Cryptozoica

by Mark Ellis

  In a husky whisper, Belleau said, “The bioplasm is still in the same condition as when I first saw it upon my induction into the school…there has been no change in its molecular density or color, almost as if it were dipped from the pool in the last hour, instead of over a hundred and seventy years ago.”

  Wadley, Haining, McArdle and Dee stared at the gel with rapt eyes. Haining husked out, “There’s no reason why it should change…it is primordial ooze, the Prima Materia from which all substances on Earth were formed. What is within that container is the vita force, the source of all life itself, unchanged and unchanging after six billion years.”

  In a voice quavering with awe, Dee quoted a passage from the Emerald Tablets:

  “ ‘All things owe their existence to the Only One, so all things owe their origin to the One Only Thing.' ”

  The vial of Prima Materia within Belleau’s fingers exuded not just a sense of antiquity but a vibration of pulsing force that surrounded him with a tingling, buoyant web. The vibration clung to him, caressing his nerve endings, slipping through his mind in tiny, rippling waves of excruciatingly pleasurable fire.

  “The sperm of the Earth,” murmured Belleau.

  Just holding the Prima Materia made him feel like a god.

  CHAPTER SIX

  May 10th, The Island of Little Tamtung

  Kavanaugh did not know how long he had been running or when the sun went down or when he stumbled and fell into the bed of wet ferns. All he knew was that he feared the night. The screeching of the archeopteryx and the grunting of an animal somewhere in the vine-shrouded wilderness terrified him.

  He knew he was being hunted. The beating of wings and the snarls of the raptor mingled with the crash of the surf beyond the tangled thicket. There was a madness in the noises that gave little comfort to the insanity lurking in the shadows of his mind. He thought he heard voices mixed in with the other sounds, but they were garbled and he could make no sense of them.

  The voices frightened him. They seemed louder than the screeching of the archeopteryx and the growls of the Deinonychus. One voice shouted directly into his ear, the words filtering into his brain so vividly the individual letters flashed with color, red for blood, yellow for danger.

  “Get up, Jack! Get up and run or you will die.”

  Kavanaugh was too afraid to get up, much less run. If the archeopteryx saw him, it would call to the Deinoncychus and he would be disemboweled, his guts unwound, just like Jessup, Cranston and Shah Nikwan. A man-shaped figure moved slowly into his field of vision, limping as if crippled. A high-pitched whistle vibrated against his eardrums, like the trilling of birdsong, and he heard a faint, dry rustling. Light gleamed dully from an intricate pattern of tiny, glittering scales.

  The figure stood taller than he, taller even than Augustus, erect upon thick-thewed legs. From down-sloping shoulders dangled long arms, the five fingers tipped with spurs of discolored bone. The neck was very long, supporting a narrow, elongated skull with a nose that consisted of a pair of flaring slits. The pronounced maxillary bones gave the impression of a blunt muzzle. Under knobbed brow ridges, the eyes gleamed golden with opalescent irises, bisected by vertical black slits. The loose flesh at the juncture of its underjaw and throat pulsed.

  Kavanaugh stared, transfixed, into those eyes. He heard a faint, agonized groan and distantly realized it had been torn from his own lips. The fathomless eyes held him captive, peering deep into the roots of his soul.

  Get up, Jack! the creature sang to him. Get up and run or you will die.

  Kavanaugh got up and ran toward the brief flares of light, reaching for them as if he were a child trying to catch fireflies. The flashes took on the appearances of faces that somehow resembled his mother, his father, his brother, and his ex-wife Laurel, all at the same time. He had a dim, faraway awareness that he had broken promises to those faces, but he couldn’t remember what they were.

  If you return, you will die.

  Then he felt an insistent, prodding pressure against his right rib cage. It wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t pleasant. He tried to roll away from it, but he couldn’t seem to move. Finally, he realized a hard object was pressing against him. Reaching down, his fingers closed on something that felt like the damp toe of a deck shoe.

  “Rise and shine, Cap’n K. Howie Flitcroft and his flunkies wait for no one.”

  Kavanaugh struggled to open one eye. Crowe’s scowling mahogany face filled his field of vision. He looked distorted, like a ferocious tribal mask viewed under a magnifying glass.

  Coughing, clearing his throat, Kavanaugh massaged his eyes with the heels of both hands. They felt as if they had been filled with hot sand. “Flitcroft is here?”

  “About ten minutes ago, him and Pendlebury. I guess they expected you to be waiting in the office.”

  “What time is it?”

  “A little after eight.”

  “AM?”

  Crowe sighed, holding up the empty bourbon bottle. He pinged a fingernail against the glass. “Of course, dipshit. You weren’t drunk for a whole goddamn night and day. I wouldn’t be surprised if you pulled a bender like that in the future, but so far your problem drinking pattern consists of getting drunk, passing out and waking up the next morning with a hangover, wanting to know what time it is.”

  “What a coincidence,” Kavanaugh croaked, “sort of like now.” He realized he was lying on his daybed, still wearing his jeans and boots.

  “You really ought to stick to Guinness…it’s a food source. There’s all kinds of vitamins and essential minerals in it. There’s nothing remotely nutritious in bourbon.”

  Kavanaugh forced himself into a sitting position, his temples pounding. “Yeah, well, you know how I am about my figure.”

  Getting his arms under him, Kavanaugh heaved his body off the daybed, not even trying to stifle his groans. Pain ripped at the walls of his skull, like a clawed animal trying to escape a box. He stumbled into the tiny bathroom and ran a sink full of tepid water. He plunged his face repeatedly into it, blowing like a whale.

  “Want some breakfast?” Crowe called. “Mouzi is frying up some fresh oysters.”

  Kavanaugh’s stomach boiled like a percolator and face submerged, he mumbled, “You’re hell on a hangover.”

  “Kill or cure, Jack.”

  Kavanaugh fought back his nausea. After his headache abated a bit, he straightened up and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He flinched at the sight. His eyes were dark-rimmed and netted with red. His complexion was like mildewed drywall, his jawline bristling with three days worth of whiskers. However, Kavanaugh took a bit of satisfaction in knowing he looked exactly as he felt—like a man who had started drinking early the evening before and kept it up all night.

  Squeezing a dollop of toothpaste onto his tongue, he swished it around his mouth, then swallowed it. Pawing through the pile of dirty laundry on the floor, he found a T-shirt that didn’t smell as if it had been used a burial shroud for a dead skunk and he pulled it on. After finger-combing his hair, he decided he was about as presentable as he was going to be, under the present circumstances.

  He returned to the living room, noting sourly that although Crowe wasn’t dressed appreciably different than he had been the night before, he at least looked and smelled fresh.

  Crowe eyed him critically. “That’s what you’re wearing to the meeting?”

  Kavanaugh gestured to the man’s fray-cuffed jeans, the tank top bearing the seal of Temple University Girl’s Volleyball Team and the fisherman’s cap. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

  Crowe shrugged. His exposed arms and upper chest showed four puckered bullet scars, inflicted during his short career as a lieutenant in the Navy SEALs. Like Kavanaugh, the man bore other scars beneath his shirt and on the backside of his psyche.

  “Uniform of the day,” Crowe drawled. “What’s your excuse except that a forty-two year old man still doesn’t know how to operate a washing machine?”

  “Neither do you,
” retorted Kavanaugh resentfully. “Mouzi does your laundry.”

  Crowe snorted. “If she did, do you think I’d be wearing this rig?”

  Assuming the question to be rhetorical, Kavanaugh did not answer.

  Slipping on a pair of sunglasses, he moved toward the door, “Let’s go. Maybe Pendlebury will have made some coffee.”

  The morning sky melted, pouring down heat. Crowe put on dark glasses as well. Wings flapped overhead and Kavanaugh glimpsed the green plumage of Huang Luan, the archeopteryx.

  “That goddamn thing is stalking me,” he said bitterly.

  Crowe squinted upward, shielding his eyes with his hands. “You’re crazy.”

  Kavanaugh didn’t argue with the observation. “I got to get some money…got to get back to the world. Make it or borrow it so I can get the fuck out of here.”

  “Borrow against what?”

  Kavanaugh gestured behind him. “My house.”

  “Nobody would want that shit shack.” Crowe shook his head in disgust. “You’re pathetic on top of being crazy.”

  Kavanaugh inhaled deeply. The air was heavy with the smell of the sea. In the full light of day, both men were reminded again of how quickly Little Tamtung had deteriorated from a prospective A-list tourist resort destination to just another moldy settlement on an insignificant island in the South China Sea.

  It wasn’t much of a town, although a sincere effort and a lot of money had been expended to build one. On the harborside stretched a paradise of white sandy beach, leaning palm trees and a dark mangrove swamp. The village center itself was a sprawl of white prefab storefronts, souvenir shops and restaurants. Almost all of them were closed, the windows boarded up.

  Water-filled holes pitted the narrow streets. Although most of the buildings were barely three years old, they seemed to have wilted at the edges, like the big decorative flowerbeds planted at all the intersections. In the tropics, decay was often swifter than growth. Overnight, mold bristled on a wet shoe, in a few hours, a body could rot, in a few weeks, a weak personality might fall apart.

  Still, when Kavanaugh and Crowe had first seen the island, both men felt that no new city could have had a more picturesque setting. A narrow river flowed through the town, streaming down from the tropical uplands. Four red-lacquered Thai-style footbridges spanned it. The brightly colored bridges as well as the flowerbeds had been Bai Suzhen’s idea, as were the stone Chinese lanterns along the walks.

  The waterfront area was still in reasonable repair. It extended outward into the bay on a green, grassy promontory. Beyond a cluster of tin-roofed houses on stilts, they saw Flitcroft’s big DHC-6 Otter twin-engine amphibian tethered to the end of a long concrete jetty. Men clustered around the rear fuselage, unloading boxes from the cargo hold. The jetty had been built to serve as a debarkation and customs terminal. It led to a four-story white stucco building, set in the center of a lawn adorned with royal palm trees.

  Although the words Cryptozoica Enterprises & Horizons Unlimited were whitewashed over on the façade above the double doors, the letters could still be made out when a shaft of morning sunshine fell directly onto them.

  The few people Kavanaugh and Crowe encountered along the waterfront walkways were mainly fisher-folk and they wore mixed Asian and Western attire. Only one of them, a young man on a pedi-cab greeted them: “Mornin’, Skipper, mornin’, Tombstone.”

  Kavanaugh ignored him. Like every other would-be entrepreneur on Little Tamtung, Chou Lai blamed Kavanaugh for the failure of his business—in his case, Cryptozoica pedicabs and sightseeing.

  The freighter, Mindanao’s Folly, was gone from the harbor, so either Dai Chinnah’s body had been recovered or Captain Hellstrom decided he wasn’t worth the effort of looking for it and weighed anchor at dawn.

  Humidity hung over the waterfront like a shroud, insufferably oppressive. Although the Tamtung islands resembled a pair of mythical Bali Hai paradises from afar, close up they stunk of dead fish, mud and the eternal heat of the tropics. The jungled bulk of Cryptozoica rising from the sea looked beautiful, too, but things with fangs and talons and appetites for blood crept among the colorful flowers.

  The building that had housed the headquarters of Cryptozoica Enterprises and Horizons Unlimited Tours had been designed to perform double-duty as a four-star hotel, the entrance of which faced the sea. Augustus Crowe and Jack Kavanaugh entered through the office annex.

  All of the furniture had long ago been removed from the big reception area, but glossy framed posters emblazoned with the bright yellow Cryptozoica logo still hung on the walls, each one displaying a different scenario and habitat of the proposed spa and clinic.

  The Jacuzzi, pool and steam baths were at the rear of the building.

  They heard the murmur of voices from a corner office and they followed the sounds down a short hallway. Howard Flitcroft glanced up from a desk stacked high with papers, from release forms to brochures. Although the window was propped open and a ceiling fan spun, the air smelled musty and old. Flitcroft made an exaggerated show of consulting his platinum Rolex and arched his eyebrows.

  “Right on time,” Kavanaugh said blandly. “As usual.”

  “I was about to commend you on your punctuality,” Flitcroft retorted dryly. “And also bring to your attention that you look and smell like a walking dog turd.”

  Kavanaugh shrugged. “Thanks. I wasn’t sure. Good thing you’ve got personal groomers following you around, right? No telling when a Forbes magazine photographer might jump out at you in a dark boardroom.”

  Bertram Pendlebury glared at him over the thick sheaf of papers in his arms. “Keep in mind who you’re talking to, Jack! You owe him big.”

  Pendlebury was Flitcroft’s right hand man, a position he secured when Flitcroft married Bertram’s sister, Merriam. A thin man with short dark hair streaked through with badger stripes of gray, he wore a tropical print shirt three sizes too large for him.

  “Suck up when you’re ordered to suck, Smithers,” Kavanaugh shot back.

  Flitcroft snapped, “Enough of that…from everybody.”

  Both Kavanaugh and Pendlebury fell silent. Flitcroft wasn’t a tall man, but he wasn’t small either. Husky of build and in his early fifties, Howard Philips Flitcroft looked more like a high school PE teacher from an Iowa town than a millionaire several times over.

  His thinning blond hair was blow-dried, sprayed, moussed, swept back and piled high to cover a sizable bald spot on the crown of his head. His blue eyes gleamed brightly with a challenge. He wore a short-sleeved yellow sport shirt, khaki pants and leather sandals. Sewn on the breast pocket of the shirt was Flitcroft’s monogram—a blue circle with the overlapping letters of HFP.

  “Why are you here, Howie?” Crowe asked.

  Flitcroft’s eyes narrowed momentarily. Augustus Crowe and Jack Kavanaugh were the only men he permitted to address him as “Howie” and he still didn’t care for it.

  “I’m straightening up, airing this place out.”

  “Not that it doesn’t need it,” said Kavanaugh, “but why?”

  “I own this place, remember?”

  “And you owned it two years ago when you flew out of here, claiming you’d never be back,” replied Crowe. “What’s changed?”

  “What’s changed is that I have a paying job for you, for both of you.”

  He stared at the two men expectantly. In unison, Crowe and Kavanaugh folded their arms over their chests. Their faces, still masked by sunglasses, remained impassive.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me about the job?” Flitcroft demanded.

  “I have a boat,” said Crowe.

  “And I have a chopper,” Kavanaugh stated. “If the job doesn’t involve hiring us to sail or fly, there’s no reason why we would be interested enough to ask you about it.”

  Flitcroft shook his head. “You guys are still so quick to cop the ‘tudes.”

  “That’s because we’ve done business with you before,” said Kavanaugh. “Howie.”
/>   “It couldn’t have been all that terrible…you’re still here.”

  Kavanaugh uttered a scoffing sound. “It’s not like I had much choice, not with all the process servers out there looking for me.”

  “Have I charged either one of you a dime of rent in two years?”

  “You haven’t collected a dime,” Crowe reminded him. “That’s different from charging us. I always figured you’d get around to billing us one day.”

  “Charge, collect, whatever…if you two go back to work for me, we’ll wipe the debit column clean and start all over.”

  “You still haven’t said what the work is about,” said Kavanaugh coldly.

  Flitcroft smiled for the first time, showing his capped, bleached teeth. “By coincidence, the work is about you flying and sailing a film crew around.”

  “A film crew?” echoed Crowe.

  Flitcroft’s smile widened and he clapped his hands together. “Boys, I’m going into the reality TV business.”

  Behind the dark lenses of his glasses, Kavanaugh’s eyes slitted suspiciously. “What kind of reality?”

  “Real people, real things and real places.” His smile widening into a grin, Flitcroft gestured expansively with both arms “A TV series about Cryptozoica.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Whose stupid, suicidal idea was that?” Crowe demanded skeptically. “Not even the most desperate insurance company in Hollywood would issue a policy to cover a project that goddamn risky.”

  “I’m financing it,” Flitcroft answered, tapping his chest. “I’ve got my own insurance company, remember? I’ll cover the cost of everything.”

  Kavanaugh slowly took off his sunglasses, started to speak, then shook his head wearily.

  “What?” Flitcroft stared at him. “Go ahead.”

  “I thought the whole strategy was to bury that fucking place and hope the world and most of the courts forgot about it.”

  “That was the strategy,” Flitcroft agreed. “But I didn’t get to where I am today by closing my mind to new opportunities.”