Paleo

by Yvonne Navarro

  Kevin stepped into the huge main foyer with a sort of childlike reverence. He’d been so angry at everything that had to do with the relocation and so furious over the loss of what he’d had in Chicago that he hadn’t even considered visiting the museum on his own, much less exploring Sunnydale. Their house was still half boxed-up anyway, entire roomfuls screaming to be unpacked. He’d expected to hate what he’d decided was an undersize museum, to criticize every aspect of it right from the start; instead, he found himself filled with excitement and an odd sense of adventure at the thought of starting over. And really, for a dinosaur lover, how much fault could he find with a place that spotlighted the immense skulls of a Tyrannosaur and a Triceratops in the center of its main hall?

  He glanced at his watch and grinned as he hurried past the skull exhibit. He wished he had more time; he’d love to spend the evening exploring the museum, all of it. How many hours had he logged in at the Museum of Natural History in Chicago? But tonight exploration would have to wait. He’d given Daniel a call just to confirm the meeting, and the other man had told him to be there no later than five-thirty. That, he’d said, would give him enough time to take Kevin on a quick, informal tour of the dinosaur exhibits and show him behind-the-scenes in the Paleontology Department. He’d made it clear that if Kevin liked what he saw, there would be more opportunities in the future.

  He made his way straight back, then turned right and went down the hall. The restrooms would be on his left, the fossils exhibit straight ahead; as instructed, he took a left before he got to either and found himself facing the entry foyer to the dinosaur exhibits. The light overhead was golden and rich, the typical go-forthe-drama mood that museums favored. Kevin liked it; he’d spent so much time in the Field Museum that encountering the same ambience here made him feel comfortable and secure, the last sensation he had expected. Beneath his feet was a floor made of huge oldfashioned granite tiles that picked up the shine of the lights and diffused it, giving the whole place an aura of class and shine. Life, at least for the current slice of time, was fine.

  Daniel Addison was waiting for him just inside the high, arched entrance to the dinosaur exhibit, standing beneath a tropically-designed sign that read WELCOME TO PALEO-VIEW! “Hi, Kevin, how are you?”

  “Good,” Kevin responded automatically, and was privately surprised when he meant it. Despite the importance of this meeting and his need to get to know this man, and even after all the time he’d spent around dinosaurs, Kevin couldn’t help it when his gaze slipped past Daniel and went to the exhibits. Some were skeletal reconstructions of the expected variety: a Stegosaurus in a defensive posture against a Ceratosaurus raiding its nest; a browsing Pelorosaurus; an unexpected but extremely interesting depiction of a group of Cynognathus feeding on a downed Kannemeyeria; another Ceratosaurus that had mostly been left in skeletal form. Kevin’s practiced eye recognized immediately that the rendition of an Hypacrosaurus nest contained fiberglass components, well-made but impossible for the knowledgeable eye not to detect. More striking were the full-flesh reproductions of lesser known species like Typothorax, Euparkeria, and Oviraptor. And even though they weren’t true dinosaurs, at the far end of the hallway near a less obvious exit was what he immediately considered the dinosaur exhibit’s crowning achievement: a life-size simulation of Pteranodon ingens in flight. They’d chosen to portray the skin tones in varying shades of red and russet browns, and the model of the creature soared overhead like some kind of massive flying devil, its wingspan easily twenty-three feet. Backlighting shone through the fragile-looking membranes covering its skeleton, highlighting the lengthened thumb that had enabled the pterosaurs to glide through the air. The long triangular jaw was filled with sharp, tiny teeth, while the reproduction’s dark eyes glinted unpleasantly. Guttural roars, screams and growls, man’s best guesstimate as to how these creatures would have sounded, blared intermittently from speakers hidden among the fake foliage.

  “Pretty damned realistic, wouldn’t you say?” Daniel grinned next to him, and Kevin recalled the No Contest tee shirt Daniel had worn while giving the class presentation. “It’s my favorite exhibit.”

  Kevin nodded. “It’s excellent,” he said with his own smile. “I’ll bet this scares the beans out of the kids.”

  Daniel laughed. “Yeah, it does. When they first set up the exhibit, it was up by the front in the showcase spot, and they came up with this awesome idea for positioning the thing where you couldn’t see it until you were all the way inside. Then you looked up, and wham! There it was, looking like it was going to swoop down and snatch you right up. The reaction was great—from the parents and the teenagers. The little ones were terrified, though. They ended up with nightmares, a few of ’em actually upchucked on the spot—not a pretty sight. The parents were calling and complaining about how freaked out their kidlets were, so we decided to move it to the far end.” He shrugged. “You can see what you’re getting into now, so the reaction isn’t as strong. If you ask me, that takes all the fun out of it. The surprise was key.”

  “Definitely,” Kevin agreed. “But it’s still a great scene.”

  Daniel looked pleased. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you upstairs and show you the cubbyhole that I call an office. They hide the academic types on the third floor, as far in the back as they can.”

  Kevin nodded and followed him, listening as Daniel chattered on about the exhibits along the way, everything from African Mammals to California History to something called the Douglas Perren Memorial Room. Not a bad setup for a small-town museum, and again Kevin was pleasantly surprised. It looked like Sunnydale had more to show beneath its bright but rather generic-looking surface, and like Daniel had said, surprise was key. They went down a series of hallways that led them farther toward what Kevin thought was the back of the building, and it wasn’t long before Kevin was disoriented. But that was okay; in time, given the opportunity, he hoped to know this little museum quite well.

  Daniel’s office wasn’t exactly the cubbyhole he’d described, but it wasn’t that much more. A large, rectangular closet with an L-shaped desk and bookshelves built into it might have been a better description, and it was packed to its maximum with books, papers, fossils, bits of petrified bone and boxes of God-only-knew what. The tiny area was cramped and crowded far beyond the level of comfort, and Kevin thought it was fantastic.

  “So,” Daniel said as he squeezed behind the desk and dropped onto his chair. “It’s time to take you from the world of Chicago’s big-time paleontology to our version here in small-town Sunnydale.” He glanced at Kevin out of the corner of his eye. “That is what you want, right?”

  “Absolutely,” Kevin said. He hesitated, but felt obliged to be honest. “I have to tell you, though—next fall, I’m out of here. I’ll be heading back to the University of Chicago for college.”

  Daniel nodded. “I expected as much. With the kind of connections you’ve probably established there, you’d be a fool to go anywhere else. But,” he scrounged around on his desktop, “I think we can keep you from getting bored in the meantime.”

  Kevin grinned. “That’s great. What can I do around here?”

  This time Daniel laughed outright. “Oh, take your pick of a couple thousand uncompleted tasks! Still, if you don’t have any objection, I’m in the middle of one right now. I’ll tell you what’s going on with it and you can decide if you’re interested. If not, we’ll do the paperwork to get you in the computer files, and I know we can find something else.”

  “Sure.” Choose something else over whatever Daniel was working on? Not likely. The man was his benefactor here, the major element in making sure he didn’t spend the next eight months so mentally unchallenged that he came out of this small town with his brain atrophied and drool running down his chin. “What are you involved in?”

  Daniel came up with a fistful of paperwork and offered it to Kevin. “There’s a stool under that pile of folders,” he said, pointing to one corner. “Just set them on the flo
or. You’ll need to fill these out.” When Kevin looked at the paperwork curiously, Daniel began to tick off the items on his fingers. “An employment application—you’ll actually get a few bucks an hour for your time—Social Security info, next of kin, junk like that.”

  “Got it,” Kevin said. Tedious stuff, but necessary.

  “What I’m doing,” Daniel told him as he began filling out the forms, “is going through a huge stack of crates in the basement. My area’s paleontology, of course, and there’s all kinds of stuff down there that’s never been cataloged, everything from field journals to supplies and files to fossils that were, for whatever reason, never recorded in the museum records when they were found. Most of it dates back to the pre-computer era, and of course someone’s come up with the bright idea that now it needs to be entered into the system.” He paused. “It’s an . . . interesting experience. I thought it was going to be the pits when I first started, but the more I get into it, the better the stuff I’m finding. What do you think?”

  “It sounds totally cool,” Kevin lied. “I think I could get into that.” Shuffling through storage boxes? Not what he’d hoped for, but at least it was something. Of course, if he preferred, he could listen to his new schoolmates talk about sports, bands he didn’t listen to, and girls he didn’t know.

  Daniel leaned forward, watching as Kevin put x ’s in the last of the required spaces on the forms, then signed his name. “I was hoping you’d say that,” he said as he gathered up the completed papers and set them aside. “That has a lot to do with what I mentioned yesterday at the school and what I wanted to show you.” He paused for a moment. “Did you . . . did you bring the Timimus egg?”

  “Sure.” Kevin picked up his backpack and pulled out the box with the carefully wrapped fossil. He offered it to Daniel.

  “Wow,” Daniel said as he opened the box. There was a hint of reverence in his voice when he ran his fingers over the rough surface of the petrified shell. “Imagine, a hundred and twenty million years ago, given the right conditions, this would have been a living creature the likes of which we can only try to visualize now.” He studied it carefully, gently rolling it first one way then the other, ebefore placing it back into the box and handing it back to Kevin. “Imagine,” he said again.

  “Oh, I have.” Kevin set the box aside but didn’t say anything else, so Daniel reached under his desk and hauled out a battered gray canvas backpack, then shoved his hand inside it. When he pulled it back out, he held up an aged leather journal, and after a second, he offered it to Kevin.

  Kevin reached for it without thinking, then almost recoiled when he realized that the journal’s leather cover was blackened with soot, evidence of some longago fire. Beneath his fingers the small book felt oddly heavy, and for a second he had the absurd notion that it was filled with something—potential maybe—that he would do well to leave alone.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a dig journal I found when I started going through the crates,” Daniel told him. “I don’t expect you to read through the entire thing. I already did, so I can tell you that a lot of what’s in there is just what you’d expect, although the fact that it’s from 1939 does make it a bit more interesting—a look at the past from a point of view you might have never before considered. There’s a chunk of every page missing though, burned or ripped away, so I couldn’t get a totally clear picture.”

  “Really,” Kevin said. He flipped through the pages, skimming parts of the stained, chunky looking writing. 1939? Missing info or not, this was completely fascinating. The digs Kevin had been on were hot and uncomfortable, alternating between the joy of discovery and the constant aggravation of inconvenience. What had it been like back then, minus even the smallest of modern inventions that Kevin and the rest of the crew had so taken for granted?

  He started to turn another page but Daniel stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Kevin, before you read any further, there’s . . .” He hesitated, obviously trying to decide on his next words. “There’s something about Sunnydale,” he finally said.

  Kevin frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Daniel looked at him and Kevin could see him trying to find the right words. “Well, things— strange things—sometimes happen here, stuff that just doesn’t go on in other places.”

  Kevin lowered the journal but didn’t let go of it. “What kind of . . . strange things?”

  Daniel shrugged self-consciously. “I can’t really explain it, except to say that after you’ve been here awhile, you’ll start to notice it. And accept it.” The dark-haired guy looked at his fingernails, at the books crammed all over the tiny room, at the floor—anywhere but into Kevin’s eyes. “I can’t really go into more detail than that, because . . . well, you’ll think someone left the lunch meat out of my brain sandwich.”

  “I guess I’m not following you,” Kevin said slowly. He was reluctant to admit it, afraid that Daniel would find him lacking in some way and change his mind about letting him into the museum’s inner circle. The truth, however, was undeniable: he had no idea what Daniel Addison was talking about.

  “And you don’t have to understand,” Daniel said. “I don’t even expect you to. All I’m asking is that you try to keep an open mind when you read the next few pages in that journal. As utterly wacked-out as it seems, here in Sunnydale, the things that Professor Nuriel writes about? Well . . . there’s a chance that here, in this town, they could really happen.”

  Completely bewildered now, Kevin only nodded as Daniel inclined his head toward the journal, a sign that Kevin could resume his reading. He lifted the beat-up book again and found his place, his eyes following the words as his brain automatically interpreted them. It didn’t take long—seconds—before his mouth dropped open and he lifted his gaze to Daniel’s. His new mentor said nothing, only sat and watched him, and waited; uncertain, Kevin tried again to process what he was seeing.

  I can translate enough of it to believe that it is a spell ritual of some sort. It’s very strnage peculiar and seems to postulate that something dead can be brought back to life . . .

  Kevin sat back. “Daniel, I—”

  “So,” Daniel interrupted. “You’ve got the egg, and I’ve got the journal. Let’s try it.”

  “What?”

  Daniel grinned at him. “I said, let’s try it.”

  “Try what?”

  “The ritual.” Daniel took the journal out of Kevin’s hand and flipped forward a few pages. “There’s a formula in here that the man who wrote this journal—a professor who at the time was a well-respected paleontologist in his fifties—claims will bring certain kinds of fossilized animals back to life. Your Timimus egg falls right into the category that’s supposed to work. Are you game?”

  Kevin just sat there, unable to believe what he was hearing. A spell? Like in . . . what? Witchcraft or something, maybe a game? But whatever you wanted to call it, that this was the next step was written all over Daniel’s face. There was a whole bunch Kevin wanted to say right now, and high on the list was “Are you out of your mind?”, but he didn’t dare. He’d heard stories about small towns and how sometimes they did things . . . well, differently. But spells?

  No matter what he thought, he had to go along; every instinct he had told him that if he didn’t, any future he might have had with the Sunnydale Museum of Natural History was finished, strangled before it had a chance to take its first breath. Unless he wanted the rest of the school year to feel like an eternity, he didn’t dare refuse.

  Kevin cleared his throat. “A–all right.”

  “Excellent,” Daniel said, beaming. When Kevin didn’t do anything else, Daniel gave him a patient smile. “The egg?”

  “Oh—yeah.” Kevin reached down and plucked it from the box, running his fingers over the rough surface a final time before reluctantly handing it to the older guy.

  “Great.” Daniel stopped and looked around the meager space that served as his office, then looked at Kevin. A rueful smile played a
cross his lips. “Look, I know you think I’m nuts. If I didn’t know people who’ve lived in this town all their lives and would swear to it, I’d think I was as nuts as a bag of pistachios. But trust me, stranger stuff has happened here, and what have we got to lose anyway? We’ll give it just that one try, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll swear never to tell anyone else how we were totally stupid enough to do it in the first place. It’s just words, and you’ll be right there the entire time. It’s not like I’m going to saw the egg open or destroy it. Okay?”

  Unwillingly, Kevin nodded. He still thought this was the craziest thing he’d ever heard of next to that guy he’d read about who’d attached hundreds of helium balloons to his lawn chair, then ended up floating out over the ocean before the Air Force got him down. But even that idiot had actually gotten himself and his supply of beer off the ground. On the other hand, what could mumbling a few words actually hurt, which, by the way, he wasn’t going to do. When it came right down to it, Daniel could have the honor, and ultimate embarrassment, of that.

  Daniel’s gaze swept the area again and he stood, still cradling the Timimus egg. “Let’s get out of here,” he suggested. “It’s too much like doing an experiment in a forgotten storeroom. Grab the journal and we’ll go over to the lab.” He laughed a little. “That way, we’ll have access to stuff we might need.”