolf would have simply died off. The animals who had emerged from the underground during the Panic in Paris had all perished, because, it was thought, that the air had changed dramatically from the ancient times when they had been frozen. Ardan surmised that most of these changes had been brought on by the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The burning of coal and oil on a mass scale wa
s unquestionably changing the quality of the air. His research was also beginning to suggest that the burning of these substances was having a global effect on the planet, which was causing these hotter temperatures to occur more frequently. He was confident that this latest incarnation of the Beast of Gévaudan would have succumbed to the changes in the air just like the creatures from the Panic in Paris had.
This hypothesis was confirmed by the lengthy reign of the first Dire Wolf to be referred to as the Beast of Gévaudan. It had emerged from the ice prior to the Industrial Revolution and, as such, encountered an atmosphere the quality of which was closer to the air that its body had been accustomed to; he was therefore able to survive for a much longer period.
The last mystery that Ardan was confident that his research in the field and in the library had solved was the exact period when which the animals had been frozen in the cave, and where they had originally come from. The idea had long been held that the creatures responsible for the Panic in Paris were an isolated group that had had been frozen together in the prehistoric times. Ardan had long thought that this notion was wrong, because at no time did creatures like dinosaurs and Woolly Mammoths live together on the surface of the Earth.
His research had led him to accounts of people like Professor Lindenbrock and David Innes. Lindenbrock had been the first man to delve deep into the interior of the Earth and had reported seeing several species of prehistoric beasts living there. His discovery was later confirmed and expanded upon by David Innes, who had reported the existence of entire underground world called Pellucidar. Innes claimed that Pellucidar was inhabited by both dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts. After reading these reports, Ardan began to suspect that the Beasts of Gévaudan and the creatures from the Panic in Paris all came from underground tunnels which led to Pellucidar. He guessed that the creatures here in Gévaudan and under Paris had attempted to make their way to the surface during an ice age and had become literally frozen in their tracks.
Ardan looked down at the slowly growing pool of water beneath him and he knew that, with the slowly increasing temperatures of the planet, these creatures would eventually thaw out and wreak havoc on the region. He also suspected that there were other places near the surface of the earth where creatures from Pellucidar might someday thaw out. With the knowledge that his conjectures were correct, and that he had a good deal of research and work ahead of him, if he were to prevent more deaths like those here in Gévaudan, Ardan pulled himself back up his rope.
He then carefully planted the dynamite he had brought around the edge of the crevice, lit it, and caused an explosion that sealed the cave, and the creatures frozen within it, forever.
With this threat addressed, Ardan walked over to the carcass of the Dire Wolf he had slain. His next task was to take the dead beast to Gévaudan and show the people that it was nothing more than an “exotic” animal. After he had quelled their fears, his would return home and start conducting research on other caves which could be holding frozen monsters from the center of the earth. Francis Ardan was determined to find these caves and seal them before their inhabitants could come out and threaten the surface of the Earth.
Peter Gabbani offers us a “slice of life” in the very adventurous existence of Doc Ardan, conveying the notion of what it is like to be confronted time and time again with an unending series of megalomaniacs with their grandiose death machines...
Peter Gabbani: Small Dreams of a Floating City
The frozen rain had begun to solidify into blocks of ice on the rear of the floats of the seaplane. This was pitching the plane nose up, and Rodrigo had to lean into the stick to keep the plane level as it sputtered above the dislodged ice chunks that rolled and toppled over in the crests and troughs of the waves. The horizon was gone. He peered out at the propellers on either side, each a blur of gray, but the noises rang true. The engines were holding. The seaplane lurched forward, dipped, and then pitched nose up once more, only to have Rodrigo thrust the stick forward to go level again.
“The ice shelf can’t be much farther.”
Doctor Francis Ardan was stretched out on the floor behind the pilot, resting to the extent that he could, with his head propped up on a crate covered by a canvas tarp. With a wool blanket for warmth, he was half asleep, the collar of his sheepskin jacket pulled tight, his goggles snug atop his leather flying helmet. A while back, perhaps when a wind burst swept the plane laterally and Rodrigo threw his hands up in a gesture that could only be called hopeless, Ardan had given himself over to a mild fatalism. All he could do was wait. The seaplane rocked, was pushed back, sank, and leapt, and Ardan adjusted his blanket. He had been pressed into accompanying Doctor Yarteb, who sat beside him staring at his compass, on this two-man expedition to the Antarctic. The details were fuzzy, but asking his employer for explanations, especially now, seemed counter to the adventurous spirit. And he had been in more harrowing situations than this. Ardan rolled on his side and looked at the outlines of the other crates stuffed into the back of the plane, as he sensed something shift under the tarp, and then glanced over at Yarteb.
Seeing Ardan, Yarteb announced, “Nature doesn’t care, does she?”
“What?”
Here, speaking meant yelling.
“Nature,” Yarteb said, leaning forward, “who are we to Nature?”
Ardan detected the tone of a complaint, which marked a measure of defiance different from his brand of resignation.
“How are we going to find San Remo in all this?” Ardan asked as the top of his voice.
The front windscreen of the plane was being blasted by an angular headwind, and thick streaming rivulets of water on the sides of the screen had long since turned to opaque chunks of pearl-colored ice.
“We’ll touch down where we can,” Yarteb said, still looking at his compass, “and then make our way inland. We’ll follow my compass.” He struggled to find the words. “At San Remo, there’ll be a team there that can get us to where the comet fragment landed.”
“Comet fragment?” Rodrigo blared from the pilot seat.
Yarteb sat quietly, while Ardan waited for his response. Rodrigo leaned back to anticipate a reply. But no explanation was forthcoming, and then Rodrigo had to once more jerk the stick forward to level the plane. Ardan looked away. He tensed every muscle in his body once and then twice to generate a little internal warmth. His feet inside his boots pulsed. Leaning on his elbow, he pressed his leather cap to the side window to steady his gaze. Below, beneath the twists of the sea smashing into the ice bergs, beneath the floating ice blocks merging, breaking apart, and then crashing together again, he knew the colors of the Antarctic: the lapis lazuli atop the submerged ice and how it gave way to the indigos of the deep, all fractures of blue and the translucent blue imprisoned in the ice. Here, though, he couldn’t see them, with the frozen rain whipping sideways and swirling, but he knew they were there. Ardan closed his eyes and rocked his head on the window before returning it to the crate. The drone of the engines remained. Yarteb looked over and then looked back.
“The ice shelf, there it is,” Rodrigo shouted.
The two passengers each looked out their respective windows and saw merely the vague darkness of the sea being overtaken by a motionless white mass. The plane was high enough not to have to negotiate the imposing vertical launch of the ice wall. And soon, once the blueness was behind them, the passengers felt the plane descend.
“No,” Yarteb said. “Don’t land here.” He sat up and reached forward to grab Rodrigo by the shoulder. “We cannot…we cannot navigate the fissures and chasms on foot. This is not the place.”
“Ah, the crevasses!” Rodrigo said in a moment of clarity.
“Yes, the crevasses. The crevasses! We haven’t time.”
The frozen rain continued to beat down on the rattling plane.
“The floats, they’ve become unstable,” Rodrigo explained. “We have to land, chip the ice off, and then we can continue on.”
They were screaming
at each other. They had to. Ardan sat calmly, squeezing his feet in his boots.
“No, we’ll never take off again! The plane won’t be able to get off the ground.”
“It’s not safe to go on like this. We are stopping.”
When Rodrigo continued the descent, Yarteb, looking at Ardan resting on his elbow, worked himself into a frenzy. Ardan saw this and came to attention. Yarteb, his eyes aglow, his face wincing with some kind of internal disgust, his chest swelling to monstrous proportions, turned sideways and kicked at the door, bursting the icy seals.
With the door open, swinging on its hinges, Yarteb took out his knife, cut through Rodrigo’s seat belt, and then with two hands yanked him from his chair and tumbled him out into the frozen rain. Ardan, as the plane dipped, dove forward, both arm extended. Rodrigo had hooked his arm at the elbow around the rigging of one of the floats, and Ardan had caught the door with one hand, while plunging his other hand out into the rain. He knew his grip would not hold, and the glove on his exposed hand was already soaked and half frozen. The plane plummeted, and Rodrigo slid down the supports.
“Ardan,” Yarteb called out with delight, making no movement toward the plane’s controls, “will you save him before the plane crashes?”
Ardan looked at the empty pilot chair and then back to Rodrigo, still hooked at the elbow around the rear of the supports while his legs were twisting off the float’s extensions. Rodrigo’s eyes blazed with fear. Ardan peered through the storm. Perhaps this could be timed.
“Let go!” Ardan yelled. “Let go, and the snow will break your fall! We are low enough! And I can save the plane and come back for you!”
His words disappeared in the rain, and though Yarteb was beyond earshot, he could not be sure Rodrigo pieced the shouts together. But then Rodrigo closed his eyes, gave a slow nod, and unclasped his arms. Ardan pushed himself back into the cabin and scrambled to grab the stick to keep the plane from diving into the ice shelf. He steadied himself in the pilot’s chair, while Yarteb jerked the door closed and latched it.